Roger Hickey is co-director of the Campaign for America's Future, an organization launched by 100 prominent Americans to expand the national debate about America's economic future. The Campaign seeks to empower working Americans, middle-class families, and the poor to make their voices heard in support of a populist economic agenda and an expansion of democracy. Recently, Hickey organized and helped to lead a national coalition of citizen leaders known as Americans United to Protect Social Security.
In 1973, Walter Karp wrote Indispensable Enemies, the definitive book on American politics. In that book, Karp argues that the political theatre of feined conflict between the Republican and Democratic parties is necessary to conceal the fact they are both owned by the American aristocracy.
One of the essential facets of this charade playing out in the American media, academia and public square, are supporting actors who help limit the scope of debate and imagination of the American public. Sometimes these actors are aspiring talking heads, ideologues or politicians, but more often than not, they are crass opportunists echoing messages developed by the respective parties or industries they actually represent. Pious progressive poseurs cautioning pragmatism, religious fundamentalists warning of Armageddon, and business-minded authority figures chastising radicals for suggesting fraud is anti-democratic, all play their part in keeping democracy down.
As neoliberals busy themselves
tbarj 2009-09-09
What the "futurists" missed is the fact Obama sold his soul five years ago. Harper's ran an article in 2006 on the deals he made with Wall Street and the DNC to finance his political career. As apologists for the Democratic Party, the futurists and other progressive fronts serve as examples of why the professionalization of activism may seem pragmatic to funders like Tides, but in the end undermines the democratization of capital. Dependency limits strategies.
dutkaman 2009-09-09
Also, to dart's comment, it simply means those people are in the wrong job: From 2000 - 2008: Average federal employee: Pay increase from $51.5k - $79.2k Average private employee: $38.8k - $49.9k
dutkaman 2009-09-09
Let me get this straight... Obama's health-care plan will be written by a committee who's head says he doesn't understand it, passed by a congress who hasn't read it, and who's members are exempt from it, signed by a president who smokes in secret, funded by a treasury chief who did not pay taxes, overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that's broke. What could possibly go wrong?
Wildlander 2009-09-09
Hinchey said that the problem in the Senate is that many democrats are strongly conservative. What that really means is that insurance companies have bought the democrats as well as the republicans. This is going to piss off a lot of people and likely to push folks closer to a revolution in this country.
dart 2009-09-09
Every well practised nod and sideways glance combined with mimicked positive speech patterns merely confirms that obama is a merely a well trained puppet.Despite his expressed approval of a single payer health reform the american people who have suffered falling real incomes since the early 70`s will now have even less support.Excellent article from Matt Taibbi: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29988909/sick_and_wrong.(A fight to the finish between Really Bad and Even Worse)See also RayMcGovern at ICH on what Obama`s Speech should say.
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Did Obama change the game? Pt.2 Hickey: A health reform bill is only beginning of public fight to gain power away from private hands
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