Monday, December 21, 2009

The Fury of the Left




What a difference a year makes. It seemed last time this season, Obama-mania was at fever pitch. Progressives felt they finally had a person in the White House they could rely on--or at least push in their preferred direction. Both houses of Congress were in the hands of the Democrats. The GOP was in defeat; President George W. Bush was a lameduck; by January, Vice President Dick Cheney would be in a wheelchair. Dissent or criticism of President Obama was not tolerated, even as some looked on nervously at the team of advisors he was selecting--who seemed much more conservative than expected. Still, all was well. Everyone settled into a "wait and see," expecting great things. After a tumultous 12 months however, Obama's starpower has been reduced to a glimmer. And even some of his most avid supporters are voicing dissent. From the Congressional Black Caucus to Joe Conason, to even members of the Democratic Senate, there are critical words for the Obama administration as it wraps up its first year. Unlike the inane teabaggers, who in their frothing racial animus cheer on failure, this dissent is borne of frustration and disappointment--from a base that feels neglected and demoralized. And it doesn't help when the president sends out his attack dogs to bite those very people--the ones who worked hardest to get him elected. Of course, there's still time to turn this around. I don't think it's necessarily that supporters are "abandoning" they president, as one article puts it. Rather, Obama's critics on the left are just looking for a fighter and a leader, the kind they thought they elected. They'd rather see him succeed than fail, realizing the alternative to having him in the White House is simply too terrible to contemplate.

Below are a few articles on this very topic. I hope somehow, they reach the eyes of the one guy who needs to read them most.

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Friday, December 18, 2009

Free Market Famines



One of the problems that occurs during discussions of global poverty (on the rare occassion they take place at all), is the seeming cognitive dissonance between the way our global economy works and the direct result it has on the crisis of developing countries. Nothing speaks to this as well as malnutrition, where market liberalization and forced structural adjustments have wreaked havoc with food availability throughout the poor nations of the global south. Whether it's Haiti, who 30 years ago grew its own rice but has been today forced to beg for food aid, or the very man-made 2005 famine in Niger, the pattern remains constant. Then, as now, the stewards of the global economy are willfully blind to their hands in these crises, and often--fantasically--actually insist on even more of the free market's hand to fix the disasters: as if trying to douse a fire by pouring more gasoline.

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Thursday, December 17, 2009

They Lost Keith

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Never mind that support for the Senate's healthcare bill has dropped to a dismal 32%. Never mind that most progressives and former supporters, including Howard Dean, have called for scrapping it. Never mind that it leaves the Democratic base demoralized and makes a mockery of a key progressive goal for the past 40+ years. Never mind that it could inflame public sentiment to include a public mandate to buy insurance from an industry they loathe. What is so glaring is that this healthcare bill, as it stands, is so offensive and odious that it lost Keith Olbermann. And in a special comment this week on his show, he took the Democratic Senate to task, Democrats in general, and even President Obama for what is increasingly becoming something between a nightmare and a joke.

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Wednesday, December 16, 2009

The Climate Debt & Copenhagen



The growing divide between the rich nations and those of the developing world over climate change erupted into full view this week, as poor nations staged a walkout at the Copenhagen Climate Summit. Citing the failure of rich nations to agree to a committment to continuing the Kyoto Protocols, the bloc of mostly African nations dubbed the G-77, staged a walkout, throwing the conference into chaos.

But in reality, the rift over Kyoto is only a symbol of a much larger issue. Poor nations, who stand to be the most affected by climate change, understand quite well that they are being punished by a global crisis they did not create. And they are standing up defiantly to the industrialized nations, who share the overwhelming responsibility for the dumping of pollutants into the atmosphere, to not only do more to curb their greenhouse gas emissions and reduce their gigantic carbon footprint, but to shoulder the financial burden that the poor nations now face in trying to react to climate change. Unlike the industrialized world, where denying man-made climate is a luxury, in many poor nations the all-too real effects are already being felt--threatening to bring famines to some, and to drown others in rising sea-levels. This "climate debt" has pushed itself to the front of the Copenhagen talks, as the smaller poorer denizens of the world now take their larger industrialized neighbors to task.

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Tuesday, December 15, 2009

The "Liberal Media" & Other Mythical Beasts



The "liberal media" is one of the most enduring myths in political Americana. Despite all evidence to the contrary, which actually shows a mainstream media that constantly tilts right of center, conservatives have managed to say this disinformation enough times that some mistake it for truth. Taking an advantage of mock outrage from Bill O' Reilly and Glen Beck over a Law & Order SVU episode, Keith Olbermann manages to destroy the fabrication of the "liberal media" so utterly, we should never hear mention of it again.

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Monday, December 14, 2009

Why ACORN Won



This past summer, after two conservative operatives revealed potentially damaging (and potentially doctored) videos of ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) members allegedly soliciting tax advice to a faux pimp and prostitute, the political universe was thrown into bedlam. Republicans and right-wing extremists, who had long painted the group as a threat to democracy--because it registers poor and minority voters--salivated at the chance to destroy it once and for all. Democrats, with the exception of a rare courageous few, tripped over their own feet running in fear to distance themselves from ACORN. The result was a rushed Congressional vote to strip ACORN of all federal funding. Turns out however, ACORN has lawyers. Those lawyers took Congress to court, and were met with success.

