Bob Borosage warns about all the "warnings" about the "center".

[madfloridian]

He warns us that the center has changed now. He gives examples of how some of the major conservatives are now moving a little from the right toward the left.....now that our country is falling down around us.

This is a good post by Bob Borosage of the Campaign for America's Future

He writes at Huffington Post about all the warnings about the dangers of the left.

Amazing Grace: Hallelujah and Get to Work

He makes this statement that jumped out at me...because all I have been hearing is how Obama must be on the look-out for dangerous liberals...

Mandates are not given; they are claimed. Majorities do not form; they are forged. The center is not frozen; it is molded by events, moved by leaders and movements.

He gives examples of some who are known right wing now speaking out differently.

Govern from the center? Americans voted overwhelmingly for change. And to be successful, Obama will have to be bold. In reality, the center has moved. Bob Rubin now is for a large, deficit financed fiscal stimulus. Conservative SEC Chair Chris Cox now tells us "self-regulation" doesn't work, and calls for re-regulating the banks. Alan Greenspan admits his ideology blinded him to reality -- or at least that he got it wrong. "We're all populists now," says Will Marshall, a leader of the Democratic Leadership Council, the Wall Street wing of the party.

Well, it will be a cold day in hell when I trust the words of those guys, but Borosage is right to point them out.

Then he continues by pointing that we have to be the ones to make things happen.

But this beltway clamor about the center serves as a warning to progressives. The entrenched forces of the status quo are already in motion. Obama takes office as the Reagan era comes to a close, bankrupted by its own failures. But change, as Obama says, isn't easy.

Even the best presidents need to be pushed to act. Even the most calcified Congresses can be driven to move. The best of the New Deal -- Social Security, the Wagner Act that gave workers the right to organize, Fair Labor Standards that gave us the weekend -- came not from Roosevelt's first 100 days, but two years later, in what became known as the Second New Deal. And that was driven in large part by an active and mobilized labor movement, and by the growing political threat posed by a populist left -- Huey Long, Father Coughlin, Francis Townsend -- that gave Roosevelt both reason and excuse to move. "I agree with you," Roosevelt reportedly told labor's Sidney Hillman, "now go out, and make me to do it."

Those of us who point out that the President Elect is surrounding himself with people who do not want the status quo changed....well, look at all the new threads popping up about just trying to get along.

It's our job to keep working for what we think is right. Thanks to Bob Borosage for reminding us.

[calimary]

1. Always like your posts, madfloridian.

You always make good points.

:patriot:

[madfloridian]

2. Coming from you that is much appreciated.

:hi:

[calimary]

4. .

:hug: :pals: :yourock: :headbang:

[KoKo]

3. Kick.

[BeFree]

5. It is great

How the first NOT stolen election in 12 years can make it look like the center has shifted. And how all the apologists start clamoring about how the failed policies of an illegal conglmeartion of politicians means the country has changed, when all along it was stolections that made us look awful.

[madfloridian]

6. For a shining moment:

From the Borosage link.

"And the world will look at America with new eyes. For a shining moment, we will be once more that city on the hill, the example of a free people choosing a remarkable new leader. A similar choice -- the son of a native born woman and an African -- could not happen in Europe, in Japan, in China or much of Asia. Amazing grace."

I posted in GDP some cartoons from Belgium, sent to me by a friend.

They are sharing our "shining moment" with us, but they will be watching lest the same ideologues gain power again. So will I.

The cartoons are spectacular.

http://www.nicolasvadot.com/Vadot_EN/Cartoons/Cartonns_Month.htm

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

7. K&R for Politics-NOT-as-usual.

[madfloridian]

8. Now there will be...

a post to point out that what I pointed out that Borosage said is wrong.

:evilgrin:

I must learn to love and embrace all Democrats as they kick some of us and those that kept us in the party after the Iraq War out the side door.

[Oregone]

9. A big problem is there aren't a ton of "New Deal" like Democrats in prominent positions

"Those of us who point out that the President Elect is surrounding himself with people who do not want the status quo changed....well, look at all the new threads popping up about just trying to get along."

A that aside, Obama doesn't seem to be leaning towards appointing any of them. But, Obama is not in the same position as FDR was. The burning pain of the economic turmoil hasn't started yet, and hence, the labor movement that may come is a few years off. The people FDR surrounded himself with may not yet exist in this political environment. If Obama isn't able to fend off the turmoil, could it be said that he has come two years TOO early?

[truedelphi]

12. Part of the problem is the mass demial of the M$M

The media is still floating the notion that this "recession" might affect Christmas sales. While carefully avoiding the mention of how the BailOut was just a HUGE HANDOVER to crooks. The word Depression is rarely used.

