Today's Stories

February 8, 2010

Pam Martens
Wall Street's Killer Instinct Spells Death Knell for Jobs

February 5 - 7, 2010

Alexander Cockburn
The Left: Downhill From Greensboro

Paul Craig Roberts
The Free Market Fetish

Forrest Hylton
The Culture of Cocaine

Joanne Mariner
"If You Were in Secret Prisons...:" The Trial of Aafia Siddiqui

Bill Quigley
Haiti, Still Starving 23 Days Later

Jeffrey St. Clair
Vigilante Justice in the Land of Enchantment

Todd Gordon / Jeffrey R. Webber Consolidating the Coup in Honduras

Joseph Nevins
Bottled Water Syndrome: the Drinking Water Profiteers

Mike Miller
What Do Grassroots Organizers Actually Do When They Organize?

Mark Weisbrot
Why Washington "Cares" About Honduras and Haiti

Alison Weir
The NYT's Ethan Bronner's Conflict With Impartiality

David Swanson
Top 10 Problems with America Assassinating Americans

Missy Beattie
Recall Notices

Jonathan Cook
How Israel Stole $2 Billion From Palestinian Workers

Richard Morse
Will Clinton Roll With His Pre-Quake Friends in Haiti?

David Ker Thomson
Sects and the City

Benjamin Dangl
Beer Battles

Cal Winslow
Healthcare Workers Savor a Victory

Jim Goodman
Fear of the Organic

Michael Dickinson
What Not to Wear or Say in Turkey

Bouthaina Shaaban
The Arab Community ... the International Community

Don Monkerud
Justice Thomas in Hiding

Ananya Mukherjee-Reed
The Olympics That Will Not Be Televised

Doug Bevington
The Rebirth of Environmentalism

Stephen Martin
Globalization Burning

Charles R. Larson
The Nigerian 419 Scam

David Yearsley
At Last, the Sackbutt Gets Its Due

Kim Nicolini
"Up in the Air:"
a Landscape of Impossible Options

Poets' Basement
Marlin and Farrelly

Website of the Day
CIA Watched as Missionaries Shot Down in Peru

February 4, 2010

Barbara Rhine
Keep What You Have, But Leave the Rest

Barry Lando
Master of Treachery: Kissinger on Iraq

David Macaray
Black Lung Rising

Shamus Cooke
China's Wage Rates for U.S. Workers

P. Sainath
India's Farm Suicides: a 12-Year Saga

Christopher Brauchli
Sammy the Mouth Alito: Chucking Precedent at the Surpeme Court

Ramzy Baroud
Will Israel Target Gaza or Lebanon First?

Suzan Mazur
The Peer Review Prison

Harry Clark
The Invention of the Jewish People

Andy Worthington
Swiss Take Two Gitmo Uighurs

Website of the Day
Selective Compassion

February 3, 2010

Paul Craig Roberts
The Crisis is Not Over

Kathleen Christison
Zionism Laid Bare

Franklin Spinney
The Pentagon Goes Intellectually AWOL

Dean Baker
No Way Out: Roadblocks on the Way to Recovery

Marc Levy
No Medal Jacket

Kathy Kelly
Banning the Homeless in Colorado Springs

Gareth Porter
Talking with the Taliban: US and Karzai Clash

Joshua Frank
Blackwash: How the Coal Ash Industry Manipulated EPA Reports

Rannie Amiri
Saada War Rages On

Gregory Vickrey
Short-Changing the Health Care Debate ... For Now

Website of the Day
Mt. Reagan?

February 2, 2010

Michael Hudson
The Bernanke Disaster

Boadiba
Boadiba's Earthquake Diary

Chris Floyd
War, Budgets and Blind Ambition

Paul A. Passavant
The Symbolic Politics of the GOP: State of the Union or Civil War?

Mike Whitney
Bair's Damning Testimony

John Ross
Who's Who in Mexico's Narco Wars?

Jonathan Cook
Israel is Criminalizing Dissent

Susan Galleymore
Wasting Good Waste

Dave Lindorff
Talk Now With the Taliban

Tolu Olorunda
Words as Weapons

Ron Jacobs
I See Hawks and Earthworms

Website of the Day
Cop Watch: Guerrilla Video Primer

February 1, 2010

Michael Hudson
Obama's Junk Economics

Stan Goff
The Murderous Mystique of JSOC: How Secret Becomes Special

Patrick Cockburn
The Case Against Tony Blair

Saul Landau
Universal Disorientation: the Modern Media and Haiti

Dr. Carol Paris, MD
Staying When They Tell You to Leave: What I've Learned Doing Civil Disobedience for Single Payer

Marshall Auerback
A Proposal for Genuine Financial Reform

Harvey Wasserman
Will Obama Guarantee a New Nuclear Reactor War?

