How Obama Tried To Sell Out Liberalism In 2011

That fact alone casts suspicion on Obama's good intentions after his failure to investigate and prosecute, and his continuing Bush's 'unitary executive' practices (and expanding them, with 'indefinite preventive detention' of American citizens and Obama's doctrine that presidents have the right to kill American citizens with no due process, no oversight, and his push for  and no transparency of anything a president asserts should be his secret).  It is pure Kafka.  Most of Obama's supporters believe that Obama ended the torture practices of the BushCheney regime and closed down the CIA black sites, but apparently that's not true: Obama's continuing to torture and has decriminalized it, along with creating all new black sites (Prison Ships, Ghost Prisoners and Obama's Interrogation Program).

There was a coup d'etat in this nation, a bloodless one, but a coup nonetheless.  And both parties are in on it and we're 'flying without a net' (Constitution).

The US can only survive by everyone (not just the liberals) wanting to get along with each other. You've got to want the country to work more than you want your way over other Americans getting their way. Or some of their way. You've got to be willing to compromise.  

Bush wasn't, and Congress didn't challenge him in the third branch of government, the judiciary. Bush created one Constitutional crisis after another. There's been real concern that if the judiciary ruled against him, he wouldn't abide. Then what? Nobody can force him. Three co-equal branches of government.

So if compromise is out (and liberals have been compromising for more than 30 years, to the point where, one example, there's no need to overturn Roe vs. Wade because Republicans and DINOs have made it impossible to obtain an abortion in 92% of the counties in the US), then what's left is to FIGHT.  

We need leadership that isn't looking to compromise, isn't helping corporations deregulate and privatize Americans' resources, but to STOP the corporate takeover of the people's government and property for the profit of the 1%.  

That's not Obama and Democrats.
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How Obama Tried To Sell Out Liberalism In 2011

At the very root of our problems are Constitutional crises created by, first, Republican presidents and now under a Democratic president.  Republicans' utter contempt for the Constitution and callous disregard for creating them caused by Democrats' cowering response is what underpins all of our problems and what's destroying the country. 

As president, you've got to really want the US to work, to exist, to not exploit the loopholes in the Constitution that keep our three-branches of government precariously balancing the democracy.  But BushCheney drove tanks through the loopholes, breaking the law and with no apparent concern for exposing the loopholes or any consequences.

Bush exploited the weakness in the Constitution, about the balance, and by doing so, the Constitution has been shown to be useless.  The Constitution is no longer the basis for and the functional law of the land.  The Constitution is no longer much respected in Congress, the Executive Branch, the SupremeCourt, nor in law or business.

Bush wasn't the first to create Constitutional crises, but he created more of them, eviscerating the Constitution for all time. How do you go forward with it when its Achilles' heel has been laid bare for any BushCheney wannabe waiting in the weeds to exploit?  What's now happened in the aftermath of BushCheney is that what Nixon did has been made legal.  Once BushCheney happened, once they exploited those loopholes for everyone to see, you can't just go on as if it never happened.  You can't "look forward, not back".  

The situation might have been remedied had Obama come into office investigating and prosecuting the Bush administration and restoring the 'rule of law'.  BushCheney exploited the inherent weaknesses in the Constitution:  A precarious balance of power between the three branches of government.  But Obama refused, and has continued the BushCheney disregard of the Constitution, even going beyond BushCheney abuses.

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How Obama Tried To Sell Out Liberalism In 2011

No.

The ONLY role for citizen, Constitutionally-designed and protected, is the right to vote every 2 years.  And even then, citizens can vote but their votes don't have to be counted -- The founders were nothing if not ironic.

That's it.  

There is no ability for "pushing" or "keeping an eye" on politicians.  You can sign all of the petitions you want (and politicians love it that you waste your time doing it); there is absolutely no requirement that petitions be taken seriously.

It's a sweet, charming idea that you ascribe to, but in a nation of over 300 million, where corporations control the air waves and the politicians, and voters barely have the time to work several jobs just to keep their heads above water (if they can find them), politicians are supposed to be doing their jobs, working for the common good, without citizens standing over them.

