Category: Politics

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, media-general, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

Want to know why right-wing pundits far outnumber those on the left in mainstream US TV? Bloggers Jay Rosen and Glenn Greenwald shared a theory on Bill Moyers Journal: having someone like Amy Goodman of Democracy Now would interfere too much with the construct disseminated by US mainstream media that the US government and major corporations are our benevolent friends, and they don’t want to air views that might help explain why the US has enemies abroad.

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter, those preachers of hate, are OK in their view because they are simply putting out a more vitriolic version of the Reaganite “mainstream.” But the soft-spoken, highly articulate and very well informed Goodman (who I consider one of the best interviewers in contemporary journalism) is considered a threat!

Of course, this doesn’t explain how another articulate and well-informed progressive,
Rachel Maddow, gets air. But it says a lot about the nature of today’s corporate media.

In the “know your enemies” department, fans of intelligent TV must read this brief transcript or watch the video. It’s a shocker.

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By Posted on Posted in Politics, Transparency vs. Secrecy

President Barack Obama is off to a great start. Some of these stories you may have heard about–others were quieter.

  • Began his foreign policy by calling several Middle East leaders (Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and Jordan’s King Abdullah–but not, unfortunately, any representative of Hamas) to talk about peace–and by appointing former Senator George Mitchell, a man who had much to do with the negotiated peace in Northern Ireland, his Middle East peace envoy
  • Also took the first steps toward drawing down forces in Iraq and closing Guantanamo
  • Overturned the secretive policies of the Bush administration in favor of much greater openness, including much better responses to Freedom Of Information Act requests:

    The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears… All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.

  • Got his Blackberry back, after the National Security Administration made it supposedly unhackable
  • Discovered, along with many of his staff, that the White House computer systems are years obsolete
  • Had a substantive discussion with his economic advisors

    • Let’s keep the momentum up! There’s a whole lot of damage to undo, and even more, a whole lot ofnew progress to be made.

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    By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

    By Howard Zinn, with opening commentary by Shel Horowitz
    Democracy Now ran a long speech by the legendary Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States (a book that is absolute must reading for any serious student of history, of the power of social change, of people’s movements, and yes, of how to get to the kind of future we all want).

    I strongly advise: go to the DN website and listen, watch, or read this speech. And then go read his book. If you’ve read it already, it’s probably time to read it again. If you’ve never read it, prepare to have your eyes opened wide.

    Here are a couple of fragments of the speech. Two of which I bolded. the first is maybe the best advice Obama could receive–and the second is advice for we, the people. For us.
    -SH

    So, the other factor that stands in the way of a real bold economic and social program is the war. The war, the thing that has, you know, a $600 billion military budget. Now, how can you call for the government to take over the healthcare system? How can you call for the government to give jobs to millions of people? How can you do all that? How can you offer free education, free higher education, which is what we should have really? We should have free higher education. Or how can you—you know. No, you know, how can you double teachers’ salaries? How can you do all these things, which will do away with poverty in the United States? It all costs money.

    And so, where’s that money going to come from? Well, it can come from two sources. One is the tax structure…the top one percent of—the richest one percent of the country has gained several trillions of dollars in the last twenty, thirty years as a result of the tax system, which has favored them. And, you know, you have a tax system where 200 of the richest corporations pay no taxes. You know that? You can’t do that. You don’t have their accountants. You don’t have their legal teams, and so on and so forth. You don’t have their loopholes.

    The war, $600 billion, we need that. We need that money…that money is needed to take care of little kids in pre-school, and there’s no money for pre-school. No, we need a radical change in the tax structure, which will immediately free huge amounts of money to do the things that need to be done, and then we have to get the money from the military budget. Well, how do you get money from the military budget? Don’t we need $600 billion for a military budget? Don’t we have to fight two wars? No. We don’t have to fight any wars. You know.

