I see a repeat of that election then 32

Despite the Great Depression of the 1930s, capitalism really was a rapidly growing system at that time. The Depression was largely a consequence of an antiquated attachment to the gold standard. But real production still had enormous growth potential.

The opposite is the case today. Our world is filled up with massive unused or underused productive capacity, what Karl Marx once called “overproduction.” In this context real profit in the classical sense has been harded to come by because it’s not just a question of sitting down to develop some new device for satisfying an unaddressed human need. We actually have so many tools for addressing human needs that they are not being put to use because no one sees a profit in it.

It’s this kind of economy which creates an environment where business increasingly turns to Reaganite tax cuts, special Halliburton contracts through the back door, and the slashing of jobs and wages, in order to make up for the decline in the rate of profit. Such an environment is not going to allow for an FDR who enacts a few social reforms.

The Rockefellers and other members of the upper class were once able to allow for taxation and public spending on general welfare because the profits of growing business were rising at such a pace that the extra costs of keeping workers content could be factored in as part of a well-run business. That does not apply today and there’s no point in using the Roosevelt era as a reference point today.

Nice Article! Now if I could only figger out how to be organized enough to write whole articles:)

However, re normy: yes he does write very well about Media in general, pointing out what McChesney & everybody has been pointing out for some time now. However to catch suckers you need bait, and the Media writing is Solomon’s gimmick.

Other fashionable Gimmicks nowadays, constructed out of real issues, but handled in a way that they become Red Herrings, are SOA, Timor, even Haiti is used that way by Vatican-loyal Misleaders such as Duane Campbell of DSA.

Darfur we hear about, but who talks about what Templesman/Gertner & their Israeli pals are doing in PR of Congo & neighboring chunks of Colonia? Others talk about the whales, climate change, 911, peak oil, Universal Healthcare — but few want to talk about Power. Which is one reason I like Cynthia: she calls it “Power with a Capital P”.

Within the present legal/constitutional setup, there are a limited number of ways the dis-empowered can gain access to a portion of real power:

a group of workers can go on strike, withhold their labor.

You can do CD or otherwise disrupt the process of Production/Distribution/Accumulation by putting your body or burning tires in the way.

There’s the Embarrassment factor; sometimes elected officials will grant a concession, a minor reform just for the sake of Appearances, to preserve the legitimacy of the System? In other words bestow a Retail Reform in order to continue screwing you wholesale. This worked better while the USSR still existed, been largely ineffective since.

Or you can seek power via the Electoral System. Which is an All Day Sucker, guaranteed to take Decades not Years to accomplish anything much. But any gains won via strikes/CD etc will be ephemeral, fleeting, revoked soons you look the other way.

The electoral strategy envisioned by the Reconstruction Movement looks to use the election cycle & knowledge of that nut/bolt System to mobilize a Mass Movement based fundamentally on people who are not now in the habit of voting, period; most taking the position “Don’t Vote! It only encourages them!”.

Those are the people we have to reach and to mobilize.

The kind of people who now make up what is called “the voting public”, including the so-called “progressive voters”, bulk of the Greens, Nader supporters, 911 TRuth nuts, etc, far as I’m concerned aren’t worth the powder to blow themselves to Idaho. Check that, I meant Killeen TX:)

Thanks for your letter, (deleted)! I’m flattered you find me worth arguing with! I’m kidding, you weren’t arguing, just Expanding the Dialogue:) Taking what 2nd City usta call the “yes, and…” adjustment:)

But later for Solomon: if you want to read about the Media, you can read McChesney, or better yet Jeff’ (Blankfort)s list of which Jews control which Outlets…

THanks again,
Dan

PS, to put this in context you may want to chk out my yesterday comment on Dissident Voice article by one Norman Solomon…
—– Original Message —–

On your first post, yes it’s true that PA had a “closed” primary, as do most states. But most states permit changes in registration until about 30 days before an election and this apparently happened in PA where 10% of Democratic primary voters were recently re-registered. I did the “math” on PA as a comment on today’s Common Dreams article by John Nichols in which he said that Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos” did not have an effect on PA results. Au contrair, there were enough “Limbaugh” voters for Clinton in PA to take her from the 5% margin she might have gotten from “real” Democrats to the nearly 10% that was defined as the “big” win that she needed to continue. So Chaos did “work” in PA and may work in IN and NC, unless Republican operatives decide by then to let the Dems choose their own poison to run against McCain in November.

