First, thanks for the props.

Second, from the discussions I’ve read, I believe you and I evaluate Obama through the same lens. When I let Obama’s pick like Emanuel, and rumored picks like Thatcher and Summers, sink in, an old saying comes to mind, “You can judge a man’s character by the company he keeps.”

Nuff said.

Best to you.

JN,

you state at the start of your post, “1) There is no way of actually knowing what Martin Luther King or Malcolm X would have thought of Obama.” You then respond by saying, “Having said that, King would almost certainly have opposed Obama on most of his major policies. ”

There’s no way of knowing, but at the same time you know that MLK would have almost certainly been opposed. I know that I oppose Obama and his policies, you may know that you do, but how can you or anyone else make a supposition about what a dead guy would have thought? True, MLK was completely juxtaposed to Obama and we may try to speculate what would have happened, but what’s the sense? He’s dead!

Can we have more fuzzy and meaningless logic, please?

Let’s make sure we don’t set a date to get together and discuss these issues, I think some of you here might end up shooting some of the others in reaction to their disparateness.

Regardless, best to all.

Chief of Staff is your “right-hand man”, he’s the one who screens, and keeps at bay what goes into the Oval Office, what gets the utmost attention and what gets little to no notice by the POTUS. Who goes in and out of the Oval Office is pretty much under the watchful eye of the Chief of Staff which is not a cabinet post and doesn’t require confirmation. Essentially, Obama’s chief of staff is an unabashed Zionist. Emanuel is aggressive in the extreme, and seems like a menacing character out of a Shakespearian drama.

Now, what do you expect of such a chief of staff who will by a key player in Obama’s picks for SoD and SoS, etc those appointments will look like?

We will see soon, but Obama’s first staff decisions was to pick a war hawk, pro-corporatist, Zionist Joe Biden; his second most important decision was to pick as his chief of staff Zionist war hawk Rahm Emanuel. That’s how things are lining up in the Obama administration.

His advisors are primarily neoliberal, Dem neocons (with a dash of liberal domestic posturing on such issues as the environment and abortion). People will say, “but look he’s got Robert Reich, a pretty solid progressive economist in there too…”. That’s a joke. Reich is not exactly the cure we need, though he’s much better than the rest of the Clinton crowd; he was an invisible player with Clinton and will be with Obama. Reich is a smart guy but in a room of neoliberal radicals, he’s a mouse. In other words, he’ll play no role whatsoever.

Ramsefall is completely right in his assessment of power. The system produces candidates. The voters, whether in primaries/caucuses or ultimately on election day, are given what the system provides: dee and dum corporate loyalists through and through.

The liberals who think Obama could be another FDR are whistling passed the grave. He’s telegraphed where he’s at. Cognitive dissonance corrodes critical judgement. The liberal establishment and their minions are suffering deep cognitive dissonance which could last a few months or for years – it is the state of denial that will not believe what is going on right in front of their eyes as they look to Fox and Republicans to offer them what they see as the “enemy”. Meanwhile the real power marches on; whether it’s Bush, Clinton, Bush or Obama…on ward Christian soldiers marching off to war in the name of the American Imperial Empire.

you state in response to doug, “you’re presupposing progressivism was ever alive in recent history. quite the contrary. it’s been dormant because it has no viable, visible, realistic representation. ”

I suppose it depends on what you mean by recent history, is 2003 recent enough? For the first time in our nation’s history we witnessed an anti-war movement before the war even began. I struggle to see that as dormancy, but of course we could do a hell of a lot better.

How about this year’s election? A nation that is still divided on racial issues managed to elect the nation’s first black president…albeit the system is utterly corrupt and misrepresented. Nonetheless, does that constitute progressive death despite the false hopes placed on one man for change? It may not have been productive progressivism in accomplishing a change in politics, but it was progressive.

While we have a long way to reach our progressive potential, to say that it is non-existent is casting a blind eye to reality.

Best to you.

if Obama were a messiah, which he isn’t of course, he would question the intentional disorder of the new world order. It’s only disorder in general society for the havenots, there’s plenty of order for the haves and the havemores. However, because he is a member of the class with order, he’s not going to attempt to make a suicidal move and challenge the disorder of the masses. That’s not his job as a corporate representative, his job is to maintain the status quo, not confront it.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The elite who are in control don’t see their system as dysfunctional because it works exceptionally well for them; widening socio-economic gaps, profit from poverty, starvation and wars, control, power, etc. Why would the controlling interests want to turn the tables around? What would be their motive; social justice? That doesn’t factor in to the equation.

