From the Archives

I found a document that runs a little like this:

Presidential Adviser: Mr. President your policies are criminal and stupid.
President: Gee Bob, ya think? Maybe we should reexamine the premises underlying our whole approach to the situation.

U.S. Adviser to Kurds Stands to Reap Oil Profits

By JAMES GLANZ and WALTER GIBBS

nyt, November 12, 2009

Peter W. Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador, could earn millions as a result of his ties to the Iraqi Kurds and a Norwegian oil company.

Did Big Oil Win the War in Iraq?

By Antonia Juhasz, AlterNet. Posted November 14, 2009.

"The reform process in Washington has been hijacked by the private health insurance industry"

Democracy Now!

Over 2,200 US Veterans Died in 2008 Due to Lack of Health Insurance

"DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: Well, we think that the Congress needs to start from scratch on this bill. The reform process in Washington has been hijacked by the private health insurance industry. If you look at the Baucus framework, which was the basis of the Senate bill—it’s on the Senate Finance Committee website. Just right-click on that document, and it turns out the author of the document was Elizabeth Fowler, who’s a former vice president of Wellpoint, the nation’s largest private insurance company, covering 35 million people. So the private insurance industry has hijacked the process. What’s come out of the House, what’s likely to come out of the Senate, is a completely inadequate bill that takes about $500 billion in taxpayer money and hands it over to the private health insurance industry.

...

It’s $500 billion in new subsidies to the private health insurance, millions of mandatory new customers for private health insurance.... I think down the line we’re actually likely to be worse off in handing over so much taxpayer money to what is essentially a private health insurance industry bailout."

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, professor of medicine at Harvard University and a primary care physician in Cambridge. She is also a co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. She testified about uninsured veterans before Congress in 2007.

Connections to the Orient

How Eurocentric Are You?

By M. SHAHID ALAM

http://www.counterpunch.org/shahid11062009.html

"At the outset of the classes I teach, I always address the question of bias in the social sciences. In one course – on the history of the global economy – this is the central theme. It critiques Eurocentric biases in several leading Western accounts of the rise of the global economy.

This fall, I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students, How Eurocentric is your day? I explained what I wanted to hear from them. Can they get through a typical day without running into ideas, institutions, values, technologies and products that originated outside the West – in China, India, the Islamicate or Africa?"

From Malinowski to Human Terrain Systems

Empires and the Sullying of Anthropology

By ROBERT LAWLESS

http://www.counterpunch.org/lawless11062009.html

"Enter a war zone with the expectation that the heavy armor will coerce the population into electing a favorable head of state; if this fails, then take refuge in your anthropologists, who will find a quick way to ‘nativize’ the war and help you clamber onto the helicopters. The country you have left behind is now more of a humanitarian disaster than when you self-righteously flew in on the wings of humanitarian interventionism."

Robert Reich: Why Unemployment Is More Important Than Health-Care Reform

"While affordable health care is critically important to Americans, making a living is more urgent. Yet the administration's efforts to date on this more basic concern have been neither particularly visible nor coherent."

How Chicago Shaped Obama: A Look at the Rise of a Politician

Democracy Now! 28 July 2008

I think this segment from July 2008 goes a long way toward explaining Barack's subsequent history:

"Anyway, so the point is, one of the things he learned in that 2000 race against Bobby Rush, who’s a former Black Panther and a real icon in the black community in Chicago, I think he—it was a very tough race. There was a lot of, you know, “Barack Obama, you’re not black enough” accusations thrown at him. And I think he came out of that race thinking that his natural coalition was different than what was in—than a strictly majority African American congressional district. He had a lot of—he had a real tough time winning over the African Americans in that race. I mean, and he got pummeled. I think he lost by thirty-something points. And at that time, he’s doing a lot of fundraising among what they call in Chicago the lakefront liberals, a lot of wealthy whites north of Hyde Park. And I think he started to realize that he had this sort of appeal to people beyond just his South Side base, and at the very least, that if he could put a coalition of sort of black, white, liberal coalition together, that that would be a sort of natural base for him...."


"The Democrats in Illinois were—won the right to redistrict the state, and like all Democrats in Illinois, Obama was deeply involved with the redrawing of his own district. In fact, one day in the spring of 2001, he sat down at a computer with sophisticated mapping software and began the process of redrawing his own district."

