Left Wing Opposition to the Global Warfare and Corporate Welfare State

The Liberty Voice posts a transcript and video of a presentation delivered at the Socialism 2009 Conference in San Francisco by John Pilger entitled 'Power, Illusion and America's Last Taboo.'

here is the 44th President of the United States, having stacked his government with warmongers and corporate fraudsters and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, teasing us while promising more of the same.

Here is the House of Representatives, controlled by Obama’s Democrats, voting to approve $16 billion for three wars and a coming presidential military budget which, in 2009, will exceed any year since the end of World War Two, including the spending peaks of the Korean and Vietnam wars. And here is a peace movement, not all of it but much of it, prepared to look the other way and believe or hope that Obama will restore, as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times, the “nation of moral ideals" . . . .

During his brief period in the Senate, Obama voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He voted for the Patriot Act. He refused to support a bill for single-payer health care. He supported the death penalty. As a presidential candidate, he received more corporate backing than John McCain. He promised to close Guantanamo as a priority and has not. Instead, he has excused the perpetrators of torture, reinstated the infamous military commissions, kept the Bush gulag intact and opposed habeus corpus . . .

Yes, a lot of good people mobilized for Obama. But what did they demand of him — apart from the amorphous “change”? That isn’t activism . . .

What Obama and the bankers and the generals, and the IMF and the CIA and CNN fear is ordinary people coming together and acting together. It is a fear as old as democracy: a fear that suddenly people convert their anger to action and are guided by the truth.

At Docudharma, ToqueDeville makes the case against infiltration and continued progressive complicity with the Democratic Party:

Some, in an attempt to remedy the situation, have advocated making the Democratic party more progressive by taking it over. "Be the party you want," they say. "Infiltrate."

This is a pipe dream. The entire structure of the two party system is designed to prevent that from happening. There will be no crashing of the gates. No progressive Democratic revolution. I explained the pipe dream in more detail here. But long story short, almost every bought out, sold out, corrupt Democrat in Washington started off trying to crash the gates.

The truth is, both parties are controlled by the same monied interests. This way, as the late Carroll Quigley observed, when an election occurs, real power doesn't change hands.

The Democratic party is not designed to represent the common people. It is designed to contain us. To create the illusion of representation so that we don't revolt . . .

Only when we realize this, and use our leverage accordingly, will we gain real political power. The only leverage a politician understands is the power to make him or her LOSE.

You want a more progressive Democratic party? You have to be willing to lose. It's that simple. Sure, it may cost them their "majority", but they will never fuck with us again.

This is how you get "better" Democrats. This is how we change this country. This is what our enemies have long understood. There is no other way. Leverage.