So it’s the day after President Obama’s inauguration. How’s everyone feeling? I’m still pretty damn excited, though it doesn’t quite feel real yet… I came to political awareness under Bush’s reign; I’m more than eager to see how such awareness might evolve alongside this administrative change.

On this day after, I second Jay Smooth in “Why I’m Happy, Why I’m Not Satisfied”:

Time to get to work! (Or, rather, to continue working, with enthusiasm!).

Refreshingly, it seems the Obama administration agrees. Already, Team Obama has ordered a 120 day halt on the prosecutions of detainees in Guantanamo Bay.

Such a request may not be automatically granted by military judges, and not all defense attorneys agree to such a suspension. But the move is a first step toward closing a detention facility and system of military trials that became a worldwide symbol of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism and its unyielding attitude toward foreign and domestic critics.

The legal maneuver appears designed to provide the Obama administration time to refashion the prosecution system and potentially treat detainees as criminal defendants in federal court or have them face war-crimes charges in military courts-martial. It is also possible that the administration could re-form and relocate the military commissions before resuming trials.

So it might be difficult to foretell direct results, to say the least.

“This is a good step in the right direction, although we still think that the unconditional withdrawal of all charges and shutting down this tainted system is warranted,” said Jamil Dakwar, director of the human rights program at the American Civil Liberties Union. “The president’s order leaves open the option of this discredited system remaining in existence.”

Jamil Dakwar is right, of course. This action is not nearly enough. However, I don’t believe that the urgency and necessity of successive steps distracts from the urgency and necessity of this first one. I commend it!

President Obama has acknowledged in recent interviews that shutting the facility is likely to be prolonged an complex. And the administration now faces a number of potentially daunting challenges to following through on the president’s campaign promise. Obama is expected to sign an executive order soon that will lay out in detail his plan to empty the facility.

I look forward to learning all about it.

Posted under Politics

Barack Obama is a very intelligent man.  Which is why his invitation of Rick Warren is such a confusing move.  Its his latest fuck you note pinned to the hope that swept him into office  (Jesus’ General has a short and brilliant synopsis).  It would also appear to be a fundamentally naive misunderstanding of what Rick Warren represents.  Rick Warren is an ultra conservative Christian who is actively working to put a mainstream spin on fundamentalist ideas.  As Lindsey Beyerstein notes:

Giving Warren even more mainstream cred is not just a cost-free nod to evangelicals. It’s a boost for someone who actively opposes Obama’s agenda and who is eager to influence secular affairs.

That mainstream cred may be cost-free to the evangelicals, but it comes at a deadly cost to the LGBT community…

Read More…

Posted under News, Politics, Religion, Sexuality

The controversial Reverand Wright was uninvited on account of his inflammatory sermons.  Pam Spaulding wonders why Rick Warren won’t be:

So apparently Wright can be given the hook when Obama’s doing political risk assessment, but not Rick Warren. You can draw your own conclusions as to why it’s now possible, even in light of the incredible mother lode of evidence of the extreme anti-gay views of Rick Warren, that Barack Obama doesn’t feel politically inconvenienced enough to dump the Saddleback bigot.

Two reasons jump out at me.  One, that team Obama expects Warren to behave during the inauguration.  The idea is for a voice of the religious right to champion causes he shares with the incoming administration.  Obama is consensus building.  Which leads us into the second reason. Obama isn’t a liberal, no matter how fiercely he was championed by liberals (myself included) and vilified by conservatives.  He is a centrist (albeit an unusually pragmatic one with definite liberal leanings).  As such he has a much wider and more optimistic view of “his base”.  Barack Obama wants to bring evangelicals to the table.  By bringing one of their own to the stage and emphasizing where they are natural allies, perhaps he believes he’ll be able to bridge the many gaps between religious conservatives and the political mainstream.

Since there isn’t likely to be an uninvite with all that at stake, time will tell how well this move plays out.  From the painful experience of being a Democratic, Obama is supremely unlikely to mollify the religious conservative leadership no matter how much he reaches out.  But perhaps this one symbolic act in January will speak the rank and file faithful louder than their conservative religious leadership’s weekly sermons and daily rants.  Perhaps it will be worth the alienating the people who worked so hard to get him into office.

