“Second, the more interesting question is not this stuff, which is ho-hum. Rather, what kind of liberal is he? Obama is really trying to carve a new niche, opposed to both McCain’s neoliberalism and Clinton’s old corporate liberalism. It’s more market-centered, more Green, more hightech, more alternative energies–a ‘high road’ Green Jobs industrial policy capitalism, but still a capitalism in the multipolar globalist camp, as oppsed to unipolar hegemonists.”

Obama has said he will continue the war in Afghanistan, regardless of the opinion of anyone else in the world.

“Third, there’s another interesting question ignored here. Socialism is not a mass demand today, so where should the left stand that goes beyond a more militant version of the old liberal redistributionism? What left pole of deep structural reform can we put out that can both press Obama and unity a progressive majority?”

The left isn’t interested in “pressing” Obama at all - in the same sense as the left isn’t interested in “pressing” Dahmer. Obama needs to be taken down - the interests that back him (corporate, multinational) need to be thrown out of power. Which of course means a revolution.

In terms of the center-right, who support Obama - the people known as progressives, absolutely, they are all about redistribution, all about improved health care and government services, they desire a 2nd New Deal. From the perspective of the center-right, these kind of pressures need to be brought to bear. Of course by now it’s too late.

Deep structural reform is impossible - only a revolution can achieve that. The Obama years will feature little change - still massive military expenditures - still deep domestic decay, still increased poverty. It could be far worse depending on what happens with America’s role in the global economy.

What frustrates me about progressives is that they speak the term “2nd New Deal” as if it can happen. America only became a superpower after World War II. Prior to then America’s elite competed against other elites around the globe for markets and resources. The world today is completely different. The global elite is largely unified under multinational capitalism. Markets are interpenetrated, every elite shares the fate of every other, which is why elites around the world are panicked about the outcome of this economic crisis despite it being centered in US financial institutions.

The point of the first New Deal was not just to alleviate revolutionary power in the United States but to *bolster* poor Americans, since those Americans (like any good slave) were valuable in the perpetual war of the American elite against other elites.

Now the slavemasters have abandoned the slaves. There will not be a 2nd New Deal under the current global economic system because what used to be a slave is now totally expendable. There is simply no point in multinational capital expending resources to bolster the American populace, since that populace is no longer worth much of anything, since slaves can be had the world over. Slaves in Asia and Africa are far cheaper than American slaves.

American wealth will continue to be siphoned away to the multinationals, whether through “Green Jobs” or whatever other term is in vogue, so long as the global economic system is structured as it is.

One very useful thing Americans can do short of all-out revolution is to demand wage increases - NOT in America but for those impoverished slaves that multinationals call the “good slaves”. We need a universal “living wage” - once we have that there will be no such thing as a “good slave” - we will all be equal slaves.

It may be just a coincidence but calling real criticism “gotcha” is exactly what McCain did when the press pointed out to him one of Palin’s contradictions.

I do think it’s impossible to not in some way become these people when you adopt an ends justifies the means policy in endorsing them

JFK was not a progressive (in fact I never heard reference to him as a progressive). He was a hardliner hawk, cold warrior, that made Nixon look like a liberal.

There was a powerful labor, socialist and progressive movement in the US during the early part of the 20th Century; hence the major parties picked up on it. Woodrow Wilson killed the left movement in America when it was strongest. Out of his mouth came the word progressive; then he essentially issued martial law against the socialist, progressive and labor movement in the run up to WWI.

So, it is clear who the real progressives have been in American history and who have used whatever term would get them elected.

In other words, McCain calling Obama a socialist doesn’t mean Obama is a “socialist”.

With all due respect you’re way overthinking Obama’s “newness” like so many “progressives for Obama” rationalists.

The reason why I say you’re overthinking it is because he’s pretty much fashioned himself as a “new” Clinton. His advisors are all from the Clinton administration. There’s really nothing you’ve mentioned that couldn’t have been said of Clinton (to say he was a corporatist and “market centered, is needlessly mincing words). Obama, as far as green, the Green Party has been Green for decades.

Nader is a consistant progressive, not a lackluster color-me whatever, like Obama. Nader was Green before Obama could vote.

