Bill Clinton

American Justice Is Not Blind, It's Sick

dlindorff — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:45:32 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Federal District Court
Judge Fernando Gaitan of the Missouri Western District Court have at
least two things in common: they are both appointees of President
Ronald Reagan, and they both think it’s just fine for the US to execute
innocent people. The same can be said for Judge C. Arlen Beam of the
8th Circuit Court of Appeals.

In a recent dissent in a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling ordering a habeas
hearing in federal court for South Carolina death row inmate Troy
Anthony Davis, a man slated to die after being convicted for the murder
of an off-duty Savannah police officer, Scalia wrote, “This court has
never held that the constitution forbids the execution of a convicted
defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to
convince a habeas court that he is `actually’ innocent.”

For his part, Judge Gaitan, in Missouri, had two shots at
considering the case of Joseph Amrine, a death-row inmate slated to die
for the killing of a fellow prisoner in a Missouri state prison. Amrine
(see my article Dead Man Walking Home
in Salon, May 1, 2003) had been convicted of the knife slaying on the
basis of the testimony of three alleged eyewitnesses—all of them fellow
prisoners. When two of those witnesses later recanted (suggesting that
it was the third witness who had actually been the killer), Judge
Gaitan rejected the habeas appeal, arguing that the two recantations
couldn’t be believed, because the third witness had not changed his
testimony. Later, when the third witness also recanted, Amrine’s
attorney brought the case back to Judge Gaitan, but this time, the
Judge again rejected the appeal, claiming that none of the witnesses
was credible “because they are all criminals.” (Which of course begs
the question of why Amrine should have been convicted in the first
place based upon the testimony of the same three witnesses.).

Amrine didn’t get any help from the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals,
which is also apparently packed with Scalia-like vampires. A
three-judge panel on that court, which included Reagan-appointee Judge
Beam, as well as Clinton appointee Diane E Murphy and George H. W. Bush
appointee Judge Morris Sheppard Arnold, unanimously upheld Judge Gaitan
declaring that even if the three recantations might suggest Amrine was
innocent, he could not get a new hearing or trial because his attorneys
should have been able to discover the evidence earlier through “due
diligence.” The judges, in rejecting Amrine’s appeal, wrote that, “even
though convinced that had it been sitting as the trier of fact, it
would have weighed the evidence differently,” an appellate court had to
defer to the determination regarding credibility of recanting witnesses
made by a lower court judge.

That is, procedural issues and rules trump facts, even in a death penalty case.

Happily for Troy Davis, a frighteningly narrow majority on the US
Supreme Court disagreed with Justice Scalia’s view of the Constitution.
Happily for Amrine, who is now a free man, the Missouri State Supreme
Court disagreed with both Judge Gaitan and the 8th Circuit Court of
Appeals panel, concluding that "a showing of actual innocence acts as a
'gateway' that entitles the prisoner to review on the merits of the
prisoner's otherwise defaulted constitutional claim."

Justice Scalia’s pinched view of the Constitution is that if it
ain’t written down in the document, it doesn’t exist. So even though
there is a clear outlawing in the Constitution against “cruel and
unusual” punishment, he purports to be unable to see how that could be
construed to include being executed for a crime you did not commit.

It should sicken every American that our judicial system could
condone execution of people that even the judges themselves concede are
likely or even certainly innocent, because of procedural rules and
politically imposed deadlines and appeals limitations, such as those
imposed by former President Bill Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism and Effective
Death Penalty Act, passed in 1995 in the hysteria following the
Oklahoma City bombing of the Murrah Federal Office Building.

I once had the grisly experience, back in 1995, of watching several
doomed men being carted off by armed police in the back of a flat-bed
truck for a date with a bullet to the back of the head on the execution
in Xian China. I remember thinking at the time what a monstrous and
uncivilized act this was. The trials in China are in name only, with
the verdict pre-ordained, and any appeals, if they happen, perfunctory.

Yet how different are things here in the US? There is the same
bloodthirsty slathering for public execution by the ghouls on the
right, the same quiescence among the broader population. There is,
perhaps one difference, and that is the political pandering to the
death-obsessed by politicians who should know better. Those
Reagan-appointed judges—Scalia, Gaitan and Beam—and the many like them
on federal and state benches across the country, were appointed
precisely because they wanted to grease the skids to the execution
chamber, and President Reagan, like Nixon before him and the Bushes
after him, have made advocacy of state-sanctioned execution a lynch-pin
of their campaign efforts. But President Clinton was no different. He
cut short his campaign for president so he could rush home to Arkansas
to sign the execution warrant for a mentally impaired man, and later,
pushed through the EDP Act to make appeals of death-row inmates much
more difficult.

President Obama is not much better. While he has not yet signed on
to any efforts to make executions easier, neither has he acted, as
president, to correct the current abysmal situation, which has seen
many people spend years or even decades on death rows, often coming
within days or hours or even minutes of execution before finally being
found innocent, and which has surely led to many executions of innocent
people over the years. Disturbingly, Obama has use the argument of
“public vengeance” to justify the death penalty, writing in his memoir,
that while he believes the death penalty "does little to deter crime,"
he nonetheless supports it for crimes "so heinous, so beyond the pale,
that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its
outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment."

Surely Obama is smart enough to recognize that when a community is
so enraged, that is precisely when the fairness of a trial becomes
hardest to assure, and thus, when the chance of a wrongful conviction
becomes the most likely. And yet he finds it safer to politically
pander to those base instincts for vengeance.

At times like these, I am sorry I’m an atheist. It would be nice to
think that there would be some special grim level of hell in store for
the likes of Justice Scalia, Judge Gaitan, and Judges Beam, Arnold and
Murphy—perhaps a row of cells from which they would be marched every
few days to be strapped onto gurneys and administered an intravenous
death potion, or into electric chairs through which a surge of high
voltage would be sent, only to return to their cells for another round
of waiting. Also for the likes of Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes
and, yes, Obama, who would be case before howling mobs of the wrongly
executed, who would call for their execution, after which they could be
marched off to the same fate over and over.

