Obama Debate Failure: Ineptitude or Obedience?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S performance in the first 2012 presidential debate last night was appalling.

 

It was also profoundly embarrassing, the most disappointing such spectacle I have ever witnessed, its wretchedness subtly underscored by the slumped-shoulder body-language of First Lady Michelle Obama as she walked on-stage to hug her husband at the televised event's conclusion. No doubt a part of her excellent mind was wondering how she might console her man in the wake of such an obvious and glaringly public failure.

 

While the pundits offered any number predictable excuses for the president's atrocious showing, none dared ask the pivotal question: given that today's politicians are nothing more than surrogates of the One Percent, bound to obey Ruling Class mandates as a condition of their survival, what if Obama was just following orders?

 

Think about it. It is obvious the corporate aristocracy overwhelmingly favors Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. It is equally clear the unpredicted intensification of terminal climate change – apocalyptic weather and the resultant famine, disease and rebellion – has added new urgency to the capitalists' plans for self-preservation through fascism.

 

Romney/Ryan would kill forever the last remnants of U.S. constitutional democracy and finalize almost overnight the conversion of the United States to the United Estates of a de facto Fourth Reich. Obama – not the least because of the First Lady's powerful and emphatic commitment to women's rights – would continue on the somewhat slower path toward unabashed fascism that characterizes his present regime.

 

But given the crises generated by skyrocketing climate-change, the slower path is no longer acceptable to the Ruling Class. The aristocrats want capitalist governance now – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and (population-reducing) genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

 

Indeed this is the class-struggle backdrop of all modern global politics. The aristocracy is assuring its own survival – and condemning all the rest of us to death – by imposing Nazi-style zero-tolerance regimes on the entire planet, with the U.S. military as the primary instrument of oppression.

 

Therefore we should consider the likelihood – I would say very high probability – Obama is again proving himself to be the obedient servant of the Ruling Class. Hence – just as after 2008 Obama the Orator became Barack the Betrayer – now he is once more following orders, handing the election to Romney/Ryan, albeit with assurance he and his family are guaranteed a permanent place in the castle.

 

Which, if one applies Occam's Razor, is the only logical explanation for the president's horrid performance last night. Too bad no brand-name journalist – not even those on the (alleged) Left – has dared raise the question.

***** 

Women's Rights: the Only Remaining Reason to Vote Democratic 

 

Editor's Note: Though I frequently post comments to story-threads on other sites, I remain conflicted about whether those words should also be published here in Outside Agitator's Notebook. Yes, I have posted such work in the past, but I have never really been comfortable with it. The contrary argument is that it is not just unnecessary duplication but ostentatious self-glorification – a notion underscored by the stylistic problems implicit in quoting one's self. Do I use quotation marks or italic to denote text that first ran elsewhere? Do I revise it for publication here? And – the biggest problem of all – how do I summarize the piece upon which I am commenting without violating the ever-more-stringent limitations on so-called “fair use”? Meanwhile the best argument for such posting comes from one of my newest readers, the New England environmental activist/organic farmer whose screen name is cleanearth. “I was asking myself the same question,” she wrote in a recent email. “Shall I put my online comments into my blog (which I haven't written in months)?  I like some of my online comments, so I think I'll do that and you should, too, so we don't use up our best thoughts online and none of our communicants (isn't that what they call churchie people?) get to see them.......so, yes, do include them in your Blog.” Thank you, Nancy; I'll do as you suggest. Here goes: 

*

Jill Filipovic of The Guardian reported recently on the Republican Party's obvious and intensifying war against women and Reader Supported News republished her story, election-year important because it underscores the one and only realm in which the Democrats have at least begrudgingly lived up to their rhetoric, remaining (somewhat) less theocratically fascist than their GOP counterparts.

Though I did not see Ms. Filipovic's scathing analysis until rather late in the day, I nevertheless commented accordingly:

The Republican Party's bottomless hatred of women is in fact absolute proof of its function as the political-action agency of fundamentalist Christianity.