Posted under Politics, Religion

There’s much to be said about the election of Obama as President; there is the racial milestone, the end of the Bush era, the stopping of a McCain/Palin administration, and so on.  One of the most disconcerting phenomena since the election is the incessant praise for Obama (who has done little but win the election) and the oft-verbalized sentiment that “everything’s going to be okay”.

At the risk of appearing cynical, the election of any U.S. President (or any election) has never ensured a prosperous future.  On the contrary, politicians (and people in general) tend to do what they’re paid to do – and Obama’s $640,000,000 bankroll from the campaign means that there’s some rich folks who are expecting him to do things that will help them out.  Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Citigroup, and Time Warner were not in the Top 10 of  Obama’s contributors because they believed that he would redistribute their wealth or give alms to the poor.  This is not a surprising expectation.  After all, sister Goldman once remarked, “Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.”

Even if Obama were an anti-war socialist with an agenda of ending world hunger (he’s not, and he doesn’t), he still faces a rather conservative Democrat majority and a reactionary Republican minority.  The machinations of the U.S. government are not easily pushed in the direction of change – even the tepid and abstract changes to which Obama has alluded.  The status quo tends to remain the status quo – and that does not bode well for most of the folks in the country (and the world).  For instance, even after populist uproar over the Wall-Street bailout/giveaway, AIG is getting another bailout of an additional $40 billion ($40,000,000,000) and this has evoked little response from Washington.

The fundamental question is whether we believe that we are sheep to be herded by a shepherd, or whether we are all shepherds of our own future.  Is what “democracy” means that once in a few years we choose one of two narrowly-chosen candidates and expect him to lead us to redemption?  Is being a citizen a spectator sport, in other words?  Or are we to understand that if we wish to control our own destiny, that we will have to get up and do just that?

What the Obama victory means, among other things, is that unlike a McCain/Palin administration, the new president might be responsive to popular organizations and movements calling for reform.  Real change (i.e. revolution) is not likely an option.  The problems that face us are unparalleled in human history: climate change, ongoing war and occupation, nuclear proliferation – the list goes on.  Despite the accolades on Obama, the belief that he’s “going to cure everything, make everything perfect“, it is going to take a great gathering of the people of good will and intention of this country to sway him.  He’s not (and maybe cannot) do it by himself.

Posted under Culture, Politics

Crossposted at Fitness for the Occasion

Now that we’ve successfully elected Barack Obama, we need to make sure he stays honest and true to his campaign.  This article from the Wall Street Journal uses an interview with his transition team to suggest he might not be.  When running for office:

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama criticized many of President George W. Bush’s counterterrorism policies. He condemned Mr. Bush for promoting “excessive secrecy, indefinite detention, warrantless wiretapping and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ like simulated drowning that qualify as torture through any careful measure of the law or appeal to human decency.”

As a candidate, Mr. Obama said the CIA’s interrogation program should adhere to the same rules that apply to the military, which would prohibit the use of techniques such as waterboarding. He has also said the program should be investigated.

However the word on the street suggests otherwise:

Mr. Obama is being advised largely by a group of intelligence professionals, including some who have supported Republicans, and centrist former officials in the Clinton administration. They say he is likely to fill key intelligence posts with pragmatists.

“He’s going to take a very centrist approach to these issues,” said Roger Cressey, a former counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Bush administrations. “Whenever an administration swings too far on the spectrum left or right, we end up getting ourselves in big trouble.”

Given that this is coming from a single advisor I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be simply wishful thinking on his part, or even playing to the media’s obsessive need to claim that Obama must run a centrist administration when a largely left-wing coalition won him his office.

This is too important an issue to let alone, we need to keep the pressure on.  So I’ve started a petition (which is only a small start).  Any other ideas?

Please sign the petition asking President Elect Obama to Uphold Human Rights.

Posted under News, Politics

CNN covered this here: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/11/04/mccain-claims-obama-will-be-like-castro/

In a very, desparate, last-minute appeal to the most stereotypically knee-jerk issue of Cuban Americans, John McCain is making robo-calls that suggest insist that Castro has endorsed Barack Obama in the election.  The content of the call has a misleading tone of “breaking news” to it, in which a slew of Latin American pariahs (supposedly in the eyes of Cuban-Americans) are associated with Obama.  Perhaps most ludicrous of all is the appeal:

Don’t give Castro what he wants. Go vote right now for John McCain and avoid establishing in the United States political policies like those of Cuba.