Unfortunately, there is no such divine justice. Only the hope that
one day, a more civilized and compassionate public will demand better
of itself, its political leaders, and its judges.

There is no greater crime than the killing by the state of an
innocent person, and yet, in America, such atrocities are not just
happening, they are condoned by judges in the highest court of the land.
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of
“Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia
Abu-Jamal,” (Common Courage Press, 2003) and more recently of “The Case
for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Clinton and Obama: The Worst and Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

dlindorff — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:20:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

Not because he is the Great Black Hope of progressives, but because
he has taken the concept of selling out to corporate interests and
compromising with Republicans to such remarkable heights that
progressives hopefully can no longer be confused about the
irretrievably corrupted nature of the Democratic Party.

On virtually every issue of importance, President Obama has sided with corporate interests and the wealthy.

On the issue of war and peace, he has sided with the
military-industrial complex, with a policy of permanent occupation of
Iraq and endless war in Afghanistan, as well as continued funding of
the country’s colossal armory of death, from strategic missiles and
submarines to aircraft-carrier-group armadas to high-tech fighter
squadrons and space weaponry.

On civil liberties, he has sided with the police state, supporting
continuation of the Bush/Cheney administration’s insidious National
Security Agency spying program, defended military spying within the US,
and refused to prosecute obvious abuses by the prior administration.

On torture, the Obama administration is continuing the imprisonment
and torture of captives in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world
at Bagram Air Base and, probably, at other secret sites, and instead of
closing Guantanamo as promised, is looking into transferring that
hellhole of torture and abuse to one or several sites in the mainland
US.

Health care reform has become a sad joke, with the emerging
“reform” bill looking for all the world like the Rube Goldberg creation
of the Clinton era that properly went down in flames. Instead of taking
on the insurance industry, the hospital companies and the
pharmaceutical industry and other parts of the profit-making
medical-industrial complex, Obama cut deals with all of them behind
closed doors, assuring that their profits would be left untouched, and
that they could essentially write their own “reform” bill through the
offices of bought-and-paid members of Congress like Senator Max Baucus.
Obama and his congressional allies carefully kept any discussion of the
single-payer idea—essentially Medicare for all, and the approach that
even Obama himself admits would be cheaper and more universal—out of
sight and off the table.

Climate change action, too, has been sold out, with Obama adopting
the approach favored by the energy industry—“cap and trade.” That
concept is a gold mine for Wall Street trading firms, which will be
doing trades next in pollution credits instead of subprime mortgages,
and for energy companies which will get free credits to sell, courtesy
of the taxpayer. And because it’s a system so easy to game, it will do
nothing or next to nothing to reduce greenhouse gases.

Finally, there’s economy and banking reform. Here Obama didn’t even
make a pretense of taking a progressive approach. There is a stimulus
program, but half of it was in the form of tax cuts—token for the poor
and middle class and significant for the rich and for businesses, and
half in the form of federal grants, often for unneeded projects like
roads and road repair which go to some of the higher paid members of
the working class, leaving the poor and the ununionized with no job
help. Meanwhile, bankers were the recipients of trillions of dollars in
bailout assistance, while nothing was done to break up the huge
mega-bank holding companies that brought on the financial and economic
crisis in the first place. Instead of picking economic advisers and
bank regulators from the many talented system critics like Nobelists
Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Obama picked veterans of the
Bush/Cheney administration, and Wall Street shills like Larry Summers
and Timothy Geithner.

Last fall, I and many progressives urged voters to elect Obama, not
because we thought he was a progressive, but because we hoped that his
background—community organizer, raised by a single mother, experience
living in a third world country (Indonesia), multi-racial—would lead
him to make at least some right decisions. We, or certainly I, hoped
too that the energized young and working class electorate that came out
for him in the fall would continue to press him aggressively to do the
right thing on war, environment, civil liberties and the economy.

I was wrong on the first count: Obama has been a corporatist
through and through on all the major issues that matter. And I was
wrong on the second. Most of the left in the US, from the labor
movement to the environmentalist movement to the anti-war movement, has
to date remained glumly quiescent as Obama has sold them out on each of
their key issues.

But here is the silver lining: The sell-out this time is so much
more blatant, and so much more serious, than it was with Clinton, and
for all the talk about Obama’s ability to string words together, he is
so much less of a charismatic figure than the gregarious Bill Clinton,
that he is unlikely to hang on to the ardent support that propelled him
to his victory last November. The disappointment and sense of betrayal
among progressives this time is palpable, especially because, while
Clinton, by 1994, had the excuse that he was working with a Republican,
or partially Republican Congress, Obama has solid control of both
houses, but refuses to use it. If, as I expect, the recession continues
to deepen, with more and more people losing jobs and homes, if, as I
predict, health care continues to be unaffordable and inaccessible, if,
as I know will happen, evidence of deadly climate change continues to
pile up, and if, as I am equally certain, Iraq explodes and the war in
Afghanistan continue to worsen, the left is going to see Obama and the
Democrats in Congress as the failures and corrupt frauds they are, and
will abandon them.

That leaves the question of what to do, and where those frustrated progressives will turn.

I don’t claim to have the answer to that. Clearly the labor movement
needs to recognize that hitching its fortunes to the Democratic Party
has been and will continue to be a dismal failure. It needs to pull all
its political money back and only support those who are 100% allies in
the struggle for the rights of workers. No money for the party as a
whole. It should also go back to the pioneering work of people like the
late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil and Chemical and Atomic Workers Union,
who before his death was tirelessly working to establish an American
labor party.

Other third parties on the left need to drop their individual
agendas and work towards unity, especially with the labor movement, in
order to create a broad-based left party that doesn’t have litmus tests
for inclusion—just broad principles like steeply progressive taxation,
an end to NAFTA and the WTO, democratization of the Federal Reserve
Bank, national health care, a wholesale slashing of the military
budget, by perhaps two-thirds or more, free education through four
years of college for all, and a crisis plan to attack climate change.