Indeed it would not be far afield to regard today's GOP -- with its legions of Teabaggers, Ku Klux Klanners and JesuNazi fanatics -- as a Christian version of Hamas or Al Qaeda.

Meanwhile the magnitude of the financial support the party gets from the One Percent underscores the fact theocracy (whether Christian, Islamic or Jewish), has emerged as the favorite Ruling Class method of imposing and perpetuating capitalist tyranny.

Why? Because under theocracy, corporate management rules by divine right.

Thus Republicans are theocrats. Their not-so-hidden agenda includes making Christianity the official state religion and using "Biblical Law" to dis-empower women and destroy the few remnants of our constitutional democracy.

Hence -- because women are always at the forefront of struggles for liberty (note how Liberty is always portrayed as female) -- women are the Republicans' primary target.

Which is the one point where the Democrats truly differ from the Republicans. The Democrats at least acknowledge women's rights, while the Republicans make no secret of their hatred and contempt for women.

And that by itself is reason to vote Democratic at all levels, federal state and local. To vote otherwise is literally to vote against women and Womanhood. 

*****

Seattle's Crosscut: Three Local Reports of Global Significance

Crosscut, an on-line journal published in Seattle, often reports on local issues that have national significance. Last week its writers hit a kind of trifecta. Dick Nelson exposed how the Democrats are no different from the Republicans in protecting the Ruling Class from fair taxation, Floyd McKay described how environment-hating capitalists will destroy a genuine near-Ecotopia in the northwest corner of Washington state, and Crosscut publisher David Brewster wrote a mini-history that omitted vital facts about how Ruling Class hostility doomed Seattle's best efforts in alternative journalism.

Mr. Nelson's report – a comprehensive update on the ugly truth that inflicts ever-deepening despair on progressives and exemplifies political reality throughout the United States – elicited my shortest (and snarkiest) comment: 

The (permanent) obstruction to meaningful tax reform in Washington state is the fact both parties are equally controlled by the One Percent and therefore represent and serve no purposes beyond those of the Ruling Class.

Though the Democrats still make a pretense of honoring the New Deal, and though a few Democratic legislators still (try to) remain true to its principles, beneath this clever disguise they are thus indistinguishable from the Republicans on all relevant economic issues.

Hence regardless of which party is in power, the rich will continue to be pampered by obscene dispensations from taxation while the rest of us suffer accordingly. 

***

Bellingham is the one city in Washington state – maybe in the entire U.S. – that not only talks environmentalism but genuinely lives it. 

For example, Bellingham voters overwhelmingly support mass transit. When the auto-centric suburbanites, the Teabaggers and all the other anti-public-transport troglodytes in the surrounding county voted to kill the city-county transit system, the courageous little metropolis saved its buses by defiantly creating its own transit authority.

The move generated immeasurable controversy, including the predictable bigotry and hatefulness from the transit-is-welfare Republicans. But it demonstrated Bellingham's stern commitment to environmental sanity – a test failed abysmally by other municipalities in this allegedly “evergreen” state, my own Tacoma included. 

Which may exemplify the biggest (unspoken) reason the Ruling Class has targeted Bellingham for destruction by turning it into an international coal port: the fact that, under capitalism, environmental steadfastness is intolerable subversion – heresy to be crushed by any means and at any expense. 

As I said in response to Mr. McKay's status report on the coal-port struggle: 

Obviously the fix is already in; the decision has already been made on Wall Street and in the relevant board rooms, and now all that remains is for it to be rammed down our throats, no matter the extent to which it triggers our gag reflexes.

Thus the coal port with all its attendant environmental ruin is to be imposed on us all, exactly as implied by the pivotal verb in Mr. McKays' second paragraph: not the conditional "would" but the defining (and definitively militaristic) "will serve." 

Anyone who imagines otherwise is in denial about the long history of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as the traditional spear-point for environmentally destructive projects favored by the One Percent. Precisely as Mr. McKay reports, the corps is already restructuring the misleadingly named "process" to minimize opportunities for effective dissent.