Every time I read things like “progressives for Obama” I think why not the “KKK for Obama” or “Born Again’s for Obama” or “Jesus Freaks for Obama” or “Flatearthers for Obama”.

Call yourselves whatever you will. There are two genuine progressives in this race - Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader.

How’s this “thoughtful independent progressives for Nader”? Nice sound to it.

Second, the more interesting question is not this stuff, which is ho-hum. Rather, what kind of liberal is he? Obama is really trying to carve a new niche, opposed to both McCain’s neoliberalism and Clinton’s old corporate liberalism. It’s more market-centered, more Green, more hightech, more alternative energies–a ‘high road’ Green Jobs industrial policy capitalism, but still a capitalism in the multipolar globalist camp, as oppsed to unipolar hegemonists.

Third, there’s another interesting question ignored here. Socialism is not a mass demand today, so where should the left stand that goes beyond a more militant version of the old liberal redistributionism? What left pole of deep structural reform can we put out that can both press Obama and unity a progressive majority?

I know these are tougher for many on the left than these little ‘gotcha’ exposes, but it’s what we really need to be talking about.

“It was progressives themselves who undermined their own movement. Obama is only filling the void that progressives created. Progressives undermined their best opportunity to build up the antiwar movement four years ago and the Green Party undermined themselves. It would be more useful if Progressive take the time to examine their own flaws rather than continueously wallow in victimization by the Democrats.”

All progressives want is a “kinder, gentler” Imperialism. They will never form a helpful movement for social justice. For the progressives it’s “talk, then bomb” instead of “bomb, then bomb some more”. Woodrow Wilson was a progressive. FDR was a progressive. JFK was a progressive. Carter is a progressive. It doesn’t matter when these people come to power because they don’t want to change the underlying reality of what a capitalist imperial power is.

The right owns America, and progressives are fully part of that right (capitalists). The left in America is virtually invisible. The left exists as individuals, unorganized, powerless, with zero media presence, which is *necessary* so long as most Americans want Imperialism to continue, and they most certainly do. All imperialists are on the right.

Progressives largely are non-impoverished Americans (usually middle class) who are pissed off at the reaming they’ve received at the hands of the Bush Adminstration. What they mostly want is a bigger piece of the imperial pie for themselves to devour. “Universal health care”, “higher taxes on the rich”, “welfare reform”, “reduced income disparity”, “environmental protection” (not betterment, just “protection”).

Universal health care is particularly educational. They might want to look up the term “universal” in the dictionary. What they actually want is definitely not universal health care, but merely free health care for all AMERICANS. Last time I checked the Rio Grande doesn’t mark the border of the universe.

Worrying that the center-right (progressives) is misunderstanding Obama (neoliberal, soft-neocon) is a real waste of time. That’s according to probably 5 billion of the world’s people, at least. But of course Americans think their own belief trumps that.

But let’s give you the benefit of the doubt “Jack” and assume you are in fact a like minded DB believer that “progressives” not Obama AND, as I said the Dem Party, have not undermined what little there is of a progressive movement.

You “Jack”/DB are as wrong now has you’ve been over the last 6 months or so when you started posting this same drivel.

First, you need to understand what a movement is and how it is sustained. Movements going head to head with the power-elite - such as the Obama/Dem/Media/Transnation Corporations - are running up against odds which are nearly insurmountable from the get-go.

Power structures, because they hold the power, can leverage and undermine, and regularly do, all kinds of grass-roots movements. For instance, they call their campaign a bottom-up grass-roots campaign pulling in young progressive minded citizens under their “tent”; they feign an anti-war position of convenience for starters. WalMart will “green-wash” saying they’re going green and put solar panels on their roofs while they continue to step on the high octane scouring the world for cheap labor and goods.

Co-opting is one thing - NOT delivering, or even planning to deliver, is something else.

Main Stream Media that gives a candidate non-stop coverage and others NO coverage at all, while never showing what went on outside of each of the Conventions and the last debate are more than complicit.

How can you have a progressive movement Deadbeat, I mean “Jack”, if no one is informed of it happening. When the uber-right candidate is calling Obama a left wing commie for gawds sake!!

