Spintested: 09/01/12

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Ten million more Americans went to the polls to vote for Obama than any other presidential candidate in the history of the nation.

The racist charge just doesn't cut it.

Yes, there is racism in the US, but it's got nothing to do with what's going on. It's a smokescreen for what's really going on - A class war, between the 1% that both parties work for and the 99% who aren't represented in our government.
About Barack Obama 2012
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

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.

Democrats said, "You have to give us more Democrats -- 60 in the Senate". In 2008, we gave them the 60. And the White House.

Obama came into office with the wind at his back. More people voted for him, a black man in America, than ever in the history of the US. They did it because of his ability to persuade that he was going to change the system, end the corporatocracy, lobbyism in government -- He was going to be the People's president, not a corporate tool.

And no sooner did Obama get elected than he slammed the brakes on the momentum of his election & a filibuster-proof Senate (tentative yet, with 2 senators, Kennedy & 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, and vote no on everything, in lockstep.

Since Obama has gotten into office, he's continued most of Bush's policies and his 'accomplishments' are being spun as "reform" when, in fact, they're Republican in nature.

There could be 100 "progressives" in the Senate and 435 in the House, and they and Obama would still find a way to deliver to corporations instead of the People. And then try to blame it on Republicans.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

Two articles that speak that I think are must reads for Democratic voters are John Cusack's Interview of Law Professor Jonathan Turley About the Obama Administration's War on the Constitution and journalist Russell Mokhiber's Ten Reasons I'm Not With Barack Obama.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

As far as the economy goes, it's not as if we hadn't tread these waters before - We had a blueprint for how to get through this ~~recession~~Depression with what FDR did in the 1930s. We even had a blueprint for how to avoid the stall we're in now, from when FDR caved to Republicans after the initial stimulus funds had shown positive effects and he took his foot off the gas (stimulus funds) at their demand.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

Obama didn't fight for what was needed to get us out of this hole; the stimulus was like lightly putting your foot on a brake of a speeding truck going 120 miles an hour into a concrete wall. It was way too little and as a result, we're poised to hit that wall after the election.

All that Obama's been doing is trying to save unregulated capitalism and the lock that the 1% has on the other 99%.

With Obama's deal to preserve Bush's tax cuts for the rich (making it Obama's tax cuts for the rich), 99ers were cut off. Of the 6 million people currently receiving unemployment benefits, Obama's deal covered only 2 million, & many of them will get crumbs from his deal because in spite of the 13-month extension, benefits will be cut off for many of those in the coming months when they reach 99-weeks. And only 25 states out of 53 states/territories in/of the US have 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, so that's even fewer still.

David Cay Johnston on Democracy Now! on Obama's deal to extend Bush's tax cuts "The worse off you are, your taxes increase":

"The bottom roughly 45 million families in America or households in America—and there are a little over 100 million households—they’re going to actually see their taxes go up. Republicans got an extraordinarily good deal, that raises, I think, basic questions about the negotiating skills of the President."

The payroll tax 'holiday' in the deal sets SocialSecurity up for its end. That's what Bush and GroverNorquist planned and why Bush believes he'll be vindicated as a great conservative in history: For ending the GreatSociety programs, by having bankrupted the nation so there's no way to pay out those benefits. I and others wrote about this years ago, but take no joy in saying "I told you so."

Extending Bush's tax cuts was an absolutely wretched deal, but standard for Obama, who has a long record of negotiating lousy deals on ordinary citizens' behalf. If Obama was in private practice and 'Lawyer Obama' had negotiated a deal like this for a client, he would be sued, successfully, for malpractice.

The purpose of the deal was so that Democratic political operatives could say, "Obama helped the unemployed"; most readers won't know the actual facts of how Obama sold out the American people. Again. Obama and Democrats have no jobs plan either. Both parties are thinning the herd.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

The stimulus was weak tea. The economy is poised on the brink and will collapse after the election.

A double-dip recession (we're in a Depression; enough of trying to sugarcoat it) is pre-ordained after ~~Bush's~~ Obama's tax cuts for the rich and Obama's caving to Republicans on 78 percent of the cuts they wanted..

This game that Obama and the DLC-controlled Democrats and Republicans are in is about trying to cast the other side as the party to blame when the bottom falls out. Because both sides work on behalf of the thieves who got our national treasure, and their job now is to keep the People managed, orderly, the system of unregulated capitalism and plutocracy intact while the rich get to keep the booty.

3 million foreclosures down, 11 million more in the pipeline. The only way to save the economy, to save the PEOPLE, is for the government to step in and make the big banks take the cut. 15 million families are about to face foreclosure. <-- Blue highlighting means it's a link to be clicked.

