Surprise!! Obama Grasping Centrist Banner in Debt Impasse [ANNOTATED]

Straight from the official establishment paper, and giving credence to the myth of a “progressive”/leftish Obama: the man is now “moving” center, as if this oily and supremely cynical betrayer of the working class interest had ever been on the left, as his most cynical or deranged accusers have argued.  The more telling passages are bolded.  Of course, disregard all the puffery and misleading crap packed into the piece by the Times’ stenographers.—Eds

July 11, 2011

By , NYTimes
OUR ANNOTATION ARE IN BRACKETS [ ]

WASHINGTON — President Obama made no apparent headway on Monday in his attempt to forge a crisis-averting budget deal (THERE IS NO CRISIS, ONLY A FABRICATED ONE], but he put on full display his effort to position himself as a pragmatic centrist willing to confront both parties and address intractable problems. [TIMES IS HERE ACTING AS A P.R. ASSET TO OBAMA AND THE DEMS]

At a news conference preceding the latest round of debt-reduction talks with Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders, Mr. Obama said he would not accept a temporary agreement to kick the problem down the road a few weeks or months.  He said that he was willing to take the heat from his own party to move beyond entrenched ideological positions and that Republicans should do the same. And he continued to insist on “the biggest deal possible,” saying that now is the best opportunity for the nation to address its long-term fiscal challenges. [BIG OF HIM TO MAKE DEALS BLOWING AWAY WHATEVER SAFETY NET THE AMERICAN PEOPLE STILL HAVE, UNDER SOME OF THE MOST CYNICAL PRETEXTS. THIS ADMINISTRATION SIMPLY DEFINES SCUM. ]

Republicans dismissed his performance as political theater [THE SHEER GALL, THE KETTLE CALLING THE POT BLACK]. But Mr. Obama’s remarks appeared to be aimed at independent voters as well as at Congressional leaders, and stood in contrast to the Republican focus on the party’s conservative base, both in the budget showdown and in presidential politics.

Mr. Obama’s remarks were among the clearest expressions yet of a repositioning effort [REBRANDING IN CLASSIC OPPORTUNIST COWARDLY FASHION, TYPICAL] that has been under way since the midterm elections last November, when Republicans captured the House and made inroads in the Senate.

Seeking to shed the image of big-government liberal [SIC] that Republicans used effectively against him last year, he has made or offered policy compromises on an array of issues and cast himself in the role of the adult referee for both parties’ gamesmanship, or the parent of stubborn children.

“If we think it’s hard now, imagine how these guys are going to be thinking six months from now in the middle of election season where they’re all up,” he said.  “It’s not going to get easier.  It’s going to get harder.  So we might as well do it now — pull off the Band-Aid, eat our peas.”  [EASY FOR HIM TO SAY.]

He added, “We keep on talking about this stuff, and we have these high-minded pronouncements about how we’ve got to get control of the deficit and how we owe it to our children and our grandchildren [CHEAP INVOCATIONS]. Well, let’s step up.  Let’s do it.  I’m prepared to do it.  I’m prepared to take on significant heat from my party to get something done.  And I expect the other side should be willing to do the same thing.” [SELLING HIS BASE OWN THE RIVER HAS BEEN HIS SIGNATURE ALL ALONG, NOTHING NEW HERE. PURE CYNICAL KABUKI WITH THE COMPLICIT RETHUGLICANS.]

Mr. Obama did not shake Republicans’ resolve to oppose any increases in taxes for wealthy Americans and businesses, as he proposes. “Eat our peas?” asked a mocking news release from the office of Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, placing the blaming for the impasse on Mr. Obama for demanding “job crushing tax hikes.”

Mr. Obama used his news conference to counter Republicans’ attacks suggesting that he wanted immediate tax increases. With the economy still weak and unemployment high, he said, tax increases should not take effect before 2013 [OUTRAGEOUS, JUST MORE CRAPPY PRETEXTS. WHO WILL BE ALIBE BY 2013?] and even then should affect only corporate jet owners, oil companies, millionaires — including himself — and billionaires. (Mr. Obama has long pressed [ pressed in rhetorical terms but never seriously fought or stuck to his guns like GW Bush] for higher taxes on income starting at $250,000.)

Denying he had “some grand ambition to create a bigger government,” Mr. Obama said that in trying to solve the debt problem, “if you don’t have revenues, it means you are putting more of a burden on the people who can least afford it. And that’s not fair. And I think the American people agree with me on that.”

