Posts Tagged ‘Misery’
Surrendercapitulationsell-outscamstampedemanagedsubmissionWeimarmoment
Welcome to the end of a great democratic experiment.
“Krugman Calls Obama’s ‘Surrender’ a ‘Catastrophe on Multiple Levels’“ — Here’s one way to feel worse about the debt ceiling deal announced by the president Sunday night: Read Paul Krugman’s column. The Nobel Prize-winning economist is about as harsh in his assessment of the deal as can be, saying it “will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.”
Rasmus: The $1 Trillion Debt Deal Today’s Boehner-Reid final agreement effectively drops explicit cuts in Defense, another Republican position all along.
ROBERT BOROSAGE: Capitulation |
President Obama’s surrender
By Andrew Leonard
A bad weekend for the White House: The Tea Party wins, Democrats lose, and the carnage will be even worse next year
Democratic politics in a nutshell
By Glenn Greenwald
Report: Dems don’t worry about angry liberals — they’ll just scare them into submission with pictures of Bachmann
Arthur Silber: The Priorities of the Damned
I’ll use a blunt and, I fervently hope, unsettling comparison. All of these repellent people have decided to rape “ordinary” Americans until they’re dead. They’re only debating who gets to rape them next. And what these human slugs know but will never acknowledge, and what they hope you won’t notice, is that they can’t even get it up anymore.
A Bad Solution to a Manufactured Crisis
It goes to show just how dysfunctional our government has become to ordinary Americans. Despite the fact that millions of us are still out of work because of the greed and excess of the last thirty years and resulting crashed economy, politicians cannot focus on real problems.
Top Economist: Deficit Deal ‘Will Do Great Harm to Our Nation’
Obama & the Fake Debt Ceiling Crisis: This President Is Really Just Smarter Than You Are
But what if President Barack Obama never intended to fight for jobs or justice? What if he believes the nonsense about Wall Street being “job creators” instead of economic vampires? What if Cornel West finally got it right? What if Black Agenda Report has been right all along? What if Barack Obama is a Reagan Democrat in every meaningful way, right down to a fanatical belief in trickle down economics? What if the president counts on corporate media and his army of careerists and sycophants to shut down and cover up cracks in the Obama consensus through which reality might leak? What if Obama is not weak, or timid, or vacillating or waiting for us to “make him do it”? What if what we’ve seen is all there is, all there ever was? The truth is that Barack Obama’s actions are entirely rational, understandable and even predictable if you suppose him to have been a vicious, vacuous and cynical right wing operative from the very beginning.
Why the Debt Ceiling Deal Strengthens the Radical Right and Weakens America
By Robert Reich The deal’s spending cuts increase the odds of a double-dip recession and strengthens the political hand of the radical right.
| RICHARD ESKOW Four Ways the Deal Hurts You |
| “1. You’ll be less likely to find a job if you’re looking. If you’ve got a job, you’re less likely to earn more
money–and more likely to lose it … 2. Your housing value is likely to suffer … 3. Your old age just got scarier … 4. Your tax bill is likely to go way up.” |
Debt Ceiling Bill May Hurt Science
Senator Bernie Sanders interview about the debt debacle:
Over Bernie’s strong opposition, Congress approved and President Obama signed a deficit-reduction deal that slashes programs for working families without asking the wealthiest Americans and the most profitable corporations to pay a nickel more. “This country needs deficit reduction, but we need to do it in a way that is fair and which will result in economic growth and job creation. This proposal does neither,” the senator said. In a Senate speech and a flurry of television interviews, Bernie called the deal “extremely unfair,” “immoral” and “grotesque.”
If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately
Thomas Paine was a herald of another era, whose writings emboldened Americans to stand up for freedom and fight in a War of Independence. He wrote the quote used in the title of this post, as well as the following:
“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.”
Do not cling to complacency or duck your head in the face of creeping corporatism and tyranny. Our times have their own herald in Chris Hedges. We must find within ourselves the courage to resist and comfort each other as we face the days ahead.
Hedges has written a cogent clear-headed view of our position on the precipice:
Calling All Rebels
TruthDig ………Mar 8, 2010 By Chris Hedges
Excerpts:
There are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is now being plunged into profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted to serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from labor unions to political parties, have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate power. And any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East German secret police. The mounting anger and hatred, coursing through the bloodstream of the body politic, make violence and counter-violence inevitable. Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be horrifying.
…the longer the liberal class dithers and speaks in the bloodless language of policies and programs, the more hated and irrelevant it becomes. No one has discredited American liberalism more than liberals themselves. And I do not hold out any hope for their reform. We have entered an age in which, as William Butler Yeats wrote, “the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
“If we end up with violence in the streets on a large scale, not random riots, but insurrection and things break down, there will be a coup d’état from the right,” David Cay Johnston said. “We have already had an economic coup d’état. It will not take much to go further.”
….“A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object,” Camus warned. “But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.”
The rebel, for Camus, stands with the oppressed—the unemployed workers being thrust into impoverishment and misery by the corporate state, the Palestinians in Gaza, the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the disappeared who are held in our global black sites, the poor in our inner cities and depressed rural communities, immigrants and those locked away in our prison system. And to stand with them does not mean to collaborate with parties, such as the Democrats, who can mouth the words of justice while carrying out acts of oppression. It means open and direct defiance.
On the same theme, see:
Time for a U.S. Revolution – Fifteen Reasons
Wall Street Will Be Back for More
Jan 10, 2010 TruthDig
By Chris Hedges
Corporations, which control the levers of power in government and finance, promote and empower the psychologically maimed. Those who lack the capacity for empathy and who embrace the goals of the corporation—personal power and wealth—as the highest good succeed. Those who possess moral autonomy and individuality do not. And these corporate heads, isolated from the mass of Americans by insular corporate structures and vast personal fortunes, are no more attuned to the misery, rage and pain they cause than were the courtiers and perfumed fops who populated Versailles on the eve of the French Revolution. They play their games of high finance as if the rest of us do not exist. And it is a game that will kill us.
Perils of Positive Thinking
Perils of Positive Thinking: Author Ehrenreich Points out the Negative Influence of the Constantly Upbeat
Nancy R. Care2
I saw author Barbara Ehrenreich speak on Friday about her newest book, Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In Ehrenreich’s view, the opposite of positive is realist.
