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."

The New Diplo History: Treading Lightly with Concern to the MIC

"Politics and Foreign Relations"

Fredrik Logevall

Journal of American History, 95 no. 4

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/95.4/logevall.html

Professor Logevall assays the health of Diplomatic History as a craft, and makes the case for the role of domestic politics in the foreign policy making. This seems fair enough, but my question is what kind of domestic politics? In Logevall's recently co-authored America's Cold War, there is a bit of ambiguity on this point. Throughout, the authors argue that "domestic variables predominate over foreign ones" (6), and in general they argue that party or electoral politics were behind the systematic hyping of the Soviet threat. But they also argue that the military-industrial complex “became a power within itself, a vested interest largely outside the perimeter of democratic control, and arguably the single greatest factor in post-1941 economic life in the United States” (8). But they do not offer any explanation for of the relationship between party or electoral politics and the MIC. Presumably, or implicitly, they are arguing that domestic political concerns are paramount, and that the MIC has its thumb on the domestic political scale (thereby precluding the emergence of a truly Realist, George Kennan style foriegn policy - but that's a different argument, see Stephanson's critique). But this is never made explict. As a consequence there is a critical ambiguity concerning the democratic basis of American foreign policy. Is US fp shaped by electoral politics (which are presumably democratic, at least until that myth is dismantled), or the MIC - which they explicitly state is not subject to democratic controls.

As a consequence Stephans critqued the book for holding to anti-democratic assumptions - that a Realist fp is corrupted by domestic (presumably democratic) influences. The authors respond that they never said that the domestic influences corrupting US policymaking were democratic - they are rather highly undemocratic (see the exchange here). However, this was never made exlpicit in their book, which is unfortunate.

The "vision thing" again

The Democratic Party could learn a lot from the Right:

Can You Say, Fascism? The Political Consequences of Stagnation

by Walden Bello

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/02-6

"The blunder was Obama's taking responsibility for the crisis in a gesture of bipartisanship, in contrast to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who "refused to take any blame for the economic hardships." Reagan and Thatcher devoted "the early years of their government to convincing voters that economic disaster was entirely the responsibility of previous left-wing governments, militant unions, and liberal progressive elites." "

The "vision thing" again. It must really sting Democrats to realize that all the "Hope and Change" rhetoric was just so much vacuous sloganeering. A rather cynical exercise in exploiting the anxiety of the electorate for short-term political gain:

"But progressives should not take comfort from the dead end offered by tea party economics. They should try to understand what has led to the failure of Obama's pallid Keynesianism. Beyond the tactical mistake of taking responsibility for the crisis and the failure to advance an aggressive anti-neoliberal narrative to explain it, the central problem that has plagued Obama and his team is their failure to offer an inspiring alternative to neoliberalism. ... For progressives, the lesson to be derived from the stalling of Obamanomics is that technocratic management is not enough. Keynesian moves must be part of a broader vision and program. ... such a program cannot simply be dished out from above by a technocratic elite, as has been the fashion in this administration, one of whose greatest mistakes was to allow the mass movement that brought it to power to wither away. The people must be enlisted in the construction of the new economy, and here progressives have a lot to learn from the Tea Party movement that they must inevitably compete against in a life-and-death struggle for grassroots America."

The Democratic Party is an Abomination

I, for one, hope the Democrats are absolutely trounced in the November elections. Democratic politicians are enablers for a craven system.

Harry Reid's Anti-Islamic Agenda

Wednesday 01 September 2010

by: Stephen Zunes, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/harry-reids-anti-islamic-agenda62863

"When Sen. Joseph Biden, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, tried to alter the wording of the war resolution so as not to give President Bush the blank check he was seeking and to put some limitations on his war-making authority, Reid, as assistant majority leader of the Senate, helped circumvent Biden's efforts by signing on to the White House's version. As the Democratic whip, Reid then persuaded a majority of Democratic senators to vote down a resolution offered by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin that would authorize force only if the UN Security Council voted to give the US that authority and to instead support the White House resolution giving Bush the right to invade even without such legal authorization. (By contrast, a sizable majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives - under the leadership of then-whip Nancy Pelosi - voted against the Republican resolution.)

...

Iraq is not the only area where Reid is willing to support mass violence against Muslim peoples. Reid co-sponsored a Senate resolution defending Israel's massive onslaught on the predominantly Muslim Gaza Strip in 2008-2009 and of an earlier resolution defending the 2006 Israeli attack against predominantly Muslim southern Lebanon, wars which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,500 Muslim civilians. Reid directly contradicted findings by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and various UN agencies in insisting that Israel's attacks against civilian population centers was legal. But when it comes to killing Muslim civilians, the facts don't matter to Reid. Just as the facts about the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center don't matter to Reid. Just as having a bigot as their leader doesn't seem to matter to Senate Democrats."