Latin America's Cold War

Hal Brands

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674055285

News Black-Out in DC: Pay No Attention to Those Veterans Chained to the White House Fence

Saturday 18 December 2010

by: Dave Lindorff   |  This Can't Be Happening | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/news-black-out-dc-pay-no-attention-those-veterans-chained-white-house-fence66096

Detroit mayor plans to shrink city by cutting services to some areas

"In some parts of Detroit, 80% of housing is empty amid widespread unemployment. Many have simply abandoned properties now worth a fraction of the mortgages on them.

Property prices have collapsed to the point where houses can be had for $100, although the average price is $7,500 (£5,000). The city council gives homes away to those prepared to pay the outstanding property taxes."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/17/detroit-shrinking

Crisis: The Motor of Capitalism

 Monday 29 March 2010  by: André Orléan   |  Le Monde

"However, today, the mass of liquidities thus produced, associated with the vertiginous growth in public debt, brings the crisis into a new stage in which the question of currency values enters the spotlight. In this matter, the sites for a possible rupture exist: for example, the dollar's hegemony, the unity of the Euro zone, the parity of the yuan - or the weakness of the pound Sterling? Should such a rupture occur, then the cohesion of international neoliberalism would find itself called directly into question.

The forces of shock that surfaced in August 2007 have not yet finished making felt their devastating effects."

Where Majors Fear To Tread Telegraph.co.uk

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/migrationtemp/2802185/Where-Majors-Fear-To-Tread.html?sms_ss=email&at_xt=4ce363087e4a12b4,0

t r u t h o u t | On Your Marx: Neoliberalism on the Rocks

truthout op-ed:

"Of course there are reasons for being suspicious of Marxism. During the Third International and in the scattered sectarian life it has led outside the universities since the Second World War, Marxism has shown a susceptibility to dogma hardly equaled outside of American economics departments. But the ideological rout that Marxism began to suffer in the ’70s did what periods in the wilderness are supposed to do: it discouraged bandwagon-jumpers and enforced a new seriousness on those who stuck around. The truth is that since the neoliberal era began thirty years ago, Marxism has yielded some of its most formidable monuments of economic thought. Two in particular are David Harvey’s abstract and categorical Limits to Capital (1982), which as the restatement and completion of a great thinker’s project easily outclasses Minsky’s John Maynard Keynes (1975), and Robert Brenner’s narrative and empirical Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), which barely mentions Marx while vindicating, through an analysis of the postwar American, German, and Japanese economies, the idea Marx took from David Ricardo and made his own: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in a situation of free competition.

 …

In economics, the analogous route is Marxism, which like psychoanalysis has a dubious reputation—and an explanatory power and long-term perspective that its rivals can’t touch. With luck, the next intellectual consequence of the crisis will be to pry the lid off Marx’s tomb, since it is only from a Marxian standpoint that the recent credit bubble can be understood in terms of the structural problems it affected to solve as well as those it has created."

http://www.truth-out.org/on-your-marx-neoliberalism-rocks60654

Patrick Cockburn: Putting Petraeus in Perspective

"His great achievement in Iraq was to persuade Americans that they had won the war when, in fact, they were withdrawing with little achieved. He was able to sell the "surge" as a triumph of military tactics when in reality its most important feature was that Sunni insurgents allied themselves with American forces because they were being slaughtered by the Shia."

http://www.counterpunch.com/patrick06252010.html

Juan Cole, The Asian Century? | TomDispatch

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175319/tomgram%3A_juan_cole%2C_the_asian_century/#more

"The most significant of the Indian purchases trumpeted by the president last weekend were military in character.  Obama proclaimed that the $10 billion in deals he was inking would create 54,000 new American jobs.  Right now, it's hard to argue with job creation or multi-billion-dollar sales of U.S.-made goods abroad.  As former secretary of labor Robert Reich has pointed out, however, jobs in the defense industry are expensive to create, while offering a form of artificial corporate welfare that distorts the American economy and diverts resources from far more crucial priorities."

MLK on Violence

"As much as I deplore violence, there is one evil that is worse than violence, and that's cowardice."
-MLK

"Farm" life in the an age of economic depression

Begin quote:

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October 5th
5-7pm
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Tresidder Union

Stephen Walt on The New Media and the Palestine Question

(YouTube)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70mh6O1FcG0

James Akins, 83, dies; energy expert presaged danger of relying on Mideast oil

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/26/AR2010072605298.html

Amid Soaring Deaths, Obama Affirms Afghan Strategy

No 'Adjustments' Needed on War Fronts: Obama

Headline, Oct 5, 2010
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/10/05-0

Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The U.S. Military as Quagmire Specialists | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The U.S. Military as Quagmire Specialists | TomDispatch

"The truth is we’re lost in the desert, careening down an unmarked road, odometer busted, GPS on the fritz, and fuel gauge hovering just above E.  Washington can only hope that the American people, napping in the backseat, won’t notice."

Ike and the Military-Inudstrial Complex

Eisenhower, 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953 34th president of US 1953-1961 (1890 - 1969)
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/9556.html


See Also:

"Military-Industrial Complex Speech," Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, p. 1035- 1040
http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html

Glen Greenwald: Collapsing empire watch

"The U.S. is now in fifth place in total number of executions, behind only China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and comfortably ahead of Yemen and Sudan."

ŽIŽEK on Violence

A Permanent Economic Emergency

What is the Left to Do?

http://www.counterpunch.org/zizek10152010.html
By SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK 

Closely linked to the necessary de-fetishization of ‘democratic institutions’ is the de-fetishization of their negative counter-part: violence. For example, Badiou recently proposed exercising ‘defensive violence’ by means of building free domains at a distance from state power, subtracted from its reign (like the early Solidarnosc in Poland), and only resisting by force state attempts to crush and re-appropriate these ‘liberated zones’. The problem with this formula is that it relies on a deeply problematic distinction between the ‘normal’ functioning of the state apparatus and the ‘excessive’ exercise of state violence. But the ABC of Marxist notions of class struggle is the thesis that ‘peaceful’ social life is itself an expression of the (temporary) victory of one class—the ruling one. From the standpoint of the subordinated and oppressed, the very existence of the state, as an apparatus of class domination, is a fact of violence. Similarly, Robespierre argued that regicide is not justified by proving the King had committed any specific crime: the very existence of the King is a crime, an offence against the freedom of the people. In this strict sense, the use of force by the oppressed against the ruling class and its state is always ultimately ‘defensive’. If we do not concede this point, we volens nolens ‘normalize’ the state and accept its violence as merely a matter of contingent excesses. The standard liberal motto—that it is sometimes necessary to resort to violence, but it is never legitimate—is not sufficient. From the radical-emancipatory perspective, one should turn it around: for the oppressed, violence is always legitimate—since their very status is the result of violence—but never necessary: it is always a matter of strategic consideration whether to use force against the enemy or not.

