More Coffee Party Buzz

From the organic and shade-grown L.A. branch. Woo-hoo!

Coffee Party USA

Another party springs up to take on a government that sticks like glue to corporate America and moves like molasses when it comes to helping ordinary Americans.

visit their web site

Our message to Congress: You work for us, not for corporations. We hired you and we get to fire you. We pay you and give you great health insurance. Now get to work serving the interests of the American people, or get out.

Anyone who wants our government to function in the interest of ordinary Americans, not corporations, is welcome to join this movement.

The real lesson of the Boston tea party

[source]

The real lesson of the Boston tea party is the power of the consumer to change society. The power of the producers ultimately rests in the hands of consumers.

From Lizabeth's Cohen's 2003 book, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America:

Almost from its initial European settlement, America participated in an economy of commercial exchange, and gradually over the centuries a market revolution increased the amount of goods that Americans purchased rather than made at home (or did without). Not only did people consume more ready-made products as time passed, but the accumulation of luxury goods—at first, imported china and textiles, later fineries manufactured domestically—marked distinctions among Americans, such as between urban and rural dwellers and among social classes. Moreover, at crucial moments of political conflict, Americans exercised their clout as consumers, withdrawing their purchasing power to put economic pressure on their opponents. On the eve of the American Revolution of the late eighteenth century, colonists shirked imported British tea and fabrics. Likewise, nineteenth-century workers organized boycotts of their employers' goods as part of their campaigns for shorter hours, higher wages, and better working conditions. But despite the longstanding significance of consumption in their lives, when Americans before the twentieth century contemplated what made for the most robust national economy, the most stable American polity, and the most independent citizenry, they overwhelmingly pointed to the vitality of production and the power of producers.

The Progressive Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a significant shift toward recognizing the centrality of consumers to the nation's economy and polity, so much so that I will refer to it as the “first-wave consumer movement.” Aspects of the Progressive program could qualify as proto-citizen consumer, anticipating as they did concerns and responses that would emerge more fully in the “second-wave consumer movement” of the 1930s and 1940s. The Progressives identified consumers as a new category of the American citizenry, an ideal broad-based constituency desirous and deserving of political and social reforms to limit the dangers of an industrializing, urbanizing, and politically corruptible twentieth-century America. Because all men and women were thought to suffer as consumers from unfairly jacked-up prices, defective manufactured goods, and unresponsive if not deceitful politicians, reform was easily pursued in their name. Progressives sought more direct democracy—primaries, initiatives, referenda, recalls, and female suffrage—as well as specific remedies to protect consumers and taxpayers from exploitation, such as municipal and consumer ownership of utilities and fairer tax policies.

Racism isn't funny

A story I missed from last week.

NBC Los Angeles:

A weekend “ghetto-themed” party thrown by fraternity students to mock Black History Month is being condemned by UC San Diego administrators.

The off-campus event, called the “ Compton Cookout,” urged all participants to wear chains, don cheap clothes and speak very loudly. "We will be serving 40's, Kegs of Natty," the invitation read.

Female participants were encouraged to be "ghetto chicks."

The invite read: "For those of you who are unfamiliar with ghetto chicks -- Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes."

Invitation text:

February marks a very important month in American society. No, i'm not referring to Valentines day or Presidents day. I'm talking about Black History month. As a time to celebrate and in hopes of showing respect, the Regents community cordially invites you to its very first Compton Cookout.

For guys: I expect all males to be rockin Jersey's, stuntin' up in ya White T (XXXL smallest size acceptable), anything FUBU, Ecko, Rockawear, High/low top Jordans or Dunks, Chains, Jorts, stunner shades, 59 50 hats, Tats, etc.

For girls: For those of you who are unfamiliar with ghetto chicks-Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes - they consider Baby Phat to be high class and expensive couture. They also have short, nappy hair, and usually wear cheap weave, usually in bad colors, such as purple or bright red.

They look and act similar to Shenaynay, and speak very loudly, while rolling their neck, and waving their finger in your face. Ghetto chicks have a very limited vocabulary, and attempt to make up for it, by forming new words, such as "constipulated", or simply cursing persistently, or using other types of vulgarities, and making noises, such as "hmmg!", or smacking their lips, and making other angry noises,grunts, and faces.

The objective is for all you lovely ladies to look, act, and essentially take on these "respectable" qualities throughout the day.

Several of the regents condos will be teaming up to house this monstrosity, so travel house to house and experience the various elements of life in the ghetto.

We will be serving 40's, Kegs of Natty, dat Purple Drank- which consists of sugar, water, and the color purple , chicken, coolade, and of course Watermelon. So come one and come all, make ya self before we break ya self, keep strapped, get yo shine on, and join us for a day party to be remembered- or not.

Exchanging Right for Might

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

From Eisenhower's Chance for Peace speech:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953.

This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace.

It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty.

It calls upon them to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?

The full speech (Internet Archive)

(h/t Existential Cowboy)

Sarah Palin Captioned

Don't miss brendanmcooney's excellent captioning of Sarah Palin's Teabagger speech.

"From the bottom of my heart, I thank you for being such suckers!"

"We are witnessing a kind of paralysis..."

[source]

Sayeth Louis Proyect, reflecting on the WTC non-rebuilding project:

Writ large, the failure of the WTC rebuilding project is a perfect symbol of the inability of the bourgeoisie to get anything done—except launch imperialist invasions. Al Smith, like FDR, was not any smarter or nervier than politicians today. What has changed is the general failure of the bourgeoisie to grasp and act on its own long-term agenda. From climate change to health insurance, from the need to repair infrastructure like bridges and roads to the collapse of daily newspapers all around the United States... we are witnessing a kind of paralysis. Nothing matters, however, as long as the biggest corporations in American can show an uptick in quarterly earnings so as to protect its shareholder’s investments. If the rest of the country is turning into Detroit, who cares?

"Nothing in this country seems to be working to anyone's satisfaction except the wealth machine that rewards those who game the system. Unless we break their grip... we're finished as a functioning democracy."
- Bill Moyers

"Democrats want America to be a Christian country, and the Republicans want America to be a Godless country."

