Banksters // Current TV

My honeymoon with the Democrats has long since passed. Our relationship has turned sour, and I'm in no mood to marry again.

March 20, 2010 |

My honeymoon with the Democrats has long since passed. Our relationship has turned sour, and I’m in no mood to marry again.

Anyone who has ever gone through a divorce or marital separation knows how traumatic it can be. Marriages are supposed to be forever, but then life intrudes. First, the blissful honeymoon when it’s unthinkable to be apart from the loved one. Then the middle doldrums when spine-tingling doubts arise followed by flimsy excuses to oneself, self-rationalisations, for the other’s bad behaviour. Love weakens but loyalty remains. (For some of us, constancy is stronger than lust.) We soon grow accustomed to abuse, insults, betrayals and infidelity to the marriage vows. After all, where would we go, what would we do, if we freed ourselves from the bondage of a bad relationship? It’s too terrifying to think about, so we don’t.

That’s pretty much where my liberal friends and I are today with the Democrats and Obama administration spiralling out of control and showing every sign of wanting to do us harm before it flames out. We, like battered husbands and bruised wives, feebly grab at straws of hope. The straws are real, too. There may be only an inch of difference between Republicans and Democrats but real people in a real world live by that inch. For example, north of Los Angeles, where I live, an Obama-reinvigorated Environmental Protection Agency is seriously probing a toxic scandal in the mainly Latino hamlet of Kettleman where carelessly dumped corporate chemicals may have led to babies being born with facial disfigurements. The Republicans wouldn’t have bothered. That’s no small thing for the people concerned. And Obama appointed a known workers’ friend in Hilda Solis as secretary of labour in place of Bush’s Elaine Chao who never saw a union she didn’t despise. In other words, our Harvard professor in the White House has done something.

But the fact remains he is a war president with blood on his hands like Lyndon Johnson – only without LBJ’s guts and arm-twisting talent. Obama leads a dysfunctional, cowardly and bribable Democratic party establishment, personified by his mean-minded economic gurus Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, and his frazzled secretary of state the war-loving Hillary Clinton. The few Democratic politicians who stand up for sanity – against the war, for a public health option – are like Florida’s Alan Grayson and Ohio’s Dennis Kucinich – marginalised by the media and their own colleagues as lunatics or, in Rahm Emanuel’s immortal phrase, “retarded”.

In a bad marriage, if we’re lucky, a sad, angry, unwelcome realism takes over and an existential fear invades our soul. But we do not want to be alone in a loveless world. A divorce often means being cast out into psychological darkness, exile from the “mainstream”, the loss of (and even abuse from) friends, a terrifying sense of isolation and inadequacy. So, stuffing our ears and blinding our eyes to our own victimisation, we recommit to the relationship. We continue to deny, deny, deny. Life goes on, diminished and undignified. Soul-suicide.

But now I want a divorce from the Democrats, the “party of the people” versus the Republicans who with a few honorable exceptions are the party of cruelty. Are there some good Democrats? You bet. Are they outnumbered by callow, fearful Democrats? You bet.

I don’t care that at the moment there’s nowhere to go and hardly anybody to cheer for.

Like the Tea Partiers I’ve had it up to here. But as a taker of GI Bill, social security and Medicare benefits, and as a child of the New Deal which put my unemployed mother and father to work, I know that only big government, as dangerous as it can be, can help pull us all out of the shit – yes, the same government that by deregulating and bailouts pushed us into it. (I wonder how many populists, screaming about “socialist” government, are only too happy to take their portion of federal money as I am.)

I wish I could get behind Ralph Nader or the Green party or Cynthia McKinney or even Ron Paul for his antiwar stance. But having just split from my heart’s desire – the Democrats – I’m in no mood to marry up again. I’m caught in a vise between a lingering wish to be “effective”, not “waste my vote”, and a Huckleberry Finn itch to light out for unknown territory.My honeymoon with the Democrats has long since passed. Our relationship has turned... more

WeAreChangeKy
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The Obama Brand: Feel Good While Overlords Loot the Treasury and Launch Imperial Wars | Media and Te

The following is an adapted excerpt from Chris Hedges' book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009) that first appeared in Tikkun magazine.

Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, armies of corporate lobbyists grease the palms of our elected officials, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia, and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, this product is duping us into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.

What, for all our faith and hope, has the Obama brand given us? His administration has spent, lent, or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer dollars to Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to re-inflate the bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls catastrophe and will leave us broke in a time of profound crisis. Brand Obama has allocated nearly $1 trillion in defense-related spending and the continuation of our doomed imperial projects in Iraq, where military planners now estimate that 70,000 troops will remain for the next fifteen to twenty years. Brand Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan, increasing the use of drones sent on cross-border bombing runs into Pakistan, which have doubled the number of civilians killed over the past three months. Brand Obama has refused to ease restrictions so workers can organize and will not consider single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans. And Brand Obama will not prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, including the use of torture, and has refused to dismantle Bush's secrecy laws and restore habeas corpus.

