My peach and apple trees are loaded this year,

  not a bad safety net ! !

But think of how much worse things could be! Sure, people are losing their jobs, homes, families, ending up destitute and on the streets. But at least, we no longer have to fear that “trap of welfare dependency.”
This is what we wanted, isn’t it?

http://www.cluborlov.com/ shows what is in store for us if we fail. Unlike Russia in the 1990’s we don’t have the infrastructure to keep going if all else fails. If the grocery stores are empty, water not pumped etc. In Russia everyone had been operating in a setting where gov’t services were dubious and inconsistent at best. So many were ready when the gov’t collapsed in 1991 and could still have food and a place to live. Unlike here. Prepare.

Among the people this Old Savage knows who thought at the time it would be worthwhile to vote for Barack Obama, the general consensus was that maybe (based on his rhetoric) he’d turn-out to be their own ‘inside man’ in the ‘gummint.’  As president he would have immediate access to vital information about the shape, content, and magnitude of The-Situation not readily available-to (in-fact rather carefully kept away-from) theamericanpeople.  The “HOPE!” they expressed back then was that he would get in, scope things out, and then report back to them, honestly and accurately (and probably at some personal risk), about the daunting reality of what actually CONfronts them. 

He might’ve even suggested some things THEY could do to address their predicament.  He might’ve drawn upon his advertised strengths, and recommended their coalescing, for example, into genuine living communities, thus reducing substantially their susceptibility to the machinations of their “global”-ist tormentors….call it ORGAN-izing.

If he couldn’t have stopped (or even much slowed) the ‘progress’ of “The Decline of The West,” he might’ve at-least used the prerogatives of the office to make it harder for vested interests, threatened by such a “CHANGE!” in the priorities of everydayamericans, to derail a movement by “....your huddled masses” out of the false eCONomy that is the ‘operating system’ of the “civilization” CONtraption, and back into the Natural Living Arrangement of our Mother Earth.

Since none of that has occurred on Barack Obama’s part, and becomes everyday less-and-less likely-to, maybe our tame Sisters and Brothers would be well-advised to just get together where they live-and-breathe and do it anyway….pay attention, in other words, to the chances they’re given, while they last.

HokaHey!

The hope was false and the change he is continuing is to destroy the republic as his predecessors have done since 1980.

I agree firefly, it’s just that I considered all the true enemies of our country who
have originally caused the suffering and debauchery are an understood or given. I
myself backed Obama for “hope and change” 100%, but now I believe energy
should be spent wisely searching for a new leader ASAP, not hoping this con artist
will change. Mind you, I think he will put on a good show for the next election
with smoke and mirrors.

Steve E,

I agree that Obama’s appointments were pretty shocking choices (Giethner, Summers and the imperialistic Robert Gates) but I think Obama chose them for their experience and knowledge, not their ideological stance.

However, your comment :”Progressives and the movement to save our nation are hampered by the continual support and naivety of Obama apologists” is absurd. ……..Hampered???? 

It seems a little naïve to blame Obama’s supporters for hindering progress when in fact the true obstructionists are the excessively powerful corporate world and the billions and billions of dollars they control in the world.

Add to that the incredibly misguided success of the rightwing propagandists on Fox News and the resultant misinformation saturating the country, and you think it’s the Obama apologists hampering progress? I say, think again.

Progressives and the movement to save our nation are hampered by the continual
support and naivety of Obama apologists. Look back at his track record and his
speeches those who follow the false, deceitful, “great hope”. From the beginning
Obama appointed eleven members of the Trilateral Commission to top level and
key positions in his administration within his first ten days in office. Note who he
allows to advise him on all issues, Emanuel. Try to realize what it really meant to
appoint Giethner and Summers to steer all the taxpayers money to the crooks on
Wall St. by the crooks themselves. He allows the military to daily drop $100,000
bombs on defenseless civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Wake up and get a
grip, you have been had. You are better off to get behind a well organized non-
violent revolution. Shut the powers that be down. Don’t show up for work, and
consume only necessities. Break ‘em.

