Knock Knock. Who's There? Left. Left who? The Left left Obama.

There's a little knock knock, joke going around

By Paul Krugman

Unsurprisingly, America's 'state' media claims that Democratic losses were due to the party moving too far to the left. As Paul Krugman wrote the day after the election:
"So, we’re already getting the expected punditry: Obama needs to end his leftist policies, which consist of … well, there weren’t any, but he should stop them anyway.
"What actually happened, of course, was that Obama failed to do enough to boost the economy, plus totally failing to tap into populist outrage at Wall Street.
"And now we’re in the trap I worried about from the beginning: by failing to do enough when he had political capital, he lost that capital, and now we’re stuck."
Eventually, Obama is going to have to figure out that the capitalist media are far from being his friend.
The media will continue to be stenographers for the Republicans, uncritically repeating as fact whatever lying talking point the Republicans push that day (like how he "nationalized" the country's health care system).
That means when the inevitable showdown and shutdown comes, the corporate-controlled media will put the entire blame on Obama -- unless he starts now to speak out forcefully when they report Republican lies as facts.
The other lesson from this election is that a awful lot of Americans are too busy trying to survive in our trickle-down economy to pay attention to what's going on.
They don't know the difference between the federal debt and the federal deficit and they only hear the news "teasers" that play before "American Idol" comes on.
But they like strong leaders who stand up for what they believe in -- even if what they believe in is a fantasy world based on badly-written books by an elitist Russian immigrant.
That's how Dubya got re-elected when most everyone thought he was not very bright and was heading the country in the wrong direction. They voted for him because he was heading the country in the wrong direction with confidence..
So man up Barack. It's going to be a knife fight. You'll have to leave the feather duster at home.

 

9/11 Anniversary 9 Years On

For many, Obama's 9/11 rallying cry rings hollow

By Bill Van Auken

The American people were first told that their enemy was Osama bin Laden, who was assigned responsibility for the September 11 attacks, events that remain shrouded in mystery and have yet to be subjected to any credible investigation.

That bin Laden began his career as a CIA “asset” in Afghanistan, when massive amounts of US military and financial aid were being poured into financing an Islamist insurgency against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, is something neither the government nor the media wished to dwell upon.
Then the Bush administration launched an unprovoked war against Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban government, which had come to power with US support, and install its own puppet regime, backed by US troops. The hunt for bin Laden was largely abandoned.
Within a year and a half of 9/11, the enemy became the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, which had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks. The war was launched based upon lies about “weapons of mass destruction” and fabricated links between Baghdad and Al Qaeda.
Now the Obama administration is engaged in the continued occupation of Iraq and a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan, as the number of US troops killed in both wars has climbed to nearly 5,700.
Obama is claiming that 100,000 US troops are in Afghanistan to battle Al Qaeda, even as US commanders acknowledge that there are less than 100 members of the terrorist group in the entire country.
That the anniversary of 9/11, used by two administrations to legitimize war crimes and violations of constitutional rights, is now overshadowed by the Koran-burning circus is symptomatic of a deep-going crisis within the US ruling establishment.
The wars that were supposed to secure US domination of key global energy resources have produced only mayhem and instability, while opposition to them among the American people is at record levels.
The concern that the demented actions of a Florida religious sect could endanger the military’s effort in Afghanistan is indicative of the fragility of the US occupation of that country.
Meanwhile, Obama’s attempt to use the September 11 anniversary to affirm that “we are all Americans” and must “stand together” rings ever more hollow.

True to his Promise, Obama Expands "War on Terror"

Well, he's done it again, just like he said he would

By Peter Symonds

A lengthy article in the New York Times, A Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents has provided a glimpse into the extent of the Obama administration’s covert wars.

Obama has not only continued but has expanded the murderous operations that were waged under the banner of the “war on terror” by the CIA and Pentagon during the Bush administration.

As the authors explain: “In roughly a dozen countries—from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics [in Central Asia] crippled by ethnic and religious strife, the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.”

Obama has dramatically intensified the CIA’s drone missile attacks against alleged insurgents inside areas of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.

The White House has “approved raids inside Somalia,” it has “carried out clandestine operations from Kenya,” and it has collaborated with European allies in covert operations in North Africa, including a recent French strike in Algeria.

The most detailed information concerns the Obama administration’s expanding covert war inside Yemen, where the US military has carried out four air strikes since last December.

The war has killed dozens of civilians, including the deputy governor of Marib Province, Jabir al Shabwani, in May. The article incidentally confirms what has not previously been acknowledged: that all of the air strikes were carried out by the United States.

These attacks are just one aspect of American operations inside Yemen. “The Pentagon and the CIA have quietly bulked up the number of their operatives at the embassy in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, over the past year,” the Times explains.

The US is also training elite Yemeni units, providing equipment and sharing intelligence to support Yemeni operations against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

While the Times article acknowledges some political risks are involved, it is uncritical, even laudatory in tone. Under the banner of the “war on terror,” the US is aggressively prosecuting its ambitions for strategic and economic dominance throughout the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia.

The neo-colonial occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have been extended into a series of covert wars aimed at consolidating the American presence and expanding Washington’s political influence.

In Yemen, the Obama administration is helping to prop up the dictatorial regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is notorious for his suppression of political opposition. He came to power in what was North Yemen in 1978 and now runs a unified Yemen as a family fiefdom.

The Yemeni military and security apparatus, which Washington is training and equipping, is firmly under the control of Saleh’s family members, who will undoubtedly use its improved capacities against political opponents and critics.

Obama’s secret wars are proceeding with little or no congressional oversight and scant regard for international or American law. As the Times pointed out, the White House is benefitting from “a unique political landscape,” with support from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Earlier this year, the Pakistani newspaper, the Dawn, reported that at least 700 Pakistani civilians were killed in the CIA’s drone missile attacks during 2009.

According to Amnesty International, the first US strike on Yemen last December was a cruise missile loaded with cluster bombs that killed more than 40 civilians over several days. None of these crimes has raised a murmur of opposition in the US political or media establishment.

Speaking to the Times, former top CIA officer Jack Devine raised concerns that the limited congressional oversight put in place after the notorious Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s.

That involved the illegal funneling of money from secret arms sales to Iran to right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua—had been weakened. For the current covert operations, he said, “there are not clear rules.”

Under the Obama administration, the Times explained, the Pentagon has expanded its covert missions, which “typically operate with even less transparency and congressional oversight than traditional covert operations by the CIA.”

The article reported: “Across the Middle East and elsewhere, Special Operations troops under secret ‘Execute Orders’ have conducted spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies.”

Not surprisingly, the CIA and military operatives involved in US imperialism’s past crimes are directing or intimately involved in the present operations.

Former CIA agent Duane Clarridge, who was indicted in 1991 in connection with the Iran-Contra affair, reemerged in Pakistan, helping to run one of several Pentagon-funded contractors providing intelligence to the US military.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Vickers, who oversees the Pentagon’s expanding Special Operation Command, was a senior CIA agent who helped direct its huge covert war to oust the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The CIA helped arm and train not only the Afghan mujahedin, but also assisted the thousands of Islamist militants from the Middle East, North Africa and Asia who passed through Al Qaeda (the Base) to fight in Afghanistan.

Vickers, along with Defense Secretary (and former CIA head) Robert Gates, was one of several top officials appointed by Bush and kept in place by Obama.

In a sign of things to come, Obama last month appointed John Bennett to head the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, formerly known as the Directorate of Operations.

Among his previous assignments, Bennett headed the CIA’s Special Activities Division, which handles highly sensitive spying and paramilitary missions. According to Newsweek, his last posting was as CIA station chief in Islamabad, where he was intimately involved in supervising drone missile strikes inside Pakistan.

