Alan Grayson "There's NOBODY Giving Obama Economic Or Military Advice You Can Call A Progressive"

Run time: 03:51 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM6pFDPu4E0   Posted on YouTube: January 05, 2011 By YouTube Member: MOXNEWSd0tCOM Views on YouTube: 254   Posted on DU: January 05, 2011 By DU Member: democracy1st Views on DU: 5097

 
January 04, 2011 MSNBC The ED Show
http://MOXNews.com

:rofl:

:sarcasm:

If the election were tomorrow, I would vote for him.

And it would be almost impossible to take the nomination away from a sitting president. Grayson knows that. If Obama got close to losing the nomination he'd play dirty and go after Grayson. The one thing we've learned about Obama is that he's able to fight like hell -- against our side.

Look how the White House abandoned Grayson and our party wouldn't come to his aid financially when the goopers targeted him. That's the little gang he'd be up against if he ran in the 2012 primaries.

0 is going to go on appointing pugs and thugs to run things and folks are just going to get angrier and angrier. Grayson is a smart man. He will know when and if the time is right. When he does I will be there to cheer him on in any way I can. The first thing he needs to do is get out of Redneckville and run at least for the senate.

If the election was in 2012 I would vote for him too.

If he couldn't hold his own seat...I'm doubtful he'd end up in the White House. He strikes me as unpredictable and slightly volatile. But, I don't think he'd be bullied.

Grayson needs to be elected to Congress in a state that will appreciate him. He's a powerful voice for citizens who aren't billionaires and multimillionaires (and probably trillionaires, too, by now).

And the mafia ...they are pretty common where there is election theft. Fl. doesn't even try to make theirs' look legitimate.

The mafia had a moral code. It is unfair to La Cosa Nostra to compare them to republican vote riggers.

:)

This district includes some rural parts of Orange County as well as the super-rich in Windermere (home of Tiger Woods and countless multi-millionaires)

He reminds of some of our tougher presidents from history. He treats the Repubs like he nasty little play-ground bullies they are and they are terrified of him. Like a father who sees exactly who the problem is when the kids start whining about who did what to whom, Grayson is never fooled by the whiners and says so. Out loud. If others in Congress had half his courage to stand up to the bad guys, this country would change for the better almost instantly.

But most of them are so compromised by Corporate money they don't dare. So people like Grayson, who isn't, find themselves without much support from their party.

However, lots of successful politicians have lost races. Clinton eg, lost the governorship, but came back later to win it back. Nixon, how many losses did he have before finally making it?

This is merely a bump in the road in what I hope will be a long, successful career in public service.

I'm just dreaming of a candidate I could vote for without having to wonder what the difference is.

were we not able to? No one is working with the president on social issues who is a progressive..... Thank you for your progressive voice-Stay active Congressman Grayson!!!!


Oops grammer....

you have to have a breadth of imagination and sense of the possibilities and no one has it including our President. Shame. I guess when people riot they will have to make some small accomodation. <sarcasm>
All the little people you know. I wonder if there is anyone Obama knows that isn't an investment banker.

When your closest economic advisors came straight out of the revolving door you'd better believe groupthink will follow.

I respect Obama's intellect but when you have a clique of Wall-Street insiders giving you a limited range of supply-side options you really need to seek alternate opinions. I wish he'd bring some credentialed voices from outside the Washington/Wall-Street bubble and give them a seat at the table.

is undermining the already damaged credibility of the Democratic Party. I seriously have to question if that has not been the motive all along. If the Democratic Party is the "party of Wall Steet" they are certainly not my party.

there is just so much that can be done. His administration is controlled.There have been enough murders of progressives to prove it. Notice the most unusual plane crashes etc. are out spoken progressives. The recent military guy who was found in a trash dump worked around the odd missing nuke thingy in Minot, SD. LOTS of the lower level AF have died in car wrecks who worked there . .

last night for the second time. Anyone who missed it, it is a must-see. You can watch it here http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/.

