truthaction.org

[Scott N]

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles."
- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

[YT]

I'm not in the mood for this bullshit.

[truthmover]

I second that. Bullshit!

And on MLK day, and in light of how important this moment is to so many people of all backgrounds, REGARDLESS OF THE POLITICAL OUTCOME, you come off like a real ass.
_________________
http://911truthburnout.blogspot.com

[chrisc]

[Dem Bruce Lee Stylez!]

People have a lot of hope for this guy, I think he's going to let them down hard. We'll see though I guess....

[Scott N]

[Scott N]

Who is Black America’s Moral Emissary to the World?

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

"Dr. King and Obama represent opposing moral and political camps."

The global reputation of Black America has suffered greatly under George Bush, who deployed Black faces as fronts for his vicious brand of U.S. imperialism. Barack Obama's silence on the Israeli assault on Gaza suggests that his honeymoon with the planet won't last long. So who is to represent the progressive values of African Americans on the world stage? "Thanks to Cynthia McKinney, millions of Arabs have been made aware of a different Black America, one that is not silent, like Barack Obama, in the face of a purposely inflicted human rights catastrophe."

The two days touch: Dr. Martin Luther King's Birthday observance and Barack Obama's presidential inauguration, January 19 and 20, respectively. To many, the juxtaposition is self-evident confirmation of the intersection of the two men's missions on Earth. Dr. King's journey, which ended with his murder, and Obama's ascent to the presidency, are seen to merge as the dates approach to form a perfect, tragic-glorious symmetry - a 48-hour revelation.

The coincidence of the calendar makes for good copy and grand sermons, but in fact reveals a great moral and political dissonance. It is true that there could have been no Obama presidency had Dr. King and the movement he sprang from not existed, but that simple fact of history does not amount to a King benediction from the grave for Obama's moral character and political policies. Indeed, Dr. King's life and words are indelible evidence that he and Obama represent opposing moral and political camps.

Tens of millions of African Americans - who did not choose the little-known Obama to be their champion, but supported him near-universally at the polls once his candidacy had been made "viable" - will celebrate vicarious attainment of power when Obama is sworn in. Yet when confronted on Obama's political agenda, enough of which has been put in motion and otherwise made plain since Election Day, few Black Obama supporters can mount a cogent defense. "Better than McCain" doesn't cut it, anymore.

When the New York Times describes the emerging Obama administration as "center-right," there is not much for an honest progressive to defend - and most African Americans are progressive on economic issues and questions of war and peace. Beyond a ritual counting of the president-elect's African American appointees, most African Americans seem oblivious to the political nature of his Cabinet, his policy pronouncements and shameful silences. More likely, they pretend to be oblivious so as not to lose that once-in-a-lifetime feeling that happened when the Black man won.

Blacks who have taken on the task of defending Obama, often wind up revealing themselves as persons of little moral or political substance, in the process. New York's Dr. Leonard Jeffries is one of the more prominent Obamists, a self-styled Pan-Africanist. In my second debate involving Jeffries, in Baltimore, December 20 (the first was the week before, in Harlem), he repeated his mantra, that Blacks should "study Obama-ology." I asked him to define this area of study. "Obama-ology," said Jeffries, visibly exasperated by my questioning of the obvious, "is the study of Obama. How he raised so much money...how he used the Internet...."

Dr. Jeffries' response revealed his position to have no political or moral content. He genuflected before Obama because the candidate raised hundreds of millions of dollars (from whom and in return for what?) and created an Internet network (to what end, beyond Election Day?). Most importantly, Obama was a hero because he won. What else is there to know or say?

At the Harlem debate, an Obama defender kept shouting into her mic, "Obama won! Black people have spoken!" - as if any discussion of his political positions was extraneous, or racially subversive, on its face. The woman was a leader of the group that organized the debate, but like others in her organization clearly did not really want a debate. None of the Obamites were even minimally capable of defending their guy's record on the bailout, his retention of George Bush's defense secretary and plans to expand U.S. military manpower, his positioning of bankers at the controls of his new administration's economic machinery, his support for AFRICOM, his key advisors' advocacy of "humanitarian" military intervention - on not one point did the Obama camp offer anything that could reasonably be called a defense, coherent or otherwise.

