Obama
Krugman on the "Deficit Agreement"
Aug 01, 2011 09:10
Paul Krugman writes this morning in the NY Times:
Krugman concludes, as I do, that the nation is currently ungovernable:
Thanks to our Republican legislators from Mississippi. They just consigned their constituents to a meaner, poorer and less educated existence for the foreseeable future. And thanks to all you fellow Mississippians who voted to turn the entire nation into a banana republic, because that’s what you have been doing.
Pah!
Read the entire article.For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
Krugman concludes, as I do, that the nation is currently ungovernable:
What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.
Thanks to our Republican legislators from Mississippi. They just consigned their constituents to a meaner, poorer and less educated existence for the foreseeable future. And thanks to all you fellow Mississippians who voted to turn the entire nation into a banana republic, because that’s what you have been doing.
Pah!
Comments
Serious Deficit Nuttiness
Jul 29, 2011 18:09
My opinion on the deficit has been made clear already. That things have come to the impasse we see today implies some first-class nuttiness and risk-taking on the part of house Republicans that is inexcusable.
Our three Republican representatives are either scoundrels, who would sell their state and country down the river just to spite Obama, or idiots, with no clue about what every student of first-year economics would flunk for not knowing.
Obama has also failed to educate the American people as to the real issues involved and has allowed the deficit vultures to frame the national debt as a family debt issue, rather than the debt of a sovereign that creates its own currency. In the end, Obama must be held as responsible for this manufactured crisis as the tea-party Republicans.
Boehner is clearly not the sharpest tack in the box and Reid has not exactly distinguished himself as an upholder of American Democratic ideals.
What a sorry bunch.
All of them.
*****************
For a rousing declaration of what the American Dream really stands for read this article by George Lakoff and Glenn W. Smith:
http://www.truth-out.org/why-democracy-public-american-dream-beats-nightmare/1311952058
Our three Republican representatives are either scoundrels, who would sell their state and country down the river just to spite Obama, or idiots, with no clue about what every student of first-year economics would flunk for not knowing.
Obama has also failed to educate the American people as to the real issues involved and has allowed the deficit vultures to frame the national debt as a family debt issue, rather than the debt of a sovereign that creates its own currency. In the end, Obama must be held as responsible for this manufactured crisis as the tea-party Republicans.
Boehner is clearly not the sharpest tack in the box and Reid has not exactly distinguished himself as an upholder of American Democratic ideals.
What a sorry bunch.
All of them.
*****************
For a rousing declaration of what the American Dream really stands for read this article by George Lakoff and Glenn W. Smith:
http://www.truth-out.org/why-democracy-public-american-dream-beats-nightmare/1311952058
The Presidential Cocoon and Iran
Jun 05, 2011 07:45
I wrote a piece in December, 2008, Rewiring the President-Elect’s Brain, that expressed a concern that the permanent government would successfully establish control over any newly-elected president, chiefly by monopolizing the flow of information to which he or she has access. Apparently, this process begins with the president-elect’s first security briefing, when the intelligence agencies have a chance to impress the official view of the world upon the future commander-in-chief. The experience is said to be “sobering,” which probably means that dangers to the U.S. are exaggerated in such a way as to promote the policies of the outgoing administration. This would be particularly true of the highly politicized intelligence apparatus that the Bush administration bequeathed to Obama.
in the article, I made the point that a president, if he is to be anything other than a passive tool of the permanent government, simply must have alternative sources of unfiltered information that enable him to evaluate the accuracy and relevance of the official channels. Given the ability of our intelligence agencies to monitor communications worldwide, however, it was equally apparent that recent presidents have been encountering extreme difficulty in acquiring independent intelligence. Roosevelt had personal channels he could tap in the certainty that his private conversations in person would remain private. John Kennedy, concerned that his conversations in the Oval Office were being listened to or recorded, often conducted his most private conversations in the Rose Garden. It is hard to imagine any place on earth that Obama could have a truly private one-to-one conversation without it being recorded, either by enemies or our own national intelligence agencies.
Now we have the journalistic legend, Seymour Hersh, writing in The New Yorker magazine that the national intelligence agencies are in rare agreement that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, and instead of being relieved at the prospect of one less nation with weapons of mass destruction, the Obama White House is actually chagrined. But not so chagrined that the “two administration officials” and “a senior intelligence official” who responded in Politico.com didn’t insist on anonymity when they told Politico that the International Atomic Energy Agency had been given “new evidence” by its members that Iran is working to develop nuclear weapons.
Hersh has already replied on the radio show “Democracy Now” that the new evidence is not evidence and not even described as evidence by the IAEA. Click on this link for a transcript of the Hersh interview.
Glenn Greenwald scorches Politico for criticizing Hersh for using anonymous sources when it uses anonymous sources itself:
But back to the presidential cocoon. In the interview, Hersh confirmed my worst fears:
When the president gets his economic advice from the very persons that assisted in destroying the economy (who then made fortunes in the process), his advice on the middle east from a rabid supporter of Greater Israel, and his military advice from a geriatric ward of cold warriors in bed with the military-industrial complex, it is entirely predictable that his view of reality will vary considerably from the facts on the ground, and that his decisions regarding both domestic and foreign policy will reflect their views. And as long as he cannot break out of this cocoon, he will continue implementing the policies that the permanent government desires.
Not a happy prospect for the rest of us. Or the nation as a whole.
Or the world.
in the article, I made the point that a president, if he is to be anything other than a passive tool of the permanent government, simply must have alternative sources of unfiltered information that enable him to evaluate the accuracy and relevance of the official channels. Given the ability of our intelligence agencies to monitor communications worldwide, however, it was equally apparent that recent presidents have been encountering extreme difficulty in acquiring independent intelligence. Roosevelt had personal channels he could tap in the certainty that his private conversations in person would remain private. John Kennedy, concerned that his conversations in the Oval Office were being listened to or recorded, often conducted his most private conversations in the Rose Garden. It is hard to imagine any place on earth that Obama could have a truly private one-to-one conversation without it being recorded, either by enemies or our own national intelligence agencies.