Not only did President Obama put Wall St. insiders on his economic team, he put the orchestrators of the disastrous policies that deregulated the financial industry during the Clinton Administration and led to the current meltdown of the economy. It was a bi-partisan effort. I'm not even sure any of these people belong to either party. They are evil, greedy, selfish, arrogant men who have helped to destroy this country. And rather than being held accountable for what they've done, they have only grown more wealth and more powerful.

In this documentary you see Ruben and Summers and Geithner, and Greenspan under Clinton stop the woman who could have saved this country from their disastrous policies.

After watching this documentary you have to ask yourself, why would anyone, Democrat or Republican, who truly cared about this country ever let any of these men near our government? Add to them, Paulson, Bernanke and the rest of the Goldman Sachs crew and no one needs to ask why it sometimes seems like no one cares about the American people. These men are not capable of caring about people, especially 'lowly' people like the ones who fill their gas tanks, or mow their lawns, clean their houses etc.

A true Democratic President would never have brought these destructive people back into power. Such a person would have sought out people like the woman who tried to stop them during the 'nineties, Brooksley Born and James Galbraith, Joseph Stiglitz, even Arthur Levitt who was part of the Wall St. gang initially, but later came to realize how wrong they were, and how right Brooksley Born was.

She tried to warn them about the dangers of derivitives in an unregulated market as she was an expert on the subject, and they basically ran her out of town.

Today, ten years later, none of them except for Arthur Levitt has apologized to her.

And the disgusting sight of Alan Greenspan whose anger at Brooksley Born for trying to 'look out of the people's money' caused him to 'go red in the face' witnesses said, sitting before Congress after spending a lifetime enriching himself from the people's money, tearing down our economy, arrogantly refusing to listen to anyone, now he says, responding to Waxman's question 'were you wrong'? 'yes, I was wrong'. Well, a lot of good that did for us and for this country.

I think of these people as traitors. Brooksley Born is a true patriot and that is who this president should have nominated for his economic team. He put the criminals back in charge so they could cover up their crimes.

The more I learn, the more I feel that there has been a coup and that no decent person can make it to the WH until there are major criminal investigations and decent government restored.

The only problem is, who is going to do that? Grayson is right, as usual. I hope he keeps talking, but I hope others join him because people like him may be this country's only hope.

I voted for Barack. I didn't want another Clinton again. So what's the first thing he does? Bring all the Clintonites into the White House. So much for being against inside Washington politics as usual.
I doubt he'll ever get it, or will admit it, that most progressive ideas today actually are mainstream. Unless there is any significant movement by him toward this, and I strongly doubt there will be, a primary challenge is not only warranted, but necessary.

Welcome to DU!

I've called this a Goldman Sachs admin. Bipartisanship was used as a excuse not to pass any true progressive legislation. This admin has produced nothing but pro corp,pro Wall St economic legislation. Thank you for the link!

Thanks for the heads up,I'll watch online.

level subsidiearies - The council on Foreign Relations and the Tri-Lateral Commission. (Tri-Lateral for three hemispheres). 3 is a very interesting number in our lives. Better known as a multi-national, ruling elite, king-equivalents. Democracy is sinking away because we've been sunk. It's the war of the idealists for all control in the most ugly way imaginable against idealists who don't know that they have lost poser.
Of, for, and by - good-bye.

in my court. The Obama team is not. Extending the millionaire tax cuts was the final straw for me because I am a progressive.

Americans still think there is a party that has represented the working class in the last two years.

Fearless patriot. Hope we haven't seen the last of him - he speaks for so many.

K&R

...was given a position in the Obama White House.


The DLC New Team

(Screen Capped from the DLC Website)

http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=254886&kaid=86&subid=85

A President is not likely to surround him/herself with folks having a political ideology at the other end of the political spectrum.

Because he campaigned on his opposition to the Iraq War! Seems like that should count for something. Then he didn't appoint anyone to his administration that didn't support the Iraq War? And you're not outraged about that? Or maybe I'm not understanding where you're coming from.

Looks like it was all just a way to position himself. He probably saw an opportunity with leading Dems supporting the invasion to flank them on the left. Too bad it was all just politics and wasn't real, and too bad so many (myself included) believed him.

Grayson, however, is a man that actually stands for something, and he's filled with courage. We need to get him a new job ASAP.

