Welcome to WWL, a place for Liberal Politics, Op/Eds, Information, Rants and Just Plain Fun.
Join in the Project to enlighten Humanity and create a more Humane, Sane and Just Society for America ~ and for the World!
I consider this a Radical Gumbo, with many varied ingredients making more than the sum of its parts. We are no-holds barred, passionate and not overly PC here. Yes, Liberals can have Fangs. Jump in and be part of the cutting edge!
War Criminal Torture Champions roam free, teach Law, and show up as guest/experts on the Sunday Talk Shows, but failing to teach all those brown kids to pass those tests is just ... wrong!
PROVIDENCE, R.I. - President Barack Obama says a Rhode Island school that recently fired all its educators is an example of how there needs to be accountability.
He made the comments Monday in Washington at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He called for "accountability" if a school continually fails its students without improvement.
He said that is what happened at Central Falls High School, where the school district's board of trustees voted last week to fire 93 teachers, administrators and other staff. No more than half could be hired back under federal law.
Obama pointed out that just 7 percent of students at the high school have tested proficient in math.
Right. That'll fix it. Fire them. Just fire them all.
(Gottlieb is ALWAYS fp material! - promoted by Diane G)
The classic Ambrose Bierce short story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge has a man being hung and miraculously the rope breaks and he escapes and has an adventure only to find in the end the rope didn't break and his escape was a dying dream of desperation. In the end the man hangs from a stiff rope, dead of a broken neck.
Over at Mindfully.org you can find hundreds of big and small literary and informational treasures for those interested in peering through the veils of darkness that the media does it's best to pull over our eyes with all of their well practiced smoke and mirrors.
One such is in the Political/Social category. An article titled Beyond Voting about the limits of electoral politics, that is particularly relevant this year.
Here's an excerpt, but the entire thing is worth a close read, and some intense discussion or at least much thought, IMHO...
Roughly speaking we can distinguish five degrees of "government":
(1) Unrestricted freedom
(2) Direct democracy
(3) Delegate democracy
(4) Representative democracy
(5) Overt minority dictatorship
The present society oscillates between (4) and (5), i.e. between overt minority rule and covert minority rule camouflaged by a facade of token democracy. A liberated society would eliminate (4) and (5) and would progressively reduce the need for (2) and (3). . . .
...
In representative democracy people abdicate their power to elected officials.
The candidates' stated policies are limited to a few vague generalities, and once they are elected there is little control over their actual decisions on hundreds of issues - apart from the feeble threat of changing one's vote, a few years later, to some equally uncontrollable rival politician.
Representatives are dependent on the wealthy for bribes and campaign contributions; they are subordinate to the owners of the mass media, who decide which issues get the publicity; and they are almost as ignorant and powerless as the general public regarding many important matters that are determined by unelected bureaucrats and independent secret agencies. Overt dictators may sometimes be overthrown, but the real rulers in "democratic" regimes, the tiny minority who own or control virtually everything, are never voted in and never voted out. Most people don't even know who they are. . . .
In itself, voting is of no great significance one way or the other (those who make a big deal about refusing to vote are only revealing their own fetishism). The problem is that it tends to lull people into relying on others to act for them, distracting them from more significant possibilities. A few people who take some creative initiative (think of the first civil rights sit-ins) may ultimately have a far greater effect than if they had put their energy into campaigning for lesser-evil politicians. At best, legislators rarely do more than what they have been forced to do by popular movements. A conservative regime under pressure from independent radical movements often concedes more than a liberal regime that knows it can count on radical support. (The Vietnam war, for example, was not ended by electing antiwar politicians, but because there was so much pressure from so many different directions that the prowar president Nixon was forced to withdraw.) If people invariably rally to lesser evils, all the rulers have to do in any situation that threatens their power is to conjure up a threat of some greater evil.
In "Illiteracy: The Downfall of American Society", Education Portal reports that 50 percent of adults in America cannot read a book written at an 8th grade level. 20 percent of Americans are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level. 42 million American adults can't read at all. The number of American adults classified as functionally illiterate increases by about 2.25 million each year.
Many of those people are Teabaggers . . .
Yeah. That'll help.
Finding America on a map is also a problem. According to National Geographic News, 11 percent of young Americans can't locate the United States on a map. The location of the Pacific Ocean is a mystery to 29 percent, 58 percent don't know where Japan is, 65 percent don't know where France is, 69 percent don't know where the United Kingdom is.
Knowledge of current issues and historical events is just as abysmal. Saul Friedman notes that 34 percent of Americans still think Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, nearly one-third of Republicans don't believe Obama was born in the United States, more than two-thirds don't know what's in Roe v. Wade, 24 percent could not name the country we fought in the Revolutionary War.
Many of these people vote, with predictably appalling results. According to Freedom Daily . . .