I agree with you Boyarsky. It is true that against unbelievable weatlh and power domination he is trying to turn around a turbo charged global capitalist system that is speeding downhill without breaks and although he hasn’t failed yet, many on the left seem to have unrealistic expectations of what is actually possible in one year!

He needs our support to work towards justice, not our condemnation, but he must stop pandering to the utterly selfish corporate interests that have absolutely zero interest in the common good of humanity.

By mdgr, March 9 at 10:00 pm

When I start a comment and it starts as this one does, it means I
am responding to that comment, be it for or agreeing with you
or disagreeing, but in my last comment, I agreed with you but I
just gave another way of looking at someone like o, which is
how I recognize obama just as I used to call bush, w.

” A BACKBRAKING LOAD THAT WAS HEAPED UPON
    HIS SHOULDERS”

This was nausia….........
I didn’t need a cold shower,,,but a toilet….

It is a human and economics story more than a political one, and President Barack Obama seems to understand that. He shows his understanding by his frequent reading in his speeches and radio talks of portions of letters he receives from the uninsured and unemployed.

All I can do is laugh.

Not sure it matters—no biggie, just clarifying—but Samosamo’s recent post ostensibly also starting by saying “by mdgr.” It appears to have been an inadvertent typo since nothing in it was either written or quoted from anything I had previously written. I think it was addressed to me, however.

The AIPAC reference is well-taken. On the other hand, I do think that posts in this thread (not this one) that indiscriminately reference Jews need to be identified as as overtly antisemitic. That meme is no less ignorant than anything circulated by the KKK. My point is that there should be no excuse for racism of any kind in rational political dialogue.

Now, I have condemned Obama and Clarence Thomas quite openly, for example, for being an consumate Oreo in every sense of the word. Frankly, I think it’s way past time that Obama stops getting a free pass by the left along those lines, and that we begin to derogatorily refer to him out loud as the Oreo-in-Chief. That’s not racism. Hell, if I were black, I would be shouting that from the rooftops. 

As someone born into the Jewish tradition, I also feel compelled to condemn Israel for utterly failing to learn the bigger lesson of the Holocaust, which should have been a lesson not in paranoia and hate but in love and humanity—in a word, in treating others as one would want to be treated. Israel has long since become a consummately racist, imperialistic, militaristic police state. That’s not internalized self-loathing you’re hearing. It is simply the truth.

Racism, however, is racism, no matter whether it emanates from a White or a Black, a German or an Arab, an Israeli or a Palestinian. Antisemitic slurs are no more but no less despicable than anti-Arab slurs.

It’s a two-way street, of course. AIPAC likes to condemn much-deserved criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic—Mossad would kill me for what I just said—and that stance is profoundly hypocritical, self-serving and as dangerously manipulative as anything served up by Joseph Goebbels.

But that can be condemned as such without slandering a people. I think that we can all agree that social justice issues ultimately have to do with behavior, not hateful and inherently inflammatory ad hominem attacks.

If people want to attack others on the basis of principle (as I have), fine; but to attack others for their religious beliefs or their race is utterly inappropriate.

Again, I am not in any way directing my comment at Samosamo. I have simply picked up the well-stated AIPAC riff and taken it just a little bit further.

Boyarsky is a pathetic apologist for the Obama corporate PR machine.  Obama is directly responsible for the weakening of the social safety net.  He could have stuck with real healthcare reform and a single payer program, and it could have been passed with the same reconciliation procedure that will now be used by Obama and the phony Democratic leadership to pass the insurance industry’s preferred bill.  Think about that.

By mdgr, March 9 at 5:43 pm

I look at it as o, for being the first black/mulatto president, is
totally not what I expected but then again, I heard enough
during the 2008 campaign to know he was a corporate and
AIPAC page in a red suit and I did not vote for him or mccain.

