Tuesday, December 30, 2014

The Walking Dead


"Modern" "Family" . . . My gosh, do folks actually watch this thing every week? And now in re-runs too!

Guess so. It's the number-one viewed American "comedy" show and the winnah of the last five Best Comedy Show Emmys. Really? The program -- and never before has that word been more applicable -- is like something created by the Stepford Wives or Donald Sutherland after the ending of Body Snatchers. The lighting and colors are the lighting and colors contained within every suburban shopping mall ever entered. While every possible identity-politics "character" moves through the zone of sterility like the zomboid he/she/it is. And such fresh ideas! The idiot dad. The over-sexed grumpy grandpa. The kids who are always smarter than their parents. The spunky soccer mom. The always-more-sensitive-than-the-straights gay guys. The crazy koochie-koochie-koo woman who gets all her laughs by not being able to pronounce correct English. The "realistic" whining direct into the camera. And no blacks or working-class stiffs to upset the stomach. The series reminds me of those movie shorts produced by Goebbels in the mid-1930s showing happy, beautiful, industrious, healthy Germans. Watching this corporate narcotic, one would never know that the US has been taken over by the military and the police, that it's conducting aggressive war all 'round the world, that everyone is spied upon, that every American-made product is a piece of shit, that corporations have their fists up everybody's bums, that half the country is unemployed or underemployed, and that most every citizen is a meth or a coke addict.

'Course the same hypnosis can be said to be laid on the self-regarding office posers and social parasites who feed off neo-liberal hate-fests such as House of Cards, Game of Thrones, or Seth MacFarlane's latest bowel movement. Ladies and Gentlemen -- your New Golden Age of Television!

Monday, December 29, 2014

Welcome to Pig City

Flags flying half-mast all over the Apple for names such as Ramos and Liu. Yet no lowering of anything official -- EVER -- and never prosecutions -- for murdered names such as Akai Gurley, Amadou Diallo, Eric Garner, Sean Bell, Abner Louima, Tamir Rice, Timothy Stansbury, Nicholas Heyward, Ousmane Zongo, Iman Morales, Darius Kennedy, James Young, Shereese Francis, Shem Walker, Ramarley Graham, Anthony Baez and many others.

Patrick Martin on the latest descent into class war.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Breaking Santa?

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Oh, What a Life It Was!


TimeWarner in partnership with Google (we're definitely heading toward a place where we'll feel perfectly fine saying things like "My baby was born, in partnership with Google" and "I went to the bathroom in partnership with Google" or "I got my girlfriend off last night in partnership with Google" and "My mom was buried yesterday in partnership with Google") --

Where was I? TimeWarner in partnership with Google has released the entire Life Magazine Archive from 1936 - 1972.

Politically, the issues are a Cold War mess, but still. Looking at these covers and words and images (and ads!), one can only ask: "What happened here?"  Where is this vivid, colorful, funny, masculine, confident, feminine, stylish, warm, sexy, youthful, bright, completely self-involved yet still modest nation?

How did we get so old and so stupid so fast?

Sunday, December 7, 2014

This Girl is a. . .


Happy 10th Birthday
to the
Best Daughter in the World!

Friday, December 5, 2014

White

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Black

Black days have a history as long as the calendar, and attach to many events, but they have one common attribute: reversal, subversion, undermining. In modernity it has attached itself to financial collapse, natural disaster, terrorism, and military defeat. In the Roman calendar, a “black letter day” was one marked with charcoal on the wall calendar, one to be waited out with circumspection. By the time "Black Friday" stuck in the eighties, it had acquired a new meaning that cemented it. It was allegedly the day that retailers finally “went into the black” — made a profit — and shopping thus acquired a civic and patriotic dimension.

In response to duty — to the alleged abandon disguised as duty — Black Friday has developed as the sly alternative. The activity is, by its very nature, as anti-Thanksgiving as you could get. Thanksgiving is, after all, a subject, even an abject celebration, in which one acknowledges submission to the whims of a distant God. Its role is in part to balance out Christmas and the practice of giving to children, in which non-reciprocity is celebrated: the child receives gifts without any expectation of reciprocal action on its part. The child’s role is simply to be. As adults we take our joy from that — Christmas Day without children is worthless and sad.

