Saturday, November 27, 2010

Beyond the Delusions of Hagiography and Demonization: The Necessity For A Mature Critique of President Obama



All,

As I and many others have often said the major obstacle to intellectual honesty, critical insight, and political clarity regarding what the Obama administration has and hasn't done since it came to power in the White House is that far too often the President is the passive object of the simpleminded desire of many to assess who and what he is (and what he "represents") on the basis of a servile, even fawning hagiography or an equally mindless and homicidal demonization. Thus the crucial role of seriously engaging in a genuine and substantive criticism of actual policies, programs, and positions advanced by him and his administration has been generally ignored, dismissed, or neglected in favor of either hysterically cynical complaint or smug self satisfied hubris. As a result neither ultimately immature stance has been of productive, useful, and lasting value for those of us in the U.S. citizenry who seek the advocacy and implementation of actual independent ideas, methods, and strategies that will build, fight for, and sustain a well organized national grassroots force for real social change and institutional transformation. It is because none of us who are really serious about this bedrock necessity can possibly accomplish our goals and objectives without directly addressing and dealing with the fundamental role of government and our collective role in it, that we cannot blithely or cynically afford to act as though what the government--and thus the President and his administration-- does and doesn't do is not important or "relevant." It IS important and necessary whether we like it or not and any large scale movement or mass based agenda that pretends otherwise is only wasting valuable time and deluding itself to our own peril.

Thus the paramount value of the leftist political journalist William Greider's prescient and insightful critique and analysis below is precisely that it refuses to separate our collective concerns as activists, organizers, intellectuals, and most importantly CITIZENS from the larger engagement and responsibility that we all have to make the kinds of radical democratic DEMANDS of the various individuals and institutional forces in political, economic, and social power in this country that will lead to the "change" and transformation of our lives and communities that we seek...

Kofi


Obama Without Tears
By William Greider
The Nation
November 29, 2010

Given the midterm election results, the question Barack Obama has to decide for himself is whether he really wants to be president in the fullest sense. Not a moderator for earnest policy discussions. Not the national cheerleader for hope. Not the worthy visionary describing a distant future. Those qualities are elements in any successful presidency, and Obama applies them with admirable skill and seriousness.

What's missing with this president is power—a strong grasp of the powers he possesses and the willingness to govern the country with them. During the past two years, this missing quality has been consistently obvious in his rhetoric and substantive policy positions. There is a cloying Boy Scout quality in his style of leadership—the troop leader urging boys to work together on their merit badges—and none of the pigheaded stubbornness of his "I am the decider" predecessor, nor the hard steel of Lyndon Johnson or the guile of Richard Nixon.

Obama has patience and the self-confidence not to insist that his solution is the best and only one. On many vital questions, he went so far as to not even say what his solution was. Such a governing style is too nice for real-life politics, where Boy Scouts get their heads handed to them.

Some politicians may enjoy Obama's generous spirit, but many despise him for it. Washington always takes the measure of a new president and tests him early on. Congress and the surrounding power centers, swiftly reading weakness in this president, decided they would fill the vacuum Obama left for them.

A friend and longtime warrior for liberal reforms described what unfolded in harsh but accurate terms: "First he was rolled by the bankers, then he was rolled by the generals, then he was rolled by the Blue Dogs and other Democrats who had no interest in going along with what he proposed." Obama seemed exceedingly tolerant of resisting forces and even cooperated with them. Or maybe he privately agreed with them. He never made it clear.

Perhaps because he was young and relatively inexperienced, Obama surrounded himself with savvy veterans of Washington's inside baseball. He inherited his economic advisers from Robert Rubin, his political team from former Senate leader Tom Daschle and center-right Clintonistas like Rahm Emanuel. Together with old friends from the academy, the administration was overstaffed with intellectual abstraction and short on street-smart politicians, especially any harboring liberal instincts. That pretty much ruled out the "change" many voters had expected. It produced a tone-deaf seminar of policy thinkers in which Obama assumed he was hearing all sides.

Republicans, who are masters of deceptive marketing, seized on Obama's most appealing qualities and turned them upside down. Their propaganda cast him not as soft but as a power-mad (black) leftist, destroying democracy with socialist schemes. The portrait was so ludicrous and mendacious, the president's party hardly bothered to respond. Egged on by the Republican Party and Fox News, right-wing frothers conjured sicko fantasies and extreme accusations: the president is not only a black man (bad enough for the party of the white South); he is not even American. The vindictive GOP strategy is racial McCarthyism, demonizing this honorable man as an alien threat, just as cold war Republicans depicted left-liberal Democrats as commie sympathizers.

Even Obama supporters began to ask, Where is the fight in the man? Some critics blame a lack of courage, but that neglects the extraordinary nerve Obama displayed in his rise to the White House—a young black man with an unusual name and limited experience who triumphed through his audacity. Obama's governing style is a function of his biography—a man who grew up always in the middle, both black and white. He succeeded by learning rare skills, the ability to bridge different worlds comfortably and draw people together across racial, political and intellectual divides. He learned to charm and disarm, not to smash and conquer.

For the first time in his life, those qualities seem to have failed him. Indeed, he may have been misled by his high regard for his own talents. This is really his first encounter with devastating political defeat. The question now is, What will he learn from his "shellacking"? Possibly not much, since it is always very hard to rethink and adjust in midstream. But remember, this man is an unusually observant politician with a great thirst for self-reflection. One can reasonably hope that as he absorbs the hard knocks, he will make calculated changes in how he governs.

