Fuck Obama

[freemason9]

welp, more blood on our hands

[elfismiles]

www.PrimaryObamaNow.com

Primary Obama Now has been created to promote a primary challenge to Obama based on his numerous failures and betrayals, to either reform him or dump him - let the people decide.

Click on your candidate choice and VOTE!

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Bernie
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total votes (15)

Dennis
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total votes (41)

Marcy
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Russ
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PrimaryObamaNow: Our 10 Point Agenda for American Recovery

1. Wall St. sales tax of 1% on their $3.7 quadrillion in annual speculative financial transactions: The casino economy speculators who caused the depression must pay for it. A tax of 1% at current turnover rates will curb speculation and yield trillions of dollars for preserving Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; help fund new infrastructure, education, and health care programs; and finance the debt service for the states and federal government

2. Reform the private Federal Reserve monopoly: Fully audit the Federal Reserve with the goal of nationalizing the bank under the Treasury Department and Congressional authority as mandated by Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. Stop the trillions of dollars in secret 0% interest loans to insolvent Wall Street banks and instead immediately release $1 trillion in credit for small businesses, infrastructure and education.

3. Immediate freeze on all foreclosures of primary family residences: Modeled on the successful Frazier-Lemke Act during the New Deal. This, along with a modification program for mortgage interest rates, will stop Wall Street predators from putting working Americans on the street during a recession and help end the wave of “fraudclosures,” robo-signings, and the illegal theft of private property by banks that do not hold the deed.

4. Student loan amnesty: Loan forgiveness and long-term interest rate reductions on the $800 billion in federal student debt will give young people an economic future instead of dooming them to a life of debt-service. Expand federal student loan forgiveness for those who engage in broad categories of public interest work, modeled on the Loan Repayment Assistance Programs currently available at some American universities.

5. Comprehensive national infrastructure programs: Create 30 million union-wage jobs building a national network of high-speed railways and broadband internet, new roads, power plants, schools and hospitals.

6. Defend the Fourth Amendment and right to privacy: Immediate repeal of the PATRIOT Act, Domestic Security Enhancement Act (PATRIOT Act II), PDD 51, and the Military Commissions Act; enforce Posse Comitatus and stop the federalization of police under the FBI’s Fusion Centers and NORTHCOM; immediately end the dragnet-style wiretapping of Americans by the NSA, US CyberCommand and their partners in private telecom; stop the CIA’s continuing use of extraordinary rendition torture; end the TSA regime of illegal gropings, naked body scanners, and interrogations expanding around the country.

7. End failed foreign wars: Withdraw from the costly, illegal wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya as well as the undeclared drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Cease the privatization of wars via mercenary contractors like Xe, SAIC, Raytheon, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, and L-3 Communications.

8. Increase cooperation with other world powers while respecting sovereignty: Stop the use of NATO “missile defense” and “color revolutions” as a weapons of intimidation against Russia; sign the international treaty to ban the use of weapons in outer space; end the sanctions regimes against Iran and Cuba and engage them as trade partners; end bellicose relations with Venezuela and other ALBA countries; end unconditional foreign aid to Israel by formally demanding an end to the occupation and blockade of Gaza and settlements in the West Bank; stop the Pentagon’s creation of bioweapons at BSL-4 laboratories; begin immediate multilateral peace talks with China, Russia, and the other member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization; stop using the World Bank and IMF as economic weapons via regressive loans, forced privatization, currency manipulation and shock therapy.

9. Cease support for terrorist proxies working for NATO military and economic interests: Withdraw all CIA support for al Qaeda-linked Libyan rebels as well as the violent resistance in Syria; remove US financial and military support for the Muslim Brotherhood, Kurdish PKK, Kosovo Force, Jundullah, Turkistan Islamic Movement, Chechen separatists, and other similar Western proxy rebels.

