ZylonBane on 5/11/2012 at 15:38
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
Gridlock is a good thing.
Stop saying stupid things.
Kolya on 6/11/2012 at 00:44
Maybe you're interested in a German comment (I know that some of you won't be, but you'll get your chance to explode soon) on the US elections that appeared yesterday. Original: (
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/us-wahl-wie-der-kapitalismus-das-land-zerstoert-a-865278.html)
Nothing in it will be news to you, just a slightly different perspective. Jakob Augstein is certainly being a bit dramatic here, painting with a broad brush. And his tagline for this column is "If in doubt, then left". Nevertheless he makes some good points and names and then goes beyond the general public perception here, that Obama was the good one and Romney an evil idiot. A perception that has been helped along by a pretty uniform news coverage of the American elections over here. Anyway. Technically this is an edited Google translation, syntax may still be a bit weird in places.
Decline of the American EmpireBy Jakob Augstein
Romney as the candidate of the rich and Obama as a candidate of the people - Germans tend to see the U.S. election as one between good and evil. This is a mistake. No matter who is president, in America reigns total capitalism. It has the power to destroy the country.
The U.S. Army develops a weapon that within one hour can reach each point in the world - and destroy it. Simultaneously in Brooklyn, Queens and New Jersey, the power cables hang from wooden poles across the street. The storm has swept them down, as in many places on the East Coast, and millions of people are without electricity. This is America: High-tech for the elites. Third-world country for the rest, no country has produced more Nobel Prize winners than the U.S.. But in New York City hospitals had to be evacuated because emergency generators could not be started.
Who thinks this is a contradiction, does not understand that America is the land of totalitarian capitalism. For its functioning public hospitals are not required and neither the energy supply of private households. The elites have their own infrastructure. Total capitalism has torn apart the American society and left the government paralyzed. The fate of America is not an accident of the system. It is its consequence.
Obama could not change that. Romney would not change it. Europe is mistaken if it considers the choice between the two as a choice between good and evil. And an "election of direction", as can be read in many newspapers, this is certainly not.
President without powerRomney, the very wealthy investment banker, and Obama, the cultured human rights lawyer, are two faces of a political system that has not much to do with democracy, as we understand it. Democracy means choice. But Americans do not have a choice. Obama offered proof. When he took office nearly four years ago, it seemed like a new American beginning. But that was a misunderstanding. Obama did not close the camp in Guantanamo, he has not lifted the immunity of the alleged war criminals from the Bush administration, he has not regulated the financial markets, and the climate was hardly mentioned in the election campaign. The military, the apparatus, the banks, the industry - all the power of the people is nothing against their power, and against them the president is also powerless.
Probably Obama wanted more but could not. But what difference does it make?
We want to believe that Obama has failed due to the right-wing in his own country. And indeed, the fanatics, of which Mitt Romney has become dependent, have thrown everything overboard, which distinguishes the West: science and logic, reason and moderation, or simple decency. They hate gays, the weak and the state, they oppress women and persecute immigrants, and their abortion moralism does not even stop at rape victims. They are the Taliban of the West.
For Europe, it does not matter who wins the electionBut they are a symptom of America's failure. Not its cause. In truth, in the U.S., neither the idealists of the Democrats nor the useful idiots of the Tea Party have power over the situation.
From a European perspective it does not matter who wins this election. What matters to us is American foreign policy. And there Obama is no dove and Romney no hawk. The incumbent president leads his wars, but rather with drones than with troops. But for the victims it does not matter if they are killed by humans or machines. The challenger in turn will not move, despite all the talk, on the side of Israel into a war against Iran, which the U.S. now can not really afford.
Anyway, it is wrong to call the Republicans the party of war and the Democrats the party of peace. Or even a left-wing party. It were the Democrats Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who started wars in Korea and Indochina. And it was the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon who ended these wars. And Ronald Reagan, who from the perspective of the European Left stands for the evil and absurdity of American politics, was by the standards to which we have become accustomed, a peaceful man, he only conquered Grenada.