In that respect, Black Friday has a mutant aspect to it. It has taken the cornucopia effect of Christmas, and applied it to adults. It is, or was, a release from the duty of giving thanks, into a day of infantilized desire. Everything about Black Friday in its high phase acquired a ritual meaning: the drive to the mall, the lining up in the snow, the fist fights, the local news crews there for the fist fights, the rush as the doors opened, the carting away, the staggering under the weight of seventy-inch plasma screens.

The actual utility of the discount goods really functioned as a McGuffin for the activity of acquiring them. What possible improvement in viewing could a seventy-inch plasma screen offer that exceeded the sheer joy of carting it away at a major discount? You enacted the Dinoysian ceremony, but then all the shit stuck around, silting up your house. Black Friday participants, if they had any sense, would buy their goods, leave the store, and dump them straight in waiting garbage cans. They would never feel as good in their adult lives.
Go here for the rest of Guy Randle's very important essay.

Friday, November 28, 2014

Head Shots

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Walter White Knows What To Do

About Ferguson and many many other things. . .

Friday, November 21, 2014

Taking Care

Madison Square Garden, May 20th, 1962. (Was Raymond Shaw waiting in the rafters?)

This magnificent document is just a normal speech on a normal day from a man arguing for a healthy labor movement, social insurance, community health, hospitalization plans, and decent housing.

"To break a union is to break yourself."

(For those who have a problem with the sound and video quality, go watch Obama in HD.)

Our Kennedy

Ordinarily filled with little but Obamoid / Zionist / anti-conspiracy swill, here Maher dishes it straight.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Mailer in the Spring of '68

It should've been a Spring like any other Spring, as it should've been a political year like any other political year. It is the night of May 28th, 1968 in Manhattan and Norman Mailer is talking with Bill Buckley -- both men at the height of their literary and cultural power. One man calls himself a "left conservative"; the other is the Godfather of the American Conservative movement. Neither man knew it at the time, but everything communal, egalitarian, and progressive in the American spirit had crested and would never again reach high tide. Robert F. Kennedy would be assassinated in 7 days. And the next 46 years (and counting) would be a reactionary nightmare.

How self-satisfied was the intellectual Left on the cusp of its extinction.

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Eyes?

Kogonada is a video artist who takes the work of great directors and makes it his own. To good or ill effect is the question.



More Kogonada here. (And thanks to Paul for the head's up!)

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Occasion of Sin

Friday, October 31, 2014

Queen of My Heart

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Dynasty!


Threeeeee!



MadBum!

Friday, October 17, 2014

The Giants Win the Pennant!

Again! Third time in Five years!!

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Peace Prize

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Z?

Shane O'Sullivan has been our most honest and therefore most important documentary filmmaker dealing with the American Assassinations of the 1960s. His Killing Oswald (2013) was the finest (the only?) work of the 50th Anniversary year which did not swallow wholly the official Warren Commission line.

Since the 1960s, the 8mm Elm Street home movie taken by clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder has been held up as our best proof that more than one gunman was firing at Kennedy in Dealey Plaza, due to the destruction of the Single Bullet Theory caused by the Z-film's timing; and the explosive movement of JFK's head and body ("Back, and to the left") caused by the fatal headshot(s). But is the Zapruder film we have all seen, the real Zapruder film? A man named Dino Brugioni was a top imagery analyst for CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center (he was the man who brought President Kennedy U-2 images proving Soviet nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba in October '62) and on the night of November 22nd, 1963, Brugioni was handed for interpretation an original negative of the Zapruder home movie. What he says he saw that night was very different from what we now see.

(Due to the bought-off chicanery of Dallas's Sixth Floor Museum, the Z-film was not allowed to be part of O'Sullivan's documentary.)

The heroic Douglas Horne guides us through a very sinister maze. 



An enhanced HD version of what Abraham Zapruder filmed that day. Or not. . .

Monday, September 1, 2014

Take Five


Happy 5th Birthday to the blog!

Swoon this.

Friday, August 29, 2014

Best TV Show of All-Time?


The show ran on the CBS television network from September 1957 through April 1963 for an astounding 225 episodes. (A radio show starring a different cast also played for four of those years.) Almost 40 episodes per season, at 26-minutes per, with many locations. (Current half-hour TV series: 20 to 22 episodes a year at 22-minutes each.)