It is not simply that the Obamites failed to muster a defense in Harlem or Baltimore or other venues; admittedly, it is difficult to defend the indefensible. What is most shocking - maddening - is their rejection of any political or moral standard for evaluating the soon-to-be Black president. All that remains is the fact of Obama's power and the delusion that Blacks somehow share in that power. There is no thought of speaking Truth to Power, and certainly no place for a moral compass in such a valueless void.

We can understand, then, how such people would imagine Obama and Dr. King to be soul mates. The fact that one of these men fought his whole life against the forces of militarism and economic exploitation, while the other empowers, and is empowered by, bankers and militarists, does not register on their anaesthetized moral and political sensors.

If the Obamites had more presence of mind, they would avoid comparisons with Dr. King, which can only redound to Obama's great detriment. King's break with his onetime ally, President Lyndon Johnson, set the standard for both political and moral behavior. When it became clear that the War on Poverty was doomed by the war in Vietnam, which acted "like some demonic destructive suction tube," devouring all available resources, King publicly declared against the war. In doing so, he severed what had been the most productive relationship between an American president and a Black leader in U.S. history. But the war gave him no choice, since military expenditures made "rehabilitation" of the American poor impossible. Both morality and politics led to the same conclusion: the Movement could not coexist with war.

The lesson is directly applicable today, but Americans, Black and white, find it difficult to recognize the characters. Obama is Lyndon Johnson. National revitalization, including redress of historical African American grievances, is impossible unless military expenditures are dramatically reduced. But Obama is committed to putting 100,000 new pairs of Marine and Army "boots on the ground," an expanded war in Afghanistan/Pakistan, a beefed up AFRICOM, and a generally bigger U.S. military footprint on the planet. This, in the midst of global economic collapse.

Dr. King would find creative ways to confront President Obama's militarism, and to actively resist further diversion of public wealth to the bankers. Were he to survey the current political scene, King would be most impressed, not with the Obamas party plans for the night after his birthday, but with the way that a daughter of Georgia salvaged Black America's moral reputation at the beginning of Israel's assault on Gaza.

Cynthia McKinney's attempted voyage of solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza on the medical relief boat Dignity, rammed and almost sunk by Israeli warships, reminds the world that not all African Americans have morphed into warmongering clones of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Thanks to the presence of the former Georgia congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate on the mission, millions of Arabs have been made aware of a different Black America, one that is not silent, like Barack Obama, in the face of a purposely inflicted human rights catastrophe.

Cynthia McKinney is Black America's moral emissary to the world. She exemplifies the Black America that consistently opposes U.S. military adventures abroad, a people that recognize organized racism when they see it, and therefore condemn Israel's treatment of Palestinians - the Black America that Martin Luther King came from.

Some of us are still in our right minds. Hopefully, most of the others will recover, sooner rather than later.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

[Scott N]

I disagree with about half of this essay but he has the Obama spectacle pegged. It's times like these I'm thankful for the existence of right-libertarians, even if they're wrong about capitalism.

Inauguration Day, 2009:
A Day of Mourning
For the victims of future wars, and for our old republic
by Justin Raimondo

When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated, he sought to dismantle the evolving Federalist tradition of pomp and circumstance. In a ceremonial sense, royalism seemed to have been restored, or so it appeared to him. As this blogger put it, "Dressed in simple attire, Jefferson walked over to the Capitol with a phalanx of riflemen, friends, and fellow citizens from his home state of Virginia."

In these last days of the American Empire, such austere republicanism would be considered impossibly quaint. Having long ago morphed into Jefferson's worst nightmare, the closer we get to the end, the more glamorous our inaugurals become. The poorer we are, the more millions we'll throw at a ceremony that is really the crowning of a monarch – and not just any old king, but an emperor bestriding the globe.

Appearances must be kept up. Like a bankrupt living on a palatial estate – one step away from foreclosure – we bask in imperial splendor even as the repo man comes knocking at the door.

At a time such as ours, the spectacle of jeweled and gowned courtiers feasting on inaugural canapés is beyond tacky. The Bourbons partied, too, right up to the eve of the French Revolution. Amid all the sounding of trumpets and the hailing of the chief, however, there is something hollow about all this unseemly extravagance.