The truth is that we do not understand America. If we look over from Germany, from Europe, we see a different culture. The political system is in the hands of the capital and its lobbyists. The checks and balances have failed. And a perverse mixture of irresponsibility, greed and religious zealotry dominates public opinion.
The Decline of the American Empire has begun. It may be that the Americans can not stop it, despite all efforts. But they do not even try.
Lazarus411 on 6/11/2012 at 01:06
If that story is printed in Der Spiegel the underlying message to that is "...and now you know why we voted in Hitler you stupid yanks!".
heywood on 6/11/2012 at 03:06
Trolling, Kolya? I would be interested to hear informed, intelligent German commentary. But that article was neither. Some of the comments to the article were interesting though.
CCCToad on 6/11/2012 at 03:14
Quote:
President without power
Romney, the very wealthy investment banker, and Obama, the cultured human rights lawyer, are two faces of a political system that has not much to do with democracy, as we understand it. Democracy means choice. But Americans do not have a choice. Obama offered proof. When he took office nearly four years ago, it seemed like a new American beginning. But that was a misunderstanding. Obama did not close the camp in Guantanamo, he has not lifted the immunity of the alleged war criminals from the Bush administration, he has not regulated the financial markets, and the climate was hardly mentioned in the election campaign. The military, the apparatus, the banks, the industry - all the power of the people is nothing against their power, and against them the
president is also powerless. Probably Obama wanted more but could not. But what difference does it make?
To this, I offer this excerpt
Quote:
Many will claim that Obama was stymied by a Republican Congress. But the primary policy framework Obama put in place - the bailouts, took place during the transition and the immediate months after the election, when Obama had enormous leverage over the Bush administration and then a dominant Democratic Party in Congress. In fact, during the transition itself, Bush's Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson offered a deal to Barney Frank, to force banks to write down mortgages and stem foreclosures if Barney would speed up the release of TARP money. Paulson demanded, as a condition of the deal, that Obama sign off on it. Barney said fine, but to his surprise, the incoming president vetoed the deal. Yup, you heard that right —
the Bush administration was willing to write down mortgages in response to Democratic pressure, but it was Obama who said no, we want a foreclosure crisis. And with Neil Barofsky's book ”Bailout,” we see why. Tim Geithner said, in private meetings, that the foreclosure mitigation programs were not meant to mitigate foreclosures, but to spread out pain for the banks, the famous “foam the runway” comment. This central lie is key to the entire Obama economic strategy. It is not that Obama was stymied by Congress, or was up against a system, or faced a massive crisis, which led to the shape of the economy we see today. Rather, Obama had a handshake deal to help the middle class offered to him by Paulson, and Obama said no. He was not constrained by anything but his own policy instincts. And the reflation of corporate profits and financial assets and death of the middle class were the predictable results.
The president isn't powerless. He is in charge of a vast intelligence apparatus, can appoint names to a kill list with no oversight, sign laws via executive over, can now wage wars without congress, at first had a complete majority and then never went up against a veto-proof opposition, and has enormous economic power through a large variety of means. Anyone who's taken even a single 1000 level government class will be able to tell you that the power of the executive branch is now greater than it has been at any time in American history.
It wasn't that Obama was a good guy in spite of everything. The exploding inequality is DELIBERATE policy on his part.
Let me emphasize one sentence:
Quote:
It is not that Obama was stymied by Congress, or was up against a system, or faced a massive crisis, which led to the shape of the economy we see today. Rather, Obama had a handshake deal to help the middle class offered to him by Paulson, and Obama said no.Renault on 6/11/2012 at 05:39
I stopped reading at...Decline of the American Empire. :rolleyes: Such drama!
demagogue on 6/11/2012 at 06:10
The problem wasn't it being a "bad" article, just that it's so ridiculously dogmatic. It uses all the phrases and ideas that the critical school has been horking on forever, and they repeat so much that the words have long ago lost any meaning (> implying they ever had meaning to begin with). Does "end of empire" actually mean anything substantive in the real world of debt reduction, toxic derivatives, and private militaries? Does an "abandoned" segment of American driven to third-world conditions by "Capitalism" make any sense? You know how to feel like you live in the third-world: have a country with almost no central heating or air conditioning in 90% of the buildings (=every European country ever. How can I take London or Paris serious as cities if I'm shaking like a hobo in December?), something you don't find in the US.
