"you can't handle the truth"

Susan A. Brewer. Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. x + 342 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-538135-1.

Reviewed by H. Matthew Loayza (Minnesota State University, Mankato)

The concluding chapter of Susan A. Brewer’s Why America Fights begins with a quotation from the climactic scene of the 1992 film A Few Good Men, where Marine Colonel Nathan Jessep (Jack Nicholson) contemptuously dismisses the right of prosecuting attorney Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) to weigh in on national security matters.  When the furious Jessep roars “You can’t handle the truth!” to Kaffee, he echoes the verdict that U.S. policymakers have customarily rendered upon the American public for over a century.  In Why America Fights, Brewer explores the U.S. government’s use of overt propaganda to handle, manipulate, and advance specific versions of the truth to convince the public that the wars that they are asked to fight are worthwhile and virtuous.
...
The Second World War, according to Brewer, temporarily diverged from the general pattern when the Roosevelt administration originally defined the target audience for wartime propaganda as an educated, informed citizen who needed to be persuaded of the viability and righteousness of Uncle Sam’s plans.  However, this idea neither survived the war, nor was it resurrected in subsequent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.  These limited conflicts, unlike the total mobilization of 1941-45, required relatively fewer contributions or sacrifices, and as Brewer observes, less civic participation.  Indeed, the author advances a compelling, if disturbing argument that since 1945, civic participation in wartime has declined to the point where citizens are asked to serve only as spectators and cheerleaders.  The mass media, she contends, has usually failed to challenge the official line in any meaningful way until discrepancies between the official narrative and reality became so evident (as occurred in both Vietnam and Iraq) that sticking to script would be to indulge in fantasy.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29336  

What's 9/11? Afghans never heard of NYC terror

Derrick Jensen on Pacifism

The Colbert Report: Nassir Ghaemi

Nassir Ghaemi

Psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi believes that mental illness can foster great leadership, but the Republican presidential candidates are too "normal."

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/394151/august-08-2011/nassir-ghaemi

"Democracy Now?"

Meet Professor Juan Cole, Consultant to the CIA

by JOHN WALSH

 

None of this is all too surprising given Cole’s status as a “humanitarian” hawk.  But it is outrageous that he is so often called on by Democracy Now for his opinion.  One of his appearances there was in a debate on the unconstitutional war in Libya, with CounterPunch’s estimable Vijay Prashad taking the antiwar side and Cole prowar.  It would seem strange for the left to have to debate the worth of an imperial intervention.  Certainly if one goes back to the days of the Vietnam War there were teach-ins to inform the public of the lies of the U.S. government and the truth about what was going on in Vietnam.  But let us give Democracy Now the benefit of the doubt and say that the debate was some sort of consciousness raising effort.  Why later on invite as a frequent guest a man who was the pro-war voice in the debate?  That is a strange choice indeed.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/08/30/meet-professor-juan-cole-consultant-to-the-cia/

Urban Rebellions Can Trigger Social Change

Saturday, 13 August 2011 09:05 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 
 

The riots, in effect, were the "forcible entry" of the Black masses into political discussions that usually treated them and their communities as invisible or irrelevant. Black poverty, deprivation and racism in urban areas went from being political non-issues to one of the most important issues of the decade.

http://www.international.to/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1961%3Aurban-rebellions-can-trigger-social-change&catid=97%3Abreaking-news&Itemid=119

The Bad Deal

 by James K. Galbraith

The President is not a progressive – he is not what Americans still call a “liberal.” He is a willful player in an epic drama of faux-politics, an operative for the money power, whose job is to neutralize the left with fear and distraction and then to pivot rightward and deliver a conservative result.

What Barack Obama got from the debt deal was exactly what his sponsors have wanted: a long-term lock-in of domestic spending cuts, and a path toward severe cuts in the core New Deal and Great Society insurance programs – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And, of course, no tax increases at all.

To see the arc of political strategy, recall that from the beginning Obama handed economic policy to retainers recruited from the stables of Robert Rubin. From the beginning, he touted “fiscal responsibility” and played up the (economically non-existent) “problem” of the budget deficit. From the beginning his team sabotaged economic recovery with optimistic forecasts and inadequate programs – in the clear interest of protecting the banking system from reform.

Nick Turse: The Pentagon's New Power Elite

Nick Turse: The Pentagon's New Power Elite

"Whereas the late scholar of militarism Chalmers Johnson used to refer to the CIA as "the president's private army," today JSOC performs that role, acting as the chief executive's private assassination squad, and its parent, SOCOM, functions as a new Pentagon power-elite, a secret military within the military possessing domestic power and global reach.

In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans."

The S&P Downgrade: Still the Best Poliitcal System Money Can Buy?

America in Decline

Friday 5 August 2011

by: Noam Chomsky, Truthout | Op-Ed 

 

‎'What remains of political democracy has been undermined further as both parties Composehave turned to auctioning congressional leadership positions, as political economist Thomas Ferguson outlines in the Financial Times.

“The major political parties borrowed a practice from big box retailers like Walmart, Best Buy or Target,” Ferguson writes. “Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, U.S. congressional parties now post prices for key slots in the lawmaking process.” The legislators who contribute the most funds to the party get the posts.

The result, according to Ferguson, is that debates “rely heavily on the endless repetition of a handful of slogans that have been battle-tested for their appeal to national investor blocs and interest groups that the leadership relies on for resources.” The country be damned.'

 

http://www.truth-out.org/america-decline/1312567242

Obama: Cutting Social Welfare to Save the Pentagon

The administration's stated budget priorities

By Glenn Greenwald

'Just think about that for a minute. We have a Democratic administration installed in power after millions of liberals donated large amounts of their time and money to help elect them. Yet here we have a top official in the President's cabinet demanding cuts to Medicare and Social Security in order to protect the military budget from further reductions. That's the position of the Democratic administration.'

