Obama and Lincoln: our readers write

CounterVortex

In the inevitable analogy to Abraham Lincoln that Barack Obama has deftly exploited, it is largely forgotten that Lincoln was only pushed to an emancipationist position by two years of civil war. Similarly, whether Obama will embrace a more sweeping agenda—re-negotiate NAFTA, nationalize the banks, instate a “Green New Deal“—may depend on how deeply the American system goes into crisis over the next years. Our January Exit Poll was: “Will Barack Obama be radicalized in office by historical circumstance as Lincoln was?” We received the following responses:

From Margery “Prairie Dog” Coffey in Rosalie, Nebraska:

I certainly hope so. Indications are that Obama does listen and is willing to change. That would give room for hope. On the other hand, will he listen to the people more than the Washington “experts” crowd who have got us into the current mess? It is very isolating to stuff your cabinet with the same old sad-ass crew and not realistic to think they will come up with new ideas.

From the pithy, not to say taciturn, S. McAlpine, somewhere in cyberspace:

Of course.

See our last Exit Poll results.

If you did not answer the Exit Poll, please make a small donation:

  1. Barack obama is no hero
    Of course this is my unpopular opinion.

    All I see progressives doing now-a-days is asking for their wants to be given by the banks. Socially we are going global using the capitalists as our leaders.

    And all the while we give them more power and profit.

    President Obama’s pick for Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, is being urged to lay the foundation for “global governance” by considering “international taxation” measures to loot more money from U.S. taxpayers.

    The recommendation is included in the report, “The Global Agenda 2009.”

    http://mensnewsdaily.com/2009/01/27/global-taxes-and-global-tv-now-on-the-agenda-2/

    Umm, I am putting down the left on this one. (I can put down the right too BTW. I can also put both sides up)

    1. There you go again
      You dismiss the reportage of the New York Times out of hand because it is a “newspaper,” and swallow the claims of far-right websites like the anti-ecologist NZCPR and anti-feminist Mens News Daily. Mareika, you show some signs of intelligence, but you have bizarre double standards where gullibility and skepticism are concerned. If you can find some corroboration about this sinister Davos scheme from a credible source, we’d like to see it. Nobody is minding the store at MND.

      1. NYTs article
        Bill, I haven’t read the NYT article. I checked out the links but … I didn’t see it. I would like to read it before commenting.

        Also be fair … the owner of Men’s News Daily is not an anti feminist. And the article is not anti feminist.

        Personally, I am a non feminist. But I do think men deserve rights also. They should have an ism too because they are not just workers. If heterosexual women have a movement and lesbians, gays, bi-sexuals, a-sexuals and the other 5 genders have a movement then heterosexual men should also. That is not so much intelligence but pure common sense.

        1. deprogramming services not offered here
          The Times story I’m referring to is right here, from our earlier exchange about global warming. You dismissed it because it was from a “newspaper,” as if this somehow discredited it. If you “didn’t read it,” you should have withheld your comment.

          MND is quite explicitly and stridently anti-feminist. The article you quoted was more of the paranoid populist bent, but these birds are clearly of a feather.

          Nobody is denying heterosexual men their rights. So their “movement” can only be an ugly reaction to the others demanding theirs. As in “white pride,” “white power,” “reverse discrimination,” “class warfare” (only applied to the “war” of the poor against the rich, never vice versa), and other such reactionary constructions.

          Look, I’m beginning to think you aren’t that bad-intentioned. But you come across as extremely naive and having been sold a bill of goods by people with a very evil agenda. I don’t have time to be your political tutor. I wish I did, but I just don’t. I suggest you go your local library and check out some Noam Chomsky. He’d be a good place to begin.

          1. I am not the one programmed
            Bill, I have no bad feelings or thoughts at you or at anyone on the left wing or the right wing. I just sit in the middle like the majority and swing from side on side on issues.

            I don’t want to be the political educated type to be honest. I don’t find the fighting humane at all.

