administration, all Republicans, many Dem's and mainstream media,
here are two of the most impassioned, deepest critiques; to be saved,
hidden if necessary, until the Soma wears off. Painful reality may awaken
Americans.
Ed
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2010/12/13-1
Video...
http://act.commondreams.org/go/3554?akid=303.39826.UlfHxh&t=18
Published on Monday, December 13, 2010 by Democracy Now!
Bernie Sanders Denounces Obama-GOP Tax Cut in 8.5-Hour Senate Speech, Says
US Becoming "Banana Republic"
The U.S. Senate is holding a key test vote today on President Obama's
controversial legislation that would extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the
wealthiest Americans. The bill caused an uproar when it was announced last
week, but no one voiced more powerful opposition than Senator Bernie Sanders
(I-VT). He took to the floor of the Senate at 10:24 a.m. on Friday morning
to denounce the tax-cut plan. He did not yield the floor back until 6:59
p.m., more than eight-and-a-half hours later.
Click of for highlights of his address:
http://act.commondreams.org/go/3554?akid=303.39826.UlfHxh&t=18
***
From: Larry Gross, Sara D. Roos, Terry Goodman, and now others.
Thank you all.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40557029/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann/
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann eviscerates Obama, Julian Assange: The Truth Will
Always Win
Olbermann: Obama turned his back on his base - msnbc tv - Countdown with
Keith Olbermann
Finally tonight as promised, a Special Comment on the tax compromise.
To paraphrase Churchill, again, let me begin by saying the most unpopular
and most unwelcome thing: "that we have sustained a defeat without a war,
the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road. We should
know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole
equilibrium of American politics and policy have been deranged, and that the
terrible words have for the time being, been pronounced against this
Administration: 'thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting'."
In exchange for selling out a principle campaign pledge, and the people to
whom and for whom it was made. In exchange for betraying the truth that the
idle and corporate rich of this country have gotten unprecedented and wholly
indefensible tax cuts for a decade. In exchange for giving the idle and
corporate rich of this country two more years in which to accumulate still
more, and more vast piles of personal wealth with which they can buy and
sell everybody else.
In exchange for extending what he spent the weeks before the mid-terms
calling "tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires" to people who have
proven, without a scintilla of doubt, without even a fig leaf of phony
effort to make it look like they would do otherwise, that they will keep the
money for themselves.
In exchange for injecting new vigor into the infantile, moronic,
disproved-for-a-decade three-card monte game of an economic theory purveyed
by these treacherous and ultimately traitorous Republicans, that tax cuts
for the rich will somehow lead to job creation even though if that had ever
been true in the slightest the economy would not be where it is today.
In exchange for giving tax cuts for the rich which the nation cannot afford,
and extending their vintage through the next election and thus promising at
best a reenactment of this whole sorry, amoral, degrading spectacle in the
winter of 2012 and at worst a rubber-stamp from a wholly Republican House
and Senate and even White House.
In exchange for this searing and transcendent capitulation, the President
got just thirteen months of extended benefits for those unemployed less than
100 weeks. And he got nothing absolutely nothing for those unemployed for
longer - the 99ers.
This the Administration is celebrating - taking the victims of Republican
Economic Policy, taking the living breathing proof that the Bush Tax Cuts
for the rich do not create jobs, and putting economic bullseyes on their
backs as of next December.
On the one hand- Unaffordable Tax breaks for the beneficiariesof the Bush
tax cuts, made ever more permanent as they threaten to suck four trillion
dollars out of government revenues in the next decade.
On the other hand: An insufficient dead-end unemployment solution for
Americans who would actually work for a living, made ever more temporary.
And we are hearing nothing about those 99ers. Even though the numbers of
them will balloon from two million to four million or more by next December,
even with this deal. Even though just last Thursday, the President's own
Council of Economic Advisers reiterated the reality that the easiest way to
create jobs and keep jobs is to make sure that the unemployed continue to
have money to spend.