Political scientist Michael Carpini analyzed thousands of voter surveys and found that there was "virtually no relationship" between the political issues that low-knowledge voters said "matter most to them and the positions of the candidates they voted for on those issues. It was as if their vote was random.
Low knowledge voters comprise 36 percent of the electorate and provide the deciding margins in almost all contested congressional and presidential elections. Here in the 21st century, with multiple crises facing us, with the worst crisis of all--global warming--steadily intensifying, we have little if any chance of dealing with any of these crises through the political system, because our elections are not decided by the well-informed voters who make rational decisions in the voting booth, they're decided by the voters who have no fucking idea what's going on.
Jon Walker over at Fire Dog Lake makes a very effective argument about why learning the wrong lesson from the defeat of Martha Coakley in yesterday's Massachusetts Senate race will lead to disaster.
Not only will Democrats lose badly if they adopt this strategy, but they will be laughed at. Republicans never had 59 Senate seats, and that did not stop them from passing the legislation they wanted. Trying to explain to the American people how, despite controlling everything, Democrats cannot do anything, because a mean minority of 41 Republican senators won't let them, is a message that will go over like a lead balloon. If you try to use that excuse, people will think elected Democrats are liars, wimps, idiots, or an ineffectual combination of all three.
(Perfection! ~This got bumped in just minutes, followed by lots of equally worthy essays, so I am promoting it to make sure it gets the views it soundly deserves. ~ But scroll people, lots of quality today! - promoted by Diane G)
This is the Democrats' story. It's a story of consequences, it's a story of tragedy, it's a story ripped from the pages of history and stained with the blood of the innocent.
There are no characters in it and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.
No We Can't has been a recurring theme of this story. When Obama got elected, No We Won't replaced it. We haven't seen any change, change has been consumed in a firestorm of corruption.
Enjoy your stay in Dresden.
Welcome to Hell.
Greetings from Slaughterhouse Five . . .
In Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim . . .
went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. He asked himself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was his to keep.
When we ask ourselves about our present, the answer is staring us in the face. It's as narrow as the tunnel vision of our "leaders", it's as deep as the corruption that oppresses us, it's as empty as our future and none of it is ours to keep.
Billy Pilgrim must have attended a White House strategy meeting right after the Inauguration . . .
I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.
It's pretty clear what the result of that meeting was. Wonderful new lies. Because of those wonderful new lies, 30,000 American soldiers are crawling into the quagmire of Afghanistan, like the big, unlucky mammals they are. 40,000 Americans will die in 2010 because of inadequate healthcare, like the big, unlucky mammals they are. More Americans will lose their jobs, lose their savings, and lose their homes, like the big unlucky mammals they are.
When the harsh truth scares the fuck out of the big unlucky mammals of this degraded species, too many of them swallow the lies, it's they only way they can go on living.
So it goes.
So it will always go unless Americans overcome their fear, unless progressives start getting serious, unless we take support for this criminal government off the table and put civil disobedience on the table.
In the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, Obama walked out of a National Security Council meeting and observed, "for a country and a people who are no strangers to hardship and suffering, this tragedy seems especially cruel and incomprehensible."
Those words from the man at the top of America's cruel and incomprehensible political system, from the guardian of America's cruel and incomprehensible economic system, from the protector of America's cruel and incomprehensible banking system must seem especially meaningless to the hundreds of millions of victims of America's corporate wars, corporate exploitation, and corporate repression. The devastation in Haiti, as tragic and terrible as it is, is minor compared to the devastation inflicted on a global scale, inflicted every minute of every day, inflicted on the poor and the powerless of every nation by the corporate masters of this country.
No Richter Scale can measure their destructive impact, no words can convey the enormity of the hardship and suffering they inflict. The death toll is in the millions, but there's no media coverage of that catastrophe. No one provides assistance to the victims, there are no relief efforts, there's no help on the way for the survivors trapped in that rubble, they're on their own . . .
We can see the corruption, we can hear the lies, we can feel the consequences closing in, we can taste the bitterness, we can smell the smoke as America burns, as the world burns, as the future itself burns. Obama and the Democrats aren't putting out the fire, they're fanning the flames. Whether that's due to stupidity or complicity doesn't really matter anymore. Putting out the fire is all that matters now.
Get ready to do that alone, because we won't be getting any help from the Obama addicts. They overdosed on unreality long ago. They took the poison from the poison stream, then floated out of here, floated out of reality into Obama Land, where the inhabitants see only what they want to see, where they hear only what they want to hear. They run through the streets, with eyes cold and dead, under a black belly of cloud in the rain, in through a doorway, they give each other white golden pearls, stolen from the sea, they're raging at "purity trolls", they're raging, and a storm blows up in their eyes whenever they're confronted with the truth.