I was completely laughing at the absurdity of this article when I first read it on other sites. You see, I actually like history and like to read. So, when I first started to see some of the Obama - FDR comparisions awhile back, I used Google to go find the text of some FDR speeches and started reading.

http://newdeal.feri.org/speeches/1932b.htm

On July 2, 1932, FDR made a speech to the Democratic National Convention that is very, very famous historically. For two reasons. One is that it was the first time a nominee gave an acceptance speech to a convention. They do it all the time nowadays, but this was the first time it occurred.

The other was because that was the speech that proposed ‘The New Deal’. If you read the speech, and you know anything about history, it is all very familiar. He is laying out the details of what we know now of as the New Deal. He wasn’t running as a candidate of little difference from Pres. Hoover. FDR clearly spelled out the New Deal months before the election and ran on it.

If you read this speech, its incredibly obvious that it is very different from a typical Obama speech. Obama chants ‘hope’ and ‘change’ all the time. Obama does the ‘I feel your pain’ bit that Bill Clinton did so well. But, what you’ll never see in an Obama speech is proposed solutions. He might well act like he understands the pain of small town people who’ve had their lives wrecked by Wall St investors who yanked all the jobs out of town and sent them to first Mexico and now China. But he never proposes solutions to the problem.

Meanwhile, early in this FDR speech, you see this line … “And you can accept my pledge that I will leave no doubt or ambiguity on where I stand on any question of moment in this campaign.”

And, later on, you find paragraphs like this “Rediscounting of farm mortgages under salutary restrictions must be expanded and should, in the future, be conditioned on the reduction of interest rates. Amortization payments, maturities should likewise in this crisis be extended before rediscount is permitted where the mortgagor is sorely pressed. That, my friends, is another example of practical, immediate relief: Action.”

That’s not vague Obama-words. That’s a clear call for an action he promises to take if elected President. The speech is full of these.

The key point is that FDR is clearly laying out in July before the 1932 election exactly what he intends to do if elected. He’s presenting the New Deal to the country then, and he campaigned on it.

While I normally like Mr. Soloman, to me in this case he’s creating a fictional history. FDR was clearly campaigning on the New Deal. This is how he was able to accomplish the famous ‘Hundred Days’ when he took office. He’d clearly told the country what he intended to do, and the voters gave him a clear mandate to go do it.

I’ve reached the opinion that the first goal of those of us to the left of the Democrats should be the destruction of the Democratic Party. We must recognize them as our enemy and treat the as such.

The interesting thing to me is that the destruction of the Democratic Party seems to be something we could accomplish. We have the power to destroy and defeat their campaigns. We might not be able to win ourselves, but in many cases we could indeed be sure of causing Democratic defeats.

The Democratic Party must win to survive. If the current party were to be placed in a position where their candidates found it impossible to win, the current structure of that party would collapse. This is because of two reasons. The politicians in that party crave power. They don’t seem to have any moral principles or issues that they support, they just want power and will say what they want to get it. If the party always lost, it would no longer be seen as a path to power for these politicians. Also, its funded by interests who want access to power. If the party always lost, its funding sources would dry up. Who wants to bribe the loser of an election?

Thus, I feel we could indeed remove this obstacle to change by a campaign over several election cycles of deliberately trying to defeat as many Democrats as we can. The best part of this strategy is that at the same time we get to campaign and support candidates that really do support our views. Its win-win to us.

If this sounds like ass kissing- then how about, what you got, punk?!

Thanks Jerry, but that’s not what I’m trying to evoke. Few things drive me up the wall more than Move On, PDA, et al. What I’m simply saying is: too often, people shoot from the hip, assume the worst of writers with a different view, and go rabid with their comments — “you must be a phony dissident/colluding Democrap/turncoat/add-your-favorite-ad-hominem if you post an article that says anything remotely positive about a Democrat, blah blah blah” — before thinking things through and writing something actually worth bothering to read. If you’re first instinct is to get in a tizzy over something you disagree with and go on a writing rampage, you really do need to calm down and unclench the sphincter before checking in with the keyboard. If this is how we engage others, then it’s no wonder why the Left is in such a shabby state and most people find progressives and their ideas irrelevant if not obnoxious.

Substantive discourse is all but dead in America. All the caterwauling, simple-minded boors on conservative radio and TV that we frequently lambaste are equally met in all their glorious infantilism by far too many leftists, liberals, progressives, radicals, etc. It’s disheartening, really.