As for slick willie, you know, the one who signed NAFTA, the FCC
act of 1996(I think it was 1996) that reversed any reforms that
Kennard was going to institute before he left the FCC and that
turned out making the mainstream media even more
monopolistic and ultra neo-conservative and then inbetween
blowjobs he helped to gut the glass-steggalman act and I rather
call that being an errand boy in a red suit browning his nose in
the patrons butts for their pleasure.

And now I wonder what those people working in the Department
of Voter Fraud will have in store not just for the 2012 election
when six months before the election o will get some pseudo
legislation passed that will make him look like that black knight
in shinning Cadillac black armor, but what will happen in 2010
because it isn’t just the president that is the pivot man, it also
involves all the other participants in that wholly circle jerk we
have in congress.

And this time there isn’t a token minority player to give the Voter
Fraud a break by not having to use all those oh so ugly and
visible fraudulent tricks to get their people elected, after all, is
has a lot to do with keeping america safe which is euphemistic
lauguage for keeping the rich wealthy.

Regarding the recent posts on racism and race relations, not to mention the stratospheric (~90%) level of Black support for Obama:

First off, I was thrilled that an Afro-American ever got elected. And yeah, I voted for him enthusiastically, believing that at worst, he would start off slowly but rapidly move in the direction of change.

Instead, as John Ellis eloquently pointed out, we got a president who all but looked away from the Gazan genocide (I say that as a Jew) and who even now (Biden’s visit) encourages the worst kind of racism and apartheid in the West Bank.

He appointed Gates to wage a war against a non-existent enemy in Afghanistan (news flash, Al Qaeda isn’t even there anymore), spending > a third of a trillion dollars a year in the process. He empowered Geithner and Summers to stage a theft from the Treasury that not even the most venal Republican would have dreamed of doing. Finally, he manipulated the health care bill away from any public option and toward the insurance industry, an industry that for purely cosmetic reasons he now says he is “impatient” with. 

What we have here is a black man with an underbelly every bit as white and co-opted as that of Condoleeza Rice.

Now, there’s a word that blacks themselves give to the token-black whose loyalties of soul (pun very much intended) are traitorously white. By white, I mean no slur to caucasians. I mean to suggest that Obama strives to blend in so well, he denies that racism even plays a role. Let’s be very clear here. Bill Clinton (who is certainly no saint as a corporate player) was blacker than Obama. At least he was no errand boy.

I mean no slur to Afro-Americans but to use their OWN term, Obama is one of the more despicable “Oreos” I have known. He is certainly smarter than Clarence Thomas, but to cheer Thomas on based mostly on his color for his having risen so high in white society is to utterly miss the point. Sorry not to be overly deferential to the black polling on Obama, but he is only a stooge, no less than Thomas is a stooge.

In a word, this is a guy who gives “good speeches” the way Courtney Love might be said to give good h**d.

Actually, let it be said that Ms. Love almost certainly has far more integrity.

This President is a responsible, intelligent and honest man. That’s more than we could hope for after the forty years of thieves, murderers and con artists.martin weiss

Um, what planet are you on? Obama is the same type only he as all the appearances of being a good person. Only he is on the same side as all the ones going back to <b<Reagan</b> delegated by all his actions. Just like Clinton who was a rightie in Democrat’s clothing. The same old poison just in a different bottle with sugar added to cut the bitter taste. Not different at their core.

We are being manipulated like were have been for years especially starting with Reagan to now. By his deeds Obama is another reich winger. He just is still good at hiding it the obvious from most. The benefit of the doubt he never earned.

Those who are interested in the future of race relations in this country will not chew Obama up and spit him out.  The right wing and conservatives are doing that, and they don’t need any help from the left.

What’s behind the radical criticism from the left?  Do they honestly think they could to bettr themselves?  Or are they unable to admit their pre-Obama ignorance of the neo-con tide rising, pre-Iraq? And the fact that they did little or nothing to stop it then?

The naivete of expecting one person to do much to save the country from its greedy, militant corporate stranglehold on the world’s economy is obvious in complaints from the left.

No, Obama is just the convenient scapegoat. I hate to say this, but I believe it is true and I wish the left would smarten up and take its fair share of responsibility.

