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.”

By Dave Lindorff

The ongoing and deepening global economic crisis, to which Barack
Obama owes his presidential election victory, is no small thing, to be
sure. It also presents us on the left with a lot of openings to press
for progressive change.

I haven't weighed in on Obama's choice for Vice President, but DLC founder Al From just made it easy with this quote in support of Evan Bayh:

"The antiwar people cannot define the Democratic Party," said Al From, a founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, of which Mr. Bayh was chairman for four years. "I think Evan's real strength is you get someone on the ticket who has a record of being strong on national security, and that is a very important quality to have."

So Al From believes supporting the invasion of Iraq makes a politician "strong on national security"?

By anyone objective measure, the disastrous invasion of Iraq has done more to weaken our national security than any other action in U.S. history.

I cannot for the life of me understand why any Democrat would vote for warrantless wiretapping.

I can easily understand why every Republican would. Republicans fully support the Bush Dictatorship in every way, including imperialism, torture, corruption, and warrantless wiretapping. If George Bush took the completely opposite positions (as he did before the 2000 election), they would support him too. They don't think and have no principles, they blindly follow their Fuhrer Leader.

But why would any Democrat - including our party leaders?

At the Presidential polling blog FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver analyzed 31 vulnerable House Democrats in conservative-leaning seats, and found 23 voted for warrantless wiretapping, while 8 voted against. Nate observes,

I just got off the phone State Senator Regina Thomas, and I can't tell you how excited I am!

Thomas is running against BushDemocrat John Barrow in Georgia's 12th District in a primary on July 15, just 4 weeks away. Barrow voted with George Bush on every issue we track, including Iraq, Iran, habeas corpus, and wiretapping. His district is 45% black, yet he votes like a southern rightwing Republican.

By Dave Lindorff

I haven’t lived in rural Pennsylvania or in rural Indiana, but I have lived in rural upstate New York, in towns where there are so few Democrats that on some local election ballots, not a single position, from town council to justice of the peace, has a contest. As in China, your option is to vote for the Republican candidate, or to leave that line blank.

And many of the people in these towns, uniformly white, when they talk politics, spend a lot of their time complaining about black people, immigrants (neither of whom can even be found in the vicinity) and the threat to their guns.

Barack Obama is exactly right.

By Dave Lindorff

During my six-year sojourn in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, one of the things I came away with was a sense of how generally un-nationalistic and non-patriotic the Chinese people were.

Caught up in the struggle first to simply survive and then, in the mid-90s, to try and grab onto the moving train that was China’s new Great Leap into Capitalism, average mainland Chinese, whether out in the remote farmlands of western Anhui Province or in the rundown houses lining the hutongs of Shanghai or Beijing, had no time for patriotic displays or nationalistic concerns.

When Chinese Communist Party leaders in Beijing would beat the drum of nationalism over Taiwanese independence efforts in the 1990s, it evoked mostly yawns among average Chinese people, and in fact, to Beijing’s embarrassment, a popular computer game featured a war-game in which Taiwan defeated the People’s Liberation Army.

Matt Stoller blogs about Democrat Bill Foster's special election campaign in IL-14 for the open seat vacated by Denny Hastert. For some unfathomable reason, Foster is embracing the Blue Dogs because he thinks they stand for "deficit reduction":

Paying down this debt must be the first order of business. I intend to work with the Blue Dog Democrats in congress -- a group dedicated to curing this by making the hard decisions necessary -- as well as any other groups that make deficit reduction their top priority. I'm sure that I'll be at odds with the Blue Dogs on more than a few issues - for example mortgage industry reform - but when it comes to deficit reduction, we all agree that we have to get our house in order.

By Dave Lindorff

I don’t want to overstate the case for Barack Obama, who has been fairly circumspect about his intentions if elected. While saying he is against the Iraq War, he has not acted very forcefully to help bring it to an end. And he certainly has not called for any downsizing of America’s bloated military budget or any end to its imperialist foreign policy—absolutely essential if there is to be any progressive change of consequence in the US.

That said, those who believe that the Democratic Party is firmly in the hands of a malignant and self-serving corporate and political elite have to explain why “their” candidate, Hillary Clinton, seems to be sinking.

By Dave Lindorff

For two years now, I have been telling people who insisted that Hillary Clinton would be the next Democratic candidate for president that they were wrong. I even put it in writing a few times.

Now I'm going to really put it out there: Hillary Clinton is Toast. She is not going to be the Democratic nominee.

The reason I always figured she wouldn't make it across the primary finish line was that she was too calculatingly conservative for primary voters.