10. Modern environmental reform: Ban genetically-modified foods and cloned animals until their safety can conclusively be proven, as the European Union currently does; end improper GMO patents by Monsanto, Bayer, Dow Chemical, and other private conglomerates seeking to generically-engineer all life on the planet; regulate or ban carcinogenic endocrine-disruptors like BPA, phthalates, and other chemical plasticizers; repeal the “no fault” vaccine courts that indemnify manufacturers; install modern filtration systems to clean up polluted American drinking water.

http://primaryobamanow.com/primaryobama ... -recovery/

PrimaryObamaNow Organizers: Our economic demands

We are a group of working families, trade unionists, academics, students, and political activists fighting to recruit a candidate to defeat President Obama in the Democratic primary. Obama is discredited failure, a puppet of Wall Street, and electoral poison for down-ticket Democrats. Our list of candidates offer a programmatic alternative to Obama’s agenda of regressive economic austerity, reckless bailouts for insolvent banks, corrupt free trade deals, illegal expanding wars, expanding executive power and secrecy, and relentless attacks on Constitutional civil liberties.

Our comprehensive economic agenda seeks a full audit of the private Federal Reserve, with the long-term goal of nationalizing under the Treasury department; a Wall Street sales tax of 1% on the speculators’ $3.7 quadrillion in annual trading turnover; a strident defense of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security; an end to fraudclosures; immediate relief programs for exorbitant student loans; and comprehensive new infrastructure construction employing tens of millions at union-wages, building high-speed railways and broadband internet, new roads, schools, power plants and hospitals.


http://primaryobamanow.com/primary-obam ... c-demands/

[wordspeak2]

Primary Obama- I can't imagine it gets any traction, but its sheer existence is a good thing. There should be a real-Left alternative to the corporate Democrat in every single primary from here on.

[2012 Countdown]

[ninakat]

Two related segments for this thread, regarding Obama essentially lying about bank fraud by saying "a lot of that stuff wasn't necessarily illegal, it was just [long pause] immoral or [pause] inappropriate or reckless." Max Keiser clarifies this even more in the second clip while talking with Michael W. Hudson (a different Michael Hudson from the well-known economist) -- responding to Hudson's seeming defense of Obama's lie as just his personality, his character. Keiser tears into that absurdity -- worth watching.

1. @ 4:00 thru 6:20

2. @ 13:26 thru 15:30

[Saurian Tail]

Going Apeshit

By James Howard Kunstler
on October 17, 2011 8:40 AM

It was amusing to see President Obama try to align himself with the OWS movement. The genial Millard Fillmore update asked them not to "demonize those who work on Wall Street." Of course, demonization proceeds from the failure of this president and his appointed agents in authority to subject those who work on Wall Street to the laws that mere mortals are supposed to follow in money matters. Hence, those who work on Wall Street appear to be something other than mortals. And since their work (on Wall Street) has had a malign influence on the common weal, some might leap to the conclusion that they are malevolent non-mortals, i.e. demons.

In this early stage of the convulsion rocking the western world, especially here in the USA, a peaceful ambience rules. That is because a game is being played. We played the game in 1968. It goes like this. You get people to turn out in the streets. The idea is to promote the right of public assembly as much as to make any particular point. (In fact, banners advocating all sorts of gripes appear.) Eventually, you get a lot of people in the streets. Feelings of happy anarchy sweep the crowd, a feeling that something special is underway, that the usual rules of everyday conduct have been suspended, in a good way. The crowd basks in the sunny glow of its own mass, happy solidarity. Everybody is behaving splendidly - more to feel good about.

After a while that gets boring, especially for young males with a lot of testosterone surging from loin to brain. They want to do more than bask in the radiance of their own righteous wonderfulness. They want to engage their large muscles, even if in the service of an idea, for instance the idea that they have been swindled. It is at first a vague idea, but large. But pretty soon it coheres emergently: swindled out of our future! Yes, it is so. Thousands of demon-like beings upstairs in the curtain-wall towers around Zuccotti Park, people wearing neckties and cultured pearls in warm offices with cappuccino machines down the hall, are at this very moment setting loose trading algorithms that will swindle us out of our future! You can see them up there at their evil, glowing screens!

That's when the yoga acrobatics and the hat crocheting are put aside and the street people - their ranks swollen into a horde-like meta-organism - start to express things beyond the right of public assembly. Something unseen goes through them, perhaps like the pheromone that transforms a field full of grasshoppers into a ravening swarm of locusts. Being people, they cannot take wing. But they can press forward and up against things, and they can surely break the glass in those sleek curtain-wall buildings (so much for "transparency") beyond which the bankers sit cringing in their expensive clothing.

