Learn about the important stand being taken today by the Chicago Teacher's Union and what is at stake in Chicago and throughout the country.

Learn about this historic strike by reading, watching, or listening to Democracy Now's ongoing coverage.

Click here for an overview of today's events and the processes that have led up to it.

Click here to watch a VERY infomative interview with education expert and activist Pauline Lipman, which provides lots of political and historical context. Below, I have reproduced the transcript of this excellent interview:

AMY GOODMAN: We’re continuing on the teachers’ strike in Chicago, the largest—well, the first strike in a quarter of a century in the third-largest school district in this country. The mayor is Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff of President Obama.

Pauline Lipman is with us, professor of education and policy studies at University of Illinois, Chicago, also director of the collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education and on the coordinating committee for Teachers for Social Justice.

So, the teachers have just gone out on strike. Professor Lipman, put this in a national context, what this means, what the Chicago strike means for the nation.

PAULINE LIPMAN: Yes, good morning.

As I said in the clip that you showed earlier, Chicago was the birthplace of this neoliberal corporate reform agenda of high-stakes testing, paying teachers based on test scores, closing failing neighborhood—disinvesting in neighborhood schools and then closing them and turning them over to charter schools—the policies that both Phil and Rhoda just described. And it was really a model which was picked up by cities around the country and then made a national agenda when Arne Duncan, who had been the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, became Obama’s secretary of education.

Chicago is now an epicenter of the pushback against it, as I also said before. And very much at the center of that is a new Chicago Teachers Union, with a new leadership that is really challenging this whole agenda with a different vision of education, a vision of education that involves a rich curriculum for all students, that puts equity at the center. They’ve named what these policies have resulted in in Chicago "education apartheid," especially for African-American and also Latino students. So, this is a battle that is being watched by people around the country. And a really strong victory for the Chicago Teachers Union, backed up by parents and community members, will send a signal that we can actually turn around this agenda. So I think it has tremendous significance. And I get the news feeds from the Chicago Teachers Union, the reports of this strike, and it’s being covered not only nationally, but internationally.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Lipman, talk about the current leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union. Talk about Karen Lewis.

PAULINE LIPMAN: Yeah, so, one thing is that, you know, in the corporate media in Chicago, we keep reading about union bosses. Well, the leadership of the teachers’ union are teachers, they’re not union bosses, first of all. Karen Lewis is a National Board certified teacher. She teaches and has been—had been teaching chemistry at Martin Luther King High School on the South Side of Chicago. She is well known in the—by students, former students, other teachers, beloved as a teacher.

She’s part of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, which is a new caucus that really came on the scene just about four or five years ago. But because the previous leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union was really not challenging this whole agenda, CORE acted like the leadership of the union. They fought the school closings that were happening every single year in Chicago. They fought for teachers who were laid off. And rank-and-file teachers, who simply had enough of these policies after just absorbing the punishment for 15 years, overwhelmingly elected Karen and the other leadership team from the CORE caucus.

And I do have to say also that Karen has just been incredibly courageous. She’s been vilified often in the media, and she has stood very firm and in a principled way fighting for the schools that Chicago students deserve.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what this means for the nation, the whole Race to the Top that President Obama has adopted—

PAULINE LIPMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —Arne Duncan coming from Chicago. Explain all of these ties.

PAULINE LIPMAN: Right, right. So, as you said, Arne Duncan was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools. And under his watch in 2004, Chicago launched a policy called Renaissance 2010, which was actually designed by the Commercial Club of Chicago in 2003. The Commercial Club is an organization of the biggest CEOs and bankers in the city, essentially. And Arne Duncan pushed through this agenda of closing neighborhood schools, turning them over to private operators or expanding charter schools and having charter schools come in, and increasingly putting more pressure on teachers to respond to the high-stakes tests that Phil was talking about earlier.

And so, that agenda, which has been really devastating in Chicago and had already been very clearly very devastating in 2008, after four years, was the agenda that Duncan took to Washington when he became secretary of education, and it’s embedded in Race to the Top. So, Race to the Top has a set of provisions that really basically means states are competing for $4.3 billion in federal funds. And in order to get those funds, they must do certain things. And those things are the kinds of things that have been done and have failed and have been devastating in Chicago. They must close failing schools or turn them around, expand charter schools, pass legislation that allows charter schools to be expanded. They must have some kind of evaluation system of teachers that’s tied to testing students. And these policies now are the national agenda.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama famously said in 2007—he said, to unions, "I will walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States."

PAULINE LIPMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you heard from President Obama?

PAULINE LIPMAN: As far—I haven’t heard from him. But as far as I know, the Chicago Teachers Union has not heard from him, either. You know, Rahm Emanuel was his chief of staff, and he’s now the mayor of Chicago. And as maybe our listeners do or don’t know, the mayor appoints the school board in Chicago. And the school board is made up of, again, corporate CEOs, financiers, a hotel magnate, real-estate developers. And part of the agenda of forcing the teachers’ backs up against the wall, I think, is an attempt to actually weaken the Chicago Teachers Union, because the Chicago Teachers Union is not—the new leadership has not only reinvigorated the union in this city, it’s reinvigorating the trade—teachers’ union movement nationally.

It’s really energized—electrified, really—teachers nationally, because this is not a traditional union, and it’s not a traditional labor struggle. It’s a union that has a different vision of education and is fighting for that. It’s a union that’s a social movement union, or trying to be a social movement union, in which it’s very democratic. Their bargaining team is made up—includes 40 rank-and-file members of the CTU. And it has energized the rank and file. So I was at the strike headquarters yesterday, and there were just hundreds of teachers showing up to pick up picket signs, talking about the issues. It’s not just Karen Lewis and her leadership that are leading this union; it’s the rank and file that are leading that union. And that is—

AMY GOODMAN: There’s going to be a large rally today at 3:00?