If the ever fractious US left, and the somnolent labor movement,
cannot come together as one, there is little hope of political change
in America. At that point the alternative would be an increasing
militancy over these critical issues, outside of the electoral
arena—something that has to happen anyhow, regardless of whether a real
third party force can be put together. We know that simply organizing
occasional polite marches in Washington, or in key cities, accomplishes
nothing. We have learned that email campaigns to deluge members of
Congress with canned opinions don’t work. What has worked, and will
always work, is massive campaigns of civil disobedience, tent cities in
Washington, organized disruption of war preparations, and door-to-door
organizing. The corrupt hacks who inhabit the halls of Congress and the
White House will not do the right thing just because it is the right
thing, or because we ask them nicely. They may, if we make them fear
that they will actually lose our votes in the next election. For the
most part, incumbent Democrats know that the people who peacefully
march down Connecticut Avenue are still likely to vote for them come
the next election. They’re not going to be so sure about people who are
being hit by tear gas and water cannons and who are being hauled off en
masse to jail at protests.

We may need to start sending that stronger message.
___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net www.thiscantbehappening.net

Say 'Good-bye' to the Nice Health Care Reform, Kids

dlindorff — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:31:01 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Of course I could be wrong. Congress could turn around and pass
some cockamamie scheme to kick the issue of health care reform down the
road, offering some kind of minimal insurance coverage to a few million
more people, and cracking down on this or that particularly egregious
health provider rip-off, and then staging a “mission accomplished”
photo op.

But real health care reform of the kind that Democratic candidates
were promising during last year’s presidential campaign is dead, killed
by the timidity of the promiser-in-chief, President Barack Obama (and
by the massive corruption of the Democrats in Congress, who hav e
accepted the tainted coin of the health care industry).

Obama could have come to the American people as a newly elected
leader and addressed us as adults, saying: “Look, we know what needs to
be done. Plenty of countries in Canada, Europe and elsewhere have
figured it out already. They set up the government as the single payer
to health providers—doctors and hospitals, etc.—and the government
bargains and sets the prices those private providers of health care can
charge. Of course that means you’ll all pay higher taxes to finance
such a plan, but the record of all those countries shows that you’ll be
saving money over all, because you won’t be paying for health
insurance, your employer won’t be paying for health insurance, you
won’t be paying co-pays and deductibles, and you won’t be getting
gouged for drugs or hospital stays or doctors’ bills. You won’t be
paying state taxes for Medicaid either, nor will your insurance and
local property taxes have to subsidize the hospital care of indigents.
On balance, you’ll all be saving money, and you’ll never have to worry
about disease or injury bankrupting you. Nor will employers be able to
hold you hostage any longer. The reality is that the countries that
have a single-payer plan are spending half of what we spend per capita
for health care, they have no uninsured citizens, and their health
overall, as measured by such things as longevity, infant mortality,
etc., is better than ours.”

The president could have said all this and rallied the tens of
millions of Americans who desperately want a health care system modeled
on the single-payer idea to his side, forcing Congress to go along or
pay the price in 2010.

Instead...

For the rest of this article, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net

________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of
“Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains”
(Bantam Books, 1992), and of “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s
Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

History Lesson: And These Are the People We Expect to Fix Things Now?

dlindorff — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:03:54 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

George Santayana once famously said, “Those who cannot learn from
history are doomed to repeat it.” But what about those who don’t just
ignore history, but who hire and take counsel from those who committed
historic follies in the past?

Back in November 1999, Congress passed legislation pushed by then
Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX), rescinding the Depression-era Glass-Steagall
Act. The measure, backed by the Clinton administration, and
overwhelmingly passed by the Senate (90-8) and the House (362-57),
opened the way for banks to merge with investment banks and insurance
companies, and led directly to the current financial cataclysm.

A report on that Congressional action written by reporter Stephen
Labaton and published in the New York Times on Nov. 5, 1999 under the
headline “Congress Passes Wide-Ranging Bill Easing Bank Laws,” includes some remarkable quotes from key players in that sellout to the financial sector.

Here’s Larry Summers, a chief architect of the current financial
industry multi-trillion-dollar bailout giveaway being orchestrated by
the Obama administration, where he serves as director of President
Obama’s National Economic Council:

''Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed
financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a
system for the 21st century. This historic legislation will better
enable American companies to compete in the new economy.''

And here’s what Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), awash in Financial
industry campaign donations but currently in high dudgeon over the Wall
Street’s bonus payments to executives, speaking about the ’99 measure
eliminating Glass-Steagall:

''If we don't pass this bill, we could find London or Frankfurt
or years down the road Shanghai becoming the financial capital of the
world. 'There are many reasons for this bill, but first and foremost is
to ensure that U.S. financial firms remain competitive.”

The article quotes the Clinton administration and Summers’ Treasury
Department as predicting that revoking Glass-Steagall and permitting
banks to expand into investment banking and insurance would save
consumers “$18 billion a year” through economies of scale—a figure that
seems rather quaint as taxpayers now pony up trillions of dollars to
rescue those same institutions. (The article notes that critics of
deregulation argued that even those paltry savings, probably
overstated, would flow to financial sector investors, not to consumers.)

The old Times clip (brought to my attention by alert
veteran radical writer and activist Bert Schultz of Philadelphia), does
highlight a couple of prophetic heroes, too.

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), one of seven Senate Democrats who voted against revoking Glass-Steagall, said:

“I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not
have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past,
and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010. I wasn't
around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was
here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of
savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to
forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.''

And then there’s the late Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN), who died in a
tragic and still unexplained plane crash during his campaign for re-election in 2002. Congress, he
said, seemed:

“…determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes.
Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound
banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis.
Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by
insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of
several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring.
Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without
putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''

For the record, also voting against Glass-Steagall repeal in the
Senate were lone Republican Richard Shelby of Alabama, and six other
Democrats: Barbara Boxer (CA), Richard Bryan (NV), Russ Feingold (WI),
Tom Harkin (IA), and Barbara Mikulski (MD). 51 Democrats, 5 Republicans
and 1 independent voted against the measure in the House.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, a key player in the current bailout
scheme, isn’t mentioned in the Times article about Glass-Steagall, but
at the time was a protégé of Summers, working as undersecretary of the
treasury for international affairs.

