Excellent points Virgil. And I will add that so many who are commenting on Obama's gaffe seem bound and determined to focus on the "bitter" part (which is defensible) and not the obviously objectionable part of what he said, which was about what the bitterness supposedly leads to--CLINGING to GUNS, BIBLES and BIGOTRY.
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That is the heart of the matter here. Even though Obama may feel sorry for these folks, he clearly also thinks they're a bunch of hillbillies incapable of reason or understanding.
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So, for instance, from Clinton's standpoint, it truly is NOT relevant whether or not she has pushed for gun control in the past or how recently she has attended church. What is relevant is whether she thinks the Midwesterners she's asking to vote for her are really a crew of pitchfork-wielding pinheads.
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She may or may not, but she hasn't been so stupid as to say such a thing in front of a bunch of well-heeled donors in San Francisco.

Posted at April 14, 2008 10:41 AM in response to Politics of Demagoguery

You and a lot of similar folks make the assumption that people are only consumers, not workers. Yes, in a consumer-only, advanced economy, globalization is just fabulous.
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But, alas, most of us have to work for a living. And we have to consider FIRST what's best for American workers. Once you do that, ONLY THEN do you have reliable consumers, particularly if you're looking toward the future.
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What we're going through right now is a brief period of basically looting America's post WWII built-up wealth, when we can deceive ourselves into thinking that globalization is a fine, long-term and in fact irreversible trend. But look at the evidence? We're in debt up to our necks to a third-world, totalitarian country and we have a negative savings rate. The only thing that sustains this economy is hot air, otherwise known as bubbles--a phenomenon that used to happen about once a century but that now seems to be cropping up in quick succession to itself.
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When we run out of bubbles, one hopes that Americans will wake up and see the connection between actually having good, lifelong, well-compensated work and living well through mass consumption by actually living within our means rather than "borrowing" from totalitarian states.
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By the way, globalization is cyclical, not evolutionary. Virtually all the world's great economic powers have arisen while well-protected behind trade barriers. Globalization has come and gone throughout history (by any measure, the world was more "globalized" in the years just before World War I--and then it all fell apart), and we should be seeing the end of this current cycle pretty soon.

Posted at April 10, 2008 9:50 AM in response to The Crunchian Take on Globalization

Loved the reference to Vonnegut's granfalloons.
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Here's another way to think of it: Quasi-tribalism. Just because the upper 1 percent or so have the means to influence economic policy, they have become a tribe. As a tribe, they haven't been able to resist the temptation to become warlike and pillage the rest of the economy. Hence the enthusiasm for globalization, offshoring, outsourcing, "bubbles" and all manner of financial hinkiness and shenanigans.
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Meanwhile, the rest of us, because we have no means, are unable to form competing tribes. Heck, we can't even form unions, let alone rise up in bloody rebellion against the marauding Tribe of the Upper 1 Percent. Hence the granfalloon effect.
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Of course, we look at tribalism in other countries (it's blooming quite nicely in Iraq, for instance) and shake our heads. And invariably it's an awful mess. However, most Americans are incapable of rising even to that level of awfulness. We are sub-tribal. The great majority of us are lost in the miasmic belief that some residue of traditional Western, Christian values endures and that, somehow, we'll be all right.
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Meanwhile, the Upper 1 Percent is chewing on our livers.
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By the way, Upper 1 Percent tribalism has no exclusive claim on Republicans. A few months ago, Mother Jones ran a handy little pie chart showing which industries are funding which candidates. As I recall, the major Dems (including Obama and Clinton) were funded mainly by the financial, insurance and real estate industries, with a generous fraction from Big Pharma. The Repubs, meanwhile, were funded by Big Oil. That's pretty much all you need to know about any of them.

Posted at April 9, 2008 9:58 AM in response to Our Imagined Economy

Another welcome to Barbara, simply the best progressive advocate we have!
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Here's why the economy and political system don't and can't possibly work: We have no say.
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I work for a company that is 60 percent employee-owned. However, employees have no representation on the board, and some fruitcake with a minimal investment is running the company--and laying off workers at a steady clip, even though we're profitable. All perfectly legal.
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This is just a more extreme instance of what most working Americans face. Consider this: If I have an online account with a broker, on some fine trading day I can "invest" say $1,000 in a stock sitting in my pyjamas in bed with my laptop on my lap by just tapping a few keys. Fifteen minutes later, I can decide I made a mistake and bail out of the stock. But for that lousy 15 minutes, I have more representation and rights within that company than, say, a full-time employee who has been working 60-hour weeks for 30 years, commuting to work 3 hours a day, depending on the company for 90 percent of his income, all his medical care and his retirement, if any.
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How does that make any sense?
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We grant corporate charters in this country that impart to companies enormous rights and privileges far beyond anything an actual citizen has. We have a right to demand whatever we damned well please in return. Demanding only that such companies make a profit--by whatever nefarious, bloody rotten means that might pop into their fevered little corporate minds--isn't enough.
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ONLY employees and the communities in which a corporation functions should be representated on corporate boards. Shareholders already have a vote when they get into and out of stocks. They need and deserve nothing more.
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And by the way, ONLY corporations that have such board representation--regardless of where the company is actually or mythically based--should be allowed to market their goods and services in the Unites States. We're still effectively and by far the world's largest consumer market; therefore we have the leverage to demand this.
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So all we have to do to pretty much fix everything is make one simple change in what we demand of the chief wealth-gathering mechanism in industrial society--the corporation. (Well, actually, we might have to do something about private-equity funds, too. Maybe outlaw them.) Short of this, nothing will ever be right.

