Emmanuel Kelly The X Factor 2011 Auditions
Posted on 17 September 2011 | 2 responses
This kind of says it all. Don’t be put off by the beginning. Just keep watching…
Why Read This?
Posted on 17 September 2011 | 1 response
This is a piece I posted on the GRASSROOTS website and Facebook today. I thought it worthwhile to post it here as well.
I want to begin as much of a discussion as I can around the subjects that I raise below. Again, I know I’ve been off this site for awhile (working very hard), but now I’m back and I treasure those of you who’ve participated on my strange (sometimes bumpy) journey over the past two years of “what’s the point?”
WHY READ THIS?
It’s a question worth asking. Why visit this website? Why go to our Facebook page? What’s the point? I want to answer that, but first everyone involved with Grassroots wants to announce that the movie will be coming to theatres in February, 2012. There will be sneak previews across the country starting next week in New England and continuing up thru Christmas. Oh, and yes…the film is finished – nearly. We’ll be screening it and listening carefully to the people who see it over the next two months, then we’ll make some final adjustments before the February release.
So why read this? Why follow this strange journey of making and releasing an independent film in the US from 2010 (when we started shooting) through 2012? What’s the point?
In the back of my mind I’ve had thoughts flickering even before we started shooting. First, I had a feeling there might be a narrative here as big as the movie, maybe bigger – a narrative that could unfold on YouTube, on our website, Facebook, on your mobile devices and computers across the country, actually across the globe (we have fans from everywhere now), even as some of you might have feared the film might never see the light of day.
But Grassroots is going to see the light of day, or rather the dark of many movie theaters. And, frankly, my suspicion now is that it’s going to see a lot more than that.
Why? Because the real story of Grassroots is about the messy process of getting something done. It almost doesn’t matter what. Of course, unlike most other projects, filmmaking and politics are fun and “sexy”, but they’re also a lot of hard work, and occasionally cause trouble, confusion, even panic…
Hopefully all the videos on our website make this clear as well as (hopefully) making clear the creative and fun parts too. And there will be new videos that will start appearing about music, post production, distribution. We’ll also re-arrange some of the older videos to help make this wacky and fragile story of filmmaking clearer.
But, again, why follow this story (over a milliard other stories)? Here’s the answer:
Phil Campbell, played by Jason Biggs and Grant Cogswell, played by Joel David Moore, are real people who got involved with something – ie: politics. They’d never done it before. They didn’t have a clue what they were stepping into and Grassroots is their story – funny, wacky, inspiring, lost, confused, found.
They did something – they ran for office. Then we did something. We made this movie about “democracy with smile” — a phrase we just coined this past week.
We could use some smiles around our political process right now, couldn’t we? And we’ll need a whole lot more smiles come next February when the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primaries hit, and then all the primaries and general election come at us.
And that’s when Grassroots will be out in the world full swing.
But the point is that Grant and Phil jumped into the process with just about nothing. Those of us who made Grassroots did pretty much the same – no money, no distribution and no cast for quite awhile (revisit the videos, revisit the journey). But isn’t that how many of the best things start? From nothing, with a good dose of fear and trembling, counterbalanced by unbridled passion.
Deep in our hearts we all know that we can do anything if we set our minds to it. Make a major motion picture or a small movie, build a chair, clean a house, wash a car or…
RUN FOR OFFICE
That’s what we’ve come to realize is Grassroots’ real story.
Run for office like Grant did; wonderful, crazy, unqualified Grant Cogswell.
RUN FOR OFFICE .
YOU.
NOT HIM.
NOT HER.
NOT SOME RICH DUDE WITH A TIE.
YOU
YOU
YOU, the “little” guy/gal whose been following our story. RUN FOR LOCAL OFFICE. WE’LL HELP YOU, even if you have no money right now and no hope. Watch our movie, then jump into the game. Maybe you’ll win, maybe you’ll lose. The point is — jump in.
