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M.T. Karthik

~ works, thoughts, events of 1977 – 2017

M.T. Karthik

Tag Archives: obama

The Rebirth of Peace – Five Moves Obama Should Make Now

09 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by mtk in elections, public letters

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

5, accords, actions, agenda, antiwar, Bush, cabinet, change, Clinton, close, Democratic, Dennis, department, drone, electorate, end, five, free, geneva, GOP, Guantanamo, Hilary, hope, Iran, iraq, Kucinich, leonard, moves, Nate, obama, pakistan, party, peace, peltier, president, progressive, rebirth, safe, Silver, things, treaty, war, warsaw

The re-election of President Obama has opened a door for believers who bought into the President’s original message of hope and change when he was elected in 2008.

Much of Obama’s support then was a direct result of his vote against the Iraq War. Democrats chose Senator Obama over Senator Clinton for many reasons, but the “Iraq War vote” was an important one that has been wrongly dismissed – it’s what tens of millions with many other differences were agreeing about.

The Iraq War vote was a symbolic difference between Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama, but with so few opportunities to truly understand our candidates in modern Presidential elections, it became a significant statistic for a large demographic of US voters who have been dismissed and reduced by mainstream media and the two major parties for more than a decade.

There is an anti-war electorate, and it’s a sleeping dragon in the USA.

Millions came out on February 15, 2003, in opposition to George W. Bush’s plans for War on Iraq. The vast majority of these then came out for Barack Obama five years later seeking an anti-war candidate, only to be disappointed by the last four years of capitulation, centrism and even rightist approaches to foreign policy by the President.

Now Obama has been re-elected by the exact same margin that George W. Bush was and the political obligation for standing up for the anti-war and progressive electorate that helped put and keep him in the White House must be addressed.

Here are five simple yet powerful moves Obama can and should make right now – while the political capital exists and the GOP is reeling from the smack in the face of the demographic and ideological realities of the election.

1. Close Guantanamo Bay Prison

2. End the Drone attacks on sovereign Pakistan and elsewhere.

3. Take a strong, open and progressive stand to approach Iran intellectually through discourse rather than via military options.

4. Create a Department of Peace, as first proposed by Representative Dennis Kucinich: taking just .001% of the defense/military budget to finance the creation of a cabinet position dedicated to peaceful outcomes to conflict. Appoint Mr. Kucinich as the first Secretary of Peace in U.S. history.

5. Pardon and Release Leonard Peltier – do it now ,Mr. Obama, at the beginning, rather than at the end of your term. Take a stand for prison reform.

I will not defend these points here, because I’m proposing them for purpose of discussion. Please read, consider, forward and comment.

Rather, I defend the idea that there would be very little or even NO political cost for taking these steps and that the benefits politically, socially and culturally would be immense.

Nate Silver has already pointed out that Obama’s margin of victory in the popular vote is almost exactly the same as Bush’s over Kerry in 2004.

Bush claimed a mandate and bombed and obliterated Fallujah! The triumphalism of the Republicans in 2004 was intensely exaggerated by FOX and the rest of television media. This is what contributed to the views of an ever-shrinking minority being allowed to dominate policy.

This is Obama’s chance to start the clean-break from the policies of Bush/Cheney and in particular the Foreign Policy, which was dominated by aggression, war and violations of every major peace treaty signed in the 21st Century: The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, The Geneva Peace Accords, The Warsaw Accords – Putin said, on the morning that Shock and Awe began in Baghdad, “It violates the U.N. Charter.”

Millions of Americans were the ones in Shock and Awe.

If Obama stood up for peace in the 21st century, tens of millions of voters and hundreds of representatives at all levels of government would support him.

It would also set a tone for his ability to work on topics which Republicans have rigidly blocked for the past four years. Obama could put the GOP way back on its heels.

Progressives would rise to support Obama for being a strong leader and taking steps to better our national character. The Democrats would gain millions who have felt left out by the centrism of the party over the last 20 years.

That is the point of this post: to create a huge groundswell of public support for these five ideas as a part of a National consciousness. That we, the 21st Century Americans, the Digital Generation, the new Americans, stand for a more peaceful relationship with the world.

It’d be easy to sell. The race between Obama and Romney was only close because so many millions did not participate. Many who did vote for Obama before left in disgust, but weren’t willing to cast a vote for the Republicans who do not share their values. These are the one Obama would attract. People longing to believe again.

Less than half the electorate votes. Obama could make huge strides among the disenchanted with principled action.

These are important stands for getting back our dignity as a nation. I firmly believe they would have very little political cost.