Which is not to say we should surrender without a fight. In a struggle of this sort, literally a battle for the future of the entire Puget Sound region, any obstruction placed in the enemy's path is a victory. 

But we should nevertheless recognize that the war -- to prevent Puget Sound from being reduced to Appalachia West and to save Western Washington from being turned into a satellite of West Virginia -- is already lost. We are thus (again) victimized by the death of the U.S. experiment in constitutional democracy and by imposition of its vultures-come-home-to-roost replacement: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us. 

As to Craig Cole and the role he is playing in the Appalachianization of Western Washington, I am not the least bit surprised. Cole was a slippery sycophant of the Ruling Class – a Republican in Democratic disguise – when I knew him at Western Washington State College in 1971, and obviously he remains so today. 

Meanwhile in the entire coal-port affair we see yet another bitter example of what is emerging as our most painful 21st Century lesson: that without economic democracy there is no democracy at all. 

***

Apropos Seattle's generally excellent on-line daily Crosscut, Mr. Brewster's curiously selective memory reveals the protect-the-One-Percent stance essential to journalistic success in the present-day United States. He thus exemplifies why today's so-called “alternative” media often differs from its Ruling Class counterpart only in the breadth and depth of its offerings, but almost never in its willingness to challenge the core shibboleths of capitalism. Obviously I could not abide Mr. Brewster's omissions: 

Interesting retrospective by Mr. Brewster, but deficient in at least three ways. 
 

There's no mention of The Seattle Sun (1974-1981), which under the editorship of Dick Clever (and later of Jane Hadley) set the pace for alternative newspaper journalism in Seattle.

One of The Sun's many coups was the series by Bruce Olson that scooped the world on the impending bankruptcy of the Washington Public Power Supply System, the largest municipal bond default in U.S. history. Alas, it was in retribution for just such fearless reporting The Sun was destroyed by a Ruling Class advertising boycott -- a pivotal fact in any history of Seattle journalism. 

Nor does Mr. Brewster make any mention of how the same vindictiveness on the part of the local One Percent, again expressed via an advertising boycott, killed Seattle Magazine in 1970.

Lastly there is the capitalist macrocosm illustrated by the Seattle microcosm.

If capitalism is to thrive in an age of terminal scarcity, it demands two dictatorial prerequisites. The first is that government at every level must be restructured in accordance with the principles set out by Benito Mussolini: absolute power and unlimited profit for the (corporate) Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else – exactly the regime now being imposed on the United States. Secondly – and as the pivotal element of the first – it is essential the masses be kept as ignorant as possible: note for example the One Percent's effort to bolster its profits by concealing the deadly dangers of genetically modified foods.

A major part of shutting off the information flow and thus dumbing down the public is, of course, the methodical destruction of newspapers – a process that becomes especially evident when the relative health of British and European print media is contrasted to the terminal sickness with which its U.S. counterpart has been (deliberately) infected.

Surely the notably thoughtful Mr. Brewster cannot be unaware of these factors, especially how various governmental policies, postal rates in particular, have been constructed specifically to destroy the U.S. press. Thus it is disingenuous of him to attribute the termination of public access to vital information as merely a consequence of random forces in an allegedly free market – a market that is in fact as deliberately structured as any psychology lab's rat maze. 

(Disclosure: a working journalist since 1956, I have had at least one proverbial foot in the alternative press since 1963, when I wrote for The Knoxville Flashlight Herald under the editorship of Marion Barry, who was then a field secretary for the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. In 1966-67, I was the text editor for Marc Crawford's TransMundo, the world's first alternative photo agency. From 1967 through 1971, my photographs and/or writing appeared in several alternative publications, among them The East Village Other, The Manhattan Tribune and Northwest Passage. From 1974 through 1976 I was the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, and into the early '80s wrote occasional in-depth reports for Tacoma Review. Most recently, I covered Occupy Tacoma for Reader Supported News, an on-line alternative.) 

LB/4 October 2012

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