PAULINE LIPMAN: There is. There is. There’s going to be a rally from 3:30 to 6:00 at the CPS headquarters, and I’m sure there will be thousands of people. It will not just be teachers. It will certainly be parents and students and community members, as well, because there is—have been really strong ties built between the teachers’ union and community organizations, because they fought together with communities against school closings and for the schools our children deserve. And so, we’re expecting a really large rally, that—I’m expecting a really large rally, and I think parents and teachers are, as well, to really send a message to Rahm Emanuel that Chicago Public Schools—and he’s really behind it—that they really need to give in to the demands of the teachers and have better working conditions for teachers and better learning conditions for students.

AMY GOODMAN: How long do you expect this to go on, the strike to go on, Professor Lipman?

PAULINE LIPMAN: You know, that’s a really good question, and I certainly don’t have a crystal ball. I think a very strong showing on the part of the public backing up the teachers, who are very solid—as you know, 98 percent of the teachers in the union voted to authorize the strike. So, a very strong, solid showing, I think, should send a message to city hall that they need to settle this. But, you know, Rahm Emanuel is very unpredictable, so we don’t know.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, Pauline Lipman, professor of education and policy studies at—

PAULIN LIPMAN: Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: —the University of Illinois, Chicago, also director of the Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education at the university, and she’s on the coordinating committee for Teachers for Social Justice. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

Who (or what) the hell is that?

OK, so I'm happy that Obama is going to get his treaty with Russia ratified and everything, but you'll forgive me if I'm distracted by this prominently placed photo of someone—or something—that is just begging to be put out of its misery.

Turns out it's Senator Jon Kyl, among the GOP Senators who were plotting to prevent the ratification of any treaty that might decrease the world's stockpile of nukes. Way to go, you Leering, Creepy Ogre-Faced Old Coot. You bang that table with your fist. "I DON'T WANNA LEAVE A SAFER, LESS INSANE/DANGEROUS WORLD FOR MY CHILDREN/CHILDREN'S CHILDREN." Does he even have opposable thumbs? (Maybe he's just waiting for someone to shove a big fat banana in that gruesomely shriveled ogre-mouth of his.)

According to the Times article:

Eleven Republicans joined every Democrat present to support the treaty, known as New Start, which now heads to a seemingly certain final vote of approval on Wednesday, as the Senate wraps up business before heading out of town. Voting against the treaty were 28 Republicans who argued that it could hurt national security. [...]

Republican opponents continued to hammer away at the treaty, arguing that its verification procedures were inadequate and that nonbinding language in its preamble could give Russia leverage to try to keep the United States from deploying missile defense installations in Eastern Europe. They said Russia got more out of the treaty than the United States.

“The administration did not negotiate a good treaty,” Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican, told reporters. “They went into negotiations, it seems to me, with the attitude with the Russians just like the guy that goes into the car dealership and says, ‘I’m not leaving here until I buy a car.’” [emphasis added....—cft]

Seriously, get a closer look at this sideshow spectacle!

Kafka couldn't have made this guy up! (OK, maybe Kafka could have, but few others.)

Journalist Dan Kennedy on Obama's "shameful" war on Wikileaks.

Boston-based journalist and blogger Dan Kennedy contributed a characteristically lucid and well-reasoned commentary to his occasional column in the UK's The Guardian last Thursday. Kennedy is a left-leaning veteran of the all-but-extinct profession of journalism.

One of the hallmarks of Kennedy's work is that his analysis of facts is always dispassionate and informed by historical context. Of particular relevance here is his knowledge of the history of journalism and the first amendment, and their relation 'state secrets'. He does a great job of articulating what is at stake in the White House's participation in, or rather, coordination of, the hysterical effort to vilify and prosecute Assange:

President Obama has decided to pursue a dangerous strategy that could cause irreparable harm to freedom of the press as we know it. According to Charlie Savage of the New York Times, Attorney General Eric Holder is investigating the possibility of prosecuting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in connection with the 250,000 diplomatic cables stolen – according to the government – by army private Bradley Manning.

By longstanding first amendment tradition, third parties such as news organisations — even an unconventional one like WikiLeaks — are not prosecuted for publishing leaked material, even if the person who gave it to them broke the law. So, Holder is working on the theory that WikiLeaks "colluded" with Manning, acting not as a passive recipient, but as an active participant in persuading Manning to give up the goods.

The problem is that there is no meaningful distinction to be made. How did the Guardian, equally, not "collude" with WikiLeaks in obtaining the cables? How did the New York Times not "collude" with the Guardian when the Guardian gave the Times a copy following Assange's decision to cut the Times out of the latest document dump?

For that matter, I don't see how any news organisation can be said not to have colluded with a source when it receives leaked documents. Didn't the Times collude with Daniel Ellsberg when it received the Pentagon Papers from him?

[...]

Almost since his inauguration nearly two years ago, Barack Obama has been disappointing liberals, whether it's through his half-measures on the economy and healthcare, his continued pursuit of unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or his failure to close Guantánamo, the very symbol of Bush-era overreach. Some of those complaints are overwrought. Politics is the art of the possible, and Obama can justifiably claim to have done what's possible in the face of Republican intransigence and the sheer difficulties of what he has faced.

By contrast, the White House's legal war against WikiLeaks is a shameful assault on our guarantee of free speech and a free press. It's ironic that after two years of bogus claims from the right that Obama is dismantling the constitution, now that he really is, the only people who seem to care are on the left.

