In case you missed it, the Obama administration's appointment of 6' 4" Texan "Big Ed" Whiteacre to the Chairmanship of General Motors Tuesday was the official signal that you can now take down all your blue and red HOPE and CHANGE and PROGRESS posters. I took mine down a while ago; it's been rolled up in the garage since April.
The honeymoon is undeniably over. All of those nasty things the Bush administration shamed you with for eight years, those unspeakable degradations you thought might stop if you just laid there quietly and endured it long enough, those criminal abuses you pretended so well were really for your own good, pretended so well that you almost came to believe would make you stronger and better -- sorry.
There may still be time to change the sheets and refill the K-Y supplies, but Big O and Big Ed and all the rest of the nation's Big Daddies are coming back for more, so you just sit there and look pretty now, y'hear? It hurts a lot more if you fight it. Remember that.
Edward Whiteacre, Jr., back when he was running AT&T during the administration of George W. Bush, claimed he didn't use a computer or know how to text message.
But he sure enough knew how to lobby the government against net neutrality, and he sure knew how to utilize his telecommunications near-monopoly to conspire with Bush's rogue junta in an illegal wiretapping operation that violated the Civil Rights of American citizens in unprecedented fashion.
Barack Obama, the candidate, said on many occasions he supported net neutrality, the idea that all Internet traffic is roughly equal and that service providers should not be permitted to regulate its flow "among the tubes" based on its source or its destination or its content. Net neutrality is widely regarded as one of the 21st century's fundamental necessities for the free flow of information, a concept, which, if you'll recall, began to take off with the invention of the printing press over 600 years ago.
Barack Obama, the president, has yet to publicly announce his position on net neutrality, though it's hard to imagine Big Ed coming to him and saying something like, "Y'know Barry ol' boy, I'd be willin' to get the telecom boys to cave a lil' bit on that net neutrality deal if you could see a way to put me in the big chair up there at GM."
Actually, if it hadn't been for the sad kabuki theater that resulted in FISA reform, something Senator Obama claimed to oppose, but which candidate Obama absented himself from when it came time to count votes in the matter, had it not been for that particular session of ass-fucking the American people were forced to endure, Whiteacre might now be pounding rocks in a dayglow jumpsuit somewhere, worrying nights about his own tender sphincter instead of getting ready to take the reigns at the shell of a once-proud and mighty American manufacturing concern.
And what did Big Ed have to say on the occasion of his appointment to the chairmanship of the company that once set the benchmark for the automobile industry? "I don't know anything about cars."
He joins a long list of executives and, as it turns out, Texans, who don't know dick about squat except how to profit from the great American pastimes of hegemony and empire building.
As the last public figure from Texas I think I ever had a kind feeling for used to sing on Monday nights in the fall on the ABC television network, "turn out the lights...the party's over."
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They're all in it together and the joke's on us.
But it's not funny
Obama has another 3 years and I hope it works out but I have some serious doubts.
Taking over businesses and appointing 20 or more Czars is gonna have some bad unintended comsequences down the road.
Just wait until healthcare comes along. You ain't seen nothing yet.
Great post Lonnie and Emma nailed it ... "meet the new boss ..."
And no, Hillary wouldn't have been any better.
It's hard to say whether or not Obabma was a liar all along, whether or not he never actually intended to deliver real-world policy or make decisions and appointments that might square with the themes and the imagery of his campain rhetoric. I suspect he did believe what he was selling the electorate in the beginning, but at some point after the convention in Denver last August, when it became clear he was going to be the next president, the real PTB made it clear to him the limitations of his executive palette.
I do not agree that Hillary would have been a better choice, as Blackflon suggests. I am coming to believe more and more what I have feared in my heart of hearts for a long time, that real change is only ever going to come when millions of people are massing in the streets, when general strikes are shutting down business as usual. The 'change the system from within' approach appears to have failed.
For more on his reckless governing, you can read my piece entitled: "American Czars are Little Caesars", just pull it up from the left side of my main blog page. rated.
It's always been falling...at least for some people, it has always been falling.
While I am not pleased with his continuing the bailout banditry of Paulsen or the ducking of THE moral issue of our day -- torture, I am reserving judgment until I see how far he is willing to go with healthcare reform and the Employee Free Choice Act (aka Bring Back Unions Act). If he does not come through strongly on these two, it will be time for me to look elsewhere.
What few understand is that Obama is following the same plan as Karl Rove -- establishing a 30-year political reign -- but with an inclusive rather than a divisive strategy. If the economy recovers reasonably well, he may well succeed. If it doesn't, I fear we're headed even harder right than Bush.
I said I was willing to allow myself to be disappointed, much as I had been by Bill Clinton in his first term, which had been the most recent time the American future seemed bright.
Well, I'm just now declaring myself officially disappointed. I'm not willing to wait, as is my good and smart brother Tom Cordle, for Obama to poke a sharp stick into the aspirations of those who believe in the right and the power of collective bargaining, or to pull the plug on the fantasies of those who believe access to basic healthcare services ought not correlate in any way to one's net worth or credit score.
I will go on record right now as a champion of unrelenting civil disobedience and recommend that everyone stop paying taxes, stop paying mortgages, stop paying credit card bills, stop bending over for the privilege of funding a secure and luxurious future for a tiny population of elite, (half) white men and their favored concubines.
As the old saying goes, United We Stand, Divided We Fall.
I want him to know the ins and outs of every goddamn vehicle his company puts out.
And I want him to know what the Germans, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Italians, the British, and the other American carmakers are making too.
