Kevin Baker Barack Hoover Obama: The best and the brightest blow it again

Posted: June 23rd, 2009 by: h2

Good video of Harper’s Kevin Baker’s July 2009 cover article: Barack Hoover Obama: The best and the brightest blow it again.

It’s pretty long, worth watching. But I have to say, the people who called in to that c-span show, both left and right, don’t give me much room for optimism. The right continues to ignore every single actual foundational component of our current issues, the Libertarians continue to blindly regurgitate their absurd anti government, pro free market foolishness long after the current financial collapse has once again proven, as if this even needed proving, that free markets don’t exist, they are fictions designed to disguise the blatant grab of power and wealth by those who espouse them. Not to say actual free markets don’t exist, but they aren’t run by oligarchs and cartels, they are individual, non corporate, and, most important, local and community based.

No hope in this administration I’m sad to say, find a copy of the July Harper’s magazine and find out why, or watch the video, it covers most of the key points.

Remember: without single payer health care, dismantling of the current financial oligarchs, and a serious redoing of the corporate lobbying industry (like banning it completely) we will not be able to move on to the next phase of our existence.

Turning off and throwing out your television is a good place to start if you’re looking for something to do right away, then you can start learning to think again.

But as Baker notes, in all likelihood, it will take a furthering of the collapse, the increased loss of the middle classes, before populist sentiment starts to rise for real. But also remember, in the Great Depression, people weren’t undergoing self-induced brain washings nightly in front of their televisions, and their lives didn’t depend nearly as much on corporate interests as they do now, and there was actual free press, not corporate controlled press.

So how this is going to play out is going to be very interesting to watch, at least in the USA. Some countries, like Germany, are at least trying to be rational, but there’s very little sign of anything like that here yet.

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