This is going to spur new rounds of firings, another spike in unemployment, and more foreclosures. More Americans' jobs, good jobs, will be outsourced overseas. Corporations still enjoy tax incentives for moving their operations overseas. GE made record profits last year ($14 billion), didn't pay a dime in taxes and got $3 billion of taxpayers' money in rebates. Bush's tax cuts for the rich are now Obama's tax cuts for the rich; in that Obama deal, the poor had their taxes INCREASED, and the payroll tax 'holiday' sets SocialSecurity up for its end.

The economy isn't improving.

Obama's in office to mellow-talk us into accepting that which we'd never stand still for if we had contentious fire-in-the-belly Democratic politicians actually fighting on our behalf. Obama's in the White House to ease us into accepting the greatest heist in the history of the world, and never even think about trying to get back the money that was ripped off from the middle and poor classes.

What Obama's doing is presiding over the end game of America, letting the 'Haves' pick the (our) bones clean. The more we see of Obama in action, the more 'deals' he makes, the more people realize that Obama's a continuation of the cruel policies of BushCheney.

We need another FDR.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama presented himself as the latest in a long line of corporate, Democrats, interested in tinkering with the system but largely agreeing with the consensus on free markets, free trade, and US. military power.

As the February 2011 cover story in TIME explains, Obama even agrees with many of the fundamentals of Reaganism, telling reporters, "What Reagan ushered in was a skepticism toward government solutions to every problem. I don't think that has changed." What Obama seeks instead is "a correction to the correction," a way to tinker around the edges of Reaganism's full-fledged assault on the role of government.

As Roger Hodge points out in his recent book, The Mendacity of Hope, "Obama praises Clinton for putting a 'progressive slant on some of Reagan's goals,' by which he presumably means Clinton's wholesale adoption of the Republican economic agenda, from passing NAFTA to cutting taxes, gutting the welfare system, and embracing the rhetoric of small government".
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

Obama's no better (nor is any DLC-controlled Democratic) than Republicans.

Obama (like all professional Democrats) is just a different stage than Republicans in the life cycle of an American politician. Like caterpillars and moths/butterflies. If you'd never seen a chrysalis or cocoon, you wouldn't know that the caterpillar is actually the same creature as the moth/butterfly, spending half its life crawling on and devouring leaves only to pupate and transform itself into a moth/butterfly so that it can fly around and feed off of other plants. And sweaters.

If Obama is a one term president, he'll have delivered to the CorporateMasters of the universe. He'll hand the baton off to Republicans for the fleecing to continue and go on to reap the benefits from his treacherous betrayal of the People, i.e., the same sort of corporate payoffs that presidents since GeraldFord have enjoyed.

Over the course of US history, corporations have managed to game our political system, and done it so effectively that the two-party system competes to serve corporate interests while defending that service as, "What's good for GM (corporations) is good for America (the People)".

Democrats and Republicans are corporate tools. Like siblings competing for the attention and approval (campaign contributions) of a parent, Republicans and DLC-controlled Democrats try to outdo each other in delivering for their real constituent, BigCorporations. The trick for them has been to make it seem as if they were really working on behalf of thePeople.

If you must continue to delude yourself into thinking Obama's a good guy who never would've started those wars, and who has only good intentions but got a bad deal, think of all this as a business plan where the CorporateMasters of the Universe have charted out their plans years in advance and select the politician/personality best able to achieve those plans in 4 year increments. If you want to lie the country into war for oil and war-profiteering, then GeorgeWBush is your man to front it (with DickCheney, the former SecretaryOfDefense who initiated the privatizing of the military a decade earlier, actually running the operation from the shadows).

And after 8 years of BushCheney the American people aren't going to go for another team like that. They're going to want HOPE and CHANGE, with a persona they can believe and trust. BarackObama.

Obama's no better than BushCheney. His 'most ardent admirers' just like the packaging better. I'm not talking skin color, although that may be a factor for some of them; I'm talking about how a 'D' after the name is a brand they trust believe and trust in, despite the fact that it's the same 'soap' (product).
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

If you read nothing else before the election, read John Cusack Interviews Law Professor Jonathan Turley About the Obama Administration's War on the Constitution.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

All that Obama's been doing is trying to save unregulated capitalism and the lock that the 1% has on the other 99%.

With Obama's deal to preserve Bush's tax cuts for the rich (making it Obama's tax cuts for the rich), 99ers were cut off. Of the 6 million people currently receiving unemployment benefits, Obama's deal covered only 2 million, & many of them will get crumbs from his deal because in spite of the 13-month extension, benefits will be cut off for many of those in the coming months when they reach 99-weeks. And only 25 states out of 53 states/territories in/of the US have 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, so that's even fewer still.