And it is the best western series of all time. Of course, there are problems. Boone insisted on the often silly intros with him in 1870s San Francisco gentry garb, almost always coming on to a girl / rejecting a girl / or sighing with a "what can I do?" expression. (Thankfully these ficelles are not part of every episode.) And that's about it. Out of the 225, maybe 10 are stinkers. But the rest. . . .

No other series is more dominated by a single personality and consciousness than is Have Gun Will Travel by Richard Boone's. His greatness as both actor and director -- and his deeply humanist sensibility -- makes HGWT a model of popular and populist art. Sometimes that sensibility goes awry, wasted on chum. At its best (actually, at its average as well), it was a constant search for what was the right thing to do. Paladin himself is a western superman: brilliant, handsome, rich; a boxer, a gunman, a stud. Yet the character is almost completely devoid of narcissism. Or if it is there at times, it becomes the subject of the piece. In the candy-colored yet morally black-and-white world of the 1950s, this is an astonishingly complex show, in terms of meaning and character.

There are many glories beyond him. Along with his artistic domination, Boone's heart is generous as both actor and director. Some of the best HGWT episodes are directed by Andrew McLaglen, Lamont Johnson, and Ida Lupino -- and he completely gives them their lead. Very literate (sometimes too literate) scripts by the great Herb Meadows and Sam Wolfe (and Gene Rodenberry). An endless succession of special acting turns, by both leads and supporting players: George Kennedy many times, Charles Bronson (amazingly good) many times, Kam Tang as Hey Boy,  Ben Johnson and Ken Curtis fresh off the Ford lot, Charles Aidman, Strother Martin, Ed Nelson, Harry Carey Jr., Shirley O'Hara, Denver Pyle, Jacqueline Scott, June Vincent, on and on. Also, the very lovely Lisa Lu as Hey Boy's replacement, Hey Girl. (Lu's also in several episodes as characters other than Hey Girl, where she also burns a hole in the screen.) Such a slender beauty it's no wonder Henry Miller started stalking her after seeing HGWT.

It is a beautiful show to look at, with a stark sheen. (Many cinematographers are credited, with Stuart Thompson grabbing most titles.) Much of the music is by Bernard Herrmann or based on Herrmann cues. Plus the immortal Johnny Western theme song.

If one comes to knows the series well, what's most remarkable is the continual changes in tone. Alternately leisurely, calm and quiet (and at times very funny); titles tight and tense as a Tohlakai drum; plots so dense they are opaque; stories where nothing much happens at all. We come back, though, to the show's awesome star. No actor has ever surpassed his engagement and commitment to a weekly role. His humor, strength, and charisma get more unique and impressive with each passing year.

One of the many good ones, from Season 2 (April 25, 1959): "The Man Who Lost"

Monday, August 11, 2014

Jeopardy '97

Oliver Stone:
I look back on Jeopardy as one of my highlights during a strange time in the '90s when I was having an enormous amount of fun. I was so bored at this point with the number of interviews, appearances, and junkets that I had to do. I don’t know how anyone can convey the torture of having to do fifty interviews in a day, repeating yourself about a film. These are the kinds of things that drive you insane, so I suppose in rebellion against that kind of mindset. I was on Jeopardy as a charity effort with Arianna Huffington and Wolf Blitzer, and I was trying to pick up this Korean girl in Washington D.C. who I was meeting for the first time, and these first time things can be very exciting, so she was in the audience and I had decided that morning to take ecstasy. I was on it on Jeopardy, and I was totally enjoying the show in a way that neither of my two co-contestants possibly could. In fact, Wolf was so uptight I was laughing even harder at his “projection” of intelligence. Arianna, a graduate in art history apparently forgot everything that day because she got zero points as I remember. I think I lost everything and won it back several times, and at the very end I whipped Wolf Blitzer with a question that I thought was ridiculously simple, but neither of these two could remember the painter of the “Last Supper.” I think a first grader could’ve figured that out, but I jumped on it and I won. The secret of Jeopardy is how fast your finger can get to the button. That millisecond makes a difference. Ecstasy gave me the power that day, but I couldn’t stay in the box however. Alex Trebeck kept telling me to get back into that box; he’s lucky I did. Anyway, I had a great night afterwards with that wonderful Korean girl who actually worked in a relief organization in Africa. All these Washington girls work in relief organizations… good hunting ground.
Including actual 1997 commercials!