"And his district changed in fundamental ways after that. He used to represent just an area in the south of Chicago that went east to west. His district changed; it now pointed north—it was a north-to-south district—and it included a huge chunk of downtown Chicago, including the famous Loop, which is the big business district; the Gold Coast; all—almost all of the Chicago Lakefront. He represented now all the museums, all the finest shopping areas of downtown Chicago, as well as his original Hyde Park base. So it was a very, very different district. It became whiter. It became wealthier. It became more white-collar. It became more Jewish. And it had one of the highest concentrations of Republicans in Chicago. And the folks that lived and worked in that district now would be the important donors for his US Senate campaign that started—that he started to run for in 2002. So it was a big dramatic change, and that redistricting really was a huge turning point in Obama’s political career."

The above reminds me of DuBois' critique of Booker T. Washington (who also "essayed to sit [on] two stools and had fallen between them"):

"Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,—criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led, — this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society. If the best of the American Negroes receive by outer pressure a leader whom they had not recognized before, manifestly there is here a certain palpable gain. Yet there is also irreparable loss,—a loss of that peculiarly valuable education which a group receives when by search and criticism it finds and commissions its own leaders. The way in which this is done is at once the most elementary and the nicest problem of social growth."

The section (from the same DN!) on Obama as an "anti-war" candidate is equally instructive. He did not take a moral, or principled stand against the war, his opposition was purely pragmatic. Obama's position was that the war was stupid - not wrong. There is a huge difference between the two.

"And his speech at the antiwar rally is a good example of that. And just like redistricting, I think you can argue that if he hadn’t opposed the war in Iraq, he would not have been a plausible presidential candidate, because that was the key distinction, of course, with Hillary Clinton. But the speech was not a—what you might call a typical antiwar speech. He started off by talking about wars that he supported: the Civil War—he talked in almost glorious terms about the Civil War and World War II. Now, nobody opposes the Civil War and World War II, so they’re not exactly the riskiest things to support. But he was in front of a pretty, you know, partially pacifist crowd, and it is an antiwar rally, and he was very careful to point out that—where he disagreed with folks in that crowd. In other words, he was trying to push off the left a little bit. He was trying not to be defined as strictly an antiwar candidate."

I think think a utopian impulse is a natural and health human response to a dystopian reality. Nicolini always offers insightful film reveiws.

Spike Jonze Re-envisions "Where the Wild Things Are"

Max's Hollow Utopia

By KIM NICOLINI

"Where the Wild Things Are presents the legacy of the 60s counterculture as a world of burnt-out disillusionment. The Wild Things in this movie talk in a perpetually stoned residue of hippie culture full of “bummers” and “downers.” They aren’t so much wild as they are decaying, sad, lonely, angry, terrified, terrifying, bitter, resentful, resigned, and lost, not unlike the multitudes of ex-hippie adults that haunted the childhoods of those of us who were born in the 1960s. Like the Wild Things in this movie, these aging hippies wore their tired Utopian ideals like some kind of dirty laundry. Their glazed eyes remember a time when things were supposed to be better while resigning themselves to the fact that things will always be the same"

Disorganized: What happened to Obama's massive network of grassroots activists?

Lydia DePillis, TNR

"It isn't a coincidence that, historically, effective grassroots movements have usually come out of losing campaigns, not winning ones--circumstances that better lend themselves to a bottom-up approach. Supporters of Adlai Stevenson's failed presidential bids in the 1950s went on to run democratic reform efforts in New York and California. Barry Goldwater's followers went on to reshape conservatism after 1964. During the 2004 primaries, the Howard Dean campaign trained a generation of online organizers, and spawned Democracy for America--now a 1.1 million-strong organization that spends money on campaigns its members choose."

A communist revival?

"After the 2008 global economic crisis a spell of naivety – about the potential of the half-forgotten anti-globalisation movement; the efficacy of anti-war demonstrations; and whose interests are really being served by identity politics – has arguably been broken. This has forced a reappraisal of the whole project of postmodern, leftwing political thought: from the commitment to non-violence, all the way up to the abandonment of materialist economic analyses like Karl Marx's theory of the 'declining rate of profit'."

Jon Stewart is a Jackass

Stewart hosts Baltzer and Barghouti (part 1 and part 2)

How Detroit, the Motor City, Turned Into a Ghost Town

"Even downtown, one ruined skyscraper sprouts a pair of trees growing from the rubble.The city has a shocking jobless rate of 29%. The average house price in Detroit is only $7,500, with many homes available for only a few hundred dollars."