Anders Stephanson, 14 Notes

The following passages are extracted from:

FOURTEEN NOTES  ON THE VERY CONCEPT OF THE COLD WAR
Anders Stephanson, Columbia University
1996, reissued 2007 
www.h-net.org/~diplo/essays/PDF/stephanson-14notes.pdf

“The well-known is such because it
is well-known, not known.”
--G.W.F. Hegel

Two debates took place last year on H-Diplo about the cold war, debates about the problems of conception and periodization. The first, during spring, concerned the ‘end’ and was occasioned by a remark I had made in passing that the cold war was really over in 1963. The second exchange, taking place in the autumn and virtually without reference to the previous exchanges, centered on when this putative war (or non-war) actually began. Aside from demonstrating a lack of institutional memory, the second debate revealed once again the extent to which the concept of the cold war is radically ‘under-determined’; by the time discussion petered out, we were back in the 19th century. The current debate, meanwhile, has typically branched out in various directions without analytical focus.

The following Notes will not rehearse my original periodization; I have argued for it elsewhere at some length. Instead I will attempt to deepen it by reflecting on the logical and ontological character of the cold war, on the conceptual conditions of possibility for talking about something called the cold war. The starting point for this genealogical exercise is the same as that of my periodization, namely, Lippmann’s critique of Kennan’s X-Article in late 1947 which introduces the term itself but also provides the historical key to its concept...  The essential aspect here is that Lippmann spotted in Kennan’s argument a certain gesture of diplomatic refusal vis-a-vis the USSR; and it was this US move (I argued) that made the cold war a ‘war’ when the refusal was institutionalized under the sign of ‘no negotiation unless from a position of strength.

Reading Lippmann, then, produced a diagnosis and a criterion but not any deeper conceptual determination. To achieve that, the cold war must be situated more distinctly within the very opposition that ultimately framed it: war and peace. If nothing else, one should consider what kind of surrender (or peace) the cold war presupposed and embodied; and that in turn requires a derivation of our notions of war and peace. I confess that a more immediate reason for doing this is exasperation with a very tiresome cliché: ‘Now that the cold war is over, etc, etc.’ Every article on international relations seems to begin with it, no matter what the author goes on to argue. As reified punditry, or something akin to advertising language, the pronouncement (often then followed by reference to that well known ‘globalized economy’) presumes a notion of an epoch so inflated and blurry that it can include everything and anything. Historical concepts certainly have the potential of reassembling past experience in novel ways, to serve new needs of the present. But the name [the cold war] in this case is a mere catchphrase. Moreover, behind it lurks not only a seamless, indivisible notion of the cold war as an epoch but also an essentialist principle, according to which everything is a reflection or expression of an original essence. That essence, of course, turns out to be the entire postwar relation, or conflict, between the US and the USSR. It has to be so, because what gives the epoch such a self-evident aura in the first place is its resounding ‘end’ with the Soviet collapse: the end is then retrospectively inscribed in the beginning and the trajectory of the ‘period.’ Histories of ‘the cold war’ can then be rewritten to explain that obvious ‘end.’ The effect is to conceal or obliterate variations in the nature of the relationship. Different periodizations of the era are also barred or simply subsumed, periodizations, say, in terms of ‘decolonization,’ ‘the economic rise of Japan and Germany,’ or ‘the universalization of the European model of the nation-state.’ [emphasis added]

…

I want to see if the very concept of the cold war can be produced, if indeed it ‘has’ a concept or is perhaps better left on the heap of everyday banalities. In short, does it entail any imminent necessity? What must ultimately be interrogated is thus the polarity of the US and the USSR itself, its very givenness. …

From Note 5: Augustine and Aquinas

… Within that shadowy context of imperfection, however, it remained that Christians desired just peace while the heathen wanted an iniquitous one, a perverse peace of domination and subservience, a peace that is “not worthy even of the name of peace.” Good and bad alike, nevertheless, seek some sort of peace. Even pax falsa, wicked peace, as opposed to pax vera, is thus peace of a kind. War, then, is derived and defined in terms of its goal, peace. …

From Note 9: Marx, Engels and Lenin

What Clausewitz generally had in mind was war in a European frame, war as epitomized in a battle performed in a baroque theater. Yet his formative experience from the age of thirteen onwards had been devastating war with the French and he remained uncertain about ‘total war’ as political liquidation. Hegel, on the other hand, stuck to the traditional view that the enemy’s internal order was beyond attack. International (i.e. European) law protected “domestic institutions” in times of war. Hegel’s lineal descendants Marx and Engels thought otherwise. Nation-states to them were irrational and bound to be undermined by the globalization of capital. More originally, they also claimed that the whole apparatus of inside and outside, sovereignty in short, served to hide the real nature of the state, namely, class rule. In a way, then, one was always already in a sort of war, a class war, whether openly declared or merely smouldering. Class conflict was a state of affairs, resulting from a certain mode of production; and as long as it remained, there could be no pax vera, only pax apparens.

… [Lenin's]  vision was followed not by Trotsky’s internationalism but Stalin’s Fortress USSR. At no time was Trotsky’s notorious formula at Brest Litovsk - ‘neither war nor peace’ - in the basic interest of Stalin’s Fortress. Lenin’s view did survive, however, in different and reinvigorated form in the figure of Mao, theorist of protracted civil war and invasion of the enemy’s social order; but that is another story.

From Note 11: Wilson and Roosevelt (i)

For the matrix or logic of the American cold-war project after the war was established by Roosevelt during 1939-41 in his attempt, in my view generally justified, to prepare the United States for (and perhaps steer it towards) the ‘inevitable’ open war.
…
As FDR saw matters, it was in fact inherently impossible to deal with dictators: ‘normal practices of diplomacy... are of no possible use in dealing with international outlaws.’ Out of this notion came the notion of ‘unconditional surrender’ enunciated at Casablanca in 1943 but actually present from the beginning in Roosevelt’s outlook. Symptomatically, he took the formula (he said) from U(nconditional).S(urrender). Grant and the Civil War, a kind of conflict that could indeed only be fought to that end. Henry Stimson expressed this logic in a more unequivocal and radical fashion when he projected onto the whole world Lincoln’s famous dictum that no nation can survive half slave and half free: from now on it was the world itself that had to be either free or slave. This was a prescription for limitless war, indeed the reinvention of war as civil war on a global scale in the name of total victory and the principle of universal right. The idea followed in the spirit of Wilson’s earlier one that the only really secure world would have to be one in accordance with US principles (i.e. those of ‘humanity’). Less obviously, it was also symmetrical with Lenin’s notion of international class war.