Surely we are heading toward a moment like that. The bank employees upstairs must be getting a little nervous, anyway, just glancing out the windows at the moiling mob below. This is apart from the tensions internally roiling the banks themselves, not to mention the entire networked system of global banking, with all its fissures and cracks, as the merry-go-round of debt flies apart under the centrifugal force of insolvency. Come to think of it, these events could not have correlated more perfectly. Just as a horrific accident in finance is about to happen, a ready-made revolutionary mob is conveniently parked outside the pilot-houses of the world's great money vessels, so as to receive the crews directly into their open arms after the smash up.

President Obama could have changed the outcome if he had actually believed in change. He could have told his attorney general to enforce the securities law. He could have replaced the zombies at the SEC and told the new ones to apply all existing regulations. Before last year's election, he could have used his legislative majorities to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and reinstate the Glass-Steagall act. He could have initiated the process of deconstructing the giant banks back into their separate functions - so that banking once again worked as a utility rather than a launching pad for colossal frauds and swindles. Not only did he fail to do any of these things, he didn't even talk about it, or try.

Obama has a lot of nerve claiming to support the Occupy Wall Street movement. He should be one of the objects of its ire. I'm not even sure Obama will get to finish out his term of office. 2012 looks like a complete horror show in the making. The way world money matters are lining up this fall, some kind of debacle seems unavoidable, much worse than the 2008 fiasco. The normal political channels are clogged and sclerotic. Our institutions are failing us. The cast of "candidate" characters across the political spectrum convinces nobody that they can manage this republic.

The weather may determine the mood of the OWS crowd. If they don't go apeshit in the next two weeks, my guess is that the nation will hunker down into a dire, melancholy holiday season followed by a desperate winter leading to a raucous spring of political transformation - not necessarily of the best kind.

For the moment, we seem to be waiting for the proverbial first broken window.

[Nordic]

Kunstler -- ever the optimist.

I do love his writing. There's some great stuff in there.

And yes I would very much like to see more ire directed at Obama for the very reasons he mentions.

A few weeks ago "Capitalism, a Love Story" was on my cable, so I dvr'ed it and watched it for the first time. And watching it now is a sad sad affair, because there is so much Obama Hopium in thay movie, and to realize the enormity of the betrayal that was Obama can really get one's ire up.

The OWS movement is the phoenix rising from those ashes. Thank god for phoenixes.

[Bruce Dazzling]

Family Values: The Roman Rigor of Obama's Death Squad
Tuesday, 18 October 2011 23:57
Written by Chris Floyd

It is not enough for the Peace Laureate to murder American citizens without charges, without trial and without warning; he must also murder their children too -- in the same cowardly, cold-blooded fashion.

Last week, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki -- an American teenager -- was ripped to shreds by an American drone missile in Yemen. The boy, like his father, Anwar al-Awlaki -- had not been charged with any crime whatsoever, much less convicted and sentenced. So what was his offense? He missed his father -- who had been in hiding from the Peace Laureate's publicly stated intention to assassinate him -- and he went off to find him.

His search took him into one of the areas of Yemen where there are groups opposed to the murderous regime now controlling the country and slaughtering its own citizens in cold blood -- with American weapons, American money, and the full support of the Peace Laureate and his peace-loving administration of peaceful peaceniks. People in such regions -- not only in Yemen but all over the world -- are of course subject to instant, agonizing death from the Peace Laureate's brave, bold robot drones, guided by noble warriors nestled in cushioned chairs behind fortress walls thousands of miles away.

And so a button was pushed, and 16-year-old Abdulrahman -- and his 17-year-old cousin -- were turned into steaming lumps of coagulate gore by the drones of the Peace Laureate. The Laureate's minions and satraps then spread the story that the child was actually a grown man, "suspected" of being a "militant." It was, of course, an arrant and deliberate lie, but it did its work. The first -- and only -- thing the public at large heard about this murder was that yet another dirty terrorist raghead had bitten the dust, and so big fat what?

