Yes We Can Has Become No You Can't

Got a lot of flack on Daily Kos for this post this afternoon, but tonight's news includes everything in my 'kitchen sink' piece, which follows:

Even those who campaigned most fervently for Barack Obama in 2008 are beginning to realize that, for whatever reasons, he has failed them. Yes You Can Has Become No You Can’t.

As the few begin to realize the breadth and depth of the disaster they have created ,established standards for police behavior are jettisoned, leading to violence against the many.

I was out of the country during the Viet Nam War, but the campus violence reported then will have been as nothing compared to what is coming. At that time, ‘the people’ were saying to power ‘No you can’t make war in a faraway land for spurious reasons’ (the so-called Communist threat).  Now power is saying to the people ‘No, you can’t prevent us from taking all the marbles’.

The spotlight shines mainly on financial crimes, but the Tea Party is relentlessly at work at the state level. Melissa Harris Perry reported this morning on MSNBC that Mississippi wants to amend its Bill of Rights to define a fertilized egg as a human being.  (The irony is that meanwhile we continue to fight Muslims because women are second-class citizens.)

How did this come about? In the sixties, counter-culture ideology was limited to ‘make love, not war’.  The middle class went on living as before, many better than before as the postwar economic miracle kept giving. But the cult of economic growth led to working class poverty. Today we are fighting a nine year old war in Afghanistan, and only winding up in Iraq to make troops and materiel available for other interventions, as we scrounge for the last barrels of oil that keep our economy going for the few.

Heavily influenced by Buddhism, instead of socialism, the 60s ideology failed to reject the capitalist ideology and tuned out the message of the “Limits to Growth”. Today’s 99 are against war, and are finally beginning to realize that only a mixed economy can provide greater equity.  But they too are failing to connect the dots: capitalist-driven greed is rendering the planet unfit for human survival, and we are now confront with “The Tragedy of the Commons”.

P.S. Tunisia’s first ever democratic election resulted in Islamists gaining the largest number of votes, with two left of center parties dividing most of the rest. The Arab Spring’s left-wing tradition goes way back, via France.

P.P.S.  Anyone notice various people in the Occupy Movement sporting Palestinian kheffias?