From Note 13: Lippmann (ii) and Kennan

… One need not embrace the Soviet position to see that the cold war as embodied in the American stance was utterly against Stalin’s interests, that he would have liked precisely what he said he wanted: negotiations, deals and reduction in tension, coupled with relative isolation, above all, recognition as an equal. Instead the USSR became a pariah.

CounterPunch Diary

The Soros Syndrome

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn10082010.html

Back at the dawn of the twentieth century Lenin and Martov were organizing their international Congresses and looking for grant money to this end. Martov, the Menshevik, told Lenin he must absolutely stop paying for the hotels and halls with money hijacked by Stalin from Georgian banks in Tblisi. Lenin reassured Martov, and then asked Stalin to knock over another bank  which he did, Europe’s record bank heist up till that time. It was one way, perhaps the only way, past the grip of cautious millionaires. Then as now.

Dr. Khair El-Din Haseeb’s Presentation  at Georgetown University

April 5, 2006

http://www.globalcomplexity.org/DrHaseeb%27slecture.htm

James Galbraith on Obama

Whose Side Is the White House On?

by James K. Galbraith

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/12/09-7

"Large countries can and do fail, they have done so in our own time. And the consequences are very grave: drastic declines in services, in living standards, in life expectancies, huge increases in social tension, in repression, and in violence. These are the consequences of following through with crackpot ideas such as those embodied in the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission, as Jeff Madrick again outlined, such notions as putting arbitrary limits on the scale of government, or arbitrary limits on the top tax rate affecting the wealthiest Americans.

This isn’t a parlor game. The outcome isn’t destined to be alright. It will not necessarily end in progress whatever happens. What we do, how we proceed, and how we effectively resist what is plainly about to happen, matters very greatly for the future of our country, of our children, and of another generation to come. We need to lose our fear, our hesitation, and our unwillingness to face the facts. If we thereby lose some of our hopes, let’s remember the dictum of William of Orange that “it is not necessary to hope in order to persevere.”

The President should know that, as Lincoln said to the Congress in the dark winter of 1862, he “cannot escape history.” And we are heading now into a very dark time, so let’s face it with eyes open. And if we must, let’s seek leadership that shares our values, fights for our principles, and deserves our trust."

© 2010 New Deal 2.0

James K. Galbraith is a Vice President of Americans for Democratic Action. He is General Editor of "Galbraith: The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 1952-1967," just published by Library of America. He teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.

Economic links

On tax rates and wealth distribution:
http://empirestudies.blogspot.com/2008/11/who-rules-america.html

Michael Hudson on Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/5/new_600b_fed_stimulus_fuels_fears

Michael Whitney on inflation and other things:
http://empirestudies.blogspot.com/search?q=Whitney

Paul Craig Roberts:
http://empirestudies.blogspot.com/search?q=roberts

Game Plan for a Flat Tax, Social Security Cutbacks and Austerity: Obama's Sellout on Taxes
By MICHAEL HUDSON (Dec 8, 2010)
http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson12082010.html

The Endless Thanksgiving: Next Up: a "Flat Tax" for the Rich
By MICHAEL HUDSON (Nov 25, 2010)
http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson11252010.html

David Cay Johnson on Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/18/free_lunch_how_the_wealthiest_americans

Wealth for the Common Good:
 http://wealthforcommongood.org/resources/tax-fact-sheet/

“Shifting Responsibility: How 50 Years of Tax Cuts Benefited the Wealthiest Americans,” Chuck Collins, Alison Goldberg, and Sam Pizzigati (Wealth for the Common Good, April 2010)
www.ips-dc.org/files/1675/ShiftingResponsibility.pdf

Chuck Collins, “Reverse the Great Tax Shift”
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/04/07/reverse-the-great-tax-shift/

Dean Baker: Peter Orzag Goes to Citigroup

Dean Baker: Peter Orzag Goes to Citigroup

"Why do the folks in power in Washington seem unable or unwilling to consider a financial speculation tax? Let's imagine for a moment that during his stint as OMB director Peter Orszag had been a vocal advocate of financial speculation taxes. It doesn't seem likely that under these circumstances Citigroup would currently be offering him a job that, according to the New York Times, would typically pay $2 to $3 million a year."

An extensive bibliography compiled by Ed Moise of Clemson University:

Iraq Wars Bibliography

http://www.clemson.edu/caah/history/FacultyPages/EdMoise/iraqbib.html#iraniraq

 

Anatomy of Defeat: Lessons from the Obama Debacle

Lessons of the Obama Debacle

by Walden Bello

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/10/12-0

"Obama had a tremendous opportunity to educate and mobilize people against the neoliberal or market fundamentalist approach that deregulated the financial sector and caused the crisis. Although Obama did allude to unregulated financial markets as the key problem during the campaign, he refrained from demonizing neoliberalism after he took office, thus presenting an ideological vacuum that the resurgent neoliberals did not hesitate to fill. No doubt he failed to launch a full-scale ideological offensive because his key lieutenants for economic policy, National Economic Council head Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, had not broken with neoliberal thinking.
...
In contrast to Obama, the right wing understood the demands and dynamics of politics at a time of crisis, as opposed to politics in normal times. While Obama persisted in his quest for bipartisanship, the Republicans adopted a posture of hard-line opposition to practically all of his initiatives.

Unlike Obama and the Democrats, the right posed the conflict in stark political and ideological terms: between left and right, between “socialism” and “freedom,” between the oppressive state and the liberating market. The Republican opposition used all the catchwords and mantras they could dredge up from bourgeois U.S. ideology.

Finally, in contrast to Obama’s neglect of the Democratic base, the right eschewed Republican interest-group politics. Fox News, Sarah Palin, and the tea party movement stirred up the right-wing base to challenge the Republican Party elite and drive a no-compromise, take-no-prisoners politics. To understand what has happened to the Republican Party in the last few weeks with the string of tea party successes in the primaries, historian Arno Mayer’s distinction among conservatives, reactionaries, and counterrevolutionaries is useful. In Mayer’s terms, the counterrevolutionaries, with their populist, anti-insider, and grassroots-driven politics are displacing the conservative elites that have long held sway in the Republican Party."

Obama Declares Wrong Emergency

by Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/29-8

Dear Madam Speaker:

Consistent with Section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), I have sent to the Federal Register the enclosed notice, stating that the emergency declared with respect to the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, is to continue in effect for an additional year.

The terrorist threat that led to the declaration on September 14, 2001, of a national emergency continues. For this reason, I have determined that it is necessary to continue in effect after September 14, 2010, the national emergency with respect to the terrorist threat.