SOP. They wouldn't be electable if they campaigned by telling the truth as their pro Corporate and Wall St. agenda would render them unelectable. Campaign rhetoric is just that, rhetoric.

Each case is different. The seemingly inevitable nomination of Hillary was derailed, at least in part, because she supported the Iraq War, which most Democrats viewed as W's insane misadventure.

To your point, it probably depends on how the DLC/New Dem type candidate perceives the electorate. If they thought sounding like a Republican would give them a better chance of getting elected, such as a Dem running in a conservative district, they'd try to sound like a Republican (and for that kinda Dem that might be a more honest position to take).

I'm not supposed to be upset that the anti-Iraq war candidate Obama didn't appoint anyone in his administration that opposed that war? Sorry, that's way past my tolerance for campaign rhetoric deception. You can say I'm just not cynical enough, or whatever, but really it matters (in this case it matters a helluva lot) and I'm not willing to just write it off as typical BS, this cuts too deep and was way too misleading.

as long as the Left collectively as individuals and organizations ignores the coordinated 1000 station talk radio 2x4 that beats them continuously they won't be getting their reps backs and the mere threat that their appointees and aides will be called communist all day for weeks, like van jones, and the distraction that means, is enough to force centrist compromise. don't expect politicians to stick their necks out like grayson if the Left keeps ignoring team limbaugh and the free speech free ride they enjoy. i'll bet none of grayson's local fans picketed the local RW radio stations that were attacking and lying about him, or on a national level when limbaugh/hannity/savage/beck threatened him.

In my opinion, it would be just as effective at making my life a living hell, and enlisting me in the walking dead club like all the other Limbaugh fans.

Any person with intelligence can see the lunacy in Limbaugh, and quickly runs away from the toxic rhetoric for fear of infection.

No, listening to Limbaugh is not the answer. THe real answer is a fundamental education for our population that teaches them abstract thinking and the ability to spot bullshit as soon as it is employed upon them.

Unfortunately, our masses are not educated. They are propagandized into buying crap they don't need, and Limbaugh is just exploiting that training for another product.

Sadly, most people can't wrap their heads around the fact that Limbaugh's product is a figment of his own reality, and they buy it hook line and sinker.

"THe real answer is a fundamental education for our population that teaches them abstract thinking and the ability to spot bullshit as soon as it is employed upon them."

Right on, that truly is needed. Critical analysis skills. How? Probably not at the top of Arne Duncan's priorities. But it should be one of ours, and thanks for raising the issue, I've raised this issue in private conversations many times. These skills could and should be taught.

they've had 20 years with 1000 unchallenged radio stations for coordinated repetition to bash teachers, unions, load local school boards, preemptive swiftboating of progressive education 'czars', and on and on.

the left keeps whining in a talk radio vacuum while limbaugh and wannabes pound think tank talking points into the earholes of 50 mil a week. i don't give a fuck if individuals listen to limbaugh or not but for the left collectively to do it is pure stupidity. instead the left gets taken to the cleaners on a regular basis and beats their reps all day and has no fucking clue why. instead it lazily whines that limbaugh gives them a headache. or fox is the problem or that their reps don't have balls.

one young republican ayn randian wet dreamer with a communications degree and a big microphone reading chamber of commerce talking points from your local RW megastation can undo the work of thousands of progressives volunteering and blogging here and there.

ignoring team limbaugh is why we're in this disaster. the collective left is ignoring talk radio and that's why we're in this mess.

global warming will not wait for education reform the way you like it. in the meantime giving limbaugh a free speech free ride means you won't get the reform you or i may want but the contiinued privatization because the left allows the right 1000 UNCHALLENGED radio stations.

limbaugh's product is not his own reality- he is just the lead man in a well coordinated radio propaganda operation that dominates media in this country. anyone who wants to know what the GOP is planning on an issue just needs to turn him on once in a while. but that is the failure of the prog groups, the dem party, and the left collectively- that they don't have a regular daily analysis of what the talk radio machine is doing, or provide a searchable transcript database of the main talkers.

and though it was not to me, I'll interject.