Friday, August 8, 2014

Sadism


Noam Chomsky on the Zionist destruction of Gaza.

Monday, August 4, 2014

Take a Number

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Haden


And another. The most beautiful jazz bassist of his time and his beautiful Quartet West ~ Ernie Watts on sax, Alan Broadbent piano, Billy Higgins drums: "My Foolish Heart" from 1987.

Charlie Haden 1937 -2014, RIP

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Garner


The great man has died, at the age of 86. His best and most characteristic work -- stripped and stripping of attitude, generous-hearted, funny, warm, intimate, always engaged and always skeptical of authority -- was on the small screen. (See below.) But he also brought his rare gifts into movie theaters as well, into works impossible to imagine without him: The Americanization of Emily, Victor / Victoria, The Great Escape, Grand Prix (his favorite), Promise, Twilight.

For those of us brought up on late-20th Century dream images flowing from an at-home television set rather than from a movie palace screen, he was Our Mitchum. Less mysterious and recessive, funnier and less dark, James Garner embodied for a less transcendent generation the transcendence of never copying the manner of someone else: that one must work at a moral art, which then makes it suitable for oneself. And, like Mitchum: a man must be caught dead before he takes himself seriously.

As Bret Maverick in "Day of Reckoning," from February of '58.

Friday, June 27, 2014

Survivor

"Surviving the 21st Century," from May 22, 2014.

Monday, June 16, 2014

The Socialists Ball


The most beautiful -- and international -- and elegant -- basketball team of all-time has done it. In a world seemingly universal in its devotion to Ego and the Cult of Violence, a 21st-century world of despair and division, the communal joyousness of the San Antonio Spurs may only be like tossing a penny into a canyon. Or maybe not. . . .

Humility, focus, connection, smartness, quiet, tribute, contribute, complexity, precision, privacy, honor ~ for its own sake, strangely apart from domination. (And over the Miami Heat, of all things.) How rare and how bracing.

Friday, May 16, 2014

Noam on Nam


From 2005.

Another View of Chomsky

From the show notes:
Is Noam Chomsky an anarcho-syndicalist or proponent of the Federal Reserve? A fearless political crusader or defender of the Warren Commission JFK orthodoxy? A tireless campaigner for justice or someone who doesn't care who did 9/11? Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we examine some of the subjects that Chomsky would prefer you didn't think about.
Noam Chomsky -- Academic Gatekeeper?

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Odessa Steps


By hook or by crook, the Obama-ites will get their War on Russia.

Mike Head on the latest act of Obama-ism.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Rooney


Mickey Rooney died earlier this month, at the age of 93. Best (and most mistakenly) remembered as the way-too-energetic Andy Hardy goofball always trying to put on musicals in his dad's barn (this at a time when he was the most popular movie star in the world), Rooney was something beyond that as well: he was one of the best and most subtle character actors of classical Hollywood.

This revealed itself, of course, when he stopped being popular, in all those B-grade noirs and TV appearances he did after the war and into the 1960s.

One of his best: Each man trying to outrun his past, by returning to it: David Janssen at his warmest and most intimate; and a middle-aged Rooney, very special. "This'll Kill You" from January 18, 1966. TV noir at its best, directed by Alex March. (With the young and luscious Nita Talbot.)



And, as himself, an appearance on the smartest and classiest show of its time, from May of '57.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Mayfair

Happy Birthday to me. And Happy 50th Birthday to the 1964 New York World's Fair!

This was it. The zenith moment of the American Century. Opening five months to the day after Dallas broke the back of that Century, the Fair embodied all that was lost and would never return again: a belief that, in the words of the fallen martyr: "Our problems are manmade - - therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable - - and we believe they can do it again."

It was a moment on the cusp of Tonkin Gulf, on the cusp of the first urban riots soon to explode in Harlem, before the murders of Schwerner, Goodman & Chaney, before the take-off of Johnson / Goldwater, before the fall of Khrushchev. . .The martyr was to open the Fair; rather, it was opened by one of his killers, Lyndon Johnson.

Here's a glimpse of the Fair through the NBC lens of the ever-droning Edwin Newman. Watch closely. You'll never see the likes of this again.

