The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    David Seaton's picture

    Solidarity: the talk and the walk

    By David Seaton on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 6:08am |

    What have they done with President Obama? What happened to the inspirational figure his supporters thought they elected? Who is this bland, timid guy who doesn’t seem to stand for anything in particular?(...) Mr. Obama is conspicuously failing to mount any kind of challenge to the philosophy now dominating Washington discussion — a philosophy that says the poor must accept big cuts in Medicaid and food stamps; the middle class must accept big cuts in Medicare (actually a dismantling of the whole program); and corporations and the rich must accept big cuts in the taxes they have to pay. Shared sacrifice! Paul Krugman - New York Times

     

    So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home. Bob Herbert's last column in the New York Times

     

    (I)n agreeing Friday night to what he called the largest annual spending cut in the nation’s history, the president further decoupled himself from his party in Congress, exacerbating concerns among some Democrats about whether he is really one of them and is willing to spend political capital to defend their principles on bigger battles ahead. New York Times


    I wonder if all those kids, the ones who worked so hard to get out the vote for Barack Obama in 2008 and thrilled to his "Audacity of Hope" and "We are the change we seek", knew that what they were electing was an animal many thought to be long extinct: a moderate-Republican?

     

    And I wonder if now that they know the score, they are going ring all those doorbells for him again in 2012?

     

    He is letting a lot of people down, who put a lot of hope and trust in him.

     

    You can bet that the budget cuts are going to come out of "entitlements", that is to say, protection for the vulnerable members of society, and certainly not from the budget of what Steve Walt calls,

    (...) a military establishment that costs more than all other militaries put together and that is used not to defend American soil but to fight wars mostly on behalf of other people.

    I thought it might be interesting to talk about what trust and "solidarity" really mean. To begin with it means standing by the people that you have caused to believe that they can count on you to stand by them when things get really tough for them. Solidarity means "having someone's back." Not letting down the people who are counting on you to protect them. This is sometimes painful and often dangerous.

     

    To illustrate this concept of solidarity I have chosen a short, but powerful video, taken from the Portuguese version of bullfighting.

     

    As you may know, in Portugal, they don't kill the bull, so at the end of the tourada, the animal must be subdued and led alive from the ring. This "final act" is often done in traditional manner, by a group of young amateurs called "Forcados" who take control of the animal with their bare hands.

     

    Belonging to one of these forcado clubs is considered an ultimate masculine rite of passage in Portugal, like playing varsity football in the USA, with the difference that "a pega de cara" is much more dangerous than football, for even with his horns padded the Iberian fighting bull is like a half-ton Rottweiler. Things can go terribly wrong, and when that happens, as the saying goes, "that is when you find out who your real friends are".

     

    Watch this short film and learn the basics of solidarity.

     

    For a long time I have wondered who Obama thought he was fooling... and I have finally come to the conclusion that he is fooling himself.  He is simply afraid to fight and he covers it with talk. I find his lack of self-knowledge frightening.

     

    If he really thinks he got a "deal" from his negotiation, that the Republican Congress is going to go quietly along with what Boehner agreed to, then his self-delusion is total. Read this from former Clinton adviser, morphed into ultra-right agitator a toute faire, Dick Morris.

    It is the duty of every Republican Congressman to vote no on this terrible deal. It violates our campaign promises to the American people. We promised $100 billion of cuts and we delivered $38 billion ($62 billion on a twelve month basis). In the Republican House's first real test out of the box it has broken the promise over which it was elected.(...) And the lesson is this: We need to purify our party and purge it of the likes of John Boehner and all those Congressmen who vote for the budget sellout. The Tea Party must take the lead in this purifying fire. We must not let the RINOs win! Dick Morris

    This was the ground where he should have made his stand. He had everything to gain by drawing a line in the sand there and declaring, "no pasarán".

     

    The president and his handlers seem to have forgotten what a near run thing the 2008 election was until Lehman Brothers went down, and how important the enthusiasm of his base was to to his final victory. This is the battle where he could have broken the Tea Party, split the Republicans and coasted to victory in 2012. What he has done is split the Democrats and alienate progressives and perhaps open himself up to a challenge from his own party or from an independent from the left who inherits the spirit for change that he so fraudulently invoked in 2008.

     Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

    Comments

    The truth is always the most bitter pill one has to swallow.


    by Beetlejuice on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 9:49am

    I think that some people do not really get the tea party yet. At least not the libertarian wing of it (for lack of a better term).

    It has been stated by a number of people that there is more than a little anarchist leanings to the tea party and it's libertarian roots. I feel this is true. I have in the past known a few anarchists. These anarchists fully believe that ANY government is bad having come to this conclusion via the extreme left and a number of them have their background in the drug culture as well. Which should not be all that surprising since the government and it's anti-drug laws and policies have been a thorn in their sides from the get go.

    A lot of the libertarian philosophy grew out of this anarchist background and I would say that libertarians are anarchists with coats and ties.

    What the libertarian element wants (and I see them as the strongest part of the tea party) is the benefits of government without the taxes and rules and regulations. It's not that they like or dislike those at the top in Wall Street. It's that they firmly believe that what Wall Street does for and with it's money or how they themselves get or spend their money or any other part of their lives is nobodies damn business. Certainly not the government's. And not just the federal government...ANY government.

    Which is also why the idea of a world government makes them go ballistic.

    There was an interview on AlJazerra the other day with a tea party leader and what he stated was the desire to shrink governments down so that they could be drowned in a bath tub.

    And remember that the tea party consists largely of the baby boomer age demographic. 75% are from the ages of 45-65. Disenchanted 1960s  leftists that now hate any form of government.

     


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 10:40am

    I think I need to be a bit more specific her. The libertarian element of the tea party HATES any form of government REGULATION.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 10:45am

    Came across this from Eleanor Roosevelt, published in 1959.  In re to your comment seems as good a place as any right now to share it at dag:

    By defining democracy as the presumption of freedom we guard against the notion that freedom can be absolutized.  When absolutized it jams and becomes nonfreedom: political freedom founders in anarchy (France before the return of DeGaulle was almost an example of this); civil liberties slip into license, and economic freedom moves toward monopoly, exploitation, and unemployment.  In this respect freedom, as Gide has remarked, is like a kite that cannot rise on the wind unless restrained.  When freedom is presumed rather than absolutized it carries no implication that governments are best which govern least.  On the contrary, it accepts Lincoln's principle that governments must do for the people what needs to be done but what they cannot do at all for themselves or cannot do as well.  Specifically in our own case this involves accepting social security and a host of government policing and regulating measures as supports of freedom.  In doing so, however, it remains aware on the one hand of freedom's worth and on the other of the way in which concentrations of power, both political and economic, can choke this freedom.  Consequently it prefers that things be done nongovernmentally where they can be done as well this way; it leans toward letting its citizens follow, alone or in groups, where their minds and spirits will lead them until evidence arises that their freedom is interfering with the freedom of other citizens...

    "What Are We For?", in The Search for America, Eleanor Roosevelt and Huston Smith, 1959, pulled from Courage in a Dangerous World: The Political Writings of Eleanor Roosevelt, edited by Allida M. Black., p. 219.

    I think that is well said, where the contrast with the Randian libertarian notion of freedom, the one that, notwithstanding several massive failures in recent years such as Katrina, the financial meltdown and the Gulf oil spill retains dominant political and economic power in the US at the moment, is clearly drawn.

    Related, FDR said that "necessitous men are not free men.  People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made."  (January 11, 1944 SOTU address).   


    by AmericanDreamer on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 12:40pm

    A month or so ago, Dave Seaton introduced a series of videos...The Century of the Self. The third one...There is Policeman Inside...was the most interesting because it began to tie things together. Turns out the Yippies are still with us today. Stew Albert, a founding member of the group, indicated political activism was basically a dead end after the '68 Democrat convention in Chicago and it all went downhill from there [13 minute mark in the film]. They came to the conclusion the personal had to become political before any change could be made. Remember those Reagan democrats that appeared in the '80's to sweep Reagan into office? I'll give you three guess who they are and your first two won't count. Odd, isn't it? The activist from the 60's are the center of today's political maelstrom. Just that somewhere along the way, they got all caught up with the materialism and political innuendo they so much were against in their youth, however, their anarchist leanings is the only thing they held on to and are still pushing.


    by Beetlejuice on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 2:37pm

    Oh geeze...I completely forgot about the Yippies. But it does not seem the least bit strange to me. The 1968 Democratic convention left a very bad taste in a lot of peoples mouths.