While they are thankfully well out of the loop in the current
scramble in Washington to both reverse the economic collapse
and try and help financial companies and financiers profit from it,
it’s worth reading too in this 10-year-old clip what Phil Gram and then
Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE and now embattled president of the New School in
New York City) had to say about ending Glass-Steagall.

Sen. Gramm:

'The world changes, and we have to change with it. We have a new
century coming, and we have an opportunity to dominate that century the
same way we dominated this century. Glass-Steagall, in the midst of the
Great Depression, came at a time when the thinking was that the
government was the answer. In this era of economic prosperity, we have
decided that freedom is the answer.''

And then Sen. Kerrey, with a line that should probably be etched someday on his tombstone as his most memorable line:

“The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown.”
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Gloomy Outlook from Business Experts

dlindorff — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 12:50:43 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Amid the news that retail sales have fallen for the fourth straight
month, that housing prices continue to slump, and that another 600,000
workers were laid off in the month of January—the largest number in one
month since 1974—comes word from some experts in the business community that things are not going to be getting better soon, and that when they
do, they will not get back to the way things were in 2006 or early
2007, before the recession began.

In an interview I did for the trade publication Investment Management Weekly
on Thursday, Putnam Investments’ global asset allocation head Jeffrey
Knight said that while the stimulus could “help to prevent a Great
Depression sequel,” at the same time “Those who measure prosperity
against the Faustian opulence of the last 10 years may find that
stability, equilibrium and even recovery will still feel like a deep
depression.”

Another fund manager, Ron D’Vari, co-founder and CEO of a new fund
management firm that specializes in so-called distressed assets—the
very things that have the nation’s banks reeling on the edge of
failure—says the economy has fallen into “an L-shaped recession where
it’s hard to say how long it will be down at the bottom.” D’Vari also
told me, “We think we will have a sort of subsistence economy—not like
North Africa, but it could look like just getting by for some time
before you see the start of a real recovery.”

Now these guys were all talking about how things look to them assuming passage
of the so-called stimulus package. In other words, the stimulus package
is not going to turn things around. In fact, D’Vari pointedly referred
to the close to $1-trillion package as ‘just a pain-killer, not a final
cure.”

President Obama would do well to heed these kinds of hard-nosed
views. He’s not likely to be hearing them right now. To date, he has
chosen for his economic team mainly retreads from the Bush and Clinton
administration—people like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner who helped
set the nation on its current disastrous economic course by promoting
globalization and the flight of jobs overseas as well as the
deregulation of Wall Street, by advocating a shift of the tax burden
from the wealthy to the working classes, by urging the gutting the
safety net for those who lose jobs or can’t find them, and by
advocating measures to artificially pump up asset values, whether real
estate or the stock market.

These are clearly not people who are going to want to call
attention to the economic and social train wreck that their own
policies have produced.

Nor does Obama’s latest announcement of his new Council of Economic
Advisers look much better. Headed up by Paul Volcker, the Carter and
Reagan choice for Federal Reserve Chairman, and a close associate of
the Rockefeller family and the Chase banking empire who helped bring us
the heretofore worst recession since the ‘30s during the early 1980s,
that panel includes Jeffrey Imelt, chairmen of mega-defense contractor
General Electric, Jim Owens, chair of Caterpillar (a firm that just
sacked 20,000 employees and during it’s recent contract disputes with
the UAW hired scabs and locked out employees, racking up a huge number
of labor law violations), William Donaldson, President George W. Bush’s
SEC chair, who had to resign that position in disgrace in 2005 after
his agency missed the Enron and Worldcom meltdowns and collapses as
well as some early hedge fund disasters, Martin Feldstein, the head of
Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers and an adviser to Obama’s
opponent, John McCain, and Austan Goolsbee, a senior economist with the
Democratic Leadership Council, a strong proponent bank deregulation and
of the job-killing NAFTA and the World Trade Organization treaties.
True, the panel does include some token labor representatives like
former Mineworkers Union president Richard Trumpka of the AFL-CIO and
Anna Burger of the SEIU, but wholly absent are more progressive
economists in line with the likes of Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and
Joseph Stiglitz, or former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich, much
less left-leaning economists like James Galbraith or Dean Baker.

Before Obama was inaugurated, there was much blather in the
mainstream press about his selection of conservative Democrats and
Republicans for his cabinet, as a strategy of having a “team of
rivals.” But clearly, where economic policy is concerned, those
“rivals” are pretty much all on the same side of the fence. (The same
can be said, by the way, of his defense department and state department
teams.)

What the country really needs at this point is straight talk and
creative new ideas—not returns to policies of the ‘90s, ‘80s, ‘70s or
perhaps even the ‘30s.

Obama needs to hear from experts who know that the economy of the
United States is not going to rebound to anything like where it was in
the last few years, and that drastic new programs and approaches are
needed if the US is not to continue a slow slide into third world
status. And the American public needs to hear the same honest news.

An economic “team of rivals” is a great idea, but to get that,
Obama would have to be willing to reach over to the left side of the
spectrum, not just the right.
___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available
in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Generals' Revolt Threatens Obama Presidency

dlindorff — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:57:14 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

If an article by Gareth Porter in run by InterPress
is correct that CentCom Commander Gen. David Petraeus and Iraq
Commander Gen. Ray Odierno, backed by a group of lower-ranking
generals, are planning to mount a public campaign to try and undermine
President Obama’s plan for a withdrawal from Iraq in 16 months, Obama
needs to act fast and nip this dangerous act of insubordination in the
bud.

