2008 President

Obamanologues at Flashpoint

obamanologues — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:26:07 -0400

Normal
0

false
false
false

MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) }

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-ansi-language:#0400;
mso-fareast-language:#0400;
mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

Obamanologues at Flashpoint
Theater (916 G Street NW,
Washington DC)

Written by R.M. Peete

Directed by
R.M. Peete

September 25
at 7 p.m.

September 26 at 7
p.m.

September 27 at 2
p.m.

September 30 –
October 3 at 7 p.m.

October 4 at 2 p.m.

October 7 at 7 p.m.

October 8 at 8:30
p.m.

October 9 – 10 at 7
p.m.

October 11 at 2 p.m.

[Pay-What-You-Can Previews: September 23 and 24 at
7:00 p.m.]
Tickets: available www.obamanologues.com and at the door

Ten, twenty, or thirty years from now, what
will you recall about the election of President Barack Obama?

Obamanologues provides a unique, historical account of a
one-of-a-kind event in U.S.
history with characters that represent diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds,
political affiliations, and socioeconomic groups.

With stories ranging from conversational
to rebellious to scholarly, Obamanologues
depicts emotions and behaviors displayed
by people in living rooms, classrooms, bus stops, and churches throughout the country.

This political theatre production is one
you do not want to miss!

Young Voters Delivered FL, IN, NC, OH

Bob Fertik — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:24:50 -0500

The data is in, and young voters had an incredible impact on the Presidential race:

About 23 million young people, an increase of 3.4 million over 2004, accounted for almost two-thirds of the overall 5.4 million increase in voter turnout. Their participation increased at a rate greater than older generations. As a result, young voters increased their overall share of the vote from 17 percent in 2004 to 18 percent in 2008. In contrast to previous recent presidential elections, a majority of young people voted in 2008 (53%), and in the competitive battleground states, youth turnout was even higher (59%). This was significantly above the 1996 (37%), 2000 (41%), and 2004 (48%) levels. In the earlier elections, "young people" were primarily members of Generation X, an alienated and socially uninvolved cohort; by contrast, the young voters of 2008 were mostly members of the civic-oriented Millennial Generation.

Their unified support for Barack Obama combined with their high turnout made the Millennial Generation the decisive force in his victory. Young voters accounted for about seven million of Obama's almost nine million national popular vote margin over John McCain. Had young people not voted, Obama would have led McCain by only about 1.5 percentage points instead of seven. Republican Internet guru Patrick Ruffini pointed out that without Millennials, Obama would not have won the combined 73 electoral votes of Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and North Carolina. While he may still have won in 2008 without young voters, Obama's margin and his political mandate would have been far narrower.

Hooray for young voters - and those who persuaded them to vote!!!

President-Elect Obama and Getting the Change We Deserve

dlindorff — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 11:40:04 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Now that the street dancing is over, and President-elect Barack
Obama is measuring the drapes for the new Oval Office (let’s hope he
loses the mounted Saddam Hussein matching pistol set and that he has
the direct hard-wired link between the Vice President’s Office and the
Pentagon severed), it’s time to start focusing on how to make this new
president live up to his mantra of “Change We Can Believe In.”

Well over 65 million people voted Obama in on the belief that he
meant what he said with that largely empty slogan. They are going to be
hugely disappointed if he doesn’t deliver.

Yet Obama’s first steps as president-to-be are not promising. His
first official appointment, naming Rep. Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of
Staff, was probably the worst possible sign of “No Change.” Emanuel, a
fellow member of the Chicago political gang, far from being something
new, is a relic of the Clinton administration, where he served as a
political strategist, pushing the disastrous “triangulation” strategy
that gave us the end of welfare benefits for poor women, the gutting of
habeas corpus, deregulation of the banking system, and an economic
program that favored bond traders over working people. Worse yet, the
naming to such a key post of Emanuel, a rabid Zionist who actually
holds dual US and Israeli citizenship and was a member of the Israeli
Defense Force (IDF), will poison Obama’s chances to broker a real,
lasting peace deal between Israel and Palestine by aligning him clearly
with the Israeli side in every Palestinian’s eyes.

Other appointments aren’t likely to be much better. Obama’s
advisers during the campaign, especially on economics and foreign
policy, have been not forward-thinking “change”-oriented outsiders, but
rather hoary old-timers like Paul Adolph Volcker and Zbigniew Brezinsky
(both veterans of the Carter presidency!). Why would we expect his
cabinet appointments to be any different? (I recently attended a talk
that featured Volcker, who was Federal Reserve Chairman under Carter
and Reagan, along with Nobel economists Robert Mundell and Joseph
Stiglitz. Volcker sounded almost senile as he rambled on and on in a
barely comprehensible mumble about the need for a “global” currency.)