Obama’s expansion of covert operations into some of the world’s most unstable countries and regions is reckless and inflammatory.

His extension of the Afghan war into neighboring Pakistan, for instance, has not only undermined the government in Islamabad and triggered a dangerous civil war, but is destabilising relations with India and throughout the Indian subcontinent.

As the US aggressively pursues its interests through military means—overt and covert—its actions cut directly across the strategic interests of other major powers such as China, and threaten to provoke broader conflicts.

Iranian President Says Obama Failed to Bring Change

Iranian President not afraid of Obama

Press TV

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has denounced the US administration for failing to implement the policy of change, saying capitalism in the US is nearing its end.

"US President Barack Obama was brought to power to salvage the capitalist system," Ahmadinejad said in an address to directors and producers of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) on Tuesday.

The president said although Obama came to power with the emphasis that wrong US policies should be reformed, he has failed to live up to his promise of change.

President Ahmadinejad further pointed out that Obama will not be able to save a dying US economy.

Elsewhere in his remarks, the Iranian president dismissed the US-backed sanctions against Tehran's nuclear program.

"The West has been trying to use sanctions to deal a blow to the Iranian nation, but Iranianians will turn those moves into opportunities." he said.

He underlined the West is trying to force Iran into a retreat through imposing sanctions.

Detroit, City of Poverty

Wage-cutter in chief's 4 hour visit to Detroit

 Patrick Martin

Obama’s four-hour visit to Detroit on Friday brought him to the center of the economic catastrophe created by the profit system.

The “Motor City” was once a byword for decent-paying jobs in the auto industry. But Detroit is now synonymous with poverty, urban decay, mass unemployment and the virtual breakdown of a functioning society.

During his visit, Obama made no comment on the mass suffering stretching for miles in every direction. Instead, he gave a 25-minute stump speech to the 1,100 workers on the day shift at the Chrysler plant, and a briefer address to the work force at the GM plant.

He didn't mention the city’s staggering unemployment rate—estimated at 50 percent or more. Nor did he utter the words “poverty,” “homelessness,” “hunger,” “foreclosure” or “eviction.”

Instead, he took the occasion of his visit to the poorest city in America to boast of the great success of his administration’s economic policies. A more cold-blooded, arrogant provocation against working people can scarcely be imagined.

Obama delivered his two speeches to audiences of auto workers who have borne the brunt of the restructuring of the industry dictated by the White House.

Some 330,000 workers have lost auto-related jobs in the past two years, while tens of thousands of retired workers have lost health benefits and seen their pensions threatened.

Obama’s “car czar” went beyond even what General Motors and Chrysler thought advisable, and demanded a 50 percent across-the-board reduction in the starting wage for newly hired workers.

The result is that side-by-side on the assembly line some workers are making $28 an hour and others $14 an hour for doing the same job. Most workers on the second shift at the Chrysler Jefferson plant make $14 an hour, but Obama’s audience consisted largely of the higher-paid first-shift workers.

Obama could say little of substance to justify the claim that his administration’s policies were producing an economic recovery, except to describe the conditions under which he took office in January 2009, and assert that things had improved since then.

The main point of Obama’s remarks at both plants was that without the intervention of the White House both GM and Chrysler would have been forced into liquidation last year, going out of business entirely instead of the structured government-supervised bankruptcy that was a condition of the auto bailout.

“Independent estimates suggest that more than 1 million jobs could have been lost if Chrysler and GM had liquidated,” he said.

“And in the middle of a deep recession, that would have been a brutal, irreversible shock not just to Detroit, not just to the Midwest, but to our entire economy.”

But the bailout was not offered without conditions, he continued, “What we said was, if you’re willing to take the tough and painful steps necessary to make yourselves more competitive; if you’re willing to pull together workers, management, suppliers, dealers, everybody to remake yourself for changing times, then we’ll stand by you and we’ll invest in your future.”

Obama made no other reference to the draconian cuts imposed on auto workers, including the 50 percent cut in starting pay. As for “pain” for the corporate bosses, GM’s profits have rebounded and GM and Chrysler executives continue to rake in seven-figure salaries.

GM Chairman Edward Whitacre, for instance, makes a $1.1 million salary, earning in one week as much as a $14-an-hour assembly-line worker makes in a year.

And that grossly understates his income, since Whitacre is paid mainly in company stock and stands to reap a fortune from the upcoming initial public offering by GM.

Obama noted that 334,000 auto jobs were eliminated between June 2008 and June 2009, and claimed that 55,000 new auto jobs have been created since then. He did not point out, however, that the bulk of these new jobs pay wages that are barely above the poverty level.

The White House intervention has had the effect of completing the transformation of auto production from a high-wage, high-benefit industry to one of brutal exploitation at sweatshop wages.

For this, Obama has earned the thanks of the auto bosses and their industrial police force—which operates under the signboard of the United Auto Workers—as well as the entire local Democratic Party establishment.

Obama was welcomed to the city with a friendly editorial in the right-wing Detroit News. Lined up behind him on the podium were the state’s two Democratic senators, the local Democratic congresswoman, Mayor Bing, also a Democrat, and Chrysler, GM and UAW officials. There was not a hint of oppositional sentiment permitted.

The address to the auto workers was imbued with economic nationalism, which Obama used to flatter both his audience and himself. He referred to his opponents in the Republican Party, who deemed the bailout terms insufficiently harsh on the auto workers and wanted even deeper cuts or outright liquidation of the company.

“You are proving the naysayers wrong,” he said. “I wish they were standing here today. I wish they could see what I’m seeing in this plant and talk to the workers who are here taking pride in building a world-class vehicle. I want all of you to know, I will bet on the American worker any day of the week!”

Obama continued, harking back to World War II: “It was workers just like you, right here in Detroit, who built an arsenal of democracy that propelled America to victory.

"It was workers like you that built this country into the greatest economic power the world has ever known; it was workers like you that manufactured a miracle that was uniquely American.”

The constant references to American greatness were somewhat strained, given that circumstances now prevailing in Detroit, and the US generally, hardly resemble a “miracle.”

The nationalist phrases were not only reactionary, but preposterous. The auto industry is entirely globalized, and giant corporations conduct their operations on a world scale, pitting workers in country after country against each other.

Obama spoke at one factory run by Chrysler—now owned by Fiat, with the Italian CEO at his side—and at another operated by GM, which has sold more cars this year in China than in the United States. GM has 32,000 workers in China, while its US hourly employment has fallen from 468,000 in 1979 to only 52,000 today.

These figures suggest the reality facing auto workers and the working class as a whole: the only way forward in the struggle against corporate downsizing, wage-cutting and the destruction of all rights on the shop floor is to unite the working class.

This is a political fight against the Obama Regime, the Democratic Party, the two-party system and the capitalist ruling class whose interests they serve.

Western Media Maxim: "Ignorance Is Strength"

This summer, Obama is Big Brother...

By Paul Craig Roberts 

Big Brother Obama, following in the tradition of Big Brothers Bush and Cheney, declared that America and the “entire world” are “appalled and outraged” by Iran’s violent efforts to crush protests organized by US interference in Iran’s election.

The American media’s one-sided and propagandistic coverage of the Iranian election has made an American hero out of the defeated candidate, Mousavi.

This leaves one wondering if anyone anywhere in the US media or US government knows that Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who served as prime minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran from 1981 to 1989, the decade following the overthrow of the American puppet government by Khomeini, has been fingered as the Butcher of Beirut.