Johanna Berrigan
Destruction, Hope and Faith in Port au Prince

Peter Gelderloos
More Wood for the Fire

David Michael Green
An Ugly Week for the Human Race (and Other Living Things)

Martha Rosenberg
If You Liked Bovine Growth Hormone, You'll Love Beta Agonists

Kevin Zeese
Health Care: a Better Idea

Alan Farago
Where Nature Saves the World ... From Us

Website of the Day
Demolishing Flint

January 29 - 31, 2010

Alexander Cockburn
The Oldest Game in Washington

Daniel Ellsberg
A Memory of Howard Zinn

Bill Quigley
Hell and Hope in Haiti

Franklin Spinney
Turning Sun Tzu on His Head: the Eikenberry Cables and the Escalation in Afghanistan

Jeffrey St. Clair
Showdown in the Malheur Marshes

Steve Early
The Night They Drove Old Labor Down

Joe Bageant
The Annotated Obama

P. Sainath
Memories of Maharaj

Jordan Flaherty
The New Politics of Post-Katrina New Orleans

Joshua Frank
Why the Stimulus Falls Short: an Interview with Doug Henwood

Winslow T. Wheeler
The New Pentagon Budget: Spending Even More, Buying Even Less

Brian M. Downing
Negotiating an Afghan Agreement?

Wajahat Ali
Dissent as Democracy: an Interview with Howard Zinn

William Loren Katz
Changing History: Howard Zinn, John Hope Franklin and Ivan Van Sertima

Dave Lindorff
SOTU Whoppers: Obama's Fog Machine

Jim Goodman
The Political Capital is Gone, Now What About Political Will?

Judith Scherr
Sending in the Marines: a Q & A with the State Dept. on Haiti

Kerry Kennedy / Monika Kalra Varma
Human Rights and Haiti

Anthony Papa
The Ordeal of Cameron Douglas: Punished for Being an Addict

David Macaray
A Man for All Seasons

Roger Burbach
Indigenous Challenges to Ecuador's Neo-Liberal Model

Belén Fernández
Police Perform Halftime Show at Zelaya Airport Farewell

Nikolas Kozloff
Chávez and Earthquakes

Dr. Susan Block
Defending the G-Spot: Yes, Virginia, It Does Exist

Windy Cooler
Salinger and Zinn: Dead Together, But Read Together?

Charles R. Larson
The Last Cargo Cult: Econ. 101 with Mike Daisey

Mikita Brottman
Theaters of Death: Losing it at the Movies

David Yearsley
Fancy Footwork

Lorenzo Wolff
The Stoic Soul of Bill Withers

David Rovics
He Fades Away: the Life and Music of Alistair Hulett

Poets' Basement
Cirino, Holt and Farrelly

Website of the Weekend
Arrest Blair

January 28, 2010

Bill Quigley
Haitians are Helping Haitians

Peter Hallward
The Fourth Invasion: Securing Disaster in Haiti

Tanya Golash-Boza
Struggling for Dignity and Survival in Haiti

Shamus Cooke
Taxing the Rich Wins in Oregon

Dave Lindorff
In Liberty County Jail

Ray McGovern
Obama Put Politics First on Afghanistan

Uri Weiss
Distorting the Basic Law: Apartheid at the Israeli High Court

Thomas M. Power
Logging for Electricity?

Cecil Brown
The Greensboro Sit-In and Obama

Wajahat Ali
Muslims Helping Haiti

Harvey Wasserman
The Late, Great Howard Zinn

Website of the Day
Hayduke, Take a Walk on the Wild Side

January 27, 2010

Daniel Kovalik
Obama's War for Oil in Colombia

Paul Craig Roberts
Rule by the Rich

Dean Baker
We Won't Get Tarped Again!

Uri Avnery
The Two-Headed Monster

Sasha Kramer
Fear Slows Aid Efforts in Haiti

Vijay Prashad
Plan of Death in Haiti

Nikolas Kozloff
Hugo and the Shockwave: the U.S., Latin America and Haiti

Mark Weisbrot
Haiti: Where Security Kills

Jonathan Cook
Holocaust Day Invited Raises Storm in Israel

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman
Et Tu, ACLU?