    I could not actually say cause I have no real proof but it would not surprise me to learn that more than a few young voters that would have gone for Bobby Kennedy voted for Nixon just out of spite to the Democrats.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 5:46pm

    This is nonsense, Beetle.

    The Reagan Democrats did not just "appear" and there is certainly no polling data that says they came from the Yippies or those 60's activists who felt "the personal is the political."

    In the same way, there is no evidence that the Tea Partiers are in any way made up of the Yippies or 60's activists. 


    by quinn esq on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 6:16pm

    Agreed. I don't want to get into arguing about it, just want to say: agreed, doesn't sound like the history I lived.

    Does remind me, though of the Phoebe Fay "blame it on the boomers, I hate old people" syndrome, wherein GenX constantly come up with new and varied revisions of pop culture history to express their own particular neurosis and erase certain histories of their own from their minds.

    It's kind of funny in way, to see people talk as if all boomers were hippies. Means those that were eventually managed to "revise" history, to pass off a lie. Hello everyone, let me tell you a dirty secret: hippies, radicals, long hairs, yippies, rockers, druggies, mods, et. al., were a very small minority of the boomer generation; they were even a very small minority of the college students of the era. Is likely more of them got spat upon by their straight cohorts than they spat on returning Vietnam vets. Reminds me of Jerry Rubin turning Reagan networking yuppie in the 80's, it was like old man trying to impress GenX youth and reject his own youth.


    by artappraiser on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 6:35pm

    I just knew that my comm net wold pull a few out of the wood work as it were.

    Ah me.....absolutely convinced that the tea party people are the new Waffen SS. Ain't no way gonna believe otherwise.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 7:07pm

    Apparently you know a dispropotionate number of Tea Party outliers.

    Overall, they were born of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Buchanan, et. al., the enemies of "the sixties," their definition of where the country went wrong starting with Dr. Spock.

    There's libertarian dopers scattered allover the political spectrum, from Neo-nazis in Alabama to aged San Francisco beats to Ted Kaczynski types in Montana. Some hippies were Jesus freaks back in the days when hppiedom was new. Unusual individuals say nothing, prove nothing about any movements.


    by artappraiser on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 8:09pm

    Here'e the url for the video:

    http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart3of4

    The part I mentioned starts at the 13 minute point.

    This is were my point is based.

    If you have something to offer which counters my point then I'd be happy to review it and compare your info to what I have found. Perhaps it may be nonsense...then again it may not. It all depends on the info available. Right now, I'll go with what Curtis says until someone can offer a different point of view with info supporting their argument.


    by Beetlejuice on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 4:00am

    Again, this is nonsense, C. "Disenchanted 60's leftists?"

    After a while, I just feel like telling people who bleat this shit to screw off. You guys don't bother with stuff like data, just trot out fabulous nonsense like "in the past I have known a few anarchists." Personally, I don't give a shit that you knew a few anarchists in the past. I knew a LOT. Still do. Knew a LOT of 60'sd activists. Still do. And a frigging tiny percentage of them have even the slightest sympathy for the Tea Partiers. 

    It just doesn't seem to cross your mind that the leftist 60's activists were a tiny percentage of the 60's population, and maybe, just maybe, there were a hell of a lot of young rightwingers there from Day One, who have trotted themselves out in slightly different hats over the years. Or do you imagine everyone was a hippie and a leftie? Christ man, do you ever spend 5 minutes looking at past polling data? 

    If you want to find the 60's activists, take a look at your local environmental groups. There are tens of thousands of 60's activists working there, still today. I'm surrounded by them.

