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It’s a good question, but it’s also one where you will want to be very careful in just how you answer it.
Just as his administration has done several times before the Obama administration will soon be urging you to call your political representatives in support of his agenda.
And the Obama administration will ask you to repeat a carefully-phrased and innocuously generic statement to the operators that take your calls.
And if you just docilely recite whatever it is you’re told, whether it’s something like “I support the Obama tax plan!” or perhaps something like “Please vote for House Bill BR-549“ then you might be very surprised later on to learn that not only were you supporting the “end of the tax cuts on people earning over $250,000″…
…. but you will also be on the record as supporting Obama’s cutting and crippling of the social safety net, including Social Security and Medicare, all so that our wise and benevolent elites can move in and finish them off at their leisure.
The details will vary but this tactic worked well for the Obama administration before and they will certainly use it again.
So, given the Obama administration’s well-documented history in this regard, it would seem to be wise for any individual or group to temper any expression of support for any Obama fiscal policy by insisting on a simple addendum such as “And no cuts to SS or Medicare!”
Of course such addenda and codicils will have to be constantly updated and amended as the administration tries to dance around them…
… and such insistence might not be too well received by the “progressive groups” that will have already lined up their memberships in the veal pen for the slaughter.
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So where is the Veal Pen roll of honor?
Yum Yum, Entitlement Cuts, Austerity for us and Largesse for The Military Industrial Complex and Security State Apparatus. That’s some progressive good eatin’.
Thank You, Sir. May I have another?
I’d have to see the text of anything before I choose to support or oppose it. Since I can’t find the text of the bill you’re referring too using a cursory google search, I have to conclude that your question is premature. Typing in “BR-549″ as you have listed it in your post takes me to a lot of unrelated crap, even if I add “House Bill” or “House Resolution”. If I add “HR” to it, I get this:
A resolution to study the possibility of regulating reciprocating engined aircraft… Not what you suggest it is. The link you provided to the Sam Stein piece makes no mention of the bill you cite or any bill for that matter, nor is there a link to the text of any bill. Now maybe saying “BR-549″ was just an example you’re using but if that’s the case, it wasn’t made clear. I’m not going to commit to anything without more information. I’m neither going to support or oppose anything simply because of what you think it may or may not contain. I guess the short answer is that if I’d have to read the bill first. You’re asking people to commit to a position based on speculation and that ain’t happening.
Dive? That’s where most of the good poetry and some great novels of the last 60 years were written. Dive bars are very popular haunts for all types of progressive/ populist thought. Anarchists use them, too. Blue collars may be cleaner today and more presentable to the 1%ers but the Obama Adm. will have misread his mandate on the downside if he caves to any of the Republican talking points. Lemmings go over cliffs every year but that’s not who elected him this time. Voters had 4 yrs to think about him. His domestic policies are only so-so now but he appears to most as, at least, fair. If he loses that edge he’s toast for the ham and eggers who enjoy dive bar cuisine.
Democrats are not progressives, they right centrists continuously moving right. Any progressives’ who play games with Democrtats are no longer progressives, if they ever were.
Michael Moore, long considered a progressive, is now vainly begging rightwing Democrats to change their spots.
1)DRIVE THE RICH RIGHT OFF THEIR FISCAL CLIFF says MM, but Obama won’t do that. He’s in favor of austerity and repeatedly promised put Social Security and Medicare on the Table. That’s what the ruling class pays him to do. NY Times 07 07 2011 “The president’s renewed efforts follow what knowledgeable officials said was an overture from Mr. Boehner, who met secretly with Mr. Obama last weekend, to consider as much as $1 trillion in unspecified new revenues as part of an overhaul of tax laws in exchange for an agreement that made substantial spending cuts, including in such social programs as Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security — programs that had been off the table. The intensifying negotiations between the president and the speaker have Congressional Democrats growing anxious, worried they will be asked to accept a deal that is too heavily tilted toward Republican efforts and produces too little new revenue relative to the magnitude of the cuts.”
2. END ALL THE WARS NOW. Obama won’t do that either. The maintenance of the Military Industrial Complex and the empire building requirements of big business won’t allow him to. They own him and he has no regard – none at all – for the thousands of GIS whose lives are taken or wasted by his racist wars. Obama is a mass murderer. Instead of asking him to end wars we should be organizing to compel the world court to convene an International War Crimes Tribunal to investigate Obama, the Clinton’s, the Bushes, their cabinets and their Chiefs of Staff.