The boy's family had a somewhat different view:

“To kill a teenager is just unbelievable, really, and they claim that he is an al-Qaeda militant. It’s nonsense,” said Nasser al-Awlaki, a former Yemeni agriculture minister who was Anwar al-Awlaki’s father and the boy’s grandfather, speaking in a phone interview from Sanaa on Monday. “They want to justify his killing, that’s all.”

The teenager, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver in 1995, and his 17-year-old Yemeni cousin were killed in a U.S. military strike that left nine people dead in southeastern Yemen. ...

Nasser al-Awlaki said the family decided to issue a statement after reading some U.S. news reports that described Abdulrahman as a militant in his twenties. The family urged journalists and others to visit a Facebook memorial page for Abdulrahman.

“Look at his pictures, his friends, and his hobbies,” the statement said. “His Facebook page shows a typical kid. A teenager who paid a hefty price for something he never did and never was.” The pictures on the Facebook page show a smiling kid out and about in the countryside and occasionally hamming it up for the camera. Abdulrahman left the United States with his father in 2002.

Nasser al-Awlaki said Abdulrahman was in the first year of secondary school when he left Sanaa to find his father. He wrote a note to his mother, saying he missed his father and wanted to see him. The teenager traveled to the family’s tribal home in southern Yemen, but Anwar al-Awlaki was killed Sep. 30 in Yemen’s northern Jawf province, about 90 miles east of the capital. “He went from here without my knowledge,” Nasser al-Awlaki said. “We would not allow him to go if we know because he is a small boy.” He said his grandson, after hearing about his father’s death, had decided to return to Sanaa.

The American boy went off to find his father. Upon learning that his father had been killed by the Peace Laureate, he tried to go back home to his family. But he stopped to have a meal with some men -- perhaps friends of his father? Perhaps "militants"? Perhaps neither? We cannot know, because the Peace Laureate and his minions do not discuss their arbitrary killings of people without charges or trial.

So Abdulrahman was blown to bits. The "soldier" who pushed the button or squeezed the joystick that fired the missile got up from his comfortable chair and got into his comfortable car and drove to his comfortable home, where -- who know? -- he might have had a delicious meal with his wife and kids, then later kicked back for a little R&R with the Wii. The peaceful Peace Laureate went out on the campaign trail, seeking to extend his mission of peace for another term. And the regime he supports in Yemen with peaceful weapons and peaceful money and peaceful pearls of wisdom about peace went on killing its own citizens.

Methinks the Peace Laureate, long derided by some for his youthful callowness, a dearth of proper gravitas, is growing into his imperial role more and more with each passing day. The outright, open murder of an imperial citizen -- followed by the completely gratuitous slaughter of the victim's son -- has the authentic ring of ancient Rome about it. That's how they did it in the high, palmy days of the Caesars; that's how we do it today. Everything old is new again. Ave, Peacenik!

[Simulist]

Simply unbelievable — except, of course, that it's true.

And just a note to you "loyal Democrats" out there who still plan on supporting this Murderer in Chief in any way (even if your support amounts to little more than a kind word): you make yourselves complicit in his crimes! — just like the stupid Bu$h supporters were before him (and even more than you would be otherwise). You are now no better than a Bu$h supporter. How does it feel?

So I hope you're proud of yourselves. (Well, not really — but, unbelievably, I'm pretty sure you probably are.)

[ninakat]

Agreed Simulist. I spent several hours last night fending off the attacks of one of my "friends" who's still a loyal Democrat, after all the evidence of their complicity in the war myriad of war crimes they've committed throughout and even before my life of almost 60 years. He's still making excuses for them and conjuring up issues from 40+ years ago when the D's actually did a few good things -- civil rights, gay rights, abortion rights were the examples. Of course, I pointed out that these movements were not initiated by Democratic politicians at all, but latched onto by the Democratic party for political purposes. And I reminded him of just how much blood LBJ, a Democrat, had on his hands during the same time period. Blinders, I tell ya, these people have blinders. Ugh.... I won't bore you with the rest.