Because we live in a society governed by the profit motive, those who reap the profits will remain content with their system and let the rest suffer to ensure their margin. Without a doubt, it is a sick system that panders to and exploits the weakness of the masses; i.e. lack of power. There is no such thing as a politician, a messiah, or an activist who’s going to fix these issues, but an organized uprising could be the start.

Best to you.

Parsing my words makes you a certifiable idiot.

It’s very hard to bring a MLK or Malcolm X into this century. But, certainly, if memory serves me, these were not men who cowtowed to power.

MLK was criticized by black radical as being too mainstream. MLK until he unequivocally came out against the Vietnam War was on a first name basis with Lyndon Johnson and worked with the power structure to get Civil Right legislation passed. “Kowtow” is a really a bogus term to use here. Max was right when he said it is hard to bring MLK & Malcolm into the 21 century after years of integration and affirmative action. Because blacks were kept out of the system in the 50’s and 60’s they had to protest outside of the system.

It’s hard to imagine an Obama would have gotten to “first” base under the watchful eye of these two great leaders.

It is hard to imagine since Obama was born in 1962.

African Americans had a sense that Obama was not the Messiah. But there’s been no real leadership to confirm those instincts. People like Wright were assassinated and lost their voice in the face of the full force of corporate power.

People like Wright was “assassinated” by the WHITE power structure therefore African American supported Obama as a reaction to the racism by the Clinton and McCain campaigns and the racism from the mainstream media. You can call it “corporate power” but blacks sees it as white supremacy.

BAR is the closest I think of a voice which speaks the kind of truth I heard from Dr. King and Malcolm.

WRONG! Both Ford & Dixon was in the tank to Howard Dean in 2004 therefore Ford & Dixon supported the DEMOCRATS when they saw it fit to. They didn’t call for a renewal of the antiwar movement or building up the Green Party until recently.

Ford & Dixon both used disdainful rhetoric in order to describe Obama’s African American support. Yet in 2004 they both wrote about the limited choices that African American had and why they should support Dean. They not once in 2004 nor in 2008 suggest that blacks vote for Nader. They did favor McKinney but they were essentially suggesting to African Americans to throw their votes away. In other words they were inconsistent and duplicitous in their analysis which is clouded by their disdain for Obama who has a more progressive domestic outlook than Dean had in 2004.

The difference between MLK and Ford & Dixon is that MLK analysis and communications were NEVER clouded by disdain.

How this all plays out remains to be seen. There are opportunities if we know what we want and are willing to put the time and energy to achieve it. The gov’t will continue to move in a parallel universe. Some will take longer than others to fully realize that hope resides outside of that power sphere.

Really now? What about Civil Rights? MLK operated in BOTH spheres.
The first thing you need to do is analyze history correctly before you formulate strategies based on your faulty reading of history.

Bills, the deflection you chose came off as racist and it’s a common one too. There are white men behind who and what gets pushed and sold, but taking the argument there plays into what you did.

Bills: I understand where you are coming from, and I may have agreed with you before Obama appointed Emanuel. I see this selection as a bad omen; that Obama will keep his promise to escalate the war in Afghanistan, that the United States will continue its blind support of the ghettoization of Palestine.

Wow. I guess I’m one of the cranks in the peanut gallery, but your comments consistently display a lack of comprehension of history. The United States is a capitalist country, by which I mean very few people hold most of the capital (concentration of wealth/power). These “capitalists” have a big input in all decision making. By dropping atomic bombs all over the world, what would have been gained for these capitalists? Would they have new markets abroad? No, because all the potential consumers would be dead.

In fact what we saw after WWII was a much more clever, subtle expansion of American power. For example we had the Marshall Plan, which is considered one of the U.S.’s humanitarian policies in text books, but in reality “set the stage for large amounts of private U.S. direct investment in Europe,” establishing the basis for the modern Transnational Corporations, which “prospered and expanded on overseas orders,…fueled initially by the dollars of the Marshall Plan” and protected from “negative developments” by “the umbrella of American power” (http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199811–.htm).

In the 1970s, the Trilateral Commission was established by some very wealthy and influential capitalists of U.S., Western European and Japanese extraction. Among the Americans involved you may have heard of David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. The Commission immediately used their power to back Jimmy Carter, who was seen as being in the best interests for Tri-continental capitalism. Brzezinski is an important name, because he now backs Obama. This summer he wrote an article in Time magazine that is stunning in it’s audacity. Not of hope, but in the bold face lies that Brzezinski manufactures surrounding the Georgia-Russia conflict, with the cherry on the sundae being the assertion that, “we live in the post-imperial age”.

