Blast from the Past: Andy’s Blog

Andy made be gone, but his writing lives on. Here’s an archive of Andy’s blogs that he posted on the old website. They were either announcements for upcoming TruthToTell episodes or comments on past shows.

GUEST BLOG: RECALL THE ROGUES

Listener Mark Davis sends this along. Link to RECALL THE ROGUES.org (We do not necessarily endorse this action, but thought it worthwhile to present the pitch from at least one group tired of the deadlock.)


Click here for News & Commentary on Minnesota

Eligible for Recall: Only state and local officials

Signature Requirement: 25% of the total votes cast for Senate in the previous election

Circulation Time: 90 days

Type of Recall Election: Recall election followed by a separate special election for successor

Constitutional Provision: Article VIII Section 6

Sec. 6. Recall. A member of the senate or the house of representatives, an executive officer of the state identified in section 1 of article V of the constitution, or a judge of the supreme court, the court of appeals, or a district court is subject to recall from office by the voters. The grounds for recall of a judge shall be established by the supreme court. The grounds for recall of an officer other than a judge are serious malfeasance or nonfeasance during the term of office in the performance of the duties of the office or conviction during the term of office of a serious crime. A petition for recall must set forth the specific conduct that may warrant recall. A petition may not be issued until the supreme court has determined that the facts alleged in the petition are true and are sufficient grounds for issuing a recall petition. A petition must be signed by a number of eligible voters who reside in the district where the officer serves and who number not less than 25 percent of the number of votes cast for the office at the most recent general election. Upon a determination by the secretary of state that a petition has been signed by at least the minimum number of eligible voters, a recall election must be conducted in the manner provided by law. A recall election may not occur less than six months before the end of the officer’s term. An officer who is removed from office by a recall election or who resigns from office after a petition for recall issues may not be appointed to fill the vacancy that is created. [Adopted, November 5, 1996]

 

Initial Procedure: A petition for recall must set forth the specific conduct that may warrant recall. A petition may not be issued until the supreme court has determined that the facts alleged in the petition are true and are sufficient grounds for issuing a recall petition.

Contact Info:
Office of the Secretary of State 
Retirement Systems of Minnesota Building 
60 Empire Drive, Suite 100 
St Paul, MN 55103 
Phone Lines: (9 a.m. – 4 p.m., M-F)
Metro Area (651) 296-2803; Greater MN 1 (877) 551-6767
Email: business.services@state.mn.us
Fax: (651) 297-7067 

Andy Driscoll: The Truth? It’s Never Really Been There in Journalism

Andy Driscoll: The Truth? It’s Never Really Been There in Journalism

I have added remarks to what actually may be a pretty naïve short entry by Mark Karlin of BuzzFlash on the actual sponsorship of a candidate by CNN. First Mark…then yours truly. (Thanks to John Kalbrener for passing this on.)

…Almost Everywhere In The Media Means More Profit For Corporations And To Hell With Our Right To Know The Realities — Without The Denials And Pretentions Of Fair And Honest Reporting By Sold-Out News Editors And Reporters Covering Their Asses (Kalbrener)

From Mark Karlin BuzzFlash

December 18, 2010

Did you hear the joke about CNN sponsoring a Republican presidential candidate debate with the Tea Party as a partner?

Well, it’s not a joke.

According to Mother Jones, “Sam Feist, CNN’s political director, says the arrangement was designed to give undecided voters a way to educate themselves about ‘ “diverse perspectives” within the Republican Party, including those of the Tea Party.’ It’s not the first time CNN has partnered with this group. Earlier this year, CNN embedded with Tea Party Express on one of its bus tours, giving the group extensive (positive) coverage.”

Hold that outraged laughter for a moment. Each year, the media corporations get more and more skewed toward titillation and craven appeals to “targeted news marketing.” And that is dangerous to a democracy.

Television news, in particular, has long since become an entertainment product, something that is sandwiched between commercials. To get higher fees for ads, the mediacorporations need to attract more viewers. And to attract more viewers, they need to sensationalize and reinforce a viewer’s worldview, not objectively report the news.