But the point is, no one should have expected anything different
from Obama. Let’s face it; If he had run a campaign using Stiglitz as
his chief economic policy guy and Ramsey Clark as his foreign policy
expert, his candidacy would have gone down in flames. And don’t tell me
`Good, we should have all voted for Ralph Nader.’” The political left
in the US is a pathetic joke. Instead of a unified third party on the
left, we had that 1-5% sliver of the electorate divided between
independent Ralph Nader and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia
McKinney! How stupid is that? If the left cannot unite when its public
standing and support is so pathetically small, how can it expect anyone
to back it (I’m being generous here in using the singular to describe
such a fractured group of people)?

No, it was correct to elect Obama. Failure to do so (and remember,
he only won the popular vote by a slender 6-percent margin, and many of
the key states that provided his much larger electoral vote victory
were won by margins that thin or thinner including 034 percent in North
Carolina), would have meant a President John “Bomb-Bomb” McCain and his
loopy VP Sarah Palin.

But as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and others, myself included,
have long said, change in America has not for the most part been made
from the top down, or through the electoral process. It has been the
result of political struggle in the workplace, on the campus and most
importantly in the streets. And that brings us to where we are today.

Progressives should complain loudly at the pathetic nominations
that Obama is making to his new administration. The new president-elect
should take heat for appointing old Clintonian hacks and for “reaching
out” to Republicans in the interest of “bi-partisanship.” But more
importantly, we on the left need to work hard to organize, demonstrate,
and protest to achieve our goals and to make President Obama and the
new solidly Democratic Congress do the right (left) thing.

For me, the two most important issues we need to focus laser-like upon are ending the wars, and obtaining worker rights.

It is time to plan a massive march, to coincide with Inauguration
Day, to demand a prompt end to the Iraq War and occupation, and a
negotiated solution to the chaotic war in Afghanistan. The protest
should also demand an end to the so-called “War” on Terror, beginning
with the immediate closing of Guantanamo’s prison, and of all the black
sites around the world.

Secondly, the left and the labor movement need to organize a million-worker march on Washington--hell, a two-million worker
march--to demand immediate passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, a
long-delayed reform of US labor law that would end almost 50 years of
bias against workers that has seen employers able to simply flout the
law and prevent workers from forming unions. Under the proposed act,
which already passed the House in the last session of Congress only to
die in the Senate (before having a chance to be killed by the
president), workers would no longer have to go through years of delay
trying to get a secret-ballot election in the workplace; they would
only have to obtain signed cards supporting a union from a majority of
employees. It would mandate that employers bargain in good faith with a
new union, and would mandate a contract if management stonewalled
negotiations. It would also, for the first time, impose penalties for
violating workers rights—for example firing union activists and their
supporters.

Why is this bill so important? Because without a powerful labor
movement, we will never see the Democratic Party, or any third party of
the left, become a serious force for progressive change. It is working
people, and only working people, organized into powerful unions, who
have the potential of pushing the government into making progressive
change, but with union representation now down to less than 8 percent
of the private workforce, and 13 percent of the entire workforce,
counting public employees, what chance is there of such a thing
happening?

Polls over the years have consistently shown that, despite all the
media propaganda against unions, and the lack of any education about
the union movement or the importance of unions in our schools, between
60% and 70% of American workers nonetheless say that they would like to
have a union on their job if they could get one. The problem is, with
the laws and the Labor Relations Boards stacked against them, they
cannot get a union, and indeed, put their jobs and their families at risk by even trying to get one.

Obama and most of the Democrats who won election in this cycle have
pledged to pass this act this year. They also owe their victories to
the extraordinary effort that what’s left of the labor movement put
into getting them elected. Workers and leftists of all stripes need to
act now to demand that they make good on that promise and on the debt
that they owe.

It is the first essential step in moving a President Obama and a
Democratic Congress—as of now still in the grip of the corporatocracy,
with little in the way of any countervailing organized pressure from
the left—in a progressive direction.

The time for dancing is over, but nothing is easy. Now it’s time
for marching, for shouting, for sitting in and for organizing to get
the “Change” we’ve earned.
_____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphie-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

John McCain: The Door to Fascism

dinamic — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:44:14 -0400

Democracy in the United States is clinging by its fingernails. The Bush administration has spent the last eight years laying the “legal” foundations for fascism. Significant measures along this dark road include the Patriot Act, the FISA bill, the repeal of habeas corpus, and a host of executive orders giving the president frightening dictatorial powers. At the same time, the Bush administration has been building the physical machinery of fascism, including domestic detention centers, a network of overseas prisons and torture centers, and most recently, the establishment of Northcom, a division of the US military with orders to serve within the United States (formerly prohibited under the Posse Comitatus Act).

The republicans are sending out their biggest loud mouths to tell America that Obama is a Marxist. Tonight on Chris Matthews Tom the bug man Delay is preaching that Obama is a Marxist and that he wants to destroy this country and shread our Constitution!

I ask you who is destroying our Constitution, right now, right in front of our very eyes? We need to get the truth out to everyone who thinks that they are undecided. Obama is not a Marxist and he does not have any desire to destroy our Constitution or America .

The republicans are getting desperate and desperate people often do very stupid and desperate things, but this is going way too far. The neocons are still in charge in DC and they want McCain as their next puppet. We can't let that happen.