I've written about this before, but it bears repeating.  The Constitution was written with loopholes that, prior to the last 30 years (and the last 10 years specifically), professional politicians loved the country enough, wanted it to continue, to not exploit those loopholes.  Now, after Bush-Cheney, all bets are off.  Obama is continuing in their footprints.
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How Obama Tried To Sell Out Liberalism In 2011

All of these politicians were and are pro-corporate, pro-military industrial complex.  The only differences have been on social issues, and on the Democratic side, they have proven to be, let's say, 'less committed' to their party's stated values, ideals, and goals, i.e. the People's issues.  Democratic voters have let them get away with it because of the propaganda campaigns aimed at us is to be "reasonable", and "compromising".

Under the DLC's control, Democratic politicians have stood for nothing and compromised away everything in the Democratic Party's platform.  Democratic voters have gone along, but when because they stand for nothing, they fall for anything.  Democratic voters have put politicians into power who do not stand and fight for their issues.  Democratic politicians have "compromised" them away.  

The DLC got into power by refusing to defend the word 'liberal' when Ronald Reagan, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove were demonizing the word. Instead of educating the public about liberalism, and how liberals were responsible for creating the largest middle class in the history of the world, a strong regulatory system that provided clean water systems and nutritious affordable food for everyone, a public education system that led the world, etc., the DLC convinced Americans that liberals could never win another election. The DLC attributed to ideology what is more accurately explained by lousy campaigns outgvnned by election dirty tricks & fraud. 

What we are dealing with is a corporate takeover of the US government.  And Obama is a DINO - A Democrat-In-Name-Only.  He's not a "centrist" as has been sold to us from his entry onto the national stage -- "Privately, Obama describes himself as a Blue Dog Democrat."


Blue Dog Democrat = REPUBLICAN

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, changing its name to 'bee' isn't going to get you any honey.
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How Obama Tried To Sell Out Liberalism In 2011

What the compromise position on Social Security, Medicare, a woman's right to choose, gays' right to marry, clean safe water and food, a safe workplace, living wages, etc?  You either believe in those things or you don't.

What's the compromise position on ending Bush's Obama's tax cuts?  Do Obama's 'most ardent supporters' know that Obama offered in these negotiations to make those tax cuts permanent?

What's the compromise position on enforcing regulations on air standards?  Not enforcing them?

What's the compromise position on a woman's right to choose?  Make it impossible for her to actually obtain an abortion?

What's the compromise position on Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and veterans' care and SCHIP, etc.?   Empty out the trust funds to pay bond holders and war profiteers so that there's nothing left for those who paid into into the trust funds?

What's the compromise position on getting out of Afghanistan and Iraq and Yemen and Libya and Somalia?  Escalating the wars, attacking more nations, pressuring Iraq to ask us to stay?

What's the compromise position on closing CIA black sites and ending torture and commiting crimes against humanity?   Prison Ships, Ghost Prisoners and Obama's Interrogation Program?  Ending habeas corpus and a president indefinitely detaining anyone he believes might be thinking about committing a crime, American citizens included, and killing them with no due process, no oversight?

There is no 'center' on most issues.  We're 'centered-out'.

NObama 2012
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How Obama Tried To Sell Out Liberalism In 2011

During the Bush years, Democrats said if the People wanted change, they had to put Democrats in the majority in Congress. So in 2006, we did.

Nothing changed. 

Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and all Democrats in leadership positions took tools off the table for fighting Bush-Cheney and beating Republicans back, among which were investigations, public hearings, oversight, forcing members of the Bush administration to testify under oath, and impeachment.  

They said, "You have to give us more Democrats -- 60 in the Senate".

In 2008, we did.  We gave them 60 for the Democratic Caucus. And, we gave them the White House. 

Obama came into office with the wind at his back. More people voted for him, a black man in good old r@c!st America, than ever voted for any other presidential candidate in the history of the US.  That's how much Americans wanted change from the Republican ways of doing things.  Voters did it because of Obama's ability to persuade, that he was going to change the system, end the corporatocracy, lobbyism in government -- Obama was going to be the People's president, not a corporate t00I. 

And no sooner did Obama get elected than he slammed the brakes on the momentum of his election and a filibuster-proof Senate (tentative yet, with 2 senators, Kennedy and Byrd, at death's door), Obama did a 180-degree turn on his promises and slowed everything down. To "work in a bipartisan manner with Republicans", after Republicans had already announced they were going to block everything Democrats wanted to do, vote no on everything, in lockstep. 