He was responsible for the bloody attacks on the US embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut during the Reagan administration that blew to pieces 241 US Marines, sailors, and Army troops.

According to Jeff Stein writing in the June 22, 2009, CQ Politics, Mousavi “personally selected his point man for the Beirut terror campaign, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-pur,” who presided over the terror cell responsible for the attacks.

The National Security Agency had a tap on the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, according to Admiral James Lyons who was deputy chief of Naval Operations at the time.

Admiral Lyons told Jeff Stein that “the Iranian ambassador received instructions from the foreign minister to have various groups target US personnel in Lebanon, but in particular to carry out a ‘spectacular action’ against the Marines.”

Stein reports that Lyons “also fingered Mousavi for the 1988 truck bombing of the US Navy’s Fleet Center in Naples, Italy.”

Bob Baer, a CIA Middle East field officer at the time, says that Mousavi “dealt directly with Imad Mughniyah,” the person responsible for both attacks.

All of these facts have gone into the Memory Hole. The US media and government have turned Musavi, the bloody butcher of US servicemen, into the would-be liberator of Iran from theocracy.

Only in America and in George Orwell’s fictional population in his predictive book, 1984, can we find such citizen ignorance.

Every day in America, a.k.a. Oceania, we see the growing power of Big Brother’s three slogans: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

From ignorance comes the strength to create a hero out of America’s terrorist enemy, Mousavi.

From freedom comes the protection provided by being constantly spied upon, no longer endangered by privacy which might keep Big Brother from discovering a terrorist plot.

This freedom from terrorists morphs into the slavery of being held in indefinite detention without evidence or charges. Habeas corpus has become the opposite of freedom as it prevents our protection from terrorists.

On June 23, Big Brother Obama, following in the tradition of Big Brothers Bush and Cheney, declared that Oceania and the “entire world” are “appalled and outraged” by Iran’s violent efforts to crush protests organized by Oceania’s interference in Iran’s election.

Meanwhile, Oceania continued its wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, crushing people right and left while gearing up to bring peace to Iran. No one is outraged at the violence. War is Peace.

Those who don’t fight wars can’t bring peace. Peace results when Big Brother’s hegemony extends over those regions that do not understand that War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.


The face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone’s eyeballs were too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like ‘My Savior!’ she extended her arms toward the screen.

At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of ‘Big Brother, Big Brother, Big Brother!’ over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first ‘B’ and the second.

A heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up.

It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and Majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. [1984]

The drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise sums up well enough the performance of Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.How long do Americans have before doubting Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth is a Thoughtcrime?

“Whether he wrote ‘Down With Big Brother,’ or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.”

The neoconservatives have set up in America Thoughtcrime watch committees over professors. Academics who depart from or challenge the neocon line are reported and are subjected to vilification campaigns.

Sami Al-Arian, a computer science professor at a Florida University, was destroyed by the US Department of Justice [sic] because he gave the Palestinian side of the story.

The neocon academic spy operation has been given a boost by Dennis C. Blair, director of National Intelligence. Writing in CounterPunch (June 23), David Price reports that Blair has announced plans for a program to train intelligence officers, whose identities and activities would not be known to professors or administrators, to conduct covert missions in university classrooms.

This is as Orwellian is it comes. Thinking independently is rapidly becoming a serious Thoughtcrime. Winston Smith was the only one among Big Brother’s subjects capable of independent thought. His ability to think independently was discovered and terminated.

Already we see that the US media is incapable of independent thought. Independent thought in the universities, where careers are dependent on government grants, is already half dead. Independent thought does not exist in think tanks, which serve the interests of donors. In America independent thought is rapidly becoming an anti-American act, which is itself morphing into a terrorist act.

Newspeak handles effortlessly the morphing and transforming of meaning. New generations born into the new system know no difference and, thus, do not need to be silenced. Once the older generations are brought to heel, truth is whatever Big Brother says.

Obama Crash

Obama fans recover...albiet slowly 

By Alexander Cockburn

 The man who seized the White House by fomenting a mood of irrational expectation is now facing the bitter price exacted by reality. It's impossible to be a “good” American president. It’s an impossible hand to play. Obama is close to being finished.

The nation’s first black president promised change at the precise moment when no single man, even if endowed with the communicative powers of Franklin Roosevelt, the politic mastery of Lyndon Johnson, the brazen agility of Bill Clinton, could turn the tide that has been carrying America to disaster for 30 years.

This summer many Americans are frightened. Over 100,000 of them file for bankruptcy every month. Three million homeowners face foreclosure this year. Add them to the 2.8 million who were foreclosed in 2009, Obama’s first year in office.

Nearly seven million have been without jobs in the last year for six months or longer. By the time you tot up the people who have given up looking for work and the people on part-time, the total is heading toward 20 million.

Fearful people are irrational. So are racists. Obama is the target of insane charges. A hefty percentage of Americans believe that he is a socialist – a charge as ludicrous as accusing the Archbishop of Canterbury of being a closet Druid.

Obama reveres the capitalist system. He admires the apex predators of Wall Street who showered his campaign treasury with millions of dollars.

The frightful catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico stemmed directly from the green light he and his Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, gave to BP.

It is not Obama’s fault that for 30 years America’s policy – under Reagan, both Bushes and Bill Clinton – has been to export jobs permanently to the Third World.

The jobs that Americans now desperately seek are no longer here, in the homeland, and never will be. They’re in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, Indonesia.

No stimulus program, giving money to cement contractors to fix potholes along the federal interstate highway system, is going to bring those jobs back.

Highly trained tool and die workers, the aristocrats of the manufacturing sector, are flipping hamburgers – at best – for $7.50 an hour because U.S. corporations sent their jobs to Guangzhou, with the approval of politicians flush with the money of the “free trade” lobby.

It is not Obama’s fault that across 30 years more and more money has floated up to the apex of the social pyramid till America is heading back to where it was in the 1880s, a nation of tramps and millionaires.

It’s not his fault that every tax break, every regulation, every judicial decision tilts toward business and the rich. That was the neoliberal America conjured into malign vitality back in the mid 1970s.

But it is Obama’s fault that always, from the getgo, he remained entirely in syc with the premises of the system.

He flattered Americans with paeans to their greatness, without adequate warning of the political and corporate corruption destroying America and the resistance he would face if he really fought against prevailing arrangements.

He offered them a free and easy pass to a better future, and now they see that the promise was empty.

It’s Obama’s fault, too, that, as a communicator, he cannot rally and inspire the nation from its fears.

From his earliest years he has schooled himself not to be excitable, not to be an angry black man who would be alarming to his white friends at Harvard and his later corporate patrons.

Self-control was his passport to the guardians of the system, who were desperate to find a symbolic leader to restore America’s credibility in the world after the disasters of the Bush era. He is too cool.

So, now Americans in increasing numbers have lost confidence in him. For the first time in the polls negative assessments outnumber the positive. He no longer commands trust. His support is drifting down to 40 per cent.

The straddle that allowed him to flatter corporate chieftains at the same time as blue-collar workers now seems like the most vapid opportunism.

The casual campaign pledge to wipe out al-Quaida in Afghanistan is now being cashed out in a disastrous campaign viewed with dismay by a majority of Americans.

The polls portend disaster. It now looks as though the Republicans may well recapture not only the House but, conceivably, the Senate as well.

The public mood is so contrarian that, even though polls show that voters think the Democrats may well have better solutions on the economy than Republicans, they will vote against incumbent Democrats in the midterm elections next fall. They just want to throw the bums out.

Obama has sought out Bill Clinton to advise him in this desperate hour. If Clinton is frank, he will remind Obama that his own hopes for a progressive first term were destroyed by the failure of his health reform in the spring of 1993. By August of that year, he was importing a Republican, David Gergen, to run the White House.