Sincerely,
BARACK OBAMA

DiMaggio: who needs mass action when you have Obama, aka, "the one."

World in Revolt: The Global Backlash Against Budget Cuts

Sunday 26 September 2010

by: Anthony DiMaggio, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/world-revolt-the-global-backlash-against-budget-cuts63465

Americans should take a page from activists throughout the rest of the world if they're seriously interested in resisting the massive budget cuts afflicting this country. Effective social change only comes about through mass action - a lesson that has emerged after years of grassroots uprisings in the U.S. and throughout the world.
...

The U.K. is characterized in many ways by a relatively stronger social welfare state (especially in relation to health care) than that seen in the U.S., and less extreme conditions for workers, with 7.8 percent unemployment compared to the United States' 9.6 percent official unemployment. Yet, British public sector workers are far more organized and intolerant of the gutting of public education. France has a similar level of unemployment to the U.S. at 10 percent and a far more advanced social welfare state, yet its workers have responded with a coordinated national campaign to protest budget cuts. In contrast, American protests against far larger austerity measures (in the form of mass layoffs and talk of serious pension cuts) are being met by scattered local protests at best. No salient national campaign is emerging across localities in this country, nor does it appear that one is on the horizon in the near future. ...

A major cause of U.S. apathy is likely the depoliticization of the American electorate and the lack of a collective working class consciousness. A majority of Americans distrust their political officials, while a growing number feel that they cannot rely upon the national government to improve their living standards. This latter trend should be particularly disturbing for those on the left who see the national government as the primary medium for promoting the improvement of living standards for the masses and for establishing and promoting collective goods. Establishing universal health care and universal funding for higher education, in addition to the strengthening of food stamps, head start, job training, Social Security, and a slew of other welfare programs will only be accomplished by increasing our support for, and reliance on the national government. These progressive victories will not emerge by "getting government out of our lives," or by turning our back on national politics. ....

Americans must realize that the only way forward is through a direct confrontation with political and economic elites. Positive progressive change is never willingly given up by elites - it must be forcibly taken from below. This is the most important lesson to take from the global backlash against neoliberalism.

UN Fact-Finding Mission Says Israelis "Executed" US Citizen Furkan Dogan

Monday 27 September 2010

by: Gareth Porter, t r u t h o u t | Report

http://www.truth-out.org/un-fact-finding-mission-says-israelis-executed-us-citizen-furkan-dogan63609

The report of the fact-finding mission of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla released last week shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style by Israeli commandos.

...

The report says Dogan had apparently been "lying on the deck in a conscious or semi-conscious, state for some time" before being shot in his face.

The forensic evidence that establishes that fact is "tattooing around the wound in his face," indicating that the shot was "delivered at point blank range."  The report describes the forensic evidence as showing that "the trajectory of the wound, from bottom to top, together with a vital abrasion to the left shoulder that could be consistent with the bullet exit point, is compatible with the shot being received while he was lying on the ground on his back."

Bacevich on Woodward, "Obama's Wars"

Prisoners of War Bob Woodward and All the President’s Men (2010 Edition) 
By Andrew J. Bacevich
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175300/tomgram:_andrew_bacevich,_the_washington_gossip_machine__/

Obama’s Wars reportedly contains this comment by President Obama to Secretary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates regarding Afghanistan:  "I'm not doing 10 years... I'm not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars."

Aren’t you, Mr. President?  Don’t be so sure.

Obama’s Wars also affirms what we already suspected about the decision-making process that led up to the president’s announcement at West Point in December 2009 to prolong and escalate the war.  Bluntly put, the Pentagon gamed the process to exclude any possibility of Obama rendering a decision not to its liking.


Pick your surge: 20,000 troops? Or 30,000 troops?  Or 40,000 troops?  Only the most powerful man in the world -- or Goldilocks contemplating three bowls of porridge -- could handle a decision like that.  Even as Obama opted for the middle course, the real decision had already been made elsewhere by others: the war in Afghanistan would expand and continue.

And then there’s this from the estimable General David Petraeus: "I don't think you win this war,” Woodward quotes the field commander as saying. “I think you keep fighting... This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives."

Here we confront a series of questions to which Woodward (not to mention the rest of Washington) remains steadfastly oblivious.  Why fight a war that even the general in charge says can’t be won?  What will the perpetuation of this conflict cost?  Who will it benefit?  Does the ostensibly most powerful nation in the world have no choice but to wage permanent war?  Are there no alternatives?  Can Obama shut down an unwinnable war now about to enter its tenth year?  Or is he -- along with the rest of us -- a prisoner of war?

After Summers Comes the Fall

After Summers Comes the Fall

by: Robert Scheer  |  Truthdig | Op-Ed
http://www.truth-out.org/robert-scheer-after-summers-comes-fall63267

Even Bill Clinton, who signed off on the radical deregulation enabling this financial meltdown, expressed remorse in one surprisingly honest moment. In an interview on ABC’s “This Week” last April, Clinton was asked by Jake Tapper if he had received bad advice from Summers and his predecessor, Robert Rubin, on regulating financial derivatives, and he replied: “On derivatives, yeah I think they were wrong, and I think I was wrong to take [their advice], because the argument on derivatives was that these things are expensive and sophisticated and only a handful of investors will buy them and they don’t need any extra protection and any extra transparency.”

The Elizabeth Warren Saga

Obama Prepares to Sort of Appoint Elizabeth Warren to Something

by John Nichols

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/16-8

The president could have appointed Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and dared the Senate to reject a woman who has become the face of the fight to hold big banks, credit card companies and speculators to account. If Republicans threatened to block her appointment, they would have clarified the question of which party is working for Wall Street and which party is on the side of Main Street.

Elizabeth Warren In Office - But Not In Power

Banksters Cheer Tepid Rules on Anniversary of Lehman's Fall

by Danny Schechter

At the same time, economics analyst Yves Smith warns, don't believe the hype: "It is now official that Warren is at best a placeholder; she cannot have much impact. She can't make much in the way of policy or personnel choices; that would encroach on the authority of an incoming director. And even her ability to influence the choice of a nominee is questionable. Her taking the advisory role now assures that the nomination of the permanent director will come after the midterm Congressional elections. Given the virtual certainty of Democratic losses, the odds are high that Team Obama will settle on a "conservative" meaning "won't ruffle the banking industry" choice, and argue its hands were tied.