    And this is where Obama and the Democratic Party have been hesitant, you know, to talk about. But we’re not hesitant to talk about it. The citizens should not be hesitant to talk about it. If the citizens are hesitant to talk about it, they would just reinforce the Democratic leadership and Obama in their hesitations. No, we have to speak what we believe is the truth. I think the truth is we should not be at war. We should not be at war at all. I mean, these wars are absurd. They’re horrible also. They’re horrible, and they’re absurd. You know, from a human, human point of view, they’re horrible. You know, the deaths and the mangled limbs and the blindness and the three million people in Iraq losing their homes, having to leave their homes, three million people—imagine?—having to look elsewhere to live because of our occupation, because of our war for democracy, our war for liberty, our war for whatever it is we’re supposed to be fighting for…

    Obama could possibly listen, if we, all of us—and the thing to say is, we have to change our whole attitude as a nation towards war, militarism, violence. We have to declare that we are not going to engage in aggressive wars. We are going to renounce the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. “Oh, we have to go to”—you know, “We have to go to war on this little pitiful country, because this little pitiful country might someday”—do what? Attack us? I mean, Iraq might attack us? “Well, they’re developing a nuclear weapon”—one, which they may have in five or ten years. That’s what all the experts said, even the experts on the government side. You know, they may develop one nuclear weapon in five—wow! The United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons. Nobody says, “How about us?” you see. But, you know, well, you know all about that. Weapons of mass destruct, etc., etc. No reason for us to wage aggressive wars. We have to renounce war as an instrument of foreign policy….

    A hundred different countries, we have military bases. That doesn’t look like a peace-loving country. And besides—I mean, first of all, of course, it’s very expensive. We save a lot of money. Do we really need those—what do we need those bases for? I can’t figure out what we need those bases for. And, you know, so we have to—yeah, we have to give that up, and we have to declare ourselves a peaceful nation. We will no longer be a military superpower. “Oh, that’s terrible!” There are people who think we must be a military superpower. We don’t have to be a military superpower. We don’t have to be a military power at all, you see? We can be a humanitarian superpower. We can—yeah. We’ll still be powerful. We’ll still be rich. But we can use that power and that wealth to help people all over the world. I mean, instead of sending helicopters to bomb people, send helicopters when they face a hurricane or an earthquake and they desperately need helicopters. You know, you know. So, yeah, there’s a lot of money available once you seriously fundamentally change the foreign policy of the United States…

    when you put together that don’t belong together, you see a “national security”—no—and “national interest.” No, there’s no one national interest. There’s the interest of the president of the United States, and then there’s the interest of the young person he sends to war. They’re different interests, you see? There is the interest of Exxon and Halliburton, and there’s the interest of the worker, the nurse’s aide, the teacher, the factory worker. Those are different interests. Once you recognize that you and the government have different interests, that’s a very important step forward in your thinking, because if you think you have a common interest with the government, well, then it means that if the government says you must do this and you must do that, and it’s a good idea to go to war here, well, the government is looking out for my interest. No, the government is not looking out for your interest. The government has its own interests, and they’re not the interests of the people…

    We have checks and balances that balance one another out. If somebody does something bad, it will be checked by”—wow! What a neat system! Nothing can go wrong. Well, now, those structures are not democracy. Democracy is the people. Democracy is social movements. That’s what democracy is. And what history tells us is that when injustices have been remedied, they have not been remedied by the three branches of government. They’ve been remedied by great social movements, which then push and force and pressure and threaten the three branches of government until they finally do something. Really, that’s democracy.

    And no, we mustn’t be pessimistic. We mustn’t be cynical. We mustn’t think we’re powerless. We’re not powerless. That’s where history comes in. If you look at history, you see people felt powerless and felt powerless and felt powerless, until they organized, and they got together, and they persisted, and they didn’t give up, and they built social movements. Whether it was the anti-slavery movement or the black movement of the 1960s or the antiwar movement in Vietnam or the women’s movement, they started small and apparently helpless; they became powerful enough to have an effect on the nation and on national policy. We’re not powerless. We just have to be persistent and patient…

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, People Helping People, Politics

    Calling it the worst fraud in history (far worse than Enron), Democracy Now released the shocking news that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had known there were serious problems around Bernard Madoff for nine years!

    Are you as sick and tired of this as I am? Enron fell apart in 2001. Michael Milken was indicted in 1989–that’s almost 20 years ago! And now we find out that Madoff, former head of NASDAQ, took the whole financial system for an astonishing $50 billion, suckering investors in with the promise of outrageously good yields and wiping out numerous good charities–the same week we find out Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich actually had the chutzpah to try to sell Obama’s vacant Senate seat.

    Have we learned NOTHING since the Milken days?

    If you’re all riled up about business scandals, about banks and industrialists coming to Washington to coax billions of our tax dollars out of the government while doing nothing either to change the over-lavish lifestyles or to pump credit back into the system, if you think these companies should get a clue before they come looking for a handout and the government should get a clue before it hands out our money without any oversight, if you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired–there are a few things you can do. They’re easy, they take almost no time, and they could make a difference.

