Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report:
The fact is that 120% evil Republicans offer the only justification for our support of 100% evil Democrats. And with the dissolution of what used to be the black consensus for equality, civil liberties, full funding for public education, and opposing war spending and corporate privilege, Obama-era Democrats continue to flee rightward toward war, privatization and austerity.
This deformed puzzle is not the political logic of free and responsible people. It’s the cramped and twisted reasoning of someone trapped in a box urgently trying to convince himself that it’s not really a box, that pragmatic acceptance of the box as the whole of the great and free universe is really all that can be hoped, struggled and strived for. It’s not. Only a beaten, cowed and enslaved people can imagine their forbears sacrificed and struggled for them to choose among greater and lesser, but both still monstrous evils.
We at Black Agenda Report spend more time denouncing Democrats because they act like and enable Republicans. We don’t spend as much time denouncing the party of white supremacy because Republicans rarely bother to pretend to be anything else. African Americans haven’t voted Republican in 50 years. But we’re more unemployed than we’ve been in seventy years, and more imprisoned than we’ve ever been.
That’s what choosing “lesser evils” has earned us. It’s time to chuck the fake choice between evil Republicans and slightly less evil Democrats. It’s time not just to think, but to climb outside the two-party, lesser-evil box, to breathe the free air and get ready for something new.
He raises some important issues. Obama has made only a handful of gestures toward black voters (I was happy to see the penalties for crack cocaine moved somewhat more in line with cocaine, an issue that disproportionately affects black Americans), but as I keep saying, I see him as the friendly face of our transition to a Third World economy. It doesn’t seem that business as usual will cut it this time.
Standing O for Bruce Dixon!
A recent poll showed that 0% of black voters supported Romney. That’s zero percent. 94% supported Obama. Proving once again that even with minimal educational opportunities presented to them black folks are a whole lot smarter than white folks. Especially southern, white, men. Education isn’t everything. Sometimes innate intelligence trumps fancy book learnin’.
The cartoon says it all. Though i realize that Rmoney/(lyin)Ryan would be worse, Obama is a huge disappointment and certainly hasn’t lived up to his hype during his campaign. i’m sure it’s not entirely his fault, but his Wall Street economic team should be in jail and i’m afraid of his drone surveilance of us all, not to mention his assassinator-in-chief role. i’d really like to see Jill Stein (Green Party), who i’m voting for, get elected.
This from cryptogon shows why Obama is not a shoe-in, despite the Republican neanderthals falling all over themselves.
http://cryptogon.com/?p=30956
Many in Middle Class Say They Are Doing Worse Financially
(from Today)
“The Great Recession and weak recovery have left slightly fewer Americans feeling like they are part of the middle class, and many who do still identify themselves as such say they are now worse off.
A new and comprehensive survey on how the middle class feels, released Wednesday by Pew Research Center, finds 42 percent of people who identify themselves as middle class say they are in worse shape financially than before the recession began. About 32 percent are in better shape, and the rest either don’t know or see no difference.
The recession officially ran from December of 2007 to June of 2009, although economic growth has generally been slow since and unemployment has remained high.
There is no hard and fast definition of middle class, but it’s clear from the Pew results that many people feel like the middle-class ideal is slipping through their fingers. The vast majority of the people who identified themselves as middle class also said that it’s tougher to maintain their standard of living than it was a decade ago.
It’s not surprising that many people feel like it’s harder to get ahead financially than it used to be. The nation’s median household income rose fairly steadily for five decades until hitting a peak in 1999. But since then, median household income, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by 7 percent, to $49,445 as of 2010. The Census Bureau is scheduled to release the 2011 data in September.”
(there’s more)
We can’t look at Obama and blame him ntirely for the mess the country’s in; the decline of the middle class began some 30 years ago. Under Obama, the tax rate is lower than it’s been since the late 50’s. He’s not been a perfect president by any means and is as much a Corporatist as Clinton was in the 90’s. And, btw, Obama has faced the toughes GOP opposition ever– which, coincidentally, may have a great deal to do with the color of his skin. He hasn’t gained everyone’s approval, but history shows that a 100% approval rating is an impossibility. So, let’s all stop whining and tossing away our votes on the Greens, unless we want Willard, Paul, and Todd to really fuckup the country!
I have real trouble with the “must prevent Caligula from destroying the country” argument.
How is it better to have a nice smooth-talker destroy the country?
(Just in case even here anyone needs the list: assassinations, undeclared drone wars, shutting down whistleblowers, giving churches priority over civil rights, bailing out banks but not average citizens, giving health care $$ even more to the insurance industry and leaving average citizens with crumbs (more crumbs than before, but crumbs), engineering mortgage fraud settlements so that nobody big was punished, and on and on and on and on and on. He’s also unhappy about not getting enough credit for being willing to cut Social Security and Medicare after the election. How can I work up a frenzy of fear about Willard & Co. after that?)