The Terrible Tale of TARP

The Big Bailout, Two Years Later

The Terrible Tale of TARP

By DEAN BAKER

http://www.counterpunch.org/baker09212010.html

We are also supposed to feel good that the vast majority of the TARP money was repaid. This is another effort to prey on the public’s ignorance. Had it not been for the bailout, most of the major center banks would have been wiped out. This would have destroyed the fortunes of their shareholders, many of their creditors, and their top executives. This would have been a massive redistribution to the rest of society – their loss is our gain.

It is important to remember that the economy would be no less productive following the demise of these Wall Street giants. The only economic fact that would have been different is that the Wall Street crew would have lost claims to hundreds of billions of dollars of the economy’s output each year and trillions of dollars of wealth. That money would instead be available for the rest of society. The fact that they have lost the claim to wealth from their stock and bond holdings makes all the rest of us richer once the economy is again operating near normal levels of output.

Instead, we have the same Wall Street crew calling the shots, doing business pretty much as they always did. The rest of us are sitting here dealing with wreckage of their recklessness: 9.6 percent unemployment and the loss of much of the middle class’s savings in their homes and their retirement accounts. And the lackeys of the Wall Street crew are telling us that we should be thankful that we didn’t have a second Great Depression. Maybe we don’t have the power to keep the bankers from picking our pockets, but we don’t have to believe their lies.

The 'Rightwing Backlash' That Never Was

The consensus is that angry voters are moving rightward. But it's nothing Democrats couldn't fix with a dose of economic populism

by Mark Weisbrot

Then the horror movie scenes began about the dreaded budget deficit, which, over the next decade, is almost entirely attributable to two non-stimulus-related items: Iraq and Afghanistan war spending and the Bush tax cuts. In spite of this well-financed campaign against the scourge of red ink, only 3% of voters see the deficit as the most important issue facing the country, as compared to 32% who chose the economy and 28% for jobs. Somehow, though, the deficit got to be so alarming that it became politically impossible for congress to even talk about another stimulus for the economy. So, very predictably, the recovery lost steam and the Democrats felt just "powerless" to do anything to boost the economy and employment before the election. This guaranteed big losses for their party in the election.

...

Republicans were able to keep this country moving to the right for nearly four decades – including through the Clinton years. For much of this time, they used a fake populist appeal based on cultural issues, portraying a "liberal elite" that was contemptuous of the values of working-class white voters – who have generally been the biggest group of swing voters. The strategy succeeded because Democrats refused to make the obvious economic populist appeal to the real interests of these voters – who were getting hammered by the loss of manufacturing jobs, weakening of labour and redistribution of income that was engineered by the leadership of both parties. In 2004, non-college-educated whites with household income of $30,000-50,000 voted for Republicans for congress by a 60-38% margin; in 2006, a switch to a 50-50 split (22 percentage points) contributed significantly to the Democrats' victory in congress.

The Next Mexican Revolution

Don't Look Now, But It's Already Started

The Next Mexican Revolution

By JOHN ROSS
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross09212010.html

Also in the revolutionary mix are an unknown number of anarchist cells, at least one of which takes the name of Praxides G. Guerrero, the first anarchist to fall 100 years ago in the Mexican revolution. Primarily operating in urban settings, anarchist cells have firebombed dozens of ATM machines and banks, new car showrooms, bullrings, and slaughterhouses (many anarchists are militant vegans) in Mexico City, Mexico state, Guadalajara, San Luis Potosi, and Tijuana. The U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has just added Mexican anarchist groups to the Obama government's terrorist lists.

...

Leftists who have been awaiting a more "political" uprising in 2010 are not convinced by Buscaglia's nomenclature. A real revolution must be waged along ideological and class lines which the narco-insurrection has yet to manifest. Nonetheless, given the neo-liberal mindset of a globalized world in which class dynamics are reduced to market domination, the on-going narco-insurrection may well be the best new Mexican revolution this beleaguered nation is going to get.

The Spectre of Decline

One and a Half Cheers for American Decline

The Future’s Not Ours -- and That’s Good News

by Tom Engelhardt

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/21-7

Here’s a simple reality: the U.S. is an imperial power in decline -- and not just the sort of decline which is going to affect your children or grandchildren someday. We’re talking about massive unemployment that’s going nowhere and an economy which shows no sign of ever returning good jobs to this country on a significant scale, even if “good times” do come back sooner or later. We’re talking about an aging, fraying infrastructure -- with its collapsing bridges and exploding gas pipelines -- that a little cosmetic surgery isn’t going to help.

The Best Weather Report in the Country

Fair Notes

by Bruce Anderson on Sep 23rd, 2010

A big weekend with rain everywhere but here.

A dismayed caller assessed the first rains this way: “Did you know that the government seeds the clouds this time every year to wreck the pot crop?”

No, we didn’t know the government’s big bag of tricks included the unleashing of inclement weather on Mendocino County’s marijuana fields, but these particu lar paranoids, the globally threatened ones, tend to monologue, and sure enough this very, very concerned citizen veered off into a multiplicity of menaces, which included contrails, PG&E’s smart meters, genetically altered salmon, peanut butter allergies, and secret surveillances everywhere, all of it aimed specifically at him. Just as we were about to recommend the only known prophylactic — a do-it-yourself tinfoil hat — the besieged man got off the line and we got back to geneti cally altered ballplayers and the Giants game.

...

There were tensions where, in ordinary elections in Mendocino County, there is usually only a kind of qui etly resigned despair, that the incumbents will only make everything worse and the challengers are crazy.

The Roberts-Hamburg race for 5th District Supervi sor is as bitter and apparently embittering as any we can remember. You’d have to go back to the early 1970s when Norman de Vall took on incumbent Ted Galletti, a very good supervisor and a very nice man. But the hip pies viewed Galletti as, well, not a hippie, and certainly not a liberal of the lockstep variety ever since dominant in much of Mendocino County. Galletti planned a huge development on Cameron Road, a straight up fabrication that Galletti never could beat back. de Vall won. And won again, and again.

But de Vall never generated the pure hatred that candi date Hamburg engenders among the County’s Ukiah-based rightwing, an entirely irrational hatred impossible to reconcile with the real life Hamburg, a modest, good-natured fellow seemingly devoid of mal ice. But to hear his opponents tell it Hamburg’s a cross between Fidel Castro and some kind of mega-hippie.

Hamburg’s opponent, Wendy Roberts of Mendo cino, is personally appalled by Hamburg. A bright, tire less, conventional woman of middle-years, Mrs. Roberts has mobilized those sectors of Mendocino County’s seething population who view Hamburg as the representative of everything that has gone wrong with the County over the past 40 years.

...

Larry Carr Sr., the mayor of Yorkville, stopped by the booth to say his family claimed he was senile. I con soled Larry with the information that I’d had to fight off the same accusations. “Larry, my friend of these many years, as soon as you nod off at the dinner table they start nudging each other and saying stuff like, ‘Well, he’s always had selective hearing but now he’s deaf and won’t get a hearing aide. He’ll be in diapers soon.’