RUN FOR POLITICAL OFFICE THIS 2012 ELECTION
One thing we can guarantee — it will change your life. It will change the lives of those around you. And it just might start to change the country. And then the point gets even clearer — the point of Grassroots the movie, Grassroots the website, Facebook etcetera. The point is to ignite that narrative of GETTING SOMETHING DONE (even if it’s sloppy, silly, seemingly stupid – which is how it often felt while making this movie, how it often felt for Grant and Phil.)
But as Woody Allen said, “Just show up.” And that’s what we’re asking you to do. SHOW UP. The real you. The best you.
Show up for the country by running in your district, and don’t forget to also show up to the movie. (If you want to see Grassroots on a big screen near you, then write us – our website is about to be revamped to make this easy. If you can pull enough people together, we’ll do a sneak preview in your neck of the woods.)
And we’ll do even more than that.
We’re teaming up with some of the top political groups in the country to help people find all the support they need to run, and hopefully get elected. Now I’m definitely a lefty, but one of our producers, Michael Huffington is a former Republican Congressman, so it’s not about a political agenda, but about getting involved right, left and center.
GETTING INVOLVED.
And that’s the reason to keep staying tuned to what it is we’re doing here – Grassroots – it’s not just a word; it’s not just a movie. In fact we will need you to define exactly what grassroots is at this moment in our history.
Now everyone would agree that things in this country aren’t looking great. We can blame it on the corporations. We can blame it on the rich, the poor, our leaders, the “illegal” immigrants. We can blame it on Global Warming or fate or… we can look in the mirror.
That’s what we’ve been trying to do as we’ve made this movie. And we’ve tried to share what we’ve seen with you.
So join us. Join yourselves. We can guarantee that we’ll all be in for one hell of a ride.
I [heart] Government
Posted on 16 September 2011 | No responses
By Paul Begala
With everyone from Rick Perry to Barack Obama bashing Big Gummint, the time has come to defend it.
Wildfires have consumed 3.6 million acres in my home state of Texas since December 2010. That’s about the size of the entire state of Connecticut. At least 700 homes have been destroyed, and four people have been killed. Of the 10 largest wildfires in Texas history, six have occurred this year. Think about that.
Now think about this: Texas governor and GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry has cut funding for volunteer firefighters, who are the first responders to 90 percent of all wildfires in Texas, by 75 percent.
Conservatives talk about government as if it were something foreign, alien, or extrinsic when in fact the Constitution says it truthfully and simply: “We the People.” Government is us. It’s capable of true greatness, real nobility, and majestic triumphs. I’d go further: the U.S. federal government is the greatest force for good in human history. Period.
The federal government freed the slaves and defeated Hitler. It built the interstate highway system, won the Cold War, integrated the South, put men on the moon, and killed Osama bin Laden. By the way, it also created the Internet, with Al Gore’s leadership. So there.
And yet the demonization of government persists. Sure, when the fires rage, Perry praises “the brave men and women who put themselves in harm’s way to protect Texans’ lives and property.” But even as the wildfires burned he hotfooted it to the Reagan Library on Sept. 7 for some good old-fashioned bashing of Big Gummint.
USA POLITICS
President Obama argued against the GOP’s antigovernment assumptions in his Sept. 8th speech to congress., Jim Young / Reuters-Landov
Even President Obama sometimes adopts the antigovernment premise, like when he killed his own administration’s air-quality standards. As if cleaner air, less asthma, and lower cancer rates would cause massive layoffs. But he got it right in his Sept. 8 speech to Congress, pummeling the notion that “the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is … dismantle government, refund everyone’s money, let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own—that’s not who we are. That’s not the story of America.”
The president is right. The truth is many of our problems were caused by too little government, regulation, and taxation (at least of the rich). Wall Street was deregulated, and when the casino went bust, taxpayers bailed out the gamblers. Regulators cozied up to oil companies, and 11 working men were killed in the Deepwater Horizon tragedy as BP’s well gushed millions of barrels into the Gulf of Mexico. After 29 miners were killed in the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia, an independent investigation found that the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration “failed its duty as the watchdog for coal miners.”