Now we have the journalistic legend, Seymour Hersh, writing in The New Yorker magazine that the national intelligence agencies are in rare agreement that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, and instead of being relieved at the prospect of one less nation with weapons of mass destruction, the Obama White House is actually chagrined. But not so chagrined that the “two administration officials” and “a senior intelligence official” who responded in Politico.com didn’t insist on anonymity when they told Politico that the International Atomic Energy Agency had been given “new evidence” by its members that Iran is working to develop nuclear weapons.
Hersh has already replied on the radio show “Democracy Now” that the new evidence is not evidence and not even described as evidence by the IAEA. Click on this link for a transcript of the Hersh interview.
Glenn Greenwald scorches Politico for criticizing Hersh for using anonymous sources when it uses anonymous sources itself:
Dutifully writing down what government officials say and then publishing it under cover of anonymity is what media figures in D.C. refer to as "real reporting." But the most hilarious part of this orgy of cowardly anonymity comes at the end, when Politico explains what is supposedly the prime defect in Hersh’[s] journalism:
“Hersh has faced criticism for his heavy reliance on anonymous sources, but New Yorker editor David Remnick has repeatedly said he stands by his reporter’s work.”
That's the criticism that ends an article that relies exclusively on anonymous government sources, appearing in a D.C. gossip rag notorious for granting anonymity to any powerful figure who requests it for any or no reason. The difference, of course, is that the Pulitzer Prize-winning, five-time-Polk-Award-recipient investigative journalist who uncovered the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib scandal grants anonymity to those who are challenging the official claims of those in power (that's called "journalism"), while Politico uses it (as it did here) to serve those in power and shield them from all accountability as they spew their propaganda (which is called being a "lowly, rank Royal Court propagandist”).
But back to the presidential cocoon. In the interview, Hersh confirmed my worst fears:
And I’ll tell you the biggest problem [Obama] has, as awful as those things are, as counterproductive, and as much as he’s following, oh, yes, Bush and Cheney in those policies—and I think the President—I’ll be writing about this—I think he was really sandbagged by the Pentagon after he got into office, when he was new and innocent. And I still think—I think right now—I would almost use the word "cult" to describe what’s going on in the White House. Everything is political. He’s isolated. Very good people say they’ve never seen a president this isolated, in terms of being unable to get to him with different opinions, etc. So [he’s] really captive of a few people there. I know this may sound strange, but I know what I’m talking about. You can’t get to the guy—and even, for example, Pickering, as competent as he is. And Pickering has done some wonderful stuff for the United States intelligence community undercover, and so he’s known as a trusted guy. Those guys who have been involved in talking to Iran off the record, Track II policy talks, for years can’t get to the President. He may not even know they’re looking for him. I just don’t know.
And so, here we have this very bright guy continuing insane policies that are counterproductive, do nothing for the United States, and meanwhile the real crisis is going to be about Iraq, because, whatever you’re hearing, Iraq is going bad.
When the president gets his economic advice from the very persons that assisted in destroying the economy (who then made fortunes in the process), his advice on the middle east from a rabid supporter of Greater Israel, and his military advice from a geriatric ward of cold warriors in bed with the military-industrial complex, it is entirely predictable that his view of reality will vary considerably from the facts on the ground, and that his decisions regarding both domestic and foreign policy will reflect their views. And as long as he cannot break out of this cocoon, he will continue implementing the policies that the permanent government desires.
Not a happy prospect for the rest of us. Or the nation as a whole.
Or the world.
Manning Exposes Torture but Those who Ordered the Torture Go Free
Dec 24, 2010 14:34
Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leaking thousands of classified messages to Wikileaks, has been held in solitary confinement under conditions that approach, if not satisfy, the definition of torture. Read a description of his conditions on Alternet and ponder what kind of a chief executive would condone what amounts to torture, especially after having been elected by the people as a decent, ethical alternative to the moral dwarfs that ran the White House for the previous eight years. It recalls the treatment of Captain Alfred Dreyfus after having been convicted of treason in 1894 on fabricated evidence by a kangaroo military court.
Manning may have indeed leaked the classified information to Wikileaks, but under the U. S. Constitution and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, his confinement, particularly when he has not been convicted and sentenced, is illegal if it amounts to torture.
Manning may have indeed leaked the classified information to Wikileaks, but under the U. S. Constitution and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, his confinement, particularly when he has not been convicted and sentenced, is illegal if it amounts to torture.
On the Election
Nov 03, 2010 18:18
I hated to see it happen to the Democrats.
But they deserved it.
Obama deserved it. He didn’t even try to do what he promised. He asked for a quarter of a loaf when he could have owned the bakery.
What was he thinking of? Wall Street lay prostrate at his feet and he exacted no price whatever to prop those insolvent financial institutions up. It boggles the mind. Executives who should be going to jail are now getting hundreds of millions in bonuses, courtesy of the taxpayers. It’s no wonder that people are outraged. The Democrats are lucky they weren’t tarred and feathered.
I even hated to see blue dogs Taylor and Childers lose to Robo-Republicans, but they both were Republicans in everything but name, so why elect a wolf in sheep’s clothing when you can get the unvarnished wolf, all ready to devour?
The people elected the Democrats to put things right, and they failed. Hell, they barely tried. They are a sorry lot, beholden to big money but claiming to represent all the people, not just the people of Wall Street.
This was not a defeat for progressives, ostracized from the administration (read Chief-of-staff Emmanuel and Attorney General Holder for starters) and their policy suggestions ignored once Obama actually came into office. Their remedies were never even tried.
There is a glimmer of hope: maybe, just maybe, Obama will realize that his idea of bipartisanship will never work with contemporary Republicans, whose idea of bipartisanship consists solely of doing their bidding. Reasonableness is weakness to them and there’s simply no dealing with them rationally, just as there is no reasoning with a bully on the school ground. Obama must stop trying to be nice and bipartisan. It didn’t work and most savvy politicians could have told him that from the beginning. I believe he knows what needs to be done; he just needs to push, hard.
Rabbi Michael Lerner has some words of wisdom for progressives on the Huffington Post I suggest you read.
But they deserved it.
Obama deserved it. He didn’t even try to do what he promised. He asked for a quarter of a loaf when he could have owned the bakery.
