Bamming Bam: Oh, The Pain Of The Believer And The Decline Of The Obama Illusion

August 30th, 2011 - by: danny

Gideon Rachman, Financial Times “Is there such a thing as a global mood? It certainly feels like it. I cannot remember a time when so many different countries, all over the world, were gripped by some form of street protest or popular revolt. 2011 is turning into the year of global indignation.”

Essay: Oh, The Pain of The Believer: Barack’s Betrayals Offer Lessons We Can’t Deny

By Danny Schechter

Journalists are not supposed to have political opinions, and yet we all do. Our “biases” are usually disguised, not blatant or overtly partisan, and can be divined in what stories we cover and how we cover them,

Even ‘just the fact’s ma’am,’ journos for big Media have to decide which facts to include and which to ignore.

Our outlooks are always shaped by our worldviews, values and experience, not too mention the outlets we work for.

Which brings me to the challenge of seeking truth and recognizing it when you see it.

I have to admit that I was seduced by the idea of Barack Obama.

The idea of a black President, the idea of a young President, the idea of an articulate President, and the idea of a man married to such a stand up women from a working class family was hard to resist.

Here’s a guy who seemed really smart, not just because he went to Harvard but because professors there I liked were impressed with him. (I taught at Harvard, and know very well how not so smart many students there can be!)

In the end, it doesn’t mean much, but in that period he lived about a block away from the House I once shared on Dartmouth Street in Somerville.

Was that a degree of separation?

He had also been a community organizer, starting in politics at the grass roots in Chicago. I also worked at Saul Alinsky-style organizing and even knew the iconic organizer personally.

Was that another degree?

He’s invoked the spirit of the civil rights movement but was not part of it. He treated Dr. King as a monument before the new memorial was conceived, embracing him as a symbol of the past, not a guide to the future.

He took an anti-war stance on pragmatic grounds only, preferring Afghanistan to Iraq. He hasn’t extricated us from either battlefield.

His strategy borrowed heavily from the Bush Doctrine. What’s the difference, really, as US troops now intervene worldwide and Guantanamo remains open for business?

There was a lot I didn’t know. I didn’t know the backgrounds of those that groomed him and funded him. His relationship with the centrist DLC was murky as were the details on the services he performed for a shadowy firm, Business International, said to have CIA links.

There were those who warned, but I guess, I didn’t want to listen.

Why? I didn’t want to reinforce my own skepticism and sense of despair. I feigned at being hopeful even as I took quite a few critical whacks at his positions in my blog. His deviations from a liberal agenda and his paens to the “free market” were considered necessary for his “electability.”

I was also influenced by the euphoria for him overseas that had become infectious but has since soured.

To be honest, I was so disgusted with eight years of George Bush for all the right reasons that I wanted him gone full stop, as did millions of Americans.

Hillary didn’t appeal to me, not because she’s a woman but because of her slavish affinity for the Israel lobby and middle of the road Democrats. (Yes, Obama, did his mea-culpa to AIPAC too!)

I was denounced as a super sexist by a few for not buying into her centrist Clintonista crusade.

She had gone from a student advocate to part of a ruling family; he went from bottom-up activism to top-down elitism.

When she joined his “team,” you knew they were always in the same league.

When the right bashed him for associating with radical Bill Ayers, who I knew, it made me suspect he might even be cooler than I thought, even as he raced to distance himself. His membership in Reverend Wright’s church hinted at a deeper consciousness until he buckled in the media heat and threw the man that married him under the bus.

And yet, I wanted to believe because I needed to believe, needed to believe it was possible to change the American behemoth, to believe that, as he kept saying, “it could be different this time.”

As the late writer David Foster Wallace put it, “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life…there is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship… else (what) you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough.”

So, in a sense, I became a worshiper like so many, not of the man or the dance he was doing in an infected political environment, but because I convinced myself that I worshiped possibility, that there are times when the unexpected, even the unbelievable occurs. I had seen Mandela go from prison to the presidency of South Africa.

History happens.

