HI !If you want a free Obama sticker to celebrate our victory, chek out this site . It's designed by Shepard Fairey, the artist who created the iconic HOPE poster. And MoveOn's giving them away free--even the shipping's free!
I just sent in for mine and I added a few more dollars just to help out . Click this link to get your free Obama sticker:
http://pol.moveon.org/shepstickers/?id=-14684708-h_yq_Yx
Thanks
Kristy Warshauer M>D>
Atrip to New York City is normally not my idea of how to spend a beautiful weekend in August, but for the fact that it was the last chance to visit with our daughter before she headed off for a year at a marketing consultancy in London. By midafternoon Sunday, we had had about all the culture, concrete and consumption we could take. So we put on running gear and headed to Central Park.
What a treat it turned out to be. I've been in Central Park several times in recent years and knew progress had been made in restoring the luster to Olmstead's jewel since management of the park was handed over to a private conservancy that had become a pet project of the Manhattan plutocracy. On this outing, I was blown away by how well manicured and maintained this enormous and varied public space was -- the lush ball fields, the carefully restored iron and masonry work, the magnificent sculptures and working fountains, the perfectly trimmed trees and bushes. I didn't find a streetlamp, a water fountain or a bathroom not in working order.
What made it all the more remarkable was the number of people using the park that Sunday afternoon, tens of thousands of all ages and backgrounds, riding, lounging, strolling, rowing, jogging, skating, eating, reading, painting, throwing, kicking, swinging, canoodling, talking or listening to live music. Yet despite the crowds, it never felt overcrowded.
There are, it seems to me, important lessons for economic policy in the Central Park success story.
The first is a reminder of the importance of creating and sustaining public facilities that are accessible to everyone and nourish a sense of community. Over the past 20 years, the tendency has been for those who can to abandon public schools, public transportation, public recreation, with the result that American society has become increasingly segregated by class and polarized by political ideology. In Central Park, I found hints that Americans were eager to reverse that trend.
The second big lesson is that investment in public infrastructure can have big payoffs. The Central Park Conservancy calculates that it invested $350 million over the past 20 years to restore the park to its former glory and requires $37 million a year to maintain it. That may sound like a lot of money, but when compared with the enhanced property values in the surrounding neighborhoods, the increased tourism it has helped to spawn and its contribution to making the city a more attractive place to live, my guess is that the return on investment easily equals that of the average hedge fund.
That doesn't mean that all spending on public purposes can be characterized as investment (an old liberal trick) or that all investments can be expected to have the same payback as Central Park. But it does put the lie to the idea that Americans no longer have the money to build and maintain the quality schools, libraries, parks, roads and public transportation systems required for an advanced economy. Collectively, we have the money. What we haven't had is the political will to raise the taxes necessary to make these high-payoff public investments.
Conservatives and Republicans see in the Central Park success story further confirmation of their belief that government is inept. After all, it took a private organization, relying primarily on private donations, to turn things around. Liberal Democrats would no doubt reply that if New Yorkers hadn't been scared away by tax-cutting ideology and had been willing to raise and spend $350 million of public funds for Central Park, the city's parks department could have accomplished the same feat.
There's something to both arguments.
Because of the power of special-interest groups and public employees, government spending priorities are too often misplaced and too many government agencies fail to use the money they have to deliver quality, efficient service. That's why outsourcing has become so prevalent, why charter schools have become so popular, and why so many state and local officials are turning to public-private partnerships and social entrepreneurs to tackle some of their toughest challenges. What Democrats in Washington have yet to realize is that this isn't about rejecting government or shrinking it -- it's about redefining it.
At the same time, it's important to remember that in terms of economic impact there isn't a big difference between a nonprofit raising $350 million in private donations to fix up Central Park or city government raising $350 million through a well-designed tax system to accomplish the same purpose. As we should have learned from the tech and housing bubbles, there is no guarantee that private investment will always be wiser than public, and there are plenty of examples of public managers and workers who perform as well as or better than their counterparts in the private sector. The idea that every dollar collected in taxes is a dollar lost from the economy is nothing but political propaganda.
What struck me most about my visit to Central Park, however, was the old-fashioned pride that New Yorkers take in the their spectacular public amenity -- a pride reflected in how they dressed, the courtesy they showed one another and the instinct to pick up the occasional piece of litter left by someone else. As I left, it struck me that the candidates most likely to prevail this fall will be those who figure out how to tap into the yearning to tackle and solve a big problem, to restore pride in the public realm and to reaffirm that sense that we're all in this together.
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U.S. rulers have started their latest oil war. They are temporarily targeting Afghanistan, but their strategic goal is to secure the Middle East. They are disguising this war as a "crusade against international terrorism." The atrocious murders in September of thousands of workers and others in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. have given them the cover they need to conceal their true motives under a cloak of flag-waving patriotism.