Last Friday a judge ruled in favor of the community organization, issuing an injunction preventing the implementation of the congressional funding ban. Judge Nina Gershon concluded what numerous rational thinking people had brought up at that the time--that the ban amounted to a "bill of attainder" that unfairly singled out ACORN, which is unconstitutional.

So it turns out the Democrats in their timidity and fear of the GOP right-wing noise machine, ran out and violated the Constitution they're supposed to uphold.

Below, Bill Quigley at Common Dreams discusses why ACORN won its suit, for the dim-witted. Timid Congressional Democrats, I'm looking in your direction.

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Friday, December 11, 2009

Obama's 9 Surges



At Westpoint last week, President Barack Obama announced a much awaited troop surge in the Afghan war he has inherited, and now expanded. Some 30,000 troops, and an untold number of contractors/support staff, would be sent to Afghanistan in the hopes of stabilizing the shattered country. What was lost to the many media pundits who discussed the speech later, is that this is hardly the first "surge" President Obama has implemented. A previous unremarked surge happened in March, when 21,000 U.S. troops were sent to Afghanistan. There have been previous increases in intelligence members and private contractors steadily since November 2008.

In the following article Tom Engelhardt recounts what he calls the "9 Surges of Barack Obama." Time will tell if we'll see a 10th....

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Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Non-Violent in Palestine



I remember watching a news report once and being struck by the glaring contradiction of images displayed by media of Israelis and Palestinians. When Israeli citizens or even troops were shown, they were depicted as either victims of a terrible suicide attack or soldiers at alert facing an unknown enemy. When Palestinians were shown, it was of stone-throwing youths, threatening men in Gaza with wrapped faces shouting angry words or of West Bank police firing machine guns into the air to disperse unruly crowds. While the role of Israeli peace-groups is rarely covered, Palestinian peace groups are thought of as near-mythical. Think resistance and Palestinians, and suicide bombers and terrorists easily come to mind--part of what the media readily covers and displays. Yet there has been a long movement of non-violent resistance on the part of Palestinians. Boston-based journalist Ellen Cantarow looks at a particular act of passive resistance, by Palestinians protesting the debilitating wall being built by the Israeli government.

Read the article here. Excerpts below.

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Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Uganda's Victorian Age



One of the missed teachable moments during the recent global outcry against Uganda's draconian anti-homosexual bill, has been the convoluted logic of colonialism and African pride injected into the discourse. While many have fittingly pointed to the role of recent U.S. conservative right-wing evangelicals--some of them elected officials--in the recent bill, not many have chosen to tackle why Uganda, and many other parts of Africa, have such seemingly retrogade policies towards the gay community. Advocates of the bill in Uganda claim homosexuality is traditionally "un-African," stating they don't want European norms being enforced on them. And they have invoked a new breed of anti-colonialism to fend off the criticism and threatened sanctions directed their way from Europe and the West--the very industrialized nations that keep the global poor impoverished. But wonder of wonders, Uganda's anti-homosexual laws don't have their origins in the traditional African past or the neo-colonial present. They arrived in Uganda just slightly over a century ago--under the banner of the white man's burden and British colonialism.

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Monday, December 7, 2009

The New McCarthyism



On December 2, 1954, the U.S. Senate voted to censure Sen. Joseph McCarthy, bringing to an end four years of political intimidation and character assassination so ferocious that McCarthy’s name is still synonymous with a particularly destructive form of demagoguery....Today, Joseph McCarthy’s ideological heirs in the Republican Party and right-wing media are using the language and tactics of McCarthy to stir fears that the nation is being destroyed by enemies from within.


So begins a report by the People for the American Way titled Rise of the New McCarthyism: How Right Wing Extremists Try to Paralyze Government Through Ideological Smears and Baseless Attacks. The report not only documents the similarities in tactics used by today's demagogues, but those media outlets and elected officials that either aid or remain silent in the face of their extremism, which only serves to poison the political discourse.

You can read the report here. Excerpts below.

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Friday, December 4, 2009

Swiss Un-hospitality



Last Sunday the Swiss held a referendum on whether to ban the construction of Muslim minarets, a startling move in a country best known for its unwavering neutrality, fine chocolate and yodeling milk maids. Switzerland's decision, which was passed by some 57% of the vote, joins a sweeping wave of European xenophobia facing recent immigrants from the Muslim world, often masked as everything from cultural preservation to secular liberty. Some of the posters used to favor the referendum, like the one above, barely concealed their bigotry and fearmongering.

Leave it however to Jon Stewart, by means of a deadpan John Oliver, to add some well-needed humor to this troubling event. Watch below.

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Wednesday, December 2, 2009

The Forgotten "Greatest Generation"



For Africa, WW2 didn't begin in 1939. It began in 1935, as Italian forces under fascist Benito Mussolini invaded the only fully independent African nation--Ethiopia. Over much of the coming decade, the entire continent would be thrown into the tumult of the war between mostly European powers. With nearly every region colonized by the warring Europeans, Africans found themselves conscripts in battles that (with the exception of Ethiopia) weren't really their own. Over 1.3 million continental Africans would end up participating in the conflict. Yet, other than the exploits of German generals like Rommel in North Africa, the continent doesn't make it into many histories of the war.

Recently however, as part of the 70th anniversary of WW2, the BBC covered these forgotten members of the "Greatest Generation." Better late I suppose than never...

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