This idea of reading something into Obama’s statement on Reagan is just out there. Where in hell is MLK when you really really really need the real deal?

Thank you for your response. You touch upon a perspective that needs to be considered an analyzed. The ISO writer are very much stuck on a particular perspective. Like I mentioned, the ISO tends to not see American Zionism as racism thus it was missing from their analysis on race. While Sustar (an ISO member) does an excellent job of the left-right scale your interjection of the bottom-top scale is very important and tends to get dismissed. It is the bottom-top scale that the paleo-conservatives and libertarians have been addressing most especially since the end of the Cold War.

You are correct in your assessment of Obama’s reference to Reagan. I hadn’t considered your perspective mainly because Reagan leaves a trail of visceral contempt. In that light it’s easy distort the context of Obama’s remarks but there is much more being said in his reference. Unfortunately many on the left can miss what is really being said and unfortunately on of the reason for the lack of solidarity on the left is what deliberately goes unsaid.

Your analysis of Obama’s remarks is absolutely correct and very important to analyze if the left really want to expand its base and influence. It has to speak to all citizens not just programatically but with inspiration.

Ironically, as a Socialist, it should have been easy or Sustar to point out how Liberalism, which function to manage Capitalism, requires a large bureaucracy of “elites” that in turn leave out the people out. By doing so, the bureaucracy can then be easily overtaken by reactionaries (such as Reagan) and then use the the bureaucracy for their own benefit and against the people. So the issue of bottom-top (the state vs the people) and the issue of alienation are important aspects to current situation that requires serious analysis.

Lee: Nicely presented argument on the left v. right issues, class warfare, and racism, and how it’s all used and abused. I mostly agree. I’d like to touch, however, on what I see as a more basic and vital struggle: the people v. the state. While Reagan certainly had his dubious and sometimes awful distinctions, I believe that Obama was speaking a little bit to that vital struggle when he said: “I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think…he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was [that] we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

To, me, that addresses a host of things: inefficiency, cronyism, class warfare, war-profiteering, and general other tyranny toward the people (individuals and groups). And while I don’t fancy either Dem candidate, this is where I give the easy nod to Obama, on legal and moral ethics and logic. The same inefficient and tyrannical federal government that exacts genocide in the Middle East on the American people’s dimes—well—it’s the same federal state that steals funds from our Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs, and creates monetary debt and inflation to maintain both the warfare and welfare. And these are “liberal” Democrats and “progressives,” too, who are selling out to the “welfare-warfare machine,” through special interest cronyism encouraged by those same federal programs that the politicians lied to us about and debased our currency for and stole our SS funds for and killed “Islamofascists” for. Surely there are other, less wasteful, inhuman, and violent ways of achieving conflict resolution and social well-being.

When Socialists and others express disdain for those they’d call “the far-right” (mercantilists, militarists, neocons, corporatists, and so on), they are well-justified. After all, it’s the Clash of Civilizations-types, the mercantilists, the militarists, et al., whose pet-project-genocides receive cash and “capital,” first and always. (“Big Pharma” and telecom mafiosi enjoy the prime largesse too, but aren’t necessarily synonymous with “the right,” as far as I can tell.)

In my estimation, the process accomodating those state ventures resembles a “militant socialism” or “hard fascism” more closely than it does “free market capitalism.” It’s actually just malfeasent statism—ancient tyrannical rule that has always ended horribly for the people and wonderfully for the “statist-corporatist elite.” The “uber-statists” use debt and inflation to finance these tragic, monstrous abuses of government power, here and abroad. But they must hedge the balance between us and them with liberty-stealing “emergency legislation,” too. Social tyranny. Financial tyranny. Tyranny Inc. Tyranny. This is why I believe that the people of the United States and all other nations are served better to focus as much, if not more, of their energy on what I believe is the most vital struggle.

The bankers and the bureaucrats don’t care if “the left” or “the right” is “winning” (define winning, right?); their pockets are always stuffed, regardless. (No wonder NBC/GE and the Democratic elite are so intimidated by Dennis “neocons and banker cartels can kiss my ass” Kucinich et al.) I see left v. right and black v. white struggles as occuring on individual v. individual, group v. group (unfortunately), and politician v. politician bases. But at the core of those—and what “the state” and its corporate media are effectively concealing from our view—is the people v. the state; it’s the one struggle that affects all of us, all the time.

I disagree with Hutchinson here: “It would not, however, show that they are willing to do the same for the millions of Blacks that cram America’s jails and prisons, suffer housing and job discrimination, and are trapped in failing public schools in America’s poor, crime ridden inner cities. Their plight and how they are viewed and treated will remain the same after Obama takes office. A President Obama won’t change that.”

To me, that’s what Obama was addressing when he brought Reagan into it. Reagan mostly failed, but campaigned on fixing (decreasing the size of, and making more efficient and local) the Department of Education and other federal bureaucratic nightmares. If a President Obama were to focus on such things—in addition to the repealing of the “War on Drugs” (War on Minorities and the Poor, really), which unjustly incarcerates non-violent people—then he could make that change, or at least be the catalyst for the change.

Also, when Dr.King was talking about UNITY he did not mean that the oppressed of America should unite with the Reaganites and zionists!

Sustar’s failure to mention this, once again this shows how the left separates and diminish American Zionism from race politics.