After all, how does a progressive blast a candidate who has Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger singing the uncensored version of “This Land Is Your Land” at his inaugural?”

Yet, there was always a nagging question: was he with us or just co-opting us?

Yes We Can?

Slowly, despite the glow and the aura, deeper truths surfaced, realities I had winked away. Its not surprising that his mantra has gone, as the Washington Post reports, from the “fierce urgency of now,” to “ Be patient, democracy is big and tough and messy.” Now journalists who supported him use terms like “wimpy,” “meek,” “anemic” and “tone deaf” to describe his discourse.

Yes, I knew, I may have been rationalizing a false god, who was only another, if more attractive, politician who says one thing and does another in a political system where power, not personalities prevail.

Like many of his predecessors he would be “captured” by the power structures, by the military men and contractors at the Pentagon and the money men on Wall Street.

He was in office but never really in charge. Clearly, he didn’t have the votes to enact a real change agenda. But that was because his own party was long ago bought and paid for.

He never had a chance, even if as I wanted to believe, he wanted one. He said he wanted to be transformational figure but the system transformed him—and quickly.

Everyone runs “against Washington,” even a Senator, who was part of it.

And so I held my nose and voted, hoping against my wiser instincts. I even made a positive film about the campaign that showed how he used social media and texting to mobilize new voters. When I tried to get a copy to the White House, through an insider there, I found they couldn’t be less interested.

By then, he had gone from playing the “outside game” to opting into the “inside game” built around compromise in the name of “pragmatism, or ‘getting it done,” in his words. In the end he was a rookie who may have outsmarted himself or just served the interests who put him there.

He couldn’t dump his most passionate and issue-oriented followers fast enough.

While his backers were still hot to trot, he became cooler toward them, and, in effect, repudiated them with few progressive appointments. He put on his flag pin and relished the symbolism of the “office.” He became the master of the uplifting speech disguising a quite different policy agenda.

He spoke for the people but served the power. His wanted the other side to love him too, even as his stabs at “bi-partisanship” proved non-starters.

When you lie down with those “lambs,” (or is it snakes?) you betray not only supporters, but their hopes. FDR was soon spinning in his grave.

I am not surprised that knowledgeable critics of his economic policies not only consider him bull-headed and wrong, but, actually corrupt, aligned and complicit, with the banksters who are still ripping us off. No wonder he’s ”bundled” more donations from the greedsters and financiers this year than in 2008! No wonder, he turned his back on consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren and is trying to kill prosecutions of bank fraud in high places.

Christopher Whalen who writes for Reuters say there will be a cost for his doing nothing, “The path of least resistance politically has been to temporize and talk. But by following the advice of Rubin and Summers, and avoiding tough decisions about banks and solvency, President Obama has only made the crisis more serious and steadily eroded public confidence. In political terms, Obama is morphing into Herbert Hoover.”

Yet, at the same time, many of us who now know how we have been used, will vote for him again, because, as he rightly calculates, there is no one else, and the alternative is even worse. Watch and weep as today’s rebels become next year’s rationalizers.

It reminds me of when activists were asked to vote for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 with the slogan “Part of the Way with LBJ.” That way ended with an endless escalation of war in Vietnam, and guns trumping butter. Sound familiar?

The search for truth and reality has hit a wall but has to continue. The lessons need to be learned. We have to say we were wrong, when we were, not in our beliefs, but in pinning our hopes on a shrewd, ambitious, and double-faced political performance artist.

While people who still back him dismiss the accusation that’s he’s a hidden socialist, Kenyan, or space alien, all too many suspect he may be a secret Republican. He is who he is, aloof, cautious, and a man in the middle. He’s staying there.

Let’s give David Foster the last word.

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness,…

… It is about simple awareness – awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over…”

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits the Newsdissector.com blog. He directed “Barack Obama: People’s President” (2009) for a South African media company.

Obama Ratings Fizzling

UTICA, NY–Majorities of likely voters continue to disapprove of President Barack Obama’s job performance (60%) and say it is “time for someone new” (55%) in the White House.