The Tragedy of Obama’s Middle East Policy

Makdisi: The Tragedy of Obama’s Middle East Policy

Ussama Makdisi writes in a guest column for Informed Comment:

"But rather than move forward on the issue with new ideas, Obama now seems determined to recycle old failed ones from the Clinton era. He has already capitulated to the rightwing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the issue of settlements. And for the second time in recent memory, a U.S. president is attempting to browbeat a corrupt, weak and now illegitimate Palestinian Authority (Mahmoud Abbas’s presidential term expired in 2009) into surrendering Palestinian rights in the name of a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The same dynamic that was at work during the failed Camp David Summit of 2000 is again evident: an Israeli leadership openly unwilling to make peace on the basis of genuine reciprocity, let alone justice or equality is meeting a Palestinian leadership utterly dependent on an American ability to pressure Israel into significant concessions, under the aegis of an American administration with the same kind of pro-Israel mentality and frame of reference that oversaw the last failed round.

One wonders why Obama is orchestrating this futile exercise at all—for the outcome of such lack of imagination will surely not be a strengthening of the U.S. position in the Middle East. Let us recall President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous stand on the Suez crisis of 1956. Taken by surprise by the British, French and Israeli invasion of Egypt, Eisenhower then faced considerable domestic pressure to go easy on Israel. He also faced strident British appeals for solidarity during the Cold War. Yet Eisenhower compelled the invading nations to withdraw, not for the sake of Egypt, but because he understood that U.S. interests could not be served by ill-conceived colonial wars and by a rigidly pro-Israel policy. Obama seems unable and unwilling to level with the American people about the need to delink Israel’s putative interests from America’s real ones. Without such a delinking, and in the context of ongoing war in Afghanistan that is fast becoming Obama’s war, Obama will surely snuff out what little hope there was when he first came to power, and when he addressed the Muslim world directly.

Obama’s presidency is shaping up to be another missed opportunity to rebuild America’s broken relationship to the Middle East. Americans may be tired of the Middle East, but they can’t afford to ignore it. The status quo no longer afflicts the people of the Middle East alone. It costs Americans as well."

Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History at Rice University and author of Faith Misplaced: the Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations (Public Affairs, 2010)

Obama vs. the Generals? Or Obama AND the Generals?

Obama once told Bill O'Reilly the "surge" in Iraq had "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams." McGovern breaks down this myth below, but my question is: Once you have surrendered this terrain, what's left to fight for? Moreover, what (real) evidence is there of Obama resisting the Pentagon? Obama's political style is one of not offending any "stakeholders," he does what the Pentagon tells him without question or hesitation. It's why he was selected for the job. 


Petraeus Cons Obama on Afghan War
by Ray McGovern
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/25-2

"Though the death toll for both Americans and Iraqis spiked in 2007, with about one thousand U.S. soldiers dying along with tens of thousands of Iraqis, eventually the violence abated, at least somewhat.

Well-informed military analysts credited a number of factors for bringing down the violence, including many that predated the surge. For instance, the Sunni disenchantment with al-Qaeda extremists - and the U.S. military's decision to put many Sunni insurgents on the payroll - occurred earlier in 2006.

So did the killing of al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and much of the de facto ethnic cleansing of the country as many Sunnis fled their former neighborhoods, turning Baghdad from a predominantly Sunni into a mostly Shia city. Despite the personal tragedies for individual Iraqis, the forced separation did cause the Sunni-vs.-Shiite violence to decline.

Also, as the U.S. occupation came under greater military pressure, American troops were given permissive "rules of engagement" that led to a number of atrocities, including the killing of civilians over the slightest suspicion that they might represent a threat.

The slaughter escalated during the "surge" with Apache helicopters unleashing 50-caliber cannon fire on "military-age males," as happened in the incident on July 12, 2007, that was captured on gun-barrel video and posted on WikiLeaks on April 5, 2010.

Grabbing Credit
Despite the variety of factors that contributed to a drop-off of violence by 2008, Washington's influential neoconservatives insisted on an explanation that credited solely the "surge" of over 20,000 U.S. troops sent to Iraq in 2007. And the FCM readily went along with the neocon spin, judging Republican John McCain as "right" on the surge and Obama as "wrong" to oppose it.

So effective was the media panegyric to the surge that Obama decided to get in step by reversing himself and offering his own gratuitous praise just two months before the election in 2008. Providing a hint of his later willingness to show "flexibility" on such issues, candidate Obama reversed himself and told Bill O'Reilly the surge had "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams." "

Obama's Jobs Plan

Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, is organizing the largest weapons sale in the history of the world.  The deal is predicted to deliver 77,000 US jobs.
 

Arming the Saudis

Friday 24 September 2010

by: Stephen Zunes, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

As Robert Vitalis, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania, looking at the history of US arms transfers to the Saudi royal family, observed,

"If the billions have not been useful to the Saudis, they were a gold mine for Congresspersons compelled to cast pro-Saudi votes, along with cabinet officials and party leaders worried about the economy of key states and electoral districts. To the extent that the regime faces politically destabilizing cutbacks in social spending, a proximate cause is the strong bipartisan push for arms exports to the Gulf as a means to bolster the sagging fortunes of key constituents and regions - the "gun belt" - that represents the domestic face of internationalism."

Cultural Studies as Political Quietism?

No, Higher Consciousness Won’t Save Us

by Norman Solomon

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/23-5

"At the time, I scarcely picked up on the fact that "The Greening of America" was purposely nonpolitical. Its crux was personal and cultural liberation -- in a word, "consciousness," which "plays the key role in the shaping of society." And so, "The revolution must be cultural. For culture controls the economic and political machine, not vice versa." In effect, the author maintained, culture would be a silver bullet, able to bring down the otherwise intractable death machine.

...

n 1995, the same Charles Reich was out with another book -- "Opposing the System" -- his first in two decades. Gone were the claims that meaningful structural change would come only as a final step after people got their heads and culture together. Instead, the book focused on the melded power of huge corporations and the U.S. government.
Reich's new book was as ignored as "The Greening of America" had been ballyhooed; no high-profile excerpt in The New Yorker or any other magazine, scant publicity, and not even faint controversy. Few media outlets bothered to review "Opposing the System." A notable exception, the New York Times, trashed the book."

President Mubarak: Walking tall, leading a region to peace.

Egyptian newspaper under fire over altered photo

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11313738

Nelson P. Valdés: Castro's "Confession"

Nelson P. Valdés: Castro's "Confession"

Is There a Cuban Model?