At the moment Bush and the ruling class as a whole enjoy significant popular support. However, the war’s imperialist character will become clear over time. Workers who allow themselves to be fooled into supporting the new mass slaughter for Middle Eastern energy supplies can come to recognize their error. Millions will eventually learn the hard way –on the battlefield and in the tightening vise of the rulers’ police state –that our class’s only rational choice is to turn the guns around and fight for communist revolution.
survival and Our Party has a decisive role to play in this growth of the communist movement in the years ahead will determine the course of class struggle and, to a great extent, the future of humanity. The period that has just begun is the most serious challenge to the working class since the start of World War II. It is fraught with grave danger. It offers great opportunity. Our organization must steel itself to meet a communist party’s responsibilities. Despite appearances and many enormous obstacles, our class can train itself to seize power and rid the world of the profit system.
imperialist who controls the largest amounts of the cheapest oil supplies can rule the world. At Mobil et al.
Neither the U.S. ruling class nor the anti-Exxon Saudi capitalists such as bin Laden — who use religion to cover their own oil dreams — will hesitate to turn the Persian Gulf red with workers’ blood in order to control this wealth. The next war has already started. When bosses fight among themselves, workers must never choose sides among them. We have only one side, the international working class. We have only one banner, the Red Flag. We have only one Party, the PLP. And we have only one goal: communist revolution. In the difficult days that lie ahead, we must never lose sight of it.
The profits of Exxon Mobil & Co. are now more seriously threatened than ever. The first sign came with the takeover of Iran in 1979 by Islamic Fundamentalist holy rollers. They used nationalism and religion as a cover for taking control of the oil there after booting out the murderous U.S. puppet, the Shah. In 1991, U.S. rulers butchered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi workers to prevent Saddam Hussein from raising oil prices and making deals with U.S. competitors. A decade and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, Hussein still rules Iraq and the U.S. continues to plan another war to destroy him and bring Iraq into the Exxon Mobil orbit.
But despite their seriousness, these problems pale before the nightmare brewing for U.S. imperialism in Saudi Arabia. The Persian Gulf holds the world’s biggest oil reserves and Saudi Arabia’s are bigger than any other Gulf nation’s and also the easiest to extract. Only Iraq comes close. Exxon Mobil, already the biggest customer for Saudi crude, has a deal in the works to get the lion’s share of Saudi natural gas riches. The Saudi royals are known for their love of mass terror, as well as their degeneracy, self-indulgence, extravagance, support for fascists around the world and corruption. Their saving grace has been their continued alliance with U.S. oil companies and their willing manipulation of supply to keep prices low, in accord with U.S. oil companies’ wishes.
But this sweetheart arrangement is on very thin ice. Three things have kept the House of Saud in power: U.S. support, a reign of terror against workers in general, particularly foreign-born oil workers, and an ability to create a welfare state for the benefit of a large labor aristocracy of Saudi citizens. However, the economic salad days are over. Per capita income is plummeting. Many Saudi-born university graduates can’t find work. The government is in deep debt, worsened by U.S. imperialism’s arm-twisting, which forced the Saudi rulers to fork over $65 billion for Desert Storm in1991. By maximizing its profits in Saudi Arabia, U.S. Big Oil has created a scenario for another Iran.
U.S. bosses have chosen Osama bin Laden as their main target in the "war against terror." Bin Laden is indeed a terrorist and an enemy of all workers. As the last issue of CHALLENGE indicated, he was a terrorist the U.S. was only too happy to fund and train back in the 1980s, when he fought against the U.S.’s Soviet rivals in Afghanistan. He joins many other Frankensteins made in the U.S.A.
But bin Laden and his horrible tactics represent much more than one ruthless individual with wealth and political ambition. Bin Laden reflects the growing threat to the Saudi royal family and, therefore, the continued U.S. control of Saudi oil and gas. The worsening economic conditions in the country, the Saudi government’s many internal contradictions, general social decay, as well as periodic strikes by foreign workers in the oil fields in Saudi Arabia "have shaken the kingdom to its foundations," wrote a serious London-based Palestinian journalist in 1997. "The only thing keeping Saudi Arabia from disintegrating or falling to an Islamic group is the absence of a cohesive force capable of replacing the royal family…But [such groups] are gaining strength at a rapid rate" (Saïd Aburish, The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud, St. Martin’s Press, 1966, p. xvi).
Aburish wrote those lines five years ago, when anti-U.S. fundamentalist terrorists had already attacked U.S. troops on Saudi soil and the Clinton White House was "desperately trying to stop Saudi Arabia’s decline into chaos." (ibid, p. xvi.)
