American’s who believe that it doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks will be unpleasantly educated as to the true nature of such a belief. ‘Blowback’ will become a term that will become more and more sadly understood amongst more and more Americans over time.

Until now, anti-Americanism has been exaggerated and much misunderstood: outside a leftist hardcore, it has mostly been anti-Bushism, opposition to this specific administration. But if McCain wins in November, that might well change. Suddenly Europeans and others will conclude that their dispute is with not only one ruling clique, but Americans themselves. For it will have been the American people, not the politicians, who will have passed up a once-in-a-generation chance for a fresh start - a fresh start the world is yearning for.

————

Even if it’s not ethnic prejudice, but some other aspect of the culture wars, that proves decisive, the point still holds. For America to make a decision as grave as this one - while the planet boils and with the US fighting two wars - on the trivial basis that a hockey mom is likable and seems down to earth, would be to convey a lack of seriousness, a fleeing from reality, that does indeed suggest a nation in, to quote Weisberg, “historical decline”. Let’s not forget, McCain’s campaign manager boasts that this election is “not about the issues.”

Of course I know that even to mention Obama’s support around the world is to hurt him. Incredibly, that large Berlin crowd damaged Obama at home, branding him the “candidate of Europe” and making him seem less of a patriotic American. But what does that say about today’s America, that the world’s esteem is now unwanted? If Americans reject Obama, they will be sending the clearest possible message to the rest of us - and, make no mistake, we shall hear it.

Read The Full Article From The Guardian U.K.

Commentary from Greg Gordon posted by the Benton Foundation…

Sen John McCain (R-AZ) broadcasts his affection for President Theodore Roosevelt (R), but his opposition to regulating the local telephone industry suggests that he may not share the former president’s passion for busting huge corporate trusts. Unlike President Roosevelt, who railed against “malefactors of great wealth,” McCain’s positions frequently have echoed those of the giant regional Bell phone companies, now consolidated as AT&T, Verizon and Quest, the big survivors of the telecommunications wars of the last quarter-century. McCain’s opposition to the 1996 Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act, intended to spur competition by pressuring the Bells to lease their lines and switches to competitors cheaply, offers a window into how he might view regulation of other markets as president. The Arizona senator characterizes his unsuccessful stand against the measure, and his later attempts to thwart its implementation, as in keeping with his commitment to free markets and his maverick positions on behalf of American consumers. He was the only Republican senator to vote against the legislation. Critics charge, however, that McCain backed an approach to telecommunications that’s limited competition and kept prices high. They note that executives of the big three telecommunications giants and their lobbyists have raised and donated millions of dollars for his political committees.

Read The Original Posting

That’s my recommendation.

If they are going to act like lemmings, then they should have the lemming for their symbol.

The Democrats should keep the jackass.

That’s my opinion.

- Stephen Bickford, East Hartford, CT

Eliot Spitzer and America’s Ethical Perversity
by Rabbi Michael Lerner

The cross-the-political-spectrum attacks on Eliot Spitzer and the intensity of the demands that he resign his office show just how far the Right-wing sexual moralizing has been able to trump any other kind of ethical reasoning in American society.

Going to a prostitute is legal in some states and some countries around the world, and is often the very arrangement that saves families from splitting up whose sexual energies have diminished but whose love is intact. It’s not uncommon for men (and now increasingly women as well) who have achieved great power in our society by adopting an outer show of ruthless pursuit of power and influence (even, as in Spitzer’s case, if the power is aimed at pursuing laudable ends) to feel a deep emptiness and loneliness that is not addressed by friends or spouse, and hence to seek some kind of outside connection no matter how superficial that is not bound by previous rules and roles. Nevertheless, I and many others in the religious and spiritual world oppose that practice when it involves adultery or prostitution, because it depends on the objectification of another human being, so that sex is disconnected in ways that it should not be from a significant encounter with the spirit of God in the other or a deep recognition that is the only real way to overcome existential or situational alienation.

Moreover, the trade in women for sexual purposes has frequently led to rape and abuse and the kidnapping of young women who are sold into sexual slavery. All of these outrageous practices are abhorrent and should be challenged. The flaunting of sexuality in the media, and the implicit message that the only real satisfaction comes from having the most physically attractive people as sexual partners, not only generates huge dissatisfaction even as it allows corporate advertise to become predators manipulating our personal sense of inadequacy to sell their products, but also generates desires that feed the sexual trade in women. Given this larger social context, until sexual satisfaction is so broadly available in our society that no one has to pay for it and so deeply tied to love that no one is objectified in the process, this kind of exploitation of women and degradation of sex is likely to continue. All of these practices foster the sexual predators of the contemporary world.