Mr. Obama also called on resistant Democrats to compromise on “trimming benefits” for the entitlement programs [THESE ARE ENTITLEMENTS BECAUSE THEY ARE ENTITLEMENTS, THEY ARE NOT HANDOUTS, AS THE INNUENDOS SUGGEST. OF COURSE SUCH ELEMENTARY CLARIFICATION WILL NEVER COME FROM HIS LIPS OR THE PROSTITUTED PUNDITS AND FELLOW DEMOCRATS], including Social Security, to ensure its solvency for future generations. [THERE IS NO PROBLEM WITH SOCIAL SECURITY; AND IF THERE IS ONE IT CAN BE EASILY FIXED. BY RAISING THE INCOME CAPS, FOR EXAMPLE.  SEE OUR NUMEROUS PIECES ON THIS TOPIC.]

“I think the American people want to see something done,” Mr. Obama said, echoing the stance of many independent and moderate voters reflected in polls and focus groups. “They feel a sense of urgency, both about the breakdown in our political process and also about the situation in our economy.”

In a break with many presidential candidates who first appeal to their party’s base to win the nomination, Mr. Obama from the earliest days of his 2008 campaign sought support from independent voters. Though liberals were attracted to him for his opposition to the Iraq war, Mr. Obama more broadly reached out to independents with his calls for bipartisanship and problem-solving; his campaign saw expanding the pool of primary and caucus voters as the only way to defeat the party establishment favorite, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Independents also powered Mr. Obama’s victory over his Republican rival, Senator John McCain. But since Mr. Obama entered the White House, polls showed, many abandoned him as the economic downturn persisted, and he pursued an ambitious domestic agenda topped by an overhaul of the health insurance system.

By November’s midterm elections, some national polls showed a majority of independents disapproved of his job performance, and winning them back has been central to the White House’s political strategy. [ENTICING THE SUCKERS ONE MORE TIME]

This year, support among independents is up, though Mr. Obama still has a way to go to regain his former standing. A New York Times/CBS News poll in June gave Mr. Obama a 50 percent approval rating among independents, up five points from the start of the year, though a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in June had 50 percent of independents disapproving of the job he is doing.

“There was never a discussion of, ‘Let’s sit down and reposition ourselves.’ There were discussions of returning to first principles and the things that motivated him to run,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior political strategist. “This is what he talked about all through the 2008 campaign — that we need to put solving problems ahead of scoring political points, and we have to think about not just the next election but the next generation.”

But David Winston, a Republican strategist for Mr. Boehner and other Republican leaders, said Mr. Obama was “putting a poison pill” into the debt talks by his insistence on higher revenue, and drawing clear lines between the parties that would benefit Republicans.

“We have two clearly different economic viewpoints,” Mr. Winston said. “And from the speaker’s point of view, if you increase taxes you’re going to contract the economy and that is going to lead to a job loss. And right now we can’t do that.”

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The strange silencing of liberal America

By John Pilger

US President Barack Obama speaks in front of a screen showing his Twitter message at the start of a ‘Twitter Town Hall’ July 6, 2011. Photograph: Getty Images.

How does political censorship work in liberal societies? When my film Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia was banned in the United States in 1980, the broadcaster PBS cut all contact. Negotiations were ended abruptly; phone calls were not returned. Something had happened. But what? Year Zero had already alerted much of the world to Pol Pot’s horrors, but it also investigated the critical role of the Nixon administration in the tyrant’s rise to power and the devastation of Cambodia.

Six months later, a PBS official told me: “This wasn’t censorship. We’re into difficult political days in Washington. Your film would have given us problems with the Reagan administration. Sorry.”

In Britain, the long war in Northern Ireland spawned a similar, deniable censorship. The journalist Liz Curtis compiled a list of more than 50 television films that were never shown or indefinitely delayed. The word “ban” was rarely used, and those responsible would invariably insist they believed in free speech.

The Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, believes in free speech. The foundation’s website says it is “dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity and creativity”. Authors, film-makers and poets make their way to a sanctum of liberalism bankrolled by the billionaire Patrick Lannan in the tradition of Rockefeller and Ford.

The foundation also awards “grants” to America’s liberal media, such as Free Speech TV, the Foundation for National Progress (publisher of the magazine Mother Jones), the Nation Institute and the TV and radio programme Democracy Now!. In Britain, it has been a supporter of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, of which I am one of the judges. In 2008, Patrick Lannan backed Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, he is “devoted” to Obama.

