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HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.

June 20, 2012

Obama's Former Law Prof Declares: "Obama has failed the progressive cause."

Why Obama Must be Defeated

by RUSSELL MOKHIBER

Not Ralph Nader. Not Amy Goodman. Not Noam Chomsky. Not Chris Hedges. Not Cornel West. Not Alexander Cockburn. Not one of the great left critics in the United States have dared say what Harvard Law School Professor Roberto Unger said last week. “President Obama must be defeated in the coming election.”

In 1976, at age 29, Roberto Unger became the youngest tenured professor at Harvard Law School. Obama took two classes from Unger – Jurisprudence and Reinventing Democracy. During the 2008 campaign, Unger was reportedly in frequent contact with candidate Barack Obama via email and Blackberry.

But here he is today saying that “President Obama must be defeated in the coming election.”

Why?

“He has failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States,” Unger said in a heavily edited video posted on YouTube last month. “He has spent trillions of dollars to rescue the moneyed interests and left workers and homeowners to their own devices. He has subordinated the broadening of economic and educational opportunities to the important but secondary issue of access to health care in the mistaken belief that he would be spared a fight.”

“He has disguised his surrender with an empty appeal to tax justice. He has delivered the politics of democracy to the rule of money. He has reduced justice to charity.”

“His policy is financial confidence and food stamps. He has evoked a politics of hand holding. But no one changes the world without a struggle.”

“Unless he is defeated, there cannot be a contest for the re-orientation of the Democratic Party as the vehicle of a progressive alternative in the country,” Under said. “There will be a cost for his defeat in judicial and administrative appointments.”

“The risk of military adventurism, however, under the rule of his opponents, will be no greater than it would be under him.”

“Only a political reversal can allow the voice of democratic prophesy to speak once again in American life. It’s speech is always dangerous. It’s silence is always fatal.”

Russell Mokhiber edits the Corporate Crime Reporter.