Kids, i kid u not: say yes to racism; don’t deny it! I am a racist; having no cure for it;remain to my grave a racist.
So why do i have this disease? Well, i am from croatia; thus, white; thus a hypocrite; but only up to a point; on a scale of zero to hundred,score a 45!

But i do lessen it a bit by chanting from time to time: if it hadn’t been for the blackest afrikanos, i wld’t be here…. i wldn’t be here….wldn’t be… and end with it here, here, here…..

The chant just can’t be turned off. And i am obssessed with finding the cure for racism and not to mention americanism.

As for god, i won’t be speaking to that bitch till she speaks to me first. And only after that, i might tell u ab her. Or,even, better, keep’er for self.

And there u are i found the cure for goddism; just keep the damn thing to urself and world wld improve by leaps and bounds.

AS for the mad prophets, well, they did’n even know that earth was round and sex good wherever or whenever one cld get it for free; i.e., just for the sex of it.
That’s my religion; so, please respect it! Also spricht bozhidarevski! spasibo, danke,sheshe, grazie, gracias!

John Ellis: On our sidebar, but carried much further.

I have a “what-if” scenario for you and others to ponder. Please think it over before reacting. One’s emotional reaction would be all too predictable. But please do all of us the courtesy of considering it carefully before flaming me with easy to come by one-liners.

There are many criticisms to be made of the Democrats and of the left but one thing that bothers me most is a relative lack of long-term strategic planning. So much is reactive, tactical, short-term.

Along those lines, I have this:

What about progressives not staying at home in 2010? What if—for once in their lives (only once and never more)—we held our nose and actually voted Republican?

What if the Dems didn’t just lose seats but lost so badly that they were effectively eviscerated? What if their humiliation was so deep that they lost all bragging rights at all to call themselves a viable party and what if, just for the sake of discussion, a potent meme were promulgated that any real progressives in that party needed to preemptively renounce their alignment with the Democrats and, like Bernie Sanders from Vermont, go the independent route?

What if instead of Dennis Kucinich’s continuing to claim that he is trying to save the Democrat Party’s soul, people like him were to form a progressive party in coordination with a groundswell of independent voters?

Now, that couldn’t occur unless the Democrat’s defeat were so crushing that it all but destroyed the party, which is why just staying at home won’t work. I want the Democratic Party’s heart cut out—much better than a wooden stake—it’s mouth stuffed with garlic and its body burnt. At that point, there would be a huge political vacuum. Here, I am trying to approach things strategically. As we know, nature just loves to fill vacuums.

Another strategic goal of that event would, of course, be to force the public—a very ignorant public, to be sure—to associate the Republicans with the same kind of damning culpability as it does the Democrats. I believe that in following this course, both parties could be toast in 2012.

Instead, there would be the Tea Party, which is truly very scary. No help for that, unfortunately. There would also be that the Coffee Party, which believes that “everyone should just get along.” And there could be—if leadership coalesced—a potent progressive/independent party. The latter party, with the right backing, could be enormous.

Without that latter scenario coming together, I see every probability of a Palin presidency in 2012.

As far as anyone’s objecting that voting Republican is making a pact with the Devil, I would reply that it is nothing of the kind. It is instead making a strategic pact with a billiard ball in order to get what we want.

“”“People are just barely hanging on at employment offices,
homeless shelters, food banks and community centers around
the country. Help is needed right away and Barack Obama is
struggling to give it.”“”“
***********************************
This I had to go back to TD’s main page to get this quote as it is
not in the article itself, but beside that point, it really shows what
a sham and how much o campaigned as a ‘changer’ for the people
who voted him into office but exposes him for the corporate
puppet he really is because he doesn’t ‘struggle’ one bit in doling
out corporate welfare like it was halloween candy.

o, has been and always will be a member of the long line of
corporate YES men that dump and pump the people in order to
maintain the elitist class of corporate criminals.