One way to measure if I am right is by memes, so if you’ve read this far and agree, I am asking all producers and hype-masters and friends and like-minded thinkers to tweet these five points and use the hashtags #Peace and #FreeLeonardPeltierNOW respectively as means of creating a measure of support.

Please do blog and produce work that promotes these ideals of peace that we all share.

Let’s push this country back on track by letting President Obama know he can be far more progressive without concern for political liability.

Start talking peace and Free Leonard Peltier Immediately – it’s the right thing to do.

21st Century Elections

07 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by mtk in elections, NYC, S.F., San Antonio

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

2000, 2004, barack, Bush, chief, City, count, editor, F.Kennedy, fiasco, Filippacchi, Florida, frank, George, Hachette, in, Jeb, John, Jr., Karl, kerry, Lalli, lawsuits, loss, magazine, manhattan, new, obama, publisher, Rove, swiftboat, vote, W., york

In Spring of 2000, Hachette-Filippacchi Inc.,hired me and a half-dozen others to work as independently-contracted temporary employees to fact-check and conduct research for George magazine – whose founder and editor-in-chief John F. Kennedy, Jr. had been killed in a light-plane crash amidst fog off the coast of Maine eight months before. They hired us to ensure George remained, in the wake of its founder’s passing, an audible element of the political discourse during the Election of 2000.

As a national magazine which was read by hundreds of thousands of voters in many states, particular focus was paid to the Presidential Election between Vice President Al Gore and George W. Bush, the Governor of Texas.

My fellow employees, under Editor-in-Chief Frank Lalli, were a tight-knit, smart and savvy crew. In fact, on Election Night we were all together at Mr. Lalli’s beautiful upper westside home where he had invited us to watch returns. But Karl Rove’s fat face and a flipped state later, many of us were back in the office. A few of us stayed up most of the night and by 10 a.m. I was not alone in the office when I was posting coverage of Florida on the George website.

Though admittedly not a heavy-hitter politically, George was engaged throughout the Election and maintained an immense audience of voting readers before the magazine was finally brought to an end in 2001.

In 2003 I covered Schwarzenegger’s Election via Recall of Davis for KPFK, 90.7fm Los Angeles.

I also covered The Election of 2004 and the Presidential Race between George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry for KPFK, 90.7fm Los Angeles and in part for Pacifica Radio. Some of that 2004 Election work exists here and online at Pacifica’s Audioport and in the Pacifica Radio Archives, but I have complete digital copies of everything I did for KPFK and Pacifica between 2003 and 2005 backed up on disc in my studio as well.

In 2008, I was no longer working as a journalist, but did cover Obama’s Victory in Iowa for KPFK and produced short Audio-Visual Installments for Freshjive on the Internet. These were amateurish and clunky by design, yet carried considerable data for anyone who had tuned in to the broadcasts I produced for KPFK four years before.

When Obama won in ’08, I was with Lloyd Dangle, who hosted a book signing and Election Night Returns Party at the Riptide in San Francisco. Earlier in the day I had a drink with former SF Mayor Willie Brown at the St. Regis – we discussed Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s plans for appointing a Senator to replace disgraced Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, forced to retire.

This year,I did not work as a journalist, but rather observed as a reader of the news media and a regular Californian voter.

The biggest single predictor of the elections of the 21st century has to be the margin of difference in registrations for the two major parties.

There are many reasons for this: smaller parties are being absorbed and disappearing for lack of membership, corporate interests fund the two major parties only, people threatened by one of the two parties runs to join the other and the demography of the nation is changing.

I have successfully predicted the last two elections as a result of my study of data and my knowledge of voting history. I think I see the electorate again.

Some points on 21st Century US Elections:

It’s impossible to write a blog about all my experiences voting and covering General Elections in the United States in the 21st Century, but suffice it to say there is a distinct difference between these and the Elections of the latter half of the 20th century, in which I also participated.

Much of this is discussed in my talk Political Media, Messages and More.

2003 was the Recall Election and spawned recalls in the 21st Century because of Schwarzenegger’s success.

2008 was the Youtube Election.

2012 was the Twitter Election.

Money and media are the driving forces of what has become a political system mired in divided, brutal contests between two immense parties which are financed primarily by corporations and special interest groups that define their policies.

We are in desperate need of a new Federal Elections Reform Act, as was passed in the early 1970’s.

Our democracy is sick. Hardly half the people with the right to vote even participate.

We need to update, nationalize and standardize voting procedures and make them more secure. We need to increase registration and participation. We need to subsidize the creation and maintenance of additional parties in the face of the massive expenditures made by Republicans and Democrats that have taken elections out of the reach of the common person. We need proportional representation in Congress.

Have been saying all of this for years, and it has only gotten worse. Here’s hoping the young people who are increasing in numbers at the polls pull off what my generation couldn’t.