David Cay Johnston on Democracy Now! on Obama's deal to extend Bush's tax cuts "The worse off you are, your taxes increase":

"The bottom roughly 45 million families in America or households in America—and there are a little over 100 million households—they’re going to actually see their taxes go up. Republicans got an extraordinarily good deal, that raises, I think, basic questions about the negotiating skills of the President."

The payroll tax 'holiday' in the deal sets SocialSecurity up for its end. That's what Bush and GroverNorquist planned and why Bush believes he'll be vindicated as a great conservative in history: For ending the GreatSociety programs, by having bankrupted the nation so there's no way to pay out those benefits. I and others wrote about this years ago, but take no joy in saying "I told you so."

Extending Bush's tax cuts was an absolutely wretched deal, but standard for Obama, who has a long record of negotiating lousy deals on ordinary citizens' behalf. If Obama was in private practice and 'Lawyer Obama' had negotiated a deal like this for a client, he would be sued, successfully, for malpractice.

ACA is a massive giveaway to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Health insurance is NOT affordable, quality medical care.

Lily Ledbetter isn't a "woman's rights" bill. And the finance reform legislation does nothing to prevent what happened to our economy from happening again.

Both parties are thinning the herd.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

Nothing really has been done to address the pay gap that exists between male and female employees. Since the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was signed into law, the pay gap has closed at less than half-a-cent per year. That trend is continuing, as the pay gap barely closed from 2009 to 2010:

Women made 77 percent of men’s earnings in 2009, the year the law passed. In 2010, that was virtually unchanged, as women’s wages rose to 77.4 percent of men’s. The gap is even larger for African Americans and Latinos: black women made 67.5 percent of all men’s earnings in 2009, while Latino women made 57.7 percent. In 2010, those figures ticked up to 67.7 percent and 58.7 percent, respectively.

Women make up half of the American workforce, and in two-thirds of American families, the mother is the primary breadwinner or a co-breadwinner. But they make less than their male counterparts in all 50 states, though the size of each state’s wage gap varies. While the gap continues to close in places like Washington, D.C., where women make 91.8 percent of men’s earnings, it is growing in others, like Wyoming, where women’s earnings dropped from 65.5 percent of men’s in 2009 to just 63.8 percent in 2010.

Because of the gender pay gap, women with the same education doing the same job as men earn far less over their working lifetimes. The wage gap costs $723,000 over a 40-year career for women with college degrees. In some industries, the gap can cost women close to a million dollars.

In November 2010, Senate Republicans killed efforts to close the pay gap when they unanimously voted to block the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have updated the Equal Pay Act, closed many of its loopholes, and strengthened incentives to prevent pay discrimination.

Now that's an election issue that Democrats could run on if they were such fighters for women's rights, don't you think?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

There was another bill out there that would not only have made the technical fix of Ledbetter, but updated the Equal Pay Act of 1963, closed loopholes and made a much bigger difference in closing the pay gap. There was no reason why the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act could not have been combined with the Paycheck Fairness Act back at the beginning of the first term, in 2009. But while the bill passed the House quickly, Democrats in the Senate didn’t get around to taking up the Paycheck Fairness Act until the lame duck session of 2010, and it predictably failed 58-41, with all Republicans opposing. There’s obviously no guarantee that the Paycheck Fairness Act could have passed earlier in the term. But it’s plausible to argue that leveraging Lilly Ledbetter, which was a campaign issue, into a real advance on equal pay could have paid off. As it is, the Senate quickly got filibustered with little fanfare in the lame duck.

The point is there were other options. But the legislation that could have made a difference was left behind. And it severely damages the credibility of the Administration and its allies to keep waving the bloody shirt of Lilly Ledbetter when it actually did pretty much nothing for the larger cause of equal pay and equal work.

KEEP READING

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

No, pal, it's you who doesn't know what you're talking about.

Lily Ledbetter has been at the top of Obama's 'most ardent supporters' lists of his "accomplishments" and has gone unchallenged because to explain the ridiculousness of it as an "Obama accomplishment" can't be done in a 10-word sound byte.

To begin with, claiming Lily Ledbetter as Obama's achievement is like the driver of the winning car in this year's Le Mans race (Mike Rockenfeller) picking up a hitch-hiking Obama right before he crossed the finish line and saying Obama won the Le Mans. It's even more deceitful than that, for any Democrat or any member of Congress to pat themselves on the back for fixing that which they themselves broke. But even that doesn't quite explain it.