In essence, “the news” has become another branded consumer product. It’s not about a balanced perspective on what is happening in the world or the key policy issues facing the nation; it’s about what will attract more viewership.

Yes, CNN is making a concession to the populist right wing, which is perceived as being in political ascendancy in Congress, but it is also trying to attract a niche market share normally “owned” by FOX. Accurate news hasn’t been seen as profitable since the days of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, but selling an “attitude” about the “news” is — or in the case of FOX, making the news up to fit a political prism.

Many progressives, including BuzzFlash, may feel vindicated that a recent study indicated that FOX viewers are the most misinformed about the news. Indeed, according to TPM, “as exposure to Fox News increased, so did the misinformation.”

But the study also showed that consumers of broadcast news outlets, in general, had many facts distorted, just to a much lesser degree than FOX viewers.

It’s a perilous time for lucid decision making when “the news” is adapted to preconceived ideas and prejudices that can increase big media profits, rather than exposing us to the truth. A perilous time indeed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Driscoll:

The early newspapers were little more than vehicles for political rhetoric and slants on “the news.” In fact, most newspapers were founded by political parties or those wanting to start one. The phony push for “objectivity” in news gathering and delivery did little more than hornswoggle a public itching to learn “the truth” from “professional journalists” who, while gathering the information necessary to convey it, found it filtered through editors and publishers made so by their biases. And it all carried over in spades to electronic newsrooms.

The Hearsts and Grahams and all the other information moguls in their respective markets were out to control the flow of information and the flow of commerce, including the sale of advertising as the financing tool to make people believe their news is/was “free.” Meanwhile, those same information empire builders started wars, ruined businesses and competitors as well as thousands of individuals publishers needed out of the way. They saw to it the law hanged or executed innocent men and women by using their papers and stations as ropes and electric chairs.

From Gibbon and Aristotle on down to the present day, the search for truth in the news is a futile one.

There’s more, obviously, but we need to wake up the public, even to our own biases in reporting and presenting public affairs we find compelling, if necessary, if only to keep people from being sucked in as they have for millennia by the promise of printing and airing “The Truth.”

In fact, we should welcome the return to “honest” and open advocacy of a point of view, or support of a candidate (or several), of endorsing a party perspective – by all news outlets in the USofA.  Such candor in coverage allows readers and viewers and listeners to determine where corporate media actually stand and drop the pretense that The Truth or The News is forever and always tainted by its presenters.

Andy

ANDY DRISCOLL: WHO, ME? Not a Prayer!

ANDY DRISCOLL: WHO, ME? Not a Prayer!

Some kind soul sent me an email recommending that I throw my hat into the ring and run for state DFL Party Chair. I think I’ll kill him.

No. Hell, no, Nada. Nein. And not a prayer.

There was a time when my ambition exceeded both my talent and popularity, but I’m far too old and, while my energy level is only fair, my ambition to serve in any political office, well, let’s say run for a political office, is nil. Who would want to consume the kind of time and energy to run for a “no-win” office? Actually, I chaired Senate District 65 for a time in the early 80’s. It had its moments, but it didn’t take long to alienate enough people to vote me out the next time around. Thank god.