“Don’t give Castro what he wants”?  Are they serious? Do they truly believe the people they are targeting are idiots?  After calling Obama a left-wing radical (he isn’t, unfortunately), a socialist (nope, sorry), a “redistributionist” (we wish!) and a host of other presumed political epithets, this is what’s thrown at Obama in the final hour of the campaign?  Message to the GOP: McCarthyism is so 1950′s.

The McCain/Palin camp has spent the last 2-3 months making Barack Obama look good – which, as he is a lukewarm, center-right candidate, is pretty hard to do – because Obama has insisted on talking about actual “issues”, even if it is in the non-specific, abstract fashion that has made him famous.  And Obama’s vague politicking, in comparison with a GOP ticket that does virtually nothing other than mud-slinging, has won the day (barring a massive election theft) in this climate of extraordinary political and economic peril.

Cornel West put it quite succinctly in the below recent clip from the show “Real Time with Bill Maher” (minute 0:50)

Well, for me, it’s just an exciting moment to be alive, when you see that kind of desperation.  It really is.  That’s what it is – it’s the last gasp of the conservative era where the economics of greed, the culture of indifference, and the politics of fear have been brought together in such a way that it hides and conceals the plight of poor people and working people.

Now, Brother West suggests that Barack Obama is at the heart of reversing this trend, which is an extraordinary exaggeration – if not wishful thinking.  Obama has ignored the mudslinging, to his credit and to his advantage.  But just as West tells us that popular movements have to come together to compel Obama to live up to much of his rhetoric (a non-trivial task, to be sure) let us not forget that Senator/President-elect Obama is not a champion of the poor nor the working-class. If there is one glimmer of hope in the future of an Obama presidency, it is that perhaps he can be pushed in that direction.

Posted under Politics

I received a chain letter recently, entitled “What if things were changed around …“, analyzing the insidious and implicit ways racism has shaped the race between Obama and McCain. However, limiting the comparison between these two candidates represents a terribly small spectrum in political discourse.  So below is the same comparison between Obama and Ralph Nader:

If Things Were Switched …

What if Obama hadn’t supported immunity for the Bush administration?

What if Nader’s top contributors had been Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Microsoft, JP Morgan, General Electric, and others?

What if Obama supported equal rights, instead of opposing gay marriage?

What if Nader proposed escalating U.S. war and occupation in Afghanistan?

What if Obama was demonized and criticized for demanding that the country could do better than George Bush and Al Gore?

What if Nader claimed to be a liberal while at the same time embracing the death penalty – even for those not guilty of murder?

What if Obama was a crusader against nuclear power and the corporate welfare nuclear energy industry?

What if Nader supported environmental degradation, such as the fallacious “Clean Coal” campaign?

What if Obama were white and had declared in a Black church, “Too many fathers also are missing… they have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men… You and I know how true this is in the African-American community.”

What if Nader had called for increasing George Bush’s federal faith-based funding, in violation of the separation of Church and State?

What if Obama wasn’t as eloquent, as good-looking, as athletic?

What if Nader had been allowed on the debate stage, alone – no wife, no children – a picture of professionalism and dedication to his life’s work that precluded having a family?

What if Obama had spent his life challenging, instead of joining, the political establishment in the U.S.?

What if Nader had used his office to support Joe Lieberman over anti-war Ned Lamont in 2006?

What if Obama was responsible for establishing standards for consumer protection, environmentalism, and civic life for the last 40+ years?

What if Nader’s political career was bolstered by folks like Tony Rezko and Richard Daley?

What if Obama had started the Citizen Advocacy Center, Citizens Utility Boards, Congress Accountability Project, Corporate Accountability Research Project, Disability Rights Center, Equal Justice Foundation, Foundation for Taxpayers and Consumer Rights, Center for Women’s Policy Studies, Clean Water Action Project, and many more?

What if Nader had broken a promise to reject private donors and campaign on public funding based on campaign finance reform?

What if Obama had taken on corporate interests in Washington,  and acknowledged the “one-sided class war” in this country, instead of being funded by huge corporate powers?