“”“Obama has made concessions to the right, which wants to
destroy him. The left has written him off. With a good sense of
what this country is about, he continues to steer a perilous
course between them. His efforts to pass an economic stimulus,
health care reform, a modest jobs bill and extensions of
unemployment and COBRA benefits have left him weakened. In
the end, he may leave the arena bloody and exhausted, but I
believe he will succeed. The president is edging forward under a
backbreaking load that was heaped upon his shoulders when he
entered office. “”“”

And this last little ditty sheds more light, for what it is worth, on
how o operates under a ludicrous idea of ‘bipartisanship’ and
‘reconciliation’ which are ostensibly the ‘act of working for the
people’ when in actuality all that ‘work’ is for his corporate bosses
who want the continuation of dumping shit on the people and
pumping them of what else we have left.

I agree with martin weiss and add that too many Americans seem to have lost the ability to reason if doing so takes more than a nano second of their time.

If reasoned we could easily grasp that the health insurance business is NOT in the business of making access to health care possible whereas they are in the business of making money - expending money on subscribers’ health care is losing money.  Too difficult to grasp?  Apparently so.

Oh please, lest you all forget, it’s supposed to be “the free market and free enterprise” that’s supposed to save us all from the evils of poverty. This is why, when you all point your collective finger at the president, I have to wonder if you’ve been paying attention for the last 30 years.

When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, it was the beginning of the end for the middle class. And here’s the best part: Reagan is still considered the “gold standard” of presidents! His policies are still at work: aggrandising the wealthy and the corporations at our expense.

How’s that working for you?

The Predictable Need to Come to Jesus NOW: A Desperate and Despicable Exercise by Boyarsky, et al in “Obama Re-Branding:”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/   
(Dennis keeps saying that he doesn’t believe the lie of re-branding. But why then is he still pimping for the Democratic Party?)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/09/obama-health-care-push-ba_n_491105.html 
(Huff hysterically conflates grass-roots with snake-in-the-grass desperation, adding to the re-branding mystique)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/surviving_without_a_safety_net_20100308/
(Re-branding of Obama and the Ides of March: “Help is needed right away and Barack Obama is struggling to give it.” Yeah, right.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/09/unemployment-insurance-ex_n_491195.html
(Why all unemployed/underemployed progressives should forget their principles and vote for the Democrats in the fall)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/business/08short.html?em=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx;
=1268147017-oNKdoop8a96Ii1K3RUurRw
(Even Treasury just got with it, incentivizing short sales and effectively dropping the price of everybody’s home—not a word, however, about renegotiating the principle downward on homes people may wish to keep.)

Now, most other presidents in my lifetime took their wars elsewhere. Pretty much everywhere they went, they destroyed the middle class. That was A-OK with most Americans, as long as our own middle class flourished, but Obama has pretty much destroyed America’s own middle class as well (Bush Jr. started it, Obama accelerated it an order of magnitude). 

That, along with the often unconscious animus of racism that took on a whole new meaning in his role as “Oreo in Chief”—an Afro-American who through his own hypocrisy is in fact truly worthy of contempt—has gone a long way in fueling the terrifying growth of the paramilitary Oath Keepers, the rapidly expanding SS arm of the Tea Party movement (http://www.alternet.org/rights/145769/the_oath_keepers:_
the_militant_and_armed_side_of_the_tea_party_movement/?page=7). You might want to read from other sources too. When Glenn Beck gets involved—he loves them—it’s something to begin taking seriously.

The Dems want to be re-elected in November, of course.  Personally, I’d rather vote for Pol Pot.  At least you know what you’re getting in the latter.

But despite the re-branding going on right about now, we already know what we’re getting with the Dems. If we don’t know it, then we deserve to die as a nation and as a people.

If progressives want an alternative, they need to make that happen outside of the two party system.  The lesser of two evils argument <sneer spit sneer> just doesn’t work anymore.

Bill’s notion that Barack feels our pain is pure BS. If that were the case he would have pushed an SBA driven small business loan proposal, not run through banks, but handled like a natural disaster. The ARC program was a total flop, and second he could have decreed low interest on credit cards, none of which he did. He is starry eyed by the Wall Street wealthy just like Clinton was. He should have had the FBI/IRS nail the Wall Street Banksters and lockedem up in Gitmo
BO is all piss and wind.