Brand Obama offers us an image that appears radically individualistic and new. It inoculates us from seeing that the old engines of corporate power and the vast military-industrial complex continue to plunder the country. Corporations, which control our politics, no longer produce products that are essentially different, but brands that are different. Brand Obama does not threaten the core of the corporate state any more than did Brand George W. Bush. The Bush brand collapsed. We became immune to its studied folksiness. We saw through its artifice. This is a common deflation in the world of advertising. So we have been given a new Obama brand with an exciting and faintly erotic appeal. Benetton and Calvin Klein were the precursors to the Obama brand, using ads to associate themselves with risqué art and progressive politics. This strategy gave their products an edge. But the goal, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers confound a brand with an experience.

Obama, who has become a global celebrity, was molded easily into a brand. He had almost no experience, other than two years in the Senate, lacked any moral core, and could be painted as all things to all people. His brief Senate voting record was a miserable surrender to corporate interests. He was happy to promote nuclear power as "green" energy. He voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He reauthorized the Patriot Act. He would not back a bill designed to cap predatory credit card interest rates. He opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872. He refused to support the single-payer health care bill HR 676, sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers. He supported the death penalty. And he backed a class-action "reform" bill that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms. ///More at the link above:The following is an adapted excerpt from Chris Hedges' book, Empire of Illusion:... more

WeAreChangeKy
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All politics is viciously choreographed. So how do we get an honest dance?

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MR. CHENEY, WE AREN'T ALL YELLOW - We don't need you to protect us.

Mr. Cheney, while you and those around you were being kept safe during the Vietnam War, I was fighting in Vietnam. I wasn't fighting for you. If I had known who you were, I would have thrown you in a well in a New York minute. Like generations before me, I hoped my own children wouldn't have to sleep in mud day after day and see their friends blown apart beside them. Now I have to listen to your endless whining about how Americans should think nothing about how important it is to be safe, safe, of course, because we are sending the children we fought to protect out to die for us. If I have to be kept safe in my old age, seeing our kids and grandkids die, many of them husbands, parents, it just isn't worth it. If real killing and dying has to go on to really protect America, something some of us aren't so sure is the case, I will go right now, but I am dragging your bloated hulk with me.

Alot of us who fought in Vietnam will go. We deserve it. We were supposed to build a world for our children and grandchildren to grow up in and we failed. We elected crooks, we took too much and gave too little and we had our head in the sand while our freedoms were taken away from us.

People like Cheney, Bush, Rove, Limbaugh, Reagan, Ginrich, Ashcroft, Rice, Delay and Lott told us the world owed us a living. Too many of us believed you and mortgaged our future to pay for a party we were never invited to anyway. We have nothing left but our kids and you are asking for them too. I say no. We are going to pay our own way. We aren't like you.

We have it coming. When it was time to come home from war and build a better society, we, instead, let cheap crooked politicans take over. We stayed out of politics. It was too dirty for us, beneath our honor. What took over, of course, was a generation of phony heroes, Bush the "war fighter" whose service records are classified for a century and an endless series of lying war profiteers, war mongers, torturers and scumbags.

I want every stinking one of them with me. They can walk in front. I will keep them moving. This is what boots are for. With Cheney, nobody would ever stand behind him anyway, if he had a gun in his hand.

What I find most offensive is that we can fight war after war because we have soldiers who have no other job than to be in the military. They are trapped, the jobs they should have were shipped overseas, the money to build a real economy wasted on phony wars and our kids are supposed to die around the world, not saving us from tyranny but working for thieves and cowards.

More sickening still, we lie to our kids, call them heroes, give them medals, make up imaginary enemies for them to hate and manipulate them by telling them how scared all of us are and how grateful we are for them keeping us safe.

We could have taught them better but we were too busy shopping, watching the "big game" and telling war stories down at the Legion hall.

Don't fight for me. Don't defend me. I don't want anyone captured, questioned, tortured or killed in my name. Don't put anyone on trial in a military kangaroo court so I can fly to Paris for a weekend without some malcontent with a box cutter getting in my face. I am an American. I will deal with it myself, thank you very much.

The worst thing a parent can do is outlive one of their children. I know this first hand. Many American parents know this first hand. Simply because we have become a generation of cowardly bloated former yuppies is no reason for us to glue ourselves to Fox News waiting for the daily terrorism outlook.

More at the link above:Mr. Cheney, while you and those around you were being kept safe during the Vietnam... more

Monkey_Films
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Networks Downplay $42 Million in 'Outrageous' Bonuses, 'Unlimited' Bailout of Fannie, Freddie

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Bailed-out bankers foreclose churches during Christmas season

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Take Your Money Out of the Hands of the Banking Oligarchs

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