But the crux of the argument was about the #OWS movement and whether or not followers of the Tea Party should be allowed into the big tent. Even Ron Paul supporters, who while I don't agree with their political philosophy, DO have legitimate grievances about what big government has become. Now, I'm no libertarian, and certainly no tea partier, but it's hard to believe the amount of vitriol my friend has towards anyone (even me) for suggesting that there's any legitimacy at all to other political opinions (regardless of how misguided they might be). I'm not talking here about trying to convert KKK types over to socialism. We all know the far-right is irredeemable. Call me naive, but aren't there "swing voters" out there still? People who don't necessarily subscribe to a particular party or viewpoint, and who could participate? In my friends world, anybody who doesn't see things his way is the mortal enemy. And he calls himself a progressive.

The irony just staggers the mind though. Here's a very intelligent and articulate person who was conned big time by Obama, Clinton, and all the other Democratic heroes -- and yet he can't see how conned Joe Six Pack in Boise has been with the Tea Party. For me, there's opportunity there -- for him, it's war. Sorry for the thread drift... had to get that off my chest.

[norton ash]

^^ Good to get off your chest, and relevant to the thread.

OWS is teaching people that Obama can and will be primaried, and that even if Romney wins, plutocratic bullshit can be fought with general strikes and civil disobedience. (I don't think November 2012 will be business as usual, btw, I think many things will have changed by then.)

Authoritiarian dupe Dems seem incapable of change. I think it's as much tribe, tradition, familiarity and FEAR of the unknown that stops them from rejecting the one-party system more than anything. They just can't say Fuck Obama, no matter how bad he is.

[ninakat]

Thanks norton. I think you've clearly sussed out the reasons for the die-hard Dems' denial about Obama. I would add foolish pride to your list (since they voted for him).

[Nordic]

The divide-and-conquer brainwashing has been going on for sooooo long it's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to overcome it.

We have to realize, as a group, as a country, that the divide isn't right-to-left. It's top-to-bottom.

They've been VERY good at pushing our buttons, and the buttons of the righties, to make us HATE each other, and to think that our fellow middle class members are the problem, and the enemy. They aren't. This IS class warfare, it always has been and it always will be.

All of us have to wake up and realize that we've been manipulated, brainwashed, psyop'ed to the point where we have a hard time distinguishing reality from fiction. The lies are that big and that complete.

It will literally take an entirely new generation to break this pattern.

Hopefully this new generation will be it. Don't know, though, those who specialize in brainwashing the right-wing have created an entire population of terrified home-schooled delusionals, who believe if they are in college and a professor starts talking about "evolution" as being something factual that he's an agent of Satan and everything they've been trained to hate.

It's like North Korea.

(I have some of these people in my family. I'm using an actual example from one of my cousin's homeschooled kids, who dropped out of a certain university because one of her professors at her fairly backwoods college started talking about evolution as if it were (gasp!) fact, and she was so upset by this that she had to change schools.)

There are a lot of them, although nothing approaching a majority, or even a large minority, but enough of them to make things difficult.

[seemslikeadream]

Team Obama’s Creative Crowd-Sourcing Fail
Hope for Work
Mr. Fish

Let it be known that this award-winning cartoon by Mr. Fish was not created gratis for the Obama campaign.

Nice try, there, Mr. President. Although he’s gotten some lift before from the resuscitated publishing relic that is Rolling Stone magazine, Jann Wenner’s music rag didn’t give POTUS a pass for a cute idea his promotions team recently cooked up that offered designers the exciting chance to create a poster for Obama’s campaign for absolutely no pay. There you go, artists—the utter lack of change you’ve been waiting for. —KA

Rolling Stone via Adweek:

The Obama campaign has more than $60 million cash on hand. In an economy this bad, you’d think a presidential campaign that flush would be happy to pay good money for a talented designer to create a campaign poster.

But the folks at Obama campaign have taken a page from the Arianna Huffington book of economic exploitation and called on “artists across the country” to create a poster ... for free.

And here’s the kicker. It’s a jobs poster.

[ninakat]

seems as appropriate a thread as any...

The Iraq War Ain’t Over, No Matter What Obama Says
By Spencer Ackerman, Wired
October 21, 2011

+ + +

Soldiers May Be Leaving Iraq, But Contractors Will Remain
Ryan J. Reilly, Talking Points Memo
October 21, 2011, 3:33 PM