Obama had his window of opportunity last year, when he could have made jobs and financial reform his prime objectives. That’s what Americans hoped for.

Mesmerized by economic advisers who were creatures of the banks, he instead plunged into the Sargasso Sea of “health reform,” wasted the better part of a year, and ended up with something that pleases no one.

What can save Obama now? It’s hard even to identify a straw he can grasp at. It’s awfully early in the game to say it, but, as Marlene Dietrich said to Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, “your future is all used up.”

Obama Goes Orwell, War is Peace

The world within 1984

Deconstructing Obama's Doublethink 1

By John Pilger

In "1984", George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that "passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"

Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war.

One that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies."

He called this "global security" and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the U.S. has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your country."

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorized by the United Nations Security Council.

There was no UN authority. He said that "the world" supported the invasion in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. In truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition.

He said that America invaded Afghanistan "only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama Bin Laden." In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over Bin Laden for trial, Pakistan's military regime reported, and they were ignored.

Even Obama's mystification of the 9/11 attacks as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the twin towers were attacked, the former Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik was told by the Bush administration that a U.S. military assault would take place by mid-October.

The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as "stable" enough to ensure U.S. control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.

Obama's most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda's attacks on the West.

His own national security adviser, James Jones, said in October that there were "fewer than 100" al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan.

According to U.S. intelligence, 90 percent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but "a tribal localized insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the U.S. because it is an occupying power." The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of "world peace."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BENEATH THE surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan is a model for those "disorderly regions" of the world still beyond Oceania's reach.

This is known as Coin (counter-insurgency), and draws together the military, aid organizations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, it aims to incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbeks against Pashtuns.

The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They built walls between communities which had once intermarried, ethnically cleansing the Sunnis and driving millions out of the country.

Embedded media reported this as "peace"; American academics bought by Washington and "security experts" briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in 1984, the opposite was true.

Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into "target areas" controlled by warlords, bankrolled by the CIA and the opium trade. That these warlords are barbaric is irrelevant.

"We can live with that," a Clinton-era diplomat once said of the return of oppressive sharia law in a "stable," Taliban-run Afghanistan.

Favored western relief agencies, engineers and agricultural specialists will attend to the "humanitarian crisis" and so "secure" the subjugated tribal lands.

That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia, where ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once-peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam, where the CIA's "Strategic Hamlet Program" was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Vietcong--the Americans' catch-all term for the resistance, similar to "Taliban."

Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and the Afghanistan adventures.

Ethnic cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance--these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people.

And yet, for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.

The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize-winner and his general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself.

The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed.

Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.

"It was curious," wrote Orwell in 1984, "to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world...

"People ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who...were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.

Dumb war

Obama opposes, "dumb war" but also fights one

By Stanly Kutler

Obama should recall what he said in 2002: “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.” Our diminished capacities and resources make such endeavors problematic. We cannot ignore present realities and forget the past.

The American Empire is alive and well and as expansive as ever. We have established more than 700 military bases across the world, largely encircling the peripheries of Russia and China, which are now central to the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

The Cold War in the aftermath of World War II drove the expansion as we searched for security—and markets, to be sure.

Perhaps we now are the largest imperial power the world ever has known. Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan trivializes the once-massive naval and air facility at Cam Ranh Bay during the Vietnam War, and we have developed “permanent” mega-bases in Iraq. We engage in denial, and euphemisms abound.

Stumping for the colonial takeover of the Philippines in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt, so fashionable today, insisted that “there is not an imperialist in the country... Expansion? Yes. ... Expansion has been the law of our national growth.”

Chalmers Johnson reminds us of Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s liberal “idealist imperialism,” which would make the world safe for democracy. Deceit comes from the top.

Johnson cites neoconservative journalist Charles Krauthammer, who, as we embarked on the Afghanistan war, touted the British model and remarked that “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”

Oh? Then why did the British with their jodhpurs and pith helmets fail in Afghanistan, as did the Russians, whether Cossacks with swords or Soviets with missiles?

Why did the British ignominiously retreat from their empire, and why did the Soviets tuck tail and leave Afghanistan in the 1980s? Rather pathetic models, and hardly to be emulated, one would think.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently visited the Republic of Georgia, which Russia had invaded in 2008 in helping establish independence for two breakaway provinces. George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice expressed outrage and sympathy for the Georgians—who sit astride the oil-rich Caucasus.

We are still at it, now in a “bipartisan” manner, pushing for, or appearing to push for, NATO membership for Georgia. When asked to specify why Georgia was so important for the United States, Clinton responded with glittering generalities of support—no blank check here, only evasion.

Clinton ardently courted an informal alliance. She reiterated the U.S. “commitment” to Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Further, she said that the U.S. “does not recognize spheres of influence”—meaning Russian.

In one sense, the statement reflected our foreign policy since 1945, while we of course maintained and expanded our own spheres of influence. The Monroe Doctrine since the 19th century offers ample evidence, and then add the Truman Doctrine, NATO and the now-forgotten CENTO and SEATO.

The Soviet Union is history, but Russia has maintained its “spheres of influence.”

After the collapse of communism, Georgia and Russia renewed their economic ties, but there were tensions over the country’s European ambitions.

Some political groups wanted to join NATO. There was the discord over Georgian involvement with Chechen rebels Russia was less than thrilled with the Georgian government. The 2008 "invasion" underlined Moscow’s determination to maintain its own “sphere of influence.”

The Obama administration is thoroughly committed to defense of the empire it inherited; there is no or little retreat from the mindless expansion of American ambition.

Teddy Roosevelt would be proud. Why are supporters of Barack Obama dismayed and shocked by his Afghanistan course, when, after all, in his 2008 campaign he promised nothing less?

In his first presidential campaign debate with John McCain, Obama said: “We have seen Afghanistan worsen, deteriorate. We need more troops there. We need more resources there. … So I would send two to three additional brigades to Afghanistan.”

Democrats and liberals so fear the war-loving right that they believe they must have their own adventures. But this is not 1961, when President John F. Kennedy told an enthralled nation that we “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” And thus he brought the Vietnam quagmire.

There are limits to our power; sadly, presidential candidates will not utter that truth, whatever painful adventures we have had. Obama might remember what he said in 2002:

“I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.”

Our diminished capacities and resources make such endeavors problematic. We cannot ignore present realities and forget the past.

Republican National Chairman Michael Steele recently attacked the Obama administration’s Afghanistan war efforts in a thoughtful statement.

Typically, the media jumped on him—NPR called it his “gaffe”—and his speech contained the media’s Sound Bite of the Week: “a war of Obama’s choosing.”

Steele’s remarks, which include a larger criticism of the war, are worth reading in full. [Editor’s note: Click here to see a transcript of Steele’s comment.]

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. The Republican ever-ready war hawks assailed Steele, who has no visible supporters within his party, let alone among Democrats. (He is unlikely to lose his position because of this flap; his presence is useful electorally.)

William Kristol invoked our Eleventh Commandment that political differences over foreign policy stop at the water’s edge (has he heard of the Internet?)—the usual ploy to thwart debate. Kristol called Steele’s remarks an “affront” to the Republican Party and to our “commitment to our soldiers.”

Sen. McCain and his cohorts metaphorically grabbed the microphone and assailed Steele because he undermined and assaulted the basic imperial behavior of the past six decades.

Sen. Lindsay Graham, McCain’s faithful sidekick, said, “This is not President Obama’s war, this is America’s war.” But Steele may have been playing good politics. The Afghanistan war is increasingly unpopular, even though for now his critique has not gained traction.