Binoy Kampmark
Gordon Ramsay in India

Website of the Day
White House Die In

January 26, 2010

Michael Hudson
Myths of Recovery

Joan Roelofs
It's the Whole System

Patrick Cockburn
The Hanging of the Henchman

Mike Roselle
Photographing Mountain Top Removal: an Interview with Antrim Caskey

Brian M. Downing
Return of the Trust Busters

David Macaray
Big Brother is Alive and Well ... and He's Signing Your Paycheck!

Bouthaina Shaaban
Haiti -- Gaza: Varieties of Compassion

Kevin Zeese
Remodeling the Antiwar Movement

Richard Morse
The Press Only Likes Fresh Blood and the Blood in Haiti is Drying

Fidel Castro
We Send Doctors, Not Soldiers

Farzana Versey
Making Haiti: Survival, Charity Tourism and the Marketplace

Jonathan Cook
Israel's "Army-Owned" University

Website of the Day
Bagram: an Annotated Prisoners List

January 25, 2010

Michael Hudson
Will Obama Put Muscle Into the White House's New Populist Play?

Anthony DiMaggio
Supremely Swindled

JoAnn Wypijewski
Judges' Shock Ruling Okays Fantasist's "Repressed Memories" Fraud

Nadia Hijab
Aiding Yemen

Robert Jensen
Great Television, Bad Journalism: Media Failures on Haiti

John Maxwell
Boojum Hunting in the Caribbean

Richard Morse
Tweets From Port au Prince: We are Far From Normal

Marilyn Langlois
Standing Shoulder-to-Shoulder in Haiti

Dan Bacher
Has Obama Sold Out to Big Ag?

James L. Secor
The Mental Paralysis of the Left

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Putting the "Pro" Back Into Progressive

Website of the Day
Glenn Beck's "Revolution Holocaust"

January 22/24, 2010

Alexander Cockburn
The Great Leap Sideways

Russell Feingold
The Supremes Have Opened the Floodgates

Ralph Nader
The Supremes Bow to King Corporation

Christopher Ketcham
Freedom of Speech for a Fiction

Manuel Garcia, Jr
Corporate Personhood and Political Free Speech

Paul Craig Roberts
How Wall Street Destroyed Health Care

Jeffrey St. Clair
Poison Letters

Nikolas Kozloff
A Thorn in the Side of the U.S. Military in Haiti

Jean Damu
Haiti: Blood, Sweat and Baseball

Mitchel Cohen
Haiti and Toxic Waste

Paul Buccheit
The Tragedy of Haiti ... and Us

Conn Hallinan
Something About Yemen

Steven Higgs
The Mystery of the Eli Lilly Rider

Rob Stone, MD
Face Time With Rahm on Health Care

Saul Landau /
Nelson P. Valdes
The Preventive Coup

Ron Jacobs
Just Walk Away From the Democrats

Vijay Prashad
The Killings in Bengal

P. Sainath
India: Self-Slaughter Every 30 Minutes

M. Shahid Alam
Inviting David Brooks to My Class

George Wuerthner
Why Grass-Fed Beef Won't Save the Planet

Missy Comley Beattie
Could a Woman Who Posed Nude Get Elected?

Jean Sabaté
Russia's Ruined Far East Metropolis

Shamus Cooke
Company Unionism

Stephen Fleischman
The Founding Fathers and the Luck of the Draw

Michael Donnelly
Gitmo Closes

David Michael Green
How to Wreck a Presidency

Michael Dickinson
Art on Trial in the Capital of Culture

Charles R. Larson
In the Aftermath of 9/11

David Yearsley
From the Liberace Museum to Persian aub Zam Zam

Lorenzo Wolff
Catching Ziggy on the Lower East Side

Poets' Basement
Ahmad and Corseri

Website of the Day
Hitler Finds Out Scott Brown Won Mass. Senate Seat

January 21, 2010

Paul Craig Roberts
Security Fools

Alan Farago
Fat Tires in the Everglades

Richard Morse
Earthquake in the Red Zone

Stewart J. Lawrence
The Prospects for Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Harvey Wasserman
The Weimar Democrats

Carl Finamore
Class Clowns

Ramzy Baroud
Iran and Latin America: the Press Stirs the Pot

Marshall Auerback
Obama Still Doesn't Get It

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Pakistan Love Story

Adam Federman
Did Commercial-ization Kill the Bees?