Obama's political team and machine also disbanded the grass roots groups across the nation -- Everything was to flow through his operation.  This was a dead giveaway that the last thing that these politicians want is an active populist movement.

Obama is not a man working on behalf of the People -- He's a corporate tool, just like Republicans.

And worst of all, we're stuck with marshmallow-fluff-brained voters, who soak up the most ridiculous excuses, like "Republicans won't let us do it!", when, in fact, Obama and Democrats don't even try.  Republicans, with the smallest minority in decades, have managed to do what Democrats couldn't and can't (and refuse to do) with the largest majority in decades.
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How Obama Tried To Sell Out Liberalism In 2011

The nation is circling the drain because the left has done more than 30 years of compromising.  

Real Democratic policies aren't that hard to sell to Americans.  When most Americans want Medicare and other government programs which they've benefitted from to continue and teabaggers shout "No government control of healthcare; Get your hands off my Medicare", the answer is EDUCATION.  

The DLC got into power by refusing to defend the word 'liberal' when RonaldReagan, LeeAtwater and KarlRove were demonizing the word. Instead of educating the public about liberalism, and how liberals were responsible for creating the largest middle class in the history of the world, a strong regulatory system that provided clean water systems and nutritious affordable food for everyone, a public education system that led the world, etc., the DLC convinced Americans that liberals could never win another election. The DLC attributed to ideology what is more accurately explained by lousy campaigns outgunned by election dirty tricks and fraud. 

When informed of the issues, most Americans agree with liberal policies. Neither they (nor I) would characterize themselves as far-anything or extreme, but mainstream. For example, nobody likes the idea of abortion, but most Americans do not want the government involved if they find themselves in the predicament of an unwanted pregnancy. And if you frame it as, "You like to k!ll babies?!?! ?!?!", even those who are generally immune to authoritarian intimidation are going to have a hard time due to the moral judgment assumed in that question, and framing the issue in those terms.

If the Bush years taught us anything, it's that anyone can sell anything to Americans, if you're stolid and relentless in your sales pitch and tactics. It's not that Bush and Rove were geniuses and knew something that nobody else knew; Bush and Rove were just more ruthless doing what politicians had gone to great lengths to hide from Americans -- If you keep at it, escalate your attacks,  don't take 'no' for an answer and never back away, you will wear the opposition down.

But Obama only does that to progressives.


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How Obama has handled the massive problems is EXACTLY how Republicans would've handled them (and how BushCheney was handling them).  Obama's not governing as he had promised or as a real Democrat would have.

The real shame, the real tragedy for all of us is that Obama could have been a transcendent president, good for both business AND the People.  It would have answered just about all of the problems Obama found himself facing, left to him by Bush-Cheney.

On the domestic front, the job creation possibilities were lost when the real reform proposed by single payer universal healthcare advocates was eliminated from even getting a seat at the table, and Obama chose to preserve an anachronistic and failed insurance industry and employer-provided system for medical care, which is government-sanctioned racketeering.

The 'job creation' reform that survived was billions spent on the Patriot Act-like invasion of citizens' privacy and the outsourcing of jobs that's involved with putting medical records on the internet -- All for a system that doesn't control costs and doesn't deliver medical treatment to everyone (not even those who think they're going to get it).  

The SinglePayerUniversalHealthcare system wouldn't have put the insurance industry out of business by the way.  It would've been a two-tiered system: Basic coverage for everyone and boutique coverage for those willing to pay for it. So nobody had to worry about poor Big Insurance and Pharma -- There would have been work for all. Big Insurance and Pharma would just had to have made smarter gambles, with no taxpayer bailouts.

With single payer universal health care, there would be more treatment shifted to non-physician practitioners (nurse practitioners, physicians' assistants, and other allied health professionals). Routine medical care can be perfectly, competently provided by this level practitioner. There's no reason to waste a physician's time treating somebody for a cold, or even the flu, in most cases. 

It's true that if universal health coverage were to become an official reality, we'd need to expand training programs for both MDs and non-MD providers to insure there were enough to go around, but in the long run it would mean cheaper and more effective service, along with job creation.  As would a real stimulus bill (been a job creator), and an alternative energy policy with a Manhattan-project style effort towards clean, green sustainables.

