Bush, Obama, McCain - what's the difference...? It's all manipulation by oligarchy...

chris hedges...

Obama, like Bush and McCain, funds and backs our unending and unwinnable wars. He does nothing to halt the accumulation of the largest deficits in human history. The drones murder thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as they did under Bush and would have done under McCain. The private military contractors, along with the predatory banks and investment houses, suck trillions out of the U.S. Treasury as efficiently under Obama. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus, have not been restored. The public option is dead. The continuation of the Bush tax cuts, adding some $900 billion to the deficit, along with the reduction of individual contributions to Social Security, furthers a debt peonage that will be the excuse to privatize Social Security, slash social services and break the back of public service unions. Obama does not intercede as tens of millions of impoverished Americans face foreclosures and bankruptcies. The Democrats provide better cover. But the corporate assault is the same.

in the article excerpted above, hedges is writing about a recent discussion he had with ralph nader... here's nader talking about the current assault on public employee unions that was the topic of my previous post...

And now wait till you see what they will do to the public employee unions. Part of it is their own fault. They are going to be crushed. Everybody is ganging up on them. You have new class warfare. It is non-unionized lower income and middle class taking it out on the unionized middle-income public employees. It is a classic example of oligarchic manipulation.

nader also points out how our super-rich elites have managed to virtually mute the justified outrage of liberals and progressives at what's happening to our country...

The banishment from the corporate media, Nader argues, has been one of the major contributors to the demoralization and weakening of the left. Protests by the left, which get little national or local coverage, have steadily dwindled in strength across the country. The first protest gets little or no coverage and this leads to movements, as well as the voices of activists, being diminished and finally suffocated.

nader makes what is, imho, an implied but arguable point, namely that protests require media coverage to be effective... while that may to a large extent be true, it seems to me that to not engage in protest and resistance because it won't make the news is just one more way we allow ourselves to be cowed into submission...

nader goes on to conclude with a thought that has been lurking in the back of my own mind for several years...

“The black swan question is whether something will erupt that is rare, extreme and unpredictable,” Nader said. “It is amazing that it hasn’t happened in any pockets of the country. How much more can the oppressed take before they revolt? And can they revolt without organizers? These are the two important questions. You have got to have organizers, and as of now we don’t.”

i think nader's belief in the need for "organizers" reflects his own history more than objective fact... however, i do see the real possibility for a "black swan"... in fact, i see a "black swan" event as more of an inevitability than a mere possibility...

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