Drew Westen: What Happened to Obama?

Published on Sunday, August 7, 2011 by The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/what-happened-to-obamas-passion.html?_r=1

by Drew Westen

It was a blustery day in Washington on Jan. 20, 2009, as it often seems to be on the day of a presidential inauguration. As I stood with my 8-year-old daughter, watching the president deliver his inaugural address, I had a feeling of unease. It wasn’t just that the man who could be so eloquent had seemingly chosen not to be on this auspicious occasion, although that turned out to be a troubling harbinger of things to come. It was that there was a story the American people were waiting to hear — and needed to hear — but he didn’t tell it. And in the ensuing months he continued not to tell it, no matter how outrageous the slings and arrows his opponents threw at him.

The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to “expect” stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought. Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans would know how to read and write.

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Jim Hightower: How a Corporatist Supreme Court Cabal Joined Forces With Right Wing and Kochs to Quietly Sell Out Our Democracy

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown
Posted on August 5, 2011, Printed on August 7, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151889/how_a_corporatist_supreme_court_cabal_joined_forces_with_right_wing_and_kochs_to_quietly_sell_out_our_democracy

Bill Watterson is Mark Twain--with a drawing pen. He is a master cartoonist, but also a sharp-witted observer of the absurd, with an impish sense of humor. From 1985-1995, Watterson penned "Calvin and Hobbes," the truly marvelous comic strip that featured six-year-old Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes. In Calvin's inventive and iconoclastic mind, Hobbes was a genuine tiger (and his best friend) and they shared boundless adventures that challenged conventional thinking and defied authority, often crashing right through the prescribed social order of the 'real' world.

A recurring theme in the strip was a two-player baseball competition in which both the kid and the tiger simply made up the rules as they went. In one strip, Calvin has hit the ball thrown by Hobbes, and he's scampering toward home plate:

Calvin: Ha Ha! A home run!
Hobbes: You didn't touch all the bases!
Calvin: I did, too.
Hobbes: No, you didn't. You didn't touch seventh base.
Calvin: Yes, I did! I touched the water barrel right after the front porch.
Hobbes: That's not seventh base. That's twelfth base!
Calvin: I thought the garage door was twelfth.
Hobbes: The garage door is twenty-third base. You touched them all out of order, and you didn't touch the secret base.
Calvin: The secret base?? What's the secret base?!
Hobbes: I can't tell you. It's a secret.

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Noam Chomsky: America in Decline

Published on Saturday, August 6, 2011 by In These Times

http://inthesetimes.com/article/11806/america_in_decline/

by Noam Chomsky

“It is a common theme” that the United States, which “only a few years ago was hailed to stride the world as a colossus with unparalleled power and unmatched appeal is in decline, ominously facing the prospect of its final decay,” Giacomo Chiozza writes in the current Political Science Quarterly.

The theme is indeed widely believed. And with some reason, though a number of qualifications are in order. To start with, the decline has proceeded since the high point of U.S. power after World War II, and the remarkable triumphalism of the post-Gulf War ’90s was mostly self-delusion.

Another common theme, at least among those who are not willfully blind, is that American decline is in no small measure self-inflicted. The comic opera in Washington this summer, which disgusts the country and bewilders the world, may have no analogue in the annals of parliamentary democracy.

The spectacle is even coming to frighten the sponsors of the charade. Corporate power is now concerned that the extremists they helped put in office may in fact bring down the edifice on which their own wealth and privilege relies, the powerful nanny state that caters to their interests.

Corporate power’s ascendancy over politics and society—by now mostly financial—has reached the point that both political organizations, which at this stage barely resemble traditional parties, are far to the right of the population on the major issues under debate.

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David Morris: We Will Grow the Economy By Shrinking It

Published on Sunday, August 7, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/07-0

by David Morris

A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only and ignorant with its ignorance.  Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age. -Henry David Thoreau

Throughout human history societies have been informed and instructed by the superstitions of their age.  For thousands of years we believed a single person–a king, a pharaoh, a high priest– should have life and death power over us.  Any other social structure was unthinkable.  We believed the gods that brought drought could be appeased only by animal and, sometimes, human sacrifice.

Today these superstitions seem ridiculous.  How could thinking people ever have believed such preposterous notions?

But here we are.  August 2011.  And the zeitgeist has given birth to a new superstition.  One that will bewilder future generations as much as the belief in the absolute power of pharaohs or drought reflecting the anger of the gods does ours.

What is this new superstition?  The belief that we can grow the economy by shrinking it.

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"Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall" - Will the US Have a Generation Z Revolution?

