Bullseye, Debs.

Posted by: china_hand2 | Jun 1 2009 12:03 utc | 4

I couldn’t agree more Debs. It is a tragedy really how short sighted and gullible people are when it comes to election time. This however is not an American phenomenon, here in Australia its not much different, and I am inclined to think that NZ’s John Key and Germany’s Angela Merkel wouldn’t be in the positions they are in if the public at large would frickin wake up and get a handle on the actualities surrounding them. How hard can it be to see through the media smoke screen and comprehend the puppetry performance we are presented with?
The income gap is widening fast between rich and poor within local communities just as on a global level the disparity between the have and have nots has grown beyond obscene. Where are the visionaries, the coordinators, and the disillusioned masses ready to march the streets, boycott the glamour institutions and businesses which represent the current decadent order, prepared to be part of an outer parliamentary opposition so forceful and widespread that no politician would want to stand in its way?
Where there is the will, there is a way. What we collectively lack is the determination to rattle the cage and revolutionise the system, and our sentence for this lack of civil courage is the government we have.
To take up the above points made by you and B, this is what Patrick Martin at WSWS thinks about GM being thrown to the vultures (via Uruknet, although slightly longish, I allowed myself to paste it in its entirety, just couldn’t find a paragraph I wanted to take out):

The expected bankruptcy filing Monday by General Motors—for decades the largest US corporation and one of the country’s biggest employers—marks a turning point for both American capitalism and the American working class. Its significance is not only economic and financial. It is also a political milestone. The US government set the June 1 deadline which has forced the bankruptcy filing.
The Obama administration holds the whip hand, having advanced $40 billion in bailout funds to the auto bosses, and the White House will effectively control GM, holding 72.5 percent of its stock and appointing a majority of its board of directors. In return for their collaboration, the administration is awarding the United Auto Workers executives a 17.5 percent stake in the downsized GM.
In compelling GM to file for bankruptcy, Obama is giving the signal to all of corporate America to attack the jobs, wages, pensions and health benefits fought for by working people in the course of more than a century. The full power of the US government is being used to set an example of making the working class pay for the crisis of capitalism.
Not since Reagan fired the striking PATCO air traffic controllers in 1981, giving the signal for a wave of corporate union-busting and wage-cutting, has an administration intervened so openly to attack the jobs and living standards of American workers. That assault—aided and abetted by the trade union bureaucracy—led to a permanent reduction in the social position of the working class. Similarly, the current government-corporate offensive is aimed at fundamentally restructuring class relations in the US. There is to be no return to the conditions that existed prior to the current economic crisis. The aim is nothing less than the destruction of all that remains of the gains won by previous generations of workers and the impoverishment of the entire working class.
Tens of millions voted for Obama and the Democrats last November in the hope that the Democratic Party would reverse the policies of the Republican Party and the Bush administration: militarism, attacks on democratic rights and the destruction of the living standards of working people. But the promises of “hope” and “change” have proven to be illusions.
Trillions have been turned over to Wall Street in the form of loans, guarantees and cash handouts from the Treasury and Federal Reserve. But what have the first four months of the Obama administration brought for the working class? Economic figures published this week suggest the answer:
• Some 13.5 million people are unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In addition, another 6.7 million people were working fewer that 35 hours a week in April because of “slack work or business conditions,” and more than 2.1 million are classified as “discouraged” and not seeking work. That brings the total unemployed or underemployed to more than 22 million people.
• A recent survey of 518 large companies by Hewitt Associates, a human resources consulting firm, reported in the New York Times Friday, found that 16 percent of employers had cut pay and 20 percent had cut hours or imposed furloughs, far higher figures than in previous recessions.
• The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that 5.4 million of the 45 million US home loans were either delinquent or in foreclosure in the first quarter of this year. The 12.07 percent delinquency and foreclosure rate is expected to rise sharply under the impact of rising unemployment.
• Subprime and adjustable-rate mortgages are no longer the principal driving force of the foreclosure crisis. In the first quarter of 2009, the foreclosure rate for prime fixed-rate mortgages doubled compared to a year before, to 6.06 percent, and these loans for the first time make up the largest share of new foreclosures.
• Home prices dropped 18.7 percent in March, compared to the year before, according to Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller Index, covering 20 large metropolitan areas. A research note by Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics predicted weaker consumption as a result: “Were this pace to continue, the loss of housing wealth this year would be roughly equal to the entire GDP of China.”
• Credit card defaults are nearing the 10 percent mark for the first time in the 20-year history of Moody’s Credit Card Index, hitting a record 9.97 percent in April, the fifth consecutive monthly record. Further increases in unemployment are expected to drive credit card defaults higher through the second quarter of 2010, Moody’s predicted.
It is critical for working people to understand the political meaning of these figures. Obama has summed up his economic philosophy as putting an end to unsustainable levels of consumption spending. It is clear whose consumption is to be cut: Not the luxuries and perquisites of the super-rich, but food, shelter, clothing, transportation, education and other basic necessities of the broad masses of working people.
This reality underlies the most under-reported policy decision of the Obama administration this week. Its flat refusal to provide a bailout for the state of California, which now faces bankruptcy because of two decades of tax cuts for the wealthy, enacted by Democratic and Republican state legislators, has left the state without sufficient revenue to pay for essential services. The White House is essentially telling Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to intensify an austerity policy that has already resulted in widespread furloughs and pay cuts for state employees and the closing of state offices.
Working people must recognize the Obama administration for what it is—the spearhead of an assault by the financial aristocracy. Obama’s policies are not the result of inadequate understanding or bad advice. He is a conscious and willing political servant of the multimillionaires, doing what is necessary to defend their class interests both at home and abroad.
The defense of jobs, living standards and basic democratic rights begins with a decision to break with the Democratic Party, oppose the Obama administration, and build an independent mass political movement of the working class, based on a socialist and internationalist program.

