Chris Hedges: Stop Begging Obama to Be Obama and Get Mad

[marmar]

from Truthdig:



Stop Begging Obama to Be Obama and Get Mad

Posted on Sep 14, 2009
By Chris Hedges


The right-wing accusations against Barack Obama are true. He is a socialist, although he practices socialism for corporations. He is squandering the country’s future with deficits that can never be repaid. He has retained and even bolstered our surveillance state to spy on Americans. He is forcing us to buy into a health care system that will enrich corporations and expand the abuse of our for-profit medical care. He will not stanch unemployment. He will not end our wars. He will not rebuild the nation. He is a tool of the corporate state.

The right wing is not wrong. It is not the problem. We are the problem. If we do not tap into the justifiable anger sweeping across the nation, if we do not militantly push back against corporate fraud and imperial wars that we cannot win or afford, the political vacuum we have created will be filled with right-wing lunatics and proto-fascists. The goons will inherit power not because they are astute, but because we are weak and inept.

Violence is a dark undercurrent of American history. It is exacerbated by war and economic decline. Violence is spreading outward from the killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan to slowly tear apart individuals, families and communities. There is no immunity. The longer the wars continue, the longer the members of our working class are transformed by corporate overlords into serfs, the more violence will dominate the landscape. The slide into chaos and a police state will become inevitable.

The soldiers and Marines who return from Iraq and Afghanistan are often traumatized and then shipped back a few months later to be traumatized again. This was less frequent in Vietnam. Veterans, when they get out, search for the usual escape routes of alienation, addictions and medication. But there is also the escape route of violence. We risk creating a homegrown Freikorps, the demobilized German soldiers from World War I who violently tore down the edifice of the Weimar Republic and helped open the way to Nazism. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090914_stop_begging_obama_to_be_obama_and_get_mad/

[ShortnFiery]

1. If we push back, the corporations STILL win but we'll be left with an authoritarian police state.

It's a LOSE-LOSE proposition but I'd rather have a super intelligent corporatist THAN a half-wit authoritarian corporatist.

Yes, I get it ... however, to elect the right wing authoritarians into office is to relinquish ALL our civil rights.

Work locally to help those "less blessed" among us? That's what I plan to do ... that's all I can do. :shrug:

[Tace]

2. This is some amazing writing

Thank goodness for Chris Hedges.

[Gman2]

3. The right has us hogtied, by ourselves.

Lefties are peaceful. Lefties are kind. Lefties are never rude. FUCK THAT. The right has used our supposed words about ourselves, to force us to dance to their tune. NO PUKE is gonna tell me what is acceptable dissent, or tone.

[nashville_brook]

4. postpartisanship is neither possible nor preferable when so much is at stake...

we need to stop believing that the party that brought us 8 years of delegitimizing the Clinton presidency is going to do anything differently now. The ball is ours. It's time to run with it.

[emulatorloo]

5. Don't you guys ever get tired of the endless hyperbole of the Hedges and the Hannitys??

It is starting to overlap.

[Gman2]

6. open your eyes, it is not hyperbole.

You can read thousands of patriots, rubbing their hands in glee, at the thought of murdering Americans for exercising their democracy.

[balantz]

7. The last paragraph of the article

- snip

It is we who are guilty, guilty for sending these young men and women to wars that did not have to be fought. It is we who are guilty for turning away from the truth of war to wallow in a self-aggrandizing myth, guilty because we create and decorate killers and when they come home maimed and broken we discard them. It is we who are guilty for failing to defy a Democratic Party that since 1994 has betrayed the working class by destroying our manufacturing base, slashing funds to assist the poor and cravenly doing the bidding of corporations. It is we who are guilty for refusing to mass on Washington and demand single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans. It is we who are guilty for supporting Democrats while they funnel billions in taxpayer dollars to sustain speculative Wall Street interests. The rage of the confused and angry right-wing marchers, the ones fired up by trash-talking talk show hosts, the ones liberals belittle and maybe even laugh at, should be our rage. And if it is not our rage soon, if we continue to humiliate and debase ourselves by begging Obama to be Obama, we will see our open society dismantled not because of the shrewdness of the far right, but because of our moral cowardice.

[balantz]

8. Kick

[It Cant Just Be Me]

9. My type.

This is my type of aggressive progressive language.
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