Website of the Day
How Free Market Theory Destroyed the Free Market

January 20, 2010

Alexander Cockburn
A Richly Deserved Humiliation

James Bovard
How the Patriot Act Perpetuates Official Robberies

Mary Lynn Cramer
Class and Party Differences in Massachusetts

Dean Baker
Making the Banks Pay

Uri Avnery
The Turkish Incident

Kathy Kelly
Tough Minds and Tender Hearts

Jeb Sprague
Haiti's Classquake

Ron Jacobs
Revolution Not a Tea Party

John V. Walsh
Why I Voted for the Republican in Massachusetts

Bouthaina Shaaban
A Wise Strategy for Obama

Gail Dines
The Ideal Partner?

Website of the Day
Water Insecurity in the Colorado Basin

January 19, 2010

Michael Hudson
Wall Street's Power Grab

John Maxwell
No, Mister, You Can't Share My Pain

Stephen Soldz
The Guantánamo Suicides

Richard Morse
Tweets from Port au Prince: "A Hungry Man is an Angry Man..."

Björn Kumm
The Tragedy of Toussaint L'Ouverture

Gary Leupp
Blowback of the Drones

Eric Toussaint /
Sophie Perchellet
Haiti's Odious Debt

Nikolas Kozloff
Chile's New Right

Benjamin Dangl
Profiting From Haiti's Misery: If the Marines Don't Kill You, the Loans Will

Dave Lindorff
The Blackout on Cuban Aid to Haiti

Robert Roth
The Politics of an Earthquake

Website of the Day
Break Up the Big Banks--ASAP

January 18, 2010

Petra Bartosiewicz
The Intelligence Factory: How America Makes Its Enemies Disappear

Nelson P. Valdés
The Rescue Operation's Priorities in Haiti

Bill Quigley
Why the U.S. Owes Haiti Billions

Richard Morse
I See No Evidence of a Government Presence Here: Tweets from Port au Prince

Tolu Olorunda
More Than Aid, Haiti Needs Allies

John Ross
The Silence of the Sub

Manuel Garcia, Jr. The Murder of Masoud Alimohammadi: Assassinating the Iranian H-Bomb

Ralph Nader
Privatizing Everything

Franklin Lamb
How McCain was Greeted in Lebanon

Frederick B. Hudson
Plucking the Chords of Change

Website of the Day
Senator Centerfold

January 15-17, 2010

Alexander Cockburn
Bum Rap for Harry, Not for Bubba Bill

Richard Morse
The Streets are Now Haiti's Living Room, Bedroom and Morgue

Bill Quigley
Ten Things the U.S. Can and Should Do for Haiti

Patrick Cockburn
Crushing Haiti, Now as Always

Jeffrey St. Clair
On the Firing Line

Anthony DiMaggio
Remaking an American Myth: Haiti, U.S. Aid and Humanitarian Relief

Tom Reeves
Haiti, Where America Never Learns

Daniel Wolff
Haiti's Ongoing Emergency

Alan Nasser
Obama's Latest Ruse: the Bank Tax

Saul Landau /
Nelson P. Valdes
A Coup in Honduras ... So Twentieth Century!

Andrew Oxford
Afghanistan's Soft-Spoken Rebel

Michael Donnelly
Big Greens and Real Greens: Biodiversity in the Age of Big Money Environmentalism

Russell Mokhiber
Democrats Going Down in Flames

Darwin Bond-Graham
The Green Drillers

Missy Beattie
War Dealer

David Ker Thomson
The Attention Economy

Gary Leupp
War on Yemen

Ron Jacobs
The Untold Story of Afghanistan

Clifton Ross
Nicaragua Now: Living the Farce

Jordan Flaherty
Her Crime? Sex Work in New Orleans

Marshall Auerback
Why Placating the Tea Baggers Protects the Status Quo

Marjorie Cohn
Keeping Same Sex Marriage in the Dark

Joe Bageant
Bass Boats and Queer Marriage

Tariq Ali
Remembering Daniel Bensaîd

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Too Soon to Fail?

Charles R. Larson
Iran at the Seams

Kim Nicolini
Vampires in Hard Times

David Yearsley
Histories of Western Music, From Grout to Kleinzahler

Poets' Basement
Garcia and Bryan

Website of the Weekend
Green Tags: Words That Stick

Support Haiti Action

January 14, 2010

Ashley Smith
The Incapacitation of Haiti: Before and After the Quake

Harvey Wasserman
Hard Core Green: How to Kick Corporate Butt

Dean Baker
The Case for Bernanke: a Really Bad Joke

Brian Cloughley
Selective Compassion

Brock L. Bevan
One Night in Sana'a: Parties, French Girls and Security in Yemen

Don Monkerud
The Health Insurance Monopoly

Winslow T. Wheeler
More Pentagon Spending

Gideon Levy
Only Shrinks Can Explain Israel's Behavior

Adam Federman
The Exxon Clause

James McEnteer
This Week in Stupid

Brian Concannon Jr
Working with the Haitian Government

Website of the Day
Protest at Wall Street

January 13, 2010

Patrick Haenni /
Sami Amghar
The Myth of Muslim Conquest

Jonathan Cook
The Iron Dome

Cecil Brown
Knocking on Woods: What Tiger Woods Jokes Tell Us About the American Character

Steven Higgs
Mercury and the "Environmental Soup"

Paul de Rooij
A People's Cartoon History of Gaza

Richard Forno
What Happens When They Change Targets?