3. END THE DRUG WAR. Not a chance – Obama has no regard for people of color. http://www.blackagendareport.c…
4. DECLARE A MORATORIUM ON HOME FORECLOSURES AND EVICTIONS. Obama favors home foreclosures and evictions and his actions prove it. … Republicans and Democrats, like Romney and Obama are of one mind on many more things than they disagree about. From war … money for banksters and speculators but no moratorium on foreclosures and no criminal investigations of mortgage and securities fraud. … Bruce A. Dixon – Black Agenda Report 08 29 2012
5. GET MONEY OUT OF POLITICS. With all due respect to M. Moore, this is just silly. Political prostitutes are in politics to get rich and not for any other reason. They have no principles.
6. EXPAND OBAMACARE. We need socialized medicine.
7. RESTORE GLASS-STEAGALL Wrong. The cure for predatory capitalism is to criminalize it, requiring life without parole for managers and owners who engage in predatory practices or cause the layoff of workers. Confiscate their wealth and place their businesses in the hands of workers and consumers to own and democratically run.
No half measures. Socialism is what we need.
8. REDUCE STUDENT LOAN DEBT. Not gonna happen.
9. FREE BRADLEY MANNING. Obama and Clinton are a pair or racist mad dog warmongers who want to kill Bradley, not free him.
10. ASK US TO DO SOMETHING. Ask us to take our lives and destinies on our own hands and build workers parties, a workers state and socialism.
AlterNet 11 19 2012
Well, yes, that’s the point of my post.
FDL regulars know the drill by now but the bulk of the public who have responded to such “calls to action” from the Obama administration in the past were very unaware of what all else they’d be giving their support too.
My apologies, I’m afraid my humor both dates and geolocates me :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_Samples
I will edit the post a bit.
… you can’t wish a guy into the cornfield if he ain’t quite ever left it in the first place…
As of now the list of “progressive leaning” groups signed up for Obama under one umbrella group or another is still being fattened up at this stage… groups are being lured in with noble phrases and stuffed with good intentions. A definitive list will have to wait until closer to game time.
But a good advance tell could be to see how any particular group feels about insisting on adding the “No cuts to SSMM” demand to whatever spiel the umbrella groups are spinning for Obama.
Got it. Thanks for the clarification.
And yep! I agree. Anybody willing to support whatever Obama wants sight unseen is nothing more than a partisan hack. Period.
“hack”? to zapKITTY struck my early morning funny bone…hack hack horking up a hairball….
Bang – actually, make that SLAM – on, Bill. Progressives are NOT Democrats, and this Progressive takes any inference that we are as an insult.
When Ronald Reagan demonized “the L word” (Liberal), Democrats scrambled to find a replacement and purloined “progressive.” But there is a huge difference between their sold-out brand of progressivism – spelled with a small “p,” which does NOT march on Washington, does NOT demand peace, does NOT support personal freedoms, does NOT demand guaranteed health care, free education through college, or an end to state-sponsored torture, and does NOT support workers – and ACTUAL, capital-p Progressivism.
Real Progressivism makes terms like “conservative” and “liberal” and and “right” and “left” obsolete, because real Progressivism UNITES people of EVERY political strips around basic issues of right and wrong. Torture is WRONG. Not taking care of those less fortunate is WRONG. Not providing everyone equal access to a high-quality, free education is WRONG. Allowing companies to run roughshod over workers and to steamroll the environment is WRONG. And there NOTHING more WRONG than war. Ever.
“…as the administration tries to dance around them…”
Note that Obama and the other cutters have already been talking about “strengthening” Social Security.
Make no mistake, this is a well chosen euphamism for “cut‘.
STRENGTHEN BY 1,000 CUTS.
this would make a good post. After the dismal failure of all professed to progressives to support a real progressive named Jill Stein it is time to start rubbin their noses in the delusions they have spread in the American public. That means progressives that openly backed Obama as a lesser evil and progressives that took a dive like occupy wallstreet.
Thanks. I think the term socialist will replace progressive as the radicalization heats up.
This is the picture I post at Joe My God, Alternet and other blogs where liberals still dare to say that Obama and the Democrats are any better at all than Republicans: http://www.theliberaloc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/feet-to-the-fire.jpg
Democrats are just Republicans in drag.
The problem with “progressive” is that we are not progressing toward anything at present, at least not in a political sense.