Philosopher's Stone:

The only serious question is this: Do we want to live in a country in which the fortunate [medically speaking] accept additional insurance costs in order to provide for the unfortunate? Or do we wish to live in a country in which the fortunate are permitted to separate what happens to them from what happens to the unfortunate? Notice that by "fortunate" and "unfortunate" I do not mean "those who do not get sick" and "those who do get sick." That would be looking at the matter ex post. I mean by fortunate "those less less likely ex ante to get sick," and by "unfortunate" I mean "those more likely ex ante to get sick." We are still talking probabilities here, of course. Even the young and healthy sometimes get cancer and have heart attacks. They just do so much less often. And by the same token, even multiple cancer sufferers sometimes go cancer free for the rest of their lives. But that too occurs much less often.

When we clear away all the bafflegab, all the confusion, all the posturing and bickering and procedural wrangling, all the political maneuvering, what we find is that the Democrats want America to be a country in which the fortunate shoulder some of the burdens of the unfortunate. And the Republicans want America to be a country in which they do not. In short, if I may put it this way, the Democrats want America to be a Christian country, and the Republicans want America to be a Godless country.

Who knew?

"Vast opportunities to express ourselves..."

Kermit:

Online social networks like facebook appear to offer us vast opportunities to express ourselves and they do change the way that people interact. They give us more options for how to package and deliver information about ourselves and reshape the way we think about privacy; making our interests and social connections more transparent and enabling people to reveal pieces of themselves in online profiles that might otherwise be known only by intimate friends.

The consequences of this are not neutral. When the world is conceived of as a global marketplace, every interaction can seem to be about buying and selling. People are encouraged to blur the distinction between self expression and creating a marketable image. The forms of expression supported by social networking technology are one recent example of this, but all of our communication is potentially affected by this posturing. When every post you make might be read by your mother, boss, or potential customer, what someone is willing to say can become highly artificial.

This artificiality is always boring, but it is most troubling when it replaces active connections.

[...]

Part of getting to know someone is learning to decipher the emotional truths encoded in their behavior, a process which takes time. Reading someone else's profile obscures this and encourages us to feel like an intimate friend without engaging in the intimate work of building friendship.

Four of the coolest people ever, talking!

Matt Taibbi and Jeremy Scahill join Allison Kilkenny and Jamie Kilstein on the coolest radio show ever, Citizen Radio! What could be better!

Yoo Fucker snaps in response to criticism of his torture memos

He lashed out today at the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility. The man who gave us torture shows that he is completely intolerant of people who question authority, his own or the President's. Sounds to me like they hit a nerve.

Yoo:

They accused us of violating ethical standards without ever defining them. They concocted bizarre conspiracy theories about which they never asked us, and for which they had no evidence, even though we both patiently—and with no legal obligation to do so—sat through days of questioning.

OPR's investigation was so biased, so flawed, and so beneath the Justice Department's own standards that last week the department's ranking civil servant and senior ethicist, David Margolis, completely rejected its recommendations.

"Whatever may have been left of the Fourth Amendment ... is now gone."

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski:

This is an extraordinary case: Our court approves, without blinking, a police sweep of a person’s home without a warrant, without probable cause, without reasonable suspicion and without exigency—in other words, with nothing at all to support the entry except the curiosity police always have about what they might find if they go rummaging around a suspect’s home. Once inside, the police managed to turn up a gun “in plain view”—stuck between two cushions of the living room couch—and we reward them by upholding the search.

Did I mention that this was an entry into somebody’s home, the place where the protections of the Fourth Amendment are supposedly at their zenith?...

The opinion misapplies Supreme Court precedent, conflicts with our own case law and is contrary to the great weight of authority in the other circuits. It is also the only case I know of, in any jurisdiction covered by the Fourth Amendment, where invasion of the home has been approved based on no showing whatsoever. Nada. Gar nichts. Rien du tout. Bupkes.

Whatever may have been left of the Fourth Amendment after [United States v. Black] is now gone. The evisceration of this crucial constitutional protector of the sanctity and privacy of what Americans consider their castles is pretty much complete. Welcome to the fish bowl.

"Evil in politics is easy to see..."

Alain Badiou:

Evil in politics is easy to see: It's absolute inequality with respect to life, wealth, power. Good is equality. How long can we accept the fact that what is needed for running water, schools, hospitals, and food enough for all humanity is a sum that corresponds to the amount spent by wealthy Western countries on perfume in a year? This is not a question of human rights and morality. It is a question of the fundamental battle for equality of all people, against the law of profit, whether personal or national.

"They are profits that we have as . . . a responsibility to keep a viable business surviving."
- Leslie Margolin, president of Anthem Blue Cross

"I wouldn’t mind seeing a little more toughness here or there."

[LBJ brow-beating a Senator]

I wouldn't mind seeing a lot more.

N.Y. Times:

Ever since his days as a young community organizer in Chicago, Mr. Obama has held fast to the belief that by listening carefully and appealing to reason he can bring people together to get results, an approach that in Washington has often come up short.

He is not showing any signs of changing his style. But he is facing perhaps the toughest test yet of his powers of persuasion: winning the votes he needs, in the face of unified Republican opposition and a deteriorating climate for Democrats, to push his health care measure through a skittish Congress.

Mr. Obama has not been the sort to bludgeon his party into following his lead or to intimidate reluctant legislators. And while he has often succeeded by relying on Democratic leaders in Congress to do his bidding — the House and Senate, after all, both passed versions of the health legislation last year — it is not clear whether his gentle, consensus-building style will be enough.

“I wouldn’t mind seeing a little more toughness here or there,” said Representative Louise M. Slaughter, a New York Democrat, who contends that if Mr. Obama had pushed the Senate harder last year, the bill would have been law by now.

Tom Johnson, a press secretary for LBJ, reflects on what LBJ would have done to get a health care bill passed:

LBJ would:

Have a list of every member of Congress on his desk.

He would be on the telephone with members (and their key staffers) constantly: "Your president really needs your vote on this bill."

He would have a list of every special request every member wanted -- from White House tours to appointments to federal jobs and commissions.

He would make a phone call or have a personal visit with every member -- individually or in a group. Charts, graphs, coffee. They would get the "Johnson Treatment" as nobody else could give it.

He would have a willingness to horse-trade with every member.

He would keep a list of people who support each member financially. A call to each to tell them to get the vote of that representative.

He would have Billy Graham calling Baptists, Cardinal Cushing calling Catholics, Dr. Martin Luther King calling blacks, Henry Gonzales calling Hispanics, Henry Ford and David Rockefeller calling Republicans.

