2012 Elections

By Dave Lindorff

So much for economic “green shoots.”

The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve, along with the servile corporate media, have been quick to grasp at and trumpet every little suggestion that things might be improving, as they did when the Labor Dept. announced last week that new unemployment claims had dropped to “just” 434,000, from a high of 684,000 in the week ended March 28 or last year.

Or when the Commerce Dept. reported last month that November housing starts had risen by 8.9% compared to the prior month.

By Dave Lindorff

Give credit to Howard Dean. This still practicing physician, former
governor of Vermont, former chair of the Democratic Party and former
Democratic presidential candidate has called for progressive members of
Congress in both houses to join their Republican colleagues in killing
what he rightly says has become "an insurance company's dream."

Those namby-pamby, self-described "progressives" in the Democratic
Party who claim that the health bill can still be saved with the
inclusion of a fake, carefully circumscribed and thoroughly emasculated
"public option" government insurance plan that at best would only be
able to offer lousy coverage at high rates to a small number of
self-employed poor people are wrong. This supposed attempt at reforming
the US health care system--the costliest and least effective in the
developed world--is simply past saving.

By Dave LIndorff

Merry Xmas Jarheads!! The Man of Peace, Nobel Laureate-to-be
President Barack Obama, your latest commander-in-chief, is going to be
shipping you out as a holiday gift to the people of Afghanistan.

You will be delivering bullets and bombs, with my name and the name
of other American taxpayers on them, to the long-suffering people of
Afghanistan by December 25, according to press reports ahead of the Mr.
Hope and Change’s planned nationwide speech tonight.

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.

By Dave Lindorff

What’s the difference between a Blue Dog Democrat and a progressive
Democrat? One is a vertebrate with a spine and a willingness to bite.
The other is a jellyfish with no spine and no teeth.

This difference has been glaringly apparent in the current fight over health care reform.

The Blue Dogs in House and Senate have been giving the progressive
Democrats an object lesson in how a small group in Congress can get its
way. They have threatened to withhold their support for the Obama
Administration’s key policy objective of a health reform package, and
have managed, with just a handful of votes between them, to remove
almost all progressive content from that legislation by threatening to
walk if they don’t get their way.

By Dave Lindorff

If the disaster of the so-called "stimulus" bill just passed by the
Senate doesn't convince President Obama and his advisers that the
strategy of "bipartisanship" that he has been espousing is a political
suicide, nothing will.

The Republican Party, with the willing help of conservative
Democrats like Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Democratic turncoats like
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), has forced Obama to agree to a joke of a
stimulus package that is nearly half composed of tax breaks which will
do nothing to bolster the economy (since most of the money will end up
either paying down credit card debt or buying Chinese and Sri Lankan
imports) and that is stripped of $40 billion to help struggling state
and local governments.