The May Manifesto 2012 [feel free to redistribute widely uncredited]

07 Monday May 2012

Posted by mtk in essay, North Oakland, public letters

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

2012, barack, congress, congressional, Democratic, election, Manifesto, may, mitt, mtk, obama, occupy, Paul, politics, president, presidential, progressive, race, reform, Republican, romney, ron, Senator

We demand better leadership, greater social welfare and a more secure future established and defended by law;

We demand the prioritization of social welfare by our government, as established by the Constitution, The Bill of Rights and this manifesto;

We demand a solution set to a Five Year Plan authored to conclude with a saner, better, safer, more economically solvent USA by the year 2068, which we consider the 50th Anniversary of The People’s Year, 1968.

We demand this begin with a bi-partisan, total-governmental “pause-and-reflect” to comprehend and address with greater social and moral responsibility what has been 30 years of a market-protective policy that has degraded our social foundation;

We demand Senators, Members, Justices and the Executive Office take much greater ethical responsibility for the struggles of our elders, the poor, the unemployed and suffering; ethical responsibility that matches at least what we achieved in great acts during times of economic crisis in our Nation’s recent past, specifically before the policies of the last 30 years: the Social Security System, FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, President Carter’s budget that predicated military aid from the USA upon humanitarian – and not political or economic – concerns;

We demand collaborative and not competitive effort in this regard – in the past we made the winner of the Presidency take other candidates as cabinet members and even the Vice Presidency – ending the animosity, showing greater concern, allowing our shared concern to become a national ethos for bettering our country;

We demand that our Representatives and our Media take a much more serious, sober and street-level look at our Nation and produce better coverage of issues and solutions-oriented messages that show our greatest strength: working together;

We demand that this pause-and-reflect to re-establish the priorities of the United States Government, our government, take place immediately, before Congress recesses and before the Election 2012 occupies the socio-political context, specifically because the elections process has collapsed in at least two of the first three federal elections of the 21st Century;

We demand an immediate Federal Election Commission as we had in 1973, focused on the rapid signing of a Federal Elections Act [FECA] that resolves once-and-for-all a nationwide, technologically-sound method of voting that satisfies major concerns about the proper casting and counting of votes, standardizes the process nationwide with contemporary technology and protects it from the blatant manipulation that has already occurred and is being swept under the rug (we have, since 2000’s horror of an election, established numerous non-profit, non-partisan institutions and groups with solutions);

We demand an end to the failed Immigration, Drug and Economic Protectionism policies that are collapsing into bitter, divisive and philosophically mean-spirited discourse predicated by race and race-orientation rather than national character;

We demand a solutions-oriented, bi-partisan Government to overcome what has gone on in the last 30 years: the slow descent of our culture into base values, the debasement of our government, our people, our way of life and our very spirit as a Nation due to despotism, political corruption, corporate influence and greed;

We demand a solution set to a Five Year Plan authored to conclude with a saner, better, safer, more economically solvent USA by the year 2068, which we consider the 50th Anniversary of The People’s Year, 1968.

We demand the Five Year Plan be authored by the Government after the Election of 2012 to allow the process of our recovery to begin next year – a Five Year Plan passed by Congress in 2013.

In solidarity,

we, the people

The Election of Barack Obama

04 Tuesday Nov 2008

Posted by mtk in elections, press clips, S.F.

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

barack, black, Brown, country, dangle, election, first, Francisco, Karthik, lloyd, Mayor, mtk, obama, Palin, president, proud, San, Sarah, sfsu, State, Stevens, Ted, university, Willie

I began Election day having a cocktail with former SF Mayor Willie Brown at the St. Regis hotel in downtown SF. We discussed in detail then-Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s plans concerning the vacating of Alaska’s Senior Senator’s seat due to the trial of Senator Ted Stevens.

Mayor Brown agreed with me that Palin seemed to be attempting to leverage herself into the Senate with her pull as Governor. (Thanks, Mayor Brown for the kind attention over the years).

Lloyd Dangle hosted an Election Night/20th Anniversary party for his Troubletown comic strip at the Riptide in San Francisco the night Obama beat McCain for the Presidency.

Some students from SFSU were there and produced this video:

Proud of Their Country with Lloyd Dangle

It was an interesting night and I am glad I was with Lloyd Dangle – an outspoken critic of Republicans and Democrats alike for more than twenty years.

M.T. Karthik

This blog archives early work of M.T. Karthik, who took every photograph and shot all the video here unless otherwise credited.

Performances and installations are posted by date of execution.

Writing appears in whatever form it was originally or, as in the case of poems or journal entries, retyped faithfully from print.

all of it is © M.T. Karthik

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