The media have a responsibility here as well. When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie bashes retired teachers for getting an average pension of about $35,000 a year, why does no one point out that they’re worth it? Or that New Jersey students have the highest AP test scores in the nation? Because that wouldn’t fit the antigovernment narrative.
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Perry’s Smash-Mouth Debate Style
The truth is teachers didn’t cause our recession; firefighters didn’t cause layoffs; nurses and cops didn’t turn a record surplus into a record deficit. Politicians and corporate greedheads did. And yet government remains the villain.
There has always been a tension in the American character. We are at turns intensely individualistic and deeply communitarian. But right now the only side that’s speaking out is the individualists’. Why doesn’t some Democrat point out that our Founding Fathers, so revered by the Tea Partiers, gave us a motto: e pluribus unum—from many, one? They did not choose canis canem edit—dog eat dog.
Some of this country’s bravest and best work for the government. Yet in the GOP debate at the Reagan Library, Perry simultaneously praised the Navy SEALs who killed bin Laden and claimed government doesn’t create jobs. Precisely whom does he think those SEALs work for? Enron?
If Perry hates government that much, maybe the next time his state’s on fire he can call a CEO.
Douglas Rushkoff: Are Jobs Obsolete?
Posted on 7 September 2011 | 1 response
Re-posting this new editorial from Douglas Rushkoff from CNN.com. It’s a sign of the times when something like this gets a widespread reading, and isn’t relegated to the pages of an obscure quarterly Marxist journal. Herbert Marcuse used to write about similar topics in the 60s and 70s, but he was considered the far left of the far left of the philosophical spectrum. It’s amazing to me that thoughts like this are being published by such a mainstream media conduit. This is Rushkoff at his very best:
The U.S. Postal Service appears to be the latest casualty in digital technology’s slow but steady replacement of working humans. Unless an external source of funding comes in, the post office will have to scale back its operations drastically, or simply shut down altogether. That’s 600,000 people who would be out of work, and another 480,000 pensioners facing an adjustment in terms.
We can blame a right wing attempting to undermine labor, or a left wing trying to preserve unions in the face of government and corporate cutbacks. But the real culprit—at least in this case—is e-mail. People are sending 22% fewer pieces of mail than they did four years ago, opting for electronic bill payment and other net-enabled means of communication over envelopes and stamps.
New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures—from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.
We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace.
And so the president goes on television telling us that the big issue of our time is jobs, jobs, jobs—as if the reason to build high-speed rails and fix bridges is to put people back to work. But it seems to me there’s something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.
I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks—or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?
We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.
According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that’s even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings Video to get the empty houses off their books.
Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff—it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.
Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services. By the late Middle Ages, most of Europe was thriving under this arrangement.
The only ones losing wealth were the aristocracy, who depended on their titles to extract money from those who worked. And so they invented the chartered monopoly. By law, small businesses in most major industries were shut down and people had to work for officially sanctioned corporations instead. From then on, for most of us, working came to mean getting a “job.”
The Industrial Age was largely about making those jobs as menial and unskilled as possible. Technologies such as the assembly line were less important for making production faster than for making it cheaper, and laborers more replaceable. Now that we’re in the digital age, we’re using technology the same way: to increase efficiency, lay off more people, and increase corporate profits.
While this is certainly bad for workers and unions, I have to wonder just how truly bad is it for people. Isn’t this what all this technology was for in the first place? The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?
Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.
The communist answer to this question was just to distribute everything evenly. But that sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised. The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can’t capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance.
But there might still be another possibility—something we couldn’t really imagine for ourselves until the digital era. As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.
We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do—the value we create—is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.
This sort of work isn’t so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another—all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.