    The Tea Party? Earth calling.


    by quinn esq on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 6:24pm

    In C's defense, I also know some of those '60s activists "turned" environmentalists, and they do like tea parties, or at least parties where tea is served. Sometimes there are other herbs besides tea at those parties, too, or so I've been told. True story: I've never smoked pot, and neither have many of my liberal friends of my generation (I'm 40). Several of us young'uns were in a group that also involved several older liberals, and all of them were aghast that we had never experimented.


    by Verified Atheist on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 6:36pm

    And I have known more than a few 60s activists come anarchists that have embraced the tea party libertarians.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 7:02pm

    How many of these 60's activists are you talking about? Two?  Three?

    Dude, it shouldn't even be up for debate any more.  I've posted the links at least a dozen times, and don't feel like looking them up again.  But the fact is that polling show beyond a doubt that Tea Partiers are almost exclusively older, middle-and-upper-middle class white Republicans.  These are people who have reliably voted Republican for decades.

    As artappraiser notes, there may be a small percentage of outliers (and apparently, you know every single one of them), but that doesn't change the fact that the Tea Partiers are older, middle-and-upper-middle class white Republicans.  If you continue to claim otherwise, it has to be assumed that you're happy to spout things you know are complete bullshit in order to make a political point.  You really should have more respect for your audience here than to continue to peddle this nonsense.   


    by brewmn on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 11:02pm

    Peterr at FDL has a diary based on a speech Obama gave at Ebenezer Baptist Church in 2008.

    He pulled this from the speech:

    . . . “Unity is the great need of the hour.” That’s what Dr. King said. It is the great need of this hour as well, not because it sounds pleasant, not because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exits in this country.

    I’m not talking about the budget deficit. I’m not talking about the trade deficit. Talking about the moral deficit in this country. I’m talking about an empathy deficit, the inability to recognize ourselves in one another, to understand that we are our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper, that in the words of Dr. King, “We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.”

    Peterr here: "Pause for a minute and let that sink in: “the empathy deficit is the essential deficit that exists in this country.”

    "We have an empathy deficit when we’re still sending our children down corridors of shame, schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education. We have a deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than ordinary workers are making in an entire year, when families lose their homes so unscrupulous lenders can make a profit, when mothers can’t afford a doctor when their children are stricken with illness. We have a deficit in this country when we have Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others, when our children see hanging nooses from a school yard tree today, in the present, in the 21st century. We have a deficit when homeless veterans sleep on the streets of our cities, when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur, when young Americans serve tour after tour after tour after tour of duty in a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged. We have an empathy deficit in this country that has to be closed. We have a deficit when it takes a breach in the levees to reveal the breach in our compassion, when it takes a terrible storm to reveal the hungry that God calls on us to feed, the sick that He calls on us to care for, the least of these that He commands that we treat as our own. So, we have a deficit to close. We have walls, barriers to justice and equality that must come down, and to do this, we know that “unity is the great need of the hour.”

    (Wendy here):

    I can't think what to say except a lot of us believed he'd internalized some of the best moral understandings of all faiths and of all moral people everywhere.


    by we are stardust on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 1:29pm

    Obviously talking the talk is not the same as walking the walk.


    by David Seaton on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 2:42pm

    Or captured by pod-people?  ;o)


    by we are stardust on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 6:08pm

    Yeah, like I've said before: What so disillusions me is not that Obama said he'd do X and Y, and failed to do X or Y. That's just a symptom. What disillusions me is that he articulated clearly that he understood so many of the interrelated problems the country faced, and that it was crucial to address all of them in a holistic way.

    Did someone pull him aside after the election and say, "OK, we've looked at the situation just as candidly as you have. And you're right about what needs to be done. But it's intractable; there's no way to pull it off. All the government can do is offer people bread and circuses (and the occasional war) as we wait for the inevitable end of our economy, culture and values."

    I ask, because the contrast between "Yes, we can!" and "WTF!" is so much more than a mere failure to walk the walk. Seaton thinks Obama is simply the greatest conman of all time. I think he still somehow believes everything he's doing will magically turn out right. That's delusional, I know. On his part, I mean, not mine.

    Pod-people! Yep, that's the only rational explanation, stardust.


    by acanuck on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 6:55pm

    I dunno, canuck.  Crap; I did a whole blog about it over a year ago, wondering if he may have been being held hostage in the ways that some FOIA request info proved other Presidents have been.  Did a lot of research for it, actually.  I can grab the link, but it may be beside the point. 