So Eliot Spitzer deserves to be critiqued and ought to be doing deep atonement for what he did. His previous moral arrogance and willingness when he had power to do so to prosecute others for their participation in creating prostitution rings makes him an easy target. We, in turn, might practice the forgiveness that our religious and spiritual traditions preach, particularly those of us who have been willing to honeslty face how flawed we ourselves are, and how at times we ourselves fail to embody in our actual practice with others the values that we publicly espouse. Humility and compassion are also part of the path of a spiritual progressive.

But the intensity of the critique of the N.Y. governor, tied with the demand that he resign, shows more about American society’s ethical perversity than about Spitzer.

The President of the U.S. and the Vice President, working in concert with several other high ranking officers of our government, lied and distorted to get us involved in a war that has led to the death of over a million Iraqis, the displacement of 3 million more, the death of 4,000 Americans and the wounding of tens of thousands more. After token opposition in Congress, our elected representatives have overwhelmingly passed budgets funding this war, rather than refuse to fund any military projects until the President stopped the war and withdrew the troops.

Meanwhile, our government has overtly engaged in torture, wiretapping of our phones, and violation of our human rights and the rights of people around the world. Senator Diane Feinstein and Senator Charles Schumer votes to confirm as Attonrey General a right-wing judge who refused to repudiate these crimes.

The U.S. government has rejected every attempt to implement the Kyoto environmental agreements or to work out new agreements sufficiently strong to reverse environmental destruction that is certain to lead to new levels of flooding particularly in several poor countries around the world. The consequence: tens of millions of deaths.

The Clinton Administration pushed, along with corporate support, a set of trade agreements that have devastated the farmers of many developing countries, forcing many off their farms and into city slums where their daughters and sons are often sold into sexual slavery. The global economic system we have fostered has led to increasing gaps between the rich and the poor, so that over one out of every three people on the planet lives on less than $2 a day, 1.5 billion live on less than one dollar a day, and over 15,000 children die every day from malnutrition-related diseases and inadequate availability of medicine that is hoarded by the rich countries who can afford the prices made to ensure huge profits to the pharmaceutical industry.

Health insurance companies and private medical profiteers are doing all they can to ensure that there will be no health care for tens of millions of Americans, unless that is provided in ways that guarantee corporate super-profits and thereby guarantee that the cost of health care paid through taxes will be huge and create anger at all government social welfare and well-being programs, leading to their likely de-funding.

People in the US have faced severe economic crises on a regional and soon on a national level because corporations move their centers of production to countries in Asia where they can exploit workers with less government or union interference and where they can destroy the environment with less societal restraints. Wild to achieve greater profits, corporations and the rich have managed to support politicians who lower the taxes on the rich, in the process bankrupting the public sector or severely reducing its ability to provide enough funds for quality education, health care, libraries, public transportation, and social welfare.

That there is no outcry for these government officials and corporate leaders to resign immediately or be impeached, that there is no moral outrage at the entire system that produces this impact, is America’s ethical perversity. Instead, the only crime against humanity that the media takes seriously and the politicians fear is being exposed for personal sexual immorality. While everyone basks in their own self-righteous demands on Spitzer, we all allow media and elected officials to fundamentally distort our ethical vision and play out our morality on the smallest of possible stages while ignoring the global and personal consequences of our larger ethical failures.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine, Chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue-without-walls in San Francisco and Berkeley, and author of The Left Hand of
God. He welcomes comments at RabbiLerner@tiikkun.org

All this ‘politics stuff’ got you confused and distracted? Here’s the electoral choice for you! (Though this is produced for Australia, it is perfectly applicable to all self-described liberal democracies).

Watch The Video

Historian and activist Howard Zinn provides some excellent perspective on how best to approach the elections this year, and what we can and should expect from them and what we should be requiring from ourselves and our system of governance.

Got this from a reader post by a bellumregio on Kevin Drum’s column regarding GOP hack David Frum. Thought it was pretty spot on and one of the best analysis on this topic I’ve seen in awhile…

Frum, the Ivy League Canadian in love with Empire, is coming up against the provincial anti-government of Dixie’s fair land. George Bush, Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee represent three Southern types. Although Bush has Yankee roots he is a typical, and unremarkable, aristocratic Texan with a taste for extraction resources and crony government. His cultural model of government has more in common with the planters of the Caribbean than with the enlightened democrats of Europe. Ron Paul is a small town no government idealist. For him it is plain fundamentalism in liberty and the Constitution. Huckabee is a Southern paternal populist. Although he will not shy way from a fight he will take into account the well being of the good herrenfolk democracy of the Christian community. This makes him less of an imperialist than careless aristocrats like George Bush.

The Southernization of the conservative movement is what Frum does not like. Southern conservative anti-intellectualism, the rejection of experts, the provincialism, the crippling cronyism, the top-down organization, low infrastructure investment and the worthless small town moralism do not make a competent empire. Empire needs experts, knowledgeable bureaucracy, and money.