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Will-the-US-Have-a-Generat-by-Dr-Stuart-Jeanne-B-110805-727.html

August 7, 2011

By Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall

Psychological oppression (manifested by widespread apathy and resignation in the face of major corporate and government attacks on working Americans) is at an all time high in the US. Historically (see my article Teenagers: God's Answer to Psychological Oppression about the Soweto uprising and Palestinian Intifada), it's often a strong and sustained youth rebellion that enables a society to throw off severe psychological oppression. This makes me naturally curious about the chances of a youth resistance movement developing in the US . The following is a breakdown of the forces I see favoring and countering the formation of a generation Z uprising in the US :

The demographics:

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Michael Moore: 30 Years Ago -- The Day the Middle Class Died

Published on Saturday, August 6, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

 http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/06

by Michael Moore

From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, "When did this all begin, America's downward slide?" They say they've heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free). That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer. That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how "lowly" your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated.

Young people have heard of this mythical time -- but it was no myth, it was real. And when they ask, "When did this all end?", I say, "It ended on this day: August 5th, 1981."

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Richard Wolff: The S&P Downgrade of US Debt: What it Means

Published on Sunday, August 7, 2011 by Richard D. Wolff

http://rdwolff.com/content/sp-downgrade-us-debt-what-it-means

by Richard Wolff

Much verbiage is piling up on this issue. Yet, it matters little that the two other giant rating agencies did not downgrade US debt as S&P did. It is likewise unimportant that all those agencies deserve the bad reputations won when their over-rating of securities burst in the collapse of 2007 and took an already unbalanced economy into deep recession. Nor does the downgrade impose major cash costs anytime soon.

The S&P downgrade is important because it clarifies and underscores two key dimensions of today’s economic reality that most commentators have ignored or downplayed. The first dimension concerns exactly why the US national debt is rising fast. There are three major reasons for this: (1) major tax cuts especially on corporations and the rich since the 1970s and especially since 2000 have reduced revenues flowing into Washington, (2) costly global wars especially since 2000 have increased government spending dramatically, and (3) costly bailouts of dysfunctional banks, insurance companies, large corporations and the economic system generally since 2007 have likewise sharply expanded government spending. With less tax revenue coming in from corporations and the rich and more spending on defense/wars and bailouts, the government had to borrow the difference. Duh!

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Paul Krugman: S&P and the USA, Right's 'Madness' and Agency's Ineptitude Led to Downgrade

Published on Saturday, August 6, 2011 by The New York Times

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/sp-and-the-usa/

by Paul Krugman

NEW YORK - OK, so Standard and Poors has gone ahead with the threatened downgrade. It’s a strange situation.

On one hand, there is a case to be made that the madness of the right has made America a fundamentally unsound nation. And yes, it is the madness of the right: if not for the extremism of anti-tax Republicans, we would have no trouble reaching an agreement that would ensure long-run solvency.

On the other hand, it’s hard to think of anyone less qualified to pass judgment on America than the rating agencies. The people who rated subprime-backed securities are now declaring that they are the judges of fiscal policy? Really?

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Jeff Goodell: An Environmental Upside to the Horrible Debt Deal?

Published on Sunday, August 7, 2011 by Rolling Stone

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/an-environmental-upside-to-the-horrible-debt-deal-20110805

by Jeff Goodell

With the debt-ceiling deal done, the details of who feels the most pain from the next ($1.6 trillion) round of cuts will be left up to a 12-person congressional "supercommittee," to be formed in the coming weeks. But you can bet that funding for dramatic action on climate change and toxic mercury pollution is not going to win out over funding for bedpans and missiles.

In fact, as others have pointed out, cutting trillions out of the federal budget is likely to mean massive cutbacks in the regulatory arm at the EPA, the gutting of clean-energy funding at the Department of Energy, and goodbye to any hopes of infrastructure spending for little projects like, say, a 21st-Century electricity transmission grid.  Erich Pica, head of Friends of the Earth,pretty much summed it up: “The draconian cuts passed are likely to mean more people out of work, more people drinking poisoned water and breathing polluted air, and a slower transition to a clean energy economy."

All true.  But maybe there’s an upside, too.  

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Robert Reich: Why We Can Thank Republicans for a Double-dip Recession

By Robert Reich, RobertReich.org
Posted on August 5, 2011, Printed on August 7, 2011
http://robertreich.org/post/8495162670

John Boehner said Tuesday the Republicans got "90 percent of what we wanted" from the budget deal. So presumably he and his colleagues are willing to take responsibility for some 450 points of today's mammoth 513-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

I'm being a bit facetious - but only a bit. It's always dangerous to read too much into one day's move in the stock market.

Yet the stock sell-off -- not just today's, but that of the last days -- cannot be easily dismissed. It marks Wall Street's largest losing streak since 2008.

Republicans repeatedly assured the nation that once the debt-limit deal was done -- capping spending, cutting the budget deficit, and getting "90 percent" of what they wanted -- the economy would bounce back.

Just the opposite seems to be happening.

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