He would get Jack Valenti to call the Pope if it would help.

He would have speeches written for members for the Congressional Record and hometown newspapers.

He would use up White House liquor having nightcaps with the leaders and key members of BOTH parties.

Each of them would take home cufflinks, watches, signed photos, and perhaps even a pledge to come raise money for their next election.

He would be sending gifts to children and grandchildren of members.

He would walk around the South Lawn with reporters telling them why this was important to their own families.

He would send every aide in the White House to see every member of the House and Senate. He would send me to see Sen. Richard Russell and Rep. Carl Vinson because I am a Georgian.

He would call media executives Kay Graham, Frank Stanton, Robert Kintner, and the heads of every network.

He would go to pray at six different churches.

He would do newspaper, radio and TV interviews -- especially with Merriman Smith, Hugh Sidey, Sid Davis, Forrest Boyd, Ray Scherer, Helen Thomas, Marianne Means, Walter Cronkite, Phil Potter, Bob Novak.

He would threaten, cajole, flirt, flatter, hug -- and get the health care bill passed.

Would Johnson have threatened, cajoled, flirted and flattered to pass a bill that caves to insurance companies, as Obama is doing? I don't think so.

Capitalism is deaf to moral appeals

[source]

"If you lack any serious understanding of how capitalism works, then it's easy to delude yourself into thinking that moral appeals to the consciences of CEOs and finance ministers will have some effect."
- Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti, "Action Will Be Taken"

"Maybe we'll just fall apart..."

From a Doug Henwood interview:

BHASKAR SUNKARA: Is there a specifically Marxist understanding of the current economic crisis that you subscribe to?

DOUG HENWOOD: Mine, of course, which is that the bourgeoisie launched a successful war on a troublesome working class in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That assault – wage-cutting, speedup, deregulation, outsourcing, union-busting, cutbacks in the welfare state, all the familiar stuff gathered under the name of neoliberalism – created a problem for a system dependent on high levels of mass consumption both to maintain aggregate demand and to secure its political legitimacy. Why put up with the volatility and tsurris of American life if there’s no promise of plentiful gadgetry and upward mobility? So the answer was to counter the downdraft of falling wages with rising borrowing, via credit cards and mortgages. That model seemed to hit a wall in the recent economic crisis, but there’s no real recognition of that fact, and no new model for accumulation. In orthodox terms, the U.S. would be ready for a serious austerity program, but our ruling class is afraid to push too hard on that, at least for now. So I think we’re going to stumble along for some time until some new economic and political model emerges. Or if one doesn’t emerge, maybe we’ll just fall apart.

Not to be outdone by Ian Welsh:

1) employment is not going to recover to pre-great recession levels for at least a generation, maybe more, in terms of % of people employed. The late Clinton economy is the best you or I will see in our working lives.

2) Politics will continue to be dominated by monied interests and that dominance will increase, rather than decrease. They will use their power to fight over the shrinking pie, rather than to increase it, and will make any real systemic restructuring of the economy essentially impossible.

3) a right wing “populist” will get in after Obama. Since the only sort of stimulus they can do is war stimulus, they will pick a war with someone. Who, I’m not sure. In economic terms they will have all the wrong solutions to various real problems.

4) Under both Democrats and Republicans the deterioration of civil liberties will continue.

5) Median standards of living will take at least a 20% drop within 10 years or so. Maybe more. Not sure exactly when, but if anything, the % may be an underestimate.

[...]

9) There will be another major economic crisis, probably within 8 years. In principle it could happen within a year, the timing depends on political actions I’m not sure how to predict. I consider this nearly inevitable.

[...]

"It is time to imagine what democracy would look like outside of what we have come to call capitalism."

Henry Giroux:

Maybe it is time to shift the critique of Obama away from an exclusive focus on the policies and practices of his administration and develop a new language, one with a longer historical purview and deeper understanding of the ominous forces that now threaten any credible notion of the United States as an aspiring democracy. As Stuart Hall insisted, we "need to change the scale of magnification" in order to make visible the anti-democratic relations often buried beneath the hidden order of politics that have taken hold in the United States in the last few decades. It may be time to shift the discourse away from focusing on either Obama's failures or urging progressives and others to develop "the organizational power to make muscular demands" on the Obama administration. Maybe the time has come to focus on the ongoing repressive and systemic conditions, institutions, ideologies and values that have been developing in American society for the last 30 years, forces that are giving rise to a unique form of American authoritarianism. I agree with Sheldon Wolin that the "fixation upon" Obama now "obscures the problems" we are facing. Maybe it is time to imagine what democracy would look like outside of what we have come to call capitalism, not simply neoliberalism as its most extreme manifestation. Maybe it is time to fight for the formative culture and modes of thought and agency that are the very foundations of democracy. And maybe it time to mobilize a militant, far-reaching social movement to challenge the false claims that equate democracy and capitalism.

If it is true that a new form of authoritarianism is developing in the United States, undercutting any vestige of a democratic society, then it is equally true that there is nothing inevitable about this growing threat. The long and tightening grip of authoritarianism in American political culture can be resisted and transformed. This dystopic future will not happen if intellectuals, workers, young people and diverse social movements unite to create the public spaces and unsettling formative educational cultures necessary for reimagining the meaning of radical democracy.

I concur! If we are to create a better society we need to inhabit new intellectual spaces and invent forms of discourse that resist and transcend the timid, short-sighted, mainstream, capitalistic view.

MAKE IT NEW!

"Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!"
- Thoreau, Walden

"The greater the inequality the more socially dysfunctional societies become."

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett are interviewed by Owen Metcalfe about their book, The Spirit Level.


Book excerpt:

The differences in the performance of more and less equal countries are very large. Rather than things being just a bit worse in more unequal countries, they are very much worse. More unequal countries have three times the rates of violence, of infant mortality and of mental illness. Their teenage birth rates are six times as high, and rates of imprisonment are eight times higher.

What could account for such huge differences in performance, spread across so many outcomes?

The answer turned out to be surprisingly simple – inequality. The bigger the income differences between the rich and poor in a country, the worse it does. The relationship could not have been clearer: the greater the inequality the more socially dysfunctional societies become – regardless of their overall economic performance. Whether a country is as rich as the USA or, like Greece, only half as wealthy, seems to have no bearing on levels of health and social problems.