Detroit failed because it built crappier cars than the Japanese did, and charged more money for them. And when they DID build an affordable car that everyone who owned it seemed to like (the Dodge Dynasty, which sat 6 and got 30mph going up the side of Lookout Mountain WAY BACK IN 1992 and the Ford Taurus station wagon, which sat 8 and again got close to 30 mph and kept on running despite being totalled TWICE, to name two Detroit cars my folks had), they stopped making them and instead focused on making SUVs with more cupholders and less gas mileage.
I want the CEO to know that if GM is going to survive, they have to build a better, cheaper car than the competitor.
The problem is that American politics is so screwed up, and we've fallen so far, not just in the last eight years, but in the last thirty, that I guess Obama figured he could say anything he wanted to get into office and do anything he wanted once he got there....because he was "historic." That dawg don't hunt, as my granddaddy used to say.
The government doesn't work, at any level. Obama was counting on that. And his attitude (and that of his wife) once in office has been, quite frankly, appalling. I mean, okay, so they've got money and he's the President, but I don't want to hear any more about Michelle's dresses, much less her wearing $540 tennis shoes (for Christ's sakes) to a homeless shelter, or dropping into London for the day to shop, while Americans are going homeless and jobless and Obama is giving away the best jobs in America to the already rich, who have the least progressive agendas around while saying that his idol is Lincoln, who came from poverty and never even went to law school. He's already broken so many promises in the first 100 days, I'm ashamed to say that I voted for him. And I'm sorry to say, however racist this sounds, that slaves make the worst masters. He's had so many benefits and so much help in his life to get where he is, that the campaign deliberately hid (like the fact that he got a legacy entrance to Harvard and was set up for the US Senate Seat in Illinois, plus got major backing from the very banks he's now refusing to regulate, and refusing to reign in a Congress that has been corrupt for years. Most senators are millionaires, so surprise, why would they want to tax the rich? Meanwhile this country is sinking deeper and deeper, while Obama and Co party with entertainers shovel out the BS that's getting thicker by the day. The attitude at the White House, who I'm in contact with, is just as offensive. And despite the rhetoric, all of our lawmakers have forgotten that they work for us, not the other way around. But that is ultimately our fault. It's time to take our democracy back. And if that means kicking Obama's ass out of office for another Democrat in four years, then that's the price he's going to pay for selling out on almost every single campaign promise that led me to believe that he stood for change I could believe in.
What on earth has happened to this country?
And what on earth happened to change that we could believe in?
As the old saying goes, United We Stand, Divided We Fall."
Lonnie this moves me nearly to tears and it's so freaking true. HUGE IF, but i IF we just quit participating in the madness, collectively, then it would stop.
Do not pay taxes. Federal income tax is not legal. It began after the beginning of WWI as voluntary contributions. (they couldn't give it up after all that and made up some crap to keep it going) There was no Fed Inc Tax and no IRS before then. Credit card bills? Sorry Charlie, you bad for trying to rob me for forever. Gig up.
And I am soooo sick of my inbred municipality trying to suck this and that fee off of my poor ass at every given opportunity.
I am NOT participating.... any more (haven't been)
Lonnie you are the voice I wish I could be.... Thanks
LOL, Tom!
@ Marguerite Arnold: "What on earth has happened to this country?" Boy, I can relate to that. Glad I'm not alone in feeling like this.
Trig, trust your own voice, brother. It's a good one, and strong, and we need many voices to be raised in unison and in multi-part harmonic discord in order to change the song and dance we've been sold our entire lives.
Sirenita, if an idealist was what we needed, or thought we were getting, Dennis Kucinich has always been there for the asking. All I expected -- or hoped for -- from Obama was the courage to just do the right thing: Convene a Truth Commission. End the Torture. Revive Anti-trust law. Protect the Right to Collective Bargaining. Provide Basic Minimum Healthcare. Respect the environment. Restore regulatory oversight, the Right to Privacy, habeas corpus. Nothing flashy, nothing fancy, just some basic respect for, as you put it, the people who elected him. I feel like an unpaid extra in an extreme bukkake film.
Marguerite Arnold, it's a pleasure to meet such a well-spoken, kindred spirit.
'touche, you are the cat's pajamas.
I am a proud suspect going forward and I can only hope that more and more are willing to join me in just saying no. They can't arrest us all. They can't foreclose and garnish and prosecute us all if we rise as one, rise as a people and say enough is e-fucking-nuff.
Power to the People. Power to the People, Right On.
OK. . .pile on everybody.
You are doing well in the business subreddit, but more up arrows always help.
anyway, i suspect i'm going to be posting shit on here in the coming months that is far more redditable than are 30 year old pictures of myself in drag.
get it together, people.
Eventually, enough people will come around to the knowledge and awareness required for change we can believe in.
Meanwhile, consider the possibility that in a nation of some 300 million people Obama might have been able to find an executive capable and worthy of the appointment to pick up the pieces at GM who had not orchestrated a systematic campaign to spy illegally on American citizens and who does not believe that the right to the distribution of information should go to the highest bidder.
I have been giving men like Obama "a chance" since the assassination of JFK and I am done.
The few true leftists remaining are so marginalized and outnumbered, they might as well be nonexistent. The corporatocracy grows more brazen by the year and that’s saying a lot considering the history of our nation.
But ultimately the biggest disappointment is with myself. I knew far better than to forcibly build hope that anything apart from the status quo would be allowed in national politics. I knew and I did it anyway to predictable results. Shame on me. I get what I deserve.
Rated.
Whether you are in the market for a new car or not, we all need to get back into the showrooms and see the cars and trucks that we invested in.
Please forward to anyone you feel has been impacted by this economy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW--vyWE98U
Thanks in advance!
Chris Kilcullen