The unemployed - unlike the rich whom this President has just bowed to are,
in fact, the job creators. They do not have investment portfolios to
expand. They do not have vast savings into which to stuff the government
checks. They have to spend the money. And the Council reported last week
that when someone becomes a 99er his or her household loses at least a third
of its income.
And where the 99er was the sole breadwinner - four households out of ten -
they lose 9/10ths of their income.
The economy is surprisingly simple. If business and the rich won't spend,
and the middle class can't spend, the only factor left to keep pushing money
into the insatiable maw of capitalism is the government.
So, should the government give the money to the rich who keep it, or the not
rich, who spend it? Apparently this President does not know the answer to
that question. Even though he has his own Council of Economic Advisers.
Mr. President, for these meager crumbs, you have given up costly, insulting,
divisive, destructive tax cuts for the rich and you have given in to
Republican blackmail which will be followed by more Republican blackmail. Of
course, it's not just tax cuts for the rich that you've given up.
There is also your new temporary payroll tax holiday, establishing a
precedent that the way money is pumped into Social Security should be
negotiated and traded off and making it just that much easier to gut Social
Security later.
And, oh by the way, in the middle of a crisis over making temporary
Republican tax cuts permanent, you give the Republicans another temporary
Republican tax cut that they can come back later to blackmail you into
making permanent. Well, Sir, at least that's the end of it.
Except, of course, for the estate tax, what Republicans so happily call,
"the death tax." Which will be reduced from its 2009 levels.
Huh?
The money given by one dead rich person to some living rich persons, will
not be taxed, up to five million dollars. More than five million and it's 35
percent - which is less than it was under the tax laws of President Bush's
last fiscal year. Sir, you have given undeserved tax breaks -and you have
carved them a little more deeply into the stone of law - to rich people,
living and dead. And you want me to tell them which Democrat proposed the
Estate Tax giveaway?
Blanche Lincoln! Blanche Lincoln, repudiated by nearly half the Arkansans
in her own party, and then repudiated by 63 percent of the voters in
Arkansas. Mr. President, you're listening to Blanche Lincoln? What? Were Bob
Beckel and Pat Caddell unavailable?
This President negotiates down from a position of strength better than any
politician in our recent history. It is too late now to go back and ask why
the President, why the wobbly Democratic leadership, whiffed on its chance
to force John Boehner to put his money where his mouth was. In September
Boehner said if he had no other option, of course he would vote to extend
tax breaks only for the middle class.
So the President and the Democrats gave him another option, naturally. But
didn't extending the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthy became necessary to get
Republican support for extending the jobless benefits? Nonsense.
Five times in the last two years, the Republicans have gone along with
extending those jobless benefits, and they've done it without being bribed
with tax cuts for the rich. Even now Boehner's September confession, and the
GOP's unwillingness to take the blame for killing off jobless benefits,
offered an alternative blueprint for this President:
Let the law expire as scheduled in 24 days. Let all the tax breaks go, and
when the Republicans take over the House and try to pass them anew, if they
somehow are not stopped in the Senate, veto anything that does not keep tax
cuts for the middle class and unemployment benefits as the dog, and perks
for the rich as the tail. The GOP is still terrified of being blamed for
cutting off the unemployed. You take that fact and you break them with it.
There is only one possible rational explanation for this irrational and
childish transaction. There are Republicans and Tea Partiers who are still
intent on cutting off their noses to spite their faces - the "Blind Rage
Conservatives" for whom any compromise is disaster, just as for this
President, apparently no compromise is disaster.
Maybe the reason the Administration's numbers don't add up in this deal is
that it was too busy instead counting votes and there really are enough on
the Far Right to sink it and the President winds up having his cake and
eating it too, proposing what he can call a "tax compromise" and then having
it derailed publicly and embarrassingly by the Republicans. Maybe the
political calculus here exceeds both in priority and quality, the real
calculus.
But I deeply doubt it. Yesterday I had an exchange with a very Senior member
of this Administration who wanted to sell me on this deal. I pointed out
that that was fine, except that - as I phrased it to him - "frankly the base
has just vanished." "Well," he replied, "then they must not have read the
details." There, in a nutshell, is this Administration. They didn't make a
bad deal - we just don't understand it.