Obama, Clinton, Reid, Pelosi and the lame rest of the Democrats, or say the ALP here in Oz or the SPD in Germany are the smile on the asshole’s face as he or she punches your nose in and then robs your wallet. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, no truer words have been spoken. Doesn’t matter where on planet earth you go to, you’ll find scheming and self-serving people making up large numbers in the political scene and enough mindless folk to ensure their rise to the top.
Obama himself hasn’t changed, that’s for sure. He pretty much knew what was going on and didn’t give a fu.k before he became potus and he certainly knows now what’s going down but couldn’t care less, now that it is him who orders the missile strikes and warfare on people all over the world, now that he and his Dems are responsible for the rules governing the gigantic wealth vortex sucking the public’s resources from the bottom to the top.
But hey, a viper does what a viper does, you can’t get angry with its nature, and if you ask me its much the same with politicians. The real power, and therefore responsibility lies with us though, the electorate, the dickheads who vote those conniving thieves back in every four or so years. As a society, we don’t flinch anymore when our troops, in our name, commit mass murder in far away places, no we don’t cringe, we vote the bloated freaks who ordered the slaughter right back into office. They are us.

Posted by: Juan Moment | Jun 1 2009 14:42 utc | 6

Will Obama End ‘War on Drugs’?

Posted by: andrew | Jun 1 2009 16:06 utc | 8

Debs @ #3
Great rant! I keep waiting for the mob to wake, but unfortunately they seem to be going into a deeper sleep. Sorry, this country is so f**ked.

Posted by: cut and run, terrorist lieberal | Jun 1 2009 16:43 utc | 10

Democracy Now! reports,
“The Obama administration is urging the Supreme Court to throw out a lawsuit filed against the Saudi royal family brought by families of victims of the September 11 attacks. The lawsuit accuses Saudi Arabia of helping to finance al-Qaeda prior to the attacks that were carried out by nineteen men, including fifteen Saudis. The Justice Department filed the brief on Friday, less than a week before President Obama is scheduled to travel to Saudi Arabia to meet King Abdullah.”
Obama is doing this only because he doesn’t want us to find out that Saudis royals may have had something to do with 9/11. If they did, then the paupers in Taliban country are let off the hook, causing Obama’s dream of having a trillion dollar war in Pakistan along with a swanky billion dollar embassy to all go up in smoke. And I must say that I wouldn’t expect anything less from a man who loves bowing down to stinky rich royals who love nothing more than to keep their people poor and in the dark about almost everything under the sun!

Posted by: Cynthia | Jun 2 2009 1:25 utc | 12

Just imagine if any other country did this. Imagine if a foreign government were accused of systematically torturing and otherwise brutally abusing detainees in its custody for years, and there was ample photographic evidence proving the extent and brutality of the abuse. Further imagine that the country’s judiciary — applying decades-old transparency laws — ruled that the government was legally required to make that evidence public. But in response, that country’s President demanded that those transparency laws be retroactively changed for no reason other than to explicitly empower him to keep the photographic evidence suppressed, and a compliant Congress then immediately passed a new law empowering the President to suppress that evidence. What kind of a country passes a law that has no purpose other than to empower its leader to suppress evidence of the torture it inflicted on people?

hmmm, maybe a country ready to buckle under the weight of it’s own hubris?
sorry, have to go now. chris mathews is talking about “the right” talking about the date our prez took his wifey on. important stuff, like that conspicuous lack of tie on said prez. i mean, it’s like CAMELOT all over again! the glamour! the pizazz! those jealous republicans just don’t love their wives the way Oglama does.
AND he’s going to get tough on Israel. AND that judge he picked is a latina. sure, one may question the logic of putting window dressing on a house on fire, but they don’t mean anything until they start getting too uppity, and we have a wonderful, increasingly militarized police force to deal with those people when the time comes.