World of not-knowing

On 15 June, I was due in Santa Fe, having been invited to share a platform with the distinguished American journalist David Barsamian. The foundation was also to host the US premiere of my new film, The War You Don’t See, which investigates the false image-making of warmakers, especially Obama.

I was about to leave for Santa Fe when I received an email from the Lannan Foundation official organising my visit. The tone was incredulous. “Something has come up,” she wrote. Patrick Lannan had called her and ordered all my events to be cancelled. “I have no idea what this is all about,” she wrote.

Baffled, I asked that the premiere of my film be allowed to go ahead, as the US distribution largely depended on it. She repeated that “all” my events were cancelled, “and this includes the screening of your film”. On the Lannan Foundation website, “cancelled” appeared across a picture of me. There was no explanation. None of my phone calls was returned, nor subsequent emails answered. A Kafka world of not-knowing descended.

The silence lasted a week until, under pressure from local media, the foundation put out a terse statement that too few tickets had been sold to make my visit “viable”, and that “the Foundation regrets that the reason for the cancellation was not explained to Mr Pilger or to the public at the time the decision was made”. Doubts were cast by a robust editorial in the Santa Fe New Mexican. The paper, which has long played a prominent role in promoting Lannan Foundation events, disclosed that my visit had been cancelled before the main advertising and previews were published. A full-page interview with me had to be pulled hurriedly. “Pilger and Barsamian could have expected closer to a packed 820-seat Lensic [arts centre].”

The manager of The Screen, the Santa Fe cinema that had been rented for the premiere, was called late at night and told to kill all his online promotion for my film. He was given no explanation, but took it on himself to reschedule the film for 23 June. It was a sell-out, with many people turned away. The idea that there was no public interest was demonstrably not true.

Symptom of suppression

Theories? There are many, but nothing is proven. For me, it is all reminiscent of long shadows cast during the cold war. “Something is going to surface,” said Barsamian. “They can’t keep the lid on this.”

My 15 June talk was to have been about the collusion of American liberalism in a permanent state of war and in the demise of cherished freedoms, such as the right to call governments to account. In the US, as in Britain, serious dissent — free speech — has been substantially criminalised. Obama the black liberal, the PC exemplar, the marketing dream, is as much a warmonger as George W Bush. His score is six wars. Never in US presidential history has the White House prosecuted so many whistleblowers, yet this truth-telling, this exercise of true citizenship, is at the heart of America’s constitutional First Amendment. Obama’s greatest achievement is having seduced, co-opted and silenced much of liberal opinion in the US, including the anti-war movement.

The reaction to the cancellation has been illuminating. The brave, such as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, were appalled and said so. Similarly, many ordinary Americans called in to radio stations and have written to me, recognising a symptom of far greater suppression. But some exalted liberal voices have been affronted that I dared whisper the word censorship about such a beacon of “cultural freedom”. The embarrassment of those who wish to point both ways is palpable. Others have pulled down the shutters and said nothing. Given their patron’s ruthless show of power, it is understandable. For them, the Russian dissident poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko once wrote: “When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.”

JOHN PILGER, the internationally renowned investigative journalist needs no introduction. 

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Obama administration shuts down investigations into Bush-era torture

By Tom Carter, WSWS.ORG 

Eric Holder: As unwilling to do the right thing as his sponsor and boss at the White House.

As part of its cover-up of Bush administration war crimes, the Obama administration announced June 30 that it would shut down 99 investigations into deaths of prisoners in US custody during the so-called “war on terror,” leaving only two investigations with the potential to develop into criminal prosecutions.

The announcement underscores the fact that the anti-democratic policies developed during the presidency of George W. Bush continue unchallenged under President Barack Obama, who is doing everything in his power to keep the lid on the crimes of his predecessor.

Following the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration quickly and quietly erected a network of secret prisons and “black sites,” where opponents of US imperialism in the Middle East—as well as, in many cases, their friends, relatives and acquaintances—were jailed, tortured and murdered.