Just as it was our fault, Mr President, for not understanding your refusal
of even the most perfunctory of investigations of rendition or domestic
spying or the other crimes of the Bush Administration, or why you have now
established for those future Administrations who want to repeat those
crimes, that the punishment for them will be nothing.
Just as it was our fault, Mr. President, for not understanding Afghanistan.
Just as we didn't correctly perceive, Sir, the necessity for the
continuation of Gitmo. Or how we failed to intuit, President Obama, your
preemptive abandonment of Single Payer and the Public Option. Or how we
couldn't have foreseen your foot-dragging on "Don't ask, don't tell." Just
as we shouldn't have gotten you angry at your news conference today and made
all the moderate Democrats wonder why in the hell you get publicly angry so
often at the liberals who campaigned for you and whether you might save just
a touch of that sarcasm and that self-martyrdom for the Republicans.
And of course, Mr. President how we totally betrayed your Administration by
not concluding our prayers every night by saying "Thank you for preventing
another Great Depression, you are entitled to skate along on your own
wonderfulness indefinitely and if you get less than you could have on Health
Care Reform or taxes, well, that'll be okay, we're happy to pay $10,000 for
a $300 car because hey, it could've been $20,000, right? And because we only
expect you to do one thing correctly during a presidency and you had pretty
much cleared that obligation when it proved that you were, indeed, not John
McCain."
We are very very sorry. In some sense, the Senior Member's remark about how
we "did not read the details" is not utterly absurd. We have enabled this
President, and his compromises-spinning-within-compromises. And now there
are, finally, those within his own party who have said "enough." In the
Senate, the Independent, Mr. Sanders has threatened to filibuster this deal.
He deserves the support of every American in doing so, as does Mr. Conyers
and Mr. McDermott and the others in the house. It is not disloyalty to the
Democratic party to tell a Democratic president he is wrong; it is not
disloyalty to tell him he is goddamned wrong.
It is not disloyalty for the 99ers and the 99ers-to-be to rally in the
streets of Washington. It is not disloyalty to remind the President that he
was elected by people to whom he had given a clear outline of what he would
do for them, and if he does not steer out of the skid of what he is doing to
them, he will not only not be re-elected, he may not even be re-nominated.
It is not disloyalty to remind him that we are not bound to an individual.
We are bound to principles. If the individual changes, or fails often and
needlessly, then we get a new man. Or woman. None of that is disloyalty. It
is self-defense. It is the acknowledgment that, as my hero Thurber wrote,
you might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards.
That is what the base is saying to this President, about his Presidency.
"Well, then, (we) must not have read the details." The Churchill quotation -
as opposed to the quotation from the very Senior member of your
Administration, Mr. President - is from October 5th, 1938.
I don't want to make any true comparison to the historical event to which it
related; the viewer can go ahead and look it up if they wish; I will confess
I won't fight if anybody wants to draw a comparison between what you've done
with our domestic politics of our day, to what Neville Chamberlain did with
the international politics of his.
The rest of what Churchill said, paraphrased - but only slightly
paraphrased - bears repeating again. The terrible words have for the time
being, been pronounced against this Administration: "Thou art weighed in the
balance and found wanting." And do not suppose that this is the end. This
is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the
first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year
unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and political vigor, we arise
again and take our stand for what is right.
On Dec 9, 2010, at 6:56 AM, Ed Pearl wrote:
Hi. I saw Olberman deliver this very powerful, comprehensive critique
and knew I should send it to you. I've not received or been able to find
the text, which is what I customarily do with such. Live is berrter anyway.
You won't regret taking 5 or 6 minutes to watch it.
Then, Julian Assange writes to his compatriot Aussies. All worth wihile.
Ed.
From: "Sid Shniad" <shniad@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2010 5:06 PM
Olbermann: Obama turned his back on his base With the tax-cut deal, the
Democrats lost their chance to stop the GOP from taking unfair advantage of
the middle class*Video:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40557029/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann/
.
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