Posted by: Lizard | Jun 2 2009 4:45 utc | 14

Can you say, wedge issues…
Boy, we just never learn how to be on guard against the use of wedge issues, do we?
How does a wedge issue work? Is an wedge issue USED as Prop-agenda?
The practice of politics really does seem like mechanical engineering for me sometimes, given how often the various segments of the electorate are consistently polarized. SPD (Strategic Political Distraction)? I war with myself over this, I know you guys get tired of hearing me go on and on about this, but damn if these incidents, such as the recent Tiller murder, don’t always seem to be used as octopus ink, to cover other deeds. The octopus squirts toxic ink, and races away across the ocean floor;The ink is thought to function as a decoy to confuse and bewilder and overwhelm.
I highly suspect these national news making events are methodically used to Obfuscate other issues such as war crimes, and further done specifically in times of crisis to amp up the collective disassociation and overwhelming-ness of it all. Just as the anthrax/sniper project was used to manipulate the ADHD American mind. In other words, yes, psyops.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jun 2 2009 5:41 utc | 16

anna missed: after our previous dialogue regarding the “immigrant shooting”, it is very interesting that KeithRachel tonight both used the termterrorism quite liberally, in this case.

Posted by: Lizard | Jun 2 2009 6:15 utc | 18

Lizard,
I’ve noticed that too. It’s about time.

Posted by: anna missed | Jun 2 2009 6:40 utc | 20

Debs —
I get that a lot, too.
I just “copy all” to a text editor (notepad, i guess? I use linux) and then reload the page, copy the data back, and then post it.
Works every time for me, but YMMV.