    I think the consensus may have been "Doesn't matter!"  But you're so right: either he really had internalized the wholeness of that, or his speech-writers had.  Big difference.  I think he changed, and had started a diary for FDL awhile ago about theories of 'why they change' (Congress-critters, but maybe the Presidents, too) once they get so much power, and surround themselves with people who in some ways hold more, especially in the financial sector. 

    Kinda like they are the layer between the Overlords and the rest of us, and see more they want.  Not that the Overlords can order out the 101st Airborne, but still.

    I did love: That's delusional, I know. On his part, I mean, not mine.  LOL!  I do think he's lost track of whom he serves, without getting too far into the weeds with it.

    Read this; I forgot the link as Destor's.


    by we are stardust on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 7:10pm

    There's the fact this former university prof and community organizer makes a mere $400,000 a year, while hobnobbing with folks who make tens of millions a year and dictators who steal billions. It's good that Obama makes millions each year in book residuals, but that still doesn't make him the alpha dog in those encounters. The fact he can on a whim order any of the others nuked does count for something, I suppose.


    by acanuck on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 7:26pm

    Yeah; different sorts of power, and really, the military seems to own him rather than the other way around.  Maybe.  Here's the whole speech; it can kinda make you weep if you believed it; I did, goddam myself.  Looked a couple minutes to see who wrote the speech, didn't find it easliy, and RL is calling.

     


    by we are stardust on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 7:51pm

    Dug that blog outta teh google cache; kinda fun scrolling down the avatar-comment list, anyway.

    Listening to this grand speech.  Oy.  Who stole the Man?  Even has his dialect going on...


    by we are stardust on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 8:03pm

    Duh.  http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/w/e/wendy_davis/2009/11/hidden-limits-to-presidential.php


    by we are stardust on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 8:10pm

    I think the whole Obama business is dead weird from beginning to end... I'm not sure we'll ever get to the bottom of it or understand it.


    by David Seaton on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 12:25am

    Wow. Amazing. It seriously brings tears to my eyes. Someone with that kind of vision and the ability to communicate it.

    Imagine if the guy who wrote that speech were president! Imagine if the president could find him and get him to write his deficit speech for wednesday. Imagine if the president actually listened to that guy. Imagine a leader like that.

    That speech is unbelievable. I'm just flabbergasted.I'd totally forgotten what Obama was capable of.

    WHERE THE FUCK IS THAT GUY?!


    by Obey on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 7:23pm

    I'm still heartbroken, gotta say. And I do think that's a big big problem today - a LOT of people invested a lot of emotion, belief, hope, in the things said. And then, it's as though he just... folded.

    Folded. 


    by quinn esq on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 12:32pm

    Quinn, 

    Be of good cheer! Watch the video of the Portuguese forcados and be inspired by action, not by words.


    by David Seaton on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 1:00pm

    This week Brown has been using Civil War metaphors at his public events to describe the deep divisions in California, and the entire country for that matter, preaching with the passion of a born-again that the country is dangerously polarized.

    “We are at a point of civil discord, and I would not minimize the risk to our country and to our state. It is not trivial. I’ve been around a long time, I’m a student of history, I’m a student of contemporary politics. We are facing what I would call a ‘regime crisis.’ The legitimacy of our very democratic institutions are in question,” he said. Jerry Brown


    by David Seaton on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 3:13pm

    An Obama is not helping one bit.

    His original proposal was a mild stimulus that would add $40bn to 2010 funding levels. The country ended up with a cut of $38.5bn – the largest spending cuts in history, slashing budgets for community programmes, infrastructure investment and healthcare provision, among other things. Left to his own devices, the Republican House Speaker, John Boehner, would have settled for less. But the Tea Party would not allow it.

    This was by no means inevitable. There is no question that Obama had to compromise, but the deal that he eventually struck did not reflect the balance of power either in the polity – where Democrats have the Senate and the presidency – or the country. With the Tea Party dictating terms to the Republican leadership, who then got Obama to blink first, the tail wagged the dog and then the dog dragged the owner into a ditch.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 8:15pm

    Where is Campaign Obama?  He says:

     

     


    by we are stardust on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 9:58pm