The Obama cult has imbued our new president with superhuman powers: they expect and enjoy the spectacle. Yet the relentless lionizing of this messianic figure is ironic, because here is an American chief executive who will doubtless become aware of his own limitations rather quickly. America is a bankrupt empire engaged in two overseas wars, with troops on every continent and bases ringing the globe. It's unsustainable, and our ruling elites know it.

The crisis [.pdf] of American state capitalism will consume Obama's presidency until his credibility is reduced to a cinder. The only solution is for the administration to create a new social compact, one in which the government takes not only a major role but the leading role in directing the economic life of the nation. In order to do this, however, a broad coalition is necessary, one that spans – and in a sense transcends – the traditional categories of "Left" and "Right." And this has been a source of Obama's broad appeal: the belief that he is above it all.

Of course, libertarians make the same claim for themselves, yet they do so on ideological grounds. The Obama-ites, on the other hand, disdain all ideology and claim the mantle of pragmatism.

This claim to be non-ideological, and therefore "practical," is a smokescreen for what is clearly an ideology of a very definite sort: it is garden-variety statism, i.e., a belief in the radical extension of governmental power. As in the case of 9/11, when the Bushies launched an invasion of a foreign country in the name of a national "emergency," our economic 9/11 has now become the occasion for a massive invasion of government into the private sector. The nationalization of the banks, the auto industry, and even, it's rumored, the newspaper industry, augur ill for the cause of individual autonomy and for the social base of the Jeffersonian remnant: small business, the middle classes, broadly defined, and the shrinking proportion of the population not entirely dependent on Washington's largess.

In the U.S., the private sector – and I mean this in an ecumenical sense, including the nonprofit and underground sectors – has always been the dominant force in society. The voluntary interactions of consenting adults – the cultural bedrock of our old Republic – have charted the course of the American river, but now the state is directing the flow.

Obama's economic program can be summed up in one word: reflation. Massive government spending, preceded by an orgy of bailouts. Earmarks, which yesterday were anathema, are now presented as a panacea. Spending on this scale requires some degree of bipartisan complicity, but how will Obama get the Republicans to go along? You'll notice he's been courting them rather assiduously, and that's given rise to a whole new brand of "conservatives," the so-called Obamacons.

Most of these were won over on the basis of their growing Bush-hatred, but the rest will come over because of his foreign and military policy. Obama, after all, ran on a platform of increasing an obscenely bloated military budget – misnamed the "defense" budget, but in reality a sum devoted to interfering in the affairs of other nations and peoples on a scale unprecedented by any previous empire. A sum, mind you, more than equal to the military budgets of all other nations on earth combined.

This is the grand bargain that will be struck, the one that will give us guns and butter. The conservatives will be won over by what John T. Flynn described as their "devotion" to "military might." As the economic crisis deepens, military Keynesianism will bring the two parties together, as Flynn foresaw, because "militarism is the one great glamorous public-works project upon which a variety of elements in the community can be brought into agreement." The propaganda of fear will become an economic necessity:

"Inevitably, having surrendered to militarism as an economic device, we will do what other countries have done: we will keep alive the fears of our people of the aggressive ambitions of other countries and we will ourselves embark upon imperialistic enterprises of our own."

Flynn was one of the most trenchant and acerbic critics of FDR, a president Obama is expected to emulate and may even surpass in the sense that the new administration seeks more power than even Roosevelt ever managed to grab. Certainly the current economic turmoil mirrors the 1930s in ways we have only just begun to experience, yet I agree with Katrina vanden Heuvel, who fears Obama may come to resemble a more recent Democratic president: Lyndon Baines Johnson. He, too, gave us guns and butter. He also escalated and prosecuted an overseas war that was increasingly unpopular with the American people – and economically and morally damaging to the United States. It's heartening to hear the editor of the Nation, the premier old-line liberal magazine once edited by Oswald Garrison Villard, swim against the "progressive" tide by publicly worrying Obama will get bogged down in Afghanistan, charge into Pakistan, and wind up being brought down by his own hubris, a quality certainly not lacking in the new administration.