This is no commentary on present DFL Party leadership (Brian Melendez and Donna Cassutt), but, yike, that damned job is almost as thankless as as that of school board member. And now, the DFL, such as it is, has “lost” the legislative majorities it enjoyed for one hell of a lot of years.
The Minnesota DFL party is as divided as the country and almost any chair would be forced to sublimate his or her personal politics and passions to mediate the warring factions within, never winning one over one faction or issue only to face another with no appreciation from any of the parties involved. Herding cats is an easy enough term that definitely applies here.
Interestingly, at this age, I generally feel wise enough, and saturated enough with party and political history, facts (not the figures) and personal experience to understand the job confronting the warped political system we’re under; but, for all their bluster, the power of political parties has essentially vanished, victims of egocentric (egomaniacal?) candidates, campaigns, incumbents and caucuses with conflicting platforms and planks, not to mention long-ago legislation that decimated their power to raise the big bucks for their endorsed candidates and their legislative caucuses.
Such is the party machinery and the laws that allow open primaries and an almost limitless flow of dollars that quadrennial conventions are little more than dog-and-pony shows where the party faithful line up against anyone who will not swear to hand over their first-born to this party for its endorsement and disappear when they their bid is refused when the real battles are fought in television commercials between endorsed candidates and those who say, “I love you all, but you’re less than 1% of the people who vote in this state or district, so, while I’d love to have your endorsement, I’m nevertheless taking this campaign to the people.”
That statement alone is proof that while the faithful conventioneers want to believe otherwise, their threats to ignore the worthiness of the candidates and/or the electability of such candidates automatically disqualify them fall on deaf ears, and, smiling all the way out the convention doors, proceed to spend millions to win the primary.
The power of the party thus diminished even further that, instead of reforming its processes and procedures to present primary voters with a cluster of vetted and qualified candidates that it could claim as its own, one of which will emerge as the party’s nominee, the party’s nominee is more often not the one the convention wanted, primarily because the candidate never promised to “abide” by the process and go quietly into that dark night if they lost the endorsement.
Now, that endorsement has become an embarrassment, made worse by the need for the party must again go, hat in hand, to its previously spurned nominee and beg them to accept the endorsement post-primary. It’s happened so often over the last 30 years that challengers to endorsed candidates have won their primary, you’d think someone would have organized a movement to get the party to respond to political realities and stop with the self-destructive pride that infects them at the moment.
When challengers to the endorsee win, it weakens both the party and it’s new nominee (witness the Humphrey after his winning challenge to Mike Freeman only to face Norm Coleman and Jesse Ventura. Of course,other campaign management issue came into play in that race, not to mention the prevailing public mood that made Jesse a “why not try this guy” hero of independents). Would Freeman have won that race?
Who’s to know? Both Freeman and Humphrey were golden political names in DFL history. (I was there that year, co-managing Carol Johnson’s campaign for State Treasurer, which she took to the people after convention feminists blew her off for another, less formidable candidate.)
Who would want to run a party like this? Who would want to set up the year’s caucuses, help draft a platform, argue over its planks and pass kit without debate only see every candidate endorsed and elected under it completely ignore it for their own political survival. Who would want to have to change stripes half the time when people they had originally spurned are now the nominees they must sell with equal enthusiasm?
 
It hasn’t helped that the country’s real powers – political and legal – have gone after the entire system of political parties in this country – in reverse of the way parliamentary systems revere them. And that’s what we’re missing in this country and its subdivisions: a multi-party parliamentary system truly representing the diverse positions of the electorate rather than honoring only candidates who now run the show. In effect we have 201 parties in the legislature and 535 parties in Congress. Every officeholder is a party in his or her own right – absolutely no ideological or organized discipline – or message. And they like it like this.
If the parties raised the money and not the candidates, they’d not be so easily bought off as individual officeholders, less beholden to the corporations that now buy them.
A party chair can’t cope with such a renegade system, but they take the crap when their party loses the voting majority(ies). The chair becomes a tool of the caucus, not part of it, not the messenger of the convention’s resolutions – more of a minion than a leader and that’s no good.
There’s more, much more about the dysfunction of this state’s party and political system we’ll talk about periodically, but count me out of the actually work to reform it. Too much anger and vilification over the changes this would represent.
Thanks again for the vote of confidence, but I would disappoint just about everyone.
No power, no deal.

ANDY DRISCOLL: The FBI at War–in Minnesota:The New Gestapo?

ANDY DRISCOLL: The FBI at War–in Minnesota:The New Gestapo?

The following – slightly edited – was the script used for the weekly hour-long program, TruthToTell for Monday, December 6, 2010 at 9:00AM titled The FBI at War – in Minnesota: The New Gestapo? – on KFAI FM in St. Paul/Minneapolis, MN. This essay version has been requested by several listeners, thus the posting here. It’s still slightly raw, but it’s what we said.

