[PAA-Discuss] Liberals Are Useless

Mon Dec 21 09:50:49 EST 2009

So, in your opinion there are two types of Liberals. The non-" millionaire" Liberals are different from "the millionaires who own the DNC". The non-"millionaire" Liberals only vote for the "millionaires" to be in that position against Republican. 

Is this the definition of good Liberals in your opinion? If so, then the article is criticizing exactly the good Liberals.

Today, Liberalism is school of thought that serves Imperialism*. 

Massoud

* That is regardless of the Liberals' intentions and despite of being millionaire or not.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <rscott77092 at oplink.net>
To: <discuss at paa-tx.org>
Sent: Monday, December 21, 2009 7:57 AM
Subject: Re: [PAA-Discuss] Liberals Are Useless

What Hedges doesn't understand - or else he's just sucking on the
Republican's Orwellian redefinition of words - He's not talking about
"liberals". He's talking about the CONSERVATIVES who run the Democratic
Party.

This is the same problem we see all over the mainstream corporate media;
fools listen only to the Republican definitions of words, then assume that
the millionaires who own the DNC are actually speaking for all of us.

> I'm resending this article that Robert sent just a while ago. It is a good
> reading. You don't have to agree with everything that the author says, but
> I'm sure at one point, while you are reading his argument, you will find
> yourself being criticized! That makes it challenging and interesting.
>
>
>
> Massoud
>
>
>
> Liberals Are Useless
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/liberals_are_useless_20091206/
> Posted on Dec 7, 2009
> By Chris Hedges
>
> Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to
> challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working
> class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free
> Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to
> organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive
> causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for
> them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject,
> cloying letters to Barack Obama-as if he reads them-asking the president
> to come back to his "true" self. This sterile moral posturing, which is
> not only useless but humiliating, has made America's liberal class an
> object of public derision.
>
> I am not disappointed in Obama. I don't feel betrayed. I don't wonder when
> he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist,
> which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney.
> How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama
> even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete.
> Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political
> machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate
> state. I don't dislike Obama-I would much rather listen to him than his
> smug and venal predecessor-though I expected nothing but a continuation of
> the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.
>
> "You have a tug of war with one side pulling," Ralph Nader told me when we
> met Saturday afternoon. "The corporate interests pull on the Democratic
> Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a
> 'least-worst' voter you don't want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so
> you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don't want to
> disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties
> get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The
> Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point.
> What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The
> escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a
> year because they can't afford health insurance? The hollowing out of
> communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas
> that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking
> point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral
> compass."
>
> I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I
> guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in
> Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground." They embrace cynicism, a cloak for
> their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky's depraved character,
> have come to believe that the "conscious inertia" of the underground
> surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty
> moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of
> self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone
> not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse
> Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the
> strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the
> far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal
> class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up
> for what it espouses.
>
> Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country
> should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of
> NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999
> Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall
> Act-designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now
> undergoing-and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue
> to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt,
> how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our
> offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush's secrecy laws or halt the
> warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial
> projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state
> kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan
> as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to
> enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel
> lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform,
> regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary
> contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a
> year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a
> doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside
> the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and
> integrity.
>
> I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in
> Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into
> Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people
> they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in
> Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then
> coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best
> way to "credentialize" yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these
> "revolutionaries" found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to
> see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little
> better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell
> of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.
>
> I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We
> fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods
> like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot
> washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better
> life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our
> nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension
> Housing Projects, and they would joke, "I hope we get mugged." They knew
> precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been
> liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more
> grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They
> would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the
> little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but
> you could trust and rely on them.
>
> I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities
> inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among
> those boxers, are qualities I admire-self-sacrifice, courage, the ability
> to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical
> discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you
> in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could
> have avoided this mess. But they don't. So here we are again, begging
> Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.
>
> Chris Hedges, author of "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the
> Triumph of Spectacle," will speak with other anti-war activists at
> Lafayette Park across the street from the White House at 11 a.m. Dec. 12
> in a rally calling for the withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq and
> Afghanistan.
>
>
>
>
>
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