It was a similar act of insubordination on the part of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff that effectively destroyed the Clinton administration
almost from day one. Recall that one of President Clinton’s first acts
following his inauguration was to make good on a campaign promise to
end discrimination against gays and lesbians in the military. His
initial order was to simply end the ban on homosexuality in the
military. But the Joint Chiefs publicly rebelled, and Clinton caved,
coming up with the ridiculous and unworkable “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
policy, under which gays and lesbians could serve in the military, but
had to hide their sexual orientation or face ouster.

When Clinton, as commander in chief of the armed forces, allowed
his generals to defy his orders, and, instead of sacking them all for
insubordination and stripping off their stars, left them in their
offices and surrendered to their objections, he didn’t just cave in to
the military. He also alerted the Republican opposition that he was a
political pushover.

Obama, on a much more serious issue—the conduct of and termination
of a war—is now apparently being more or less openly defied by his top
generals, who after all get their glory and power by having troops in
battle, and who are also worried that a collapse of the puppet regime
in Iraq could leave them looking like losers. They are thus opposing a
pullout from Iraq (and a hardly precipitous one at that!) out of
self-interest and self-preservation.

If Commander in Chief Obama allows this insubordination and
political opposition to exist among his senior generals, his presidency
is toast. He will be a prisoner to a militarist policy in Iraq and
Afghanistan that will drag down his presidency in the same way that
Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was destroyed by the generals running the
Vietnam War. Furthermore, just as Republicans in Congress saw Clinton’s
weakness in his dealings with the Joint Chiefs and began dogging his
every move, they, and Obama’s opponents among the Blue Dog Democrats in
Congress, will see weakness and move against him.

There is only one answer to this challenge to presidential
authority: President Obama must sack both Petraeus and Odierno, and any
other general who tries—openly or behind the scenes--to move
politically against his military strategy and orders. The model for
this action is President Harry Truman—widely viewed, whatever his
faults, as a forceful leader—who fired the popular Gen. Douglas
McArthur when McArthur went behind his back to Republicans in Congress
to push for a wider war in Korea.

This is not just a matter of salvaging an Obama presidency. It is
also a profound constitutional issue. There is no greater threat to
democratic freedom than a military that refuses to accept, or that
actively works to undermine civilian authority. Generals and admirals
certainly have a right to object to the decisions made by their
commander in chief, but they cannot act in defiance or those decisions
while in uniform. Admiral William Fallon took the right course of
action. Opposed to Bush/Cheney administration plans to attack Iran, he
chose to resign his post as CentCom Commander and to resign from the
military. If Gen. Petraeus and Gen. Odierno oppose Obama’s plan for a
pullout from Iraq, they should do the same and then speak out if they
wish.

For the past eight years, the biggest threat to American democracy
was that a president and vice president attempted to convert the office
of president into a military dictatorship, with the position of
commander in chief subsuming and replacing the position of president.
Now the danger is that the nation’s top generals are trying to
eliminate or emasculate the president’s role as commander in chief,
making the generals the leaders of the nation’s military. Both dangers
are equally threatening to constitutional government.
___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The Ugly Truth: America's Economy is Not Coming Back

dlindorff — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:12:46 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama and his economic team are being careful to
couch all their talk about economic stimulus programs and bank bailout
programs in warnings that the economic downturn is serious and that it
will take considerable time to bounce back.

I’m reminded of an experience I had with Chinese medicine when I
was living in Shanghai back in 1992. I had come down with a nasty case
of the flu while teaching journalism at Fudan University on a Fulbright
Scholar program. <!--break>A Chinese colleague suggested I go to the university
clinic. When I told him there wasn’t much point since doctors couldn’t
do much for the flu besides recommend fluids and bed rest, he said,
“That’s Western doctors. You could go to the Chinese medicine doctors
at the clinic. They can help you.” I figured, what the hell, and we
went. The doctor inquired into the lurid details of my illness—how my
bowel movements looked, the color of the mucus in my nose, etc. He
didn’t really examine me physically. Then he prescribed an incredible
number of pills and teas and sent me home with a huge bag of stuff, and
instructions on the regimen for taking them through the course of each
day. I followed the directions dutifully, and my colleague came by each
day to check on my progress. By the fifth day, when I was still running
a fever and feeling terrible, I told him I didn’t think the Chinese
medicine was working. He replied confidently, “Chinese medicine takes a
long time to work.”

I laughed at this. “Sure,” I said. “But the flu only lasts a week
or so, and now, when I get better, you’ll say it was the Chinese
medicine, right?”

He smiled and agreed. “Yes. You are right.”

Obviously the Obama administration recognizes that it needs to keep
the finger of blame for the current economic collapse squarely pointed
at the Bush administration, which is certainly fair in large part
(though the Clinton deregulation of the banking industry played a major
part in the financial crisis and its enthusiastic promotion of
globalization began the massive shift of jobs overseas that has left
the nation’s productive capacity hollowed out). But it also seems to
recognize that it cannot tell the bitter truth, which is that our
national economy will never “bounce back” to where it was in 2007.

America, and individual Americans, have been living profligately
for years in an unreal economy, propped up by easy credit which
inflated the value of real estate to incredible levels, and which led
people to spend way beyond their means. Ordinary middle-class working
people have been encouraged to buy obscenely oversized homes at 5%
down, or even no down payment. They have been lured into buying cars
the size of trucks, one for each driving-aged member of the family (in
our town, so many high school kids drive to school that the school ran
out of parking spaces and the yellow school buses, largely empty on
their runs, are referred to by the students as the “shame train,” an
embarrassment to be seen riding). They’ve installed individual
back-yard swimming pools, unwilling to share the water with their
neighbors in community pools. Boring faux ethnic restaurant franchises
of all kinds have befouled the landscape, filling up with families too
stressed out to cook, and willing to endure over-salted, over-priced
and tasteless cuisine and tacky plastic décor night after night.

Now this is all crashing down. Property values are in free-fall.
Car sales have fallen off a cliff. Joblessness is soaring (At present,
it’s approaching an official rate of 8%, but if the methodology used in
1980, before the Reagan administration changed it to hide the depth of
that era’s deep recession, were applied, it would be 17% today, or one
in seven workers).

