Monday, December 28, 2009

What the New Year Demands

By Robert Parry
December 28, 2009

The U.S. political battle lines for 2010 are already clear. Despite having caused many of the severe problems the country faces, the Republicans and the Right are again in the ascendancy, having shifted the blame for most of the troubles onto President Barack Obama and the Democrats.

Read on.
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5 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello,

I couldn't agree more. I do feel that if a leftish media were possible it would have materialized by now, however. Perhaps if 'only the rich can save us' does not work, the Chinese will push the country over the edge and mass poverty will wake up the moribund public. Obama is doing exactly what he wants and what I expected. I have done nothing to support him since his speech to the CFR after his U.S. Senatorial win. He is a DLC person, a corporate elitist with less stridently backward views on social issues, and like Gore, Kerry, Lieberman, the Clintons et alia, is duplicitous to the core but ever faithful to the DLC's positons. That's why he so vehemently insisted he was not a member.

Then he hired Rahm....

Thank you for your work,

Donald Isenman

Mon Dec 28, 02:05:00 PM 2009
Anonymous said...

Any time Democrats say that another candidate "siphoned votes" from their candidate, they express a political bigotry that holds major party candidates to be more privileged than all others, while those who don't subscribe to the Republican or Democratic party platforms are relegated to a second-class status, in which their mere participation in the democratic process is amounts to "spoiling" an election by "siphoning" votes to which the major party candidates alone are entitled. What nonsense. The Constitution grants all citizens an equal right to participate in the political process. You undermine your position by uncritically invoking such political bigotry to express your partisan preferences.

Mon Dec 28, 02:54:00 PM 2009
Anonymous said...

You acknowledge that Bush "stole" the election yet you push the myth that Nader "siphoned votes". Gore "siphoned votes" from Nader, a man that was willing to fight for real change.


You continue the myth that a Gore-Lieberman administration would have been fundamentally different from the Bush administration. Have you been paying any attention to Lieberman, his corporate shilling on health care and warmongering?

Gore did run a crappy campaign and did have an idiotic recount startegy that would have made him lose when he won. (That and the way he shut Nader out of the debates shows how much he cares about democracy.)

You are telling us we need a leftist media structure that tells the truth and holds politicians accountable in an article where you act as an apologist for Obama and the Democrats. The corporate Democrats have the White House and a super majority and are showing that they only serve their corporate paymasters.

Here's a reminder of the Bush-Gore record:

1. Promoted welfare reform that ended the federal safety net and put many children at risk.

2. Lobbied, with big business, NAFTA and GATT into law against labor, consumer, environmental and human-rights groups.

3. Expanded corporate welfare programs.

4. Approved dozens of giant mergers in the chemical, oil, drug, defense, agribusiness, media, HMO, hospital, auto, banking, and other financial institutions.

5. Encouraged larger military weapons exports by the private munitions companies using taxpayer subsidies and approved many costly and redundant weapons programs.

6. Supported a bloated military budget, post-Soviet Union, driven more by defense industry greed than national defense needs.

7. Failed to enforce laws against corporate crime, fraud and abuse.

8. Gave away to corporations massive taxpayers assets in natural resources, scientific, health, space, and other R&D areas.

9. Bailed out, with taxpayer billions, reckless governments and oligarchies through the IMF.

10. Opened up large areas of Northern Alaska for oil and gas drilling and supported the destruction by coal companies of mountaintops in Appalachia.

11. Gave the auto companies an eight-year holiday from higher fuel efficiency and auto safety standards.

12. Signed legislation eroding civil liberties and produced a record that commentators called “abysmal.”

13. Under-enforced the civil rights laws while orating for them.

14. Backed large corporate prison expansions and failed to address discriminatory patterns of criminal justice enforcement.

15. Supported dictatorships and oligarchies that have suppressed their people.

16. Continued the deep sleep of the regulatory agencies at the expense of health, safety and economic assets of consumers and workers.

17. Favored big agribusiness over the family farmer.

18. Subsidized and gave the biotechnology industry insulation from regulation.

19. Raised large amounts of money from almost every corporate interest and let big money continue to nullify honest elections.

20. Opposed ways and means to facilitate consumers, workers, taxpayers, and investors banding together for self-defense.

Maybe the next time you continue to push myths and political bigotry towards real progressives you will think about how corporate shills like Clinton-Gore-Lieberman-Kerry-Obama-Biden "triangulate" when they are in power.

Mon Dec 28, 07:41:00 PM 2009
Michael Perry. said...

My viewpoint from across the pond (UK) is that we should forget about what people say, and instead watch what they do. I recall it was Michael Moore who pointed out that 98% of existing members of Congress are returned to office at every election. He contrasted this with the totalitarian regime of the old Soviet Union, where a mere 92% of the Politburo were returned to office.
Many working people who don't have the time to digest a newspaper the size of a paperback every day possess a visceral perception of the corruption and decay that has overwhelmed the democratic process, both here in the UK and in the US.
They desperately need clear,concise, straightforward information to help them judge how their members of Congress really stand on important issues, and probably most important of all, whether their elected officials are motivated by venal self interest, or by a genuine desire to serve those who elected them.
Robert Parry hits the bulls-eye in pointing out that unlike Obama, FDR lived in a time when the US had a free press.
Today, we have Fox News organising rallies attended by 70,000 "Teabaggers" displaying their awareness of civic responsibilty but carrying signs that read "Obama Is A Marxist Muslim" etc....
It is all to easy to dismiss these people as misguided morons, but given the state of the media, what are we to expect?
We can take it as a given than Rupert Murdoch and his ilk realize that the internet is the chink in their armour. It should not be beyond the realms of possibility for us to exploit this new medium for the publication and amplification of inconvenient truths to the full, before they work out how to shut it down.

Tue Dec 29, 05:38:00 AM 2009
sharonsj said...

If the Republicans are on the ascendancy, then we are in deep doo-doo. And America is stupider than I thought.

Take a look at eight years of Republican control and the disgusting mess they left before you start claiming they are in a comeback. Just because Gov. Corzine (D-NJ) lost doesn't mean that New Jersey was enamored of his Republican opponent, it's that they hated Corzine more. And when the new gov makes an ass of himself, the voters will be scrambling for someone else. The problem is that voters have a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum--and maybe we should start writing in "none of the above."

Tue Dec 29, 03:48:00 PM 2009

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