Your assessment of the impact of how the other side catapults their propaganda is right on, and should not be overlooked.

I take issue with the "blame the left" tone of your post, though. Are we blameless? I'm sure we could all do more, or take better targeted action. But pretty much every thread of mainstream society, let alone the vast propaganda machine you're talking about, has nothing for the left but blame. It's always our fault, isn't it? I see no need to add to this, we should support each other while we discuss corrective action.

There is a feeling of superiority that makes the left vulnerable to underestimating the impact of right-wing and corporatist talking points (stupid and transparent as they are). So your post has value in bringing the incredible impact of the various propaganda devices to our attention.

The much larger component of why our ideas are overlooked, or never heard, IMO, is revenue streams. There is some money on the left, however how many of us here, many of us intelligent and articulate advocates of progressive thought, have any reasonable expectation of making a living by advocating our cause? Sure, some do, the vast majority of us, though, are forced to slave away at various jobs and do what we can in our spare moments. The money and infrastructure for such things on the right are, IMO, orders of magnitude beyond ours. This is no accident. We're up against the wealthiest, most powerful interests on the planet. That is, almost by definition, the landscape the left has to operate in.

The media empires and think tanks you rail against didn't show up out of the goodness of conservative activists' hearts. They showed up because powerful moneyed interests saw them as ways to get more of what they want, which is money. They spend this money setting up this infrastructure because it greatly increases their profits. Outside of organized labor, whose resources pale next to the vast corporate wealth they're up against, and which grows more and more irrelevant in the era of locating jobs wherever the most desperate and unregulated workers can be found, there is no corresponding mechanism to drive a viable, competitive messaging industry for the left.

What we have, for what it's worth, is the truth. It's much harder to convince people of lies than truth. We also have numbers, vast disempowered masses. Unfortunately, and to the point of your post, we lose many of these people to the propaganda machine.

One way to help offset this would be for people to learn, and ideally be taught, critical analysis skills. It's an eternal problem for humanity. We (we the masses, present company excepted of course) follow alpha leaders because they're alpha, not because their ideas are superior. It's always been this way but there can and must be progress made, it's the ultimate root cause issue. It's also a long-term effort. We won't get results on this front anytime soon. But a necessary one for the ultimate survival of humanity. We have to evolve to our new situation. For most of humankind's history, strong, alpha leaders who fought rather than thought, were advantageous to members of the group, or at least more so than in the current social context we live in. Seeing through BS, resisting charismatic leadership in favor of wise and thoughtful leaders, leaving the cults of personality behind, is an evolutionary task humanity has to achieve, or we ultimately perish as a species.

On the more concrete, immediate level, I fully agree we need the kind of information infrastructures you're talking about. It's not anything new, we've known this and fought for it for a long time now, to little result, while the moneyed interests open their wallets and out pops a Tea Party to safely divert the public's anger away from them. Incredibly frustrating.

If you or anyone else here has ideas about how to bring about a competitive messaging system for the left, it would be a great place for DU to focus on, perhaps as a forum group, I don't know. DU itself is one of the greatest examples of a forum for left-based thought and information, though it suffers from preaching mostly to the choir (our thoughts are not broadcast on thousands of stations over and over).

My personal view is that the current broadcast media monopolies are about to be broken wide open by the integration of the internet with television, which opens up amazing opportunities for getting non-corporate media into people's living rooms. I'm an unemployed computer programmer who is interested in working on interfaces for this, and I'd love to hear from anyone with similar interests.

I wonder what we really elected in 2008 sometimes. I certainly see nothing better as an alternative to Obama at the moment, but I wish Obama had the mind-set of an Alan Grayson. We NEVER would have had DADT linger until the final days of 2010, when we had to pay hundreds of billions in tax breaks for the rich in order to get a few million people a few more weeks of unemployment.

.... the president is ill served by his advisors. It's hard to bring change when you are being advised to do the same old thing by people who benefit from the same old thing.

why not bring on Paul Krugman or Dean Baker? Those economists actually predicted the housing bubble and the huge mess we are in now.

He decides whom to listen to.

Face it: He's getting the advice he wants.

And as Ed Schultz asked him to do, stay active.