I don’t argue because it’s fun to harass you, I argue because the ideas you’re putting forth stem from good-intentions, and you obviously have a good heart and head, but sadly the ideas asserted are naive. You rest on hypothetical statements about which historical figures would have done what in this or that situation. Contrary to your pure speculation that doesn’t take into account the historical record, history shows that all empires (and emperors) have held on to as much power as possible, by what ever means were available, while all the while trying to justify their existence as being “best for the civilized world”.

When candidate Obama visited Israel, he spent 45 minutes with Palestinians. He didn’t bother to visit Gaza, where a million and a half are held in the world’s largest openair prison.

His first appointment as President-elect was Rahm Emanuel for his Chief of Staff, a man whose father was a Jewish terrorist in the Irgun Zvai Leumi, and who was part of the group that assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte in 1946. Emanuel himself has an Israeli passport, which he hides, and served in the Israeli military during the first Gulf War, possibly in Israeli military intelligence.

In his visit to Israel, Barack Obama himself promised ALL of Jerusalem to Israel, something no US President has gone so far as to do.

I am sure he will continue American (and Israeli) use of deadly radioactive DEPLETED URANIUM on the Muslim peoples of the Middle East, and will continue the bombing of innocent Afghani wedding parties, even over the protests of puppet Karzai.

Even though you have said so much, I am sad to say that you have not even said everything that needs to be said.

will he? who can say. I, for one, sincerely hope so. and this possibility in and of itself gives me and a lot of folks (perhaps less articulate than you guys) a little hope.

Hoping against reality will get us nowhere. I’d rather that energy be directed toward building real change at a real level than trying to “pressure” a president who’s already declared himself reactionary.

Serious, positive change in this country usually doesn’t come from the fringe. It’s easy to sit out there disconnected and cast aspersions at the status quo and the standard methods of addressing it–it’s easy to be above it and aloof. you’re cynical legends, stars (especially in your own estimations), neighsayers to be reckoned with. but how exactly does this help? it allows you to feel superior, but does it improve our causes?

like it or not, Obama is one of us. he played the game, said the things he had to say, avoided the pitfalls he had to avoid and blended into the system. He now stands poised to really address our agenda (not just cleverly, arrogantly bitch and complain about it).

will he? who can say. I, for one, sincerely hope so. and this possibility in and of itself gives me and a lot of folks (perhaps less articulate than you guys) a little hope.

and one more bit of naive idiocy for the bozhidar and the rest of the cranks in the peanut gallery. you say the US is as evil an empire as any. at the end of WWII, we could have told the rest of the world that they were now US possessions/states, cranking out more A-Bombs and dropping them on anyone who chirped contrariwise. Caesar and Napoleon would have. Alexander would have. Ghengis Khan probably would have. Hitler definitely would have. Truman held up (GWB probably wouldn’t have.

There are lesser and greater empires and evils in the world. The US has been a lesser and greater evil depending on the decade and the leadership. call me stupid, but I’d like to think we could be entering into a lesser phase. . . maybe even a break even or positive one. can’t we legitimately hope for this and work together in at least loose, hopeful concert towards such ends?

Equating Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad to the entire U.S. elite power structure?

Bills is a moron.

Having said that, King would almost certainly have opposed Obama on most of his major policies. He was not the watered-down ‘liberal’ that has been post-humously adopted by the US political establishment. He described himself as “Democratic Socialist,” actively opposed the injustices of American society, and opposed the imperial genocide against Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos.

Is it likely then that he would support Obama? A man who professes his dedication to ‘neo-liberal’ economics, tolerates the current injustices of American society (even going so far as to deny that they exist at all), and presents himself as much an imperial war-monger as Bush or McCain?

Obama fights only for himself. He is a shallow opportunist & a war-mongering corporate puppet who specialiseses in empty promises & dramatic pauses. He’s like the second coming of Tony Blair. Or Bill Clinton. Or John F Kennedy. Remember how they turned out?

The fact that America finally has its first president who isn’t 100% white represents the partial success of struggles in the past. Shame it couldn’t have been someone better; someone who would have broken the mold in some other respects, like renouncing America’s supposed ‘right’ to interfere in, blockade, bomb or invade any country in the world.

PS: Mr Bills,
What “works” of LBJ are you referring to? The further escalation of the genocidal & pointless war against Vietnam, perhaps? Yeah, you’re right. Obama’s administration could well come to “rival” such “works.” UNLESS the people of America force him into a REAL change of policies & priorities.

And finally, try listening to real hip hop, not the shit promoted by record companies & MTV (Same with any other type of music). The “self-promotion, violence, greed, chauvinism, lewdness & superficiality” in rap are just a reflection of the exact same things promoted in US culture more generally. Gangstas are just capitalists on a smaller scale.