The conservative movement in the US is really just a Southernization of national government and the economy. Huckabee even says that the US was founded on honor. He really means the culture of the Southern US is an honor society. This is not the whole story but it accounts for the particular tenor of conservatism in the US.

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I think the war in Iraq has highlighted a split in the nation. Old style isolationism is long gone. But we do have the elites on one hand who embrace neoliberal economic policies including global labor arbitrage and immigration to some degree, reject risk-sharing schemes that put a burden on the haves, and are prone to foreign interventions to prop up Pax Americana. Opposing this economic axis we have anti-imperialist progressives and the old herrenfolk democrats who find their sense of patriotism betrayed. The later find Ron Paul and Huckabee attractive candidates. In essence there is a national move across the political spectrum against the elites for a Middle Class America-first politics that rejects the foreign for the domestic. It will become isolationism or worse if the elites do not respond by governing for the many and not the few who benefit from neoliberalism.

Read the original article Here

Good to see this key issue regarding the commodification of our rights given some attention in the major media.

Money, by definition, is a medium that can be exchanged for goods and services and is used as a measure of their values in the market. We are taught that the value of some things, such as our integrity as individuals, our privacy, and our right to free expression, cannot be expressed in monetary terms.

But in the United States today, we apply this principle inconsistently - and generally in ways that undermine democracy and favor wealthy people and special interests.

The US Supreme Court, in its 1976 decision in the case Buckley v. Valeo, essentially concluded that free expression can be counted in dollars. Money spent to influence elections, the court concluded, is a form of constitutionally protected free speech.

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Other Western democracies presume political speech and access to airwaves are priceless. So France, for example, requires all media to provide an equal forum to all candidates, if it is provided to one. Free access to broadcasting’s mass audiences is wholly consistent with democracy and the public interest. Moreover, the FCC already has sufficient authority to make this a condition to hold an otherwise free broadcast license as a public trust. Without the requirement to spend huge amounts of money to access instant mass audiences, candidates could instead focus on issues of concern to the American people, and the cost of elections would decrease.

But perhaps the United States instead will continue to act as if basic rights can be bought, sold, and owned.

The article, going to the heart of the communications rights issue, does a good job in deconstructing the underlying reasons why this condition exists, and what can - and should - be done to rectify it in our civic culture.

Highly recommended read

Ah yes, the best democracy money can buy.

The corporacrats certainly know how to quickly discern whose in charge of filling up the feeding troughs.

As the new Congress considers legislating network neutrality for internet service providers, telecoms in Colorado are piling on the campaign cash for Democrats who will decide the issue. Campaign donations from telecoms in the state have shifted dramatically from Republican candidates to Democratic ones over the 2004-2008 election cycles.

Read The Full Report

Though this is not meant as an endorsement, I do find the headline of this article first published in the Guardian U.K. to provide a pretty good reason to support John Edwards’ candidacy.

What is interesting is some of the feedback I have gotten in regards to this, and the claims that Ron Paul would actually be the candidate most feared by the Corporatocracy.

There is no question there that Ron Paul would be no fan favorite of the corporate elites. I myself have a fair amount of respect and affinity for Rep. Paul’s principled stances on a number of important issues (though he does appeal to a certain contingent of the American electorate which is rather disturbing. Endorsements from the Aryan Nation don’t exactly get me all warm and fuzzy about someone’s political career).

However, without getting into the debate over who might be more ‘realistically viable’ as a candidate, I would think that in comparison to Edwards, Paul would have some critical deficiencies in regards to this question. The thing about Ron Paul is that he promotes an economic ideology that provides, whether intentional or not, an enriching fertilizer and an open playing field for these criminal entities to operate. Market Fundamentalism is the flag and mantra of the Corporatocracy. Paul’s economic prescriptions have been the basis for the provision of the political leverage that these entities have been wielding since day one, since their earlier dominance at the turn of the last century, to even the basis for the original economic structuring of American political power with the usurpation of the American Revolution by the implementation of a property-over-people’s rights constitution. The mechanism for providing for minority control over majority rule has been the hallmark of the American political structure since day one (it is, in it’s most literal and blatant incarnation, the very essence of the slave state which America was founded as).

The question comes down to, do we live in a democratic society that contains a market economy, or do we live in a market society? Unfortunately, I just don’t see Ron Paul as being capable of making the necessary distinction to that question. And that confusion is exactly what the Corporateers thrive on (though whether Edwards could or even would deliver on his rhetorically charged promises is also another question entirely).

Symptoms over disease. You’ll never be able to cure the disease by supressing the symptoms. And America needs to challenge itself to begin to finally, openly, honestly and meaningfully confront the true nature of the problem by answering this simple question to every aspect of every question we have… “Who Decides?”.

- Andy Valeri, USTV Media