What was he thinking of? Wall Street lay prostrate at his feet and he exacted no price whatever to prop those insolvent financial institutions up. It boggles the mind. Executives who should be going to jail are now getting hundreds of millions in bonuses, courtesy of the taxpayers. It’s no wonder that people are outraged. The Democrats are lucky they weren’t tarred and feathered.
I even hated to see blue dogs Taylor and Childers lose to Robo-Republicans, but they both were Republicans in everything but name, so why elect a wolf in sheep’s clothing when you can get the unvarnished wolf, all ready to devour?
The people elected the Democrats to put things right, and they failed. Hell, they barely tried. They are a sorry lot, beholden to big money but claiming to represent all the people, not just the people of Wall Street.
This was not a defeat for progressives, ostracized from the administration (read Chief-of-staff Emmanuel and Attorney General Holder for starters) and their policy suggestions ignored once Obama actually came into office. Their remedies were never even tried.
There is a glimmer of hope: maybe, just maybe, Obama will realize that his idea of bipartisanship will never work with contemporary Republicans, whose idea of bipartisanship consists solely of doing their bidding. Reasonableness is weakness to them and there’s simply no dealing with them rationally, just as there is no reasoning with a bully on the school ground. Obama must stop trying to be nice and bipartisan. It didn’t work and most savvy politicians could have told him that from the beginning. I believe he knows what needs to be done; he just needs to push, hard.
Rabbi Michael Lerner has some words of wisdom for progressives on the Huffington Post I suggest you read.
Yet More on the Stupidity of Austerity in a Recession (III)
Jun 25, 2010 22:00
Joe Firestone. posting on New Economic Perspectives, makes a highly persuasive argument against attempts to balance the budget under present conditions in his post An Open Letter to President Obama. He concludes with the following paragraphs:
It is becoming all too clear that President Obama is in over his head in the field of economics. Receiving instruction from Bernake, Geithner and Summers will not put him any closer to economic reality, and especially its impact upon the average citizen. As I wrote over a year ago, real progress will come only when he fires this plutocratic threesome who genuinely believe that anything good for the financial sector (read “Goldman Sachs”) is good for America.
Admittedly, some of the letter may be a little difficult for the lay reader, but it is not abstruse or deliberately obfuscating. Anyone who retains some of what s/he learned in Econ 101 should not find it difficult. Chalk up its difficulties to the economic instruction all high schools graduates and most college graduates lack. But read the letter.Mr. President, this has been a long open letter, and I'll close it with some short statements. First, you will hurt, not help fiscal sustainability by pursuing austerity in Federal spending. Second, austerity in these times is not fiscally responsible. It is fiscally irresponsible. Third, real fiscal responsibility means spending what Government needs to spend to fulfill public purposes, and spending in such a way that spending can continue in the future, until public purposes are achieved. There are all kinds of public purposes going begging right now, and you're proposing that achieving those has to be subjected to austerity constraints because we are running out of money. Fourth, I can't imagine a more fiscally irresponsible course than the one you appear to be moving towards now. And that fiscally irresponsible course will, make no mistake about it, also hurt fiscal sustainability. While it won't destroy our solvency, it will destroy part of our productive capacity, and this will give us less room for government spending in the future to both heal our economic problems and avoid inflation while doing it.
So, please Mr. President, don't do austerity. Don't assume you know all about economics. Don't believe we have solvency problems when we have none. Don't believe we have to worry about inflation, when there is not the slightest chance of it anytime soon. Look at what you've done so far and evaluate it honestly. No excuses, please. It can't be right, because it has not worked. Don't be fiscally irresponsible and join the other global elites in following an ignorant and mistaken economic policy, likely to drive the world into a double-dip recession, or perhaps even a Great Depression 2.0. Instead, change course right now! Act like our President, an American President. Give us what we need, not what they need. Be loyal to us, not to them. And end this recession before it ruins any more American lives.
It is becoming all too clear that President Obama is in over his head in the field of economics. Receiving instruction from Bernake, Geithner and Summers will not put him any closer to economic reality, and especially its impact upon the average citizen. As I wrote over a year ago, real progress will come only when he fires this plutocratic threesome who genuinely believe that anything good for the financial sector (read “Goldman Sachs”) is good for America.
Volcker Prevails, Geithner & Summers Lose
Jan 22, 2010 20:38
Undoubtedly, the loss of the senatorial race in Massachusetts Tuesday, has acted as a wake-up call to the Obama administration that something simply must be done about Wall Street. The anger that pervades the rest of the nation (including this writer) over the kid-gloved treatment of the very institutions and their leaders that brought about financial near-calamity is completely justified on a number of grounds, not the least of which is the obscenely large bonuses to be handed out to the miscreants with the attitude that its recipients are entitled to them.
Obama is reacting because he must.
From his comments yesterday, which I missed because of high fever, it appears that the Goldman Sachs contingent, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, were shut out of a come-to-jesus meeting between President Obama, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and Bill Donaldson, former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is further clear from Obama’s remarks that the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression Era statute that separated commercial banking and investment banking, must be reenacted in some form, and that the government cannot ever again allow itself to be put in the position of standing behind banks that speculate with their depositors’ money.
Obama also made it clear that something would have to be done about institutions that are “too big to fail.”
It was only a couple of months ago that the New York Times reported that there was no possibility of Glass-Steagall becoming reenacted, but what a difference two months and the election of a right-wing Republican in a safe Democratic state can do!
As I see it, Obama was expected to do two things in his first year: 1. See universal health care enacted and 2. Take affirmative action to fix the financial system. The first has certainly hit a buzz-saw, and as for number 2, Obama simply did not seem to have the stomach to pick a fight with Wall Street—or anyone else, for that matter. I was aghast when I learned who Obama’s economic team would be and predicted that they would sooner or later have to be cast overboard if there were to be any real hope of reform. The gangplank was prepared at 11:34 AM, EST yesterday. Expect the Goldman Sach contingent to soon discover the importance of spending more time with their families.