Cross-posted at Slumming with Socialists.

Lieberman wants gays to die for their country but he won't grant them full equality

“I will be proud to be a sponsor of the important effort to enable patriotic gay Americans to defend our national security and our founding values of freedom and opportunity."
- Joseph Lieberman, February 22, 2010

He applauds the willingness of gays to serve and die for their country and yet he can't find it in his heart to support same-sex marriage, giving gays a right that everyone else in America can take for granted.

Does that seem fair?

Countless gays are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. Joe won't sacrifice his bigotry.

We must...

"We must break
the Money Trust
or the Money Trust
will break us."

- Louis D. Brandeis, 1913

(h/t Economic Populist)

"Cooperation would replace competition as a major driving force of economic and social progress."

Praful Bidwai on Gandhi's lagacy (via ZNet):

In Gandhi’s vision, Independent India would be sui generis, a society unlike any other, in a class of its own. India would not embrace statist Communism, but would not be capitalist either. India would not follow the Western pattern of industrialization, urbanization and individuation (or atomization, as its critics might term it), which seemed to many in the last century to be necessary and inevitable—the eventual destination of all societies as they “develop” and modernize.

[...]

Gandhi’s India would not be secular in the classical Western sense of strictly separating religion from politics and public life. But it would respect plurality and be tolerant towards different religions and would not discriminate against any faith. There would be no casteism and untouchability in such a society; social hierarchy and gender discrimination would be questioned and reduced. This society would strive for a non-violent relationship with nature, the animal world, other countries and societies. It would strive to establish harmony both internally and between India and other nations.

Cooperation would replace competition as a major driving force of economic and social progress. Decentralization and devolution of authority to the smallest unit—the village community or panchayat—would be at the core of Indian politics.

[...]

Even with its imperfections, this represents a huge advance over the pitiably imitative, slavishly unoriginal, Western-style neoliberal model embraced by the Indian elite and our present leadership, which believes that there is no alternative to the “free market” or a homogenous future for the whole world which lies in liberal democracy, market-led society and Coca-Cola. The idea of justice, equity and harmony that runs through Gandhi’s vision is infinitely superior to the repulsive notion of self-interest and greed as the driving force of growth and prosperity and progress in the elitist perspectives.

[...]

"Populism is fundamentally re-active"

Populisms come and go, the need for a "truly radical emancipatory politics" abides.

From First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (p. 61), by Slavoj Žižek:

Populism is ultimately always sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry "I don't know what's going on, but I've just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop!" Such impatient outbursts betray a refusal to understand or engage with the complexity of the situation, and give rise to the conviction that there must be somebody responsible for the mess - which is why some agent lurking behind the scenes is invariably required. Therein, in this refusal-to-know, resides the properly fetishistic dimension of populism. That is to say, although at a purely formal level fetishism involves a gesture of transference (onto the object-fetish), it functions as an exact inversion of the standard formula of transference (with the "subject supposed to know"): what fetishism gives body to is precisely my disavowal of knowledge, my refusal to subjectively assume what I know. This is why, to put it in Nietzschean terms which are here highly appropriate, the ultimate difference between a truly radical emancipatory politics and a populist politics is that the former is active, it imposes and enforces its vision, while populism is fundamentally re-active, the result of a reaction to a disturbing intruder. In other words, populism remains a version of the politics of fear: it mobilizes the crowd by stoking up fear of the corrupt external agent.

Yoo Fucker: Okay for President to Call for Massacres

Michael Isikoff:

The chief author of the Bush administration's "torture memo" told Justice Department investigators that the president's war-making authority was so broad that he had the constitutional power to order a village to be "massacred," according to a report by released Friday night by the Office of Professional Responsibility.

[...]

At the core of the legal arguments were the views of Yoo, strongly backed by David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's legal counsel, that the president's wartime powers were essentially unlimited and included the authority to override laws passed by Congress, such as a statute banning the use of torture. Pressed on his views in an interview with OPR investigators, Yoo was asked:

"What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? ... Is that a power that the president could legally -"

"Yeah," Yoo replied, according to a partial transcript included in the report. "Although, let me say this: So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief's power over tactical decisions."

"To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?" the OPR investigator asked again.

"Sure," said Yoo.

Yoo is depicted as the driving force behind an Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department memo that narrowly defined torture and then added sections concluding that, in the end, it essentially didn't matter what the fine print of the congressionally passed law said: The president's authority superseded the law and CIA officers who might later be accused of torture could also argue that were acting in "self defense" in order to save American lives.

They will never apologize

“I will never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.”
- George H. W. Bush, Newsweek, August 15, 1988

“Let us continue to love our country, be proud of our country, never apologize for our country!”
- Sarah Palin, July 25, 2009

"Like all of you, my responsibility is to act in the interest of my nation and my people, and I will never apologize for defending those interests. "
- Barack Obama, Spetember 23, 2009

Health care endgame, Senate to play

[source]

It is sickening to watch the health care endgame unfold. It is particularly nauseating to see a bunch of senators at the 23rd hour suck up to the public with a letter they know will go nowhere.

They are all a bunch of cynical opportunists who would do anything to appear virtuous as they stab us all in the back.

Throw the bums out.

P. S. Yes, you can become a "citizen sponsor" of the letter. Enjoy your pretend influence.

"We have met the enemy and he is us."

[source]

Jeff Huber:

Dead or alive, Osama bin Laden is the greatest strategist in the history of human conflict. With no navy or air force or anything that resembles a formal army, he’s managed to whip the world’s mightiest nation like a rented camel. Our economy is shot, the best-trained, best-equipped military in history has been proven impotent, and our moral standing in the world has gone through the sub-basement.

[...]

Our "struggle against violent extremism" has produced, at a conservative estimate, a minimum of 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq alone. The figure may be well over a million. In 2007, official Iraqi government statistics showed that the country possessed 5 million orphans. That’s a bunch more Iraqi orphans than Saddam Hussein ever made.

Osama bin Laden didn’t need to survive beyond December 2001 to wreak havoc on the United States and the rest of the world. We’ve done it for him.

[source of orig.]

"Organized labor seems ever destined to play the role of Charlie Brown, the inevitable loser, while the Democratic occupant of the White House plays Lucy -- doomed ever to disappoint."
- Robert Fitch

And people wonder why labor has become powerless...

[source]

"Extreme economic inequality ultimately leads to political instability and often revolution."

