When I see a guy who starved 500,000 kids, I don’t think about him as a guy I could work with and suggesting that it’s not as bad as what the guy who didn’t get voted in would have done reeks of extreme cowardice or apathy. Whitlam would have been overthrown by the CIA whether it was Nixon or Johnson farting in the oval office.

Can’t agree with you on that, mostr Australian’s I know are very cynical about politicians, and most of us knew exactly what Bill Clinton was about , we just have this funny old view that you never ever work with the conservatives, never ever. Too many libertarians running around in the American left, who somehow seem to feel in you drop the child into the deep end it will swim, doesn’t happen. The triumphant working class that Karl Marx envisiaged worked in large factory towns and cities, we don’t have that now and we need to rethink how it is done not spit the dummy cause the candidate is not ideal

Hue, When is Saturday Night Live going to pick up on this?

I suppose when they switch from parody to satire

I have written similar articles myself. Please indulge the links:

http://dissentingjustice.blogspot.com/2008/10/split-ticket-what-californias-battle.html

http://dissentingjustice.blogspot.com/2008/10/2008-is-not-1964-why-liberals-and.html

http://dissentingjustice.blogspot.com/2008/10/sober-look-at-democratic-sweep.html

Obama supporters piss me off no end. I have bottom lines: the least I expect from a candidate, and Obama does not even come close to meeting it. Fear of McCain and/or Bush is not enough of a reason to vote for a murderous thug like Obama. I disagree with Obama on hundreds of issues. I believe elections are important and we should work hard at electing non-one party system candidates that are real progressives.

I’ve called for an all-out boycott of all mainstream corporate media. This means: giving up your morning newspapers, your corporate news programs and stations (such as CNN & MSNBC, etc.), and magazines. If enough of us do it we can drive them out of business or willing to start covering ALL the news, and stop excluding progressive voices and ideas.

But if it’s not caught by bankruptcy, then the ecological crisis combined with global warming will bring it down.

My new post ‘SAD’ provides some details about the Ecological Crisis. If you’re feeling depressed, don’t read it!

First, a lot depends on who wins. It matter to me, most of the working class and almost all African Americans, that McCain loses. It doesn’t seem to matter much to Frank, so in some ways, he’s not part of any left I want to deal with. He’s deluded into thinking he can end this war while dissing all these folks.

I’m not in his first group, thinking Obama will magically move left. We’ve had him pegged as a liberal speaking to the center from day one.

But I’m not in his second group, either, thinking every advance is teeny. If we organize well, we may actually get some rather important ones.

‘Organize’ is the key word here. He asks how we plan to pressure the politicians on high. Whether in the Obama camp or any other, you first get the attention of politicians mainly in two ways–organized voters or organized money. Since we don’t have the latter, we stress the former, and that’s what we’ve been doing–building new grassroots organization of voters that belong to us, not the Dems or anyone else at the top. Second, you deploy your forces both in the streets, at the polls, in the schools, in the military, everywhere. But if you have no base community organization to do these things WITH, then all your talk is so much cafe chatter.

Because of our work in this campaign, we’ve done fairly well. But Frank is really clueless. How would he know, since his cynicism blinds him? He just doesn’t get it after all these years. If you want socialism or any other kind of radical change, you have to go to the working class, where they happen to be; you don’t just play ‘waiting for lefty’ or run around with red flags and hope they’ll come to you. And then you work with their allies as well, against the main immediate enemy.

I live in blue-collar Beaver County in Western PA. We went into this campaign with an independent base organization of 80-100 workers united around ‘Out Now,’ HR 676, and Green Jobs.

That’s still our key stands, but we’ve added Kucinich’s 16-point New Deal plan to project into the Bail-out battle.

But we’ve nearly doubled our size in the last nine months, made new allies in other unions, made new alliances in the Black community and with antiwar Obama youth at some local campuses.

We also now have an online public face weblog, Beaver County Blue, which puts out a left-progressive pole and is widely read among unionists and Black activists.

We demonstrate against the war every week, but we build strong organization that belongs to us, and operates within the milieu I write about. Some of the local Dem incumbents worry, but we’re widely appreciated as a source of good ideas and tireless work.

We work with IVAW here, as well as MFSO, and together with other peace groups and a state senator, we now have resolutions in the statehouse to yank the PA guard out of the war.

We circulate hundreds, if not thousands, of items against all kinds of repression on our national P4O lists, and forward them to many others. In Denver, we worked on the IVAW security team to lend a hand with a successful action.

So we’re doing well, but always hope to do better. We’re far from perfect.

But this won’t satisfy you. You’ll cherry pick some demand or another issue or event to strike a pose, so no matter.

