Damn, Keith.

There is a big difference between the way American liberals and American conservatives form ideas. Most conservatives (at least the neocons everybody hates) give up their principles when someone important tells them to. It's unbelievable how far right the hivemind has gone because of Fox and corporate media. Liberals are simply not going to do that. The Democrats have transformed themselves into a center-right party, but the progressive base refuses to budge. Fox News would never, ever, ever criticize George Bush with the same scathing ferocity as Olbermann displayed here towards Obama. That's the difference between America's right and left.

Can we stop calling Obama liberal now?

The Bush tax cuts are being extended by two years. The super-rich minority will be receiving billions upon billions from the U.S. government. Way to reduce the deficit. This was a deal Democrats struck in order to extend unemployment benefits. I'm fucking pissed. Two million Americans being able to eat should not be a bargaining chip. I'm not sure whether I should complain that this is what America has become, or jump off a bridge after the realization that this is what we always have been.

I'm seeing a lot of internet rage from progressives right now saying that they're not going to vote for Obama in 2012 because of this. Normally this would piss me off, but I'm keeping my fucking mouth shut now. They're right. If you're a liberal, then no one expects you to vote for a moderate. It's as simple as that. I'll still be voting for him, but not because I want him to be President. It's inevitable at this point that every catastrophic policy that Republicans want is going to get passed, so I'm just hoping that voting Democrat might slow them down a little. Democrats owned the government for the last two years, and their greatest achievement is a health care mess that Republicans proposed in the 90s. That's not change. Once I get out on my own and get myself established, I'm going to seriously consider moving to Canada. Fuck this dumbshit country.

Chris Hedges: A Collapsed Economy, Hateful Conservatives and Ineffectual Liberals Are a Recipe for Fascism

http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/148778/hedges:_a_collapsed_economy,_hateful_conservatives_and_ineffectual_liberals_are_a_recipe_for_fascism/?page=entire

America's position on the fascist scale isn't quite back to McCarthyism yet, but these Republican whisperings of 'investigations' should raise the eyebrows of freedom-loving Americans everywhere. I don't know what our country is going to turn into (if anything) once the new Congress is seated, but if a charismatic figure emerges from the Tea Party, I'm buying a gun. I've kind of wanted to anyway after teaching rifle and shotgun to boy scouts this summer, but protecting myself in case a fascist uprising occurs in America will simply be a convenient byproduct.

American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have descended into the irrational. On one side stands a corrupt liberal class, bereft of ideas and unable to respond coherently to the collapse of the global economy, the dismantling of our manufacturing sector and the deadly assault on the ecosystem. On the other side stands a mass of increasingly bitter people whose alienation, desperation and rage fuel emotionally driven and incoherent political agendas. It is a recipe for fascism.

More than half of those identified in a poll by the Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports as “mainstream Americans” now view the tea party favorably. The other half, still grounded in a reality-based world, is passive and apathetic. The liberal class wastes its energy imploring Barack Obama and the Democrats to promote sane measures including job creation programs, regulation as well as criminal proceedings against the financial industry, and an end to our permanent war economy. Those who view the tea party favorably want to tear the governmental edifice down, with the odd exception of the military and the security state, accelerating our plunge into a nation of masters and serfs. The corporate state, unchallenged, continues to turn everything, including human beings and the natural world, into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse.

All sides of the political equation are lackeys for Wall Street. They sanction, through continued deregulation, massive corporate profits and the obscene compensation and bonuses for corporate managers. Most of that money—hundreds of billions of dollars—is funneled upward from the U.S. Treasury. The Sarah Palins and the Glenn Becks use hatred as a mobilizing passion to get the masses, fearful and angry, to call for their own enslavement as well as to deny uncomfortable truths, including global warming. Our dispossessed working class and beleaguered middle class are vulnerable to this manipulation because they can no longer bear the chaos and uncertainty that come with impoverishment, hopelessness and loss of control. They have retreated into a world of illusion, one peddled by right-wing demagogues, which offers a reassuring emotional consistency. This consistency appears to protect them from the turmoil in which they have been forced to live. The propaganda of a Palin or a Beck may insult common sense, but, for a growing number of Americans, common sense has lost its validity.

The liberal class, which remains rooted in a world of fact, rationalizes placating corporate power as the only practical response. It understands the systems of corporate power. It knows the limitations and parameters. And it works within them. The result, however, is the same. The entire spectrum of the political landscape collaborates in the strangulation of our disenfranchised working class, the eroding of state power, the criminal activity of the financial class and the paralysis of our political process.