You could easily add to this list.  If this were a real democracy, do you really believe that the only two valid candidates would be members of the Democrat and Republican parties?

Racism is very real and degrades the fabric of our society.  But if racism was the only barrier to democratic leadership, surely Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney would be a much preferable candidate for progressive voters.  When our only real choice on election day is a candidate who embraces the escalation of foreign war and occupation, who has been bought and sold by corporations his entire career, who supports widespread use of the death penalty, who refuses to impeach or hold the Bush administration accountable; then maybe racism isn’t the biggest problem we face in this country today.

Educational Background:

Barack Obama:
Columbia University – B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in International Relations.
Harvard Law School- Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude

vs.

Ralph Nader:
Princeton University – Magna Cum Laude in Public and International Affairs
Harvard Law School – Juris Doctor (J.D.)
University of Hartford - Professor of History and Government
American University Washington College of Law – Faculty Member
(Served in the U.S. Army)

Education isn’t everything, but this is about the two highest offices in the land as well as our standing in the world.

There has to be a reason that, in spite of the above, we are where we are today.  Racism is one of the keys.  Another is the fact that our politicians are bought and sold by corporate power, and money is everything.  Our government is up for grabs by the best spokesman who can convince us they offer change while maintaining the status quo at the same time.  Of course, there is a generous dosage of country-wide stupidity too.

Posted under Culture, Politics

Many (most?) folks on the left agree that Obama is the more sensible (or “less crazy”) candidate than McCain, but that Obama is clearly not a leftist candidate.  Faced with the choice of Obama versus McCain, rational people will choose Obama, but what is the extent should that be taken?  Should rational people campaign for the Democrat candidate (who will always be slightly less destructive than the Republican candidate) every  election?  Isn’t this at some point perpetuating and enabling a system of the “slightly lesser evil”, thus ensuring that evil continues?  Are folks willing to defend themselves to an Aghani who has lost her family due to Obama’s proposed escalation of the occupation there, if he were to become president?

Posted under Politics

Please take the time to watch the above video. It was taken at a McCain/Palin rally in Bethelem, PA. You can find similar videos of part one and part two of a rally in Strongsville, OH. They offer a glimpse into U.S. culture not covered by mainstream media (but should).

It would be impossible to deny that the vitriol of these supporters have not been increased by the recent shift of the McCain/Palin campaign to focus almost exclusively on Obama’s connection to Bill Ayers, the former Weatherman. Instead of even rhetorically addressing any issue or policy, the McCain/Palin campaign has gone for broke in their attempt to take the lead solely by making this association. Whether it works or not will likely decide the outcome of the race, but it has clearly exacerbated the overt hatred of these rally participants.

In the above video, Obama is being called a “Muslim” in a “terrorist cell”. In one of the videos from Ohio, a woman who refers to Obama as a “terrorist” has a child with her, who says, “You need gloves to touch him.” In another, a woman refuses to admit that she believes Obama is a terrorist, but he “has the bloodlines” for it. That such racism and repugnance exists in the United States is not a surprise; however, that it has revealed itself so publicly, so proudly, so defiantly in such a mainstream forum as a presidential campaign is especially disgusting. And very, very dangerous for the fabric of our society.

Particularly striking is the difference between rallies of the Democrat and Republican campaigns. Whereas one might be hesitant to proclaim fundamental differences between the people supporting either McCain or Obama, I have never seen participants of an Obama rally call for the death of McCain, or referring to him (or Republicans) as “terrorists”. Obama rally attendees do not refer to hecklers in their midst as “faggots”. Much can be criticized of Obama rallies (such as their lack of any real substance), but the sentiment is one of hope and positive change – raising Obama/Biden up as a turning point in U.S. politics. I believe that this sentiment is misplaced in the Democrat ticket, but the McCain/Palin platform has become about tearing down and demonizing their opponent. This is the current dichotomy of mainstream U.S. politics, and only one is going to win on election day. Despite either campaign being devoid of real solutions for national and global woes, one cannot help but desire that the campaign of hope beats out the campaign of hate.

Update (10/10 @ 10:45): Apparently even John McCain can’t control the hatred he’s stoked.  He’s being booed at his own rallies for suggesting Obama is “decent citizen”.  This can’t end well.