Castro's "Confession"

By NELSON P. VALDÉS

Alan Nasser: Driving Another Nail Into the Coffin of the New Deal

Alan Nasser: Driving Another Nail Into the Coffin of the New Deal

"What is most significant about last Wednesday’s speech is its reassertion of Obama’s adamant rejection of New Deal liberalism. There was a flat-out dismissal of direct government creation of jobs: “I’ve never believed that government’s role is to create jobs or prosperity…I believe it’s the private sector that must be the main engine of our recovery.” There will be no public works programs. Not because they haven’t worked in the past; the WPA was a transcontinental project and employed vast numbers, and no one denies its success. Nor because of lack of need; we are in precisely the sort of situation which Keynes correctly identified as requiring government to take on the responsibility for creating useful employment. Such is the position of the most estimable of liberal economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, James Galbraith and Robert Kuttner. Obama sneeringly dismisses them as “the professional left”. "

Do Not Pity the Democrats

By Chris Hedges

"Investing emotional and intellectual energy in electoral politics is a waste of time. Resistance means a radical break with the formal structures of American society. We must cut as many ties with consumer society and corporations as possible. We must build a new political and economic consciousness centered on the tangible issues of sustainable agriculture, self-sufficiency and radical environmental reform. The democratic system, and the liberal institutions that once made piecemeal reform possible, is dead. It exists only in name. It is no longer a viable mechanism for change. And the longer we play our scripted and absurd role in this charade the worse it will get. Do not pity Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. They will get what they deserve. They sold the citizens out for cash and power. They lied. They manipulated and deceived the public, from the bailouts to the abandonment of universal health care, to serve corporate interests. They refused to halt the wanton corporate destruction of the ecosystem on which all life depends. They betrayed the most basic ideals of democracy. And they, as much as the Republicans, are the problem."

Marijuana "Prohibition" on California's Ballot

Monday 13 September 2010

by: Kevin Zeese | Consortium News | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/marijuana-prohibition-californias-ballot63203

"Joseph McNamara, former police chief in San Jose, California, and Kansas City, Missouri, an active member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, describes the marijuana laws as much worse than ineffective: "they waste valuable police resources and also create a lucrative black market that funds cartels and criminal gangs with billions of tax-free dollars." "

Re-Branding the Occupation

Business as Usual in Iraq

By MARJORIE COHN

http://www.counterpunch.org/cohn09132010.html

"Obama's speech about withdrawing combat troops from Iraq is an effort to demonstrate compliance with the SOFA as the midterm elections draw near. But events on the ground reveal that he is playing a political version of the old shell game. As Obama proclaimed the redeployment of a Stryker battalion out of Iraq, 3,000 combat troops from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment redeployed back into Iraq from Fort Hood, Texas. And that cavalry regiment will have plenty of company. The State Department is more than doubling its “security contractors” to 7,000 to make sure U.S. interests are protected. And with them will come 24 Blackhawk helicopters, 50 Mine Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles and other military equipment. ...

When Obama spoke to the nation about ending combat operations in Iraq, he delivered his message with a spin that would make George W. Bush proud. Obama renamed the U.S. occupation of Iraq “Operation New Dawn,” and talked of the sacrifices we made during “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” But he failed to mention the more than 100,000 dead Iraqis, the untold numbers of wounded Iraqis and the 2 million Iraqis who went into exile. He said nothing about the few hours per day that most Iraqis enjoy electricity. He neglected to note that unions have been outlawed and Iraq’s infrastructure is in shambles. And he omitted any reference to the illegality of Bush’s war of aggression – in violation of the UN Charter – and Bush’s policy of torture and abuse of Iraqis – in violation of the Geneva Conventions. Obama chose instead to praise his predecessor, saying, “No one could doubt President Bush’s . . . commitment to our security.” But foreign occupation of Iraq and mistreatment of prisoners never made us more secure."

The War Business Booms

Published on Monday, September 13, 2010 by Agence France Presse

Congress to Be Told of 60-Billion US-Saudi Arms Deal

WASHINGTON - In the largest US arms deal ever, the administration of US President Barack Obama is ready to notify Congress of plans to offer advanced aircraft to Saudi Arabia worth up to 60 billion dollars, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The newspaper said the administration was also in talks with the kingdom about potential naval and missile-defense upgrades that could be worth tens of billions of dollars more.

The administration sees the sale as part of a broader policy aimed at shoring up Arab allies against Iran, the report said. ...

Earlier media reports said that to assuage Israel's concerns, the Obama administration has decided not to offer Saudi Arabia so-called standoff systems, which are advanced long-range weapons that can be attached to F-15s for use in offensive operations against land- and sea-based targets.

Catching up on the August News

The next dozen or so posts (below) are catch-ups from August.

"They won't mutiny."

Here Be Dragons

MRAPs, Sprained Ankles, Air Conditioning, Farting Contests, and Other Snapshots from the American War in Afghanistan

By Ann Jones

"It’s a measure of our sense of entitlement, I think, that while the Taliban and their allies still walk to war wearing traditional baggy cotton pants and shirts, we Americans incessantly invent things to make ourselves more “secure.” Since no one can ever be secure, least of all in war, every new development is bound to prove insufficient and almost guaranteed to create new problems.

...

Many young soldiers told me that they actually live better in the Army, even when deployed, than they did in civilian life, where they couldn’t make ends meet, especially when they were trying to pay for college or raise a family by working one or two low-wage jobs. They won’t mutiny. They’re doing better than many of their friends back home. (And they’re dutiful, which makes for acts of personal heroism, even in a foolhardy cause.) They are likely to reenlist, though many told me they’d prefer to quit the Army and go to work for much higher pay with the for-profit private contractors that now “service” American war."

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175280/tomgram%3A_ann_jones,_in_bed_with_the_u.s._army__/

The Ethics of War Through the Looking Glass

Whose Hands? Whose Blood?
Killing Civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq

By Tom Engelhardt

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175282/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_out%2C_damned_spot%21/#more

"The Wikileaks leak story, in fact, remained a remarkably bloodless saga in the U.S. until Admiral Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (who has overseen the Afghan War since he was confirmed in his post in December 2006) took control of it and began focusing directly on blood -- specifically, the blood on Julian Assange’s hands. Within a few days, that had become the Wikileaks story, as headlines likeCNN’s “Top military official: WikiLeaks founder may have 'blood' on his hands” indicated. On ABC News, for instance, in a typical “bloody hands” piece of reportage, the Secretary of Defense told interviewer Christiane Amanpour that, whatever Assange’s legal culpability might be, when it came to “moral culpability... that’s where I think the verdict is guilty on Wikileaks.” "

With Arab Opinion Like This, Obama Needs Media Advice

The rhetoric of his Cairo speech has soured: the president can only move the debate on with a sea-change in US attitudes

by Jonathan Steele

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/11-6

"A year later the disappointment is massive. A poll taken in six Arab countries in June and July shows the air has gone from the Obama bubble. The percentage of Arabs with a positive view of the US has sunk since last summer from 45% to 20%, while the negative percentage has risen from 23% to 67%. Only 16% call themselves "hopeful" about US policy."

