More Obama Stupidity

He is Reagan, building a new conservative movement and helping it come to power. Without Obama and his shitty policies, would we have gotten Scott Brown? Chris Floyd (internal links omitted, I recommend reading the entire thing):

And what is Barack Obama’s agenda? What is his political program? It breaks down into three main elements: unwinnable wars, unconscionable bailouts, and unworkable, unwanted health care “reform” that forces people to further enrich some of the most despised conglomerates in the land. It is, in every way, a recipe for moral, economic and political disaster. It is a gigantic anchor tied around the neck of the Democratic Party, and it will drag the whole lumbering wreck back to the bottom in short order.

It also provides a fertile breeding ground for the willful, belligerent ignorance of the Right to thrive. With such an egregiously stupid and destructive agenda at work in the White House, opponents need only say that they are against it, and they are guaranteed a wide following. Who would not be against unwinnable war, unconscionable bailouts and unworkable boondoggles serving rapacious elites? The actual positions held by these opponents – the actual policies they will pursue once in power – are given little scrutiny in such circumstances. The opponent represents change from a hated status quo – and that’s enough. Later, when their odious positions come to light, it is too late.

Where have we seen this dynamic at work before? Oh yes, it was way back in November 2008. Barack Obama represented change from the hated status quo, from the agenda of the ruling Republican party. And what was that agenda? Why, unwinnable wars, unconscionable bailouts and the assiduous service of rapacious elites. The actual positions held by Obama – the actual policies that he would pursue once in power – were given little scrutiny. Except by a precious few – such as Arthur Silber, who long ago warned that Obama’s election would be ruinous for genuine progressive change, that he would merely put a new gloss on the old corruption while disarming dissent from ‘progressives,’ who would feel bound to support the president against his rightwing enemies – even if it meant “holding their noses” and supporting bad policies like the health care reform bill or the Afghan surge.

Now it is obvious to all that Obama’s core agenda is the same as Bush’s: maintaining the elitist, militarist, corporatist system in all its essential elements. The “War on Terror” goes on, expanding into new lands. Torture and murder are still countenanced and concealed, in concentration camps and secret sites that are still in operation. All of Bush’s most egregious assertions of authoritarian power are embraced and defended in court. Wall Street is rewarded, not regulated for its vast crimes. The legislative architect and champion of one of the most regressive, punitive, draconian acts of class war in our time – the Bankruptcy Bill, that atom bomb dropped on working people, the sick, the old and the young – has been plucked from deserved obscurity and made Vice President of the United States. A grotesquely expensive, unjust and dysfunctional health care system is not only left intact by “reform,” it is given millions of new, captive customers, and more public money to guarantee its profits.

Once again, the question arises: Is this a winning agenda?

Although as always, I guess the real question is winning for whom?

And now this: http://agonist.org/sean_paul_kelley/20100125/just_privatize_everything Further proof the bus is on its way into a ditch. I just don’t have any bandwidth for outrage any longer.

Politico is reporting that Obama will call for a freeze on all non-military dsicretionary spedning.

Fuck it. It’s all over now. I’m never voting Democrat again.

Personally I’m taking a bit of comfort in this kind of news. The doom overtaking the US seems at least more certain now. No more fretting about whether someone can pull us back from the brink of disaster. Obama has decided to take us over the edge, but instead of diving headlong, we’re gonna rapel (sp?) down the side of the cliff to a nice soft landing. If the rope doesn’t break (that’s a big if), we might even have a swift but soft landing.

Ian needs do an essay on the economic phenomena of diminishing utility in regard to: 1. value, the basis for graduated progressive taxation on income. 2. leverage, the diminishing ability to obtain desired results from a given input. 3. a review of Thorstein Veblin’s opus (for perspective). 4. a projection of diminishing returns available for governmental effectiveness, the eroding of politico-economic authority from repeated economic failures (bankrupt economic strategy/theory).

There, I’ve done the easy part ……

spending freeze, privatization, cat food commission. time to review what neoliberalism did to russia in the early ’90s especially since larry summers was involved that time too.

3 million dead.

lancet, jan 2009, mass privatisation and the post-communist mortality crisis: a cross-national analysis

….

impeach obama.