A country that enters a severe economic crisis with a government of known fascist tendencies is almost certain to become fascist. This is the real danger of a McCain presidency: John McCain is a member of the party that has spent the last eight years preparing for and partially executing a full fascist takeover of the United States. We simply cannot risk having McCain at the helm as we face the coming crisis. John McCain would be all too likely to try to solve the crisis by resorting to extreme, dictatorial and radically undemocratic measures. Moreover, he would be surrounded by the same sorts of advisors who used George W Bush to enact a radical right-wing agenda. These same advisors would be all too happy to use the economic crisis as an excuse for a full takeover of political power.

We should also keep in mind that the Bush administration used threat of terrorism to build the present surveillance/security state, but there is compelling evidence that the real reason for its construction was a growing awareness on the part of the government and the ownership class of this nation that we are facing a severe economic downturn and that this might lead to significant domestic unrest.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/18295

Fun Thoughts: Messin' With Republicans

dlindorff — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:55:55 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

A week out from Election Day, with the polls looking pretty good for Barack Obama's election, especially in the Electoral College, focus is shifting to the Senate, where Democrats would need to pick up 10 seats in order to be able to both prevent Republican obstruction via filibuster, and send Connecticut's turncoat Sen. Joe Lieberman into well-deserved oblivion.

Getting to a 10-seat gain may look like long odds, but it occurs to me that this really doesn't matter. In fact, a President Obama could have fun picking off a couple of Republican senators from states that have Democratic governors, by naming them to posts in his administration, thereby simultaneously demonstrating a bi-partisan approach to governance while ensuring solid Democratic control of both houses of Congress. And he could do this without having to name out-of-synch conservatives to any position.

For example, Obama could invite either Sen. Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe, both Republican senators in Maine, to serve in some capacity in the cabinet--perhaps in the role of EPA Administrator or Secretary of the Interior, or as Secretary of Health and Welfare or of Education. Either one would be hard put to turn down that offer, and if accepted, Maine's Democratic governor, John Baldacci, would get to name a replacement, who would be a Democrat.

Oregon Republican Senator Gordon Smith is in a tight race for re-election in that liberal state. If he succeeds in returning to office, Obama could offer him a cabinet post, too--perhaps Secretary of Commerce. Smith has been campaigning almost as an ally of Obama in his effort to defeat Democratic challenger Jeff Merkley, so he'd be an easy fit, and that would give Oregon's Democratic governor, Ted Kulongoski, the chance to name a Democratic replacement--probably Merkley. So everybody (except Senate Republicans) wins!

If still another Democratic Senate seat were needed to hit the magic number of 60 in the next Senate, Obama could find a job for Tennessee's Lamar Alexander, or even Pennsylvania's senior senator Arlen Specter.

Republicans, of course, would be livid if their numbers were pared in this way, but that would be fun to watch. All the named Republican senators above are relatively liberal and have suffered at the hands of their party's conservative majority. Most would probably jump at the chance of a cabinet post.

So if Obama wins next Tuesday, but Democrats fall short in the Senate, look for some entertainment in the coming few months.

________________

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

I'm Calling the Race for Obama

dlindorff — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:36:54 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I’m ready to call this election. It’s going to be a big win for Barack Obama.

I know this because of a story I heard from an employee of a major
polling organization. He tells of a poll worker who was interviewing
homeowners in a small town in central Pennsylvania, part of that “real”
American hailed by Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
The man knocked on the door, and when the woman of the house answered,
told her he was a pollster and wanted to know how her household planned
to vote in November.

The woman turned and yelled into the house, “Honey, how are we voting this year?”

From inside the house, a male voice yelled back, “I guess we’re voting for the nigger.”

The woman turned to the stunned pollster and, without a hint of embarrassment, said, “I guess we’re voting for Obama.”

Simply put, Obama has won the racist vote, a core Republican constituency since the late 1960s.

Indeed, it is likely that instead of the famed “Bradley Effect”
(named after the Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, who famously lost a
race for California governor which the polls said he would win
handily), according to which some white voters supposedly tell poll
takers they are voting for the black candidate in a race for fear of
appearing racist, while in fact they plan on voting for the white
candidate, the opposite is going to occur. That is, there are probably
many white racist voters like the one in this small Pennsylvania town,
whether in some northern suburb or village, or in Southern states like
Virginia, North Carolina or Georgia, who are fed up with the Bush
years, want a change, and are planning to vote for Obama, but would not
want their friends to know they were voting for a black man. Call it
the “Obama Effect.”

If I’m right that this anecdote is reflective of a broader
phenomenon, look for just the opposite of what we saw happen in the
2004 election, when the exit polls and the networks were calling the
election for John Kerry, and in fact key states like Ohio, supposedly
solidly in the Democratic column, went for Bush. (Sure there was voting
machine chicanery, but there were also problems with the exit polls.)
This year, if there are substantial numbers of white voters who vote
for Obama but sheepishly tell exit pollsters that they voted for
McCain, we may hear that races are close, or that states are going for
McCain that will ultimately, when the actual votes are counted, go for
Obama.