The Obama honeymoon is over. The low-hanging fruit, admittedly meager after eight years of Bush, has been harvested. The hard and unpopular decisions that have been put off must soon be made. Obama has been as bipartisan as any president could be and he has been rewarded with snarls, curses, prevarication and stonewalling from his opponents. He will have to use the immense power of the presidency to push through real change. Not to draw too fine a line—he will have to put his foot on the neck of Wall Street and some of the other powerful corporations that are fattening themselves on the back of average Americans. That is not his preferred mode of dealing, but it is the only way that will produce results in the political climate today.
How Obama handles himself and his administration over the next six months will determine the success of his presidency.
Here beginneth the trial—by fire—of Barack Obama.
Obama is reacting because he must.
From his comments yesterday, which I missed because of high fever, it appears that the Goldman Sachs contingent, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, were shut out of a come-to-jesus meeting between President Obama, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and Bill Donaldson, former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is further clear from Obama’s remarks that the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression Era statute that separated commercial banking and investment banking, must be reenacted in some form, and that the government cannot ever again allow itself to be put in the position of standing behind banks that speculate with their depositors’ money.
Obama also made it clear that something would have to be done about institutions that are “too big to fail.”
It was only a couple of months ago that the New York Times reported that there was no possibility of Glass-Steagall becoming reenacted, but what a difference two months and the election of a right-wing Republican in a safe Democratic state can do!
As I see it, Obama was expected to do two things in his first year: 1. See universal health care enacted and 2. Take affirmative action to fix the financial system. The first has certainly hit a buzz-saw, and as for number 2, Obama simply did not seem to have the stomach to pick a fight with Wall Street—or anyone else, for that matter. I was aghast when I learned who Obama’s economic team would be and predicted that they would sooner or later have to be cast overboard if there were to be any real hope of reform. The gangplank was prepared at 11:34 AM, EST yesterday. Expect the Goldman Sach contingent to soon discover the importance of spending more time with their families.
The Obama honeymoon is over. The low-hanging fruit, admittedly meager after eight years of Bush, has been harvested. The hard and unpopular decisions that have been put off must soon be made. Obama has been as bipartisan as any president could be and he has been rewarded with snarls, curses, prevarication and stonewalling from his opponents. He will have to use the immense power of the presidency to push through real change. Not to draw too fine a line—he will have to put his foot on the neck of Wall Street and some of the other powerful corporations that are fattening themselves on the back of average Americans. That is not his preferred mode of dealing, but it is the only way that will produce results in the political climate today.
How Obama handles himself and his administration over the next six months will determine the success of his presidency.
Here beginneth the trial—by fire—of Barack Obama.
Obama's Cairo Speech
Jun 05, 2009 11:30
Obama gave a stemwinder of a speech yesterday in Cairo. The press was duly impressed and laudatory, for the most part, but others pointed out that the main thing Obama changed was the mood.
I am optimistic; before U. S. policy can change for the better, the conversation must first change. The speech was aimed mainly towards the American public, and, considering the demonization of Islam and its adherents we have seen in the post 9/11 period, it is indeed a breath of fresh air.
It committed Obama to nothing substantial and concrete, however, and that was surely by design. The political mindscape must change before the political landscape can be transformed. Simply by treating Islam and muslims with respect, Obama is altering the mindscape.
I am optimistic; before U. S. policy can change for the better, the conversation must first change. The speech was aimed mainly towards the American public, and, considering the demonization of Islam and its adherents we have seen in the post 9/11 period, it is indeed a breath of fresh air.
It committed Obama to nothing substantial and concrete, however, and that was surely by design. The political mindscape must change before the political landscape can be transformed. Simply by treating Islam and muslims with respect, Obama is altering the mindscape.
Poor Obama!
Apr 25, 2009 11:59
Poor Obama! He made the egregious mistake of releasing secret memos written by legal prostitutes in the Bush administration justifying torture, and now, as a result, pressure is building for legislative, possibly criminal, investigations of said whores and the higher officials who ordered the memos.
Obama could have saved himself all this trouble with the judicious use of a shredder and some Cheneyesque stonewalling.
Now it’s too late. He may eventually be forced, kicking and screaming, to authorize criminal investigations, and, heaven forbid, even prosecutions.
He should have known that this would happen.
Obama could have saved himself all this trouble with the judicious use of a shredder and some Cheneyesque stonewalling.
Now it’s too late. He may eventually be forced, kicking and screaming, to authorize criminal investigations, and, heaven forbid, even prosecutions.
He should have known that this would happen.
Seizing the Bully Pulpit
Apr 09, 2009 10:52
It is now clear that Obama’s presidency will be a very public presidency. In the two and a half months since his inauguration, he has likely accumulated more media exposure than George Bush did in his first two years of office.
No one who has studied the Obama campaign has failed to be impressed with his strategic focus, that is, his ability and willingness to sacrifice immediate gains in the interest of ultimate victory. Long before the primaries, Obama had determined what was and was not essential to winning the Democratic nomination and general election, and, although he was quick to change tactics that were not working, his strategic plan to obtain a majority of convention delegates and then electoral votes remained relatively constant.
So when Obama makes himself accessible to the media to the extent that he has done, one can be fairly certain that such openness is not necessarily an exercise in ego-gratification, but the result of cold, hard calculations about what he must do to govern.
For reasons not immediately relevant to this discussion, George Bush speaks execrably in public, his speech consisting of little more than sentence fragments, malapropisms, oxymorons and grammatical train-wrecks that would have made Will Rogers blush. Yet it is universally conceded that this limitation did not hinder him in 2000 or 2004, when he came so close to winning both elections over far more able opponents, that—with a little help from his father’s appointees at the U. S. Supreme Court in 2000 and Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell in 2004—he became president both times. Not only did he become president, he was able to effectively push his right-wing political and economic agendas through Congress with little need to appeal personally to the public.
Bush could do this because he had a distinct advantage over Obama: the corporate media is inherently conservative. It goes without saying that, since its founding, the Fox empire has functioned as an arm of the Republican Party. The other networks, however, all of them either megacorporations or subsidiaries of megacorporations, have remained strongly biased toward right-wing, conservative positions on almost all the major public issues. NBC, for example, is owned by General Electric, a major defense contractor. ABC is a subsidiary of Disney, and CBS is the result of a merger with Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which at the time of the merger was a major defense contractor. The majority of “experts” who regularly appear on the networks are right-wing, or, at best, middle of the road, which in today’s context means Republican lite. In such an environment, progressive alternatives to the corporatist agenda never make it to the public.