Thursday, April 10, 2014

LHO


A brilliant and moving primer on the man who didn't shoot anybody, no sir: Shane O'Sullivan's Killing Oswald.

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

It Was You, Barry

Surprise, surprise. It was the White House Death Squad Commander inventing and pushing all those lies about the Syrian government's involvement in the Ghouta poison gas attack last August. Actually, it was the US-backed Syrian "rebels" who did it, supplied by US lap dogs Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia -- intelligence well-known by Obama whose planned Libya-type destruction of Syria was stopped by -- get this -- the Pentagon. Hail to the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate!

Seymour Hersh spoke with Amy Goodman about his just published report. (A report blacked-out by all establishment US media.)



Hersh's full investigation.

Thursday, April 3, 2014

Guess Who Was Behind This Junk?


[For the answer, please click on it.]

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Fools Rush In

"Logorama" (2009) from H5.

Friday, March 21, 2014

It Lives

You think things are murderous and suffocating now. . .

Monday, March 17, 2014

95.7 Precent of Crimeans Flip Off the White House

by Paul Craig Roberts
In an unprecedented turnout unmatched by any Western election, Crimeans voted 95.7% to join Russia.  As I pointed out earlier today, under the twisted logic of Washington Crimea has never been a part of Ukraine as Russians were not allowed to vote when the Soviet dictator Khrushchev stuck the Russian province of Crimea into Ukraine in 1954.

While Crimeans celebrate in the streets and international observers declare the referendum to be totally fair and free of all interference and threat, the neo-Nazi White House declared that “we don’t recognize no stinking vote.”  The moronic White House spokesperson said that the White House and “the international community”–Washington  in its arrogance thinks that it is the voice of “the international community”–do not recognize the results of democracy in action.

Democracy is not acceptable to Washington, or to the two-bit punk American puppets who rule for Washington in Germany, UK, and France, when democracy does not serve Washington’s agenda of hegemony over the entire world. The neo-Nazi White House spokesperson lied through his teeth when he claimed that the referendum, which has been declared by international observers to have been completely free, was “administered under threats of violence and intimidation.”

This statement, which the entire world now knows to be false, marks the government in Washington, and its subservient media,  as the worst and most dangerous liar the world has ever experienced.  All Washington is capable of is lies: Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda connections, Syrian President Assad used chemical weapons against his own citizens, Iran has a nuclear weapons program, Gaddafi gave his soldiers viagra so they could better rape Libyan women, Russia invaded Crimea, on and on.  I could continue with hundreds of incidences of Washington’s lies.  Indeed, among aware people the word Washington has become synonymous with liar.

When will the world sanction the criminal enterprise that pretends to be a government of the United States?

When will the War Crimes Tribunal and the International Criminal Court issue arrest warrants for Obama and his entire criminal regime as well as the criminal regimes of Bush and Clinton?

When will the assets of the US government and its criminal members be seized?

How long will the world tolerate Washington’s incessant destruction of countries and peoples from Somalia to Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Pakistan to Yemen to Syria to Ukraine, with Russia, Iran, and China waiting in the wings?

The United States government is the worst criminal enterprise in the history of the world. Not a single member of the government has told the truth about anything in the entire 21st century. The executive branch lies consistently to Congress, and the cowardly, weak, despicable fools sit there and take it.  Congress is so useless it might as well be abolished.  I expect Obama to issue an executive order abolishing the useless institution at any moment.

But “we have freedom and democracy.”

The truth is that the entire evil of the universe is concentrated in Washington.  It is this evil that is destroying millions of lives, and it is this evil that will destroy the world.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Sahl


The Daddy-O of modern American comedy.

From last November's 50th Anniversary remembrance. Thank you, David Feldman.



(Those for whom the audio player does not show or does not work, please go here.)

Monday, March 3, 2014

War Against All

Glen Ford:
The world is learning what U.S. senatorial candidate Barack Obama meant on October 2, 2002, when he told a Chicago crowd that he did not oppose all wars. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.” We now know that President Obama is committed to full spectrum, no-holds-barred, war-without-boundaries against all potential resistance to U.S. imperial rule, anywhere on the planet – a project he considers neither rash nor dumb. At stake is survival – not of the people and government of the United States, which face no existential threat from any quarter, but of an empire whose self-defined strategic interests encompass the entire globe. There is a terrifying logic to Washington’s frenzy: when the systemic structure is collapsing, it must be propped up everywhere.