In a possessor-possessed relationship one expects all kinds of ills to happen:crucifiction,gladiator sport, lions let loose in ammong people in arenas, hiroshima, slavery,slaughter in gaza or iraq.

So what’s with losing ur job? Work u did not own? That it wasn’t urs u shld have known?!?!

And even tho u were a possesion in an recession, u cld have united against ur knaves even tho u were slaves?
But is now late? To fling open the gate?

No its not. So, stop eating all those sweets and hit the streets! Also spricht bozh and bitte vergessen sie nietzche!

President Obama is not so much a pragmatist as people think, he too pays homage to the Wall Street Bankers and the Federal Reserve. So much so, that the health care reform that he promised is now a thing of the campaign past as well as ‘the Can Do’ presidency that he promised would change the face of America.
We, the people like myself, progressives see the agenda of the progressive movement slipping perilously down the precipice of ‘pragmatism’ and expediency.
I, for one, am appalled at the lack of knowledge of the president’s handlers, they are not men of the people and they cannot know what it is like to be out
of work at age 50 with no prospects of further employment because the Wall Street Bankers, demand ever greater and exceedingly higher profits at the cost of employees and the business’s that count on their employment.
Face it people, the illusion of democracy is a thing of the past in America and it is not necessarily a good thing that NAFTA and its ilk are taking over the world’s economy.
The ‘corporatocracy’ runs America at the expense of the people, Oh, I forgot, the corporations are people
too, and they have a legal right to the 1st Amendment. To give campaign funds without regard to the people, these thieving bastards are now running the selections of the president and the Congress.
We are no longer what the founding fathers envisioned, a republic democracy, founded on the rights of people, not corporations to run their government and decide who is elected to the offices of highest government.
Sadly, this was not the case until the Presidency of John F. Kennedy, when he was murdered by the very same people who now run the country, we the people lost the greatest chance of change this country ever had. All because the corporatocracy wanted a losing war, where they made billions upon billions of dollars at the expense of the people, sort of like Afghanistan and Iraq.
No country has ever successfully invaded Afghanistan since its founding. Every empire that has ever tried has failed, and failed miserably at that task. We in America are no different, we cannot win where others have tried and died doing this.
This is not pragmatism, but a foolish and naive notion of empirical superiority that forces nations such as ours to come up with plans to ‘spread democracy’ wherever we want.
Please wake up America, we are now, and no longer will be a democracy as long the corporations have legal rights such as people do.

This article is one of the few I’ve read recently that emphasizes Obama’s mature, responsible approach to current problems brought on by the very forces who want to oppose everything he can do to solve them.
Life must go on—whether or not the public option is legislated now, something must be done, now. Obama is one of the few pragmatists proceeding with the responsibility of administering government rather than “politics as usual” or, in the case of the GOP, destruction of the rule of law in the attempt to extort the American People.
I’m surprised at how fickle are the oh-so-principled progressives, abandoning their only hope because he doesn’t coddle them in a death-spiral of ideals.
This President is a responsible, intelligent and honest man. That’s more than we could hope for after the forty years of thieves, murderers and con artists.

This article illustrates perfectly why the Obama administration should have concentrated on “The Economy Stupid” before spending a year and 2 months on a “health insurance reform” bill that was written by the insurance industry.

A Republican couldn’t have done this without an outcry from what remains of the left. But since it’s a (D), it’s just fine.

Here’s a hint for the conceptually challenged: If you are going to pass a law that all Citizens *must* purchase a defective product from a for profit company, (unconstitutional by the way, notice the complete silence from the media, the R’s AND the D’s?) wouldn’t it have been easier if they weren’t homeless?

Jobs Jobs Jobs. First. Before laws that require buying stuff.

And for those that think this monstrosity of a bill can be “fixed” later, ask yourself when NAFTA or the Patriot act will be “fixed”. I’m thinking it’s probably not a good idea to hold your breath.