Posted at April 8, 2008 10:04 AM in response to Too Late?

But is it then forbidden for white to ever even suggest that it's also an open possibility that certain figures (such as Rev. Wright and his ilk) take real, enduring, glowing-ember elements of discrimination and try to fan them into towering flames of race hatred? Apparently it's a fairly lucrative thing to do.
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I agree Krauthammer is normally pretty flaky. But in the particular column that MJ links, he makes some good points. Why indeed, for instance, would Obama feel comfortable exposing his kids to Wright's garbage?
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Posted at March 22, 2008 10:12 AM in response to Krauthammer, Tucker Carlson, Rev Wright & Other Racial Paranoids

May one dissent here?
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For one thing, the speech came too late. He gave it only after he was caught, ie, after Rev. Wright's hideous rantings were exposed.
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And Obama's equating his white grandmother's legitimate fear of black men (black-on-white crime far exceeds white-on-black crime, and even Jesse Jackson has acknowledged his fear of black men on the street) with Wright's rantings will be, and should be, deeply offensive to those who heard and thought about Obama's words.
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As should be the equivalence that Obama sets up between Wright on the one hand and the black community on the other, saying he couldn't abandon either. There are lots of black preachers who actually do speak of Jesus and love--as Obama originally said of Wright, although he seemed to hedge on that in his speech.
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Obama didn't have to choose Wright's church or one like it. But he did. I suspect it was a way of building his political base and street cred with the radical black community in Chicago, much as his relationship with corrupt property developer Tony Rezko gave him the crucial early money he needed.
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There's 20 years of the Obama-Wright relationship. MJ Rosenberg, elsewhere on this site, defends this by noting that most of have disagreements with what our holy men are telling us. True, but there are radically different degrees of disagreement. If the heart and core of any part of a preacher's sermons are DEEPLY objectionable to you, you have an obligation to speak up or walk out, just as you do in any other social situation. Otherwise, you are part and parcel of that objectionable community, regardless of any precious little qualms you keep to yourself.
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You are what you do.
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Given Obama's 20 years of sitting through some of Wright's garbage--as he admitted in his speech--his words yesterday, however eloquent, amounted in essence to an acknowledgment that he had backed himself into a corner.

Posted at March 19, 2008 10:03 AM in response to Obama: How Race Card Protects Class Privilege

If you're attending religious services where the rabbi or minister is preaching things about the temporal world that are objectionable, you have an obligation to either speak up or leave. A holy man's "spiritual" guidance is not something that can conveniently be detached from his temporal judgments and preaching. It's all one fabric. One is what one does.
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What may have been acceptable or overlook-able back in the '50s (Kennedy and Cushing, for example) doesn't necessarily pass muster today. Lots of things are like that.
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Here's a rule of thumb: If you find yourself under one roof worshiping with a bunch of neo-cons, you might want to start paying attention to the service.

Posted at March 15, 2008 10:48 AM in response to The Irrelevance of Obama's Minister

Rev. Wright is just another one of these Chicago characters who, like Rezko, Obama has chummed up with over the years to advance his career.
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After 17 years of Obama attending this church of hate, I don't see why anyone should necessarily buy Obama's repudiation of Wright at this point, only AFTER Wright was caught spewing his racist bile and poisonous filth on video.
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By the way, there's a big difference between 17 years of attending sermons and close association with and mentoring by this jerk and picking up an endorsement from some fruitcake (like Hagee for McCain) whom you're only vaguely aware of or Billy Graham dropping in from time to time at the White House. (Minor point: I don't think it was commonly known that Graham was anti-Semitic until that audiotape emerged a few years ago.)
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But let's face it: Given the 40- and 50-point gaps between how whites and blacks have been voting in the primaries, given the hysteria over all the imagined racism every time a Clinton supporter opens his/her mouth, given the weepy victimization seen from time to time in the Clinton camp--all distracting from what Paul Krugman now correctly calls one of the great economic disasters in the history of the planet--we as a nation are just nowhere near mature enough to have a democracy of any sort. We just can't handle it.
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Posted at March 15, 2008 10:39 AM in response to The Irrelevance of Obama's Minister

Elizabeth Warren is a treasure. Her posts on TPM are nearly always the most enlightening on the site. So thanks for this and all the good work you do.
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One has to wonder, who makes the laws that clear the way for this kind of thuggery? Don't people who work for a living have ANY representation at ANY level of government?
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Finally, so many discussions of our economy and politics occur in a vacuum. So, one wonders as well, do other civilized nations have these problems with their credit industries? Are credit card companies allowed to prey like vampires on, say, helpless
Belgians, Finns and Spaniards?

Posted at March 9, 2008 9:24 PM in response to Credit Squeeze

Didn't youth leave the labor movement behind, and not the other way around? So shouldn't we be urging young people to look to labor, not labor to look to the young?
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The Port Huron statement marked the end of the old left, not the beginning of the new, with its multiculturalism, identity politics, rainbow this-and-that and globalization.
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If you want to unite the left, the movement is going to have to be in the other direction. I'm no great fan of unions. I've never worked under one, but of the people I've known who have, all but one have had nothing but negative things to say about them.
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Nonetheless, I think unions are necessary--just as much for those of us who don't have access to them as those who are members. Politically, they're spot on. It's up to the rest of liberaldom--or the progressive movement or whatever we're supposed to call ourselves these days--to move toward labor.
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One help would be for the Dems--the next time they have the White House and Congress--to make damned sure to pass legislation right away to make it dead simple for labor to organize. Somehow, that never seems to get done.

Posted at March 9, 2008 5:00 PM in response to Labor's Generation Gap