Eventually, the economic slide will hit bottom and begin its slow
climb back, as all recessions do, but there will be no return to the
days of $500,000 McMansion developments, three-car garages and a new
car every two or three years for both parents plus a car for each
highschooler. Not only will banks no longer be able to offer such
credit to clients. People, having been burned, will not be willing to
borrow so much. Company health care benefits, pension programs or
401(k) matching programs that were slashed during this downturn will
not be restored when the economy picks up again.

Over the last 20 years, America has degenerated into a nation of
consumers, with 72 percent of Gross Domestic Product (sic) now being
accounted for by consumer spending—most of it going for things that are
produced overseas and shipped here.

That is not an economic model that is sustainable, and it is a model that has just suffered what is certainly a mortal blow.

What we are now seeing is the beginning of an inevitable downward
adjustment in American living standards to conform with our actual
place in the world. As a nation of consumers, and not producers, with
little to offer to the rest of the world except raw materials, food
crops, military hardware and bad films (none of which industries employ
many people), we are headed to a recovery that will not feel like a
recovery at all. Eventually, productive capacity will be restored, as
lowered US wages make it again profitable for some things to be made
here at home again, but like people in the 1930s looking back at the
Roaring 20s of yore, we are going to look back at the last two decades
as some kind of dream.

It would be better if the new administration would be honest about
this, because with honesty, we could have a recovery program that would
actually address the real critical issues facing the country—the
decline of our educational system, the irrationality of official
promotion of home ownership that has led to the proliferation not just
of suburbs but of exurbs, the over-reliance on the automobile for
transportation, the unprecedented waste of resources, the pillaging of
the environment, not to mention the decimation of the retirement system
and the creation of a vast medical-industrial complex that is sucking
the life-blood out of families and businesses alike.

With honesty, we could also confront the other big obstacle to
national recovery—the nation’s obsession with militarism and foreign
wars. The honest truth is that the US is technically bankrupt and in a
state of chronic decline, and yet the nation persists in spending a
trillion dollars a year on war and preparations for war, as though
America were in mortal danger from foreign enemies.

The truth is that we are not threatened by Communism, by drug
lords, or by Muslim Jihadists in any serious way. Rather, we have
become our own worst enemy.

The administration could start by telling us all this straight up,
but the problem is, most of us probably don’t want to hear it, which
explains why we’re not hearing it. It also explains why we’re about to
blow another trillion or so dollars on propping up failing banks,
funding pointless highway and bridge construction, and blowing up
illiterate peasants in remote places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in paperback edition). Lindorff spent five years reporting on China and Hong Kong for Business Week magazine. His current work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

digg_url = 'http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/39374';
digg_title = "The Ugly Truth: America\'s Economy is Not Coming Back";
digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n\r\n President Barack Obama and his economic team are being careful to couch all their talk about economic stimulus programs and bank bailout programs in warnings that the economic downturn is serious and that it will take considerable time to bounce back.\r\n\r";
digg_skin = 'standard';

One-Sided Propaganda `Journalism' About a Destabilizing Boondoggle

dlindorff — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:51:44 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

A CBS/Associated Press story
yesterday reported that the man who runs the Pentagon’s anti-missile
program, Lt. Gen. Henry Obering III, had warned incoming
President-elect Barack Obama that any reversal of Bush/Cheney
administration plans to install anti-ballistic missile missiles in
Poland would “severely hurt” American interests.

It was a classic “stupid” story of the type that we now expect to
get from our corporate media—basically a regurgitation of the statement
of one self-interested official, backed up by a few supporting quotes
from other government officials, and the usual “anonymous” official
sources, and lacking any context or opposing viewpoints.

Let’s analyze this a little more. The Bush/Administration, since
coming into office eight years ago, has been putting intense pressure
on Russia by pressing to have NATO expanded right up to Russia’s
borders—also to have NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan, to Russia’s
south in central Asia. As one ratchet up in that pressure, the
administration pushed to get anti-missile sites placed in some
countries on Russia’s western border. One such proposed location was
the Czech Republic, but that was rejected because of local opposition.
Poland, however, agreed, after being pressed hard by the administration.

For US consumption, the move was presented as being aimed at Iran,
which Bush and Cheney keep insisting is constructing nuclear bombs. No
one could explain why anti-missile missiles placed in Poland, which
sits in northern Europe, would have any utility in knocking down would
be Iranian missiles aimed at Europe, or, for that matter, why Iran
would want to fire nuclear missiles at Europe, which, in Britain and
France, has a large and sophisticated nuclear stockpile capable of
incinerating Iran. The real target of those missiles became clear when
Georgia provoked Russia into sending its army into the breakaway state
of Ossetia. Before that little military conflict, Poland had been
resisting US pressure to agree to the missile sites, because of strong
local opposition. After Russia moved its troops and tanks into Ossetia,
and trounced Georgia’s military, Poland went ahead and approved the
anti-missile site.

If the anti-missile missiles were intended to protect against Iran,
such a decision by Poland would have made no sense whatever. Clearly
the US was pointing those things at a different enemy: Russia. And that
of course is how the Russians view things. Earlier this month, within
days of the US election, Russia’s president warned that if the
anti-missile battery were placed in Poland, Russia would move
short-range nuclear-capable missiles up to its border with Poland, thus
not only rendering the US missile “shield”, such as it is, useless
because there would be no notice of any attack from that close, but
also escalating the wholly unnecessary conflict between the US and NATO
on the one hand, and Russia on the other.

Of course, this is exactly what the Bush/Cheney plan has been all
along: to increase tensions with Russia, and thus justify continuation
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which should have been
dismantled along with the demise of the Soviet Union. The Bush/Cheney
strategy has been to use NATO as a kind of global cover for its
military adventures, such as Afghanistan, which is, it should be noted,
about as far from the “North Atlantic” as one can get.