Commerce cannot be the sole guide of human behavior. This utopian fantasy, embraced by the tea party as well as the liberal elite, defies 3,000 years of economic history. It is a chimera. This ideology has been used to justify the disempowerment of the working class, destroy our manufacturing capacity, and ruthlessly gut social programs that once protected and educated the working and middle class. It has obliterated the traditional liberal notion that societies should be configured around the common good. All social and cultural values are now sacrificed before the altar of the marketplace.

The failure to question the utopian assumptions of globalization has left us in an intellectual vacuum. Regulations, which we have dismantled, were the bulwarks that prevented unobstructed brutality and pillaging by the powerful and protected democracy. It was a heavily regulated economy, as well as labor unions and robust liberal institutions, which made the American working class the envy of the industrialized world. And it was the loss of those unions, along with a failure to protect our manufacturing, which transformed this working class into a permanent underclass clinging to part-time or poorly paid jobs without protection or benefits.

The “inevitability” of globalization has permitted huge pockets of the country to be abandoned economically. It has left tens of millions of Americans in economic ruin. Private charity is now supposed to feed and house the newly minted poor, a job that once, the old liberal class argued, belonged to the government. As John Ralston Saul in “The Collapse of Globalization” points out, “the role of charity should be to fill the cracks of society, the imaginative edges, to go where the public good hasn’t yet focused or can’t. Dealing with poverty is the basic responsibility of the state.” But the state no longer has the interest or the resources to protect us. And the next target slated for elimination is Social Security.

That human society has an ethical foundation that must be maintained by citizens and the state is an anathema to utopian ideologues of all shades. They always demand that we sacrifice human beings for a distant goal. The propagandists of globalization—from Lawrence Summers to Francis Fukuyama to Thomas Friedman—do for globalization and the free market what Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky did for Marxism. They sell us a dream. These elite interpreters of globalism are the vanguard, the elect, the prophets, who alone grasp a great absolute truth and have the right to impose this truth on a captive people no matter what the cost. Human suffering is dismissed as the price to be paid for the coming paradise. The response of these propagandists to the death rattles around them is to continue to speak in globalization’s empty rhetoric and use state resources to service a dead system. They lack the vision to offer any alternative. They can function only as systems managers. They will hollow out the state to sustain a casino capitalism that is doomed to fail. And what they offer as a solution is as irrational as the visions of a Christian America harbored by many within the tea party.

We are ruled by huge corporate monopolies that replicate the political and economic power, on a vastly expanded scale, of the old trading companies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Wal-Mart’s gross annual revenues of $250 billion are greater than those of most small nation-states. The political theater funded by the corporate state is composed of hypocritical and impotent liberals, the traditional moneyed elite, and a disenfranchised and angry underclass that is being encouraged to lash out at the bankrupt liberal institutions and the government that once protected them. The tea party rabble, to placate their anger, will also be encouraged by their puppet masters to attack helpless minorities, from immigrants to Muslims to homosexuals. All these political courtiers, however, serve the interests of the corporate state and the utopian ideology of globalism. Our social and political ethic can be summed up in the mantra let the market decide. Greed is good.

The old left—the Wobblies, the Congress of Industrial Workers (CIO), the Socialist and Communist parties, the fiercely independent publications such as Appeal to Reason and The Masses—would have known what to do with the rage of our dispossessed. It used anger at injustice, corporate greed and state repression to mobilize Americans to terrify the power elite on the eve of World War I. This was the time when socialism was not a dirty word in America but a promise embraced by millions who hoped to create a world where everyone would have a chance. The steady destruction of the movements of the left was carefully orchestrated. They fell victim to a mixture of sophisticated forms of government and corporate propaganda, especially during the witch hunts for communists, and overt repression. Their disappearance means we lack the vocabulary of class warfare and the militant organizations, including an independent press, with which to fight back.

We believe, like the Spaniards in the 16th century who pillaged Latin America for gold and silver, that money, usually the product of making and trading goods, is real. The Spanish empire, once the money ran out and it no longer produced anything worth buying, went up in smoke. Today’s use in the United States of some $12 trillion in government funds to refinance our class of speculators is a similar form of self-deception. Money markets are still treated, despite the collapse of the global economy, as a legitimate source of trade and wealth creation. The destructive power of financial bubbles, as well as the danger of an unchecked elite, was discovered in ancient Athens and detailed more than a century ago in Emile Zola’s novel “Money.” But we seem determined to find out this self-destructive force for ourselves. And when the second collapse comes, as come it must, we will revisit wrenching economic and political tragedies forgotten in the mists of history.

Keith Olbermann suspended from MSNBC

Good job you morons, your channel just lost half its viewers.

