[Peace-discuss] James Petras fulminates…

[E. Wayne Johnson]

Mort,
I was severely criticized when I sat on an animal care committee over at 
the University for using
the expression "calling a spade a spade" as some misguided and 
misinformed administrators
felt that I had used a racist term.  (They didn't appreciate my blunt
critique of their lack of discernment in management either, so 
criticizing my language
presented them a convenient diversion.)

The expression about spades dates back to the ancient Greeks and refers to
some lack of sophistication in one's description of a hog trough.

But some think it refers to a racial slur that dates from the 1920's. 
No amount of googling and etymology would change the minds of these
administrators...


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> I thought you'd be sympathetic :-)=
>
> I believe the refusal to lambast Obama for his various choices of 
> advisors at the UFPJ has to do somewhat with not offending those 
> African-Americans (many on the steering committee), so proud and happy 
> that Obama was elected. Only Ali Abunimah of those on the podium 
> called a spade a spade, infuriated that Obama supported the strangling 
> of the Palestinians, especially in Gaza. Also, I can surmise that the 
> relief of so many that the Bush regime was repudiated with Obama's 
> election has tended to attenuate their impulse to then immediately 
> attack the beneficiary.
> --mkb
>
> On Dec 19, 2008, at 12:54 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> Why should Petras fulminate?  Obama is planning to kill a lot of 
>> people and immiserate more, just as he said he would.  And Petras 
>> seems so upset at the prospect that he can't even get straight why 
>> our rulers would do such things.
>>
>> He seems to ascribe it to stupidity: "They blindly back a small, 
>> highly militarized and ideologically fanatical colonial state 
>> (Israel) against 1.5 billion Muslims living in oil and mineral 
>> resource-rich nations with lucrative markets and investment potential 
>> and situated in the strategic center of the world. They promote total 
>> wars against whole populations, as is occurring in Afghanistan, Iraq 
>> and Somalia and, which, by all historical experience, cannot be won."
>>
>> That's wrong both as to cause and effect.  The Clinton-Bush-Obama 
>> regime has in fact done rather well in achieving its real goals and 
>> will probably continue to do so, despite the danger to humanity.  And 
>> they are generally quite rational in the Weberian sense of fitting 
>> means to ends (with occasional foul-ups, like the Coalition 
>> Provisional Authority, but they can be corrected, with more deaths). 
>> They're vicious, not stupid, as the rest of the (shoe-throwing) world 
>> recognizes.  But Americans who see that can be strangled in the bath 
>> of propaganda.
>>
>> I find myself quoting Thomas Pynchon a lot these days: "If you can 
>> get them asking the wrong questions, you don't have to worry about 
>> answers."  --CGE
>>
>> Morton K. Brussel wrote:
>>> Worth pondering. I would like to ask Petras whether would have 
>>> preferred McCain.Palin to the here reviled Obama.
>>> I asked a panel at the UFPJ, which  included Tom Hayden, why there 
>>> were no real progressives nominated to Obama's team, and received no 
>>> answer. I thought this was a gross omission, because it must have 
>>> implications for the anti-war movement. James Petras gives his 
>>> interpretation of those implications. The panel at UFPJ were not 
>>> willing to consider them.  (Maybe it was too late in a long 
>>> session.) --mkb
>>> <http://petras.lahaine.org/articulo.php?p=1766&more=1&c=1>
>>
>>
>> Yes, indeed, “our greatest intellectual critics”, our ‘libertarian’ 
>> leftists and academic anarchists, used their 5-figure speaking 
>> engagements as platforms to promote the con man’s candidacy: They 
>> described the con man’s political pitch as “meeting the deeply felt 
>> needs of our people”. They praised the con man when he spoke of 
>> ‘change’ and ‘turning the country around’ 180 degrees. Indeed, Obama 
>> went one step further: he turned 360 degrees, bringing us back to the 
>> policies and policy makers who were the architects of our current 
>> political-economic disaster.
>>
>> The contrast between Obama’s campaign rhetoric and his political 
>> activities was clear, public and evident to any but the mesmerized 
>> masses and the self-opiated ‘progressives’ who concocted arguments in 
>> his favor. Indeed even after Obama’s election and after he appointed 
>> every Clintonite-Wall Street shill into all the top economic policy 
>> positions, and Clinton’s and Bush’s architects of prolonged imperial 
>> wars (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense 
>> Robert Gates), the ‘progressive true believers’ found reasons to dog 
>> along with the charade. Many progressives argued that Obama’s 
>> appointments of war mongers and swindlers was a ‘ploy’ to gain time 
>> now in order to move ‘left’ later...
>>
>> The electoral scam served several purposes above and beyond merely 
>> propelling a dozen strategic con artists into high office and the 
>> White House. First and foremost, the Obama con-gang deflected the 
>> rage and anger of tens of millions of economically skewered and war 
>> drained Americans from turning their hostility against a discredited 
>> presidency, congress and the grotesque one-party two factions 
>> political system and into direct action or at least toward a new 
>> political movement...
>
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