            But I like this….

            http://libcom.org/thought/introduction-why-an-everyday-manifesto

            …………

            ON another note, did you ever read the Bank’s manifesto?

            The Bankers Manifesto of 1892

            Revealed by US Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, SR from Minnesota
            before the US Congress sometime during his term of office
            between the years of 1907 and 1917 to warn the citizens.

            “We (the bankers) must proceed with caution and guard every move made, for the lower order of people are already showing signs of restless commotion. Prudence will therefore show a policy of apparently yielding to the popular will until our plans are so far consummated that we can declare our designs without fear of any organized resistance.

            The Farmers Alliance and Knights of Labor organizations in the United States should be carefully watched by our trusted men, and we must take immediate steps to control these organizations in our interest or disrupt them.

            At the coming Omaha Convention to be held July 4th (1892), our men must attend and direct its movement, or else there will be set on foot such antagonism to our designs as may require force to overcome. This at the present time would be premature. We are not yet ready for such a crisis. Capital must protect itself in every possible manner through combination (conspiracy) and legislation.

            The courts must be called to our aid, debts must be collected, bonds and mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible.

            When through the process of the law, the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and easily governed through the influence of the strong arm of the government applied to a central power of imperial wealth under the control of the leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders.

            History repeats itself in regular cycles. This truth is well known among our principal men who are engaged in forming an imperialism of the world. While they are doing this, the people must be kept in a state of political antagonism.

            The question of tariff reform must be urged through the organization known as the Democratic Party, and the question of protection with the reciprocity must be forced to view through the Republican Party.

            By thus dividing voters, we can get them to expand their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us, except as teachers to the common herd. Thus, by discrete action, we can secure all that has been so generously planned and successfully accomplished.”

            THE BANKERS’ MANIFESTO OF 1934

            From New American, February, 1934.

            “Capital must protect itself in every way, through combination and through legislation. Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law, the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of wealth, under control of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an IMPERIALISM of capital to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd. Thus by discrete action we can secure for ourselves what has been generally planned and successfully accomplished.”

            http://nesara.insights2.org/BankersManifesto.html

            There are hundreds of sites on this so take you pick who you want to listen to.

            Also check out all the programmes the left implements. You will see the bankers on every steering board.

  2. Have you heard of this group

    How Communitarians Change the US Legal System with Federal Regulators
    by Niki Raapana, January 10, 2009
    http://nord.twu.net/acl/federalregulators.html

    Across America, the old system crumbles before our eyes. Business and homeowners in every corner of America are trying to understand how the government got so much power. Many of us are busy people who race around all day, working. Most people who own anything here have been working their butt off for years to keep it. Our people aren’t that stupid. They can see that every year their government passes a new law that restricts them from operating freely. A moron can see that all new regulations, acts, taxes, revisions, codes, and executive orders have one thing in common. It’s part of every new ruling. Ask anybody. Every new law gives some new government agency the absolute power to take our property away from us.

    One way (there are several) the communitarians steal our property is through their administrative courts. These are not to be confused with constitutional courts. Often called Hearing and Review Boards, they are appointed agents of the agency who rule on agency rules. What that means is they work for the official Department that also hands out tickets and fines for infractions of Department regulations. The same guy who sits on the sub-committee writing the new regulations can also be the Hearing Examiner who presides over the meetings held to determine the guilt of person’s charged with violating the Department regulations he helped to write. Most Americans assume, because this is what we are taught, that they live under constitutional law. So when an average, busy, hard working American finds himself charged with a crime in an administrative courtroom, there is much confusion.

    Here’s the problem:

    Americans are still taught the government of the United States was created for one purpose, and one purpose only. It was established to “protect and maintain individual rights.” According to the rule of law, there are three very separate branches of government, and every government official must swear allegiance to protect and maintain the rights of every individual citizen in the nation. Our system was designed so that there would always be suspicion between the branches; it was a barrier to a coup or any one branch assuming more power than the Constitution allowed.