Among those who do approve of Obama’s performance, 34% say they are disappointed by the president, but don’t want to undermine him by saying they disapprove.

The job approval and re-election results in the Aug. 25-29 IBOPE Zogby interactive poll are little changed from the last similar survey conducted Aug. 2-4.

Washington Post: For millions, recession is the new normal

For millions, the recession has become permanent, no longer a crisis to endure so much as a reality to accept; and, a record number of people exist on the fringes of the workforce.

Dean Baker: Don’t Expect Much From Obama’s Job Message

Obama Names New Economic Advisor #3: ‘Obama nominates Alan Krueger as his new chief economist’

National Journal: Alan Krueger’s appointment to lead the White House Council of Economic Advisers will strengthen Obama’s much-depleted economic team, but don’t expect him to radically shake up the administration’s approach to job creation. In truth, his success in the job will depend instead on Krueger’s ability to focus Obama’s efforts on a relentless campaign to address sky-high unemployment.

Katrina: Six Years Later

Recovery’: Black death, devastation and depopulation to “build back better”
6 Years After Katrina, Lower 9th Ward Still Bleak

Six years after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast,the New Orleans the Lower 9th. black neighborhood hardest hit is still a ghost town. Redevelopment has been slow in coming, and the neighborhood has just 5,500 residents – one-third its pre-Katrina population..In the Lower 9th Ward, the fire station for Engine 39 hasn’t been rebuilt…firefighters use a trailer. Schools and churches are boarded up. Scores of houses still bear the familiar “X” spray painted on doors and the front of houses to designate a building had been searched… The only difference is they are faded now. But politicians, investors and celebrities continue to promise a better future … for the area that hasn’t had one supermarket in 20 years…Developers hope to get federal hurricane recovery low-interest and forgivable loans…Other parts of New Orleans have flourished thanks to federal recovery dollars that have brought new businesses, schools and streets. Entrepreneurship and civic engagement is up, city schools have shown test-score gains and the middle class is growing, according to a new report by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center tracking the city’s recovery…Not everyone is convinced.
David J. Livingstona Wisconsin-based grocery consultant who studied the New Orleans market, said the Lower 9th Ward is too depopulated to support a supermarket, questioned whether the Lower 9th Ward can ever be a lively spot for commerce…

CLG: SeizeDC! After much deliberation, the CLG has decided to postpone Seize DC until the spring of 2012. We believe that more time is necessary for the protest momentum to build in light of austerity measures and extended and intensified military interventions and wars. Please remain on the Seize DC protest alert list and stay apprised of plans as they develop for a spring Seize DC protest.

Other stories of interest

Der Spiegel Via Huff Post: Wikileaks Inadvertently Leaks Documents Naming Names

Other recent leaks from Wikileaks (Electronic Intifada)

Special Wikileaks revelations coverage:

Special treatment gives Israeli mobsters free access to US soil: WikiLeaks

Did Wikileaks just reveal the US blueprint for Libya?

Dissector Interview on Press TV on the Islamaphobia Report

What is True?

News Via NATO re events in SIrte, Libya: “Print

BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO says Libya’s warring sides in the Gadhafi stronghold of Sirte are now engaged in “discussions.”

Col. Roland Lavoie also says NATO’s role will continue as long as civilians in the country are under threat, although the area around the capital Tripoli is now “essentially free.”
He spoke to reporters Tuesday near Naples, where NATO’s Libya operation is headquartered, and by video link to journalists in Brussels, as well.

News About Sirte Via Russia: Protecting Civilians? Bombing Continues

For the third day in a row, NATO aircraft are conducting massive missile and bomb strikes on the city of Sirte, home town of Muammar Gaddafi, not allowing anyone to escape. The city perimeter is surrounded by rebel check points, behind which there are special forces units from Britain, France, Qatar and United Arab Emirates.

The exit from the city is completely blocked. Neither women, nor children are allowed to leave. Men, captured attempting to leave the town together with their families, are shot. Their families are sent back into the city under bombing. There is practically no way to bury the corpses, stated in a letter that was received at Argumenty.ru this morning. The writer is a former officer in the Soviet and later Russian special forces, who is now in Sirte.