This is a rare sounding-of-the-alarm from an experienced and sober-minded journalist who really knows what he's talking about.

Hyperlink: David David Petraeus Petraeus

The blog PhuckPolitics.com makes an elegant observation: at present, General David Petraeus is serving a public relations function on behalf of the Obama Administration's Afghanistan strategy that bears an uncanny resemblance to the public relations function he once served on behalf of the Bush Administration's Iraq strategy.

Read Obama’s Afghanistan full court press.

Harper's piece on "The Vanishing Liberal."

Frequent Harper's contributor Kevin Baker—who, according to his byline, is actually a novelist—has a couple of great things to say in an essay in the magazine's April issue (which non-subscribers like Your Humble Blogger will simply have to go out and buy in order to read). The essay's subtitle—"How the left learned to be helpless."—is somewhat misleading, or in any event insufficiently specific. Let's face it, the contention that the left is helpless can in and of itself be said to be controversial only in the sense that it assumes that the left exists. 

What's important about Baker's argument as regards this helplessness is the comparison he posits between today's thoroughgoingly lost and disillusioned left—a group among which I suppose most normal (or even semi-normal) people under the age of 40 must by definition count ourselves—and its intellectual and spiritual forbears in American history: the Populist and and the Progressive movements. Those movements, for all of their flaws, had gravitas. Vitality. Rocks. You get the picture.

It should not be surprising that contemporary left/liberalism/whatever pales in comparison to those often quite radical historical movements. But what's nice is that Baker's piece offers more than the usual woe-is-us routine.

(Not that it's bad to say "woe is us." It's actually necessary for us to say it. However, the usual plodding, overlong and doom-and-gloom-laden fare does tend to get annoying. For example, see the final rant that now-former Harper's Editor-in-Chief Roger Hodge contributed to the magazine before he was—shockingly, and in an ominous sign for the mag's future, as Hodge was an intelligent and ballsy editor—sacked.)

Instead of simply throwing up his hands in despair (although he does do that), Baker threads together a political-historical narrative that serves as a call for genuine grassroots action of an order that we've not seen in this country in generations. He sets the scene by lamenting the fact that President Barack Obama,

[o]ne of the most charismatic politicians of his time, a man who was able to raise the most money and draw the biggest crowds in American political history has apparently decided that his new job is to fluff up the generals and bankers and politicians who not very long ago were in panicked disarray. Armchair psychologists from the Maureen Dowd school of political commentary like to analyze this conversion in terms of the elusive personality of Obama himself. Others prefer to dwell on the surprising ineptitude of his administration. And some simply accept his about-face in terms of the political exigencies of an essentially conservative nation, concluding wistfully that Obama is confronted by so many barriers to change—Republican obstructionism, the treachery of this or that Democratic senator, the nature of the Constitution itself—that the country is now ungovernable.

All of which may be true. But it only skims the surface of a greater tidal shift, one that has little to do with Obama himself and in fact has inundated the whole of our democratic process. This shift, which is subtle and has been many years in the making, might best be understood by considering a design underlying many of the interrogation techniques we employ at the (still-unclosed) prison at Guantánamo or at the black sites we still maintain, wherever they are. That is, bringing about the state known as learned helplessness.

The expression dates from a famous set of experiments by Martin Seligman some forty years ago, in which he found that dogs exposed to repeated and seemingly random electric shocks eventually stopped trying to escape those shocks, even when they could very easily do so. This insight gave rise to “no touch” torture, pioneered in large part by the CIA, whose efforts to “break” prisoners involved all manner of techniques, from the unsavory to the absurd, such as depriving prisoners of sleep for weeks on end, bombarding them with ear-splitting noises, exposing them to extreme heat and cold, shackling them in “stress positions,” tying bras to their heads, making them bark like dogs, and waterboarding them. There is no evidence that such practices enhance the odds that prisoners will provide more useful information to interrogators. It is well established, though, that they will make prisoners docile, and so the techniques remain popular.

For decades now, as our public discourse in general has become more scattered, random, and irrational, Republicans—funded by corporate and other elites in the private sector—have stunned Democrats with absurdist attacks that have proved to be effective at garnering votes and, more important in the long term, at hampering Democrats even when they hold the majority. Democrats have been reduced to a state of psychological helplessness, one in which any political obstacles—ranging from the prevarications of stalking horses like Senators Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, to the plaintive cries of the tea-baggers out in the streets, to the sterner demands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Big Pharma—are transformed into insurmountable organic obstacles.

We have learned to be helpless. And in this state of political depression, it no longer matters how many elections liberals win for the Democrats, or how badly Republican, right-wing policies fail or how much damage they do to the country or the world. There is simply no way to do anything differently.

Such hapless fatalism is, of course, in direct opposition to every tenet of American liberalism, which is rooted in the idea that human agency is still possible in the modern world—that democratic action can make a difference when ranged against vast, impersonal forces and supposedly immutable “laws” of human society. Liberalism’s antecedents lie in one nineteenth-century rebellion after another—against laissez-faire capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, Social Darwinism, and other efforts to transmute political dispositions into irrefutable “social science.” American voters of the time were regularly assured by authoritative voices that “hard money” was an indispensable economic principle; that women, people of color, and many varieties of European immigrant were inherently inferior; that any attempts to regulate the “natural” workings of the economy, even private charity, would thwart human progress because they interfered with the culling of those who, in Herbert Spencer’s description, were not “sufficiently complete to live.

[...]