MSNBC has suspended star anchor Keith Olbermann following the news that he had donated to three Democratic candidates this election cycle.

[...]

Politico reported Friday that Olbermann had donated $2,400 each to Reps. Raul Grijalva and Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, and to Kentucky Senate contender Jack Conway. While NBC News policy does not prohibit employees from donating to political candidates, it requires them to obtain prior approval from NBC News executives before doing so.

In a statement earlier Friday, Olbermann defended his donation, saying, "I did not privately or publicly encourage anyone else to donate to these campaigns nor to any others in this election or any previous ones, nor have I previously donated to any political campaign at any level."

Griffin's statement underscores that it was Olbermann's failure to obtain approval, and not the actual political donations, that prompted the suspension.

[...]

I like Keith. He's the fire and brimstone to Maddow's calm sanity. Sure, he's 50% show and rhetoric, but what he says is at least based on facts. What pisses me off the most is Fox's parent company donated millions of dollars to Republicans and nobody raised a fuss, but this guy is fired for donating less than $10,000. Oh, and no fewer than 30 Fox News personalities "endorsed, raised money, or campaigned for Republican candidates or organizations" during the elections. I'd understand this if he was a reporter, but he's not a reporter. He's a pundit. I'd be surprised if he didn't give money. I'm really curious to see how conservatives are going to explain this with their liberal media conspiracy delusions.

The only way MSNBC can redeem itself in my eyes is if they have Cenk Uygur replace him, who's filled in for Keith before. He has Maddow's intelligence and Olbermann's passion. He would be perfect.

Olbermann made MSNBC, and he deserves better. I'm really going to miss his Special Comments. Here's a few of my favorites.

Reddit forms new political party

Doris Kearnes Goodwin made a great point in the video from the last post. Republicans winning elections nationwide does not mean there's some sort of new conservative movement, because two years ago with Obama's inauguration we thought there was some new progressive movement as well. All it means is that people are pissed off, both parties suck, and they just want somebody to do something.

Here's Cenk Uygur's response to election night. It starts off brilliant, and then slowly dissolves almost into incoherent rant, which is certainly forgivable considering the circumstances.



Liberals are pissed off because Democrats are not a liberal party. They are a moderate party. I will always love Barack Obama and I will follow him to the grave, but the man needs to grow a pair and learn how to play politics. Dems had all the ammunition they could've asked for this election cycle, and they didn't use any of it. It seems like the only people in Washington who actually seem to care about accomplishing things are Obama and about five or six specific congressmen, at most. Every other person is exactly how Cenk described - corrupt as shit. If they're not corrupt, then they know enough to keep their heads down because the people who are corrupt will destroy them.

A thread popped up in Reddit earlier today calling for a new political party - the Progressive Party.

I'm sick of modern-day, impotent liberalism.

We need unapologetic progressives - liberals with teeth, not smirking hipsters carrying ironic signs with clever slogans.

A "Progressive Party"!

We don't need to win. But we need to fight, and without fear or apology. And let us never echo the nonsensical rhetoric we're currently hearing on all sides. Let us never try to recreate a utopian America that never existed in the first place. Let's take an honest inventory of the actual (not imagined) problems our country is currently facing and then take real action.

Let's start a genuine grass-roots movement, and refuse to allow it to be hijacked by corporate interests.

Feingold/Kucinich 2012!

Let's do this.

I have mixed feelings about it. Splitting the vote of a party is always going to bring victory to that party's opponents. And Republicans have miraculously avoided that so far with the Tea Party, by simply having Tea Party candidates run as Republicans. I really doubt this will actually happen. But I still hope it does. At this point, I'm about ready to throw my hands up and write in "Psyduck" at the polls just for shits and giggles. How can things get any worse? The American people are too fucking dumb to realize when they're being lied to, and they're just going to keep voting Republican as long as Democrats continue to play the moderate card.

Plus, the internet has proven in the last few years that it can really be a powerful tool for starting amazing things. 4chan was responsible for the backlash against Scientology. And if there was ever such a thing we could call 'the crossroads of the internet,' it is reddit. The idea for the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear originated on Reddit. That's how Colbert got the idea. If liberalism is going to have an actual voice in America, it's not going to come from sell outs and corrupt shitheads in the media, such as with the Tea Party. If it's going to happen, it's going to come from the internet.

