The “last hope debate”… can anyone bear to watch?

Reflection
Passing through an Amtrak station on his way to an interview in Greensboro, North Carolina, Barack Obama catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror. [Callie Shell / Aurora for TIME]

Well.. the NYT calls it the “last, best hope for John McCain to reverse the tide…”

Hoefstra – Long Island – 9 PM –

This gave me a laugh tho:

First Read:

NBC/WSJ pollster Peter Hart (D) passes along this finding from a recent poll he conducted: 37% of McCain voters say they detest Obama and would have a hard time accepting him as president, while a similar number of Obama voters (36%) say the same thing of McCain.

DNA! DNA!  We need some DNA!

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Mike Davis has a new piece out…

[I]n addition, both Obama and his vice presidential partner Joe Biden, in their support for Secretary of the Treasury Paulson’s plan, avoid any discussion of the inevitable result of cataclysmic restructuring and government bailouts: not “socialism,” but ultra-capitalism — one that is likely to concentrate control of credit in a few leviathan banks, controlled in large part by sovereign wealth funds but subsidized by generations of public debt and domestic austerity.

Never have so many ordinary Americans been nailed to a cross of gold (or derivatives), yet Obama is the most mild-mannered William Jennings Bryan imaginable. Unlike Sarah Palin who masticates the phrase “the working class” with defiant glee, he hews to a party line that acknowledges only the needs of an amorphous “middle class” living on a largely mythical “Main Street.”

If we are especially concerned about the fate of the poor or unemployed, we are left to read between the lines, with no help from his talking points that espouse clean coal technology, nuclear power, and a bigger military, but elide the urgency of a renewed war on poverty as championed by John Edwards in his tragically self-destructed primary campaign  [oh please, there was no inherent ”tragedy” as he meant none of it, his run was to eclipse any poverty message from Kucinich   — Mcat].  But perhaps inside the cautious candidate is a man whose humane passions transcend his own nearsighted centrist campaign. As a close friend, exasperated by my chronic pessimism, chided me the other day, “don’t be so unfair. FDR didn’t have a nuts and bolts program either in 1933. Nobody did.”

What Franklin D. Roosevelt did possess in that year of breadlines and bank failures, according to my friend, was enormous empathy for the common people and a willingness to experiment with government intervention, even in the face of the monolithic hostility of the wealthy classes. In this view, Obama is MoveOn.org’s re-imagining of our 32nd president: calm, strong, deeply in touch with ordinary needs, and willing to accept the advice of the country’s best and brightest.  ::snip::

I caught an NBC (GE! GE! USA! USA!) interview with Paulson, in which he unblinkingly stated that the American people were buying shares “that will be very valuable”.

Yeah?  Who says?  You?

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This from Madman from the last thread fits in here…

America’s Political Cannibalism By Chris Hedges

It is no longer our economy but our democracy that is in peril. It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the collapse of the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in czarist Russia that opened the door for Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies, presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash.

As the public begins to grasp the depth of the betrayal and abuse by our ruling class, as the Democratic and Republican parties are exposed as craven tools of our corporate state, as savings accounts, college funds and retirement plans become worthless, as unemployment skyrockets and as home values go up in smoke, we must prepare for the political resurgence of a reinvigorated radical Christian right. The engine of this mass movement—as is true for all radical movements—is personal and economic despair. And despair, in an age of increasing shortages, poverty and hopelessness, will be one of our few surplus commodities.

Karl Polanyi in his book “The Great Transformation,” written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences—the depressions, wars and totalitarianism—that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism—and a Mafia political system—which is a good description of the American government under George W. Bush. Polanyi wrote that a self-regulating market, the kind bequeathed to us since Ronald Reagan, turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried the free market’s belief that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market. He reminded us that a society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic worth beyond monetary value, ultimately commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always destroy the foundation for a continued prosperity.