President Obama’s contribution to the disintegration of the global order is awesome; he is a great innovator. Whereas other U.S. leaders were content to simply violate international law with regularity, Obama has rewritten the statutes. The very concept of national sovereignty has been discarded in favor of a kind of universal parole status overseen by a pyramidal “international community” with the United States at the top. National self-determination, the bedrock of international law – is now treated as a franchise, to be issued or withdrawn at the whim of any coalition the U.S. is able to assemble. For Haiti, a simple troika of the U.S., Canada and France constituted a quorum empowered to erase 200 years of independence. For Libya, the recognized government’s capital crime was its threat to quell a jihadist revolt in one of its cities. The Syrian state has been condemned for resisting tens of thousands of foreign-financed killers who recognize no earthly law whatsoever. The U.S. backs a coup against the lawfully elected government of Ukraine by the direct descendants of Nazis. Simultaneously, Obama threatens the democratically elected government of Venezuela with dire consequences if it harms a hair on the head of rioters bankrolled and directed by Washington.

It is almost moot to accuse the Obama administration of interfering with the internal affairs of other nations, since this president does not recognize the elementary rights of nation states. National sovereignty has been replaced, in the Age of Obama, by an arbitrary “humanitarian” interventionist imperative that can only be exercised by the most powerful. This is not law, but its opposite: “anti-law,” promulgated by a decaying, outlaw empire.

If nations have no sovereign rights, then their inhabitants have no right to self-determination – which is the point of Obama’s imperial project. Washington’s bid to render all the world’s peoples subject to its “humanitarian” veto of their self-determinationist rights represents a devolution of civilization.

In liquidating the fundamental tenets of international law, Obama normalizes the most diabolical crimes: crimes against peace. He has redefined war, for U.S. purposes, as limited to conflicts in which Americans are killed in action. Thus, he told Congress in 2011, the massive bombing of Libya did not constitute a war, or even “hostilities,” since no Americans were killed.

No rules of sovereignty, no rules of war, no individual or national rights that a superpower is bound to respect. The United States, under Obama’s leadership, is building an infrastructure for fascism on a planetary scale.

Now you know why the U.S. is spying on all the peoples of the Earth: it’s trying to put our species on lockdown. That’s Obama’s mode of war.
And Chris Floyd.

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Dynamite

Chris Floyd on Obama's latest act of Nazi aggression

Monday, February 17, 2014

Testament

One great writer on another.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Comfort & Joy

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Overthrown

From Joe Kishore:
This evening, Barack Obama will deliver his fifth State of the Union address, an annual political tradition that over the years has become a hollow ritual, with little or no relationship between the president’s words and the actual state of American society. This year will be no different.

In the days leading up to this year’s address, administration officials have dampened expectations of significant initiatives. Instead, the speech will propose a series of minor measures aimed at shaping the “narrative” of the Obama presidency. According to a New York Times analysis over the weekend, Obama has “come to feel acutely the limits on his power,” but sees the State of the Union address as “a critical opportunity to drive an agenda that may yet shape his legacy.”

For the officials who occupy high-level positions within the state apparatus, separated by an immense social and political gulf from the realities confronting the majority of the population, Obama’s “legacy” is crafted with a handful of phrases borrowed from the latest handbook on corporate marketing. However, history—and, more immediately, the general public—will judge the administration not on the basis of honeyed phrases, but by its actions.

Here are some of the major actions that will determine how this administration is seen historically:

* It ordered the assassination of a US citizen without due process.

The former constitutional law professor, whose initial job was with a CIA-linked corporation, is the first president in American history to openly boast of executing a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, without judicial review. More than any other, his administration has sought to institutionalize and bureaucratize extra-judicial state killing, presiding over weekly meetings and the drawing up of “kill lists” to select targets for US drone missiles.

* It vastly expanded the global police state spying apparatus.

The revelations of Edward Snowden have exposed to the American and world population a spying apparatus that operates without constraint, monitoring the communications of virtually every person on the planet.

* It criminalized those who reveal government crimes.

The administration’s attitude to democratic rights is summed up in the fate of those who have exposed illegal state actions: Bradley Manning is in prison, Julian Assange remains trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in Britain, and Edward Snowden has been forced into exile in Russia, facing death threats from US officials. Meanwhile, the administration has adamantly opposed the prosecution of government officials who ordered torture and carried out war crimes.