And so we arrive at the present moment, in which the people are not asked to do anything. The fine words and able presentation of Obama, whether delivered at West Point or on Wall Street or in the well of the House of Representatives, obscure the fact that they are subtle parodies of a century of liberal argument. Whereas the Populists’ soapbox lecturers or the Progressives’ magazine exposés or FDR in his radio “fireside chats” explained the way of the world to the people and argued for why and how that way must change, Obama—like most Democratic leaders—concedes that the way of the world is wrong but tells us why it must stay that way because, some time in the past, powerful interests decreed it so.

[...]

Now, to be sure, there are problems with Baker's narrative—especially as regards sympathies within some manifestations of historical Progressivism itself toward Social Darwinism and other 'social scientistic' gobbledygook that he ignores completely—but no matter. It's worth a read. And one of its themes—the notion that human beings can and/or should always work to improve the world in which we live, to make it more fair and just, etc.—is a very interesting one about which I intend to say more in the near future. Specifically, I think there are some important details of this Enlightenment spirit that a rejuvenated left-populism needs to get right intellectually and rhetorically.

Succinct, thorough explanation of economic crisis & why Obama can't & won't reform the system.

If you want a succinct explanation of why the economy went south and why Obama's hands are tied to do anything about the outrageous unemployment levels in this country, I encourage you to watch this interview with Yves Smith, who is the brilliant, no-bullshit brains behind the blog Naked Capitalism.

The interview, which appeared on the Canada-based Business News Network, and which begins at about the 5:00 minute mark of the linked segment, also provides insight into the facilitating role performed by mainstream economists since as early as 1980, in inventing, espousing and legitimating the phony, casuistic, and rhetorically scientistic rationale for pursuing economic policies that precipitated the crisis.

She furthermore comes right out and says it: the Obama Administration can't and won't reform our broken financial system because it is beholden to Wall Street. According to Ms. Smith, Obama received more campaign funding from the financial services industry than any previous presidential candidate (adjusted for inflation, etc., presumably).

Obama's financial advisers are, as we all know, the same dudes who escalated the crisis in the first place. They also were among the 'experts' to give the guilty policies their gloss of scientism. But it doesn't really matter who they are, because no 'expert' -- no matter how glossy his gloss, no matter how dizzyingly rational-seeming and science-evoking his numbers and graphs -- can match the heft and gravitas of the thunderous basso profundo of the Almighty American Dollar.

Ms. Smith has written a book that looks interesting -- I mean, considering that it's economics and everything -- called, Econned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Damaged Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism. She's smart, and we like her here at Crib From This.

Obama's memorial address at Fort Hood (& a brief excursus on how cable news isn't news).

Since I don't have cable and wouldn't watch cable news even if I could, I'm not familiar with exactly what idiotic statements from the Washington DC political mercenaries led Time magazine's David von Drehle to decry the idiotic framing and commentary with which "television culture" obscured the immediacy and impact of Obama's Fort Hood address.

While I'm certain that von Drehle is telling the truth, maybe it's time someone suggested to him just not watching cable news. It isn't -- after all -- news, is it?

I'm not bragging, by the way, about the fact that I don't watch cable news. I'm just saying: Cable news is a perfectly valid form of entertainment, of distraction from the headaches of quotidian reality, and I just happen to prefer other forms of distraction. Like playing my antique zithers and fucking.

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, Obama's address was a truly exceptional and praiseworthy bit of speechifying. And it appears that lots of others -- like Slate's John Dickerson -- agree with me:

[...]

These men and women came from all parts of the country. Some had long careers in the military. Some had signed up to serve in the shadow of 9/11. Some had known intense combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some cared for those did. Their lives speak to the strength, the dignity and the decency of those who serve, and that is how they will be remembered.

That same spirit is embodied in the community here at Fort Hood, and in the many wounded who are still recovering. In those terrible minutes during the attack, soldiers made makeshift tourniquets out of their clothes. They braved gunfire to reach the wounded, and ferried them to safety in the backs of cars and a pick-up truck.

One young soldier, Amber Bahr, was so intent on helping others that she did not realize for some time that she, herself, had been shot in the back. Two police officers - Mark Todd and Kim Munley - saved countless lives by risking their own. One medic - Francisco de la Serna - treated both Officer Munley and the gunman who shot her.

It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know - no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. And for what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice - in this world, and the next.

These are trying times for our country. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the same extremists who killed nearly 3,000 Americans continue to endanger America, our allies, and innocent Afghans and Pakistanis. In Iraq, we are working to bring a war to a successful end, as there are still those who would deny the Iraqi people the future that Americans and Iraqis have sacrificed so much for.

As we face these challenges, the stories of those at Fort Hood reaffirm the core values that we are fighting for, and the strength that we must draw upon. Theirs are tales of American men and women answering an extraordinary call - the call to serve their comrades, their communities, and their country. In an age of selfishness, they embody responsibility. In an era of division, they call upon us to come together. In a time of cynicism, they remind us of who we are as Americans.

We are a nation that endures because of the courage of those who defend it. We saw that valor in those who braved bullets here at Fort Hood, just as surely as we see it in those who signed up knowing that they would serve in harm's way.

We are a nation of laws whose commitment to justice is so enduring that we would treat a gunman and give him due process, just as surely as we will see that he pays for his crimes.

We are a nation that guarantees the freedom to worship as one chooses. And instead of claiming God for our side, we remember Lincoln's words, and always pray to be on the side of God.

We are a nation that is dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are created equal. We live that truth within our military, and see it in the varied backgrounds of those we lay to rest today. We defend that truth at home and abroad, and we know that Americans will always be found on the side of liberty and equality. That is who we are as a people.

[...]