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists in an Age of Torture

Daniel Drennan
A Black Panther in Beirut

Martha Rosenberg
The "Good Cancer" Spin

Brenda Baletti, Gilson Rego and Antonio Sena
Battle in Amazonia

Website of the Day
Haiti Aid: Artists for Peace and Justice

January 12, 2010

Bill Salganik
The Myth of "Cadillac" Health Plans

Uri Avnery
The Quiet American Goes to Yemen

Dean Baker
Big Bank Theory

Dan Kovalik
Chiquita Lauded for Human Rights Abuses

Raza Naeem
Yemen's Memories of Revolution and Resistance

George Wuerthner
Up in Smoke: Why Biomass Wood Energy is Not the Answer

Dave Lindorff
Looking for Those Green Shoots

David Macaray
I am Blacker Than Rod Blagojevich

Tolu Olorunda
Bono Bombs, Again

Patrick Bond
Copenhagen Inside-Out

Website of the Day
Unfortunate Checkout Aisle Juxtapositions: Tiger and Abdulmutallab

January 11, 2010

Patrick Cockburn
Only Fools Rush Into Yemen

Gareth Porter
Potemkin Tunnels: Iran Uses Fear of Secret Nuclear Sites to Avert Attacks

John Ross
Mexico Welcomes 2010 With Bombs and Riots

Gregory V. Button
TVA Health Assessment Report on Coal Ash Raises Troubling Questions About the Agency

Ralph Nader
The Last of the Prairie Populists: Losing Byron Dorgan

Tom Barry
Not Systemic Failure, Failed System

Mikita Brottman
The Healing Powers of Facebook

David Michael Green Lost in the White House

David Swanson
Obama as the Secret Decider

Kevin Zeese
The Baucus 8 Are Free

Website of the Day
Solitary Watch: News From a Nation in Lockdown

February 8, 2010

It's a Lot to Ask

Just Give Us Some Truth Now

By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

The layers of the American political pathology are so multiple and so deep, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start.

It’s not so much that we’re a country with problems.  Every country has its challenges, and compared to much of the rest of the world I’d take our particular batch hands-down.  It’s just that so many of ours are self-inflicted.

Still, looking out across the panoply of peril, all the unfortunate ways in which we get it wrong as a society, I can’t help but think that what’s at the bottom of the stack, providing a foundation for the rest, is a profound national stupidity.  Maybe it’s my professional bias as an educator, but I often think that our biggest single problem is our (often willful) ignorance.  Moreover, that’s the single national characteristic that enables so many of our other maladies.  If only we would allow ourselves to think, it seems to me, so much of the inanity that passes for normal in our politics would be laughed off the stage, and we’d all sure be a lot better off for it.

Honestly, this was the single thing I found most compelling about candidate Obama (as opposed to President Obama, who’s more or less been one disappointment after another).  Whether he was talking about dumb wars, or the fear-marketing of guns, gays and god, or addressing the question of race in America, Obama would sometimes do something that America hadn’t seen in its political class since Jimmy Carter was in the White House:  He would sometimes tell the truth.

Mind you, not often, and not even the whole truth.  But the comparison was nevertheless startling, so long has it been since we’ve seen anything like this.  Ronald Reagan not only began the era of “America, The Movie”, he personified it as president like no one else ever has.  Why worry about national problems when you can have yellow ribbons, poignant sunrises, and kick-ass wars against mortal enemies like Grenada instead?  America has never quite recovered from this turn to the fantastical, this Hollywood spectacle of a government.  Indeed, so deeply rooted has it become that, in order to help hold onto our comforting delusions, we now have a tenacious mythology which has arisen around the Great Mythologizer himself.  The mythmaker has become myth too.  New lies promulgated to prop up the old ones.