But the fact remains that we’re building serious organization for serious work. You can call it ‘pandering’ or whatever you like, since our local opposition knows better. It really doesn’t matter what Frank or his local compatriots, the Pittsburgh student anarchists, think about this, because, first, they rarely think things through much at all, and second, they hang up near the University of Pitt, and are completely irrelevant to the actually class struggle unfolding here. Fine by us, since there’s plenty of sane and radical working-class youth here for us to relate to with politics that can go somewhere.

It’s actually quite refreshing outside the cul-de-sac of the ‘left bloc’ swamp. Frank is welcome to stay there, if he insists. But if he ever want to put that baggage down, he’s welcome here, too.

As for the antiwar movement ‘disappearing,’ what a hoot! A whole new sector of it has emerged, the antiwar Obama youth, about a million of them. They just decided to try to use Obama to end the war. whether wisely or not, they didn’t bother to ask me or Frank if this was OK. They just did it. Same with the union workers who give Obama standing ovations when he asserts he’ll end the war.

Now if you’re an antiwar leader, your task is not just to lead the people who mainly agree with you. That’s the easier, softer way. You have to try to lead those who don’t mostly agree with you, who are not yet activists or anti-imperialist, but are the workers who cheer Obama or the youth who work for him.

That’s what we do, and we’re doing it rather well. Believe me, we’re already preparing a mass mobilization on an Obama White House (hopefully Obama will win) early this spring to demand he follow through on ending the war, and to block any wider wars. We’ll have lots of new troops to work with, not just a bunch of wacked out anarchists who think the way to end the war is to play dress-up with black clothes and masks, break store windows, and play tag with cops in the streets. After the RNC fiasco, thanks, but no thanks. We have better ways to go about it.

So again Joshua, you now have an idea of what ‘Progressives for Obama’ will be doing. So give us a summary of what you’ve accomplished, and what your plans are, and all that you’ve gained from boycotting all our activity.

When some talk of what the left should or shouldn’t do, or Zionism as the ultimate enemy, there seems to be an utter lack of appreciation for American Empire power. It has crushed and destroyed whole nations, Laid them unhabitable. It scorches the earth with bombs so vile, it is unmentionable what happens to human flesh as a result of their launch.

The “left” is sadly laughable when compared to this montrous empire.

Those who search for a peaceful America are up against something so utterly destructive in nature as to make such cries for peace a deep and penetrating sorrow, a tragedy beyond words.

The politics of evil is more than simply a flipant cynicism, it is incarnate.

Everyone else is a pawn on the FED’s chess board.

The Lesser of Two Evils Puppet is going to be the next El Presidento!
But who calls the shots in this game? The Puppet OR the Puppeteer?

Magnifico! Put on your party hat, America. You won the prize.

You’ve successfully answered the musical question, “How lethally stupid can one country be?”

Whatever horrors you are experiencing in your country due to the US Empire, take some comfort that at least with a McCain victory, you’ll have plenty of polarized liberals at least taking notice.

I know a social worker in Australia who LOVES Bill Clinton (in a lusting after a rock-star sort of way), and she is appalled by Bush and the Iraq war. Don’t bring up 500,000 starved to death children though or you won’t get invited to the next party.

I understand that the public is feeling pressure in this economic calamity, and at the same time they may even be anticipating a hint of relief in the political wake of a W and Chaney departure. Nonetheless, that the choice is so limited and the public so desperate has to be why Obama’s supporters are blind to the reality of his voting record; pro war, pro petro and pro civil right’s infringement laws. Or, they HAVE taken the time to track his voting record, but are willing to compromise values for a fresh image, as that is about all the country will get.

While Obama may have a few stronger characteristics than his geriatric opponent, it’s challenging not to perceive all this as evidence of democracy’s impotent condition in the U.S.

It’s true that Nader is a stubborn fighter who refuses to throw in the towel, that’s admirable, but not the problem. He hasn’t built a movement behind him, not one like the phenomena we’re witnessing with Obama, but a genuinely collective movement of the masses who all know what to do at the polls, and why. Electorate participation of 80% or more is what is needed, support that men like Jorge Gaitan, Jacobo Arbenz and Evo Morales had behind them, these men had reality changing movements behind them with enough power to overturn the system. What will Nader take home next Tuesday, maybe 8-10%?

If the U.S. wants change that will turn back the fascist progression of the past eight years, the movement had better start brewing on 05 XI 08, there’s no time left to wait. Naomi Wolf makes a solid case for this type of critical action in her “The End of America”, of any of you haven’t yet read it.

Best to all.