None of this history made it into the CBS/AP story yesterday. Nor
was there any mention of the fact that the anti-missile missile program
itself is little more than a $160-billion boondoggle.

The only thing that would be “severely hurt” if the Polish basing
plan were killed by the incoming Obama administration would be Lt. Gen.
Obering’s career, the more so if Obama did the right and proper thing
and killed the whole “Star Wars” project altogether.

There are plenty of critics of this Reagan-era boondoggle. After
the spending of $160 billion on the program, not one missile has ever
actually been shot down if flight in a real test, where the trajectory
of the target wasn’t strictly plotted out in advance to guide the
interceptor. Moreover, as many scientific critics have repeatedly
pointed out, even low-tech Third World nations like North Korea could
include countermeasures such as decoy warheads, which would render any
effort at interception of a real warhead impossible. The entire idea of
an anti-missile shield against nuclear weapons is an incredibly
expensive fraud, yet one which promises to revive the threat of nuclear
war, because the simplest way to overcome an anti-missile system is to
increase the number of incoming missiles, and to put them as close to
the target countries as possible to reduce warning time.

Yet none of this kind of criticism of the Polish missile-basing plan was mentioned in the CBS/AP story.

It’s funny. If CBS or AP ran a story about a warning by the
chairman of General Motors saying that failure to give the company a
$25 billion bailout would “severely hurt” the US economy, without any
comment by critics of such a taxpayer gift, everyone would recognizing
the article as junk. But with national security stories, no one raises
an eyebrow when this kind of thing is done.

President Elect Barack Obama has a chance to do what President
Clinton should have done, which is to kill the whole “Star Wars”
program. He can start by killing the absurd and dangerous plan to put
anti-missile platforms in Poland.

If the media will report fairly and honestly about this issue,
instead of simply passing off the arguments of self-interested
proponents like anti-missile program director Lt. Gen. Obering, maybe
the American people will demand that it be ended, and that the billions
of dollars that have annually been wasted in pursuing this Pentagon
fantasy be put to better use, perhaps building schools or developing
electric cars to replace the gas guzzlers nobody wants to buy anymore.
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Why Puerto Rico's Democratic Primary Won't Matter

dlindorff — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:10:17 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

There are a number of reasons why the Puerto Rican Democratic primary election set for this coming Sunday won’t matter, in terms of Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the party’s nomination.

The main one is that she’s not going to get the big vote that she has been predicting.

Clinton, trailing Obama by about 400,000 votes nationwide with only three primaries to go, is fantasizing that she will win the lion’s share of one million Puerto Rican votes, which would put her in the lead for the nomination in terms of the popular vote, though not in the delegate count.

The problem with this fantasy is that Puerto Rico, a colonial possession of the US since the 1898 Spanish-American War, while famous for its passionate electorate when it comes to island elections, is not going to have that kind of turnout for a Democratic presidential primary. Indeed, local politicos in Puerto Rico are saying they will be surprised if even 600,000 people turn out to vote.

Clinton may well win the majority of those votes that are cast, but her margin is shrinking as Obama campaigns and runs ads on the island. She’s already down to a 13% lead, with 11% still undecided, and that lead is liable to shrink further, not grow. Even if Clinton kept that lead in the voting, however, if the turnout were just 600,000, she’d only pick up a net 88,000 votes. And Obama is likely to win Montana and South Dakota two days later, by large margins, erasing much of that gain again.

The other thing is, why would Democratic leaders and the all-important remaining undecided so-called superdelegates care what Puerto Rican voters do? Thanks to the continuing colonial status of the island, although its residents are all American citizens, free to travel to and from the US and to carry US passports, they are not allowed to vote in national elections, have no representation in Washington, and don’t even pay federal taxes (only Social Security and Medicare taxes). Puerto Rico has no Electoral College votes.

That in a nutshell is why Puerto Rican voters are so uninterested in this primary—so uninterested that the Democratic Party of Puerto Rico earlier this week requested that the island’s election authorities close 1000 polling stations. It wasn’t that they thought nobody would want to vote in them—they couldn’t find volunteers to staff them!

The other thing is it would not surprise me if the vote this Sunday comes out a lot closer than the polls have been predicting. For the most part, the early advantage held by Clinton has been a matter of name recognition. Clinton’s husband was president for eight years, and moreover, with half of the eight million Puerto Ricans living in the mainland US, most of them in New York, Clinton is familiar as “their” Senator. By rights, she ought to be considered Puerto Rico’s home state senator, as sure to win this primary as she was of winning New York, or as Obama was of winning Illinois.

But in fact, there are reasons for Puerto Ricans, particularly those on the island, to view Clinton negatively. Her husband, after all, helped get rid of corporate tax breaks for American companies doing business on the island—tax breaks that kept a lot of US manufacturing jobs on the island. Doubling the felony, the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, pushed through the NAFTA treaty that made it easy for those same companies, when their tax breaks were lost, to pack up and move to Mexico, since Puerto Rico also lost its advantage of being inside the US customs zone. Now US companies can make things in Mexico, where labor costs are a fraction of what they are in Puerto Rico, and ship them tariff-free to US consumers.

Puerto Ricans also do not have the same latent hostility towards blacks that some Mexican-Americans may harbor, and which the Clinton campaign so shamelessly tried to stir up in her Texas and California campaigns.

Unlike Mexican-Americans, who are ethnically a mix of white and Indigenous American, Puerto Ricans are much more a mix of white and African—a legacy of the slaves that Spain brought over to the island to replace the native Indians who were slaughtered, worked to death or who died of disease and starvation. Many Puerto Ricans are indistinguishable from African-Americans in appearance, and when they come to America to visit or live are likely to experience the same racism from whites that African Americans experience. They are not going to be easy marks for a campaign that tries to stir up racial fears or animosity.

Obama’s skin color will not be a liability in Puerto Rico. It will more likely be an asset.

Although predicting this kind of thing is always risky, I’m going to bet that Clinton will win a narrow victory in Sunday’s Puerto Rican primary—somewhere between 5-9 percent, with turnout of perhaps 550,000.