Confluence:

The founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, states that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Today, however, just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 61% disagree and say the government does not have the necessary consent. Eighteen percent (18%) of voters are not sure.

However, 63% of the Political Class think the government has the consent of the governed, but only six percent (6%) of those with Mainstream views agree.

Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters now view the federal government as a special interest group, and 70% believe that the government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.

I can’t help but feel we are headed for civil unrest if the Obama administration and Congress don’t start doing something about jobs and the disastrous economic situation that the bottom 90% of the people in this country can see, but those at the top either can’t see or don’t care about.

In my spare time I’ve been reading a book called It Could Happen Here, by Bruce Judson, who is a “Senior Faculty Fellow” at the Yale School of Management. Judson argues that economic inequality in the U.S. has reached the point where we are very close to meeting all the historical markers that lead to the overthrow of governments.

Judson writes that the disparity between rich and poor is now the greatest since the early 20th century, and most of this disparity has built up over the last 30 years. From the book (no link available):

The top earning 10 percent of U.S. families receive 49.3 percent of all U.S. household income, including capital gains. By comparison, this top 10 percent received a substanially lower 34.2 percent of the nation’s total household income in 1979. The comparison is far starker for the super-rich, the top 1 percent….In 1979 the top 1 percent of American received 10 percent of the nation’s total income, by 2006 this figure had more than doubled, to over 22.8 percent. The top 1 percent of American families now take home one-quarter to one-fifth of all of the household income generated by society.

Judson says that “extreme economic inequality ultimately leads to political instability and often revolution.” He says that historically revolutions have been set off when the middle class begins to feel that government no longer serves their needs. As long as a society has a thriving middle class, it is protected from such upheavals.

Obamacare

Will Obama be able to deliver healthcare reform ? I believe so, because I believe he has the support of the health insurance industry. He made a deal with Big Pharma, and in my somewhat jaded opinion I believe the kicker was his willingness to drop the Public Option. I don't believe Obama saw that as a loss because he likely never saw it as anything more than a negotiating tool. Below is a link to an article and story on his meeting with pharmaceutical industry leaders and their lobbyists and how a mutually beneficial deal was arrived at.

http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2010/02/12/the-legacy-of-billy-tauzin-the-white-house-phrma-deal/

Healthcare "reform" is still up in the air, but I believe the White House is determined to deliver a package. Obama needs it desperately because he looks to his legacy. The Democrats need it to show they were able to accomplish something. The health insurance industry likes what has been put together so far because it mandates 30 million new customers with the industry making little more than cosmetic sacrifice. The only ones not benefiting are the American people who will see costs continue to rise with service steadily decreasing. The Republicans are irrelevant here. They can only obstruct any meaningful reform; the best they can offer the health insurance industry is the status quo.

If the Democrats can make this happen through the reconciliation process it would be the best of all possible worlds for them. They can further gut an already gutted and useless package making it even more industry friendly. They can point to a great victory-Finally! Health Care reform delivered to a grateful American public-allowing Obama's cheering supporters a time for celebration till they need to seek out medical care and they discover they are even worse off. But this in itself is also a victory for the Democrats-Obama will be able to blame the packages shortcomings-effectively the entire fetid package-on the Republicans partisan opposition.

"'What is a populist?' read the research query. 'The senator thinks he might be one.'"

Great article on populism by Jim Hightower. Includes a lists of things the People's Party of America fought for:

* The first party to call for women's suffrage.
* An eight-hour day for labor, plus wage protections.
* The abolition of the standing army of mercenaries, known as the "Pinkerton system," which violently suppressed union organizers.
* The direct election by the people of U.S. senators (who were chosen by state legislatures at the time).
* A graduated income tax.
* Legislation by popular initiative and referendum.
* Public ownership of railroads, telephones, and telegraphs.
* No subsidy of private corporations for any purpose.
* Prohibition of speculation on and foreign ownership of our public lands and natural resources.
* A free ballot and fair count in all elections.
* Civil-service laws to prevent the politicalization of government employees.
* Pensions for veterans.
* Measures to break the corrupting power of corporate lobbyists.

When I lived in Washington, DC, in the 1970s, I got a call from a friend of mine who worked for the Congressional Research Service--a legislative agency that digs up facts, prepares briefing papers, and otherwise does research on any topic requested by members of Congress.

My friend could barely speak, because he was hooting, howling, and guffawing over a research question he'd just received. It was from the office of Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, the aloof and patrician Texas Democrat who was known on Capitol Hill primarily as a faithful emissary for Wall Street interests. At the time, Bentsen was contemplating a run for the presidency, and apparently he was searching for a suitable political identity. "What is a populist?" read the research query. "The senator thinks he might be one."

Uh...no sir, you are not.

Bentsen was closer to being "The Man in the Moon" than he was to being a populist. Yet, he was hardly alone in trying to cloak himself as "The People's Champion" while remaining faithful to the plutocratic powers. These days, there's a whole flock of politicos and pundits doing this--from Sarah Palin to Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich to Glenn Beck.

They are abetted by a media establishment that carelessly (and lazily) misapplies the populist label to anyone who claims to be a maverick and tends to bark a lot. Although the targets they're usually barking at are poor people, teachers, minorities, unions, liberals, protestors, environmentalists, gays, immigrants, or other demonized groups that generally reside far outside the center of the power structure--the barkers are indiscriminately tagged as populist voices.

First of all, populism is not a style, nor is it a synonym for "popular outrage." It is a historically grounded political doctrine (and movement) that supports ordinary folks in their ongoing democratic fight against the moneyed elites.

The very essence of populism is its unrelenting focus on breaking the iron grip that big corporations have on our country--including on our economy, government, media, and environment. It is unabashedly a class movement. Try to squeeze Lord Limbaugh into that philosophical suit of clothes! He's just another right-wing, corporate-hugging, silk-tie elitist--an apologist for plutocracy, not a populist.

Fully embracing the egalitarian ideals and rebellious spirit of the American Revolution, populists have always been out to challenge the orthodoxy of the corporate order and to empower workaday Americans so they can control their own economic and political destinies. This approach distinguishes the movement from classic liberalism, which seeks to live in harmony with concentrated corporate power by trying to regulate its excesses.

"The very essence of populism is its unrelenting focus on breaking the iron grip that big corporations have on our country--including on our economy, government, media, and environment. It is unabashedly a class movement."