The program can be heard/downloaded from www.TruthToTell.org

By Andy Driscoll, Producer/Host, TruthToTell

It’s come to this: it has become illegal to disagree with this nation’s government, its policies, its cavalier entries into war and to say anything publicly that would thus appear threatening to those policies, no matter how unconstitutional they may be. Oh, they may not be coming to get you right away, but the stories about the overreach of the US government into the lives of other peoples is only as bad as it is in its intrusions into the lives and welfare of average American citizens dissenting from, protesting and challenging the authority of the police, the FBI, Homeland Security, the TSA, CIA and the entire alphabet soup that makes up the country’s military and law enforcement community. And it becomes increasingly apparent that the current administration, the President and his Justice Department are almost as stifling of our First and Fourth Amendment freedoms as any Fascist regime history has dealt humanity.

Extreme? Before you laugh in our faces over the very serious use of that term as it applies to much of what has been termed and institutionalized as national security, homeland security and other post-9-11 federal agencies, listen to this TTT discussion about what is actually going on at home and abroad in the land – our land – as witnessed by the raids conducted, subpoenas issued to and spying invoked on, and generally nasty treatment of  – citizens and immigrants, dissenters and demonstrators, travelers and at-home residents who resist privacy invasions or challenge arrests for even minor offenses. The evidence is rapidly mounting in all of these disparate quarters – word of mouth tales, stories published by credible reporters and publications and videos appearing online of just how bad it’s getting between we the people and our federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. The resemblance to the Gestapo of legendary German fame is all too clear, according to credible observers.

This program was originally going to try to dissect the raids on three of this area’s most vocal antiwar activists, including Jess Sundin, who was scheduled to be with us today, but encountered a medical emergency. Jess is known widely for her antiwar efforts, including around the RNC in 2008 and other time. She and Mick Kelly and others were subpoenaed to appear before a Chicago federal grand jury and they refused to do so.

Those demands went away, but three more subpoenas were later issued to three others – Sarah Martin, a member of Women Against Military Madness, Tracy Molm, an organizer with Students for a Democratic Society and Anh Pham, an anti-war and immigrant-rights activist. This time, US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is not backing off. Now, after a couple of weeks of research, it is clear that these subpoenas and others issued in Chicago are simply one more of the rocks in the rippling waters of encroaching law enforcement. Some of that research, for instance, has led to serious questions about the legitimacy of the troubled young Somali, Mohammed Mohamud’s plan to trigger a bomb at a crowded Christmas-tree lighting ceremony in Portland.

The well-known critic and filmmaker, Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon Magazine, goes after media sycophants who have bought the FBI line whole, never questioning once the underlying truth of this episode, which may be a case of well-crafted entrapment, which Mohamud’s family is now loudly claiming. Greenwald’s story is well worth examining in detail we haven’t time to relate today.

But similar stories of such manufactured plots to discredit Muslim-Americans date back several years, including one related in Rolling Stone about a Rockford, Illinois, when members of the Northern Illinois district office of the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force recruited a local Muslim to rope in a hapless young and essentially homeless, video store clerk – an unhappy young jihadist who would rail on about Americans and Jews, thus attracting the attention of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

He hardly had the wherewithal to do anything about his rantings. Nevertheless, the Task Force recruit offered this kid shelter and some ideas about targeting some local folks and malls for bombing. The convoluted plot ended when the kid tried swapping his stereo speakers for some grenades and guns. In what Rolling Stone’s Guy Lawson calls the Fear Factory, this Joint Terrorism Task Force – the very same that occupied St. Paul during the RNC and conjured cases against the young antiwar protesters here, only to watch those cases dissolve into nothing, has some 100 units operating in similar fashion all around the country.

These task forces are comprised of the agencies of the Justice Department and Homeland Security – the FBI, the Secret Service, CIA, ICE, Drug Enforcement Agency – as well as the State Patrol, sheriff’s offices and local police. They’re everywhere all the time – on our streets, our telephones, and the Internet, interconnected by what are called Fusion Centers.