 

The Obama administration has continued and expanded the anti-democratic methods of the Bush administration, including the use of presidential assassination orders, indefinite detention without trial or charges, blocking court cases that threaten to reveal torture, domestic spying, prosecution of whistle-blowers, “rendition” of alleged terrorists to countries that practice torture, open violations of US and international law, including the War Powers Act in the case of Libya and the Geneva Conventions more generally, and the maintenance of illegal torture camps such as the infamous facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The administration’s 101 investigations into torture deaths were a token measure to begin with. The investigations were initiated in 2009 and were designed to placate popular disgust with torture and other crimes carried out under Bush.

The 101 cases by no means include every death in US custody, and rather conveniently, no case in which the torture victim survived was selected for investigation. The investigations proceeded on the explicit basis that the infamous Bush Justice Department torture memos would not be challenged. Neither would the Bush-era policy of “enhanced interrogation” (a euphemism for torture). The only question that was to be pursued in the investigations was whether the Central Intelligence Agency operatives in the 101 selected death cases had violated Bush administration guidelines. Saddled with such limitations from the outset, the investigations could barely scratch the surface of government-sanctioned war crimes.

Echoing Obama’s mantra of “looking forward, not backward,” Attorney General Holder announced June 30 that 99 of the 101 cases did not warrant further investigation.

“I welcome the news that the broader inquiries are behind us,” remarked Leon Panetta, who left his post as CIA director July 1 to become secretary of defense. “We are now finally about to close this chapter of our agency’s history,” he added. Panetta was referring not to closing the chapter in which torture took place, but closing the chapter in which the agency’s practices were subjected to any form of official scrutiny.

While the two ongoing investigations remain officially secret, some details have been leaked to the press. One case involves the murder of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; the other case involves a murder at the secret CIA “Salt Pit” prison in Afghanistan. These two cases are remarkable both for the shocking brutality of the murders themselves as well as for the cold-blooded “business as usual” attitude of the CIA operatives involved.

Only the most depraved intellect could have designed the nightmarish “Salt Pit,” located northeast of the Kabul, Afghanistan airport, in which a young Afghan man named Gul Rahman was murdered on November 20, 2002.

Ghairat Baheer, a physician and son-in-law of an Afghan political figure associated with opposition to the US occupation, survived the Salt Pit and gave a chilling account to the press of the conditions surrounding Rahman’s death. Baheer and Rahman were old friends, and they were abducted by CIA operatives at around the same time in October, 2002. They were taken together to the Salt Pit for “enhanced interrogation.”

The CIA chose an abandoned brick factory for the installation. According to Baheer, an unimaginable stench permeated the Salt Pit, where prisoners were kept in windowless cells with metal buckets for latrines. Prisoners called it the “dark prison” because there were no windows and no electric lights.

Prisoners spent much of their time in total darkness. The CIA operatives running the prison wore full face masks and used medieval-type torches to make their way through the blackness. In many cells, prisoners were shackled naked to the rough walls with metal chains. No expense was spared to ensure maximum ghoulish terror.

Baheer said he was forced to sleep naked on a rough concrete floor next to his latrine bucket, when he was not chained to the wall of his cell. The cell was perpetually dark.

CIA operatives took turns repeatedly torturing the two men. Among the countless horrors, the two men would be tied to chairs, their torturers would sit on their stomachs, threaten to kill them, stage mock executions, beat them, or douse them with water and leave them to freeze naked in the unheated cells.

According to Baheer, Rahman was stubborn and defiant during the interrogations. The details of the events of the morning of November 20, 2002 are still unclear, but it is known that at some point Rahman’s captors stripped him naked below the waist, shackled his hands over his head, brutally beat him, and then doused him with water. Within hours, Rahman had died of hypothermia.

The Salt Pit prison was closed last year after it became the subject of international scrutiny and survivors began to describe to the press the hideous terrors that took place inside. In closing the prison, the CIA no doubt also had in mind the destruction of any physical evidence of the crimes that had been committed there.

The CIA appears overall to have regarded the Salt Pit as a successful operation. According to information leaked to the Associated Press, the CIA Kabul station chief has been promoted at least three times since Rahman’s death.

The second of the two ongoing investigations involves the murder of Manadel al-Jamadi at the hands of CIA operatives in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq on November 4, 2003.

Jamadi, an alleged insurgent, was abducted violently from his house outside Baghdad in 2003 by Navy SEALs—the same feared and secretive military force that has been lauded in the bourgeois media for the murder of Osama Bin Laden. Apparently, Navy SEALs pursued Jamadi into his kitchen, where he made a ferocious last stand, toppling his stove onto one of the SEALs. In retaliation, the SEALs beat him savagely before turning him over to the CIA for interrogation at Abu Ghraib. Naturally, no trial or legal process of any kind was involved in this operation.

