Rupert Murdoch’s racket

Seumas Milne of the U.K. Guardian puts things into perspective:

Murdoch's overweening political influence has long been recognised, from well before Tony Blair flew to Australia in 1995 to pay public homage at his corporate court. What has been less well understood is how close-up and personal the pressure exerted by his organisation has been throughout public life. The fear that those who crossed him would be given the full tabloid treatment over their personal misdemeanours, real or imagined, has proved to be a powerful Mafia-like racket. It was the warning that News International would target their personal lives that cowed members of the Commons culture and media committee over pressing their investigation into phone hacking too vigorously before the last election.

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An obvious way to cut the deficit

Alan Grayson included me in his recent mass-emailing on the topic of the budget deficit. Guess how he would cut the deficit?

Last year, we spent $154 billion in appropriated funds on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is in addition to the $549 billion in appropriated funds for the Pentagon – you know, just to keep the lights on. And the non-appropriated cost of war was even higher – especially when you include the cost of care for the 15% of all the American troops in Iraq who come home with permanent brain abnormalities. According to Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, the war in Iraq alone is costing us $4 trillion and counting. That’s more than $13,000 for every one of us, and roughly 8% of our entire net worth as a nation. The cost of war is enormous. So enormous that, as I pointed out in H.R. 5353, The War is Making You Poor Act, if we simply funded that cost through the Pentagon’s own budget, rather than through supplemental appropriations, we could eliminate taxes on everyone’s first $35,000 of income ($70,000 for married couples), and still reduce the deficit by more than $10 billion a year. And that was last year. Since then, the number of wars has gone up by 50%.

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Why are Obama’s supporters not expressing outrage at his actions?

Glenn Greenwald sums up the problem at the U.K. Guardian:

The same Democratic president who supported the transfer of $700bn to bail out Wall Street banks, who earlier this year signed an extension of Bush's massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and who has escalated America's bankruptcy-inducing posture of Endless War, is now trying to reduce the debt by cutting benefits for America's most vulnerable – at the exact time that economic insecurity and income inequality are at all-time highs. Where is the "epic shitstorm" from the left which Black predicted? With a few exceptions – the liberal blog FiredogLake has assembled 50,000 Obama supporters vowing to withhold re-election support if he follows through, and a few other groups have begun organising as well – it's nowhere to be found. Therein lies one of the most enduring attributes of Obama's legacy: in many crucial areas, he has done more to subvert and weaken the left's political agenda than a GOP president could have dreamed of achieving. So potent, so overarching, are tribal loyalties in American politics that partisans will support, or at least tolerate, any and all policies their party's leader endorses – even if those policies are ones they long claimed to loathe.
And that's just the beginning of the problem with Obama. Consider the damage he has done on other issues.
Obama has continued Bush/Cheney terrorism policies – once viciously denounced by Democrats – of indefinite detention, renditions, secret prisons by proxy, and sweeping secrecy doctrines.He has gone further than his predecessor by waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, seizing the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process far from any battlefield, massively escalating drone attacks in multiple nations, and asserting the authority to unilaterally prosecute a war (in Libya) even in defiance of a Congressional vote against authorising the war.
Greenwald's article contains many links documenting Obama's abysmal record. Obama has destroyed the modicum of "hope" that I still had. I am now convinced that there is no solution to our biggest problems by using the system. On the national level, voting is a charade to trick ordinary folks into thinking that they have a voice in their government--they've been tricked into thinking that voting is adequate and responsible citizen participation. What we need, more than ever, is for people to turn off their TVs and to stop living in the fantasy world of sports teams and movie stars. We have a country to run, and we have President who does what loud and obnoxious people tell him to do. We need to become loud and obnoxious if we are to get Barack Obama to do the right thing, because he has proven himself to be, at best, a channeler, not a leader. We need to challenge him by calling him out and labeling him for what he is: Not-Leader! I write this as a person who financially supported Obama and voted for him. And I would still support him over McCain/Palin or any modern-day equivalents. The big question, then is how we get the voters to wake up from their fantasies, to become well-informed and to loudly demand that our elected representatives run the country in a responsible and sustainable way. How do we get citizens to express unrelenting outrage at the corrupting influence of the current system of financing campaigns with huge sums of private (mostly corporate) money? Anything less is nihilism. Perhaps that is what we need to start calling Americans who think that the mere act of reading their crappy local newspapers, watching the most popular versions of TV "news" and voting makes them responsible citizens: Nihilists! Perhaps I am able to see Obama for what he is because I am not very "tribal." I agree with Glenn Greenwald that "tribalism" is why progressives are not speaking out against the man they supported for President. It's time to stop being tribal. That would be the start of a solution.

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The Grinches Who are Stealing Christmas from America

House Majority Leader Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and House Speaker Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) are the Grinch and his dog Max who along with the other Republicans in Washington are stealing Christmas from America. The stealing of Christmas from America is going on as part of the ongoing “negotiations” related to the raising of the debt ceiling and has nothing to do with anything but hubris and insanity. Ronald Reagan ran against a $1 trillion national debt in 1980. Reagan, Bush I and Bush II gave corporations and millionaires a series of tax cuts and tax eliminations which were supposed to spur investment and create jobs and make the economy grow. What America got from Reagan, Bush I and Bush II is a nearly $14 trillion national debt and the Republican plan to “fix” the problem is to destroy Medicare, Social Security, unions and what is left of America’s Middle Class. Albert Einstein said on definition of “crazy” is to “do the same thing over and over expecting a different result.” Republicans will do nothing but oppose any debt reduction plan of President Obama because they think voters will blame the President if the entire country and the world are thrown into economic chaos! The Grinch House Majority Leader Ryan and Max the Dog House Speaker Boehner want us all to believe that yet ANOTHER bigger and better round of Reagan, Bush I and Bush II tax giveaways to the corporations and millionaires will fix the economy even though the past Reagan, Bush I and Bush II policies gave us the Great Recession and $14 trillion in national debt! The Grinch and Max the Dog are stealing Christmas from America because if only corporations and millionaires can afford it, Christmas is gone! So, we are at an impasse and the crazy Republicans will throw the country and the world under the bus if the President and the Democrats don’t let the Grinch and Max the Dog have their way. It’s time for the Grinch and Max to abandon their craziness and to learn the true meaning of Christmas---Christmas is for all us here, not just corporations and millionaires.

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