Teaching a rat’s eye view of history

[source]

Michael Yates reflects on his experience teaching (in the '70's) a film called The History Book:

This film was made by an agency of the Danish government and was meant to be shown to Danish school kids. Given its extraordinarily radical content, this is remarkable. In its nine sections, it tells the story of the beginning and development of capitalism from the point of view of the exploited classes (serfs in feudalism and wage workers in capitalism). The narrator is a rat, reflecting playwright Bertolt Brecht’s view that we needed a “rat’s eye view of history.” The rat enters center stage and says, “Did you ever wonder why there are rich and poor?” As good a question as there is for a course in economics, though one that was never answered or even much discussed in all but one of the thirty or so economics classes I took. Things really get rolling after that: The corruption, venality, and brutality of the feudal nobility, both secular and religious; the rise of a money-grubbing merchant class; the “primitive accumulation of capital,” including the slave trade and the pillage of Africa and the Americas; early capitalism and periodic crises; the rise of monopolies; wars and modern imperialism; and various anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles. There are many memorable scenes. Two of my favorites are the rat on battlefields in the First and Second World Wars shouting to the soldiers, most of whom are from the working class, “Don’t kill each other, kill the capitalists,” and a U.S. businessman opening up the skull of an African student brought to the capital of capitalism to be properly acculturated and vomiting a cornucopia of goods into his skull.

The History Book made students uncomfortable. In a review in the New York Times, Vincent Canby dismissed the film as ridiculous propaganda. But it is much more than that. It strikes at the heart of cherished beliefs: the sense of U.S superiority, the notion that our economic system is the best in the world, the feeling that slavery and racism are things of the past and irrelevant for an understanding of the contemporary world. The movie relentlessly attacks these and many other “common sense” ideas so dear to citizens in the world’s rich nations and nowhere
more so than in the United States, even to sophisticates like Vincent Canby.

[...]

Most students confined their displeasure with the film to the end-of-term course evaluations and bitching among themselves. But a few were so angry that they stormed out of the room during some particularly outrageous scene, or they gave me a furious look. One particular distraught student was an older man who had recently mustered out of the Marine Corps a sergeant, after twenty years and three tours of duty in Vietnam.

[...]

He made it through the course, but afterwards he told me that he wanted to come down the auditorium aisle and strangle me after I showed The History Book. I took this more seriously than I might have if a callow eighteen-year old had said it.

For the most part college was a good experience for the veterans. After a year or two of classes, they began to see the world in a more complex and sophisticated way. For some, their experiences as working class youth, including those in Vietnam, began to make some sense to them. For a few, college helped them exorcize their demons. Sarge was no exception. He started to do better in his courses, and he got a little less rough around the edges. We even had civil conversations. He joked about the rat movie.

After graduation, Sarge took a job with the local transit company. He was on full military pension, but he was still a relatively young man, too young and too disciplined not to work. His job was covered by a collective bargaining agreement, and he turned out to be a good union man. Some time after he took this job, he called me. He had a grievance against the company, and he wanted my advice. At first, I said to myself, “Well, doesn’t that just figure. We were ideological enemies when he was a student, but now that he has a problem with his boss, who does he come to? The guy who hates the bosses but knows what to do when they put the screws to you.” But then I thought that maybe Sarge’s new experiences, including his education, had changed his outlook. Maybe under different circumstances, I’d have been Sarge and he’d have been me. Or maybe we’d both have been factory workers out on a picket line. I helped him as best I could.

Wouldn't it be nice...

If every last one of them except Dennis of course, who does not deserve such a fate, were voted out of office in an expression of popular disgust with Congress' awful track record over the last several years?

"Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true."

As they suck up to corporations, destroy the middle class and perpetuate massive inequality, you can watch them make fake little going-nowhere appeals that are meant to convey the message that they give a shit:

"Eighteen Democratic senators have now signed onto a proposal pushing the party's leadership to pass a public option health care plan using a Senate procedure that requires fewer than sixty votes."

Tolstoy's writings on civil disobedience and non-violence

Good book.
Came out in 1968.
Cost: 95 cents.
Value: inestimable.

You will find all of the essays online:

The beginning of the end
Two wars
Notes for officers
Notes for soldiers
On patriotism
Carthago delenda est
Patriotism, or peace
Letter on the peace conference
Letter to a non-commissioned officer
Letter to Dr. Eugen Heinrich Schmitt
A reply to criticisms
Reply to critics
Letter to the liberals
"Thou shalt not kill"
Help!
The emigration of the Dukhobors
Nobel's bequest
Letter to Ernest Howard Crosby
Nikolai Palkin
Church and state
From: The kingdom of god (from chapter one)
Postscripts to "The life and death of Drozhin"
On the negro-question

"When we see trained animals accomplishing things contrary to nature: dogs walking on their forelegs, elephants rolling barrels, tigers playing with lions, and so on, we know that all this has been attained by the torments of hunger, whip, and red-hot iron. And when we see men in uniforms with rifles standing motionless, or performing all together with the same movement - running, jumping, shooting, shouting, and so on - in general, producing those fine reviews and manoeuvres which emperors and kings so admire and show off one before the other, we know the same. One cannot cauterize out of a man all that is human and reduce him to the state of a machine without torturing him, and torturing not in a simple way but in the most refined, cruel way - at one and the same time torturing and deceiving him."
- Leo Tolstoy, "Notes to Officers"

"Obama is a brand. He functions as a brand ... for the corporate state."

Chris Hedges, on target on a lot of issues.

Bank of Screw America

The Wal-Mart of banking. Share this video.

Americans for Fairness in Lending:

What do Hammurabi, Plato, Charlemagne, Dante and Queens Mary and Elizabeth have in common? They all condemned, outlawed or regulated the charging of interest on loans. In fact, until the early 1900s interest rates in the United States were kept at or near 10%. And until 1979, loan laws provided some interest rate cap in every state. Then everything changed. Governments and banks put profits before people. And now the lending industry is spiraling out of control.

I hate armchair warmongers

The N.Y. Times published one today:

...the pendulum has swung too far in favor of avoiding the death of innocents at all cost. General McChrystal’s directive was well intentioned, but the lofty ideal at its heart is a lie, and an immoral one at that, because it pretends that war can be fair or humane....

Scum of the earth.