Posted by: china_hand2 | Jun 2 2009 12:01 utc | 22

@china hand2 thanks for that FWIW I had saved the stuff into uedit which where I tend to write from so maybe I’ll try n post it now.
@Juan Moment I do’nt disagree with you that citizens in all the countries you listed are equally unaware of the true nature of the slugs they continue to re-elect, but there are a couple of points I did want to clarify. NZ has elected a tory government to replace the pseudo left government that was in office for 10 years.
I am surprised to have observed that there hasn’t been any further swing to the right, because there hasn’t, if anything what has been happening with the Key government is a sort of mirror image of Obama or Rudd, that is they have been making the occasional tokenistic gesture to the right whilst continuing the course of slightly left of centre wishy washy economics speckled with a continued assault on personal liberties (eg despite te fact that Key got elected on a platform that his government would stop telling citizens what to do, the new government is planning to introduce laws to stop citizens from using cell phones when driving – something the Clark government avoiding doing for many years because their polling told them citizens would hate them for it). Altho Key has made announcements about renewing NZ’s ‘traditional’ defence ties thus far they have been speeches unsupported by actions. Most likely because they know they are on highly dodgy ground that could cost them their gigs if the citizens feel NZ is back in the kneejerk ‘do whatever USuk do’ military alliances.
There is no substantive difference between the culture here and that of OZ, england or amerika and I certainly don’t think kiwis are more perceptive or less greedy/corrupt than the other countries yet it is pertiment to consider how this situation has developed.
It seems to me as one who came back here after the change had occured that a major error was made when the globalist technocrats were using this place as a testing ground for neo-liberalism back in the 80’s. They over-egged the greedy grab pudding. After Labour, the political party which was meant to be allied with the kiwi worker, privatised everything that wasn’t nailed down and abolished the nation’s entire regulatory structure, the tories got elected on a citizens backlash, went even harder to push in neo-liberal shibboleths. They destroyed the right for a worker to withdraw his/her labour and slashed welfare benefits, so the citizens realising they had nowhere to go campaigned long and hard to get some fundamental changes to the way politicians get elected. That is a form of proportional representation was introduced. It still has a high threshold (5% of the vote before a party gets seats awarded on the basis of proportion or winning one district – the latter an attempt by the traditional parties to stem the tide which hasn’t been that successful).
Of course that is why the IMF and partner in crime the world bank used this place – their fuckups would occur where it didn’t really matter. Since then think tanks and research units and all the rest of the globalist tools of control have been much better at devising false dichotomies to distract voters in the big nations (-until now that is I believe Oblamblam has sold out too much in too short a time and has made the political infrastructure as vulnerable to concerted citizens action as it was here.)
Now the major parties have learned to play the game the tories were the slowest learners, but they have learned how to put together a government of them plus minor parties from across the left right spectrum. It doesn’t matter that much what awful agenda the neo-liberal globalists want to run they can’t do anything too contrary to what citizens say they stand for, because if they do the political reaction is much swifter than under the old system which was the same sort of first past the post legislative elections as amerika, Oz and england.
Of course there are moves afoot by the tories to turn back the clock but it will be hard for them to succeed since citizens will be loathe to consciously hand back the power thay have won so success will have to come from a pretty good trick. Which I am sure the tories are working on but the fact that proportional representation makes live so good for the pseudo left party means any deceit is likely to be exposed.
The figures are the same pretty much everywhere conservative parties are always in the minority for national support. When they do win it is because the left has so pissed of the voters by not doing what they were meant to a big chunkstayed home or the right has pulled some stunt out right before the election.
It always used to be the ‘red scare’ bulldust but that is much harder since the Soviet Union turned up its toes which is why a lot of pols in the west are trying to crank up the cold war again.
At the moment we have a government which is pissing off it’s conservative supporters by being too leftie which is that mirror image. But we can’t get complacent here either because Key who was a banker with Morgan Stanley before he came back to run the joint, has been careful to get NZ’s public sector to get into debt again. The Labour mob generated surpluses every year one upshot of which is that despite 3 or 4 quarters of negative growth ie a technical recession, unemployment has sat at around 5%. IF Key can run up a big debt he will be able to convince voters that it isn’t their fault the kitchen sink got sold, it is the fault of those mean foreign bankers who made them do it.
People here are just as gullible. For example whenever I tell people that the day after the election the articles about NZ’s change of government in the New York times and Ha’aretz both headlined the fact that NZ has just elected it’s third jewish PM they always say “Is John Key jewish?” That was something the tories went out of their way to keep from NZ voters – something that he wouldn’t discuss during the campaign. They argued that it shouldn’t matter, and it fact from a prejudice point of view it doesn’t matter at all, he was the third jewish PM not the first no one has a problem with a jewish PM, except if it indicated a change in NZ’s foreign policy where NZ sidled closer to apartheid israel. As of course it will which is why Key didn’t want to discuss his heritage. He would have been forced to tell us whether he was a zionist or not. If he said no he would have either upset the voters when he changed NZ’s vote at international forums esp the UN general assembly, or upset some of his foreign backers if he didn’t. If he said yes it would have raised the spectre of the tories returning NZ back to being the USuk yesmen of yore and that would have cost him plenty of votes, so he deceived the voters and betrayed himself by taking the moral coward’s way through.
The point I did want to make though was that the problem of these lying assholes isn’t totally un-fixable. Sure the pols and their backroom backers still pull the same stunts here but are much less successful because absolute power has eluded either of the two major parties since people forced a change.
I realise that this change was much easier in a small society than it would be in amerika but it is still achievable (old MoA hands have heard all this from me before but I mean it – hammer away long enough and maybe amerikans will decide to try and force change). Nothing will change as long as citizens alternate between tweedledum and tweedledee, especially when the change is down to the sam 3-5% of the electorate, and most especially considering the stark, shameful truth that so-called floating voters are often the least informed and least rational voters. The mob who forced the change here were a coalition comprised acroos a huge spectrum of political views, everyone buried the hatchet and worked together for change.
Now obviously getting the local nazi party onside is unlikely to put you ahead since the trad average white man politicians use fear of extremists and loonies getting into parliament as one of their major weapons to fight PR, but as everyone who engages in political discussions with lots of other people knows; it is the voters who support one or other of the ‘big two’ who are in the minority most of us have some alternative point of view to the homogenised lowest common denominator pap the big parties serve up.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jun 3 2009 6:22 utc | 24

I double-checked on the john key zionism claim. There was actually quite a lot of available info before the election about Key’s mother and Key’s secular upbringing (he attended catholic school, for example).
Parviz, perhaps you could weigh in on this Jewish Question?
There appears to be a long thread on the Key-is-jew-scum thing at stormfront.com, but I’m too chary to join the firewalled debate.

Posted by: slothrop | Jun 3 2009 14:57 utc | 26