Whatever.  My guess is that if we can ever have a serious discussion of Reagan in the future, one of the great crimes that will be attributed to his presidency will be the same supposed virtue that our lame punditocracy ascribes to it now.  They say it was a revival of the American spirit and a restoration of our national confidence.  In fact, what it was instead was a grand journey of self-delusion taken by an entire country, and at great cost, much of which we continue to pay to this day.

Thirty years of this disastrous turn in American politics could make even the half-truths of someone like Barack Obama refreshing and welcome, sometimes even stunning.  I had almost forgotten what it was like to have a politician talk to me like I was an adult with a brain, rather than some Sunday School kiddie in short pants, who could only distinguish between Mr. God and Mr. Satan, the one with the beard and the one with the horns.  I had almost forgotten what it could be like to see a president describe the world in three dimensions, complete with nuances and complexities, rather than some silly faux dichotomy between Good and Evil, with our team always representing the former.

Since becoming president Obama has cracked that door open a bit once or twice, though far from sufficiently and even less than during his campaign.  His Cairo speech had some of these elements.  And then he did it again a couple of times last week, especially when he visited the Republican House retreat and held a televised Q and A with those scary monsters.

Much as I hesitate to say it, the changes in the Obama White House this last week are slightly encouraging.  It’s even possible that they’ve recognized what a suicide mission they’ve been on this last year and have taken some baby steps in the only direction available to them for survival, let alone any sort of redemption.  Obama doesn’t strike me as constitutionally able to throw a punch at an adversary.  It’s just not in his character.  But this week, at least, he flicked a couple of spitballs.  For this White House, that’s progress.

In any case, there was much that was telling about the event.  First, that this semi-hostile dialogue – which many have compared to the British weekly tradition of Prime Minister’s Question Time – transpired at all was a somewhat profound development.  Of course, that statement says far more about the pathetic nature of the American political system than it does about Obama or the cavemen from the Valley of the Right who questioned him.  It’s also enormously telling that the GOP resisted until the last moment allowing the cameras to roll during the question and answer period – they really didn’t want to go there.  Think about that.  You had a single meek politician going up against two hundred rabid bullies, and which side wanted to make sure the public didn’t see the engagement?  Did Republicans know something in advance that made them fearful of public exposure, even when going up against President Neville O’Bambi?

Perhaps it was the same thing that caused FOCS (Frighten Old Children Silly) “News” to cut away from the broadcast in the middle of it, despite the food-fight event being the very epitome of what television loves to show in politics.  Uh-oh.  Not only was Obama occasionally holding Republican feet to the fire, but he was even doing it without a Teleprompter!  Evidently, the sight of the nice, genteel, reasonable black man helping a bunch of white sharks make themselves look like the stupid liars they are was all too much for Mr. Ailes and company.  Seeing this was causing smoke to pour out of the ears of robo-regressives all across America, their circuits frying all at once.  Cut to American Idol reruns, boys!  Fast!

Why?  Because Obama was actually making these lying thugs own, even slightly, the consequences of their destructive deceits.  Here he was with the Republicans at their retreat, for example: 

“There was an interesting headline in CNN today: ‘Americans disapprove of stimulus, but like every policy in it.’  And there was a poll that showed that if you broke it down into its component parts, 80 percent approved of the tax cuts, 80 percent approved of the infrastructure, 80 percent approved of the assistance to the unemployed.  Well, that's what the Recovery Act was.  And let's face it, some of you have been at the ribbon-cuttings for some of these important projects in your communities.” 

Similarly, the next day he was tweaking seven Republicans who actually walked away from their own proposal for a bipartisan debt-cutting commission, just because the socialist president had subsequently agreed with them on the idea.

The Kumbaya Kid is considerably more gentle about whacking these Joe McCarthy protégés than I would be.  I’d like to see a lot more Harry Truman out of him, and a lot less Harry Reid.  A lot more Betty Friedan, and a lot less Betty Crocker.  Just the same, the Massachusetts election may go down as an inflection point in this presidency, the moment at which the White House figured out that standing by silently and watching yourself get your ass kicked by dress-up cowboy cowards unarmed with anything but lies and bullying tactics turns out to be, amazingly enough, something of a strategic error in national politics.

But what I find so astonishing about moments like this is how revealing they are of simple truths that somehow manage to get lost, particularly in the ranks of the Democratic Party.  To begin with, Barack Obama has been hard at work for a year now, crashing an enormously promising presidency that just happens to also have his name attached to it, and the way forward has always seemed to me so transparently clear.  Regressives in Congress (some from his own party), representing parasitical special interests, are sucking the blood from the American polity, even as the corpse begins to stiffen in rigor mortis.  Maybe I’m just a sucker for that old fashioned democracy gospel, but I still believe that many times good policy can also be good politics.  How much greater public fury at banks and other corporate predators does there need to be before the president realizes that actually taking on the malefactors of great wealth in this society also happens to be the best thing that could happen to him politically?  How many times does he have to lose public support because of the astounding fabrications people are promulgating about him before he decides to stop playing nice and call the liars liars?