On a personal note, I consider the Democrats and liberals to be a worse menace to this country and world than Republicans for many reasons I won’t go into here. Nevertheless, many leftists and progressives who’ve done a lot of important and admirable work, both in action and with the pen, will throw their support — to varying degrees — behind the Democratic presidential candidate, and this publication, despite the biases of the editors, will present the varying sides on the electoral question as best we can in the interest of — hopefully — stimulating a vigorous, substantive and mature discussion.

Maybe I’m too much the optimist . . .

As for the straightness of my “facts,” if you’re referring to the “Limbaugh effect” in PA, I’m concerned myself about that. See the John Nichols post on Common Dreams this morning that there was no such effect, so I guess he agrees with you if I know just what you are saying. It is very true, I think, that many Repubs crossed over to vote for Obama in TX as well as PA, but I think for reasons other than a “dirty trick” effort to keep Clinton in the race, since their voting for Obama would tend to produce an earlier closure on the race. My sense is that, rather, the Obama crossers in both states really did like him and really might vote for him in November, since they are probably mostly white males many of whom. as Glen Ford noted, are closet racists eager to show their non-prejudice by voting for a “safe” black: one who doesn’t talk like Jeremiah Wright. The Operation Chaos launched by Limbaugh was for an entirely different purpose: to have Republicans vote for Clinton in order to prolong the democratic primary process to McCain’s advantage; these mischieve-makers would revert back to their Republican sympathies to vote for McCain in November. Nichols thinks that the “facts” don’t support this because, he says, exit polls showed that about as many Republican cross-overs voted for Obama as for Clinton. But let’s look at that and do a bit of quick math. There were “roughly” 2.3 million votes cast, and Clinton’s margin of victory was roughly 215,000. Most estimates I’ve seen indicate that about 1 in 10 voters were those who had re-registered as Democrats for the purpose of the election; making that maybe 230,000 cross-over votes. If even half these voted for Clinton, as exit polls seemed to indicate, she got 165,000 votes that she would not have gotten without the “Chaos” effect: not enough to eras her 215,000 plurality but easily enough to drastically alter the “double digit” victory which was being described on both sides as the benchmark level of her win she would need to be able to continue the race. So…while I’m perfectly winning to eat crow if the ideas I have “thrown around” are wrong, I’m not quite ready to sit down to that delicious meal; maybe tomorrow when we get some more facts. Meantime I’d like to see some data on registrations (which have already closed) in Indiana and North Carolina to see whether more Republican dirty election tricks are in the offing here. Let me say, before other posters jump on me as an Obama apologist, I’m an equal opportunity opponent of both these candidates; but I’m also an implacable detester of one party manipulating the results of the other party’s elections. I’m also willing to sustain the “Jeremiah” (pardon the expression) role I assumed with the first article, warning that a Limbaugh effect would be occurring in PA, of warning that we may get a similar effect in the May 6 primaries; unless the Repubs will have decided by then that it’s time to pull the plug on their pseudo-support for Clinton and let the now-bloodied Obama proceed to the nomination. Convoluted conspiracy? Well look at the history of Republican dirty tricks; like those phone calls in NH in 2002.

Jerry D. Rose, did I catch you on NPR this morning? You sound just like their known-nothing guests. You just float whatever hunch you have even when you have nothing.

Obama’s vote in Texas came from Republicans crossing over. Most likely true in Penn as well. So why don’t you stop repeating (in the case of Texas) disproven lies.

For those who missed it, here (in Texas), it’s now a big issue because a significant number of Obama voters didn’t vote in any other race.

Jerry, get your facts right.

Someone said Solomon didn’t belong here. Amen to that.

It’s a primary. The current administration is incredibly unpopular. Poll after poll suggest that a clear majority of Americans are starving for a truly progressive leader. There’s no need to “play the game.”

What we need is for Obama and/or Clinton to stand up to the Corporatocracy. Since it’s clear that both are sellouts, I have no choice but to vote for someone I can actually respect…even if she (McKinney) can’t win.

Rush’s listeners are not activity oriented - it’s all hot air.

I believe it is Obama the Republicans want McCain to run against. Hillary is one of them so they cannot unearth too much on her and Bill; hence more voters will hold their nose and vote Hillary over McCain.

But ! Obama is full of more shit than a Xmas turkey and they’ll serve him up to where even his biggest fans won’t vote Barack.