In a broader sense, even based upon the pre-election poll numbers
we are seeing, with Obama ahead in Virginia and North Carolina and
within the margin of error in Indiana, Georgia, North Dakota and
Montana, what seems to be happening in this election is the collapse of
the long-successful Republican strategy of using “social issues” and
fear-mongering, particularly fear of African-Americans and immigrants,
to convince white working class Americans to vote for a party whose
interests were and are clearly against their own. Republican campaign
ads and candidate speeches are larded with code words that seek to
appeal to those fears: “pals around with terrorists,” “don’t know who
he really is,” “anti-American preacher,” “wife not proud to be an
American,” “community activist,” “socialist,” “not really born in
America.” But they’re not working. Neither is the old Republican
nostrum of cutting taxes for the rich on the pretense that it will lead
to jobs for the poor. When McCain charges, as he has been doing
frantically of late, that Obama has been outed by “Joe” (sic) the
Plumber as a “socialist” and that he will be taxing the rich "to spread
the wealth around,” most people today are probably thinking, “Hey, that
idea of spreading some rich folks’ money around sounds pretty good to
me!”

That is to say, Obama’s populist rhetoric, whether it is sincere or
not, and particularly his promise to cut taxes for most Americans while
raising taxes on the wealthy and on the large corporations, and to make
college and health care affordable to all, is winning over a large
number of Americans, including many who for decades have been
responsive to Republican fear- and race-mongering and to Republican
"free-market" ideology.

There are many people on the left who argue that Obama and the
Democrats are a sham, and that they won’t really tackle taxing the rich
and corporations in any serious way, or offering real help to
struggling working class Americans. They may well be right. Certainly
the flood of campaign contributions from Fortune 1000 corporations
suggests that corporate America will have a big seat at the White House
table in an Obama administration, as they do already in the Democratic
Congress. At the same time though, the rhetoric of this campaign is
setting up a major expectation among millions of ordinary voters for
real progressive action on economic issues. This hope, given continued
organized political pressure after November 4, could lead to real
action.

I would argue that when the real “Joe’s” and “Jane’s” of America,
the ones who have been suckered in for years by cynical Republican
fear-mongering and race-baiting campaigns finally turn away and vote
for hope—even if that hope is being over-sold--it creates the chance
for a real movement for progressive change in the country.

At any rate, it certainly looks like my theory will be put to the test come Inauguration Day.
_____________

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). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Why I'm Voting for Barack Obama on November 4

dlindorff — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:04:31 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Okay, I was going to vote for Ralph Nader this November 4.

It was an easy decision. I live in Pennsylvania, which is now,
according to all the polls, reliably in the Obama column, with the
Democratic candidate holding an insurmountable lead in the polls of 14
percent over Republican John McCain—enough to overcome even the most
devious Republican vote suppression techniques and voting machine
chicanery.

I was going to vote for Nader because I find Obama to be a
seriously flawed candidate. He ran early on an anti-Iraq War platform,
saying not that invading Iraq was wrong legally and morally, but that
it was “the wrong war.” Since then, he has backed away even from saying
he wanted the war ended, opting for a 16-month withdrawal timetable
that would have the killing and dying in that sad land going on longer
than most wars this nation has fought. He has also called for an
escalation of the war in Afghanistan, despite clear evidence that more
troops just will make the situation there worse, and has called for an
expansion of the US military budget, to increase the size of the Army
and Marines, which will only encourage more warmongering, more killing
and more waste of precious resources.

Obama also sold us all out by going along with a bill sought by
President Bush granting immunity to telecom companies that aided and
abetted the illegal and unconstitutional spying on Americans by the
National Security Agency—spying that we now know is massive almost
beyond our imagination, even including the monitoring of private family
conversations of American service personnel in Iraq, of journalists,
and almost certainly of Bush administration political “enemies.” By
backing that obscene bill, Obama has made it almost impossible for
victims of this police-state surveillance campaign to sue and find out
what the Bush/Cheney administration has been up to all these years.

In so many ways, Obama has tacked to the middle or even the right, while spouting soaring but empty rhetoric about “change.”

Meanwhile, everything Ralph Nader says makes perfect sense. He has
consistently called the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the crimes that they
are. He has consistently called for a nationalized health care system,
which every other modern nation has long since proven to be a more
cost-effective and health-effective way to run a medical system than
the failed free-market approach advocated by Obama and the rest of the
Establishment political system. He has correctly denounced the economic
bailout as welfare for the rich and for the corporate criminals who
have been sucking the life out of the US economy for years.

And yet, I think I have to vote of Obama this year.

The reason is partly because I know I would vote for Obama if I
lived in Ohio or Indiana, where the race between McCain and Obama is
too close to call, and so, to vote for Nader when it is simply safe to
do so here in Pennsylvania is really a cop-out.

But even more important, when I see the hate-filled racists and
right-wing yahoos braying at McCain and Palin rallies, when I hear
people calling for Obama to be killed or lynched, and when I see the
rabid hate mail circulating in email inboxes falsely labeling him as a
secret Muslim, a terrorist, a Marxist and a black nationalist, I want
to see the man resoundingly win this election.