The media, in other words, did much of Bush’s speaking for him. During Clinton’s presidency, the media, under the guise of objective reporting, served mainly as an echo chamber for the Republican Party and relayed uncritically their attacks on Clinton at every opportunity. Given this history, we can reasonably expect that Obama will get virtually no help from the same media that gave Bush a pass at every turn. They will seize upon even the slightest slip-ups by Obama and his family, and if the inevitable mistakes fail to appear, they will be fabricated as the needs arise, like the recent “outrage” over Mrs. Obama’s improperly touching the queen of England.
Obama’s response to this state of affairs has been to seize and wield the bully pulpit more effectively than any president since Jack Kennedy. Having observed that silence in the face of innuendoes, half-truths, and outright lies is fatal to a progressive politician, that the truth may or may not ultimately out by itself, and that it is political suicide to depend upon the media as a disinterested provider of timely and accurate information to the public, he has, at least up to now, preempted his opponents’ place in the national conversation and is using it to advance a mostly progressive agenda.
The media, accustomed to defining and guiding the national agenda by creating narratives that explain to the public why things are the way they are, has been at least temporally thwarted in exercising its usual role. The power to tell a story that runs around in everyone’s mind—George Lakoff calls it “framing”—is an awesome power, almost godlike. The media made Bush president twice by creating stories about his opponents that they were unable or unwilling to overcome with stories of their own. In both cases, the media stories were mixtures of truth and falsehood that contained just enough of the former to keep them from being rejected outright, and enough of the latter to make people feel uneasy voting for their targets.
In the case of Al Gore, the media story was that Gore was untruthful and boring. He was reported to have claimed that he invented the Internet, and that the novel, Love Story, was written about him and his wife, Tipper.
John Kerry, a recipient of three purple hearts during the Vietnam War, was subjected to a series of scurrilous lies by a group of veterans known as the “Swiftboaters,” who claimed that he did not deserve the medals he received.
Neither Gore nor Kerry successfully overcame the unfavorable and mostly untruthful media narratives that their Republican opponents threw against them.
My disappointment with the Clinton administration is well-documented in the pages of this web site, but his presidency was a failure in many respects because the Republicans and their allies in the media were able to push their own story into the minds of the public—creating a reality that was at odds with the truth—without serious opposition. Bill Clinton came into office with good intentions and high hopes, but a conservative tidal wave, nurtured by fear, greed and dishonesty about its real intentions (aided by Clinton’s own personal shortcomings), reduced him to a survivor, barely able to hold on to office in the face of a ferocious onslaught by the conservative think tanks, the media, and congressional Republicans. Obama knows perfectly well that the same forces intend a similar fate for his presidency and he is determined not to let that happen.
While he has not completely eliminated the power of the media to dominate the political mindscape, he has successfully developed a preemptive strategy that up to now has disrupted their attempts to construct a consistent, unfavorable myth that they can insinuate into the public unconsciousness through endless repetition. By promptly communicating his positions and their rationale to the public before the poison takes effect, he has repeatedly made his antagonists look like fools, knaves, or just sore losers.
I think this is good, not so much because I am enjoying watching the media’s discomfiture (which I am), or because I have an inflated opinion of Obama’s abilities (which are impressive in any case), but because Obama can now be judged by what he actually accomplishes, rather than by what the Republican leadership, the Fox network, and George Will would like us to believe that he has accomplished.
And that is an accomplishment worth applauding.
No one who has studied the Obama campaign has failed to be impressed with his strategic focus, that is, his ability and willingness to sacrifice immediate gains in the interest of ultimate victory. Long before the primaries, Obama had determined what was and was not essential to winning the Democratic nomination and general election, and, although he was quick to change tactics that were not working, his strategic plan to obtain a majority of convention delegates and then electoral votes remained relatively constant.
So when Obama makes himself accessible to the media to the extent that he has done, one can be fairly certain that such openness is not necessarily an exercise in ego-gratification, but the result of cold, hard calculations about what he must do to govern.
For reasons not immediately relevant to this discussion, George Bush speaks execrably in public, his speech consisting of little more than sentence fragments, malapropisms, oxymorons and grammatical train-wrecks that would have made Will Rogers blush. Yet it is universally conceded that this limitation did not hinder him in 2000 or 2004, when he came so close to winning both elections over far more able opponents, that—with a little help from his father’s appointees at the U. S. Supreme Court in 2000 and Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell in 2004—he became president both times. Not only did he become president, he was able to effectively push his right-wing political and economic agendas through Congress with little need to appeal personally to the public.
Bush could do this because he had a distinct advantage over Obama: the corporate media is inherently conservative. It goes without saying that, since its founding, the Fox empire has functioned as an arm of the Republican Party. The other networks, however, all of them either megacorporations or subsidiaries of megacorporations, have remained strongly biased toward right-wing, conservative positions on almost all the major public issues. NBC, for example, is owned by General Electric, a major defense contractor. ABC is a subsidiary of Disney, and CBS is the result of a merger with Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which at the time of the merger was a major defense contractor. The majority of “experts” who regularly appear on the networks are right-wing, or, at best, middle of the road, which in today’s context means Republican lite. In such an environment, progressive alternatives to the corporatist agenda never make it to the public.
The media, in other words, did much of Bush’s speaking for him. During Clinton’s presidency, the media, under the guise of objective reporting, served mainly as an echo chamber for the Republican Party and relayed uncritically their attacks on Clinton at every opportunity. Given this history, we can reasonably expect that Obama will get virtually no help from the same media that gave Bush a pass at every turn. They will seize upon even the slightest slip-ups by Obama and his family, and if the inevitable mistakes fail to appear, they will be fabricated as the needs arise, like the recent “outrage” over Mrs. Obama’s improperly touching the queen of England.
Obama’s response to this state of affairs has been to seize and wield the bully pulpit more effectively than any president since Jack Kennedy. Having observed that silence in the face of innuendoes, half-truths, and outright lies is fatal to a progressive politician, that the truth may or may not ultimately out by itself, and that it is political suicide to depend upon the media as a disinterested provider of timely and accurate information to the public, he has, at least up to now, preempted his opponents’ place in the national conversation and is using it to advance a mostly progressive agenda.