Forty-five minutes after he walked into Abu Ghraib, Jamadi was dead. It appears that once he arrived, Jamadi was subjected to further beatings and was chained to the wall, after which he lost consciousness and asphyxiated. Jamadi’s bruised and bloodstained corpse is featured in a number of the infamous Abu Ghraib photos, with grinning US military personnel standing over him and giving the “thumbs up.”

For as yet unexplained reasons, Jamadi’s corpse was packed in ice and stored in a shower in an attempt to prevent decomposition (military officials jokingly referred to him as “the Iceman”), and CIA officials mysteriously attached an intravenous tube to one of his arms before whisking the corpse out of the facility the following day. It appears that not long after Jamadi’s death a heated dispute broke out between the CIA and the Navy SEALs over which organization would take the blame. CIA operatives at Abu Ghraib rapidly moved to destroy all of the evidence of Jamadi’s death, including a bloodstained hood, and they scrubbed clean the death chamber.

While the Rahman and Jamadi murders constitute only the tip of the iceberg, they expose the day-to-day reality of CIA operations in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. The CIA, tasked with discovering and silently “taking out” opponents of the occupations, operates outside the bounds of US and international law. When a federal court ordered the CIA to release 92 video tapes of “enhanced interrogations” in 2005, the CIA responded by destroying the tapes, a brazenly criminal maneuver for which no official to this day has been prosecuted.

The decision by the Obama administration to shut down virtually all of its investigations is a clear signal that the war crimes will continue. Indeed, in the bourgeois press, Holder’s announcement last Thursday was generally interpreted as a green light from the Obama administration to resume and escalate the practice of torture and murder of political opponents in the Middle East. The headline of an article in the Washington Post read, “Could Torture Make a Comeback?”

A deeply reactionary and chilling editorial in the Wall Street Journal, titled “Vindicating the CIA: Ending a Disgraceful Investigation,” went further. Gloating over Holder’s announcement, the editors declared, “The disgrace is that this probe was ever undertaken.”

The editors continued, “The probe has still done considerable harm by creating a culture of second-guessing and political retribution that CIA operatives must now consider as they try to protect against terror threats.” Translated from the euphemistic language of the so-called “war on terror” into plain English, this means that the intelligence agencies should be permitted to go about the grisly work of torturing and murdering their enemies in secret without any restrictions or oversight whatsoever.

The fact that this view enjoys wide support within the ruling class should be taken as a dire warning. How will this same ruling class respond to the development of a popular movement within the US that directly challenges its interests?

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Let’s go again with the Lesser Evil: US teachers’ union endorses Obama for 2012 election

US teachers’ union endorses Obama for 2012 election

By Alexander Fangmann and Jerry White , WSWS.ORG
6 July 2011

Obama: Lesser Evilism once again protects a corrupt politician from just retribution.

The National Education Association—whose 3.2 million members have been a major target of the Obama administration’s attack on public school teachers—became the first major union to endorse the Democratic president’s reelection bid in 2012.

On Monday, 72 percent of the 8,000 delegates attending the union’s national convention in Chicago endorsed the president for a second term. “President Barack Obama shares our vision for a stronger America,” Dennis Van Roekel, president of NEA, declared. “He has never wavered from talking about the importance of education or his dedication to a vibrant middle class.”

Indeed, the president never stops talking about the importance of education while his administration wages an unrelenting war against public education on behalf of the financial and corporate interests that are setting out to destroy it.

As for the president’s dedication to a “vibrant middle class” Van Roekel must be referring to the upper-middle-class managers who run the American trade unions. The NEA president made $397,721 in total compensation last year, nearly six times the salary of an average public school teacher.

As for rank-and-file teachers, the president has only shown a dedication to destroying their jobs and living standards and to vilify them for poor student performance that is largely the result of poverty and decades of school cuts.

Hardly a day goes by without a report of some new attack on teachers and public education. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, since August of 2008 over 200,000 positions in local school districts have been eliminated. Another 227,000 teachers and staff face the axe in 2011-12, according to the American Association of School Administrators.

In school districts like Detroit—“Ground Zero” in the president’s campaign for school “reform”—dozens of schools have been closed or turned over to privately operated charter schools. Throughout the country teachers have been victimized, forced to take pay cuts, work longer hours without additional compensation, and suffer layoffs as a result of budget cuts.