Link: Frontline's "The Warning" will detail the roles of Rubin, Greenspan, Summers & Geithner in enabling financial crisis.

More information and "sneak peak" video hyperlinks can be found at the blog DownWithTyranny,

whose author writes:

[...] Tonight at 9PM PBS is debuting The Warning by Mark Kirk. I heard him being interviewed on the radio this morning. It promises to be a blockbuster of a program and if you ever wonder how all these highly paid smart guys dragged the whole country-- if not much of the world-- into ruin, you really ought to try to watch. Kirk's goal is to open the black box and unearth "the hidden history of the nation's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression." [...]

Well, here's to hoping that Obama will turn out to be a Theodore Roosvelt, not a Henry Kissinger.

Does this look like a man who spent his time thinking: What are my political opponents going to say about the fact that I have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?? I mean, all I've done is negotiate one lousy peace between Russia and Japan, and other than that, I've busted some trusts and before that I rode around on horseback a lot.

President Barack Obama's not the first person -- and certainly not the first American -- to receive the Nobel Peace Prize without really having "done anything" to deserve it.

I'd take that any day over 1925's banker/soon-to-be-vice president-of-the-US Charles G. Dawes version, in which you win the coveted prize for doing something that seems in the short-term to hold the promise of peace but that a couple of years later clearly has had basically no success whatsoever in preserving peace.

 

And I'd even prefer 1925's Charles G. Dawes version to 1973's Henry Kissinger version, in which an arrogant liar and war criminal who has respect neither for the rule of law nor for human life takes home the medal for bringing to an end a war that he thereafter goes on to extend for years (for reasons of prestige, despite the resulting escalation in the loss of life on an unimaginable scale...).

Washington DC's professional chatterers like Slate's John Dickerson are the only people who are getting their undies in a bundle about Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. Whatever the Republicans try to throw, it ain't gonna stick. Nobody -- whether she likes Obama or not -- will change her position as much as an inch in one direction or the other because of winning the damn Nobel Peace Prize.

Anyone whose day is made because of Obama's win -- and apparently, internationally (especially in the Third World) there are lots of such people -- is going to celebrate it, and -- as usual -- nobody gives a shit what the GOP's Southern Meathead Brigade has to say about it.

Wow.

The blog Phuck Politics has brought to our attention the existence of a shocking but intelligently produced and enlightening video document of the so-called "9/12 Tea Party" protests in Washington DC. The video was created by something called New Left Media, and I'm telling you that it's worth watching.

For one thing, it's not just shocking but really really funny.



And also: infuriating. And also: sad.

One of the things that I think makes this video so excellent and informative is its tone and pacing. It has a distinct and consistent editorial voice, but this voice is not intrusive or partisan. Moreover, although ruthlessly candid, it does not go out of its way to mock or condescend to its subjects. This reflects good editorial judgment in that the subjects do a more than adequate job of hanging themselves with their own noose.

An effect of this good editorial judgment is that this piece manages to do more than simply give the viewer a headache. It actually reveals the confusion and ignorance of the vast majority of the protesters. While this doesn't necessarily make them sympathetic characters, it does leave you with a strong sense of the forces/interests that are misleading them and profiting off of their ignorance, their lack of education and their general superstitiousness.

Sure, these rednecks are dumb as rocks, but that's not what I find most frightening. What I find most frightening is that they lack common sense.

Obama: the bargain, the moment of truth and health care.

I've been asked by one of our favorite readers if I might weigh in as to my thoughts on President Obama's health care speech of last Wednesday. Here's my long-winded (but I hope not pedantic or, uh, boring...) reply.

In approaching the health care address, as in approaching all things Obama-related, I divide my assessments into two distinct categories: (1) substantive and (2) operational.

By the first category, I mean, you know, the content: What does it say as a matter of pure policy?, etc., etc. By the second, I refer to the impact and significance that the speech would appear to have operationally, specifically with respect to its embeddedness within salient and underlying political contingencies and discourses.

Some background for my thinking:

Obama differs from other presidents of my lifetime in that he has, in fact, managed to surprise me by occasionally saying something so smart and incisive that it strikes me as something more than simply operational or tactical. In fact, I'm convinced that that's what made Obama appealing to people on the left in the first place: At his best, he offers us much-needed relief from the interminable Samuel Beckett-speak of 20th Century Presidential Personae -- cant that has been particularly excruciating over the course of the previous four presidencies.

Obama speaks and thinks in a way that makes sense to us: It's partly a generational/demographic thing, and it's partly a matter of sheer charisma. It's could even be bollocks: he's got them. (Bollocks are testicles, kiddies.) Not compared to Theodore Roosevelt, maybe, but compared to pretty much any president since JFK. Of course, considering the competition, that's maybe not saying a whole lot...

I remember during the presidential primaries or something, I was explaining to my friend what I thought was actually potentially fresh and worthwhile about Obama, and I phrased it this way:

If you're not going to go out there and actively work to usher in The Revolution, then Obama's your man. In other words: OK, if you want to vote for Kucinich, do it. if you want to vote for Nader, do it. (I did that once and have no regrets.) I applaud you. If you want to start a new, intelligent leftish political movement, then go for it. God knows, we could use something like that. These are worthwhile and commendable projects.

But, I continued, if not -- i.e., if you're going to participate in the political system, warts (of which there are many) and all -- then Obama represents the closest thing to a genuinely progressive force that the political system can in fact, in this moment and time, successfully produce. Vote for Obama, and you'll know that at least you're supporting without a doubt the best thing that our tattered, and bought-and-sold-many-times-over political system can deliver.