But it’s more than that. I also, perhaps against all logic and
experience, admit that I expect something good of an Obama presidency.

Call me naïve, but based upon my own life experience, I keep
thinking that a guy who has worked as a community organizer, a Harvard
Law School grad (and even law journal editor!) who could have named his
price at a Wall Street law firm, but who chose instead to be a
political and community activist, a guy who has relatives who live in
humble surroundings in Kenya, and who spent some of his childhood
actually living in a Third World Asian nation, not to mention a guy who
has surely felt the sting of being called a nigger, has to bring
something new to the White House. Certainly no other president in the
history of the country has come to the office with such a background.

Sure Obama is no leftist candidate. But if he were, he wouldn’t be
heading for an election victory. He wouldn’t even be the Democratic
nominee. He’d be, at best, where Dennis Kucinich is—holding a seat in
Congress where his every progressive effort would be stymied or mocked
by the House leadership.

The unfortunate reality is that the true left in the US is a joke
(many of its purists even mock successful left candidates political
figures like Kucinich, for god’s sake!). Fractured and fractious small
groupings have little or no link to the organized labor
movement—traditionally the bedrock of any successful left political
power. And the labor movement itself is as weak as it has ever been and
keeps growing weaker. The left in the US, such as it is, has even less
connection with the broad mass of the American public, thanks to years
of successful propaganda linking it to Stalin, Mao and Soviet Communism.

I have no illusions about the progressivity of the Democratic
Party. Certainly it has its progressive elected officials who have made
it into office—people like Kucinich, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Russ
Feingold, Rep. Maxine Waters and the like. But clearly, the Democratic
Party has shown itself to be in thrall to the moneyed interests on Wall
Street and in the corporate suites.

That said, there are important things that could happen—and I
stress the word could, not would—if this election were to be won by
Obama and by Democrats in the Congress. One of these things is that
there will be new Supreme Court justices named over the next four
years. Some will inevitably replace some of the aging “liberals” on the
bench (some of whom have not always been so liberal on economic
issues). Some could also replace current conservative justices
(Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, both obese men, don’t
look terribly healthy to me, Justice Kennedy is getting on in years,
and even Chief Justice Roberts, while looking hale, has a problem with
epilepsy or some other ailment that has caused him to collapse in a
frothing fit of unconscious on occasion).

Also important is legislation to make it less of an obstacle course
for workers to win union representation and labor contracts on the job.
A major reason that unions have shrunk from over 30 percent of the
workforce in the 1950s to just 9 percent of the private workforce (and
13 percent of all workplaces, public and private) today, is that labor
law has been whittled away and turned to management’s advantage to such
an extent that it is almost impossible now to win a union election.
Employers who break labor laws suffer no penalty even when found
guilty, and workers who are unfairly fired for union activity can hope,
at best, if they are lucky, to win reinstatement and back pay after
fighting for years. Most just give up.

If a Democratic Congress passed new labor legislation and a
President Obama signed them into law, as he has promised to do, and if
new pro-labor officials were appointed to the national, regional and
local labor relations boards that adjudicate labor issues, we could see
a genuine revival of the labor movement in America with consequences
for workers’ lives, and for the political system that would be far
reaching and profound—and that could even pave the way for a resurgence
of a left/labor political movement.

Finally, with respect to war and militarism, I tend not to take
Obama’s warmongering seriously. Given the man’s background, I am
confident that he is not a militarist by nature. It may be politically
opportunistic for him to try during this campaign to out-tough McCain
on Afghanistan while calling for a wind-down of the war in Iraq, but it
would be a disaster for him to pursue a wider war in Afghanistan after
taking office, ensuring that his presidency, like Bush’s, Lyndon
Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s before him, would be dragged down by an
endless bloody conflict.

A President Obama will have his hands full trying to deal with an
unprecedented financial fiasco, and will want the wars off his plate as
quickly as possible. Maybe I’m being a Pollyanna, but I simply can’t
see a smart guy—and Obama is a smart guy—getting dragged into another
quagmire.

Besides, I have a darker vision, which is that the crisis of global
warming, so long denied by the Bush administration, is going to make
itself felt soon in ways that will be impossible to ignore, and which
will demand a crisis response. Obama, I believe, will be the right
person at the right time, to lead that response.

And that brings me to the final reason I am voting for Obama. As
crazy as John McCain clearly is, with his default setting on war as a
solution for all problems, this sickly and possibly terminally ill old
man has chosen to have a certifiable right-wing, closed-minded, bigoted
and stunningly ignorant religious zealot as his back-up. Sarah Palin,
as vice president, would in all probability end up becoming president
during a McCain first term.