I stick by exactly what I posted. The flaw is in your eyes which seems determined to condemn a movement which can barely get traction for the fact that there is a military industrial corporate complex that owns nearly all the worlds resources, backed by the worst kind of gangster capitalists, bolstered by a duopoly, and providing the public with a 24/7 dose of fascist propaganda.

The US is an unraveling empire. The power elite will do ANYTHING to keep it’s power. We’ve seen the use of the media in Latin America to squash dissidents at every turn.

Are you so naive “Jack” that you think that that is not what is going on here?

Perfectly stated. It is not so much what Obama is - a corporate bought pol. It is that he (and the Dem Party) co-opt and undermine what little there is of a progressive movement in the US.

The problem with the aforementioned comment is that it wasn’t Obama who undermined the progressive movement. It was progressives themselves who undermined their own movement. Obama is only filling the void that progressives created. Progressives undermined their best opportunity to build up the antiwar movement four years ago and the Green Party undermined themselves. It would be more useful if Progressive take the time to examine their own flaws rather than continueously wallow in victimization by the Democrats.

I think you’re mistaking what I’m saying. Perhaps I should just say I agree with Ron Horn and leave it at that.

Brian Koontz: I couldn’t agree with you more.

For example, Naomi Klein, hailed as a “hero of the left”, isn’t even on the left. Interviewed by Tony Benn, she stated that she is a “Keynesian Capitalist”. Therefore she fits into the mold of New Deal Capitalism, a staunch supporter of FDR, and is on the *Right* (center-right) of the political spectrum.

Noam Chomsky, though a friend to the left on many issues, hailed the post-WWII years in America as the golden years for democracy. Nevermind that America has been *officially* an imperial power since 1898, and unofficially long before that, beginning with the genocide of the indigenous, all of which show a complete lack of democracy. For white landowning males, however, I’m sure the post-WWII years were a golden age.

So it doesn’t surprise me at all that the “left” in America largely supports Obama, given who our “heroes” are. The “left” in America doesn’t want revolution, it doesn’t want substantial change, at most it wants “Keynesian Capitalism”, and it sees Obama as a step in that direction.

The left, as a political position, *begins* with socialism and extends through anarchism, environmentalism (true environmentalism, not just the lesser evil of reduced industrialism), and primitivism. Much like various flavors of the right, those positions are all aligned and all need to be fighting together against the right.

What’s going on here is that the American populace is so far to the right that anyone even center-right (such as Klein) appears to be some kind of extreme leftist. We are so steeped in free market nonsense, neoconservative insanity, and industrial and capitalistic orgasms, that we have become blinded to reality and to political possibilities.

That’s what happens when you live in the HEART of the global empire. Every imperial society in history is deluded, and Americans perhaps the most so.

I constantly hear noise about the “lesser of two evils” as the reason why workers should support the DP, which is precisely why workers have no political force or voice of their own, or even an independent working class reformist party. Leftists get to “participate” in politics by joining in coalitions within the DP, Social Democrats of America, Democratic Socialist Party, Rainbow/PUSH and of course the CPUSA who loves the Democratic Party more than most democratic party voters do. Their editorials in Political Affairs magazine literally proclaim their “love” of Obama.

One question should be asked is why do we even fall for this “progressive” stuff? Do people know the origins of “progressivism” and how unabashedly conservative it was? Do they know the Bob Lafollette ran the PP as his own personal family business and that his son dissolved it into the Republican Party? Or do we speak of the term “progressive” in the old-line Stalinist sense of a union of progressive forces? The original progressives were all war supporters, they supported every war the country was in from the birth of their party to its death. In that sense, at least, Obama is a “progressive”.

Perfectly stated. It is not so much what Obama is - a corporate bought pol. It is that he (and the Dem Party) co-opt and undermine what little there is of a progressive movement in the US.

As some have said, we are so weaned on the two party system, it’s as if our collective worldview cannot concede another option. So, we are left with lies and deceits that make this campaign even more frustrating than the Gore/Bush one where at least many progressives saw Nader as a real option.

The problem now is that this is not a time for business as usual. We are in a state which will take a complete counterculture, political and economic hard turn. The system is incapable of such a correction. The system (and its establishment candidates) is the problem.

There are American thinkers and writers who are totally against what Obama supports, and yet they, too, are supporting him.

The pathology is that deep.