As we said earlier, the stories are really mounting with regard to the overreach of law enforcement – in so many ways emboldened and set free from Constitutional constraints by the Patriot Act and subsequent court rulings that seem to have unleashed a fearful rise in legal intimidation and concocted events and enemies in several of our cities, focusing, more than ever on our most vulnerable groups – those easily swayed and considered enemies in the eyes of middle-class America, thanks to media reports that fall in, lockstep, behind official pronouncements that Muslims and Latino immigrants are the enemy within.

County sheriffs and city police have become handmaidens of these joint task forces. Local citizens are finding that any arguments with any officer about the legitimacy of an arrest or stop for alleged violations can get them beaten and/or taken to jail for the slightest infraction.

The problem is that most Americans would say we’re exaggerating the fear, the danger of a police state, but others will tell you that this is a creeping phenomenon, not yet fully realized by a good share of society – yet – but not unlike – truly – the German experience of the 1930’s in many more ways than one – as we’ve been reminded by social critic Allen Roland, who quotes liberally from the classic book, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans from 1933 to 1945. He parallels Roland cites to today’s United States are startling and fearsome.

[program]

Resistance can be one of those scary maneuvers when what you’re resisting can bite back with the power and authority currently vested in our myriad law enforcement agencies at all levels. Bur resist we must even as we risk our necks if we’re to uphold the basic tenets of the Constitution – to be free – to dissent – to question authority when authority violates the law.

Obama Was Used, And Is Now Used Up

(Comment from Dr. Gary Kohls: You ALWAYS lose when you make a pact with the devil!!) How true this truism.

It’s a sad duty to pass this on. I’ve worried that those of us who have shared these assessments of Mr. Obama for almost a year were too isolated to be believed. Indeed, many of my family and friends have scorned such blasphemy as all of us usually do in initially defending our voting choices, rationalizing the results of this President’s disappointing decisions over the last 19 months. One need not demand the solid evidence required by others to conclude that the outcomes are the proof of each point made below. Each is its own stark reality.

Andy Driscoll

Published on Sunday, November 7, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

 

Obama Was Used, And Is Now Used Up

by Robert Freeman

Barack Obama was used. Of course, he knew he was being used when he made the deal. But what he didn’t know was how quickly he would be used up. Now he has to face two years of humiliation knowing that he betrayed the people and the country he claimed to champion – and knowing that everyone else knows it as well – but also knowing that he’s gotten what’s coming to him.

 Obama made a deal to get the job in the first place. The deal was that he would carry on with Bush’s bailout of the banks, with Bush’s two wars, with Bush’s suppression of civil liberties, that he wouldn’t prosecute or even investigate any of the enormous fraud that had brought down the country, or the lies that had railroaded it into war.

Even before he took office, he began fulfilling his end of the bargain.

He appointed Larry Summers head of the National Economic Council. It was Summers, more than any other person, who was responsible for dismantling the Glass-Steagall regulations that had acted as a firebreak against banks looting the country since the Great Depression. Summers had made millions consulting for hedge funds before taking the office.

Obama appointed Timothy Geithner Secretary of the Treasury. Geithner had been head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, another central actor in the hear-no-evil-see-no-evil-speak-no-evil dereliction that passed for financial oversight in the Bush administration. He had been a major architect under Bush of the financial bailout that passed trillions of dollars to his former banking cohorts on the pretext of saving the system.

Obama re-appointed Ben Bernanke chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Before becoming Fed Chair, Bernanke had been Bush’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Together with Geithner, Bernanke is the person most responsible for the collapse, the one person who could have slowed the asset bubble while it was still possible. He had been at the helm of the Fed since February 2006 and a member of its board for years before that.

Obama re-appointed Robert Gates, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, signaling that there would be profitable continuity with Bush’s wars, gulags, and other military expressions of empire. And then, of course, he quickly tripled the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan even without a coherent strategy or even statement of goals.