Twenty three states have balances that are budget disasters. Kucinich and Issa and the Government Reform Committee arm of the House realize that the first 350 Billion dollars of the BailOut is being stolen away from us - Paulson tore up Section 109 and he is doing what he wants with the money. in return, I surmise, for massive pay offs from his buddies at AIG. (AIG has now received close to 150 Billion - some 80 billion before the Bailout and additional BailOut funds. I'm suyre we can now breathe easily, knowing that Christmas junkets for that gang of thieves are in the works as I type.)

Kashkari intimates that "he doesn't know" when Paulson will ask for the second 350 Billion. But since those two have already run through $ 350 Billion (plus another 80 billion for AIG) I imagine it will be soon.

They really don't want to have any money lying around for the day that Obama takes power on Jan 20 2009. Have to take it now while the taking is good.

[annabanana]

10. self delete.

What ever happened to him?

[BrklynLiberal]

11. Excellent post, making an excellent point. Obama was elected to bring change.

I think that there must be change...even if it is gradual. We must have some signs that that the Obama administration will not be "business as usual" .

Oh..and off to the greatest with you..

[madfloridian]

14. There does need to be some sign...

that it is happening. :hi:

[bertman]

13. Thanks for the post, Madflo. Now it's time for US to make President-elect Obama do it.

We can all start by going to this site and expressing our alarm at the direction his appointments are signalling: http://www.change.gov/page/st/contact

Barack Obama told us that it was about US. Now it's up to US.

[struggle4progress]

15. Radio wacko Father Coughlin was not "populist left": he attacked Roosevelt, "Jews" & "Communists,"

and the New Deal and eventually supported Hitler and Mussolini; see http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5111/

[madfloridian]

16. I wondered about that name....also Long.

:eyes:

[struggle4progress]

17. The Long and Coughlin Movements (New International v2 #3 May 1935)

Arne Swabeck

... Yes, there could hardly be any doubt as to where the Louisiana Kingfish stands politically. He knows the power of the catch-phrase: “Share-the-Wealth”; but when he began in his own state and imposed a five cent a gallon tax on gasoline, there followed some conferences between Long and President Hilton of Louisiana Standard Oil and after that the Legislature was summoned in a special session and rebated four to the five cents. On the other hand, in his own state, where he rules supreme, he has made no move to ratify the child labor amendment, or to enact old age pensions, or minimum wages, or unemployment insurance. Thus the demand to “Share-the-Wealth” is not meant to include everybody. Moreover, from his labor record the following facts stand out. The courts and the civil authorities of his state were used to break the strike of the longshoremen and to defeat the efforts of the textile workers’ union to end conditions of virtual peonage in the Lane Cotton Mills. Huey Long is a staunch supporter of Governor Talmadge of Georgia who declared martial law during the national textile strike and put the strikers wholesale into concentration camps ...

http://marxists.anu.edu.au/history/etol/writers/swabeck/1935/05/coughlong.htm

[suzie]

19. Huey Long was an absolute demagogue

But he initiated a huge public works program at a time, during the Depression, when jobs were certainly needed. Lots of roads and bridges were built in a state that only had 300 miles of paved roads.

He promoted free textbooks, building schools and adult education classes when Louisiana had the highest rate of illiteracy in the nation.

Long pumped a lot of money into LSU and into scholarship programs for poor kids.

He started the building of the Charity Hospital campus in New Orleans which was destroyed by Katrina, and supported mental hospitals in the state.

Long was a corrupt demagogue with dictatorial tendencies and would have been a dangerous guy on the national scene.

However, Long built roads, bridges, schools, hospitals--I thought that a lot of people were agitating for those kinds of public works programs today.

[struggle4progress]

20. Of course, Long's political style may defy simple classification. But he does not

seem to have been a leftist in any standard sense.

[JimboBillyBubbaBob]

18. The Center

There is a song that says, "Oh, the more it changes, the more it stays the same. We just rearrange the players in the game." Our history has demonstrated time and again that policies may shift in one direction or the other, but they inevitably arrive back at some center. True, that center itself may shift and ultimately does. I chuckle to myself, while at the same time, having the thought that sociologically it has been demonstrated that there is an evoloving acceptable level of social deviance. That is, I feel positive in the long run.

[madfloridian]

21. More from Borosage about center right.

"And now the work begins. Obama inherits the desert—with the situation far more dire than many, even now, understand. Manufacturing is at levels not seen since the deep recession in 1980. Consumers are cutting back spending. The banking system is still reeling from losses and shocks. The recession now has gone global. Homeowners have lost $5 trillion in housing values.

So forget about the routine chattering-class babble about how America is a "center right" nation and Obama must "govern from the center." .... With independents and moderates looking more Democratic and liberal on issue after issue, the claim that this is a center-right nation was misleading even before this election. Americans are voting for a northern, liberal, Ivy League-educated, African-American, former college professor to be president, someone who campaigned on raising taxes on the wealthy, affordable health care for all, investing in new energy, getting out of Iraq and against trickle down economics. Conservative nation?"

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2008114505/hallelujah-and-now-work-begins