For the time being, as we contend with what appears to be a global economic slowdown by destroying food and demolishing homes, we might want to stop thinking about jobs as the main aspect of our lives that we want to save. They may be a means, but they are not the ends.
Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist and the author of “Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age” and “Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take it Back.”
Information here about Douglas Rushkoff’s upcoming “Connect 2011” event, a one-day conference to explore alternatives futures of social media outside the context of marketing and what to do about the overwhelming corporate influence on today’s Web. Connect takes place October 20 at the Angel Orensanz Center in New York City.
Pray For Goldman Sachs
Posted on 4 September 2011 | No responses
In these deeply troubling times we need to now face a hard reality and stop worrying about convincing President Obama of anything. We need to convince his bosses, Goldman Sachs and a few others on Wall Street that what’s good for the Republic is good for them. We need to convince them that Warren Buffet is right. Tax the rich. Tax the rich and save Social Security, Medicare, the Public School System, the physical infrastructure of this once important beacon of Democracy and dynamic capitalism called the USA.
And We, the People, need to stop believing what we learned in Elementary School about the “Balance of Powers.” Otherwise we’re all going down the drain of history, a drain that (as we also learned when we were young) is not a lot of fun. It’s brutal and chaotic and if We the People go down that drain, so too will Goldman Sachs, with all its billions in bonuses.
Because no amount of money ultimately protects you against the collapse of a nation, against raging compatriots in the streets too desperate to care anymore. Look at Rome, Greece, Rawanda, Russia (twice recently – the Czars, then the Commies). Take a look at Gadaffi, Hussein and all the other leaders in the Middle East who have been feasting off their people.
And if it all comes unglued here in the US you can bet your billions in bonuses that it isn’t going to go all that well anywhere else in the world.
A new world war in our lifetime; nuclear weapons used indiscriminately with radiation leaving no corner of the globe untainted; riots of hundreds of thousands, even millions (not to mention global warming, tsunamis and the rising waters of another hurricane devastating lower Manhattan next time)?
When the floodgates of history kick in (natural or unnatural) they can kick in real big.
Does Goldman Sachs really believe it’s immune from history just because a lot of its executives got real high SAT scores; have been able to plunder pension funds, etc. with impunity and got bailed out in 2008 by the taxes of We the People?
And do We, the little People beneath the boot heel of Goldman Sachs et al, have the luxury anymore to imagine that we have anything other than a titular president? Do we have the luxury to remain deaf to our forefathers who, when they set this whole thing in motion, warned us of blood in the streets every twenty years or so to keep a thing like democracy going? (I never like that part of their revolutionary message. We’ve been able to more or less slip by those kinds of blood baths with the exception of nearly a million deaths during the Civil War) But please remember that American Civil War, you brilliant men (and a few women) of Goldman Sachs, remember the possibilities of what history can bring with even one hand tied behind its back.
Remember and think hard and meanwhile I’ll pray for every one of you that works down there in Lower Manhattan. Maybe others will pray for you too. This is no laughing matter anymore, because what comes next (if you guys – and a few gals – make the wrong choices) could well make the blood baths of the past look like child’s play. So tax the rich, save Social Security, Medicare, the infrastructure, Education and most important – I guess – yourselves…
And if you do come to your senses – please pass it on to our president.
Thank you.
Back in the Saddle
Posted on 3 September 2011 | 3 responses
I feel like the kid who cried wolf a bunch of times, saying I’d come back to this site again and really do some writing, etc. I don’t really know if anyone’s listening anymore, but I’ve been really swamped with making a TV movie called “Girlfight” up in Vancouver, which turned out really well. It’s with Ann Heche and will air on the Lifetime Channel in October (more details later).
Also I did a TV show a few weeks back in NY for CBS, airing in mid season (right now, called “The 22” – it will probably change). It stars Adam Goldberg and Leelee Sobieski. (All three of these actors – by the way, Ann, Adam and Leelee – were an absolute joy to work with!)