But let's be realistic. This isn't happening. In fact, I'm pretty sure everyone's going to forget about this in a week. I'm convinced that America is too far gone. Any chance of a third party arising is going to be immediately squashed by the people with money. The reason why more than two parties were able to exist in the first half of the 19th century was because the system wasn't corrupt. Any no name could run - Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, Abraham Lincoln - and every one of them could have a fair shot if they were smart enough. Money doesn't let that happen anymore. Let's face it. We're fucked. We will forever be fucked. The only thing that's going to loosen corporate power's stranglehold on our government is another Theodore Roosevelt. I almost wish I believed in a god so I could pray and convince myself I'm not entirely powerless. I'm just going to swallow my pride and continue voting Democrat. If I'm going to get fucked in the ass, at least Democrats will be gentle about it.

Yes, America is in fact really fucking retarded.

I voted. Clean conscience.

Gosh, this was a fun election season. And by "fun," I mean I want to put a gun in my mouth. I should be surprised at the results. I want to be. But I'm not, and I think that says a lot about the state our country is in. It's like America doesn't have a memory span that lasts over a couple months. Doesn't anyone fucking remember the Bush years? Do they honestly think Republicans have changed?

Remember when this exact same thing happened in 1994, and the Republicans tried to impeach Bill Clinton for shits and giggles? Remember how they harassed him, and refused to confirm as many judges as they could? Remember how they made it clear that they'd rather shut down the government than let a president who's a democrat succeed? The shit's about to get much, much worse. Those were normal Republicans. Now Congress is filled with a bunch of extremists and conspiracy theorists. Future generations are going to look back and really wonder what the fuck we were thinking.

Check out the Republican who won Illinois.



Christ. Just look at that guy. He spent this election cycle embellishing his military career and lying about being a teacher. Poor Wisconsin lost progressive hero Russ Feingold to a climate change-denying, tea partying millionaire. My former hero Alan Grayson lost by 20 points, but I stopped respecting that asshole after he Breitbart'ed some footage in a campaign ad and compared his opponent to the fucking Taliban. Oh, and Nancy Pelosi lost her job too. John Boehner is the god damn Speaker of the House. Edit: I just realized Dems weren't able to do anything meaningful about DADT before this election. Kiss that goodbye too.

It could've been a lot worse though. Republicans didn't get the Senate. And there's really only two possible outcomes to this: either Republicans stay true to their word and fix the deficit, or they fail utterly. Either outcome will be good for the country. I've already seen whispering among Republican candidates about potential "investigations" into Democrats or the Obama administration, so watching them chase shadows instead of governing should be very entertaining. I guess there's not really any point to this post other than to vent my frustration at how fucking stupid our country is. Also, I really wish this ad would've been aired on every channel in every state for the last six months.

Critique of Stewart

I'm indifferent about the speech Jon Stewart gave at the end of the rally on Saturday. Here it is if you didn't see it.



Summed up, he basically just wants the media and political parties to stop bickering, and come together to accomplish things, because we're all Americans dammit.

I have a problem with this message because first, it's the exact same message Obama came into office with. Obama's done some amazing shit in the short time he's been president, but you simply can't deny that what failures he had came about because of this attitude. Every single time he tried playing ball, Republicans took advantage of him. And second, his speech implied that the left is equally at fault for the partisan dick waving. The left isn't innocent, but implying that they're just as bad as Republicans is simply wrong. Democrats weren't the ones screaming at the president and calling him a liar in the middle of his address to the fucking country. Democrats aren't the ones race baiting and making white people fear minorities with campaign ads. It's not the left who's jumped into bed with corporations and special interests (at least not entirely). Democrats don't have a television station. Democrats aren't throwing Republicans to the ground and stomping on their heads. They are not equally at fault for the political climate in the country right now. That is a fact.

Additionally, if an idea is flatout wrong, then you shouldn't compromise with it. There are two types of things we debate about. The first is where compromise is on the table. These are the issues where truth is murky, and both sides have legitimate concerns. I'm talking about health care, or economic issues.

The second type of thing we debate about is over things that can be logically proven as true or untrue. There should be absolutely no room for compromise with these. Creationism should not be taught alongside evolution because creationism is wrong. Gay people should not have to settle for civil unions because they are human beings, and they are not separate but equal. These are debates that are over before they begin.

Just like how Republicans lump every issue into the second category, the problem I see with Stewart's speech is that he lumps every issue into the first one. I love Jon Stewart. His message is nice, and I really wish I could agree with it. If you would've asked me two years ago what I'd think of a speech like this, I would've been on board 100%. I was a bit more moderate back then for one, and I also fell in love with Obama's dreamy rhetoric just like everyone else. I did think the country could come together, and I thought compromise could happen. But that is completely impossible now, and the right is entirely to blame. Their idea of compromise isn't compromise at all, it's "tear up your idea and do what we say." You can't act like a civil person around children and expect them to act civilly back. You know why? Because they're fucking children.