Bluntly put, Obama needs to learn hardball. People saw this in him when he fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and many of us yearn to see more. If he absorbs the lesson of power, he will accept that sometimes in politics you can't split the difference or round off sharp edges. He has to push back aggressively and stand his ground, more like those ruthless opponents trying to bury him. If Congress won't act, the president will. But first he has to switch from cheerleading to honest talk. Tell people what the nation really needs, what Republicans intend to sabotage. In a political street fight, you've got to hit back.

Only Obama can decide this about himself, but others can influence the outcome by surrounding him with tough love and new circumstances created by their own direct actions. It does not help Obama to keep telling him he did great but the people misunderstood him. He did lousy, not great, and in many governing dimensions people understood his failures clearly enough. They knew he gave tons of money to bankers and demanded nothing in return. They knew he thought the economy was in recovery. They couldn't believe this intelligent man was that clueless.

Popular forces can blow away the fuzziness. They can mobilize to demonstrate visible support for the president's loftier goals and to warn him off the temptation to pursue a Clintonesque appeasement of the right. Given the fragile status of his presidency, Obama needs to know that caving in is sure to encourage enemies and drive off disheartened supporters. People should, likewise, call out the president's enemies and attack them with the harshness that's out of character for him. The racial McCarthyism of the GOP establishment is a good place to start.

People who still have great hope for Obama can help revive his presidency, but only if they toughen up themselves. Stop holding his hand (he's an adult) and start building a people's agenda that compels the president to change his. Obama won't like this at first—his own supporters talking back—but he can learn to draw strength from their courage. If people fail to step up with their own message, the president will likely fail with his.



About the Author

William Greider, a prominent political journalist and author, has been a reporter for more than 35 years for newspapers. He is the National Affairs Correspondent for The Nation magazine.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

We Must Organize To Oppose and Defeat California Anti-Immigration Legislative Campaign Sponsored by State Tea Party

http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2010/11/calif-petition-drive-can-start.html

All,

Needless to say not only must California voters and citizens do everything in our collective power to thoroughly oppose and defeat this openly racist and repressive petition campaign and proposed legislative measure dead in its xenophobic tracks, but we all especially need to organize and unite nationally against these insidious state initiatives sponsored and backed by local and national Republican and Tea Party affiliates as well as other various independent rightwing groups who are virulently anti-Latino and Asian immigrant like the heinous California based Tea Party group described in the article below.

In the meantime: Please respond and let me know what you think of these and related issues with respect to your own local circumstances throughout the country...

Kofi




LATEST ON CALIFORNIA POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT

November 23, 2010

California petition drive cleared for Arizona-style immigration law

The California Secretary of State's office today authorized a signature drive to place an Arizona-style immigration law before California voters.

Called the "Support Federal Immigration Law Act," the proposal was submitted to state authorities in September by Michael Erickson, a Tea Party activist in in the Bay Area city of Belmont and former chair of the Sonoma County Republican Party.

Erickson, speaking at a videotaped rally on his initiative's website, said he worked with a legal team to draft a version of Arizona's Senate Bill 1070, which requires that police investigate a person's legal status if an office has reasonable suspicion of that status.

"Since we're never going to get something like this passed through the Democrat-controlled Legislature, it's going to be we the people who are going to make it happen," Erickson said at the rally.

Erickson told the Bee Tuesday that he's tried to draft his proposal -- which also makes it a state crime to hire illegal immigrants -- to avoid constitutional pitfalls. The Arizona law now faces challenges that it is unconstitutional and an overreaching of state law into federal responsibility for immigration enforcement.

Initiative supporters must gather at least 433,971 signatures of registered voters by April 21, 2011, to qualify for an election. Erickson said he'd aim to put the measure before voters during the 2012 election cycle.

The effort will rely largely on volunteers from California's Tea Party network, Erickson said.

The California proposal would make it a state crime for undocumented persons to seek work while hiding their immigration status, and a state crime for employers to "intentionally or negligently" hire an illegal immigrant.

The measure would also require all highway patrol, police, sheriff's deputies and other officers to investigate a person's immigration status if they are "reasonably suspicious" that a person who they stopped is in the country illegally.

The difference with Arizona's law, Erickson said, is that officers would have to contact federal immigration authorities and conduct such a check within a "timely manner" and could not hold a person for a long period of time.

Like the Arizona law, the proposal would also seek to allow legal residents to sue officials or agencies if they refuse to carry out this type of immigration enforcement.

Posted by Susan Ferriss

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Matt Taibbi On the Ongoing Criminality of Major U.S. Banks, Wall Street, and The Capitalist Domination of Government

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/201011/20101111_taibbi.html?vid=1642086966#video


All,

The always provocative, incisive, and dynamic investigative political journalist and acclaimed author Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine is easily one of the best and most informative writers in this country on the political economy of capitalism in all of its contemporary social and cultural dimensions, its extremely pernicious national/global domination of our lives, and what really needs to be done about it. The following interview with Matt appeared on the Tavis Smiley program on PBS November 12, 2010...

Kofi

Watch the full episode. See more Tavis Smiley.

Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and the author of five books, including the best seller The Great Derangement and, his latest, Griftopia—an account of the ongoing political and financial crisis in the U.S. Taibbi previously held various editorial positions and won a National Magazine Award for commentary. He also played pro basketball in Mongolia, was one of the first Americans to play pro baseball in Russia and worked as a sports editor for the Moscow Times. The Huffington Post named Taibbi one of its 2010 Game Changers.