The media, accustomed to defining and guiding the national agenda by creating narratives that explain to the public why things are the way they are, has been at least temporally thwarted in exercising its usual role. The power to tell a story that runs around in everyone’s mind—George Lakoff calls it “framing”—is an awesome power, almost godlike. The media made Bush president twice by creating stories about his opponents that they were unable or unwilling to overcome with stories of their own. In both cases, the media stories were mixtures of truth and falsehood that contained just enough of the former to keep them from being rejected outright, and enough of the latter to make people feel uneasy voting for their targets.
In the case of Al Gore, the media story was that Gore was untruthful and boring. He was reported to have claimed that he invented the Internet, and that the novel, Love Story, was written about him and his wife, Tipper.
John Kerry, a recipient of three purple hearts during the Vietnam War, was subjected to a series of scurrilous lies by a group of veterans known as the “Swiftboaters,” who claimed that he did not deserve the medals he received.
Neither Gore nor Kerry successfully overcame the unfavorable and mostly untruthful media narratives that their Republican opponents threw against them.
My disappointment with the Clinton administration is well-documented in the pages of this web site, but his presidency was a failure in many respects because the Republicans and their allies in the media were able to push their own story into the minds of the public—creating a reality that was at odds with the truth—without serious opposition. Bill Clinton came into office with good intentions and high hopes, but a conservative tidal wave, nurtured by fear, greed and dishonesty about its real intentions (aided by Clinton’s own personal shortcomings), reduced him to a survivor, barely able to hold on to office in the face of a ferocious onslaught by the conservative think tanks, the media, and congressional Republicans. Obama knows perfectly well that the same forces intend a similar fate for his presidency and he is determined not to let that happen.
While he has not completely eliminated the power of the media to dominate the political mindscape, he has successfully developed a preemptive strategy that up to now has disrupted their attempts to construct a consistent, unfavorable myth that they can insinuate into the public unconsciousness through endless repetition. By promptly communicating his positions and their rationale to the public before the poison takes effect, he has repeatedly made his antagonists look like fools, knaves, or just sore losers.
I think this is good, not so much because I am enjoying watching the media’s discomfiture (which I am), or because I have an inflated opinion of Obama’s abilities (which are impressive in any case), but because Obama can now be judged by what he actually accomplishes, rather than by what the Republican leadership, the Fox network, and George Will would like us to believe that he has accomplished.
And that is an accomplishment worth applauding.
Assessing Obama and Other Thoughts
Mar 19, 2009 17:10
From the first time I heard Obama at the 2004 Democratic convention, I felt that his speeches have lacked a certain substance, a certain gritty edge, a certain rhetorical gesture, that I would have liked to hear. There was a blandness that caused my eyes to glaze over. A real sociopath would have spoken a lot better.
That hasn’t changed.
It probably has something to do with a lack of originality and a failure to leaven his advisory loaf with some truly creative and radical yeast. In the field of economics--a field so corrupted with the largesse of plutocrats, corporations, and wealthy right-wing cranks--the absence of a few brave, if not foolhardy, souls to question the given wisdom can make it difficult for a policy maker to envision practical and necessary—but unorthodox—solutions.
Given the economic advisors that Obama has gathered around him, I suspect that he is overawed by Ivy League intellectualism, even though he ought to be able to see through it, having spent three years at Harvard Law School. He is a very bright and decent but conventional thinker, however, and unless he is violently pushed in a different direction by the unfolding of events, he will follow the conventional wisdom. It is entirely possible that, like Roosevelt, he will ultimately find himself being pushed. Let us hope that we will have not already sunk too far into the abyss by then.
I have been thinking about Bernard Lietaer quite a bit lately. I've also been thinking about banking (who hasn’t?), and have concluded that by increasing banking reserve requirements to 100% and nationalizing the Federal Reserve System, which would prevent banks from creating money, we would solve 50% of our Wall Street banking problems. If we severely restricted margin purchases, options, and derivatives, and raised the top marginal income tax rate back to 90%, we would solve another 40%. Increasing the Federal Estate Tax and eliminating the step-up basis would take care of another 5%. Imposing a Tobin Tax on all monetary transfers would also be a good measure, as well as a 10-year holding period for an investment to be taxed as a capital gain and an end to the investment tax credit. That would take us well over 100%. ;-)
Alternative or complementary currencies, recommended by Lietaer, could be a huge benefit in many instances. I like the idea of eldercare credits. Also, a community mutual credit system could strengthen local connections between people and local businesses. It could also help the community survive bad times when people have less official cash. Alternative or complementary currencies have profound political implications, however, as they circumvent the government's monopoly (currently delegated to the banking system) on creating money and levying taxes. They will therefore provoke opposition from the banks and the government. Pity. We could use the resilience they provide for our fiat currency system.
That hasn’t changed.
It probably has something to do with a lack of originality and a failure to leaven his advisory loaf with some truly creative and radical yeast. In the field of economics--a field so corrupted with the largesse of plutocrats, corporations, and wealthy right-wing cranks--the absence of a few brave, if not foolhardy, souls to question the given wisdom can make it difficult for a policy maker to envision practical and necessary—but unorthodox—solutions.
Given the economic advisors that Obama has gathered around him, I suspect that he is overawed by Ivy League intellectualism, even though he ought to be able to see through it, having spent three years at Harvard Law School. He is a very bright and decent but conventional thinker, however, and unless he is violently pushed in a different direction by the unfolding of events, he will follow the conventional wisdom. It is entirely possible that, like Roosevelt, he will ultimately find himself being pushed. Let us hope that we will have not already sunk too far into the abyss by then.