These are all good things, but Obama and Democrats have chosen the dark side.  The corporate side.
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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

The [...] is a hyperlink, with the rest of the article by Chris Hedges.  Click on it.
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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

 

MADDOW: America, it‘s your tax dollars at work. This is the war economy as translated to land-locked Central Asia. We dump a ton of money thinking that we are paying for our military effort. Everything that goes along with our military effort ends up letting - or in this case, directing like a squirt gun, instead of flooding - 

ENGEL: The streets become rivers of mud. 

MADDOW: But the money doesn‘t go to the country and trickle down its economy. It just goes to the elites and power brokers who can keep it for themselves. 

ENGEL: A war lord system. There is a lot of money in war - contracting, supplying, shipping. And if you have been in power, you keep those contracts for yourself and you build neighborhoods like this. And maybe, you don‘t even live here. You live somewhere else, in a foreign country. 

MADDOW: This is what it is like in Kabul. This is the exact same dynamic that we saw in Kandahar where you‘re talking with these counterinsurgency doctors and soaked military officers who are incredibly smart and have far reaching thinking about this sort of thing and they can because of that, they can see the basic contradiction at work that we‘re trying to do. 

If the whole effort, all the money and everything, is to establish governance and - if the whole effort is to establish governance, all of our money, all of our spending here is only supporting the elite, the warlordism -

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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

ENGEL: Exactly. And the reason the streets are still unpaved is that these government officials refuse to pay any taxes to the government. They are in a fight so the government won‘t come and pave the roads or connect it to any kind of sanitation system at all because the same government ministers won‘t pay to register the neighborhood. 

MADDOW: So they won‘t throw their weight around to get their neighborhood taken care of, because they don‘t live here anyway. 

ENGEL: They don‘t live here anyway. So you have these large homes, and some of these homes - you see this building right behind you? 

MADDOW: That looks like a hotel. 

ENGEL: No. No. No. They are all private homes. 

MADDOW: This is a private home? 

ENGEL: It‘s a private home. It probably has 25 bedrooms in it and garish, colonnades and unusual architectural features. And then, they‘ll rent that out to some western client and they‘ll charge either by the bedroom or by the floor or for the whole thing. And if you were to build this one - it‘s obviously under construction - that is a $1 million plus house in Kabul with no paved streets. 

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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

ENGEL: Because this was originally just empty land. You can see there is no real pavement or anything like that. When the Americans came in with the northern alliance (the northern alliance, which was the allies against the Taliban) took this land and then gave it away to all their cronies. They created a new war wealth neighborhood out of nothing. 

MADDOW: And so we‘ve still got open sewers and we‘ve still got no pavement, but we have rococo castles. Nouveau riche castles. 

ENGEL: That lease for $10,000 to $25,000 a month, because it‘s a safe area. But here‘s the irony. Most of the government officials - and these are almost all owned by government officials - don‘t live in them. They rent them out to foreign companies, contractors. And they live in Dubai or have their families in Islamabad. So they are purely investment properties. 

MADDOW: There‘s a sign right there in that one. It says, “house for rent.” 

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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

The Afghan and Iraq wars were advertised as uplifting acts of philanthropy:

Wars to spread security, freedom, democracy, human rights, gender
equality, the rule of law, etc.

============================================

The war in Iraq was very very clearly about oil, as was the war in Afghanistan. The oil pipeline that was planned (in Afghanistan), the best security for that was an occupation." 


"If you map the proposed pipeline route across Afghanistan and you look at our bases? Matches perfectly. Our bases are there to solve a problem that the Taliban couldn't solve. Taliban couldn't provide security in that part of Afghanistan -- Well now that's where our bases are. So, does that have to do with Osama Bin Laden? It has nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden. It has everything to do with the longer plan, in this case a strategy which I wouldn't necessarily call neoconservative, however it fits perfectly in with the neoconservative ideology which says, 'If you have military force and you need something from a weaker country, then you need to deploy that force and take what you need because your country's needs are paramount'. It's the whole idea of unilateralism, of using force to achieve your aims."

-Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel whose assignments included a variety of roles for the National Security Agency and who spent her last 4 1/2 years working at the Pentagon with Donald Rumsfeld 



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUxI3rSLDO8



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SltOy_F6ZII

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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

Spend long enough at war, and you cannot fit in anywhere else. It finally kills you. It is not a new story. It starts out like love, but it is death.