"Neoliberalism and the Academic-Industrial Complex"

Thursday 12 August 2010

by: Jason Del Gandio, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/neoliberalism-and-academic-industrial-complex62189

"In 1979, the top 1 percent of Americans owned 20.5 percent of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 99 percent owned 79.5 percent. By 2007, the top 1 percent increased its share to 34.6 percent, while the bottom 99 percent declined to 65.4 percent."

What Mischief Can 200 Billionaires Make?

Neocons in Waiting: Iran, Obama, and the Next Asian Land War

An Israeli Attack on Iran would reduce Barack Obama to a One-Term President

by Juan Cole

"They have more assets than is visible on the surface. They have perhaps half of America's 400 billionaires on their side. They have the enormous military-industrial complex on their side. They have the Yahoo complex of besieged lower middle class White America on their side. They have the Israel lobbies on their side. They have important segments of the Oil and Gas lobbies on their side. They have the whole American tradition of permanent war on their side. They should not be underestimated."

Task Force 373

Manhunters, Inc.

Pratap Chatterjee

TomDispatch

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175287/tomgram:_pratap_chatterjee,_manhunters,_inc./

"There are quite a few outspoken supporters of the “capture/kill” doctrine. Columbia University Professor Austin Long is one academic who has jumped on the F3EA bandwagon. Noting its similarity to the Phoenix assassination program, responsible for tens of thousands of deaths during the U.S. war in Vietnam (which he defends), he has called for a shrinking of the U.S. military “footprint” in Afghanistan to 13,000 Special Forces troops who would focus exclusively on counter-terrorism, particularly assassination operations. “Phoenix suggests that intelligence coordination and the integration of intelligence with an action arm can have a powerful effect on even extremely large and capable armed groups,” he and his co-author William Rosenau wrote in a July 2009 Rand Institute monograph entitled, “The Phoenix Program and Contemporary Counterinsurgency.”

...

"Other military types claim that the hunter-killer approach is short-sighted and counterproductive. “My take on Task Force 373 and other task forces, it has a purpose because it keeps the enemy off balance. But It does not understand the fundamental root cause of the conflict, of why people are supporting the Taliban,” says Matthew Hoh, a former Marine and State Department contractor who resigned from the government last September. Hoh, who often worked with Task Force 373 as well as other Special Forces “capture/kill” programs in Afghanistan and Iraq, adds: “We are killing the wrong people, the mid-level Taliban who are only fighting us because we are in their valleys. If we were not there, they would not be fighting the U.S.” "

On Not Offending those with Anti-Islamic Prejudices

Gary Leupp: Hurt Feelings and the Ground Zero Mosque

http://www.counterpunch.com/leupp08192010.html

"The prevalent argument against the center---that it may hurt people’s feelings---is an argument that people should be hurt by the mere existence of an Islamic site near “Ground Zero.” That they should feel hurt at the site of a Muslim establishment as they walk around Lower Manhattan, associating it with the 9-11 hijackers. That they should conflate Mohamed Atta and Rauf, or that at least if they do, their feelings should be respected. Of course Rauf’s hope is to counter precisely such feels by encouraging understanding and dialogue. (The fact in any case is that according to an August 10 Marist poll only 31% of Manhattan residents oppose the center!)"

The Myth of Land Ownership

Housing Crisis, System Failure

Saturday 21 August 2010

by: Rick Wolff | MRzine | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/housing-crisis-a-symptom-capitalisms-failure62507

"The US housing industry's basic problem is the system in which it is embedded. The larger capitalist economy shapes the gap between the costs of privately produced homes and American workers' earnings. Over the last 75 years, US capitalism has bridged that gap by means of private credit guaranteed and/or subsidized by the government. This system provides incentives as well as opportunities for excessive home prices, diminished wages and salaries, and excessive quantities, risks, and costs of housing credit. The last 30 years have seen all three phenomena converge into a systemic crisis."

Death by Globalism

Economists Haven't Got a Clue

Death By Globalism

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09012010.html

"The Krugman Keynesian school is just as deluded. Neither side in “The Great Stimulus Debate” has a clue that the problem for the U.S. is that a large chunk of U.S. GDP and the jobs, incomes, and careers associated with it, have been moved offshore and given to Chinese, Indians, and others with low wage rates. Profits have soared on Wall Street, while job prospects for the middle class have been eliminated."

A Glorious Non-bullshit Time

Waking Up in the 1930s

by Howie Stier

http://www.truthdig.com

Sept. 3, 2010

"The ’30s was a time when people had very little and there was nothing to hide behind … it was a glorious non-bullshit time,” wroteCharles Bukowski, the poet and author who grew up in Los Angeles during the Depression, and who was moved by the image of the unemployed men, the fathers of classmates, killing the day sitting on the porches of east Hollywood.

Today, in his old neighborhood, he’d find the unemployed, mostly young creative types who came to L.A. to work in TV and film, filling the cafes, the ubiquitous shops emblematic of L.A. culture. Noon and you can’t find an open table in any of them. But the coffee shop-goers don’t come here to socialize, to discuss politics or movies, or even to have coffee. These are offices for those without a reason to be in an office, where they sit silently, staring at laptop screens, poring over Craigslist job offerings, firing off résumés into cyberspace, pecking away at pipe-dream projects. And they are filled with hope and unable to share the poet’s sensibility and embrace of a non-bullshit time."

They Make Solitude and Call it Peace

"To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name empire; they make solitude and call it peace.”
- Tacitus

"What US Left Behind in Iraq is Even Uglier Than You Think"

by Nir Rosen

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/08-9

"Seven years after the disastrous American invasion, the cruelest irony in Iraq is that, in a perverse way, the neoconservative dream of creating a moderate, democratic U.S. ally in the region to counterbalance Iran and Saudi Arabia has come to fruition. But even if violence in Iraq continues to decline and the government becomes a model of democracy, no one will look to Iraq as a leader. People in the region remember -- even if the West has forgotten -- the seven years of chaos, violence, and terror. To them, this is what Iraq symbolizes. Thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other failed U.S. policies in the broader Middle East, the United States has lost most of its influence on Arab people, even if it can still exert pressure on some Arab regimes."