The former officer of the Soviet, then Russian special forces, a retired lieutenant colonel Ilya Korenev, whom [Argumenti.ru] have earlier called a “source”, and who is close to Colonel Gaddafi, decided to mention his name in the letter.

In the city until now no troops, rebels or special forces have dared to enter. In the night there were many small provocations in order to try to establish the locations of the government troops. Several small squads of rebels tried a probing action in the night to reconnaissance, but were destroyed. At the same time in the air at that time was a remote-controlled reconnaissance spying aircraft (UAV) “drone”, which exposed the city’s defense. After an hour air attacks took place on these plotted points. However, defenders of the city have already left their positions to other locations, writes the lieutenant colonel.”

Gareth Porter, IPS, Hariri Bombing Indictment Based on Flawed Premise

WASHINGTON, Aug 29, 2011 (IPS) – The indictment of four men linked to Hezbollah in the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri made public by the Special Tribunal on Lebanon Aug. 17 is questionable not because it is based on “circumstantial evidence”, but because that evidence is based on a flawed premise.

The evidence depends on a convoluted theory involving what the indictment calls “co-location” of personal mobile phones associated with five distinct networks said to be somehow connected with the plot to murder Hariri.

The indictment, originally filed Jun. 10, says that, if there are “many instances” in which a phone is “active at the same location, on the same date, and within the same time frame as other phones”, but the phones do not contact each other, then it is “reasonable to conclude from these instances that one person is using multiple phones together”.

Military Resistance: Controversy Over Approved Shoes For US Army

Aug 29, 2011 By Lance M. Bacon – Staff writer, Army Times [Excerpts]

An Army message about footwear certainly stepped on some toes.

The wear of shoes that feature “five separate, individual compartments for the toes” is prohibited in All Army Activities message 239/2011. Such shoes “detract from a professional military image,” the message said.

Soldiers are not allowed to wear them with the individual physical fitness uniform or when conducting physical training in military formation.

When Army Times first reported the rule, it drew an immediate response from runners.

Many said the Army was forfeiting safety and performance for aesthetics.

The decision was made by Sergeant Major of the Army Raymond Chandler and his board of directors, which is composed of key command sergeants major.

“The decision was based on the lack of conformity with the Army’s conservative professional appearance,” said Hank Minitrez, a spokesman for Army G-1.

More commentary on Hurricane Hype (Undernews): Category 5 coverage of a Category 1 storm

Too much of the on air reporting of Hurricane Irene sounded like the news folk were reading from a thesaurus entry for the word “disastrous” and coming up with a new synonym every other sentence. It is true as Nate Silver argues, that the coverage in size was not extraordinary, but the coverage in tone certainly was. Like everything else in contemporary American life, we seemed to have lost any sense of subtlety and gradation.

Will Bunch, Philadelphia Daily News – As the cleanup from Irene’s whirlwind weekend visit continues today in Philadelphia and elsewhere on the Eastern Seaboard, the cyclone leaves behind a Category 5 controversy.

You can certainly argue that Irene wasn’t overhyped, since the storm caused at least 18 deaths, widespread flooding and power outages for more than 1 million customers. You can also make the case that more people might have died were it not for the unusually expansive evacuation orders and the media coverage that they received.

On the other hand, the nonstop TV hyping of worst-case scenarios even after more-responsible forecasters saw as early as Thursday that Irene would not be a major hurricane caused millions to expect something far, far worse – “the East Coast Katrina,” or maybe the water wall from The Ten Commandments – than what showed up.

Longtime media writer Howard Kurtz, now with the Daily Beast, nailed the disparity when he said that although Irene did prove to be a Category 1 storm, causing significant disruption, it received Category 5 coverage into the weekend.

RSN: New Audit Shows Federal Reserve Spent 16 TRILLION on Secret Bailouts.

And Finally:

‘Michele Bachmann: Hurricane Irene Is God’s Warning To Washington; Campaign Says She Was Joking’

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