Obama and Democrats got into power on a pledge to change the way Washington works. Little is ever said or explained about what that really means. I'm going to attempt it:

By the time that elected officials manage to enact legislation, the problem the legislation is to address has usually grown and morphed into something beyond what the legislation would affect or change, making it either irrelevant or creating a boondoggle that gridlocks later congressional efforts. Or, something else.

With Lily Ledbetter, it took 45 years to have the legislature address a problem (statute of limitations for filing equal pay discrimination lawsuits in the Civil Rights Act of 1964) in what never should've been agreed to by Democrats in the first place in 1964. Lily Ledbetter really had nothing to do with "landmark sex discrimination". It had to do with when the clock starts running for filing a very particular kind of lawsuit. It doesn't affect statutes of limitation for any other kind of lawsuit. It doesn't apply to the filing of all lawsuits. It's just for a particular class of lawsuits - For the filing of an equal-pay lawsuit.

And it wasn't 45 years of Congresses trying to fix it. It was a year and a half. It was in response to the Supreme Court's decision in 2007 in one woman's lawsuit. It's not going to affect millions, or thousands or even hundreds of others - Ironically, if it were to affect more women, it never would have passed, no matter what party held the Congress (because it would have meant more money paid out from corporations to women, and Democrats work for corporations just as Republicans do).

If you want to tout passage of Lily Ledbetter then you're going to have to take the blame for not following it up immediately with legislation for transparency in pay. Being able to find out what everyone else is getting paid. It's a joke without it. It's like taking you to a Michelin star restaurant, blowing the aromas from the kitchen in your face, but not letting you eat anything at all.

KEEP READING
About Barack Obama 2012
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

In 2002, on the issue of abortion, Sotomayor upheld Bush's 'Global Gag Rule' (the policy of withholding funds for international groups that offer family planning information and services, including abortion).

On the issue of discrimination, she frequently rules against plaintiffs. For example, in 2004, she ruled against African-American corrections' officers who said they were retaliated against for filing discrimination complaints.

Sotomayor certainly doesn't look at the law through the prism of how it serves the interests of the People.

And Sotomayor was with the Scalia-Thomas-Alito faction that boycotted the SOTU - Sotomayor was in Guam, addressing a group of students and swearing in new members of the Guam Bar Association, a first for a US Supreme Court Justice (are you kidding, Sonia, missing the most public showing of US democracy and the 3 branches of government by leaving the US for a 5 day trip to Guam?).

In claims against big business, Sotomayor (herself a former corporate lawyer) wrote the dissent in a 2-1 decision that ultimately favored victims' families. This was concerning the 1996 crash of TWA flight 800 off of LongIsland. Sotomayor wrote, "The crash hadn't occurred in US territorial waters, therefore victims' families shouldn't have had the right to sue for extra damages." She wrote that the judges who disagreed with her were ignoring legislative history and earlier case law," saying "their decision was a legislative policy choice which shouldn't be made by the courts".

That's conservative talk.

We need more Earl Warrens. What we don't need are politicians looking to avoid a fight, and want to work "in a bipartisan manner". Republicans declared war on Democrats years and years ago, while Democrats keep trying to "make nice". Democratic politicians have gotten fat and lazy, feathering their own nests while Republicans have made long inroads into furthering corporate interests.

Whether Democrats are inept or corrupt, the result is the same: They have failed to protect the interests of the 99%. And all that they're putting out this campaign season is warmed-over Republican-like policies when drastic populist steps need to be taken.
About Barack Obama 2012
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

15. Appointed Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, the first Latina to ever serve on the bench.

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

Obama's appointments are really nothing to defend. Both Sotomayor and Kagan are to the right of the justices that they replaced (Souter and Stevens).

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/09-0

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/13/kagan

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4074

http://www.theroot.com/views/sotomayor-liberal-enough?page=0,1

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/18/AR2009071801787.html

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2009/07/17/abcs-greenburg-sotomayor-not-liberal-activist-almost-conservative

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-balan/2011/06/28/nprs-totenberg-kagan-sotomayor-not-nearly-liberal-predecessors

http://hispanic9.com/true_to_hispanic_beliefs,_sotomayor_is_not_a_liberal.htm

KEEP READING

About Barack Obama 2012

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

11. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, makes it illegal for employers to pay unequal wages to men and women who perform equal work.

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

No it doesn't.

The Ledbetter Act has nothing to do with "landmark sex discrimination." It has to do with when the clock starts running for filing a very particular kind of lawsuit. It doesn't affect statutes of limitation for any other kind of lawsuit. It doesn't apply to the filing of all lawsuits. It's just for a particular class of lawsuits: For the filing of an equal-pay lawsuit.
About Barack Obama 2012

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

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