If I’m right, she will pick up a net 55,000 votes and 5-6 delegates. There are also 11 Puerto Rican superdelegates, but they will also probably split fairly evenly, at best, for her.

So no big deal—especially since Puerto Rican voters, in the end, simply don’t count.

Until the island is either made a 51st State—an unlikely occurrence since it would be a reliably Democratic state virtually ensuring Democrats of Senate and House majorities for years to come, and thus would never be admitted by Republican members of Congress, and since almost half the island is passionately opposed to such a submerging of their unique culture—or set free as an independent nation, the citizens of Puerto Rico will mean next to nothing to the powerbrokers in Washington.

The Democratic Primary is over, whatever Hillary Clinton may say or do between now and the Democratic Convention in August.

Obama has won it.
___________________
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

digg_url = 'http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/33688'; digg_title = "Why Puerto Rico\'s Democratic Primary Won\'t Matter"; digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n\r\n There are a number of reasons why the Puerto Rican Democratic primary election set for this coming Sunday won’t matter, in terms of Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the party’s nomination.\r\n\r\n The main one is that she’s not going to get the big vote that she has been predicting.\r\n\r\n Clinton, trailing Obama by about 400,000 votes nationwide with only three primaries to go, is fantasizing that she will win the lion’s share of one million Puerto Rican votes, which would put her in the lead for the nomination in terms of the popular vote, though not in the delegate count.\r\n\r"; digg_skin = 'standard';

The New Media (and Clinton) Story Line: Democrats Need to Worry about Obama

dlindorff — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:38:07 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Before the West Virginia primary vote on Tuesday, it was a foregone conclusion that Hillary Clinton would sweep the state, perhaps by over 70 percent. In the event, she came close to that, with 68 percent of the vote. Now that the vote has happened, Clinton and a corporate media anxious to spin out the ratings-boosting contest as long as possible, are arguing that Obama is in trouble.

It is true that twenty percent of those voting for Clinton in this almost lily-white, low-income, low-education state said they voted for her on the basis of race, which is to say they wouldn't vote for a black man. Theirs was a vote Clinton has actively pursued. Forty percent of her backers said they would not vote for Obama in the general election if he were the Democratic candidate.

What was not asked or reported, though, is what percentage of her voters would not vote for Clinton either, if she were to become the nominee. I'm guessing it's a fair number. That is to say, I think that people were voting for Clinton not because they support her, but because they wanted to vote against a black candidate.

You read it here: Hillary Clinton clearly has no more chance to win West Virginia in a general election than does Barack Obama.

So let's move on to a more salient question: Does Obama's poor showing in West Virginia mean he is going to lose in other states where many of the voters are white, working class, and don't have high school diplomas or college degrees?

No. Of course not.

West Virginia is not just Michigan without car companies and pasties. It's Michigan without Motown and Rap music. It is, that is to say, an almost totally white, incredibly insular, racist state--the kind of place that if you're a black person traveling through on the Interstate, you'd best stick to the highway rest stops to get your coffee. It has plenty of fine people living inside its boundaries, but it also has people who'd be just as at home in rural Mississippi--except that then they'd have to live--god forbid!--in the vicinity of "colored people" (West Virginia is only 3% African-American--you can walk around even a city like Wheeling all day and not see one).

Certainly Obama will have his work cut out for him winning over working class Americans. Hillary Clinton and her seemingly pump-headed husband Bill (see my April 28 column Invasion of the Pumpheads) have been hard at work turning them against him for months now, and Republican John McCain, who knows a thing or two about how racist some voters can be (Bush's campaign during the 2000 South Carolina primary, successfully spread the vicious lie that McCain's adopted Indian daughter was the "love child" of an adulterous relationship with a mythical black woman) can be expected to pick up where she left off, probably courtesy of surrogates and 527 campaign groups.

But the reality is that most of the American white working class is not racist. In most states, whites and blacks work together every day, share lunch and after-work beers, and get along fine. Most working-class people know that their real political enemies are the bosses who keep cutting their real wages, shipping their jobs overseas, busting their unions and financing the politicians who help them screw average Americans.

All Obama has to do is make it clear, during the general election campaign, that he understands all this, and is really going to take their side, by restoring labor law to some kind of at least impartiality, so that unions can start to organize the vast unorganized workforce whose members overwhelmingly want a union. All he has to do is say that he will call a halt to unfair trade agreements that encourage American firms to move overseas and sell their crap back to the US instead of making it here. All he has to do is say that he will start taxing the rich again, and corporations, and cut the tax burden on working people.

Racism thrives on irrational fear. Hillary Clinton has been playing to that fear with her evocation of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. McCain will play to that fear too. That's why Obama's "hope" campaign has made sense, but he needs to go further than just hope. He needs to start making concrete what he will be doing for those working people who are the targets of the insidious fear campaigns.

The voters of West Virginia are probably a lost cause. Too many of them, like the Germans of the early 1930s, have been convinced by the fear-mongers that their enemy is a group of "others"--in this case black people. There's not much a candidate like Obama can do about that. But the toxin of racism has been in retreat, thankfully, for years, in most of the nation, and Obama's excellent showings in states like Virginia, Missouri and Wisconsin are solid evidence of that.

The false calculus offered by the Clinton campaign, which argues that no Democratic presidential candidate can win the presidency without winning West Virginia, is based upon races that were won from the middle, leaving working class people with no real reason to vote--the kind of campaign Bill Clinton ran, and that Clinton could be expected to run, should she improbably win the nomination.

What Obama has demonstrated in his primary campaign, is that he can reach beyond the hard core Democratic Party base, and attract the votes of independents (mostly white people) and even Republicans. He now needs to work to replicate his successes in states like Virginia, Wisconsin and Missouri, to expand his reach to those working class voters who have been leaning Republican or to Clinton.

To do that, he needs to make a much more populist case than he has to date.
__________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Pennsylvania-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net