This country and the world simply cannot risk having as the leader
of America an end-of-times believer at this critical moment. It’s not
just the polar bears and the wolves in Alaska who would suffer under a
Palin presidency. It would be all life on earth.
_____________

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

digg_url = 'http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/36876';
digg_title = "Why I\'m Voting for Barack Obama on November 4";
digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n Okay, I was going to vote for Ralph Nader this November 4.\r\n\r\n It was an easy decision. I live in Pennsylvania, which is now, according to all the polls, reliably in the Obama column, with the Democratic candidate holding an insurmountable lead in the polls of 14 percent over Republican John McCain—enough to overcome even the most devious Republican vote suppression techniques and voting machine chicanery.\r\n\r";
digg_skin = 'standard';

Presidential Campaign Enters the Silly Season

dlindorff — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:12:11 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I’ve been getting some emails that refer to Barack Obama as a
“Manchurian Candidate,” a guy who is somehow hiding a secret radical
and/or Muslim jihadist agenda that will burst forth if he’s elected
president. There is a certain idiot factor at work here, since if Obama
were a closet Weatherman, who somehow learned of and adopted that 1960s
college dropout organzation’s creed at the tender age of 8, it would
have clashed badly with any Muslim teaching he might have picked up as
a student in an Indonesian public school at the same time (he attended
an Indonesian public schoolfrom the age of 6 to 8 before transferring
to a Catholic-run institution).

But since some low-wattage and conspiracy-minded people seem ready
to believe this kind of stuff, let’s consider John McCain’s early
background, and the possibility of his being a Manchurian Candidate
too. Fair’s fair, right?

Okay. McCain, it turns out, was actually born outside the US, in
the Panama Canal Zone, which in 1936 was territory leased from Panama.
His father, a Navy officer, was stationed there with his wife at the
time of McCain’s birth. Now it’s a safe bet that McCain was largely
raised—fed, diapered, and spoken to—at that age by a local Panamian
woman. That’s what, after all, you do when you are an elite officer and
the wife of an elite officer in a foreign country where low-wage help
is abundant. Who knows what subversive ideologies were poured into the
young McCain’s tender ears at that vulnerable period of his life by his
Panamanian nurse? Maybe that would explain McCain’s support for an
amnesty program for immigrants from Latin America a few years back.
Does he have a secret agenda to throw open the doors of America to
Latin American immigrants once in the White House?

And worse yet, maybe his Panamian amah was a Marxist! Lord knows
that Central America in the mid-1930s was a hotbed of revolution. The
dreaded Augusto Sandino had only just been executed in Nicaragua, just
north of the Zone, two years before McCain’s birth, following a bloody
guerrilla war against US Marines, and the region was full of bitter and
vengeful nationalist and Marxist revolutionaries bent on throwing the
US out of Latin America. Could his nurse have been one of these people,
whispering and implanting the language of liberation into the young
boy’s still unformed mind, ready to spring to life once he assumed high
office in Washington?

Then we turn to McCain’s prisoner of war days in the hands of the
North Vietnamese. Certainly his mind was weak and vulnerable to
control. While many of McCain’s fellow POWs endured five, six or more
years of torture without cracking, he is said to have begun spilling
secrets and agreeing to broadcast anti-American propaganda statements
after only four days of torture shortly after his capture. We also know
that the Communists had a sophisticated system of mind control
developed, which was shared among the Communist nations of the USSR,
China, North Korea and North Vietnam. Were these techniques applied to
the captive McCain, and did they leave him after five long years of
captivity robotically programmed to seek and win the presidency, only
then to launch a campaign of sabotage to soften America up for
Communist takeover?

This prospect seems much more likely than that some Muslim teacher got to Obama in his grammar school in Indonesia.

Actually, I find the Obama Manchurian Candidate theory much weaker
than the McCain Manchurian Candidate theory, just based upon my own
experience. I was, after all, put through some serious indoctrination
by my own family. My parents sent me to Sunday School at the local
Congregational Church, from the age of six to the age of about 11. I
can still remember the earnest parent volunteers teaching us all the
nonsense about the earth being formed in six days, about Adam and Eve,
the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, the Virgin birth (What
was a virgin, I wondered? They wouldn’t say…), and the crucifixion and
resurrection. None of it stuck. Despite the indoctrinators’ best
efforts, I left Sunday School an atheist and remain one today. The only
thing I really learned in Sunday School was how to smoke—something a
number of us learned together while skipping class and hiding out in
the church attic. Is Christian dogma that much weaker that it can fail
to impress a young mind while Muslim dogma can take a firm hold in an
even shorter time? What an insult to Christianity!

My daughter too, is testimony to the limits of early childhood
propaganda efforts. At the age of 7, we brought her to Shanghai, China,
where for a year, she attended first grade in a local Chinese public
school. She learned excellent Chinese there, but though there was
considerable indoctrination in Maoist theory, with special focus on the
life of the young Mao and also of the selfless workers’ hero Lei Feng
(they actually had one daily class called “Loving the Country class”
and most other subjects had a propaganda aspect), and though she also
attended a fifth grade Chinese public school when we returned to China
a few years later, for a stay in Xi’an, at 24 she is hardly a Commie or
a Maoist, I’m sure though, that should she someday decide to run for
president, some of the same people who suspect Obama of being a closet
Muslim terrorist will say she harbors secret Communist sentiments from
her early school years.