Sadly, there is little debate over the war in Afghanistan, as there is little about foreign policy generally.

Steele confronted a longstanding consensus that supports our imperial expansion—again, supported by real and imagined security interests, magnified by economic considerations, not least of which is the health of our domestic “defense industry” enterprise.

Our foreign policy course hardly arouses Congress, which has not raised any serious discussion since the Senate ratified the NATO treaty in 1949, or when Congress organized to cut off funding for the Vietnam conflict.

The Senate Armed Services Committee fulfilled McCain’s prediction that Gen. David Petraeus would be quickly and unanimously confirmed as military commander in Afghanistan. Sen. Robert Byrd’s death diminished the opposition, leaving few in the Senate with the will or courage to challenge U.S. policy in that war.

As Petraeus took command of the “international” forces in Afghanistan, he declared that “we are in this to win.” Obama’s promise to begin withdrawing troops in July 2011 may be politely ignored.

We can be sure the general did not undertake this command to dismantle an American army. President Obama may look back nostalgically on the simplicity of sacking Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Growing Tensions in US

Wobblies!: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World

But it now!

Unemployment predicted to rise further

By Patrick Martin

Most economists assume the unemployment rate will resume its upward march in coming months, with the social “safety net” for the unemployed entirely shredded. There's an increased nervousness among the political elite over growing social tensions.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell claimed on Sunday that he would support the extension of unemployment insurance if it was “paid for” by budget cuts elsewhere. Both Obama’s speech and McConnell's comment suggest a growing nervousness among the political elite over the growing social tensions in the United States.

In his Saturday radio and Internet speech, Obama seized on the opposition of Senate Republicans to an extension of jobless benefits to strike a false and demagogic pose as the defender of the unemployed.

The White House has been virtually silent for the past six weeks as the deadlock in the Senate has caused extended benefits to expire for more and more unemployed workers. An estimated 2.5 million workers have been cut off since June 1, and the toll mounts by 50,000 every day.

Obama’s embrace of populist demagogy is a transparent effort to position the Democrats for the upcoming congressional elections, under conditions where persistent long-term unemployment has discredited his administration and allowed the Republicans to posture, with equal falsity, as advocates of “job creation.”

One news analysis described this cynical contest as follows: “As the election approaches, each party is battling to depict the other as more heartless.”

The disputes between the Democrats and Republicans, however bitter rhetorically, are arguments over what tactics and methods can best be used to serve the interests of the ruling elite.

Both parties defend the profit system and the interests of the financial aristocracy, which are completely incompatible with the needs of working people.

Under conditions of the deepest slump since the Great Depression, the US government cannot carry out even the minimal measures to alleviate mass suffering that were commonplace in past recessions.

According to one study, in previous recessions since World War II, extended unemployment benefits continued for an average of 23 months after the unemployment rate reached its peak.

In the current slump, the peak official jobless rate was reached eight months ago—assuming that official unemployment figures accurately reflect reality—and extended benefits have already been cut off.

There is good reason to believe that the unemployment rate will resume its upward march in coming months, with the social “safety net” for the unemployed entirely shredded.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell claimed on Sunday that he would support the extension of unemployment insurance if it was “paid for” by budget cuts elsewhere. Both Obama’s speech and McConnell's comment suggest a growing nervousness among the political elite over the growing social tensions in the United States.

One right-wing commentator, former Bush speechwriter David Frum, voiced this concern openly.

“The most surprising thing about this recession, at least to me, has been the total absence of an economic protest movement by the unemployed and the foreclosed.”

“Time and again in American history, the hard-pressed and dispossessed have spoken loudly, fiercely, in the public square. Not this time.

"There are no Populists or Wobblies, no Bonus Marchers or sit-down strikers. Perhaps, as we settle more deeply into our long stretch of joblessness, the Tea Party is only the first wave of popular discontent. It could be another storm is yet to come.”

The Obama Glee Club ♫ Don't stop, believein' ♫

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's, OBAMA!

  By Chuck Baldwin

Liberals called Christian conservatives "dupes," "buffoons," "gullible," and a whole lot more in the way in which they 'worshipped George W. Bush. But now it is the liberals' turn to worship 'their' president and sink to the depths of self-delusion.

When President George W. Bush was first elected back in 2000, I well remember the way Christian conservatives went gaga over him.

They would deny it, of course, but it was more than hero worship: they acted as if he were a god.

Life-size posters filled Christian bookstores. Religious broadcasters and televangelists swooned over him like 16-year-old girls used to swoon over Elvis Presley.

Pastors invoked his name almost as a prayer. The Religious Right acted like they had died and gone to Heaven. In the minds of Christian conservatives, G.W. Bush could do no wrong.

The result of all this sophomoric silliness was that the Religious Right became blind, impotent lackeys to a Big-Government, big-spending, Orwellian, and inept administration--maybe one of the worst in U.S. history.

And all of this was not lost to the political left. They called Christian conservatives "dupes," "buffoons," "gullible," and a whole lot more. But now it is the liberals' turn to take a voyage in the vehicle of villainous vulnerability.

First, there was the major media's "anointing" of President Barack Obama. Yes, I use the word "anointing" on purpose. Make no mistake about it: in the minds of the major media, Obama was not inaugurated; he was canonized.

No pope, king, or potentate of history received the coronation that Barack Obama received. To the liberals who dominate the news media and entertainment industry in this country, Obama is not a President: he is a god.

For example, did readers see the way NBC newsman, Brian Williams, bowed to his majesty, Barack Obama? (see above).

The list of ways that media and entertainment lemmings fawn over Barack Obama is almost endless. And just when one thinks he has heard it all, out comes the blathering balderdash from Newsweek editor-at-large Evan Thomas.

Appearing on last weekend's Inside Washington, Thomas lauded President Obama as a "brave," "great teacher" who "stands above everybody."

But Thomas saved his most outrageous oratory for last Friday's Hardball program. On Hardball, Thomas gushed, "I mean in a way Obama's standing above the country, above--above the world, he's sort of God."

There you have it: according to Newsweek's Evan Thomas, Barack Obama is "sort of God."

Well, now that God is in the White House, I suppose we don't need the Constitution; we don't need the Bill of Rights; we don't need Congress; we don't need the Supreme Court; we don't need individual sovereign states; we don't need the media; and we certainly don't need Evan Thomas, do we?

There it is, my friends: because Barack Obama is the President, the major media now worships toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Goodbye resistance; goodbye objectivity (if they ever had it); goodbye fairness; goodbye investigative reporting; goodbye accountability (at least for Obama); goodbye professional journalism; and goodbye free and independent press.

Hello propaganda; hello favoritism; hello yellow journalism; hello socialism; hello to a revised monarchy; hello globalism; hello elitism; and hello Conditioning.

What in the world has happened to us? How is it that otherwise intelligent and educated people can so quickly forget virtually everything their principles and values taught them, and become little more than clumsy chumps for a Presidential administration--any Presidential administration? Are we that slavish? That childish? That foolish? Apparently so.

As bad as it was under Bush, it will be twice as bad under Obama. Only because, at least with Bush, the major media's natural liberal bias tended to want to keep Bush somewhat honest.

That meant Bush would often face criticism from the media for some of his unconstitutional policies.

Forget it with Obama. The liberal bias of the major media will tend to cause them to support anything this guy says or does, and to always look the other way whenever unconstitutional or illegal activity surfaces.

For eight years, Christian conservatives had "Lord Bush." Now, liberals have "Lord Obama." Seems to me that gods come pretty cheap these days.

War With Iran, Imminent?

"...the two party system agrees to the necessity of more war."