* It waged war without limit.

Obama continued the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and sent countless drone missiles to pulverize targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other countries. He initiated a war in Libya to overthrow and murder Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi in 2011. For two years, the Obama administration and its allies have financed and armed an Islamist-dominated opposition in Syria, igniting a civil war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and turned millions of Syrians into refugees.

The administration has carried out a “pivot to Asia” to militarily encircle and economically and diplomatically undermine China. It has deliberately provoked regional tensions that threaten, 100 years after the eruption of World War I, to unleash a new global conflict.

* It oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in world history.

The 2008 bailout of the banks and the “quantitative easing” programs begun under Bush have been vastly expanded under Obama. His administration has made available virtually unlimited resources for speculation by Wall Street. Over the past five years, the Federal Reserve has purchased more than $1.5 trillion in essentially worthless mortgage-backed securities from financial institutions, and even more in US Treasuries. It has printed trillions of dollars and injected them into the financial markets.

As a direct consequence, the stock market has soared. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has more than doubled since the first months of Obama’s first term. The net wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans has risen accordingly, from $1.27 trillion in 2009 to over $2 trillion today, an increase of 60 percent, or more than $700 billion. Ninety-five percent of all income gains between 2009 and 2012 went to the wealthiest one percent of the US population.

Corporate profits are higher than ever, while wage growth is at the lowest level since the end of the Second World War. In the aftermath of the Obama administration’s 2009 restructuring of the auto industry, real wages for auto workers have fallen 10 percent and wages for manufacturing as a whole have fallen 2.4 percent. As a result of the collapse in wages, for the first time in history the majority of Americans receiving food stamps are working age.

* It gave a free pass to Wall Street criminals.

Not a single top banker has been held accountable for the crimes he committed and the disaster he inflicted on the world’s population. The Obama administration has shielded Wall Street criminals from prosecution, as epitomized by the fate of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, known to Washington insiders as Obama’s “favorite banker.” Despite repeated and well-documented illegal activities, Dimon not only walks free, but has been awarded a 74 percent pay raise for 2013.

* It carried out a social counterrevolution, beginning with the decimation of health care for workers under Obamacare.

Obama has overseen a relentless assault on every social program. As he delivers his speech tonight, 1.3 million jobless people face destitution, having been stripped of cash assistance by the decision of the White House and congressional Democrats to allow benefits for the long-term unemployed to expire. Yesterday, Democrats and Republicans reached a deal to cut $8 billion from the food stamp program, following a $5 billion cut imposed last November.

Obama boasts that his administration has lowered domestic discretionary spending to its lowest share of the US economy since the 1950s.

His principal domestic initiative, the health care overhaul, is a gigantic fraud, aimed not at expanding health care, but slashing it. His administration has sought to palm off a requirement that individuals purchase expensive, sub-standard health insurance from private insurers as a significant social reform. Obamacare is the opening shot in an assault on the core social welfare programs dating from the 1930s and 1960s, Social Security and Medicare.

Obama’s legacy is an indictment not only of one individual or one administration, but of the social and political system in which his policies are embedded. Obama is the willing tool of the massive corporations and the military-intelligence apparatus that run American society.

His administration has operated with the support of the trade unions and the liberal and “left” forces, wedded to identity politics, that championed his election in 2008 as a “transformative” event in American history. The State of the Union address will be aimed in large part at providing a phony “reformist” image around which these forces can coalesce to bolster support for the Democratic Party and block the emergence of an independent movement of the working class.

The political pundits believe that a staged event in Washington can somehow override views formed in the course of five years of bitter experience. But the mood in the country has changed markedly since Obama’s election as the candidate of “hope” and “change.” Among broader layers of the population, disillusionment is now deeply rooted. For them, Obama’s speech will have little effect.

Perhaps Obama’s most significant legacy will be that his administration demonstrated to millions that the ruling class has absolutely nothing to offer, and that it presides over an economic system, capitalism, that is historically bankrupt. The conclusion that follows, and is beginning to be drawn by wider sections of the working class, is that it must be overthrown.
UPDATE: Kishore on the speech. And Bill Van Auken.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Room at the Bottom

Now roasting over an open fire. . .