War is the beautiful young nymph in the fairy tale that, when kissed, exhales the vapors of the underworld.

The ancient Greeks had a word for such a fate: ekpyrosis.

It means to be consumed by a ball of fire. They used it to describe heroes.

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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

So US forces transferring individuals to NDS Kandahar in violation of a July 2011 order suspending such transfers are absolved from any responsibility?  

Or to a facility called "Mullah Omar's House," a residence taken over by Special Forces soldiers and renamed Firebase Maholic. There, the torturing by Afghan forces was in the presence of Americans.
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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

To anything.  
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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

What's the objective, how is the military going about achieving it, and where are our tax dollars going?

Not long ago, Rachel Maddow walked the dusty, garbage-strewn streets of Afghanistan with RIchard Engel to see what exporting US-style democracy means, and what US nation-building actually builds. Watch this to see where are our tax dollars going, and learn how we are not "nation-building", not making us safer, and not helping the Afghans or building their nation at all (or a democracy). Learn how this has all been just a huge rip-off of the American people:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR5BHnN__5M

RACHEL MADDOW: There are very few countries in the world poorer than Afghanistan where abject poverty is almost everywhere. The keyword there is almost. There are super rich folks here. We visited their neighborhood in Kabul. They‘re garish, bizarre. What it looks like to be rich in poor, war-torn, land-locked Central Asian neighborhood. 

MADDOW: So we are in a neighborhood now. Kabul. Talking about the distribution of wealth, in Kabul and the effect of - 

RICHARD ENGEL: There is a distribution of wealth. This is where it is distributed. This is where it ends up. All of the money from contracts and association with the government and association with the U.S. military has ended up here. 

MADDOW: Why? 

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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

What's the mission?
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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

The war in Afghanistan—where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, where the cultural and linguistic disconnect makes every trip outside the wire a visit to hostile territory, where it's clear that you're losing despite the vast industrial killing machine at your disposal—feeds the culture of atrocity. The fear and stress, the anger and hatred, reduce all Afghans to the enemy, and this includes women, children and the elderly. Civilians and combatants merge into one detested nameless, faceless mass. The psychological leap to murder is short. And murder happens every day in Afghanistan. It happens in drone strikes, artillery bombardments, airstrikes, missile attacks and the withering suppressing fire unleashed in villages from belt-fed machine guns.

Military attacks like these in civilian areas make discussions of human rights an absurdity. Robert Bales, a US Army staff sergeant who allegedly killed 16 civilians in two Afghan villages, including nine children, isn't an anomaly. To decry the butchery of this case and to defend the wars of occupation we wage is to know nothing about combat. We kill children nearly every day in Afghanistan. We don't usually kill them outside the structure of a military unit. If an American soldier had killed or wounded scores of civilians after the ignition of an improvised explosive device against his convoy, it wouldn't have made the news. Units don't stick around to count their “collateral damage.” But the Afghans know. They hate us for the murderous rampages. They hate us for our hypocrisy.

The scale of our state-sponsored murder is masked from public view. Reporters who travel with military units and become psychologically part of the team spin out what the public and their military handlers want, mythic tales of heroism and valor. War's seen only through the lens of the occupiers. It's defended as a national virtue. This myth allows us to make sense of mayhem and death. It justifies what's usually nothing more than gross human cruelty, brutality and stupidity. It allows us to believe we've achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters. It disguises our powerlessness. It hides from view the impotence and ordinariness of our leaders. But in turning history into myth we transform random events into a sequence of events directed by a will greater than our own, one that's determined and preordained. We're elevated above the multitude. We march to nobility. But it's a lie. And it's a lie that combat veterans carry within them. It's why so many commit suicide.               

[...]

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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

You desperately need to read this.
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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

Overheard at OFA:  "Keep saying 'You think Romney/Santorum/Gingrich wouldn't torture?'"

This is why Obama needs a primary challenge.  He has conceded all of the ground, all of the policies, both domestic and foreign, on the left of Genghis Khan, so that all that gets discussed is rightwing and righter.

NObama 2012
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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

The most important read of the day.
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U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban: Report

Torture is ongoing under Obama.

And this.  

And this, and this.
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