I have been thinking about Bernard Lietaer quite a bit lately. I've also been thinking about banking (who hasn’t?), and have concluded that by increasing banking reserve requirements to 100% and nationalizing the Federal Reserve System, which would prevent banks from creating money, we would solve 50% of our Wall Street banking problems. If we severely restricted margin purchases, options, and derivatives, and raised the top marginal income tax rate back to 90%, we would solve another 40%. Increasing the Federal Estate Tax and eliminating the step-up basis would take care of another 5%. Imposing a Tobin Tax on all monetary transfers would also be a good measure, as well as a 10-year holding period for an investment to be taxed as a capital gain and an end to the investment tax credit. That would take us well over 100%. ;-)
Alternative or complementary currencies, recommended by Lietaer, could be a huge benefit in many instances. I like the idea of eldercare credits. Also, a community mutual credit system could strengthen local connections between people and local businesses. It could also help the community survive bad times when people have less official cash. Alternative or complementary currencies have profound political implications, however, as they circumvent the government's monopoly (currently delegated to the banking system) on creating money and levying taxes. They will therefore provoke opposition from the banks and the government. Pity. We could use the resilience they provide for our fiat currency system.
Obama to Palestinians: Tough Luck
Jan 25, 2009 20:16
The president made a speech at the State Department the other day outlining his policy priorities.
It had already become obvious with his appointment of Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff that his policy towards Israel would offer little change from that of the Bush administration. Now the inhabitants of Gaza know that they can look forward to more of the same.
According to Obama, the carnage inflicted by the overwhelming military superiority of Israel was an appropriate response to the Palestinian provocations:
Consequently, we should expect no satisfactory resolution of the Palestinian problem during Obama’s administration. Israel has made Gaza into what is, for all practical purposes, a concentration camp, and the next time the inmates become restless, the Israeli military will again deliver a vicious and indiscriminate punishment to everyone living there, irrespective of civilian status, gender, or age, as it has just done. And it will be done with the blessings of this administration.
It is becoming clear that there is no room anywhere in Greater Israel for the indigenous people who live there now or who once lived there. Given the progressive strangulation of Gaza and the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, it seems as though the Israelis are planning their own Final Solution to the Palestinian problem.
Do we really want our nation to be the enabler for this?
Tom Lowe
It had already become obvious with his appointment of Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff that his policy towards Israel would offer little change from that of the Bush administration. Now the inhabitants of Gaza know that they can look forward to more of the same.
According to Obama, the carnage inflicted by the overwhelming military superiority of Israel was an appropriate response to the Palestinian provocations:
Obama’s failure to mention that the rockets were a response to Israel’s refusal to open the borders as agreed--people were dying of starvation in Gaza as a result--demonstrated that Israel, in the eyes of this administration, can do no wrong.For years, Hamas has launched thousands of rockets at innocent Israeli citizens. No democracy can tolerate such danger to its people, nor should the international community, and neither should the Palestinian people themselves, whose interests are only set back by acts of terror.
Consequently, we should expect no satisfactory resolution of the Palestinian problem during Obama’s administration. Israel has made Gaza into what is, for all practical purposes, a concentration camp, and the next time the inmates become restless, the Israeli military will again deliver a vicious and indiscriminate punishment to everyone living there, irrespective of civilian status, gender, or age, as it has just done. And it will be done with the blessings of this administration.
It is becoming clear that there is no room anywhere in Greater Israel for the indigenous people who live there now or who once lived there. Given the progressive strangulation of Gaza and the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, it seems as though the Israelis are planning their own Final Solution to the Palestinian problem.
Do we really want our nation to be the enabler for this?
Tom Lowe
Thoughts on Saturday Evening 3 Days Before the Inauguration of Barak Obama
Jan 17, 2009 22:23
We are in the last days of the most evil and dangerous presidency this country has ever experienced.
To begin to repair the damage wrought by the right-wing wrecking crews over the past 28 years, our nation will require far more than a savior. Obama alone cannot get us out of this mess. The Democrats cannot do it by themselves.
We, the citizens, enabled our presidents, congresses and courts to bring us to this point. We will have to stop the enabling.
The habit will be hard to break.
We voted for men (and a few women) who told us what we wanted to hear.
They told us that greed was good. We eventually came to believe it.
We paid no attention to their crimes--and their crimes were numerous, from Iran-Contra to the looting of the financial industry.
We refused to notice the militarization of our police forces, and the gutting of our constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Without questioning, we allowed ourselves to be terrified by whatever our elected officials told us we should be terrified of, and gave them free rein to do whatever they wanted to do to free us from the fear du jour.
We let them instigate wars and conflicts that we had no business fighting.
We allowed our manufacturing industries either to close or to move overseas.
We spent all our spare time watching television, where we slowly became transformed from citizens into consumers who have consequently almost completely forgotten the knowledge of how a citizen is supposed to act.
And, worst of all, when the nation experienced the trauma of 9/11, which happened because our bozo of a president ignored repeated warnings of the attack, instead of impeaching him for criminal negligence, we bestowed upon him the powers of a Roman emperor, which powers he used to invade a nation that had nothing to do with the attack on 9/11, to torture prisoners, and to reward his political allies by paying them huge sums of money in connection with the Iraq war, much of which they promptly stole.
And nearly half of us who cast ballots in 2008 voted for an elderly half-wit, who, along with his vulpine running mate, promised to carry on the very same policies (if he could only remember what they were) that brought us to this point.
It is enough to deeply discourage anyone who loves his country.
With Obama as president and the Democrats with a majority in Congress, there are grounds to hope that our nation is in somewhat more responsible hands that it was before. To preserve the republic, however, will take more than responsible caretakers. It involves changing the fundamental direction of the ship of state, away from a nation completely controlled by large corporations, banks, mass media, and the military, all of which have demonstrated conclusively that they cannot be trusted on their own to act in the public interest.
A formidable task, indeed. Let the work begin.
Tom Lowe
To begin to repair the damage wrought by the right-wing wrecking crews over the past 28 years, our nation will require far more than a savior. Obama alone cannot get us out of this mess. The Democrats cannot do it by themselves.
We, the citizens, enabled our presidents, congresses and courts to bring us to this point. We will have to stop the enabling.
The habit will be hard to break.
We voted for men (and a few women) who told us what we wanted to hear.
They told us that greed was good. We eventually came to believe it.
We paid no attention to their crimes--and their crimes were numerous, from Iran-Contra to the looting of the financial industry.