"Stress, loneliness, depression, boredom - the madness of everyday life."

"Antidepressants were the third most prescribed type of drug in 2008, hitting $9.6 billion in sales, up from $9.4 billion the year before."
- Washington Post, August 30, 2009

Do you read John Zerzan?

Here's something from Future Primitive.

Stress, loneliness, depression, boredom-the madness of everyday life. Ever-greater levels of sadness, implying a recognition, on the visceral level at least, that things could be different. How much joy is there left in the technological society, this field of alienation and anxiety? Mental health epidemiologists suspect that no more than twenty percent of us are free of psychopathological symptoms. Thus we act out a "pathology of normalcy" marked by the chronic psychic impoverishment of a qualitatively unhealthy society.

[...]

The mental disorder of going along with things as they are is now treated almost entirely by biochemicals, to reduce the individual's consciousness of socially induced anguish. Tranquilizers are now the world's most widely prescribed drugs, and anti-depressants set record sales as well. Temporary relief-despite side-effects and addictive properties-is easily obtained, while we are all ground down a little more. The burden of simply getting by is "Why All Those People Feel They Never Have Any Time," according to Trish Hall (New York Times, January 2, 1988), who concluded that 'everybody just seems to feel worn out" by it all.

"Antidepressant sales are rising in most Western countries, and they have been for at least a decade. Recently, we learned that the proportion of Americans taking antidepressants in any given year nearly doubled from 1996 to 2005."
- Neuroskeptic

And it's only going to get worse...

David DeGraw:

Paul Buchheit, from DePaul University, revealed, “From 1980 to 2006 the richest 1% of America tripled their after-tax percentage of our nation’s total income, while the bottom 90% have seen their share drop over 20%.” Robert Freeman added, “Between 2002 and 2006, it was even worse: an astounding three quarters of all the economy’s growth was captured by the top 1%.”

Due to this, the United States already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the average worker much harder than CEOs, the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99% of the US population has grown to a record high. The economic top one percent of the population now owns over 70% of all financial assets, an all-time record.

As mentioned before, just look at the first full year of the crisis when workers lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. During the same time period, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans increased by $30 billion, bringing their total combined wealth to $1.57 trillion, which is more than the combined net worth of 50% of the US population. Just to make this point clear, 400 people have more wealth than 155 million people combined.

Meanwhile, 2009 was a record-breaking year for Wall Street bonuses, as firms issued $150 billion to their executives. 100% of these bonuses are a direct result of our tax dollars, so if we used this money to create jobs, instead of giving it to a handful of top executives, we could have paid an annual salary of $30,000 to 5 million people.

So while US workers are now working more hours and have become dramatically more productive and profitable, our pay is actually declining and all the dramatic increases in wealth are going straight into the pockets of the Economic Elite.

"400 people have more wealth than 155 million people combined."

Torturer Confesses, Justice Goes Deaf and Dumb and Blind

Scott Horton:

Section 2340A of the federal criminal code makes it an offense to torture or to conspire to torture. Violators are subject to jail terms or to death in appropriate cases, as where death results from the application of torture techniques. Prosecutors have argued that a criminal investigation into torture undertaken with the direction of the Bush White House would raise complex legal issues, and proof would be difficult. But what about cases in which an instigator openly and notoriously brags about his role in torture? Cheney told Jonathan Karl that he used his position within the National Security Council to advocate for the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques. Former CIA agent John Kiriakou and others have confirmed that when waterboarding was administered, it was only after receiving NSC clearance. Hence, Cheney was not speaking hypothetically but admitting his involvement in the process that led to decisions to waterboard in at least three cases.

What prosecutor can look away when a perpetrator mocks the law itself and revels in his role in violating it? Such cases cry out for prosecution. Dick Cheney wants to be prosecuted. And prosecutors should give him what he wants.

Glenn Greenwald discusses the braggart here. Cheney is counting on two things: Obama's cowardice (painted over as bipartisanship and looking forward) and our exhaustion with the whole torture issue.

When will Obama start channeling Alice Cooper?

No more Mister Nice Guy
No more Mister Clean

Yeah, okay, the answer is never.

Would he maybe go for the more introspective Motörhead approach?

When I was young I was the nicest guy I knew
I thought I was the chosen one
But time went by and I found out a thing or two
My shine wore off as time wore on
I thought that I was living out the perfect life
But in the lonely hours that the truth begins to bite
I turned around I read the writing on the wall
I ain't no nice guy after all
I ain't no nice guy after all

Gandhi's Pat Robertson side...

A Blank Slate:

On 15th January 1934, a colossal earthquake hit Bihar [...] The death toll was estimated at twenty thousand. Gandhi visited Bihar in March and spoke to the bereaved, destitute and homeless people. The earthquake, he told them, “is a chastisement of your sins.” And the particular sin that he had in mind was the enforcement of untouchability.

Even Gandhi’s closest supporters were horrified. The victims of the earthquake had included poor as well as rich [...] But Gandhi was explicitly blaming the victims, appropriating a terrible disaster to promote his own religious ideas. Nehru, who had been helping the relief efforts in Bihar, read Gandhi’s remarks “with a great shock”. But the most effective refutation came from Rabindranath Tagore, long one of the Mahatma’s greatest advocates. Tagore argued caustically that this supposedly “divine” justice, if such it was, constituted the least just form of punishment imaginable. [From Indian Summer, Tunzelmann]

(h/t Bad Attitudes)

"There is no earthly reason why ... the abuse of extreme poverty and the abuse of war should not be totally abolished."

"Perfect human felicity is doubtless a pathetic illusion, but there is no reason why certain obvious abuses, certain obvious results of insane mismanagement, should not be removed. This is not idealism. It is common sense. War under modern conditions is such an abuse, such a piece of pure insanity; and to put an end to war were not to outrage the laws of nature by a stroke of monstrous ideality, it were simply to give a new direction to these laws by the use of common intelligence.

[...]

Human nature is pushed forward by the very profoundest law of its existence towards light and air and liberty and happiness and leisure and culture. It is also pushed forward by a profound law of its existence towards competition and struggle and rivalry. But there is no earthly reason why these two laws should not at least be so reconciled that the abuse of extreme poverty and the abuse of war should not be totally abolished. To lay it down as an austere, scientific dogma, as some writers do, that we must always have poverty and always have war, is not to have sufficient trust in the miraculous transformative power of life."
- John Cowper Powys, The War and Culture (1914)

"Confined to a, b, c, or d in the multiple choice test, when we know there is another possible answer."