 By Shamus Cooke

When the UN refused to agree to the severe sanctions the US wanted, Obama responded with typical Bush flair and went solo. The new U.S. sanctions against Iran are an unmistakable act of war. If enforced, Iran’s economy will be potentially destroyed.

The New York Times outlines the central parts of the sanctions:

“The law signed by Obama imposes penalties on foreign entities that sell refined petroleum to Iran or assist Iran with its domestic refining capacity. It also requires that American and foreign businesses that seek contracts with the United States government certify that they do not engage in prohibited business with Iran.”

Iran must import a large part of its refined oil from foreign corporations and nations, since it does not have the technology needed to refine all the fuel that it pumps from its soil. By cutting this refined oil off, the U.S. will be causing massive, irreparable damage to the Iranian economy — equaling an act of war.

In fact, war against Japan in WWII was sparked by very similar circumstances. Franklin Delano Roosevelt spearheaded a series of sanctions against Japan, which included the Export Control Act, giving the President the power to prohibit the export of a variety of materials to Japan, including oil.

This gave Roosevelt the legal stance he needed to implement an oil embargo, an obvious act of war. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor simply brought the war out of the economic realm into the military sphere.

Iran is facing the exact same situation. Whereas the Obama Administration calmly portrays economic sanctions as “peaceful” solutions to political problems, they are anything but. The strategy here is to economically attack Iran until it responds militarily, giving the U.S. a fake moral high ground to “defend” itself, since the other side supposedly attacked first.

But the U.S. is provoking militarily too. According to the New York Times: “The Obama administration is accelerating the deployment of new defenses against possible Iranian missile attacks in the Persian Gulf, placing special ships [war ships] off the Iranian coast and antimissile systems in at least four [surrounding] Arab countries, according to administration and military officials.”

The same article mentions that U.S. General Petraeus admitted that, “… the United States was now keeping Aegis cruisers on patrol in the Persian Gulf [Iran’s border] at all times.

Those cruisers are equipped with advanced radar and antimissile systems designed to intercept medium-range missiles.” Iran, as well as the whole world, knows full well that “antimissile systems” are perfectly capable of going on the offensive — their real purpose.

Iran is completely surrounded by countries occupied by the U.S. military, whether it be the mass occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the U.S. puppet states that house U.S. military bases in Arab nations (not to mention Zionist Israel, a U.S. cohort in its war aims against Iran).

Contrary to the statements of President Obama, Iran is already well contained militarily.

It remains to be seen how closely U.S. allies will follow the new oil sanctions; they will be under tremendous pressure to do so. The European Union has already signaled that it will follow Obama’s lead.

Ultimately, the march to war begun by Bush is picking up momentum under Obama. Congressional Democrats and Republicans gave the President their overwhelming support in passing these sanctions, proving that the two party system agrees to the necessity of more war.

Uniting the U.S. anti-war movement is crucial if current and future wars are to be stopped. A step in this direction will take place at the National Peace Conference, in Albany, New York, July 23-25.

National Peace Conference

Liberals Have Become Complacent

Liberals remain silent...

 

By Clancy Sigal

There is an astonishing lack of anger among liberals, progressives and radicals who have abandoned emotion to the right. Our role model continues to be not FDR, still less Malcolm X, but our "bipartisan" and apparently tone-deaf President Obama.

In this second or third year of a devastating depression, not just recession, that has inflicted an epidemic of suffering on the lower half of the American nation, Obama is very busy being fluent and civil while being essentially untouched by the rage felt by so many of us.

Our world, as we have known it, is being annihilated, and nobody in power shows signs of giving a damn.

The real anger is all on the right, kidnapped – or authentically voiced – by the all-white Tea Partiers, Palinites, Oath Keepers and "armed and dangerous" patriot groups, some but not all of whom are native-fascistic but also include pissed-off libertarians and the disappointed and dispossessed at the bottom of the pile.

Look at the mess. Evictions – I'm a child of Great Depression furniture-thrown-on-the-street – are skyrocketing. Mortgage holders are in a feeding frenzy on their hapless fellow citizens.

Michelle Obama lectures us on obesity while one in eight Americans (and one in four children) are on federal food stamps.

The human toll of long term, more-or-less permanent unemployment is yet to be counted as millions of Americans are pushed out of the middle class and become the "new poor" queueing up at food banks for the first time in their lives.

Those who do vent and get angry are put down as crackpots, which they sometimes are. But the so-called left seems to have joined the mainstream (and even the radical) media in under- or mis- or never-reporting what's actually happening in the lives of so many of us.

Like Obama, Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic party establishment we've forfeited real gut language in favor of policy abstractions, the "issues" syndrome, that so easily hide an open wound.

Joe Stack, who rammed his Piper Cherokee into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, murdering an IRS worker and injuring many, was one maladjusted injustice collector.

But his online 3000-word suicide note, a long-repressed scream of protest, has the virtue of unminced words we are never likely to hear from anyone in Washington or a state capitol. "When the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die."

Where and when did we lefties lose this vital part of our social language? Was it in pre-school where we're urged as toddlers to use sweet reasonableness to resolve disputes?

Or have we grown so stiffly respectable that we're afraid of being loud and vulgar?

Or that – horrors! – we'll get too closely identified with the Great Unwashed like Joe Stack, Amy Bishop (the professor who shot her Alabama colleagues), crazy bikers, teenage gangs and "poor white trash" who tend to express their anger mainly against each other?

Whatever the reason, the suppression of sane, liberal anger has been around at least half a century, certainly since the sociologist C Wright Mills in his influential book The Power Elite deplored the loss of capacity by the public to experience outrage as contrasted with earlier periods in American history.

The last time I remember collective anger as legitimate was in the 1960s. Ever since there's been a gradual slide into sterile politeness.

Recently, I attended a meeting of my local school board where a mild, hardly-above-a-whisper grumble from a parent prompted his expulsion enforced by armed police.

Who knows what might have happened if any of us in the audience had stood up and actually spoken out as in that famous Norman Rockwell painting of a town hall meeting?

Why should full-throated emotion be the monopoly of the so-called "populists" who seem to be the only people around unafraid to shout, yell, stomp and scream?

I grew up in a boisterous, immigrant, loud neighborhood where everyone had an opinion and voiced it full throttle.

Somewhere along the line, maybe when I shifted from working class to middle class, I lost my rough, grating, empowered, assertive voice – and maybe the anger that had fuelled it. If so, that's a pity.

Who Own America? (It's not us)

Business buys politics

By Johann Hari

For over a century, the US has put some limits – too few, too feeble – on how much corporations can bribe, bully or intimidate politicians. But now The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations can run political adverts during an election campaign.

This week, a disaster hit the United States, and the after-shocks will be shaking and breaking global politics for years.

It did not grab the same press attention as the fall of liberal Kennedy-licking Massachusetts to a pick-up truck Republican, or President Obama's first State of the Union address, or the possible break-up of Brangelina and their United Nations of adopted infants.

But it took the single biggest problem dragging American politics towards brutality and dysfunction – and made it much, much worse. Yet it also showed the only path that Obama can now take to salvage his Presidency.

For more than a century, the US has slowly put some limits – too few, too feeble – on how much corporations can bribe, bully or intimidate politicians. On Tuesday, they were burned away in one whoosh.

The Supreme Court ruled that corporations can suddenly run political adverts during an election campaign – and there is absolutely no limit on how many, or how much they can spend.

So if you anger the investment bankers by supporting legislation to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, you will smack into a wall of 24/7 ads exposing your every flaw.