Posted under Culture, News, Politics

Reject Subsidization of the Rich
The bailout plan, both Treasury Secretary Paulson’s original draft and the version Congress tried to pass yesterday, is a massive blank check to the wealthiest, privileged and non-productive members of our society.  It is corporate welfare at an unprecedented scale, effectively rewarding years of financial gambling and a housing bubble. Handing hundreds of billions of dollars to the same folks who have weakened our economy would be something bordering insanity, for the following reasons (and others).

Key problems with the bailout are:

• Despite rumors to the contrary, the revised bailout bill (which failed yesterday) does not put restrictions on CEO pay. And even if it did, restricting the salaries of a handful of executives in a handful of firms is not going to make this bill more accountable nor going to prevent any of this from happening again. (How much of a punishment is it to pay someone $400,000 a year?).
• Oversight of the bailout is unclear at best, and effectively absent at worst.
• Henry Paulson, the same man who insists that our economy is on the edge of collapse, whose plan included giving him unprecedented, non-reviewable power to distribute $700,000,000,000 with full immunity, was the former CEO of Goldman Sachs just a few years ago – one of the same institutions that he’s proposing giving billions of dollars to. Even if he has the best of intentions, despite having the very definition of a conflict of interests, he’s the same guy that said in early August that “We have the strongest global economy I’ve seen in my business lifetime,” How is this not a case of the crazy people running the asylum?
• The drumbeat of disaster and economic ruin if we do not immediately give a third of the U.S. annual budget to banks is eerily reminiscent of the passage of the PATRIOT Act and the vote on the war on Iraq.
• There’s no guarantee that the huge bailout will actually fix the problem!
• In the past week, we’ve seen false reporting from NPR to the New York Times to columnists like David Brooks. It is not possible to make a rational, appropriate decision in such a short period of time in such a misleading and frenetic environment.
• There’s much more to comment on (keeping this short in the interest of getting this post published).

Where do the Democrats stand on this?
Obama, unbelievably, has privately urged the Democrats to not support bankruptcy reform. This is the most fundamental component of any economic stability package, would affect the folks trying to pay their mortgages, and according to Dennis Kucinich, the Democrat Presidential candidate is opposed to it. Given that Obama’s top contributor is Goldman Sachs, with JP Morgan, Citigroup, UBS, Lehman Brothers, and Morgan Stanley in his top 16, we should not be surprised.

Some folks are bringing some perspective and courage to the debate. Marcy Kaptur (D, Ohio) gave this revealing and measured response before she cast her “No” vote. Sheila Jackson also delivered some words of wisdom on the floor of the House: “America has been diagnosed, but we need a second opinion”. And recall it was mostly Republicans which stopped the bailout from being passed. What we’re witnessing is the tug of war on politicians between the people who fund them and the people who vote for them.

What to Do!
1.) Call Your Congressperson!
This is a list of how every House Representative voted for the bailout – how did yours vote? Call your House Representative (find them here) and tell them not to pass the bailout – tell them the current bailout bill is unacceptable, and anything that they pass to address the situation must include comprehensive and wide-ranging relief for those who are paying off home mortgages.
2.) Join organizations like CODEPINK and United for a Fair Economy in calling for alternatives to the bailout, like a Bailout for Main Street.
3.) Read more, get informed, know what’s going on. The greatest problem we have right now is a dearth of information and understanding. This is not a topic that’s going to go away soon, so we better know what we’re all getting (or are being put!) into.

UPDATE: Paul Krugman offered a framework to understand the current financial breakdown on Wall Street:

1. The bursting of the housing bubble has led to a surge in defaults and foreclosures, which in turn has led to a plunge in the prices of mortgage-backed securities — assets whose value ultimately comes from mortgage payments.

2. These financial losses have left many financial institutions with too little capital — too few assets compared with their debt. This problem is especially severe because everyone took on so much debt during the bubble years.

3. Because financial institutions have too little capital relative to their debt, they haven’t been able or willing to provide the credit the economy needs.

4. Financial institutions have been trying to pay down their debt by selling assets, including those mortgage-backed securities, but this drives asset prices down and makes their financial position even worse. This vicious circle is what some call the “paradox of deleveraging.”

Posted under Economy, Politics