    First, tell Obama’s transition team what you want to see the next administration accomplish. It’s the first time I can remember a newly elected president making a conscious and thorough effort to tap the wisdom of the general public.

    Second, sign the Business Ethics Pledge and help create a climate where the Milkens, Madoffs, Kenneth Lays, and Blagojeviches of the future won’t find anyone to listen to their crooked Ponzi schemes and extortionate rackets.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, People Helping People, Politics

    Nelson Mandela was the first black president of South Africa, who came to power after decades of an oppressive apartheid regime that enforced a horrible climate on its people of color–the vast majority of its population. Mandela himself was imprisoned for 27 years.

    When Mandela and the African National Congress came to power, it would have been easy to conduct Nuremberg-style trials and punish the transgressors. But instead, South Africa established an official Truth and Reconciliation Commission; he handled the need to change with love. The Commission thoroughly investigated many of the old regime’s criminals, but did not punish them–instead using the trials to create healing rather than division.

    While it’s easy to imagine taking a good deal of satisfaction from seeing the rogues of our rogue state–Bush, Rumsfeld, Gonzales…and especially Rove and Cheney–on trial and facing long prison terms, from the point of view of healing the country and actually accomplishing a progressive agenda in these already-difficult times, it may make sense to have the trials but have them under the banner of truth and reconciliation, and let their consciences (such as they are) or the Higher Power they call claim to believe in, be the ones to punish them.

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    By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, Web 2.0/Social Media

    Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst for Forrester Research, found some pretty important stats about the uses of various Web 2.0 portals by the two major presidential campaigns. The study looked at Twitter followers, Facebook supporters, number of videos uploaded and watched, and more. And Obama wildly outperformed McCain on every single metric–from 380% more supporters on both MySpace and Facebook to an astonishing 240 times (that’s 24,000 percent!) more followers on Twitter.

    Of course, McCain’s cluelessness around the Internet was the butt of many jokes–but Obama really gets it, and that may be a contribution to the landslide victory.

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    By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, Uncategorized

    While we congratulate Barack Obama for his historic landslide victory, let’s remember that we marketers can take many lessons from this campaign. A few examples:

    A transformative, emotion-based, positive campaign will trump a narrow,negative, issues-based campaign. Obama inspired hope, and gave millions of people a voice and interest in presidential politics that they hadn’t had before. The last two party nominees to try this were also successful: John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan (remember “It’s morning in America”?)

    Take away your opponent’s advantages by neutralizing the rhetoric. McCain’s campaign claimed to put “country first”–but Obama was the one who walked the talk. His speeches were you-focused, his message was of unity and solidarity.

    Stay on message. Obama was so good at this that even when he shifted the message (for example, embracing offshore drilling after opposing it), he wasn’t called on the flip-flop. Of course, this may be because McCain flip-flopped on all sorts of issues, and was pretty vulnerable.

    Don’t apologize for your beliefs. Three out of the four most recent prior Democratic nominees–Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry–all crawled on their bellies with messages that basically said, “umm, I’m not really a liberal, I didn’t mean it, I’m soooo sorry!” And all three lost because doing that took the wind right out of their sails. Bill Clinton, who is not a liberal, didn’t play that game. Not surprisingly, he won. Obama never apologized, ignored the L-word, and didn’t even flinch when in the closing days, McCain revved it up and actually called him a socialist (traditionally, the kiss of death in US politics).

    When you attack, don’t sling mud at your opponent’s character, but at the specific actions or positions: “You…sung a song about bombing Iran.” “That endorsement didn’t come easy. Senator McCain had to vote 90 percent of the time with George Bush and Dick Cheney to get it.”

    Stay clean, tell the truth, and don’t do the things you attack your opponent for. After 21 months of intense scrutiny, neither Hillary Clinton nor John McCain could find much negativity of substance. The man apparently has no scandals. He’s in a strong relationship with his wonderful family, hasn’t been caught with his fingers in the till or with his pants down, and hasn’t shaken anyone down for money or votes. So the attcks were based on ridiculous stuff that didn’t stick:

  • He’s an elitist (and McCain, the son of an admiral who owns numerous houses and thinks $5 million income is middle class, isn’t?)
  • He goes (or went) to the wrong church (and we just won’t talk about the right-wing extremist demagogues like John Hagee that McCain was so cozy with
  • He’s a Muslim (and even if it were true, what’s so horrible about that?)
  • He’s not really a US citizen
  • He “pals around with terrorists”
  • He’s a socialist

    • All these vicious lies came back to bite McCain, and to draw huge turnout among Obama’s base.