Alan, I wish you and family would move to Los Angeles and
replace the worthless Jane Harman.

:thumbsup:

And get a clue Barack....though sadly maybe he does have a clue, it's just the wrong clue. Once again, Obama is looking for entrenched Wall Street insiders as his top financial honchos. More hawks to guard the chicken coup. Why not smart people from Main Street? Because what has been going on for a long time is that these guys float in and out of government and places like Goldman Sachs, they pass favorable rules for people like Goldman then sporadically go back to Goldman where they benefit from those same rules, or lack thereof.

This is one of the biggies I challenge the dogged apologists with, the ones who have Obama wrapped in teflon: who put a gun to his head and made him appoint the likes of Summers and Geithner to reign in (wink wink) Wall Street - let alone Emmanual as his cheif of staff?

And the Big Con/Shell Game rolls on. But hey, what's really important, what's Snooky up to? Who is on "Dancing With The Stars"?

2008 - Top donors to obama campaign...

University of California $1,591,395
Goldman Sachs $994,795
Harvard University $854,747
Microsoft Corp $833,617
Google Inc $803,436
Citigroup Inc $701,290
JPMorgan Chase & Co $695,132
Time Warner $590,084
Sidley Austin LLP $588,598
Stanford University $586,557
National Amusements Inc $551,683
UBS AG $543,219
Wilmerhale Llp $542,618
Skadden, Arps et al $530,839
IBM Corp $528,822
Columbia University $528,302
Morgan Stanley $514,881
General Electric $499,130
US Government $494,820
Latham & Watkins $493,835

from opensecrets.org

When did we achieve universal health-care, exactly? If he thinks that has been accomplished then he is mistaken.

I'll bet the progressives that voted for him feel like suckers by now. His liberal base, blacks and poor whites will reelect him though. We progressives are loud but tiny.

You already knew the answer to your insulting question!

That Grayson should shut his mouth now simply because he's an American citizen and not a congressman any longer?

If your not implying this, (when its quite obvious that you are)....then do your tap dance and correct me - I look forward to being wronged on this!

But don't you think it is stupid to take political advice from someone who just lost an election?

By hook or crooks, everyone will have health insurance. (mostly crooks)
It's not single payer
It's not affordable.
It's mandated by law. (That's what upset the tea party)
But it is universal, in that there is a provision to require that , somehow, everyone buy it. You can't be denied coverage.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/f/fa/20100331033349!Alan_Grayson_high_res.jpg

:patriot:

The WH has never had 'out side the box' advice on the economy. He has been getting advice from orthodox economists. None of them have any solutions for a recession. Heterodox economists such as krugman have good ideas; but, people like Krugman are ignored.

The same thing with military. Obama has not been told that a military option fails.

It's a shame he never amounted to anything more than a :crazy: sounding, self-agrandizing, mostly classless, political gadfly while serving in the US Congress.

Hope he comes back!

Its too bad the President isn't listening to progressives. I for one will sit out the next election no matter what the president does from now on.

But you want to take shots at the President from Irrelevant Island.

You just would like to make believe he is irrelevant by saying it over and over in place of something substantial. He does not appear to be irrelevant to most on this site, or to Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, The Ring of Fire et al.

But I guess in your world, these folks are irrelevant as well.

We really want, this, we shouldn't compromise on that, blah, blah. And what does that get done? Nothing.

Give me health care reform, finanical reform, as imperfect as they may be, rather than the old way way because we want to be ignorantly pure.

I might agree, at least with your premise.

and like some who will remain nameless, will not turn on his own sucking up to the rich.

The concept of trickle down economics should have been exposed for what it is. The fact that it wasn't proves that Grayson is correct. Watching the attempts at righting our economic ship with the same economic assumptions that got us to where we are has been like helping my kids with math. They create these really difficult, complex explanations in an attempt to get the correct answer when there was a fundamental flaw very early on in the equation solving process. All of their attempts at solutions are stated in terms of a fundamental mistake. Trickle on economics should have been convicted and executed in the public square. Obama's people are trying to solve the problems in terms of the fundamental mistake. Go Alan Grayson!