After seeing the president in action this week, the obnoxiously abrasive pundit Chris Matthews opined that Republicans should fear Barack Obama’s learning curve.  That one gave me a real chuckle.  As far as I can see, no one in America has more to fear from Obama’s learning curve than the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, who is currently slated to be very much on the housing market in January of 2013.  Indeed, the single thing most utterly astonishing to me about the Obama presidency is how such a politically astute candidate could turn out to be such an absolutely lame, slow-to-get-it, president.  And I’m not even talking about the guy’s policies or ideology, much of which I abhor, since they frequently amount quite literally to warmed-over Bushism.

I’m just talking about Obama’s lack of street smarts.  The health care bill was paradigmatic, though hardly the only example.  When it comes to selling his policies and strategic communications and winning the battle, he is decidedly not Bush-like.  That reality is made all the more ironic by the fact that, unlike Bush, Obama doesn’t even need to resort to outrageous lies in order to pitch manifestly evil policies (even if his are considerably less than wonderful).  Never has a president failed so dramatically to employ his best weapon – the bully pulpit – to market his proposals for the country.  Never has a president gotten so little from such favorable conditions for presidential success as Obama did this last year.

All of which begs the question of what American politics might look like if we had a president who was out there swinging for the fence, telling big truths, and mobilizing the public behind some new, healthy, and not even necessarily so hard-to-swallow national choices?  The results could be astonishing.

The lists of areas where honest political discourse combined with presidential leadership could produce huge effects is fairly endless, though there is of course the danger of overload and distraction with too many initiatives at once.  Just the same, here’s my top ten:

* Start with campaign finance reform:  No other single domain has more potential to unleash more necessary change in America.  The simple truth is that American government is for sale, and about eight or nine tenths of what ails the country is attributable to these daily acts of treason, in which government officials sell out the national interest in favor of their own, and that of their political benefactors.  This problem will never be solved by Congress.  It requires a president who lays it out, pounds the drum incessantly in public, and humiliates the legislative branch into action.  However, that would, of course, require telling a whole bunch of truth.

* America is in fiscal crisis right now, and the president’s current solution is to pretend to seriously cut spending, and to locate all those cuts in the domain of domestic spending, just as some folks argued long ago was the real conspiracy behind Reagan’s massive deficits.  What astonishes me almost daily is that there is not a single serious actor in American politics who is talking about slashing ‘defense’ spending.  The United States today drops twice what the entire rest of the world combined spends on their militaries, and there is not a single state actor anywhere in the world who does or could threaten us.  There is no Nazi Germany or expansionary Soviet Union.  And yet we spend like we’re in a great power death match, despite the fact that we are bleeding red ink in order to do so.  Couldn’t somebody speak honestly about this, especially since our finances are in a meltdown, or must we all continue to tip-toe around the drunkard in the family, pretending not to notice all the damage?

* Deregulation has produced the all too predictable results almost everywhere it has been applied, but especially in the financial sector.  There’s a reason we have jails and courts and police and laws against robbery, rape and murder, you know.  There’s also a reason why, following the debacle of the Great Depression, we regulated banks and Wall Street.  The reason for both is the same.  If you make it easy for people to commit crimes (especially by no longer making the acts in question crimes at all), they will.  How many times do we have to go down this path before we learn that greedy bastards will kill us all if we let them?  And yet, even today, when there is so much anger at Wall Street, no prominent voices are seriously talking about the paradigm shift that is necessary to protect the society and indeed the world against these predatory sociopaths.

* The health care fiasco has (once again) been just that.  But even if the administration had gotten its bill through Congress, it would have only been a fiasco of another sort.  Democrats on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue looked like circus freak contortionists, trying to write a bill that brought positive change to the country’s massively broken system, but doing so without going anywhere near the systemic, fundamental source of the breakage.  No one can quite come out and say the truth here, as simple as it is:  Introducing private insurers into health care provision adds nothing in terms of care, and dramatically degrades the system in every respect, from cost to complexity to coverage to care.  We don’t require people to buy insurance – or have a job which provides it – if they want national security from the military or home security from the fire and police departments.  So why should we do health care that way?  The short answer is because nobody with a platform has the guts to tell that truth.