    Administrative Procedural Law is communitarian. Communitarianism is the legal theory that claims the rights of individuals must be continuously “balanced” against the common good. The Communitarians believe individual rights hurt the community. So they took it upon themselves to be the community’s “silent voice.” That’s why you never heard of them or their debates over your property and privacy rights. They know people don’t like to sacrifice themselves or their children for the common good. (For years they’re tried to convince Americans to give up their arms. Maybe these two things have something to do with each other.)

    How can a government like ours, established only to protect individual rights, be slowly modified into a communitarian government that protects the rights of the majority to trample individual rights? Without amending the constitution, it had to be accomplished very quietly, at the highest levels of academia and government.

    Communitarianism is the theory that created all the American “protection” agencies at the end of the 18th century. It’s the theory of British Conservation imported in 1901. It’s the theory behind Prohibition which created the DEA (who can never go away). This same theory fueled the protection of American Indian lands, and is used to protect the Palestinians the same way in Gaza today. Rounding up dissidents and holding them in pens to protect them is nothing new to our federal government. Everyone knows the feds stole Japanese businesses and put them in prison camps for the community good. But not everyone is told the reasoning behind these violent, aggressive, and sometimes genocidal policies. Nobody ever explains it is communitarian balancing.

    The theoretical foundation for communitarianism is a clever blending of ancient philosophy, theory, mysticism, alchemy, cabala, mythology, legends, religions and I would add delusions. Adhering to the dialectical form of advancing knowledge and utilizing both Hegel’s ideological framework and Marx’s materialist interpretation, the communitarian framers set up a series of conflicts that would help mankind achieve a higher state of social evolution. God told them to protect the community at large (who simply doesn’t need to know that yet). (1) Communitarians believe they are more advanced spiritually and morally than the average world citizen, and they’ve got the global public completely fooled into agreeing with their ego maniacal self assessment.

    The assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 was a big boost to our human progress. His successor introduced massive communitarian agencies to take control over American lands. Conservation was a British policy used to destroy and rebuild local industry and agriculture in their Middle Eastern colonies. Teddy Roosevelt thought it was a great idea. Since good ole TR knew that in the U.S. it had to sound a lot nicer, our first communitarian president (by default) promoted it as a way to protect the people’s lands. Over the last century the agency created to “protect” public lands has grown into a massive domestic armed enforcement interdepartmental agency with supreme abatement and local policng power. Today their open mission is to promote sustainability, a vague communitarian concept of “protecting” the future.

    Over the past fifty years, protecting the land expanded to protecting the environment, and now, in 2009, it’s expanding to protect our children from used clothes and toys. A federal law passed by the US Congress empowers an environmental protection agency to demand American compliance to expensive testing prior to the sale or donation of used children’s items. The very last vestige of American political economic practices, our right to donate our goods and engage in unimpeded second hand bartering and sales, is gone. This couldn’t have just happened overnight.

    It didn’t. Beginning with the creation of a new agency called the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887, by the time of the New Deal the idea of balanced agency powers over the constitution was firmly entrenched in American lawyer’s thinking. After WWII it became firmly entrenched in the American legal system. (2)

    Internationally, this same theory was used to legitimize the Nuremberg Tribunals and it was the moral justification for implementing the Marshall Plan for Rebuilding Europe. Today it’s suggested we need Obama to establish a Marshall Plan for Rebuilding the USA. Oh yeah, and this was also the theory used for creating the Peace Palace, International Court at the Hague, the Criminal Court in Rome, the Sanhedrin Court in Jerusalem, the League of Nations, the United Nations, the EU, the WTO and all new Free Trade Unions.