Such is the state of some American minds.
__________________
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

digg_url = 'http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/36666';
digg_title = "Presidential Campaign Enters the Silly Season";
digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n I’ve been getting some emails that refer to Barack Obama as a “Manchurian Candidate,” a guy who is somehow hiding a secret radical and/or Muslim jihadist agenda that will burst forth if he’s elected president. There is a certain idiot factor at work here, since if Obama were a closet Weatherman, who somehow learned of and adopted that 1960s college dropout organzation’s creed at the tender age of 8, it would have clashed badly with any Muslim teaching he might have picked up as a student in an Indonesian public school at the same time (he attended an Indonesian public schoolfrom the age of 6 to 8 before transferring to a Catholic-run institution).\r\n\r\n But since some low-wattage and conspiracy-minded people seem ready to believe this kind of stuff, let’s consider John McCain’s early background, and the possibility of his being a Manchurian Candidate too. Fair’s fair, right? \r\n\r";
digg_skin = 'standard';

The Power of "No"!

dlindorff — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:53:21 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The Congressional switchboard is jammed. You can get through, but it
takes a dedicated finger on the redial button of your phone. Operators
at the Capitol say it's been that way for a week now, as Americans
across the country have been flooding their Congressional delegations
with phone calls (and emails) urging them to vote "No" on the
Bush/Paulson Wall Street bailout.

That today is no exception, after Democratic Party leaders (and both
major party presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama)
bought into the plan after adding some window-dressing measures
designed to make it look more palatable. This shows that the public is
not fooled.

People see clearly that this is a trillion-dollar giveaway to the
very people who have been hollowing out and destroying the US economy
for over a decade or more by convincing both parties to let them do
whatever they want to get rich, free of any kind of significant
oversight or regulation.

As Nobelist economist Joseph Stiglitz has written
of this outrageous rip-off, there are four problems facing the
financial system, and the bailout proposal only addresses one--getting
the toxic mortgages off the banks' books and onto taxpayers' hands.
Left unsolved is the gaping hole in banks' balance sheets in the form
of loans made to people and companies which cannot be repaid, which
will mean they still won't start lending money again. Left unaddressed
too is the continuing collapse of housing prices, which will inevitably
lead to more bank collapses even after the bailout. Finally, Stiglitz
says there is the general loss of faith in the financial system--a
major crisis which the bailout will also not solve.

Stiglitz doesn't even address a fifth problem which is that this
trillion-plus-dollar boondoggle (and when you add in the bailouts of
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bear Stearns, the multiple mega-bank
failures and the pending auto-industry bailout, you're already talking
$1.5 trillion and counting), all of it with borrowed money, the stage
is being set for a collapse in the US dollar, with consequences that
will reverberate through the economy. Consider: if the dollar
collapses, as many experts say is almost inevitable with this kind of
huge addition to the national debt, oil prices (which are set in
dollars) will soar to compensate, the price of all the other goods that
Americans import--more than half of everything we use in daily life
thanks to the decimation of American manufacturing--will rise
dramatically, and ultimately, in an effort to stem the bleeding,
interest rates will have to be raised, thus bringing what's left of the
economy to a grinding halt.

All of this is readily predictable--and indeed a group of over 200 prominent economists has written Congress
joining Stiglitz in opposing the bailout plan--but that doesn't matter
to the proponents of the bailout in Washington. What they want is to
get past Election Day, and the bailout may do that, unless the public
gets really aroused.

The tsunami of calls and emails to Congress, and last week's
nationwide demonstrations against the bailout suggest that the public
is waking up to this looming disaster and to the fact that they are
being sold a bill of goods.

If you haven't made an effort to call your two senators and your
representative to demand that they vote "No" on this bailout, do it now
(the number is 202-225-3121 or 202-224-3121), and don't give up when
you get a busy signal. That's a sign that you are not alone. Just keep
hitting "redial" until you get through. At that point, get the
operator, before switching you, to give you direct numbers for your
three members of Congress, so you can bypass the main switchboard
number after that.

Unlike the 2002 rush to war against Iraq, this latest bum's rush can still be stopped.
__________________

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). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Does Anyone Want to Buy a Private Pension Plan? Going Once...

dlindorff — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:17:54 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

That deafening silence you hear coming from the McCain campaign is
straight-talkin’ John touting his plan for privatizing Social
Security...not.

With Wall Street banks falling like dominoes, a hundred billion dollars vanishing overnight, and the Treasury
Department scampering about trying to prop up failing enterprises
from Bear Stearns to Fannie Mae, and with domestic and global equity
and bond markets swooning, Americans are afraid to open those envelopes
that come every quarter telling them the value of their hard-earned
401(k) retirement plans.

No wonder John McCain isn’t touting privatizaton these days.

It’s not just that many of those private 401(k) plans McCain and
his ilk so love for the working stiff were invested in the very
financial institutions that have seen their share values drop to zero,
or in other financial institutions that were themselves heavily
invested in the stocks or debt instruments of the growing list of
failed institutions. It’s that the tottering US financial edifice is
shaking the broader markets, making stocks, bonds, and even giant
insurance companies like AIG look like houses of cards, and a poor bet
for funding one’s dotage.

