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To: koan who wrote (110129)3/30/2010 9:03:18 PM
From: Cogito Ergo Sum  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 116555
 
Then all those corporate lobbyists are inconsequential ... right ?

The people elect their leaders based on their leader's promises and no leader ever says that he's gonna ki$$ this a$$ and this a$$ and I can't miss that a$$... but somehow they all do... and no that is not directed specifically at Mr. Obama.



To: koan who wrote (110129)3/30/2010 9:05:18 PM
From: Broken_Clock  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 116555
 
Chris Hedges' Columns
Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction

Posted on Jan 24, 2010

truthdig.com
By Chris Hedges

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.



To: koan who wrote (110129)3/30/2010 9:14:13 PM
From: Broken_Clock2 Recommendations  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 116555
 
Is America ‘Yearning for Fascism’?
truthdig.com
Posted on Mar 29, 2010

By Chris Hedges

The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

“We are ruled not by two parties but one party,” Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. “It is the party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded.”

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health care policies is a step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic democracy die.

cont.