Obama was and is NOT Dennis Kucinich. He's not Ralph Nader, and he's not Jimmy Carter. That is part of the point of Obama being Obama: He's not a lost cause and doesn't represent lost causes. He's a winner. He's one of the Beautiful People, with all of the good and bad that comes along with that.

Obama can and does play ball with the big boys. He is and always has been a political realist, and he sold himself to us as a political realist. He beat the Clintons not just because he represented a superior political vision (which he did, by an infinitesimal degree of difference), but because he out-smarted the Clintons.

It wasn't just luck that turned John McCain's campaign into such a disaster: It was the Obama campaign's tactical superiority: Out-flanking your opponent, faking him out, making him sweat over -- and waste money in -- the wrong state at the wrong time, by deliberately sending misleading signals about your own campaign's concerns.

Within a day of the McCain campaign's having trotted out Sarah Palin (as I remarked on that occasion), it dawned upon me: the Republicans are throwing the election.

In retrospect, it seems clear to me that part of the reason this happened is because the Obama campaign forced them into retreating. And: prevailing rhetoric and received wisdom aside, the GOP is still in retreat, if not chaos.

The trouble is that Obama's victory meant -- and means -- that those of us on the left who brought him to office would have to come face-to-face with the limitations of our screwed up and corrupt system, limitations that we didn't really have to face up to in the same way when we were toiling under the tyranny of the Bush/Cheney cabal. With those guys, we could take out our frustration on the other side, for stealing elections. We could decry the stupidity and self-centeredness of the idiots who actually preferred those asshole to Gore or Kerry (not that we loved those guys either...), who at least could speak in complete sentences.

It seems perverse to put it this way, but in Bush/Cheney, we had on our hands a fine distraction that was from the real culprits of the demise of the United States: our nightmare of a de-funded public infrastructure, the menace of neoliberalism and public-private partnerships, a completely unregulated financial sector, masses of political and economic capital concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, the deterioration of the trustworthy news and information (not that we ever had much of that...), the calcification of class, status and racial divisions, a powerful neoconservative lobby, etc., etc., etc....

And so, entirely contrary to the conventional wisdom about Obama being a man who delivers pretty speeches, all form and no substance, for the first time in a long time we have a president who -- for better and, undoubtedly, for worse -- is something more than merely a symbol: He embodies the limited reach of the political left. Or, rather: Obama is the closest thing we have and can have to left-minded president.

And the ugly thing that nobody wants to face up to is that "the left" by this definition -- that is, the left, insofar as the left subsists in the realm of the possible -- is not very damn far left. It is to this phenomenon that I am referring with the titular "moment of truth."

It is this structural limitation that we see embodied in Obama. For a president is more than merely a man: he is a nexus of powerful political and financial interests. Just look at how people become president, what processes make it possible.

Presidents must, of necessity, be products of the status quo. Whether or not they are able (like the aforementioned Teddy Roosevelt and a few others), over the course of their tenure in the Oval Office, to become an active force in transcending or transforming the very status quo that produced them is a function of innumerable factors that lie outside of the control of a single man, and even outside of the control -- contrary to the view favored by conspiracy theorists -- of any single group of interested parties.

In any event, it is the left of -- appallingly -- Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, of Arne Duncan and the Clintons and Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. I mean, that's what passes for the left.

But people who get mad at Obama for this fact -- as we all do -- are wasting their energy, and they are pointing their finger at the wrong person. Obama is exactly what he said he was and exactly what we knew he would be. Even if we didn't know we knew it.

Sometimes it's not an easy thing to digest. Obama's not a hypocrite. To the extent that anyone has expected Obama's political program to be genuinely progressive, she has been kidding herself.

And so, anyway, that brings us back to Wednesday's health care speech. Here's what I thought: Substantively, it contained the inevitable disappointments and a few very positive developments. On the disappointment side, it seemed pretty eager to chuck the so-called "public option," but that was all but sure to happen. And anyway, I'm not all that convinced it makes much of a difference, considering that the government already owns all sorts of stuff that it doesn't own "on paper," like the big banks and the auto industry. So, when it comes down to it, what difference does it make what it's "called"? Now, being the tenacious opponent of neoliberalism that I am, I reserve the right to change my mind on that one, if, let's say, all health care is going to end up being "left to the market to...urm...solve." But even were that the case it wouldn't be anything new: It describes precisely the horrible non- system that we have now. Other substantive disappointments include Obama's continued pandering to senior citizens -- although somewhat less shamelessly than on previous occasions -- and that inevitable fact that Obama had to make a point of declaring a policy of 'fiscal prudence', especially as regards the federal deficit, which was politically a necessary move, but is also as far as I'm concerned completely bogus (like all claims within the bogus field of economics).

Substantively speaking, the best -- or most encouraging -- thing about the speech in my opinion had to do with the fact that it went some way toward framing health insurance reform in moral terms, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the Alpha and Omega of the health care issue. But, hey, that's me.

More important was that the speech was, operationally speaking, a bit of a masterstroke, as far as I'm concerned. As I've mentioned in the past, I'm fairly certain that the whole right-wing circus show of last month -- a.k.a., neo-Nazis at town hall meetings -- was something that the Obama administration and the Dems generally not only welcomed but allowed to crest (and then some!).

In the grand scheme of things, this 'August strategy' has served Obama and the Dems well in that it has:

1. linked perceptions of any putative 'Republican position' on health care to the handiwork of the Southern Racist Right,
   
   
2. galvanized the Democratic base through its visceral, disgusted reaction to the aforementioned SRR, and
   
   
3. fostered the commonsense presumption among 'mainstream Americans' (read: the upper-middle class suburban people who voted Obama into office in the first place and on whose support his health care agenda turns) that opposition to any moderate-yet-ambitious (read: Obamian) reform measure is identified primarily with people who are 'outside the mainstream' (read: poor, uneducated white trash, with whom upper-middle class suburbanites do not wish to be identified [and who pay their high property taxes for this very reason!]).