In any case, I’m just about back in LA for awhile (more on that via Tweets, I’m diving back into that too) and my focus will be on “Grassroots,” the movie, which will be released theatrically in February 2012. But I’ll be really exploring what the movie and its implications will be over the next few months, as this election overwhelms us.
Grassroots politics. Real politics. Politics of the people. Democracy. That’s what the movie plays with in an entertaining way. Grassroots politics on the big screen and also we will be using the film to joyfully and tactically try to get people (young people, students, people unemployed) to run for office. (More on that later too…)
So, there’s a lot to start to talk about. To discuss. It’s all been bottled up in me over these past few months and now I’m looking forward to sharing it all with whomever wants to listen (and respond to) what Grassroots is about in this upcoming election and beyond, an election that might be one of the most important that the US has experienced.
And that’s, the point, I guess. Dive in. Do your best, even if – as in my case – for awhile I fell off the horse or whatever it is this website has been trying to do.
That’s the point…(without putting too fine a point on it).
Space Shuttle Launch: Atlantis Blasts Off For The Last Time
Posted on 8 July 2011 | No responses
(MARCIA DUNN, AP/THE HUFFINGTON POST) CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Atlantis and four astronauts rocketed into orbit Friday on NASA’s last space shuttle voyage, dodging bad weather and delighting hundreds of thousands of spectators on hand to witness the end of an era.
It will be at least three years — possibly five or more — before astronauts launch again from U.S. soil, and so this final journey of the shuttle era packed in crowds and roused emotions on a scale not seen since the Apollo moon shots.
After days of gloomy forecasts full of rain and heavy cloud cover, the spaceship lifted off at 11:29 a.m. — just 2½ minutes late — thundering away on the 135th shuttle mission 30 years and three months after the very first flight. The four experienced space fliers rode Atlantis from the same pad used more than a generation ago by the Apollo astronauts.
The shuttle was visible for 42 seconds before disappearing into the clouds.
The crew will deliver a year’s worth of critical supplies to the International Space Station and return with as much trash as possible. Atlantis is scheduled to come home on June 20 after 12 days in orbit.
Before taking flight, Commander Christopher Ferguson saluted all those who contributed over the years to the shuttle program.
“The shuttle is always going to be a reflection of what a great nation can do when it dares to be bold and commits to follow through,” he said. “We’re not ending the journey today … we’re completing a chapter of a journey that will never end.”
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It wasn’t clear until the final moments of the countdown that the launch would come off. That was fitting in a way, since Florida’s famously stormy weather delayed numerous shuttle missions almost from the start of the program and was a major reason spaceflight never became routine, as NASA had hoped for.
Hundreds of thousands of spectators jammed Cape Canaveral and surrounding towns for the emotional farewell. Kennedy Space Center itself was packed with shuttle workers, astronauts and 45,000 invited guests, the maximum allowed.
NASA’s original shuttle pilot, Robert Crippen, now 73, was among the VIPs. He flew Columbia, along with Apollo 16 moonwalker John Young, on the inaugural test flight in 1981.
Other notables on the guest list: a dozen members of Congress, Cabinet members, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, four Kennedy family members, Jimmy Buffett, Gloria Estefan and two former NASA chiefs.
The space shuttle was conceived even as the moon landings were under way, deemed essential for building a permanent space station. NASA brashly promised 50 flights a year — in other words, routine trips into space — and affordable service.
But the program suffered two tragic accidents that killed 14 astronauts and destroyed two shuttles, Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. NASA never managed more than nine flights in a single year. And the total tab was $196 billion, or $1.45 billion a flight.
Yet there have been some indisputable payoffs: The International Space Station would not exist if it were not for the shuttles, and the Hubble Space Telescope, thanks to repeated tuneups by astronauts, would be a blurry eye in the sky instead of the world’s finest cosmic photographer.