We refused to notice the militarization of our police forces, and the gutting of our constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Without questioning, we allowed ourselves to be terrified by whatever our elected officials told us we should be terrified of, and gave them free rein to do whatever they wanted to do to free us from the fear du jour.
We let them instigate wars and conflicts that we had no business fighting.
We allowed our manufacturing industries either to close or to move overseas.
We spent all our spare time watching television, where we slowly became transformed from citizens into consumers who have consequently almost completely forgotten the knowledge of how a citizen is supposed to act.
And, worst of all, when the nation experienced the trauma of 9/11, which happened because our bozo of a president ignored repeated warnings of the attack, instead of impeaching him for criminal negligence, we bestowed upon him the powers of a Roman emperor, which powers he used to invade a nation that had nothing to do with the attack on 9/11, to torture prisoners, and to reward his political allies by paying them huge sums of money in connection with the Iraq war, much of which they promptly stole.
And nearly half of us who cast ballots in 2008 voted for an elderly half-wit, who, along with his vulpine running mate, promised to carry on the very same policies (if he could only remember what they were) that brought us to this point.
It is enough to deeply discourage anyone who loves his country.
With Obama as president and the Democrats with a majority in Congress, there are grounds to hope that our nation is in somewhat more responsible hands that it was before. To preserve the republic, however, will take more than responsible caretakers. It involves changing the fundamental direction of the ship of state, away from a nation completely controlled by large corporations, banks, mass media, and the military, all of which have demonstrated conclusively that they cannot be trusted on their own to act in the public interest.
A formidable task, indeed. Let the work begin.
Tom Lowe
Rewiring the President-Elect's Brain
Dec 06, 2008 22:10
The New York Times reported Wednesday that our president-elect is now talking about withdrawing combat troops for Iraq within 16 months, “... with the understanding that it might be necessary—likely to be necessary—to maintain a residual force to provide potential training, logistical support, to protect our civilians in Iraq.” (I haven’t the slightest idea what “potential training,” means within the context—or in any context—and would appreciate some enlightenment if a reader would like to comment. I suspect it didn’t mean anything, but served as a placeholder until his mind could catch up.)
We are now seeing in the result of an intense and concerted effort by the established agencies of the federal government, particularly the Pentagon, to infuse into the head of the incoming president and his closest advisors the worldview held by the permanent government. It is an indoctrination difficult to resist, in no small part because much of it is classified, which limits the ability of the president to tap sources of information outside the security establishment. George Bush, whose lack of curiosity has been commented on for many years, apparently saw little reason to question the official worldview of the neocons, even when it became obvious that much of their worldview was pure fantasy.
But for a president to properly do his job, he must be able to develop his own sources of information outside of the almost hermetic cocoon that is designed to envelop and protect him, not only from physical harm, but from whatever might interfere with the official streams of intelligence that are intended to reach the president thoroughly vetted. We know from bitter experience, however, that a president who relies exclusively on official intelligence places himself at the mercy of those who supply the intelligence, and that intelligence can far too often be filtered in such a way that his decisions are flawed, or even disastrous. A president must have independent sources of intelligence.
A president requires independent intelligence for two reasons: first, it gives him an accurate idea of how well his advisors and the agencies charged with gathering and vetting intelligence are performing. Barring an intelligence disaster, the only way to test one’s intelligence sources is with other sources of intelligence. Roosevelt often surprised his closest advisors with information of which they had just come to inform him. His friends around the nation and the world privately fed him news on a daily basis.
Second, government intelligence agencies are not infallible; they have institutional blind spots, sometimes for political reasons (Douglas Feith is a classic example), and sometimes for structural reasons, such as when management simply doesn’t believe a matter is important when it is actually critical. And then there is the unavoidable human tendency to tell the ruler what the speaker thinks the ruler wants to hear. An informal intelligence network can quietly inform the emperor about his new clothes when he might otherwise find out too late.
Owing to the ability of the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the FBI to monitor communications worldwide, it has become considerably more difficult for any president to maintain unofficial communication with his own informal intelligence sources, but somehow the president must find a way. His advisors will be hesitant to shade the truth when they know he has ways of checking what they tell him, and thus his decisions are more likely to be based on reality.
We are now seeing in the result of an intense and concerted effort by the established agencies of the federal government, particularly the Pentagon, to infuse into the head of the incoming president and his closest advisors the worldview held by the permanent government. It is an indoctrination difficult to resist, in no small part because much of it is classified, which limits the ability of the president to tap sources of information outside the security establishment. George Bush, whose lack of curiosity has been commented on for many years, apparently saw little reason to question the official worldview of the neocons, even when it became obvious that much of their worldview was pure fantasy.
But for a president to properly do his job, he must be able to develop his own sources of information outside of the almost hermetic cocoon that is designed to envelop and protect him, not only from physical harm, but from whatever might interfere with the official streams of intelligence that are intended to reach the president thoroughly vetted. We know from bitter experience, however, that a president who relies exclusively on official intelligence places himself at the mercy of those who supply the intelligence, and that intelligence can far too often be filtered in such a way that his decisions are flawed, or even disastrous. A president must have independent sources of intelligence.
A president requires independent intelligence for two reasons: first, it gives him an accurate idea of how well his advisors and the agencies charged with gathering and vetting intelligence are performing. Barring an intelligence disaster, the only way to test one’s intelligence sources is with other sources of intelligence. Roosevelt often surprised his closest advisors with information of which they had just come to inform him. His friends around the nation and the world privately fed him news on a daily basis.
Second, government intelligence agencies are not infallible; they have institutional blind spots, sometimes for political reasons (Douglas Feith is a classic example), and sometimes for structural reasons, such as when management simply doesn’t believe a matter is important when it is actually critical. And then there is the unavoidable human tendency to tell the ruler what the speaker thinks the ruler wants to hear. An informal intelligence network can quietly inform the emperor about his new clothes when he might otherwise find out too late.
Owing to the ability of the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the FBI to monitor communications worldwide, it has become considerably more difficult for any president to maintain unofficial communication with his own informal intelligence sources, but somehow the president must find a way. His advisors will be hesitant to shade the truth when they know he has ways of checking what they tell him, and thus his decisions are more likely to be based on reality.