In the age of Obama, what the late, great libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard dubbed the welfare-warfare state will take on gargantuan proportions, just as it did under LBJ, both at home and abroad. This is bad news on every front. An inaugural celebration? Not for me, thank you. I'm going into inaugural mourning: all black to mourn the victims of Obama's wars, and the death of our old republic.
~ Justin Raimondo

[Scott N]

[snowflake]

[Stefan]

This very worth listening to -

Mykal from We Are Change London and Mohsin from We Are Change London and Paris discuss Obama:

http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/31251

[YT]

[Scott N]

Celebrity Pledge of Allegiance to Heir Obama

MySpace Celebrity and Katalyst present The Presidential Pledge


Some great stuff here, like celebrities admonishing you to drive slower so as to reduce greenhouse gas and "P Diddy" demanding you turn off your lights. For Obama. As part of your new "pledge to service".

My reference to "Brazil" above ("suspicion breeds confidence") was prophetic. Video ends by borrowing a line from an actual propaganda poster in that very film -- "we're all in to together" (borrowed, in turn, from a 50's era billboard in the US). It's true, of course, but used in this context the slogan is intended to imply a false unity of class interests under capitalism, therefore reinforcing the dominant paradigm

Obama is the American Dream embodied, a walking, talking swindle of monumental proportions.

As Sut Jhally writes:

"The American Dream is much more than a gentle fantasy, it is the dominant discourse in the U.S. for understanding (or misunderstanding) class. It is a cultural doctrine that encompasses vast tracts of American life. No politician would dare to question our belief in it - any more than they would publicly question the existence of God. Even though politicians of many different persuasions pay lip service to the dream (it is, in conventional wisdom, "what's great about America"), it is not a politically neutral idea. It favors those on the political right that say that anyone, regardless of circumstance, can make it if they try. In such an egalitarian world, the free market delivers a kind of equity, making public intervention and regulation an unnecessary encumbrance. For government to act to eradicate the enormous social problems in the United States is to defy the logic of the dream. Intervention implies, after all, that the system is not naturally fair, and opportunity is not universal.

The American Dream is, in this context, insidious rather than innocent. It is part of a belief system that allows people in the United States to disregard the inequalities that generate its appalling record on poverty, crime, health, homelessness and education. It is not surprising that the more fortunate cling to the self justifying individualism the dream promotes. One of the saddest things about the United States is that sometimes the less fortunate do too.

The ideological dominance of the American Dream is sustained by its massive presence in popular culture. The television and film industries churn out fable after fable, thereby reducing us to a state of spellbound passivity in which decades of stagnating incomes for many Americans have been accepted with little protest. The success we are encouraged to strive for is always linked to the acquisition of goods, a notion fueled by the ubiquitous language of advertising, in which consumers do not usually see themselves in commercials, they see a vision of a glamorous and affluent world they aspire to."

"We're all in it together". Forget about class struggle.

Obama's hero is apparently Abraham Lincoln, who regarded the preservation of the Union (ie a strong central government designed to maintain wealth disparity) as the fundamental purpose of his presidency.

"Much like Soviet-era schoolchildren who were indoctrinated to worship Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, a corpus of 16,000 books on Lincoln conditions Americans to believe that the simple country lawyer from Illinois honorably defended his country and freed a race. His ethereal presence at Obama's inaugural ceremonies, and Obama's copious references to him, reinforce this national mythology.

Indeed, Lincoln was positively clairvoyant about the Leviathan State, and fought to usher it in.

"Lincoln thought of himself as the heir to the Hamiltonian political tradition, which sought a much more centralized governmental system, one that would plan economic development with corporate subsidies and the printing of money by the central government," DiLorenzo writes.

While waging the Civil War, Lincoln turned constitutional rights on their head, imprisoning thousands of Northern citizens without trial (including dozens of newspaper publishers and members of the Maryland legislature), confiscating citizens' firearms and even deporting a member of Congress, Clement Vallandigham, for opposing Lincoln's income tax proposal."

Apparently many progressives are "inspired" by Obama's "call to service". I am creeped out beyond measure.

My only solace is that the "dream" can't help but devolve into the nightmare. The sooner we rich the pit of the downward spiral the sooner we can do away with this silliness. Obama is the last, great white hope of the ruling class, doomed to failure because he believes in a system that doesn't work.

[Scott N]

[chek NI]

It does have a slight tinge of the Pledge macht Frei about it sure enough.

Nevertheless, the man's ability to inspire a (self-promoting) gush from players in the the media and draw what looked like millions onto the streets should not be lightly dismissed by anybody.

We've yet to see what he might do, even if hoping for the best while expecting the worst.