He put together a “stimulus package” of $787 billion when reputable economists were screaming that the collapse in demand from the Great Recession was at least four times that amount. Then, in an attempt to appease the Republicans, he made one third of it business tax cuts, despite the notorious ineffectiveness of such policies in generating jobs. When states cut back their payrolls and spending in the slump, it effectively neutralized the impact of Obama’s program. Yet he never seriously attempted to get more.

He proposed no jobs program to employ the seven million people who had lost their jobs. No infrastructure program to repair the failing roads, bridges, tunnels, water and sewerage systems of the country. His anti-foreclosure program was a joke. Some three million homes will go into foreclosure this year alone while one in four mortgages are under water. The share of equity that middle class Americans own in their homes is now lower than it was before World War II.

And now the conspicuous, embarrassing truth is that he’s not needed any more except as a tilt-up dummy sustaining the illusion of democracy. And you can see why. The rich owners of the country who put him into office in the certainty that he would be a smooth liar, able to sell the masses on the empty opiates of “hope” and “change” – they certainly don’t need him any more. Do the rundown.

The owners of the banks don’t need him. They got their buddies, Obama’s appointees Geithner and Bernanke, to buy their trillions of dollars of toxic sludge with taxpayer money, saving them from imminent bankruptcy. They’ve got the Fed loaning them money at zero percent interest so they can loan it back to the government at three percent and to payday borrowers at hundreds of percent. It is literally a free, no-risk license to print money.

The same bankers, the ones who caused the Great Collapse, got Obama to create the fiction of financial reform that left them bigger than they were before the collapse and with their exotic derivatives – Warren Buffet’s “financial weapons of mass destruction” – untouched. They are making the largest profits in their history and paying themselves the biggest bonuses on record. What do they need Obama for any more?

The insurance companies don’t need him. They got him to create the fiction of health care reform by requiring 32 million Americans to buy their intentionally defective products and getting middle class chumps to pay for it. Their stock prices doubled as soon as the reform bill was enacted, a pretty clear sign of what the smart money boys knew about the deal.

They got Obama to abandon his campaign promise of enacting a public option that would have actually brought down the cost of health care. So we still have a system that costs twice what any other industrial nation’s system costs and which delivers inferior results. It is still on track to bankrupt the country by consuming one out of every six (soon to be one out of five) dollars spent in the economy. What do they need Obama for any more?

The weapons makers don’t need him. Since Eisenhower, they’ve been the king makers in American politics. They’ve gotten a continuation of the never-ending wars they have always been able to engineer. In fact Bush’s Secretary of Defense Gates, now Obama’s, commented recently that the U.S. was never going to leave Afghanistan. It’s clear who’s running that show. What do they need Obama for any more?

The oil and gas companies don’t need him. They got the collapse of climate change legislation that they wanted at Copenhagen. Even as their products hurtle the earth toward inescapable calamity, they are left with effectively no restrictions on their poisonous products. What do they need Obama for any more?

Not having the guts to raise taxes on the rich who now corner a larger share of the nation’s income than at any time since 1929, Obama has appointed a commission to recommend changes to Social Security. He loaded it with people who, even before it started, made it clear they would recommend gutting the most successful public program of the past 80 years. If past is prelude, they will likely try to turn it over to the renowned stewardship of the finance industry and the stock market, just as Bush had tried to do. It’s like when only Nixon could go to China, or when only Clinton could end welfare as we know it.

From the minute he took office, he has carried out his designated role of pacifying a rightly restive populace about their economic security while shifting ever more of the nation’s wealth to those who are already the most wealthy; of continuing the country’s program to impose its empire on other nations by force; of dismantling historic constitutional protections of the people against intrusive and abusive government; of subordinating the people to their new corporate masters.

For a guy who’s billed as a “Great Communicator” he has utterly failed to articulate any narrative whatsoever of national transformation or renewal, of rescuing the nation from the precipitous downward spiral begun under Bush, his predecessor. He couldn’t even manage to pin ownership of the failed economy on Bush, even though the Great Recession started in December 2007, more than a year before Obama took office.