"Scholars, who pride themselves on speaking their minds, often engage in a form of self-censorship which is called 'realism.' To be 'realistic' in dealing with a problem is to work only among the alternatives which the most powerful in society put forth. It is as if we are all confined to a, b, c, or d in the multiple choice test, when we know there is another possible answer. American society, although it has more freedom of expression than most societies in the world, thus sets limits beyond which respectable people are not supposed to think or speak."
- Howard Zinn, A People's History

Obama's unrequited love

"FDR said, maybe not entirely honestly, of the American rich, 'I welcome their hatred.' Obama will do or say anything so that they’ll return his love—which, despite all his efforts, isn’t yet forthcoming."
- Doug Henwood, LBO News

Here an Obama basher, there an Obama basher, everywhere an Obama basher...

Unknown News:

It's really quite entertaining to watch, as Obama goes from a man promising grand change and holding the potential for at least modest course corrections, to a guy whose name will be a punchline for future generations (think Millard Fillmore).

On issue after issue after issue, the Obama administration keeps moving in the opposite direction from anything that the people who voted for him could be said to have supported. The Bush-Cheney war criminals won't be prosecuted, which is almost literally a green light for the next Republican administration to resume policies of torture and war crimes. Wiretapping and diversion of Americans' emails without warrants continues unabated. The banking industry, home to the nation's richest criminals, continues to receive bailout checks instead of subpoenas. The wars continue, with only lip service to any end, and the open secret of new wars in Pakistan and Yemen. Guantanamo remains open for business, and we all know what that business is. Health care reform remains an unfulfilled promise. The President speaks of his support for "clean" coal and nuclear power. On and on the list goes.

It's been a grand doublecross, worthy of a soap opera on the CW, with Mr Obama playing the angsty vampire. Among the few people I call friends Obama won unanimously in 2008, but I don't see how he'll get any votes in 2012.

For many, anger at Obama has given way to acceptance of his betrayal of liberal values and laughter at his incompetence. We don't expect much of anything from him anymore.

"Enough with the Gandhi-esque s--t ..."

Obama admires Gandhi (no doubt he admires the Gandhi who said "I advocate training in arms for those who believe in the method of violence").

A TPM reader:

Let's put the blame for this lack of action and acomplishment squarely where it belongs: Obama. He has noble intentions of "changing the tone" in Washington, but sometimes high-mindedness is simply naiveté. Enough with the Gandhi-esque s--t - it's time to pass some bills that will make a positive impact in the lives of millions of Americans.

"Black people see progress when they are actually facing disaster."

Glen Ford:

Obama-induced chemical imbalances messed up Black people’s minds regarding the gap between Black and white incomes. Asked if the racial gap had grown smaller in the last ten years, 56 percent said “yes” in 2009, compared to 41 percent in 2007. In fact, the racial wage gap had grown significantly. In 2000, Black households made 64.8 cents for every dollar made by whites. By 2008 Black households had slipped three cents, to 61.8 cents on the white dollar – approximately the same size gap as existed in 1989 and 1979. Blacks are worse off, income-wise, than ten years ago, and except for a brief uptick in Black household income during the Clinton bubble-boom of the Nineties, the Black-white earnings gap has remained virtually unchanged for the past 30 years.

ObamaL'aid is a mind-altering substance, a hallucinogen. It makes Black people see progress when they are actually facing disaster. Obama-on-the-brain also behaves like an opiate, blocking out pain. African Americans’ ability to apprehend political and economic danger is compromised by Obama-induced delusion, while the opiate effect prevents Blacks from knowing where and how badly they have been hurt. That’s a fatal combination.

Faulty Foresight

"We can see that in modern times the huge and unlimited powers of production by machinery, united with a growing tendency towards intelligent Birth-control, are preparing the way for an age of Communism and communal Plenty which will inevitably be associated (partly as cause and partly as effect) with a new general phase of consciousness, involving the mitigation of the struggle for existence, the growth of intuitional and psychical perception, the spread of amity and solidarity, the disappearance of War, and the realization (in degree) of the Cosmic life."
- Edward Carpenter, Pagan and Christian Creeds (1921)

Brief moments of populist sentiment aren't good enough

"How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for 9/10th of the people to eat? The only way to be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub that he ain't got no business with!"
- Huey P. Long, Dec. 11, 1934

Most politicians opportunistically express a few populist sentiments to garner our support then immediately return to business as usual. Such politicians don't deserve to be in office.

Economic Populist:

The Democrats have had brief moments of populist expression. When his bill to help with soaring foreclosure rates failed, Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) exclaimed, the banks, “frankly, … they own this place.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said recently, “The truth is -- let me break the bad news to the American people -- big money interests control the United States Congress.”

Each Senator returned to the fold after their statements. Durbin continued as Senate Whip, gathering votes for a middle of the road corporatist agenda. After he criticized of big money interests, Sanders supported the big-money-friendly Senate health reform bill. No Senator and few members of Congress have adopted redistribution of wealth the centerpiece of their agenda.

A sustained populist movement requires a central statement on the current distribution and future redistribution of wealth. Adopting that position is a deal killer when it comes to campaign fund raising, the ticket into modern electoral politics.

One consistent national voice for universal social justice, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, (D-OH), has been consistently maligned and marginalized with the result that his message is buried.

"Isn't Fannie and Freddie's objective ... to make homes affordable for everyone?"

Automatic Earth:

The administration is caught up in a desperate attempt to keep [home] prices at elevated levels, far above trend levels, because it itself has financed much of the movement towards those high prices, and is presently buying anything for sale just so they don't keep falling.

Does this policy have any chance of success? No, it doesn't, not for any extended period of time. The reasons for that are for instance the mountainous levels of personal debt in America, the rising foreclosure rates, the 11 million unsold homes inventory, and the number of unemployed Americans, which varies anywhere from 15 million to 40 million, depending on how you count. Personal incomes in 2009 fell most since 1938. There are dozens of other trends that doom the "lift home values" policy. But the administration, as well as Congress (not a negative word was heard from the GOP on the Obama statement either) have painted themselves into a damp dark corner from which escape will be immensely painful, no matter what they try. In fact, what they actually try to do is pass on the pain to you.