    Communitarian Law is cited by the Chinese, the Russians, the Pope and the EU. It came to the US via several back doors. In 1884, the London Fabian Society began training “change agents” to quietly infiltrate established governments. (It was a London Fabian who tutored McKinley’s assassin in anarchist action.) Peaceful Fabian theory is used by some Israelis to justify Zionist occupation and war in the Middle East. 1887, besides being the year legal balancing was introduced in the US, is also the year of the First Zionist Convention in Switzerland. Of interest to students of Zionism, the communitarian debate “between public power and private right” began in the 20th century under Zionist justices sitting on the US Supreme Court. In 1979, the Fabian-Zionist Communitarian guru Dr. Amitai Etzioni began making suggestions to US Presidents on ways to creating new volunteer and enforcement agencies in the US. Don’t think for a moment that this idea for a citizen military agency came from either Obama or Biden. Today it is openly reported in the US Press that the current US Supreme Court bases some of its decisions on the Talmud. President Bush says our legal system is based in ancient Judaic Law. He’s not lying if he’s talking about Administrative Law.

    On February 10, another new regulatory agency will assume power to confiscate our property. This agency wasn’t created to take our land, limit our construction or protect our water and air. Oh no. The communitarians have already done all that. They’re moving forward. This agency was created to steal our children’s clothes and toys. (3)

    We can look around any American neighborhood and see what the communitarians have done to our country. The signs of change are everywhere. Conversations among Americans always include a reminder from one person telling another about some new regulation with, “Oh no, you can’t do that anymore,” or “You have to get a permit for that now.” Even when the new regulation makes absolutely no sense, people are made to feel a sense of shame if they don’t agree to the new requirement. This insane manifestation of communitarian federal agency power is now going to tell American mothers they cannot buy or share used children’s clothes? These wackos think that by calling their invasive data gathering program the American Community Survey (4) our people will believe they have to answer all the questions?

    The most often heard justification for a new bizarre government agency’s demand is that “everyone has to do it.” No. They don’t. They really, really don’t.

    Sources:

    1. http://nord.twu.net/acl/manifesto.html
    2.. http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/6/3/4/5/pages63452/p63452-3.php
    3. http://www.uspirg.org/issues/toy-safety
    4. http://www.census.gov/acs/www/index.html

    1. You really are obsessed
      Do you think you are going to convert us to your far-right philosophy by endlessly posting obscurantist screeds? “Communitarianism” doesn’t go nearly far enough. It is absurd to hold up abstract “individual rights” as the sole legitimate raison d’etre of government in a society which is founded on vast wealth inequities. For instance, my “individual rights” as a tenant in New York City are best protected by rent control laws which circumscribe the property rights of my landlord. But I’m sure your pal Nikki doesn’t see it that way.

      1. I am a pain, I know
        I am interested in understanding in my own way. I take information from many sources because I think that if you learn from only one source you don’t see the whole picture.

        I guess I will end up angering you but I have to say I am learning a lot through you. But I am not against you. I just challenge.

        I work in the community and sometimes end up interviewed by the media.

        I don’t want to do wrong. The world is taking big risks in it’s globalisation. How can any of us be sure that there are some good people in charge who know exactly what they are doing? We can’t because they can’t know everything? And can we even trust them no matter how good their intentions?

        I have heard from other old school union representatives that democracy was taken from them also. Have you noticed this yourself?

        1. Glad you’re learning, anyway…
          We are strong believers in getting information from multiple sources (it is the purpose of this website to digest news from a wide variety of sources). Your problem is that you dismiss information from mainstream sources like the New York Times out of hand and treat arcana from far-right fringe websites with credulity. Sources like the Times should certainly be questioned, but it is absurd to give real newspapers and the lunatic fringe equal weight.

          Likewise, we also oppose corporate globalization, but this right-wing paranoia about sinister banking conspiracies to instate communitarian tyranny or whatever is really off-base. The reasons to oppose globalization are clear enough: the attack on labor rights and environmental standards, the “race to the bottom,” the erosion of biological and cultural diversity. You don’t need to resort to any conspiracy theories.

    2. toxic toys?
      Glancing over this I followed one of the links. If I read it right this character is against regulating toxic levels in children’s toys(?!). If so this is a classic case of how ‘libertarians’ resemble high school Star Wars obsessives (see: Ron Paul).

      Disclaimer: I’m too busy to follow the whole screed so if I’ve gotten the point wrong my bad.