State of the Union: A bankrupt ruling class talking to itself

[Ichingcarpenter]

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech was a cynical propaganda piece, filled with fraudulent claims and promises that no one, least of all his audience at the US Capitol, believes in the slightest.
The annual address has long since become an ossified ritual, a kind of national pep rally into which social and political reality seldom intrudes.
With Obama’s speech Tuesday night one had more than ever the sense of the president as chief representative of the financial aristocracy that rules America, speaking to a house filled with millionaire congress members and bought-and-paid-for representatives of big business.

It has more and more come to resemble a political echo chamber, in which the ruling establishment celebrates and talks to itself in utter indifference to the needs and concerns of the country’s working people, the overwhelming majority of the population.

In the run-up to the speech, the media had worked to build up expectations with wild predictions that Obama would use it to launch war on social inequality or, as the Washington Post put it, a “sustained assault on Republicans over a populist economic agenda.” The day after, the old adage, “the mountain labored and brought forth a mouse” came to mind.


According to some accounts, Obama’s speechwriters were instructed to tone down references to social inequality and emphasize the concept of “opportunity”—the old Horatio Alger myth that with perseverance anyone can become a millionaire. This was combined with a reassurance to the Wall Street criminals that “Americans understand that some people will earn more than others, and we don’t resent those who, by virtue of their efforts, achieve incredible success.”


https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/30/pers-j30.html

[canoeist52]

1. Although...

I don't believe the unions deserve the blame and disparagement. Unions need strengthening and are not our enemy.

The rest is accurate.

[2banon]

5. actually it has an important point.

when your're working at minimum wage and belong to a Union like SEIU, it should be hands off my paycheck collecting money I need to make ends meet.

I don't mind paying dues, but it should be what I can afford as determined by me the worker. I was doing Elder Care for a number of years, and the SEIU sucked significant amount of my miserable - low wage paycheck to the point where I had to quit being a caregiver for low income seniors.

I could only accept work for people who were not dependent on IHHS for their care, (which is anathema to a caregiver's personal interest in helping low income seniors!) because I couldn't AFFORD to pay my share of my rent and utility bills each month due to the amount SEIU was snatching out of my paychecks! (at the time it was $70 from $300 earned income before taxes)

In the meantime, my mailbox was flooded weekly with very EXPENSIVE glossy (very UN-GREEN) campaign mailers and notices which were essentially duplicates, rarely was it ever a unique purpose. That's how they were spending & wasting my money.

My general sensibilities are pro-union . - but there needs to be some very significant organizational changes to return to it's original purpose and mission as well as broaden to other sectors. And stop with the extortion of low wage workers!

[socialist_n_TN]

8. wsws is a web site of the Socialist Equality Party........

subjectively Trotskyist, but actually centrist in nature. IOW, vacillating between reform and revolution. However even though centrist, they are echoing Trotsky's view on unions that they are necessary as organizing centers of the working class and can even be revolutionary organs, but MOST of the time (and especially in so-called "democratic" capitalist states) they are a way for the rulers to control the revolutionary impulses of the workers and channel them into economic only demands that they (the owners) can cede and eventually take away as conditions change.

As I said they are needed, but there's no need to sugar-coat the negatives of unions. Most of the time 1) They are not revolutionary organs 2) They feel like there can be an accommodation between labor and capital, that there is some sort of "win/win" spot in the zero-sum game of class war. 3) They quite often create a "labor aristocracy" of highly paid workers who are used by the owners to help to oppress the lower paid part of the working class (class collaborators/traitors). 4) They are bureaucratic and top-down in form (usually) which allows the development of a labor bureaucracy that is invested in the perpetration of the capitalist system even at the expense of the workers they represent. And this is just a partial list.

Now all that said, I support unions every chance I get and in every way I can because we need them to be centers of organization. I'm just not going to overlook their faults.

[Laelth]

2. Morally bankrupt, perhaps.

It's the 99% that's facing real bankruptcy. Interesting choice of words by the author.

-Laelth

[fredamae]

3. Working Poor VS

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/31/lloyd-blankfein-pay_n_4701753.html

[L0oniX]

4. ruling - war monger - class ...watch Dirty Wars

Obama owns this.

[2banon]

7. watched it twice last night - no words. n/t

[2banon]

6. “the mountain labored and brought forth a mouse” came to mind. " - (I Agree completely)

It's really difficult to sit through these, I think the last time I watched SOTU was in 2009, wasn't intending to, but with all the hype I thought maybe I should this time.

Big FAIL.

I think it will be the last one I'll ever watch again. I suppose I shouldn't have expected more from this guy when he first took office, but I wanted to believe, and so I did. That is until he made it clear that I was a fool to buy into his campaign rhetoric and even a bigger one to buy into his inaugural speech.

hmm, how does it go?

'Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.'"

[TBF]

9. I liked the part about

raising the minimum wage. That would help out a bunch of folks who could really use it.

Generally I prefer to read the speeches rather than watch them.