These times provide a crash course on the corporate state:

If a company like AIG is too big to fail, the government will rescue it. Mere people — too small to matter — are expendable.

The insurance industry is too big to fail. A person’s health is too small to matter, so — when it fails due to the absence or loopholes of insurance coverage — that’s tough luck.

The Defense Department is too big to fail. The people it’s killing in Iraq and Afghanistan are too small to matter.

The U.S. nuclear arsenal is too big to fail. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, undermined by Washington, is too small to matter.

Overall, the warfare state is too big to fail. The virtues of peace are too small to matter.

Agribusiness is too big to fail. Family farmers are too dirt-small to matter…

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As corporate media coverage of the presidential race becomes even more notably stingy with intrepid journalism, the mainstream press enthusiasm for "The Daily Show" seems more cloying than ever.

The pattern is now a routine feature of the media landscape: "The Daily Show" gets laudatory attention from major news organizations, where countless journalists watch like shackled prisoners in awe of Superman.

Look — up in the media sky — it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Jon Stewart!

While news accounts note how many viewers hold faux "news anchor" Stewart in higher esteem as a journalist than the "real" ones at the top of the media pack, there’s a sheepish quality to much of the coverage…

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Norman Solomon had an additional role in Denver last week — he was an elected Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention. In a blog for CommonDreams, he shared his observations.

Beyond the Conventions

With varying degrees of confidence or even complacency, many people have assumed that the jig is almost up for the horrendous political era that began when George W. Bush became president. Always dubious, the assumption is now on very shaky ground.

The Bush-Cheney regime may be on its last legs, but a new incarnation of right-wing populism is shadowing the near horizon.

Much as modern capitalism is always driven to promote new products in the marketplace, the corporate-fundamentalist partnership must reinvent and remarket itself. We’re now seeing the rollout of a hybrid product under the McCain-Palin brand.

Last night, after watching Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech and the laudatory responses from many TV journalists, I remembered wandering around the floor of the Democratic National Convention a week ago. At the base, the two major parties are even more different than the speeches are apt to indicate…

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By now, across the progressive spectrum, some familiar storylines tell us the meaning of the Obama campaign. In a groove, each narrative digs its truths. But whether those particular truths are the most important at this historical moment is another story.

We can set aside the plotline that touts Obama as a visionary pragmatist who has earned the complete trust of progressives. The belief has diminished in recent months — in the wake of numerous Obama pronouncements on foreign policy, his FISA vote to damage the Fourth Amendment and the like — but such belief was never really grounded in his record as a politician or his policy positions…

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A reasonably evenhanded biography of Barack Obama, published last year, describes him as “an exceptionally gifted politician who, throughout his life, has been able to make people of wildly divergent vantage points see in him exactly what they want to see.” The biographer, David Mendell, reports that “the higher he soared, the more this politician spoke in well-worn platitudes and the more he offered warm, feel-good sentiments lacking a precise framework.”

Now, less than four months before Election Day, with growing disquiet among significant portions of Obama’s progressive base, the current negative reactions can’t be dismissed as potshots from the political margins. Even the New York Times, in a July 4 editorial headlined “New and Not Improved,” has expressed alarm: “We are not shocked when a candidate moves to the center for the general election. But Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games.”

But on July 8, Obama made a valid point — even if it wasn’t exactly the point he was trying to make — when he disputed “this whole notion that I am shifting to the center” and argued: “The people who say this apparently haven’t been listening to me.” Overall, his career as a politician has embraced conciliation and compromise rather than pushing against centrist corporate agendas…

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Speaking in a time of war, Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Somehow this madness must cease.”

Forty-one years later, young soldiers are returning to the United
States from terrifying zones of carnage. The old claims of a justified
war have melted away. So have the promises of a humane society back
home.

Statistics about the war dead tell us very little about human
realities. And familiar downbeat numbers about health care — 47 million
Americans with no health insurance, perhaps an equal number woefully
under-insured — tell us very little about the actual consequences or
other options.

“The shocking facts about health care in the United States are well known,” Yes! Magazine
noted in the autumn of 2006. “There’s little argument that the system
is broken. What’s not well known is that the dialogue about fixing the
health care system is just as broken.”

That’s an apt description. For all the media focus and political
rhetoric on health care, the mainline discourse is stuck in a
corporate-friendly rut. But there are signs that a movement for a
rational, humanistic health care system in this country is now gaining
strength…

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With 223 days left in his presidency, George W. Bush laid more flagstones along a path to war on Iran. There was the usual declaration that “all options are on the table” — and, just as ominously, much talk of diplomacy.

Three times on Wednesday, the Associated Press reports, Bush “called a diplomatic solution ‘my first choice,’ implying there are others. He said ‘we’ll give diplomacy a chance to work,’ meaning it might not.”

That’s how Bush talks when he’s grooving along in his Orwellian comfort zone, eager to order a military attack.

“We seek peace,” Bush said in the State of the Union address on January 28, 2003. “We strive for peace.”

In that speech, less than two months before the invasion of Iraq began, Bush foreshadowed the climax of his administration’s diplomatic pantomime…

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In politics, as in so many other aspects of life, anger is a combustible fuel. Affirmed and titrated, it helps us move forward. Suppressed or self-indulged, it’s likely to blow up in our faces.
With the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination coming to a close, there’s plenty of anger in the air. And the elements are distinctly flammable. As Bob Herbert just wrote in the New York Times, “the Clinton and Obama partisans spent months fighting bitterly on the toxic terrain of misogyny, racism and religion.”

Herbert doesn’t spread the blame evenly. And, as an elected Obama delegate to the national convention, I don’t either. But at this stage in the nomination process, the returns of blame aren’t merely diminishing — they’re about to go over a cliff.

The anger that’s churning among many Hillary Clinton supporters is deserving of respect. For a long time, she’s been hit by an inexhaustible arsenal of virulent sexism, whether from Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh or Chris Matthews…

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Barack Obama’s triumph on Tuesday night was a victory over a wall that pretends to be a fly on the wall.

For a long time, the nation’s body politic has been shoved up against that wall — known as the news media.

Despite all its cracks and gaps, what cements the wall is mostly a series of repetition compulsion disorders. Whether the media perseveration is on Pastor Wright, the words “bitter” and “cling,” or an absent flag lapel-pin, the wall’s surfaces are more rigid when they’re less relevant to common human needs and shared dreams.

“We’ve already seen it,” Obama said during his victory speech in North Carolina, “the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn’t agree with all their ideas, the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives, by pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy, in the hopes that the media will play along.”

And how, they’ve played along. From the front pages of “quality” dailies to the reportage of NPR’s drive-time news to the blather-driven handicapping on cable television, the ways that media structures have functioned in recent weeks tell us — yet again — how fleeting any media attention to substance can be.

News outlets spun out — “pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy” — as media Obama-mania about a longshot candidate morphed into Obama-phobia toward the candidate most likely to become the Democratic presidential nominee. The man who could do little wrong became a man who could do little right. The lines of attack were spurious and protracted enough to be jaw-dropping…

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