Therefore, the reason I think Obama's speech was an operational masterstroke has a great deal to do with its timing. The right-wing cant had escalated marvelously. A healthcare reform opponent performed a Heil Hitler salute in response to an Israeli man's impassioned advocacy of reform. Banners displaying images of Barack Obama with a Hitler mustache superimposed upon his upper-lip. The (hilarious) Barney Frank thing. Anti-reform protesters wielding loaded firearms in the vicinity of the President of the United States.

It had all lingered just long enough at its vomit-inducing stage, and Obama, who has been holding back and eluding the spotlight -- "But, Mr. President: your poll numbers!" -- and at the perfect moment, does a commendable job of delivering what might stand as among the skilled rhetorician's most-impressive-yet feats of oratory:

That large-heartedness -- that concern and regard for the plight of others -- is not a partisan feeling. It's not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character -- our ability to stand in other people's shoes; a recognition that we are all in this together, and when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand; a belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgment that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.

This has always been the history of our progress. In 1935, when over half of our seniors could not support themselves and millions had seen their savings wiped away, there were those who argued that Social Security would lead to socialism, but the men and women of Congress stood fast, and we are all the better for it. In 1965, when some argued that Medicare represented a government takeover of health care, members of Congress -- Democrats and Republicans -- did not back down. They joined together so that all of us could enter our golden years with some basic peace of mind.

You see, our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem. They understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can be exploited. And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter -- that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

That was true then. It remains true today. I understand how difficult this health care debate has been. I know that many in this country are deeply skeptical that government is looking out for them. I understand that the politically safe move would be to kick the can further down the road -- to defer reform one more year, or one more election, or one more term.

But that is not what the moment calls for. That's not what we came here to do. We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it. I still believe we can act even when it's hard. (Applause.) I still believe -- I still believe that we can act when it's hard. I still believe we can replace acrimony with civility, and gridlock with progress. I still believe we can do great things, and that here and now we will meet history's test.

Because that's who we are. That is our calling. That is our character. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

I'm just as cynical as the next man, but I must say, this is some quality stuff.

If nothing else, it makes the Fox News thugs look one-foot-tall.*


________________
* In addition, that is, to sounding -- and being -- dumb.

Analysis of Obama's health care address.

I've been laboring over a couple of posts that will probably never see the light of day because they're too meandering and/or abstruse (even by my usual standards). So that's why I haven't posted anything in a few days. Anyway. So,

Sean Quinn of FiveThirtyEight.com has written a cogent analysis of President Obama's Wednesday night address before a joint session of Congress on the subject of new health care legislation:

My initial reaction to reading and then watching President Obama’s speech last night was that it was a very strong speech, one even more effectively delivered than written. There were two notable “show, don’t tell” moments that I thought were particularly helpful on the President’s behalf.

First was the high-profile, notorious Joe Wilson moment, a serious breach of decorum (in the U.S.) that served to underscore the exact point Obama had been making: we’d like to have a substantive contribution from Republicans, not the lying – his word – histrionic nihilism we’ve been seeing. Cue Joe Wilson with lying histrionics. Well done, Joe. It pissed people off, made a money-bomb for his opponent Ron Miller, and was similar to the way Dems (although certainly not Republicans) reacted to Sarah Palin’s acid floor speech at the convention on Sept 2, 2008. We saw the few Republicans who were in field offices last year motivated by Palin’s presence on the ticket but not McCain’s; we also saw many more people showing up to Obama offices in part galvanized by opposition to her sneering speech (and overall Palinosity).

The second “show, don’t tell” moment was the one on the issue of tort reform that Republicans hold dear. When Obama mentioned this subject and suggested a practical approach that accounted for across-the-aisle concerns, Republicans cheered. Obama continued, engaged by their cheering, and within his body language and tone of voice it struck me that he seemed to have shifted into live negotiation rather than a one-way speech. Optically, it was a show of good faith that seemed to give truth to his offer of open-doorism. It was a visceral, good guy, higher ground moment.

Read the rest of Quinn's piece here.

And here's a decent reflection in Salon.com.

Robert Reich speaks the truth.

You remember him, right? He was Secretary of Labor under Clinton, and represented the sensible (Leftier) wing of that administration. In his blog, Reich advises us on How To Fight Heathcare Fearmongers and Demagogues.

Why are these meetings brimming with so much anger? Because Republican Astroturfers have joined the same old right-wing broadcast demagogues that have been spewing hate and fear for years, to create a tempest.

But why are they getting away with it? Why aren't progressives -- indeed, why aren't ordinary citizens -- taking the meetings back?

Mainly because there's still no healthcare plan. All we have are some initial markups from several congressional committees, which differ from one another in significant ways. The White House is waiting to see what emerges from the House and Senate before insisting on what it wants, maybe in conference committee.

But that's the problem: It's always easier to stir up fear and anger against something that's amorphous than to stir up enthusiasm for it.

I have been thinking and saying this a hundred billion times lately. Particularly after news leaked of the administration's icky deal with Big Pharma, in the absence of a guarnatee that there will be a public health insurance option as a part of the plan, how the hell can anyone get enthusiastic about the plan? Other than in a negative direction against the fearmongering thugs?

Anyway, Reich's commentary is definitely worth reading in its entirety.