Paul Krugman, in today’s New York Times, says that the Federal
Reserve Bank and the US Treasury Department, in letting Lehman Bros,
the nation’s fourth largest investment bank, go bankrupt, instead of
doing yet another government bailout, was a kind of financial Russian
roulette. Could Lehman’s collapse lead to a wholesale collapse of Wall
Street and the US banking system, ala 1929-31? Krugman says,
incredibly, that nobody really knows, including Fed Chairman Ben
Bernacke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

That’s not the kind of thing you want to hear when you’ve managed,
over the course of a working life, to save maybe a few hundred grand in
a tax-deferred retirement plan that is all invested in stocks and
bonds. Nor is it very comforting, if you are one of the millions of
Americans who put your money into some kind of insurance annuity,
expecting to get a guaranteed stream of income for life, to hear that
AIG, the largest insurance company and one of the biggest issuers of
such “private pension” programs, is struggling to come up with $40
billion in cash to avoid going belly up itself.

Now fortunately, for nearly all American workers, there is a
backstop: Social Security, which is not invested in any financial
instruments, and which pays out monthly benefits to retired and
disabled workers and their dependents based not upon the whims of the
markets but on the lifetime earnings of the worker in question. Unlike
a 401(k) investment, which is dependent for its size and reliability on
the performance of the financial markets in which its assets are
invested, or an annuity, which is dependent upon the financial survival
and viability of the insurance company which issued it, Social Security
is a program in which the payments of benefits are an obligation of the
federal government, and are paid from a fund of money that has been
paid into by the retiree and her employer in earlier years, by current
workers and their employers who pay a tax on current earnings, and, if
necessary, by supplemental funds allocated by the Congress. Social
Security benefits are adjusted each year for inflation (though since
President Bill Clinton, those adjustments have been reduced because of
a sleight of hand that makes inflation appear to be less than it really
is).

McCain, and Republicans in general, have been pressing for years to
have Social Security privatized, or partially privatized, with at least
some of the money taken from employees and employers for Social
Security invested in financial instruments such as stocks or bonds.
They’ve tried to sell this snake oil to young workers by pointing to
the rising stock market, and claiming ominously that some day, with so
many current workers approaching retirement, Social Security will go
“bankrupt.” Last year, the Bush Administration, which has filled the
Social Security Administration with GOP hacks, actually had notices
sent out to every American worker warning that “unless something is
done,” Social Security might not be there for younger workers when it’s
their turn to retire.

This kind of cynical scare tactic is beneath contempt, and is
designed to weaken support for one of the most significant progressive
legacies of the New Deal. The reality is that as the Baby Boom
generation reaches retirement, starting with the first Boomers who will
hit 65 in 2011, the elderly lobby, already enormously powerful, will
swell to become perhaps the most powerful “special interest” voting
bloc this nation has ever seen. Retired Americans will have the
electoral clout in another 10 years to make Social Security whatever
they want it to be.

They (we really, since at 59 I am part of that generation) will
insure that the government pays us and our fellow retirees a decent
retirement stipend, and we will also insist that reforms be undertaken
to insure that our kids also get secure retirements.

We will do this not by undermining the program, as McCain and other
Republicans have called for, by privatizing all or part Social
Security, but by making sure that every dollar earned by even the
richest of people is taxed, instead of having the social security tax
limited to the first roughly $100,000 of earnings. We will demand that
if more taxes are needed, they be paid by employers, not workers.
Currently employers and employees each pay about 7.5% of wages as a
payroll tax into the Social Security Trust Fund. There is no reason why
that split should be 50/50, though. Employers could pay a bigger share.
(Right wing economists try to argue that any tax paid by an employer
ultimately comes out of the employees’ wages, but this ignores the law
of supply and demand: workers don’t negotiate wages, or accept a job at
a certain pay level, based upon the gross wage being paid, but on what
they will be taking home each payday. Extra taxes paid by an employer
could not be automatically taken out of employee pay. They would have
to come out of corporate profits.)

The timing of the current spreading financial crisis has exposed
McCain’s call for privatization of Social Security as a bad idea
masquerading as reform. Since McCain can be expected to pursue the idea
if elected, it’s just one more reason for American voters to reject his
candidacy.
______________

digg_url = 'http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/36027';
digg_title = "Does Anyone Want to Buy a Private Pension Plan? Going Once...";
digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n That deafening silence you hear coming from the McCain campaign is straight-talkin’ John touting his plan for privatizing Social Security...not.\r\n\r\n With Wall Street banks falling like dominoes, and the Treasury Department scampering about with trying to prop up failing enterprises from Bear Stearns to Fannie Mae, and with domestic and global equity and bond markets swooning, Americans are afraid to open those envelopes that come every quarter telling them the value of their hard-earned 401(k) retirement plans.\r\n\r\n No wonder John McCain isn’t touting privatizaton these days.\r\n \r";
digg_skin = 'standard';