April 8, 2010 archive

I really don’t have the time to write this up, but I wanted to draw your attention to this series on HuffPo.  In is quite an indepth, inside look and well worth the whole read.  Despite the cheerleading, there are pissed-off liberals.  We are not alone.  Enjoy.

Power Struggle: Inside The Battle For The Soul Of The Democratic Party

Doug Kahn, a big Democratic donor and heir to the Annenberg fortune, is not giving any money to candidates running for office this year even though he has donated more than $200,000 to candidates in past election cycles.

“The people who are really liberal, like me, are disgusted. And the ones I’ve talked to are just saying, forget this. They’re throwing their hands up. They’re not going to give money,” says Kahn.

In 2008, says Kahn, he asked the DCCC to list candidates who had an outside shot of beating a Republican and weren’t currently getting much party backing. He jumped in and gave the maximum contributions, donating to several of the 34 Democrats who voted against health care reform. In 2010, he says, he’ll spend his money in a different way. “Anger is a real motivator,” says Kahn.

The Florida donor plans to spend $100,000 between two districts currently held by Blue Dogs. He’ll come in during the last few weeks and spend money educating Democratic voters about the Blue Dogs’ record. “I’m convinced that if they know what the voting records of some of these people are — that is, Blue Dogs — a significant percentage, a percentage that could beat the Blue Dog, will simply not vote. I might be wrong about that, but I’m going to try it out,” says Kahn.

Kahn says he doesn’t yet know which districts he’ll attack and has no interest working to defeat a Blue Dog who is already going to lose. He wants Blue Dogs on the edge and he wants to push them off. The purpose, he says, is not to teach those particular dogs a lesson, but “to move the Blue Dogs who are in the House to have some fear of Democratic voters.”

Pelosi worked to muzzle progressives who said they could never vote for the watered-down Senate version. “I told the members, the members who said, ‘I’m never voting the Senate bill,’ I said, ‘Fine. Let me take care of that, but to the extent that you go out and say that, you are empowering the insurance industry and those who are trying to say just do a small bill,” she said. “That empowered them: ‘See, she’s never going to be able to pass the bill, so why don’t we just go for this thing, which happens to be what the insurance company is advocating.’ So we’re saying, ‘No, you have to have the courage to go for it, and what is it that we can put over the finish line that is strong and tough as possible, giving the president his opportunity to strive for bipartisanship?”

There’s a whole lot more.  

The cult of Obama has reached a new plateau of surreal achievement in accepting the practice of summary execution of US citizens by presidential decree. This is somebody’s idea of showing that Obama is “tough.” We should be grateful that the collective wisdom on the political display of toughness does not extend to showing the drawing and quartering of captured “terrorists” on cable television, but there are still a few more years left in Obama’s term of office, so we can’t rule anything out.

How did it come to this? How did the most highly educated and affluent society in the world accept the practice of killing of its citizens by Presidential decree? The answer is broadcast video propaganda. I believe that television is the most highly perfected mechanism for the propagation of hysterical fear that has ever been invented. The evil linkage between television propaganda and American electoral politics has created a toxic witches brew that is dissolving our democracy. Americans have been conditioned to be so deeply afraid of “threats” that they are willing to grant unlimited power to a government that will keep them “safe.”

This is why we now have a Murderer in Chief in the White House.  

Even among the micro-elite of economists who have won the Nobel Prize, Amartya Sen is a super-star, because once upon a time he proved something that actually matters.

Famines aren’t caused by lack of food.

This was about as much of a surprise as Jesus feeding the multitude with five loaves and two fishes, but verily “all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over,” and likewise the starving residents of Bengal in 1943 and Bangladesh in 1974 and the Sahel in 1968 (and ongoing) could have been fed, if only a messed up system of economic entitlements hadn’t starved them.

And out of the background of his already astonishing analysis, Professor Sen extracted yet another discovery even more astonishing to anyone invested enough in the problem of hunger to be surprised by anything about it.

Famines never occur in democracies with a free press.

During the Bengal famine of 1943, for example, production of rice in Bengal was actually greater than in 1941, when there was no famine. But at that time Bengal was controlled by the United Kingdom, which continued to export rice from Bengal while 10,000,000 Bengalis died of starvation and diseases related to malnutrition.

While India was ruled by England, about 25 major famines ocurred, but after India became an independent democracy…

Zero.

And meanwhile in nearby Bangladesh, where democratic institutions are weak and their otherwise impotent army dominates politics and society, famines continue to occur with depressing regularity.

Amartya Sen is as familiar to almost every post-secondary student in the Third World as almost every American is familiar with Mickey Mouse, and if you ever wonder why crowds in the Ukraine and Peru and elsewhere are willing to risk their lives to establish or protect democracy, although Americans run happily in and out of Wal-Mart while their Constitution is eviscerated, it may be because Third-World agitators understand that democracy is always a matter of life and death, and after we lose control of politics and the media, almost all of us will also almost inevitably lose everything else.