They're addicts. Denial is their drug. They're stoned on it, they're hooked on it, they smoke it, they inject it, they mainline it, they freebase it, whatever it takes to get baked. They're all dealers of denial, they're all pushers of denial, they hook each other up, they're wired on it, they're all wired on it, scoring the next fix is all they care about. Whatever the Big Man does or doesn't do is just fine with them.
When Obama needed the votes of progressives to get elected, his message was Change We Can Believe In. But now that he no longer needs us, now that he has power, he has a very different message for progressives . . .
That blunt message is echoing from one end of the Beltway to the other, from the White House to Capitol Hill, it's echoing from K Street to Wall Street and across the corporate media airwaves. Corporate power must not be challenged. Don't even think about it. Byron Dorgan got the message. Chris Dodd got the message. Robert Wexler got the message. We all got the message.
2 AM and she calls me 'cause I'm still awake,
Can you help me unravel my latest mistake?
I don't have to tell you what her latest mistake was, I don't have to tell you when she made that mistake, I don't have to tell you because she wasn't the only one who made that mistake. 100 million other Americans made the same mistake on November 4, 2008, they believed the lies, they voted for liars and frauds and career criminals up and down the ballot.
So here we are.
"Pragmatic" progressives tell us we can't jump the track, the corporate media tells us we're just cars on a cable, the "Christians" tell us life's like an hourglass, glued to the table, so go to church unless you want to be damned to Hell for eternity like the Muslims and the Jews and the heathens in Africa and Asia. Well we've seen this movie before, we know who the killers are, we know who the victims are, we know who the warmongers are, we know who the hypocrites are, we know how it ends, we know how it always ends, but no one can find the rewind button, no one can ever find the rewind button.
Because that's what it's going to take, the netroots joining together to actively campaign against the Dems, in order for the left to be taken seriously. This will require playing genuine political hardball going into next year's midterms, and building up going into 2012.
Before I proceed, let me just point out that I am a progressive first and a Democrat second. This is because as an activist, I recognize that movements must control political parties, and when the reverse is true, bad things happen. See this column for elaboration. Therefore, I recognize that it is time for the left to start waging all-out war.
The following is based largely on the entry, "For a Full Court Press". It proposes action going into the 2012 elections, but it seems to me that we can and should begin building the foundations next year (which is only days away) for the midterms. The point is this: if progressives don't start getting genuinely tough with the Democrats, and start making the party accountable to us, then it's going to continue behaving like a party of Republican-wannabes that simply use and abuse us while implementing Republican policies - which we all know are utterly disastrous for the country. Here is what I propose.
1.) Draft an 8 or 10 point list of progressive policy principles that encompass a broader array of more specific issues (for example, on the economy: tight regulation, public investment in infrastructure through direct job creation, and steep, direct taxation of the wealthy).
2.) Get as many Democrats as possible to sign - in physical writing - a commitment to support and implement these policy principles. If they refuse, deny them all fund-raising and votes in next year's primaries.
3.) Seek out vetted candidates to run in primaries against incumbents who refuse to sign the pledge. Also, we must have independent progressive candidates ready to run in the general elections as a backup plan.
4.) Instead of giving money to Democrats, use it to target them in newspaper, television, and Internet ads on their many failures to follow through on voter expectations. Use grassroots on-the-ground campaigning to encourage voters to go with primary opponents from the left or with independent candidates from the left - but get them out to vote. Incumbents benefit from low voter turnout, and we want higher turnout. Having left-wing candidates on the ballot against right-wingers will offer voters a true choice, and perhaps get them to the polls.
5.) Offer full support to any Democrats who do sign on to the pledge. If they sign and then renege, be prepared to follow through on #3 and #4.
I hate to say all this, because I've been a registered and loyal Democrat since I was old enough to vote, but we will probably have to punish the party at the polls next year. The leadership won't take us seriously unless they know for a fact that we will no longer cave in and support them unless they do as they're told by us. And if they decide they'd rather be Republican-wannabes out of power in perpetuity, then so be it. The left doesn't need the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party needs the left. It's time we prove that to them.
I want to conclude this entry by pointing out that I fully support Jeff Roby's Full Court Press idea, and that we should begin building the foundation now. Obviously we are not going to accomplish much in 2010; it shall take years to build the progressive movement back up, and we'll be facing stiff opposition every step of the way from right-wingers seeking to thwart a growing left-wing movement. But the sooner we begin building, the sooner we can start putting the Full Court Press plan into action.
************* The Wild Wild Left's graphics are courtesy of Edger.
Want a better look? Contact Edger at edger10 at gmail dot com!
*************
We're excited to promote The Pluto Chronicles, A Field Guide to Our Corporate Overlords and the Nation's Clueless Plutocrats.
Check out the new site.
public regarding many important matters that are determined by unelected bureaucrats and independent secret agencies. Overt dictators may sometimes be overthrown, but the real rulers in "democratic" regimes, the tiny minority who own or control virtually everything, are never voted in and never voted out. Most people don't even know who they are. . . .