    The one accusation that stuck was about his lack of experience. Hillary’s “3 a.m.” ad was extremely effective, and swung Ohio and Texas into her camp. But McCain absolutely threw that argument away when he selected the even-less-experienced, ethically challenged, and totally clueless Sarah Palin.

    Perhaps the most important lesson of all: When you really want something, work your butt off for it, be the kind of ieader that inspires others to help, and take nothing for granted. Obama’s on-the-ground organiation has been awesome since the get-go, and that was a decisive factor.

    Finally, when the universe hands you a blessing, accept it. The economic meltdown was perfectly timed to provide enormous advantage to Obama, and he was wiling and able to run with it.

    In fairness to McCain, I think a lot of the errors in judgment he showed were the result of his handlers. They apparently let him write his own concession speech, and this gracious, conciliatory, and beautiful message was not only his best speech of the campaign, it may have been the best of his career.

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    By Posted on Posted in Politics, Social and Economic Justice

    Greg Palast is one of my favorite investigative journalists, especially when it comes to theft-of-vote issues. But as a political thinker, he can be muddy. Yesterday, he released a column essentially saying he was voting for Obama despite his political reservations in order to make up for years of racial injustice. He called the article “Vote for him – because he’s Black,” and talked movingly about a favorite teacher who was hounded out of the system because he was black.

    So, I’m going to do something that Dr. Bruce would think little of. I’m going to vote for the Black man.

    Because he’s Black.

    The truth is, I’m wary of Barack Obama. His cozy relations with the sub-prime loan sharks who funded his early campaign; his vote, at the behest of his big donor ADM corporation, for the horrific Bush energy bill.

    But there’s one thing that overshadows policy positions, one thing he cannot change once in office: the color of his skin. The same as Mr. Bruce’s.

    By Palast’s logic, the black dictator Robert Mugabe is a better choice than a visionary like Mikhael Gorbachev or Lech Walesa (both white males). should we vote for Sarah Palin because she’s a woman? While if all other things were equal, I might vote for the candidate who came from the more disenfranchised background, that’s not even a factor for me in this race. Because the candidates are far from equal. I vote for the candidate who I feel will do the most good–and sometimes, like today, that is not the one I most agree with.

    True, I share Palast’s reservations about Barack Obama, and could add a few of my own. I wish he were as liberal as McCain and Palin paint him out to be. And if all I wanted to do with my vote was overcome historic injustice, I could vote for the Green Party. Not only Cynthia McKinney but also her running mate are both black and female, and her politics–or Ralph Nader’s, for that matter–are a lot closer to mine than Obama’s are.

    I spent a lot of time thinking about whether to vote for McKinney, Nader, or Obama. I’ve often voted 3rd party and I still regret voting for Kerry instead of the Green Party’s David Cobb in 2004 (a decision I didn’t make until I was actually in the voting booth, by the way). And though I don’t have any illusions about how much change an Obama presidency will mean, this year, I’m not only voting Dem but I’m actually went up to my neighboring swing state (New Hampshire) and volunteered.

    And I feel good about it.

    If the candidate had been Hillary or some of the others, I would have voted 3rd party this year. So…why am I voting for Obama anyhow?

    I really do see the country needing a unifying force right now, and a complete and total repudiation in the largest possible numbers of the last eight years And to me that means Obama this time, even with my significant reservations. And I do think that Obama is seriously motivated by a desire for social change, and is far more ethical and smart than the typical candidate. I want to support the Democrats moving for once in a good direction, after a series of centrist, bland, uninspiring and cowardly candidates who gave me no reason to vote for them, starting in 1988 with Michael Dukakis. The only exception was Bill Clinton, who was centrist but far from bland, at times inspiring, and willing to be controversial. Not surprisingly, he’s been the only Democrat to win in the past 20 years.