The station is essentially completed, and thus the shuttle’s original purpose accomplished. NASA says it is sacrificing the shuttles because there is not enough money to keep the expensive fleet going if the space agency is to aim for asteroids and Mars.
Thousands of shuttle workers will be laid off within days of Atlantis’ return, on top of the thousands who already have lost their jobs. And the three remaining shuttles will become museum pieces.
This day of reckoning has been coming since 2004, a year after the Columbia tragedy, when President George W. Bush announced the retirement of the shuttle and put NASA on a course back to the moon. President Barack Obama canceled the back-to-the-moon program in favor of trips to an asteroid and Mars.
But NASA has yet to work out the details of how it intends to get there, and has not even settled on a spacecraft design.
The space shuttle demonstrates America’s leadership in space, and “for us to abandon that in favor of nothing is a mistake of strategic proportions,” lamented former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who led the agency from 2005 to 2008.
After Atlantis’ lights-out, 33rd flight, private rocket companies will take over the job of hauling supplies and astronauts to the space station. The first supply run is targeted for later this year, while the first trip with astronauts is projected to be years away.
Until those flights are up and running, American astronauts will be hitching rides to and from the space station via Russian Soyuz capsules, at more than $50 million per trip.
Russia will supply the rescue vessels for Ferguson and his crew if Atlantis ends up severely damaged in flight. But the Russian spaceships can carry only three people, including two crew members, and any rescue would require a series of back-and-forth trips. That is why only four astronauts are flying Atlantis, the smallest crew in decades.
That reliance on Russia — with no other backup — has many space veterans worried. A contingent of old-time flight directors and astronauts, Crippen included, is seeking a last-ditch reprieve for the space shuttle, at least until something is ready to take its place.
Crippen acknowledged it is futile at this point.
“I’m afraid that ship has sailed,” he said on the eve of the launch. But noting the improvements that had been made in the shuttles over the past three decades, he said: “Those vehicles, in my opinion, could fly for another 30 years and could be flown safely.”
This last journey by Atlantis may be stretched to 13 days if enough power can be conserved. Weather permitting, Atlantis will return to Kennedy, where it will be put on public display. Discovery and Endeavour already are retired and being prepped for museums across the country.
The Breaking Point
Posted on 7 July 2011 | No responses
By: Jane Hamsher Thursday July 7, 2011 12:46 pm
According to both the Washington Post and the New York Times, Obama is proposing cuts to Social Security in exchange for GOP support for tax hikes. Lori Montgomery in the Post:
At a meeting with top House and Senate leaders set for Thursday morning, Obama plans to argue that a rare consensus has emerged about the size and scope of the nation’s budget problems and that policymakers should seize the moment to take dramatic action. As part of his pitch, Obama is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security, according to people in both parties with knowledge of the proposal.
And Jay Carney’s carefully chosen weasel-words today do not contradict this:
“There is no news here – the President has always said that while social security is not a major driver of the deficit, we do need to strengthen the program and the President said in the State of the Union Address that he wanted to work with both parties to do so in a balanced way that preserves the promise of the program and doesn’t slash benefits.”
Nobody ever says they want to “cut” Social Security or Medicare. They want to “save” it. Just ask Pete Peterson, he wants to “save” it. Likewise AARP. They don’t want reduced benefits for senior citizens, they want to “preserve” it for future generations. If they have an enormous customer base they can market private “add-on” accounts and other retirement products to when Social Security goes bye-bye, I guess that’s just a happy coincidence.
Now if you think that this is something the President is doing because it’s the only way to get Republican cooperation you can stop reading here, because we’re going to disagree. From the moment he took the White House, the President has wanted to cut Social Security benefits. David Brooks reported that three administration officials called him to say Obama “is extremely committed to entitlement reform and is plotting politically feasible ways to reduce Social Security as well as health spending” in March of 2009. You can only live in denial for so long and still lay claim to being tethered to reality.