* Education is another area with fundamental issues that nobody dares speak about.  There are lots, actually, including the stupidity of making a college education increasingly out of reach for current and future generations.  How brilliant is that, even if all you care about is global competitiveness or national security?  There’s plenty more where that particular lunacy comes from, but the one that is the most sickening of all, and that most betrays our supposed commitment to equality of opportunity, is local funding of schools.  While dollars spent don’t directly equate to quality of education, they sure do matter, especially in their absence.  It is a national crime that kids growing up in one neighborhood get vastly greater educational resources than the (probably darker-skinned) kids from just down the street.  It seems to me that a little public education, pardon the pun, on this issue might go a long way toward shaming America into living up to its professed values.

* Global warming is another area where an astounding vacuum in pedagogical leadership from our political class has created a planetary suicide pact in place of what should be a plethora of prudence preventing post-apocalyptic peril.  It’s one thing to allow the tail of narrow interests like pharmaceutical, health insurance, sugar, tobacco or weapons industries to wag the dog of public policy and murder tens of thousands of people every year.  It’s quite another to allow the short-term stock price of Exxon-Mobil to take out an entire planet.  Where is the political leadership educating the country on the nature and imminence of this threat?

* It might be nice if we could have an honest conversation about some of our recent foreign policy crimes, too, especially now that other countries like the Netherlands and Britain are at least cracking that door open.  There is already so much evidence out there proving the magnitude of lies we were told about Iraq and torture and 9/11 and more.  Would it be too much to ask for a little bit of truth to come out?  We spend countless hours and unending rolls of yellow ribbon trying to convince ourselves how much we care about our military personnel.  In fact, by continuing to allow them to die for lies, we hide from ourselves how little we actually care.

* We could be a lot more honest about our foreign policies in general, as well, especially when it comes to the Middle East, where some pretty whopping ongoing lies cost us dearly, every day.  Americans not only get just one side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict represented in their media, they even get just one side of the debate within Israel.  There’s a greater range of dialogue inside Israel about that country’s policies than there is in America.  Supporting the paranoid Likud version of reality is not the same as supporting American interests in the world.  Indeed, it’s not even the same as supporting Israel’s interests, truth be told.  But how could most Americans ever figure that out, when they are limited to only one side, of one side, of the story?

* The United States has a sickening approach to world governance, as well.  Whether it comes to land mines or the rights of children or global warming or family planning or just about any treaty, norm or initiative you could name, we are right there alongside Somalia and Libya as the outliers in international morality.  Our attitude toward the United Nations and other global institutions is similarly self-reverential.  These organizations are seen to exist for the purpose of supporting American interests (and those, worse yet, as defined in corporate boardrooms), and are ignored, defunded or otherwise trampled upon whenever they do not.  How refreshing would it be if our political class might reeducate the country to start acting like we’re the five percent of the world’s population we actually are, rather than ninety-five percent?

* And while we’re at it, we could really make some profound changes to our attitudes about governance at home, as well.  For thirty years now, regressives have been teaching Americans that it’s well and proper to hate their own government.  Never mind that those same right-wingers most often have been the government over the last three decades.  And never mind what it means to hate a government in a democracy, where the people doing the hating have chosen that government.  The effects of this massively destructive impulse have been profound, and go a long way toward explaining the unraveling of American society and political culture we’re now living through and living with.  Governments do some truly horrid things sometimes, it’s true, along with some pretty wonderful things as well.  But policies, and the vehicle for those policies, are not the same thing.  It’s time that we had some leadership who reminded Americans that government, for all its flaws, is not inherently evil.  Indeed, it can profoundly impact people’s lives for the better, including protecting people from predators of all sorts.  Which is precisely why the purveyors of unmitigated greed in America so badly want us to hate it.

I know, I know.  It’s a lot to ask, talking honestly for once about all these issues and so many more not even listed here.

Actually, it is and it isn’t.  So many people in America already get so much of this stuff.  In so many cases, the public is ahead of its politicians.

The ground is fertile and the moment is pregnant with possibilities.  Once you start talking about these things honestly, you can never go back.  And creeps like just about every politician in the GOP, along with their enablers on radio and TV, can no longer commit their verbal and legislative outrages with impunity once people know better, and once they are regularly exposed to an alternative narrative.

People in this country are ready to seek solutions again.  We just need a little honesty to make the critical difference, and prevail over the frightened Neanderthal tribe and their politics of fear.

Won’t somebody just give us a little truth?

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.  He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond.  More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

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