Anti-Obama Rage Justified. When do we Kill and Eat the rich?

Barack Obama was pissed.

Did you see him, yesterday afternoon? There he was: finger waging, lectern thumping, with grim, angry looks all around defending his decision to strike a deal with the GOP that would grant a tax break to the richest of the Richie Rich Regressive Randian Rascals out there and extend the Bush tax cuts.

Obama lashed out at Republicans for worshipping at the altar of Trickle Down Economics and liberals for being “sanctimonious” to a fault.

This is a decision so unpopular with the American people who it may very well mean the end of his relevancy as a President (as Rachel Maddow suggested), or that it may guarantee that he sees a Primary challenge from the left in 2012 (as Robert Kuttner recently reported).

And while the lone socialist talking head, Larry O’donnel, took the position that Obama struck the best possible deal he could get, the debate amongst Politician, analyzed by professional pundits has little or nothing to do with how the majority of Americans feel about this issue.

Consider a few statistics from a recent CBS news poll:
Only 26 percent of Americans support the GOP’s proposal to extend the cuts for all Americans. 70% of Democrats want to extend the cuts only on incomes below $250,000.
Even among Republicans, support for extending all the cuts is less than half at 46 percent.

What is in play here is so obvious and only bears mentioning to reframe this debate: elected officials do not even pretend to be accountable to their constituents. They are accountable to the interests of the richest 1% or less in this country. This may have always been true, but the recent Citizen United Supreme Court ruling created a new monster this past election cycle, the Super PAC: granting the super wealthy even more influence and an even greater voice in the political process than ever before.

When lobbying for a more just and equitable world, your letter to your Congresswoman or man or Senator will likely have about the same effect as a sandcastle trying to stop a Tsunami.

What the overwhelming majority of American need is some leverage. Think of it another way. When the United States of America negotiates secretly with – Iran for example, do you think the USA takes the nuclear option off the table? No. That is the leverage we have. My question then is, how far off is the day when the American people, negotiating openly with the super wealthy class via their proxy pawns in Congress and the White House say something like: do we, the unwashed masses want to kill and eat the rich? Well, lets just say that all options are on the table. The negotiating table, and the dinning room table. And yes, pun intended you hyper capitalist trickle down bastard.

As I watch Obama play at negotiating with this lame duck Congress the words that more often than not dancing in my head in reference to that duck are the immortal words of Arlo Guthrie from his protest song Alice’s Restaurant:

“I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL.”

If one of does that well they might think we was crazy and just ignore it. If two people, can you imagine, two people ranting and raving like that –well they might think they was faggots and file us under Don’t ask Don’t Tell.

But if three, can you imagine if three, or fifty or hundreds of people a day getting so visibly angry, well they might think it was a movement the Kill and Eat the Rich Movement.
And then maybe we would get more Politicians sounding like Bernie Sanders and less sounding like Barack Obama.

Turn the Page? This playbook never ends.

- Davis Fleetwood
Presidents say the darndest things. Some are shifty eyed and so full malapropos that one wonders how they graduated high school while others wax poetic as if they were scripted in an Aaron Sorkon version of the West Wing. Every single President since WW2, however, governs and politics from non-negotiable set of principles that are misguided, homicidal, and, from the viewpoint of the Empire known as the U.S., ultimately suicidal.

Barack Obama delivered his turn the page speech last night, attempting to close the chapter on Operation Iraqi Freedom. Judging from the new curtains in the oval office, and the tastefully chosen family photographs flanking the President as he calmly gazed into the teleprompter behind his recently waxed eyebrows, one got the sense that this administration had loaded up on their hubris supplements and had set out to make some history.

Turn the page? For what? Another 10 years in Afghanistan? Drive by drones indiscriminately killing perps in Pakistan operated by a pilot in Nebraska? Why don’t we just nuke Iran and then exterminate the Palestinians and expedite this mofo? Turn the page? This book is painful, man. Let’s get to the end already!

We don’t need to turn the page, Mr. President. Every one on the planet is now of an age where they lived most, if not all, of their lives reaping the rewards or (as is more commonly the case) suffers the consequences of living with the reality that would be absurd if it were not so ingrained in us. It is this same reality from which President Obama’s “turn the page speech” came from last night.

Namely (to paraphrase liberally (no pun) from Andrew Bacevichs’s excellent new book, Washington Rules; America’s Path to Permanent War):

First, The world needs to be organized. Without this, there would be chaos.

Second, It will not be an international coalition or organization such as the U.N. charged with organizing the disparate cultures spanning the globe, Au contraire mon cheri, the prescription and enforcement of global order will come from the only nation with the will, vision and wisdom to lead: the U.S. This leadership requires that we take on a never-ending list of obligations worldwide without respect to cost, stretching us both morally (like a crime family kingpin obeying his own set of rules) and financially (like a Gen X grad student with a pocket full of high interest credit cards and an online gambling addiction).  Side note to gamblers and borrowers: the house always wins.  It doesn’t take an accu history future cast to predict that when all of the blowback comes, we won’t have the money to deal with it or the friends to get our back.

Third, the principles that define the international order will be defined and articulated by… any guesses? Very good, you are getting the hang of this, the U.S. American principles posses’ universal validity. That these principles change over time should not affect their universality. Don’t look behind the curtain, Dorothy, the laws governing the international order are as prescribed by the most recent articulation of American values, and it is this most recent articulation that the rest of the world must conform.

Finally, everyone accepts this reality.  If you don’t, you are a kook. World leaders may grumble to the press or even challenge our authority, but in the end, everyone wants Uncle Sam to continue to shoulder the burden of being the world superpower, super cop, and super bag o douche. For evidence of that, peruse the comments in the video and see if you can count the derivatives of the sentiment: “If don’t love the U.S. Fleetwood, then move to Montreal why don’t ya?”

You know, that is a good question, one that I will endeavor to answer with you in the coming months.

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