President Obama applauded the decision of school authorities in Rhode Island to fire all of the teachers and staff at Central Falls High School when they rejected a “turnaround” plan that would have involved major concessions, saying the school board was “showing courage and doing the right thing for kids.”

Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education and the author of that turnaround plan, has been charged with implementing this model all over the country after overseeing its expansion in Chicago when he was the Chicago Public Schools CEO.

Many states have now implemented education “reform” bills, designed to win money from Obama’s Race to the Top program, by implementing teacher evaluations based on student test scores, eliminating teacher tenure, lowering the standards for teacher education, expanding the use of charter schools, and carrying out mass firings at so-called poorly performing schools. The result has been a disaster, with masses of students displaced and tens of thousands of teachers out of work.

In this attack, the NEA and the other major teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have been full partners. Far from opposing the destruction of public education, the NEA and AFT executives fully agree that the working class must pay for the economic crisis and the systematic transfer of wealth into the hands of the financial elite carried out by Republicans and Democrats alike.

In private, NEA officials told teachers Obama is the “lesser evil” compared to the Republicans. But the Obama administration has gone further in attacking the rights and living standards of teachers than any Republican administration. The NEA endorsement of Obama is motivated solely by the narrow institutional concerns of the labor apparatus.

Unlike the Republicans—who have sought to destroy or circumvent the unions—the Democratic Party has utilized the services of the NEA and AFT to implement its attacks. By continuing to lavish tens of millions in campaign contributions on this big business party, the labor bureaucracy hopes to preserve its legal and financial interests, especially its ability to deduct dues from teachers’ dwindling paychecks. While imposing pay cuts on its members, the NEA voted at the convention to raise the level of union dues.

The NEA delegates also voted to support “teacher evaluation” methods based on student achievement, which have been used to facilitate the firing of educators across the country. In doing so, the NEA said it wanted to play a greater role in determining which teachers would be terminated.

The NEA and AFT are thoroughly hostile to the interests of teachers. When teachers spearheaded a fight against Republican Governor Scott Walker’s anti-worker bill in Wisconsin, the NEA-affiliated Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) worked with the Democrats to sabotage the struggle. It then rushed to sign contract extensions that gave up everything—freezing wages, requiring higher pension contributions and introducing health insurance payments—in return for the continued collection of union dues.

In Illinois, the NEA and AFT collaborated with the Democratic-controlled state government in crafting the “reform” legislation known as Senate Bill 7, which imposes longer school workdays and years without compensation, facilitates the firing of teachers and all but criminalizes the right to strike. Again, however, the labor managers maintain a “seat at the table” to impose these attacks.

Although the NEA is the first union to endorse Obama, it is only the first of what will be many endorsements. The Democratic Party is thoroughly right-wing and anti-worker, but for the union officialdom this is something they can live with, since the Democrats employ their services to push through their agenda.

Some concern was voiced among delegates about the endorsement of Obama, given the record of attacks. Clearly sensing the unease among some of the delegates, Vice President Joe Biden gave a demagogic speech saying any differences with the union were “more a fight within the family” than a fundamental disagreement.

The NEA endorsement underscores the necessity for teachers and all those that oppose the attack on public education to break with this rotten organization, and develop a political movement—based on a socialist program—to fight the Obama administration and the capitalist system, which it defends.

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Andrew Cuomo’s Flawed Liberalism

Yes, he deserves credit for pushing gay marriage through. But New York’s governor is still paying far too much attention to the millionaires, and not enough to the masses.

By Eric Alterman

Andrew Cuomo: a Bill Clinton with an Italian surname?

If you take a look behind the dramatic, and in many respects thrilling New York State vote to legalize marriage for all people—gay or straight—one cannot help but conclude that it’s lucky my state is populated by a great many wealthy homosexuals. Because without them, basic human rights for gays—and pretty much every other victim of discrimination–would be at the mercy of the same forces that are destroying almost every other aspect of traditional liberalism in America.

When even a card-carrying liberal like Alterman calls a guy like Cuomo “flawed”, the man has got to be pretty bad.