But my feeling on dogma is you can usually translate even the most dogmatic drivel into something sensible with a little effort, abusing and morphing their point sometimes into something unrecognizable to them maybe, but it's for the greater good. The Republican base really has derailed. Obama really has let down expectations (although IMO he's delivered boatloads more than he dropped the ball on, if anyone paid enough attention to notice that). If I cared about it, that's what I'd do to this article, pulling out and translating the respectable points line by line... It's just that takes forever and it'd be better if someone just wrote a respectable article in the first place.
Edit: It also gets a bit of a pass for me because I have a love-hate relationship with German philosophy & German political theory in particular... I love reading it so much that I take it almost as an offense when it doesn't stand up to its own standards or falls into dogma.
heywood on 6/11/2012 at 07:30
Way to add to the reality distortion CCCToad. It took me a few minutes to find the original source for your claim, but here it is:
(
http://nymag.com/news/features/barney-frank-full-transcript-2012-4/index12.html) http://nymag.com/news/features/barney-frank-full-transcript-2012-4/index12.html
Quote Posted by Jason Zengerle (of New York Magazine, interviewing Barney Frank)
Yeah, in legislating, but moving from legislating to the system itself, are there things about the American system that you think make it superior to these other systems? Or inferior?
Quote Posted by Barney Frank
I never thought about it. But if you are running for prime minister of England and your party gets a majority on Tuesday, you’re kissing hands on Wednesday. We shortened the transition from March to January but we still have a more than two-month transition. The mortgage crisis was worsened this past time because critical decisions were made during the transition between Bush and Obama. We voted the TARP out. The TARP was basically being administered by Hank Paulson as the last man home in a lame duck, and I was disappointed. I tried to get them to use the TARP to put some leverage on the banks to do more about mortgages, and Paulson at first resisted that, he just wanted to get the money out. And after he got the first chunk of money out, he would have had to ask for a second chunk, he said, all right, I’ll tell you what, I’ll ask for that second chunk and I’ll use some of that as leverage on mortgages, but I’m not going to do that unless Obama asks for it. This is now December, so we tried to get the Obama people to ask him and they wouldn’t do it. During the critical period when the TARP was being administered, there was a vacuum of political leadership. And Obama at one point, when we were pressing him, said, “Well, we only have one president at a time.” I said I was afraid that overstated the number of presidents. We had no president. I would, I’d give them a week.
BF's point is about the length of time between the election and inauguration. Obama avoids being drawn into executive branch policy making prior to becoming President, and you interpret that as Obama fucking the middle class and deliberately adopting a policy of exploding inequality.
Quote Posted by demagogue
The problem wasn't it being a "bad" article, just that it's so ridiculously dogmatic. It uses all the phrases and ideas that the critical school has been horking on forever, and they repeat so much that the words have long ago lost any meaning (> implying they ever had meaning to begin with). Does "end of empire" actually mean anything substantive in the real world of debt reduction, toxic derivatives, and private militaries? Does an "abandoned" segment of American driven to third-world conditions by "Capitalism" make any sense? You know how to feel like you live in the third-world: have a country with almost no central heating or air conditioning in 90% of the buildings (=every European country ever. How can I take London or Paris serious as cities if I'm shaking like a hobo in December?), something you don't find in the US.
Come on demagogue, the US has ICBMs. Doesn't it follow then that Americans should live in hurricane proof bunker homes with underground utilities and backup generators? :rolleyes:
On a serious note though, Londoners tend to keep the heat on in winter a bit warmer than I'm used to. I don't think I've ever been cold indoors anywhere in the UK. Same for Norway. Can't speak about Paris in winter though. Maybe they get by without heat since the winters aren't so bad?