And if you think it’s only the President, and the progressives in Congress will oppose him, we’ll have to disagree about that too. Nancy Pelosi can always come up with the votes she needs to pass whatever the White House wants, and she’ll do it again this time. It’s her only chance to ever be Speaker again. If the Democrats somehow manage to retake control of the House, she needs Obama’s support. She’ll shake her fist and say things like any health care bill “without a strong public option will not pass the House” — and then turn around and force her caucus to walk the plank.
Progressive Democratic “leaders” like Raul Grijalva will fold once again like a house of cards if need be — and they know it. Today, the Huffington Post reports:
Progressives Won’t Criticize Obama For Proposed Social Security Cuts
Grijalva and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), a vice chair of the caucus, defended the president for signaling he would be willing to take a look at changes to the programs, arguing there are ways to restructure entitlement spending to save money without hurting beneficiaries.
Translation: They’ll wait for the whip count to see if their votes are needed, and if not, they can let somebody else be the “rotating villain” this time. But just in case, they’re leaving the back door open for themselves.
What we’re watching is the death of the Democratic Party. Or, at least the Democratic Party as most of us have known it. The one that has taken its identity in the modern era from FDR and the New Deal, from Keynesianism and the social safety net. Despite any of its other shortcomings (and they are myriad), the Democratic Party has stood as a symbol for commitment to these principles. As recently as 2006, Democrats retook the House in a surprise wave election because the public feared that George Bush would destroy Social Security, and they trusted the Democrats over Republicans to secure it. Just like George Bush, Obama now wants to “save” Social Security….by giving those who want to burn it to the ground the the very thing they’ve wanted for decades.
Any member of any party who participates in this effort does not deserve, and should not get, the support of anyone who values Social Security and cares about its preservation. The amount of damage that the Democrats under Obama have been able to do has been immeasurable, by virtue of the fact that they are less awful that George Bush. But where George Bush failed, Obama will probably succeed.
Which means we’re watching another casualty here: Democracy. Or at least, the illusion that we live in a democratic society. The public, regardless of party, overwhelmingly opposes cuts to Social Security and Medicare. But elected officials of both parties are hell-bent on conspiring to bring the programs to an end. They seem to have come to grips with a fact that the public has not: their tenure in office depends on carrying out the wishes of oligarchical elites.
There is only one thing you can reasonably conclude as you watch the political theater that is transpiring: what the voting public thinks really isn’t all that important. And to the extent that it does matter, it can easily be channeled by those with sufficient money to pay the tab. Samuel Johnson said that patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels, but in our modern era, that honor goes to tribalism. The list of horrors that people found intolerable when George Bush was in office, but are now blithely accepting because “Sarah Palin would be worse,” grows longer every day.
We’ll fight this, because it’s the right thing to do. We will probably lose. But we will make it as painful as possible for any politician from any party to participate in this wholesale looting of the public sphere, this “shock doctrine” for America. And maybe along the way we’ll get a vision of what comes next. Because what we believe in as Americans, and what we stand for, is not something the Democratic party represents any more.
NBA VS NFL
Posted on 7 July 2011 | 1 response
Even if you aren’t a Sports Fan this is Very Interesting!
****************
36 have been accused of spousal abuse
7 have been arrested for fraud
19 have been accused of writing bad checks
117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses
3 have done time for assault
71, I repeat 71
cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
14 have been arrested on drug-related
charges
8 have been arrested! for shoplifting
21currently are defendants in lawsuits,
and
84have been arrested for drunk driving
in the last year !
Can you guess which organization this is?
Is it the NBA Or NFL?
Give up yet?
Scroll down,
Neither,
it’s the 535 members of the
United States Congress
The same group of Idiots that crank out
hundreds of new laws each
year
designed to keep the rest of us in line.
You gotta pass this one on!
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The Truth About the Economy
Posted on 20 June 2011 | No responses
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said he could explain the problems with the economy in less than 2 minutes, 15 seconds—and he did it (with illustrations to boot). It’s great! Check it out.