And finally, with legislative gridlock the only certainty for the next two years, the Federal Reserve has taken control of the nation’s economic policy. Its new policy of “quantitative easing” (printing money) is not only despicable in its own right, the recourse of scoundrels and national failures (think Weimar Germany in the 1920s), it is completely undemocratic, carried out in secret by the most notoriously elitist, private institution in America. It is a capitulation to a self-anointed feudal-like autocracy without modern equal, an undisguised admission that it is the banks and their owners that run the country. And it is the inescapable result of Obama’s policies.

It’s hard to feel sorry for Barack Obama. When all the politics, posturing, posing and pontification are over, his party lost because he betrayed his base and they could not stomach voting for his people or his party again. He’s proven himself a duplicitous executive and a feckless “leader” who has “led” the Republicans to their biggest pick-up in the House in decades. Now he has to live with it. But the damage is incalculable. It will last for generations. It will be an embarrassment to watch him try to pretend to be effective the next two years, with everyone – himself included – knowing that he is used up. But he is. Good riddance.

Robert Freeman writes on economics, history and education. His earlier pieces, “The Five Circles of Economic Hell,” and “The U.S. is Facing a Weimar Moment,” were also published on CommonDreams.

For Now, It’s Probably the Same Ol’, Same Ol’

For Now, It's Probably the Same Ol', Same Ol'

 

I need to let it all settle down, this election; but I have a few counterweight issues to think about in light of our apparent losses.
Politics is an ever-energized process. Never any time to sit back and rest on laurels – even when there aren’t any to rest on. The expectations are always far too high in the electric atmosphere of an Obama win and a takeover of the house of Congress. Problem is – those expectations are impossible to meet – especially in the deepest economic downturn in modern history. Barely an adult alive who recalls the Great depression. It’s all new and the collapse of everything must be blamed on someone and that someone is whoever’s in office at the time, to wit: incumbents of every stripe.
 
Since the common man or woman cannot dismantle the corporations that got us into this mess, they rush to dismantle the institutions they have the power to: governments at all levels. 
You cannot take a man’s or woman’s job from them, and/or their health care (once reliably provided by employers, but no more) and/or their pensions (also provided in some measure or another by their employers, but no more), and expect them not to lash out. Add to this that the same machinery the government bailed out with our money also may have taken their homes away, and there’s not an incumbent alive today that won’t feel the brunt of the  rage resulting from this out-and-out assault on the middle class.
But again, the middle class cannot take down the banking system, the real estate industry, the insurance companies or strip the investment bankers (not to mention all other consumer industries that have ripped them off); they can only take their government apart, incumbent by incumbent, until the message they want to convey hits home.
But, here’s their continuing illusion: that any government bought and paid for by corporate America and the contractors that wage war in our name will be any different than the one they removed, because it’s the system, not its occupants, that are so corrupted and co-opted by the same corporate America that sent their jobs overseas and now refuse to lend them the money to get them back on their feet and doesn’t really care that the middle class survives beyond consuming the goods and services produced by slave and child labor overseas.
It’s a system in total ruin because the subsystems created to control the greed and overreaching Dwight Eisenhower warned us about almost 60 years ago are now completely controlled by the very same people they were designed to regulate.
And as soon as people march in the streets to protest this and the wars we’ve created and maintained to control the world’s resources they’re met by raging renegade police officers who say such demonstrators are terrorists and that they’re acting in the name of law and homeland security to protect us from those terrible people: us. This, when they’re doing nothing less than dispatching forever any semblance of the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution – all sanctioned by Barack Obama and his FBI and other security forces. Barack Obama – for whom expectations shot through the roof to the point of an impossible dream, supports all of this pro-corporate, pro-contractor, war-mongering behavior as if this should be the norm for the UNited States of America.
I really don’t know if we can recover any semblance of almost any part of the US Constitution. But we’re dreaming if we think that by throwing the bums out, we’re changing much of anything.

 

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