If you displease oil companies by supporting legislation to deal with global warming, you will now be hit by a tsunami of advertising saying you are opposed to jobs and the American Way. If you rile the defence contractors by opposing the gargantuan war budget, you will face a smear-campaign calling you Soft on Terror.

Representative Alan Grayson says:

"It basically institutionalises and legalises bribery on the largest scale imaginable. Corporations will now be able to reward the politicians that play ball with them – and beat to death the politicians that don't...

"You won't even hear any more about the Senator from Kansas. It'll be the Senator from General Electric or the Senator from Microsoft."

To understand the impact this will have, you need to grasp how smaller sums of corporate money have already hijacked American democracy. Let's look at a case that is simple and immediate and every American can see in front of them: healthcare.

The United States is the only major industrialised democracy that doesn't guarantee healthcare for all its citizens. The result is that, according to a detailed study by Harvard University, some 45,000 Americans die needlessly every year. That's equivalent to 15 9/11s every year, or two Haitian earthquakes every decade.

This isn't because the American people like it this way. Gallup has found in polls for a decade now that two-thirds believe the government should guarantee care for every American: they are as good and decent and concerned for each other as any European.

No: it is because private insurance companies make a fortune today out of a system that doesn't cover the profit-less poor, and can turn away the sickest people as "uninsurable". So they pay for politicians to keep the system broken.

They fund the election campaigns of politicians on both sides of the aisle and employ an army of lobbyists, and for their part those politicians veto any system that doesn't serve their paymasters.

Look for example at Joe Lieberman, the former Democratic candidate for Vice-President. He has taken $448,066 in campaign contributions from private healthcare companies while his wife raked in $2m as one of their chief lobbyists, and he has blocked any attempt in the Senate to break the stranglehold of the health insurance companies and broaden coverage.

The US political system now operates within a corporate cage. If you want to run for office, you have to take corporate cash – and so you have to serve corporate interests.

Corporations are often blatant in their corruption: it's not unusual for them to give to both competing candidates in a Senate race, to ensure all sides are indebted to them. It has reached the point that lobbyists now often write the country's laws. Not metaphorically; literally.

The former Republican congressman Walter Jones spoke out in disgust in 2006 when he found that drug company lobbyists were actually authoring the words of the Medicare prescription bill, and puppet-politicians were simply nodding it through.

But what happens if politicians are serving the short-term profit-hunger of corporations, and not the public interest? You only have to look at the shuttered shops outside your window for the answer.

The banks were rapidly deregulated from the Eighties through the Noughties because their lobbyists paid politicians on all sides, and demanded their payback in rolled-back rules and tossed-away laws. As Senator Dick Durbin says simply: "The banks own the Senate," so they had to obey.

It is this corruption that has prevented Barack Obama from achieving anything substantial in his first year in office. How do you re-regulate the banks, if the Senate is owned by Wall Street?

How do you launch a rapid transition away from oil and coal to wind and solar, if the fossil fuel industry owns Congress? How do you break with a grab-the-oil foreign policy if Big Oil provides the invitation that gets you into the party of American politics?

His attempt at healthcare reform is dying because he thought he could only get through the Senate a system that the giant healthcare corporations and drug companies pre-approved.

So he promised to keep the ban on bringing cheap drugs down from Canada, he pledged not to bargain over prices, and he dumped the idea of having a public option that would make sure ordinary Americans could actually afford it.

The result was a Quasimodo healthcare proposal so feeble and misshapen that even the people of Massachusetts turned away in disgust.

Yet the corporations that caused this crisis are now being given yet more power. Bizarrely, the Supreme Court has decided that corporations are "persons", so they have the "right" to speak during elections.

But corporations are not people. Should they have the right to bear arms, or to vote? It would make as much sense. They are a legal fiction, invented by the state – and they can be fairly regulated to stop them devouring their creator.

This is the same Supreme Court that ruled that the detainees at Guantanomo Bay are not "persons" under the constitution deserving basic protections. A court that says a living breathing human is less of a "persons" than Lockheed Martin has gone badly awry.

Obama now faces two paths – the Clinton road, or the FDR highway. After he lost his healthcare battle, Clinton decided to serve the corporate interests totally.

He is the one who carried out the biggest roll-back of banking laws, and saw the largest explosion of inequality since the 1920s.

Some of Obama's advisers are now nudging him down that path: the appalling anti-Keynesian pledge for a spending freeze on social programmes for the next three years to pay down the deficit is one of their triumphs.

But there is another way. Franklin Roosevelt began his Presidency trying to appease corporate interests – but he faced huge uproar and disgust at home when it became clear this left ordinary Americans stranded.

He switched course. He turned his anger on "the malefactors of great wealth" and bragged: "I welcome the hatred... of the economic royalists." He put in place tough regulations that prevented economic disaster and spiralling inequality for three generations.

There were rare flashes of what Franklin Delano Obama would look like in his reaction to the Supreme Court decision.

He said: "It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies, and other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americas."

But he has spent far more time coddling those interests than taking them on. The great pressure of strikes and protests put on FDR hasn't yet arisen from a public dissipated into hopelessness by an appalling media that convinces them they are powerless and should wait passively for a Messiah.

Very little positive change can happen in the US until they clear out the temple of American democracy. In the State of the Union, Obama spent one minute on this problem, and proposed restrictions on lobbyists – but that's only the tiniest of baby steps. He evaded the bigger issue.

If Americans want a democratic system, they have to pay for it – and that means fair state funding for political candidates. Candidates are essential for the system to work: you may as well begrudge paying for the polling booths, or the lever you pull.

At the same time, the Supreme Court needs to be confronted: when the court tried to stymie the new deal, FDR tried to pack it with justices on the side of the people. Obama needs to be pressured by Americans to be as radical in democratising the Land of the Fee (CRCT).

None of the crises facing us all – from the global banking system to global warming – can be dealt with if a tiny number of super-rich corporations have a veto over every inch of progress.

If Obama funks this challenge, he may as well put the US government on e-Bay – and sell it to the highest bidder. How would we spot the difference?

Citizens of Oceanea, A Message For You

The Ministry of Obama

By John Pilger

In 1984, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that "passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace.

Rather, a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies." He called this "global security" and invited our gratitude.

To the people of Afghanistan, which the U.S. has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your country."

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorized by the United Nations Security Council.

There was no UN authority. He said that "the world" supported the invasion in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. In truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition.

He said that America invaded Afghanistan "only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama Bin Laden." In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over Bin Laden for trial, Pakistan's military regime reported, and they were ignored.

Even Obama's mystification of the 9/11 attacks as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the twin towers were attacked, the former Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik was told by the Bush administration that a U.S. military assault would take place by mid-October.

The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as "stable" enough to ensure U.S. control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.

Obama's most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda's attacks on the West. His own national security adviser, James Jones, said in October that there were "fewer than 100" al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan.

According to U.S. intelligence, 90 percent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but "a tribal localized insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the U.S. because it is an occupying power." The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of "world peace."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BENEATH THE surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan is a model for those "disorderly regions" of the world still beyond Oceania's reach.

This is known as Coin (counter-insurgency), and draws together the military, aid organizations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, it aims to incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbeks against Pashtuns.

The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They built walls between communities which had once intermarried, ethnically cleansing the Sunnis and driving millions out of the country.

Embedded media reported this as "peace"; American academics bought by Washington and "security experts" briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in 1984, the opposite was true.

Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into "target areas" controlled by warlords, bankrolled by the CIA and the opium trade. That these warlords are barbaric is irrelevant.

"We can live with that," a Clinton-era diplomat once said of the return of oppressive sharia law in a "stable," Taliban-run Afghanistan.

