Cornel West

Cornel West: In the U.S. oligarchs rule and rotating politicians reign!" Obama is a neoliberal tied to the oligarchs!".

Obama becomes an obedient servant of the corporate elite

Cornel West believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”

“This was maybe America’s last chance to fight back against the greed of the Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any democratic experiment,” Cornel West laments. “We are squeezing out all of the democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone."

"The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways."

Cornel West and the fight against injustice

The provocative US intellectual discusses issues of race, civil liberties and Barack Obama's leadership.

From Japan (Again): A Warning to the World

A reporter, describing the devastation of one city in Japan, wrote: “It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts ... as a warning to the world.” The reporter was Wilfred Burchett, writing from Hiroshima, Japan, on Sept. 5, 1945. Burchett was the first Western reporter to make it to Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped there. He reported on the strange illness that continued to kill people, even a full month after that first, dreadful use of nuclear weapons against humans. His words could well describe the scenes of annihilation in northeastern Japan today. Given the worsening catastrophe at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, his grave warning to the world remains all too relevant.

The U.S., the largest producer of commercial nuclear power in the world.

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Cynical deficit-reduction theater

Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.

Cornel West on Charles Rangel, Bush & Kanye West and Why Obama Admin "Seems to Have Very Little Concern for Poor People"

Michael Moore to Obama: Toughen Up

Broke away from the status quo, do not vote for the lesser of two evils, Do not vote to support a President you do not believe in.

Travel a different path: if Obama comes out and tell us he will NOT take Corporate and Wall Streets money in 2012 and fight for us we will put him back to the White House in 2012.

Moore is delusional. He's wrong about people supporting the left democrats. The notorious stupidity of the American people is not limited to the right wing racists and theocrats but thoroughly permeates the liberal democratic community as well.

El fracaso de Obama

La arrogancia de Obama ha sido motivo de crítica, muchas veces injusta, de parte de la derecha. El Tea Party ha explotado el intelectualismo de Obama -educado en Harvard- y de su Administración -repleta de títulos de Ivy League- como una prueba de su separación respecto al país real, a la América profunda. El rechazo al intelectualismo es un fenómeno viejo en la sociedad norteamericana sobre el que ya teorizó Richard Hofstadter en un magnífico ensayo en 1963.

Pero, en el caso de Obama, esa crítica reposa sobre un sustrato cierto. El intelectualismo de Obama es, obviamente, una garantía de su solvencia, pero también es motivo de una actitud excesivamente contemplativa ante los acontecimientos. Su arrogancia no es el fruto de una cuna privilegiada sino el producto de un éxito prematuro.

Esa personalidad se refleja en su política. Quizá el momento elegido no era el mejor para la reforma sanitaria, quizá debió corregir sobre la marcha, quizá tuvo que atender los primeros síntomas de malestar entre los ciudadanos.

Son muchos quizás, efectivamente. Es fácil juzgar los acontecimientos a posteriori. Pero lo que distingue a los gigantes políticos es su capacidad de acertar en las decisiones inmediatas. Obviamente, Obama no ha acertado. Pueden parecer magníficos algunos de sus logros y extraordinariamente nobles sus motivos. Pero una mayoría de los norteamericanos no lo cree y, en una democracia, es obligación de un presidente respetar la opinión de sus electores. En una democracia hay gobernantes, no grandes timoneles ni guías morales.

Tea With Frankenstein

Democrats are the very reason for the tea party, this latest episode of American idiocy. Had the party done something with the grand historic opportunity handed to them two years ago, none of this would be happening. Had they not booted so badly a rare alignment of the stars that gave them crises allowing real, serious solutions, along with a despised opposition allowing the final crushing of the conservative disease for a generation or more, we wouldn’t be sitting here today laughing at serious candidates for the United States Senate who have staked out firm positions on the societal perils of onanism.

If Barack Obama had channeled Harry Truman instead of Neville Chamberlain, this show would have been over a long time ago. But the president instead decided to make nice with vicious thugs, even though he never needed to, and even though they were publicly excoriating him in the ugliest and most deceitful terms, just as he was negotiating with them. And negotiating. And negotiating some more. The Fool Down The Hill spent a year cutting deals with Republicans in Congress on his health care debacle, giving in to them at every turn, and stiff-arming the progressives who had made him president, only to achieve exactly what anyone who has been remotely conscious since Joe McCarthy’s day knew would be the outcome: no Republican votes for a bill they themselves had helped water down to near insignificance. Add to that Republican obstruction on every other issue, the almost complete absence of GOP votes on anything – even legislation they had previously sponsored – the Democrats favored, along with the right’s continuous assault on every real or (mostly) imagined personal characteristic of the president, and now you see a huge part of the explanation for the tragicomedy that is American politics at this moment.

What’s worse, Obama’s stupidity is a gift that will keep on giving for a long time. By means of his actions in the White House so far, he has nearly guaranteed that he cannot recover in the coming years, no matter what. He has done one of the few things that more or less assures his presidency of being finished. The right will never let up on him, even if he were to adopt their agenda wholesale. And let’s be clear about this – he more or less already has. If you lay out the positions of the Obama administration on everything from civil liberties to gay rights to economic policy to national ‘defense’ and more, there’s hardly a damn shred of difference between his positions and George W. Bush’s. It’s a ludicrous lie to call this milquetoast regressive in a Democratic suit a liberal, let alone a socialist. And we’ve only just begun with Bad Barry, folks. After he gets his ass royally kicked in November, Obama will lurch even further to the right. But that will engender even greater scorn from the sickos living over there under their slime-infested rocks, as well as endless congressional investigations of bogus administration scandals, likely including an impeachment. Or did you miss the 1990s entirely, Barack?

But that’s only the start of it. Because Obama was too dumb to recognize that everything hinged on reviving the economy (did you miss the last century, too, Bro?), and because he was too cowardly to move boldly on anything whatsoever that he did, he has also lost ordinary, centrist, independent voters who think both parties are generally worthless but will vote for anyone who can actually produce solutions. It’s possible that you can bring those people back, but it ain’t likely. The first rule of politics is that people vote their pocketbooks. Thus, any prayer at winning again would require an economic recovery. But that isn’t gonna happen, in part because Half O’Bama half-assed the stimulus bill, partly because he was seeking bipartisan support which – wait for it now – never came, despite the compromises which reduced the size of the stimulus and turned one-third of it into ineffective tax cuts that the one-tune-jukebox Neanderthals demanded. It’s also not gonna happen because this downturn is less a one-off event than it is the culmination (we grimly hope – it could get worse yet) of a thirty year grand national downsizing project, and because it is less an economic recession than it is a wholesale and permanent restructuring. No economist I’ve heard of sees any shred of economic recovery anywhere on the horizon throughout all of 2011, and neither do I. In fact, there are good reasons to think it gets worse from here.

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Harry Belafonte

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