    I think we are presented with a rare window, and if there’s an overwhelming majority plus veto-proof Congress, Obama may move left in the crisis, much as FDR did. After all, even LBJ and (on certain issues) Nixon moved way to the left once they were in office. I also think that while his vision is limited and his thinking somewhat too conventional, he is sincere about social justice. He’s also amazingly smart, charismatic, ethical, compassionate, and quick on his feet. He understands the need to do something about energy policy and climate change. He understands, form personal experience, the peculiar cultural and philosophical stew that is the United States electorate. He understands the power of good marketing and will be an effective salesman for his policies on Capitol Hill and in the public squares of American opinion. And he is by disposition well to the left of the Clintons, though nowhere near as far as I’d like.

    And Obama is the only figure on the national scene who could actually be, as George W. Bush so famously claimed to be and then did the opposite, “a uniter, not a divider.”

    He may actually be in a position to accomplish more change than we expect. He may actually be that transformative leader. Dare I call this the audacity of my hope?

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    By Posted on Posted in Politics, Uncategorized

    You’ve just got to wonder. What are these people thinking?

    “When I started talking to them, it kind of became clear that they were kind of just telling people to leave that they thought maybe would be disruptive, but based on what? Based on how they looked,” Elborno said. “It was pretty much all young people, the college demographic.”

    Elborno said even McCain supporters were among those being asked to leave.

    “I saw a couple that had been escorted out and they were confused as well, and the girl was crying, so I said ‘Why are you crying? and she said ‘I already voted for McCain, I’m a Republican, and they said we had to leave because we didn’t look right,’” Elborno said. “They were handpicking these people and they had nothing to go off of, besides the way the people looked.”

    Let’s hear it for those good old American First Amendment values of free speech and assembly, Senator McCain. Is this kind of profiling any less despicable than racial profiling?

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics, Uncategorized
  • Good summary of all the race-baiting, commie-baiting, Muslim-baiting McCarthyistic crap coming out of many corners of the McCain campaign, most of it apparently condoned by both McCain and Palin: at least 13 separate incidents, including some real nasties, like the woman who made up the story that she was mugged and disfigured for supporting McCain and the robocalls to Jewish voters in Pennsylvania warning of another holocaust if Obama is elected (that one actually did get disavowed, but McCain personally endorsed a sleazy brochure that tried to tie Obama to 9/11). And several more dirty tricks, many targeting black voters, listed here.
  • Front-page story in The Times of London (owned by Rupert Murdoch, but still a reputable paper) has several Vietnamese involved in McCain’s capture/rescue and imprisonment denying that he was ever tortured–in separate interviews. American mainstream media has apparently been ignoring this story, and I’m not convinced it’s true, but you’d think the press would want to investigate, since the torture story has been the basis for his entire career. The closest I could find to corroboration was this anonymous report that claims to be from a fellow POW

    • According to a fellow POW, John McCain sustained some injures after ejecting over North Vietnam, but was never tortured or mistreated. Speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of what the new Republican Nazi Party might do to him and his family, he said, “Hell, they didn’t have to torture McCain. He talked incessantly. We didn’t nickname him “Songbird” because he was cute or had a pleasant voice…”

    I’ve known McCain for years and while he’s a lot of things, a straight talker he is not. Even though I was shot down twice in Vietnam, I wasn’t captured. The records show that most pilots did their very best to avoid being captured, and those who were, carried out their orders according the United States Military Code of Conduct, especially Article III. There is no record of John McCain trying to escape or aiding others in their attempt to escape. I also know that like me, McCain is one sick old man. He’s eaten up with PTSD and hate, and it’s not the North Vietnamese, North Koreans or even the Taliban he hates. He hates Americans for leaving him to rot in a POW camp. Evidently, the Pentagon didn’t believe McCain warranted being rescued to the degree that McCain believed.

  • McCain’s hypocrisy shows up on just about every issue. As one example, how about John McCain pushing Reagan to meet with terrorists without preconditions.

    In 1987, John McCain cast several votes in an attempt to force the Reagan administration to meet with RENAMO1, a guerrilla organization in Mozambique that State Department officials at the time described as a “terrorist group,” 2 without requiring that the group meet any preconditions.

    Oh, and how about Palin’s ties to a terrorist separatist group in Alaska–much less tenuous than Obama’s ties to Ayers?

  • The ridiculous and desperate attempt to pin vote fraud charges on Acorn, and by implication, Obama–while the Republicans continue the biggest disenfranchisement campaign in US history

    This is only the tip of the iceberg. I could chronicle this stuff all night. “Mr. Straight Talk” has some serious explaining–and apologizing–to do.

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