To see the plain truth of our political lives today—that “money talks and bullshit walks”—as one of those ABSCAM criminals so pithily put it, one need only look closely at the backstory to this (genuinely) historic moment. To win the necessary votes for passage, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and his team turned not to Republican senators or their constitutents, but to their top-dollar donors. People like former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and the billionaire Paul Singer, who speaks proudly of the “wedding album of my son and son-in-law,” married in Massachusetts, and the hedge fund managers Cliff Asness and Daniel Loeb who “had the influence and the money to insulate nervous senators from conservative backlash if they supported the marriage measure.” Within days, Cuomo had $1 million in his Republican gay marriage fund and a “path to victory.”

Cuomo, himself, is a perfect symbol of the transition of American liberalism from an ideology focused on the standing of working people to one based on issues of social and cultural freedom that do not interfere with anyone’s ability to make money hand over fist without paying too much of it in taxes.

Gay marriage advocates initially complained of Cuomo that he did not endorse legally sanctioned same-sex knot-tying until 2006. But to be fair, it was always a forgone conclusion. Cuomo lives in what used to be called “sin” with his girlfriend, Sandra Lee, who has an openly gay brother. He is no prude, just a pragmatist. Ever since Bella Abzug found herself at a fundraiser during her 1970 run for Congress at the Continental Baths—where Bette Midler got her start—gays have become an increasingly important and influential source of funds for New York (and later national) Democrats. (Abzug called her gay adviser, Doug Ireland, and screamed “You cretin. What have you done to me? I’m up here in these fucking baths—filled with guys in towels held up by Bella buttons and some are only wearing the buttons and not the towels!”) Ted Kennedy held the first fundraiser as a presidential candidate among openly gay people during his 1980 campaign and the openly gay author and financial adviser, Andrew Tobias, became Democratic Party Treasurer in1999.

This inexorable march through America’s political institutions has largely been a ground game of paying politicians and winning public opinion—which has been trending both much more friendly to gay rights specifically as well as much more libertarian on all matters. When the numbers reached a sufficient plateau—60 percent in favor of gay marriage in New York—it became easier for a cautious, poll-driven politician like Cuomo to hop on board. That moment is still a ways off nationally; only 53 percent nationwide say they support gay marriage. (Barack Obama, it must be noted, happily accepted  the campaign donations of over 600 wealthy gays last Thursday in Manhattan, but was not willing to take the leap into endorsing gay marriage.)

“Yes, the arc of history bends, on occasion, in the direction of justice. But you had better be able to afford the admission price.

”

Amidst this moment of joy for so many, a transformation in the nature of American liberalism can be seen in the transition from one New York Governor Cuomo to the next. As one profiler of Andrew’s put it, “Mario was an FDR liberal (and child of immigrants) with an unyielding faith in the government’s power to improve people’s lives; Andrew is a product of the Nixon era, when that faith was tested and the government again had to prove its competence.” That’s a generous way of saying that while he is, with his party, progressive on social issues, Andrew Cuomo sucks up to money just about as energetically as his Republican opposition. His impressive leadership on gay marriage—where he put money to work for social liberal causes—has been matched by an equally intensive commitment to ensuring that the wealthy are not asked to make any special contributions to what used to be called “the public good.” When Cuomo proposed recently that New York would cap annual increases in the amount of property taxes collected annually by school districts and towns at 2 percent a year or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower, he tried to explain to the Old Man that the decision was “operational,” while same sex marriage, he insisted, was “at the heart of leadership and progressive government.”

The same liberal Democrat who fights for gay marriage is presiding over abudget agreement that will cost New York City schools 2,600 teachers, 600 more than estimated, and lay off 1,000 city workers, many of whom work in health care for the poor, at a time when the need for both could hardly be greater. Cuomo, who one must sometimes remind oneself, is a Democrat, also fought tooth and nail to ensure the death of New York’s millionaire tax, at exactly the moment when its proceeds might have been able to prevent exactly the kinds of cuts described above. In his willingness to play “bulldog for the rich,” as Michael Powell puts it, he is distinguishable from Roger Ailes’ favorite politician,  right-wing New Jersey Governor Chris Christie only in degree, rather than in kind.

There’s a lesson in all this: Yes, the arc of history bends, on occasion, in the direction of justice. But you had better be able to afford the admission price. Sadly the folk who had every right to feel both represented and inspired by the likes of Franklin Roosevelt, Ted Kennedy and Mario Cuomo—the people who Bill Clinton said “work hard and play by the rules” —need not apply.

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Eric Alterman is a distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress and media columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama.

 

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast ateditorial@thedailybeast.com.


 

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