Favored western relief agencies, engineers and agricultural specialists will attend to the "humanitarian crisis" and so "secure" the subjugated tribal lands.

That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia, where ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once-peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam.

The CIA's "Strategic Hamlet Program" was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Vietcong--the Americans' catch-all term for the resistance, similar to "Taliban."

Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and the Afghanistan adventures.

Ethnic cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance--these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people.

And yet, for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.

The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize-winner and his general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself.

The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials.

People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.

"It was curious," wrote Orwell in 1984, "to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world...

"People ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who...were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."

Obama Further Expands The War on Terror

I wonder how many of the people in this picture voted for Obama...

By Bill Van Auken

Three days after the failed attempt by a 23-year-old Nigerian student to trigger an explosion on a Northwest Airlines passenger jet, President Barack Obama threatened to unleash US military power in Yemen and across the globe.The Obama regime is now threatening to launch offensives in Yemen and Somalia, supposedly to root out terrorism. This only exposes similar justifications for the wars in Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iraq as a fraud against Americans and the world.
Three hundred innocent people nearly lost their lives in Detroit on December 25. If they had, their deaths would have been one more episode of “collateral damage” in a military offensive by US imperialism that has cost the lives of well over a million people over the past eight years in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

 These military campaigns have been driven by the interests of US capitalism in asserting dominance over the strategic oil supplies as well the pipelines and shipping routes of the Middle East and Central Asia.

In targeting Yemen and Somalia, Washington is preparing to militarily straddle the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, giving it control of the chokepoint in a key route for shipping oil from the Persian Gulf to the West.

America’s ruling financial elite is pursuing these aims with cold-blooded indifference to the loss of human life that they entail, including among innocent American civilians forced to pay the price for the criminal acts of their government.

Three days after the failed attempt by a 23-year-old Nigerian student to trigger an explosion on a Northwest Airlines passenger jet, President Barack Obama threatened to unleash US military power in Yemen and across the globe.

Obama interrupted his Hawaii vacation Monday to deliver his bellicose remarks in the face of a crescendo of Republican criticism. The Republican right has tried to exploit the abortive attack in order to indict the Democratic administration as “soft” on terrorism.

This campaign has been fueled in part by the claim initially made by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that “the system worked” in the incident, which easily could have claimed the lives of 300 passengers and crew members.

In fact, there are serious questions about how the student, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was able to board the plane.

He reportedly bought a one-way ticket, paid for in cash, and checked no luggage. Moreover, according to an account given by fellow passengers, he and an accomplice had tried to get him on the flight without showing a passport.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press cited unnamed intelligence officials as stating that they had recordings of conversations between Abdulmutallab and at least one member of al Qaeda.

His father had informed the US Embassy in Lagos more than a month earlier that his son had fallen in with Islamist extremists in Yemen, which resulted in his name being placed on a terror watch list.

Any one of these things should have triggered intense scrutiny. That they did not suggests the possibility that Abdulmutallab’s boarding the flight was facilitated from within the national security apparatus.

This allowed him to carry out an action that is now being used to justify yet another US military intervention abroad.

Clearly, the Republicans in Congress have no interest in probing any of these issues. Rather, they are trying to turn the failed bombing into an argument in defense of torture, for keeping open the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and to vindicate all of the criminal policies of the Bush administration.

Obama’s response has been an attempt to outflank his Republican critics from the right by threatening another expansion of US militarist aggression.

There can be little doubt that this will be supplemented with intensified attacks on democratic rights and the continuation of the policies of torture and preventive detention.

In his remarks Monday, Obama vowed “to use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle, and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us—whether they are from Afghanistan or Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, or anywhere where they are plotting attacks against the US homeland.”

The US administration is already in the midst of an escalation that is sending another 30,000 US troops into Afghanistan.

It has mounted an intensified campaign of Predator drone missile attacks against Pakistan, while, according to recent press reports, also sending Special Operations units and CIA operatives into the country to conduct covert assassination and “snatch and grab” missions.

It has justified these acts of military aggression as a necessary defense of the “homeland” against terrorist attacks, the same rationale given by the Bush administration for launching the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan as well as the invasion and occupation of Iraq, now in its seventh year.

Now, the Obama White House is preparing to unleash “every element of our national power” against Yemen and Somalia, and perhaps other nations yet unnamed.

The Pentagon and the CIA are already involved in semi-covert operations in both of these countries.

In Somalia, having organized a proxy invasion by US-assisted Ethiopian troops in 2006, Washington is now channeling arms and other military aid to the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), while carrying out clandestine assassination raids by American commandos operating from US warships.

In Yemen, US warplanes have carried out repeated strikes against purported Al Qaeda targets as well as against Shia rebels known as the Huthis in the country’s northwest.

Washington has cemented increasingly close relations with the repressive dictatorship of Field Marshal Ali Abdullah Saleh, dispatching top officials, including Central Command chief General David Petraeus and Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, to the Yemeni capital of Sana’a.

The December 25 bombing attempt on the Northwest flight may now be used to make the US military interventions in both countries more direct, overt and deadly.

In his remarks Monday, Obama justified these actions as a means of keeping the American public “safe and secure” in the face of what he termed “a serious reminder of the dangers that we face and the nature of those who threaten our homeland.”

The reality is that the military actions being prepared by Washington will have just the opposite effect.

If the statement attributed to the group Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula claiming responsibility is to be believed, the attempted airline bombing was undertaken in retaliation for the December 17 US bombing of Yemen that claimed the lives of more than 60 civilians, nearly half of them women and children.

What does the December 25 incident reveal about “the nature of those who threaten our homeland”?

Abdulmutallab, the son of one of Nigeria’s wealthiest bankers, was apparently radicalized while attending the prestigious University College London.

Like millions of young Muslims, most from far less privileged backgrounds, he undoubtedly was outraged by the images of dead and wounded men, women and children produced by the US invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as by the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza by Washington’s closest ally and client state, Israel.

That this anger is channeled into the retrograde Islamist politics and reactionary terrorist methods of groups like Al Qaeda is no accident.

These organizations represent in a real sense Washington’s Frankenstein’s monster.

For decades, the CIA promoted Islamist movements ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to the precursor of Hamas as a means of undermining socialist and left-nationalist movements in the Middle East.

This policy found its most lethal expression in Afghanistan, where Washington spent billions of dollars in financing and arming an Islamist insurgency against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul.

This triggered a war that devastated the country and killed more than 1 million Afghans. It was in this war, initiated in 1978, that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda got their start.

Similarly, in Yemen, as part of its Cold War crusade, Washington backed the Islamist regime in the North against secular nationalists in the South who called themselves socialists and forged ties with Moscow.

In the country’s 1994 civil war, Yemenis returning from fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan played a prominent role in helping to secure the rule of Saleh.

That the Obama administration is now threatening to launch offensives in Yemen and Somalia, supposedly to root out terrorism, only exposes similar justifications for the wars in Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iraq as a fraud against the people of the United States and the world.

Three hundred innocent people nearly lost their lives in Detroit on December 25. If they had, their deaths would have been one more episode of “collateral damage” in a military offensive by US imperialism that has cost the lives of well over a million people over the past eight years in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

These military campaigns have been driven by the interests of US capitalism in asserting dominance over the strategic oil supplies as well the pipelines and shipping routes of the Middle East and Central Asia.

In targeting Yemen and Somalia, Washington is preparing to militarily straddle the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, giving it control of the chokepoint in a key route for shipping oil from the Persian Gulf to the West.

America’s ruling financial elite is pursuing these aims with cold-blooded indifference to the loss of human life that they entail, including among innocent American civilians forced to pay the price for the criminal acts of their government.