From the U.S. imperialist viewpoint, "chaos" means loss of the Saudi oil fields. Bin Laden admits that they are the ultimate prize he hopes to win for his faction of bosses. In a 1998 interview, he "claimed that the United States has carried out ‘the biggest theft in history’ by buying oil from Persian Gulf countries at low prices. According to bin Laden, a barrel of oil today should cost $144. Based on that calculation, he said, the Americans have stolen $36 trillion from Muslims…" (Associated Press, 9/28).
For U.S. imperialism, led by Rockefeller’s Exxon Mobil, the stakes are in the trillions. War is their only option to maintain their grip on the world’s most crucial resource. For the international working class, the only option is to overthrow these exploiters and establish a society without profits or imperialist bosses.
(exxonwtc100101.html)
Maybe i'm naive , but i think not using the other type of publique financing is a way
for Senator Obama to show that he knows we support him, we believe in him and that he is our
candidate! The People's Candidate ! What Is GOOD For America !
The Barack Obama presidential campaign introduced a new site last week, FightTheSmears.com, that it hopes will debunk persistent myths about the senator: that he's a Muslim, that he won't say the Pledge of Allegiance, etc. As we have argued before, restating the myths often reinforces them, no matter how persuasively they've been refuted.
Rather than restate untruths about Obama, the campaign would do better to start some rumors of its own. Here's a template e-mail the Obama campaign might consider disseminating.
From: [Redacted]To: [Redacted]Subject: WHO IS BARACK OBAMA?
There are many things people do not know about BARACK OBAMA. It is every American's duty to read this message and pass it along to all of their friends and loved ones.
Barack Obama wears a FLAG PIN at all times. Even in the shower.
Barack Obama says the PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE every time he sees an American flag. He also ends every sentence by saying, "WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL." Click here for video of Obama quietly mouthing the PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE in his sleep.
A tape exists of Michelle Obama saying the PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE at a conference on PATRIOTISM.
Every weekend, Barack and Michelle take their daughters HUNTING.
Barack Obama is a PATRIOTIC AMERICAN. He has one HAND over his HEART at all times. He occasionally switches when one arm gets tired, which is almost never because he is STRONG.
Barack Obama has the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE tattooed on his stomach. It's upside-down, so he can read it while doing sit-ups.
There's only one artist on Barack Obama's iPod: FRANCIS SCOTT KEY.
Barack Obama is a DEVOUT CHRISTIAN. His favorite book is the BIBLE, which he has memorized. His name means HE WHO LOVES JESUS in the ancient language of Aramaic. He is PROUD that Jesus was an American.
Barack Obama goes to church every morning. He goes to church every afternoon. He goes to church every evening. He is IN CHURCH RIGHT NOW.
Barack Obama's new airplane includes a conference room, a kitchen, and a MEGACHURCH.
Barack Obama's skin is the color of AMERICAN SOIL.
Barack Obama buys AMERICAN STUFF. He owns a FORD, a BASEBALL TEAM, and a COMPUTER HE BUILT HIMSELF FROM AMERICAN PARTS. He travels mostly by FORKLIFT.
Barack Obama says that Americans cling to GUNS and RELIGION because they are awesome .
Fans and Supporters of Senator Obama!
Visit the site : FIGHTTHESMEARS.COM
its great and original idea , congratulations and a helpful tool !
Y all have a great and Blessed day !
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/09/us-wants-58-bases-in-iraq_n_106172.html
The Bush administration is negotiating for bases in Iraq not just a few to house our future troops to....God Bless them ...continue to train the Iraq troops . But 58 bases , i dont know , maybe they are other types of facilities, posts or something . but that sure sounds like quite a few . Who knows maybe thats what nouri al Maliki is asking for . They better pitch in and help with the expences. The base we have in Japan is if i understood correctly , entirely by the Japanese.
Oh well the complete article is for your reading above .
Today June 8 th 2008 Mr. Tim Russert and his panel of experts were discussing the now general election Sen Obama ys. McCain. At one point there was a mention that GEORGIA <i could be wrong it might have been Alabama> but Im pretty sure it was GEORGIA had 600,000 unregistered
African American voters !!! So we need to verify the info and get busy.!
NYT's op-ed page, Nathan Thrall and Jesse Wilkins offer an interesting history lesson about President John F. Kennedy's meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in 1961. Many urged Kennedy to hold off on the meeting, but the president ignored them and "was pummeled by the Soviet leader" for two days because he "was no match as a sparring partner." Khrushchev said Kennedy was "too intelligent and too weak" and then proceeded to begin erecting the Berlin Wall and making plans for nuclear missiles in Cuba. Kennedy's famous quote, "let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate," has figured prominently in the presidential campaign and has often been invoked by Sen. Barack Obama. But Obama "should heed the lesson that Kennedy learned in his first year in office: sometimes there is good reason to fear to negotiate."
A History Lesson For Us All
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