HYPOCRITES!! (Part II): Health care, Medicare Part D and generational politics.

At the conclusion of Part I of this discussion, I mentioned the hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of Republicans who oppose a public health insurance option, yet have nothing negative to say about Medicare and Social Security, which, when combined with Medicaid, represent by far the most expensive government entitlement programs currently in existence.

The Republicans, like the Democrats, would never be caught opposing these unfunded programs because they are massively popular with the most active and influential sectors of the electorate: the elderly. As the Baby Boomers continue to age -- and increasingly bottleneck the system -- this popularity of these programs is unlikely to decline.

So, somehow, these government-administered entitlements do not get mentioned in the same breath as Congressional/Obamian health insurance reform when hard-Right ideologues and thugs hit the pavement or spread lies over the Internet about death panels and whatnot.

Thing is: Many of those who decry health reform as "socialistic" are themselves willing and continuing recipients of Medicare and Social Security Benefits. Thus, I should like suggest that these people are a bunch of crusty old self-centered whiners and liars, and that we ought to declare a generational war!

Doesn't it shame them that they would deny to succeeding generations the same entitlements from which they themselves have benefited, from the Social Security Act to the GI Bill to Medicare to Medicaid, up to and including the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit for those 65 years of age and older that was passed, without funding and in between the two largest tax cuts for the wealthy ever to be passed into law?

Nothing -- including military spending! -- even comes close to the costliness of these programs. Apparently, Americans 65 and older are simply more deserving of this bounty than those of my generation. My generation, by contrast, has been weathering an inhospitable economic and educational environment. Ours is an age in which the notion of class mobility has long been a cruel joke. Our experience is one of the accumulation of debts, of forgoing health insurance, of meager opportunities.

I'm not arguing that the Great Depression was a walk in the park. I am, however, arguing that, in the wake of the Social Security Act, the radical expansion of opportunities for higher education represented in the GI Bill and in the proliferation of colleges and universities in order to accommodate the Baby Boom, the United States enjoyed a sustained period of economic, social and cultural progress.

Anyway, in my limited experience with such things, the clearest, most objective and most focused discussion of the recent political-historical context of Republican flip-flopping on government-coordinated public health insurance plans is contained in a recent episode of the PBS series Frontline, titled: Ten Trillion and Counting. (You may wish to click here for a link to streaming video of the entire episode, which is well worth your time.)

The piece actually tackles the subject of the United States' skyrocketing national debt. but its discussion of George W. Bush's passage of Medicare Part D -- sandwiched between the passage of the two largest tax cuts for the wealthy in United States history -- could not be more relevant to our present discussion. Here is that section of the episode:



Here's part of the transcript:

FORREST SAWYER: It finally passed by five votes.
[on camera] Why would a small government conservative initiate a program that is so massive?
JACKIE CALMES, The New York Times: Politics.
FORREST SAWYER: What do you mean?
JACKIE CALMES: There's no group that votes at the rate and in the numbers as those over 55, and 65 and over certainly. And Democrats, as well as Republicans, want to please seniors, and that's why our entire budget is tilted towards programs for seniors.
FORREST SAWYER: [voice-over] The reason that the Bush administration could pass Medicare part D was that the Republican Congress in 2002 had let a rule called "pay as you go" lapse. It was a rule established by the first President Bush and a Democratic Congress to enforce fiscal discipline.
GREGG IP: His father endured some very serious political pain to do the right thing to get the deficit down. And one of the steps was that a rule called "pay-go," or pay as you go. And this rule basically meant that if you wanted to introduce a new tax cut or a new spending program, you had to find a way to pay for it with an offsetting tax increase or spending cut. Well, in 2002, that rule expired.
ALICE RIVLIN, Dir., Office of Management & Budget, 1994-96: In the Clinton years, we had the "pay-go" rule, pay as you go, and that meant we couldn't pass a lot of good-sounding ideas, including Medicare prescription drugs. It's not that nobody thought of that in the '90s. A lot of people thought of it. But we couldn't pay for it. To pay for it, we would have had to have done a tax increase or cut out some other spending in major proportions, and nobody wanted to do that, so we didn't do it.
FORREST SAWYER: But the Bush administration did do it. With "pay-go" no longer restraining spending, they had pushed through Medicare part D, a program that's projected over time to cost as much as $8 trillion.
DAVID WESSEL: They did not come up with a way to raise taxes or cut spending somewhere else to pay for it, so they just passed this thing. It goes into law. It's a promise to elderly people that we'll pay- subsidize their drugs, and we borrow every year to pay for it. And in the end, it's more expensive than the war in Iraq because the war in Iraq ends at some point. Certainly, it will end now that Obama's president. But the prescription drug benefit will go on forever.
FORREST SAWYER: It will go on forever because it's a promise made by the federal government to its citizens. Seniors are entitled to this benefit, just the as they are entitled to Social Security and Medicare itself. These entitlements are all enormously popular, but they're also enormously expensive. Medicare part D alone will cost $60 billion this year.
JACKIE CALMES: The expense of that over time, unfunded liabilities for the government, at a time when more people are reaching retirement age and qualifying for Medicare, added more to the long-term obligations of the government than all of Social Security.
FORREST SAWYER: Medicare part D was the largest spending bill the president signed, but there were dozens of others. During his first five years as president, with a Republican-controlled House and Senate, George Bush never vetoed a spending bill. Fiscal conservatives in his own party accused him of being the biggest spender since World War II.

I think this is worth bringing up next time one finds himself in a bar, confronted by someone who insists that Obama is a socialist or that the Democrats are the big spenders... It was, after all, Bill Clinton who balanced the budget.