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/05/military

Gar Alperovitz: The Decision to Bomb Hiroshima

Gar Alperovitz: The Decision to Bomb Hiroshima

Here is how General Dwight D. Eisenhower reports he reacted when he was told by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson that the atomic bomb would be used:

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives."

In another public statement the man who later became President of the United States was blunt: "It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

Prashad: California Dreamin'

Obama and the 2012 Elections

Primary Lessons

By VIJAY PRASHAD

"The California Progressives have taken a strong stand for the immediate period. I hope that others in the Democratic Party will take a similar position and push their colleagues into a public political discussion on the future of progressivism in America. Come the day when progressives in the Party such as Raúl Grijalva and Keith Ellison, Bernie Sanders and Donna Edwards, Emanuel Cleaver and John Conyers, Barney Frank and Bobby Rush, Maxine Waters and Jose Serrano consider how best to fight against the lunatic Right and the neo-liberal Right, to articulate a clear path to a progressive future that is not hampered by the Democratic Party's progressive mirage."

http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad08022011.html

Obama: The Master of Winning by "Losing"

August 2, 2011

Gratuitous Capitulations

Obama Surrendered (But Got What He Wanted Too)

By ANDREW LEVINE

"[Obama] did not exactly stumble into this latest, spectacular defeat; rather he took advantage of the situation the Republicans presented, and made the most of it.
...
That is what Obama is about. And so, in the preposterous episode of political theater our political class staged in the past few weeks, he gave his all. He did negotiate badly enough that Business Schools could make a case study of his machinations, but he was more disingenuous than inept. Obama surrendered for one overwhelming reason --because he wanted to; because he is not just in the game to win, but to win for Wall Street. The time is long past due for liberals to face that reality, and to deal with it not, not as Obama and his advisors expect, by acquiescing out of fear that the alternative is even worse, but in a constructive way. If a Dump Obama cannot get going now, then when?"

http://www.counterpunch.org/levine08022011.html

Twain: I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.

AlterNet / By Bruce E. Levine

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

The ruling elite has created social institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance.

The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade. 

http://www.alternet.org/vision/151850/8_reasons_young_americans_don%27t_fight_back%3A_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance/?page=entire

Obama's Austerity: We should have seen this coming, No?

Obama's Big Payback to Wall Street

The Worst Deal in American History?

By MIKE WHITNEY

Here's a clip from a speech Obama gave in November 2008, before he even took office, and long before the budget deficits had become a problem:

"Our economy is trapped in a vicious cycle: the turmoil on Wall Street means a new round of belt-tightening for families and businesses on Main Street ....we'll have to scour our federal budget, line-by-line, and make meaningful cuts and sacrifices as well."

Huh? You mean Obama was prattling the right-wing mantra before he ever set foot in the Oval Office?

Uh huh; which explains why he picked the two losers most responsible for the Crash of '08 to lead his economics team; Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. Obama devotees shrugged off the appointments as a rookie error unwilling to breach any criticism of the Dear Leader. Even now, they cry "Foul", claiming Obama was either hoodwinked or --get this--a "poor negotiator".

Get real. Obama is as far right as you can get without donning a Tricorn hat and joining a militia. Don't believe it?

Here's an excerpt from his book Audacity of Hope where he gushingly praises his boyhood hero, Ronald Reagan:

"Reagan spoke to America's longing for order, our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces, but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, person responsibility, optimism, and faith.

That Reagan's message found such a receptive audience spoke not only to his skills as a communicator; it also spoke to the failures of liberal government, during a period of economic stagnation, to give middle-class voters any sense that it was fighting for them. For the fact was that government at every level had become too cavalier about spending taxpayer money. Too often, bureaucracies were oblivious to the cost of their mandates. A lot of liberal rhetoric did seem to value rights and entitlements over duties and responsibilities. Reagan may have exaggerated the sins of the welfare state, and certainly liberals were right to complain that his domestic policies tilted heavily toward economic elites, with corporate raiders making tidy profits throughout the eighties while unions were busted and the income for the average working stiff flatlined.

Nevertheless, by promising to side with those who worked hard, obeyed the law, cared for their families, and loved their country, Reagan offered Americans a sense of a common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster. And the more his critics carped, the more those critics played into the role he'd written for them--a band of out-of-touch, tax-and-spend, blame-America-first, politically correct elites (Audacity of Hope, 31-32). (Excerpt from, Christopher Caldwell, What Obama Owes to Reagan, Daily Kos)

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney08012011.html

Aijaz Ahmad and Sabah Alnasseri on Imerialism and Neoliberalism

Global Flashpoints: Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism

November 16, 2007
Toronto

ISLAM, ISLAMISMS AND THE WEST by Aijaz Ahmad
Aijaz Ahmad, visiting Professor of Political Science at York University.

Sabah Alnasseri, Sabah is refugee from Iraq now teaching Middle East Studies at York University.
http://www.socialistproject.ca/theory/sr2008.html

Prashad on the Costs of War

An Economic Draft

The Costs of War

By VIJAY PRASHAD

"The impact of war is self-evident, since economically it is exactly the same as if the nation were to drop a part of its capital into the ocean"
-- Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 1857-58.

Acknowledging this obscenity, Ralph Nader wrote in the Chicago Tribune (July 20) that big firms should be judged based on their "corporate patriotism." They like to take tax breaks and be rescued by marines when it suits them, but they are unwilling to invest their untaxed profits to build up the productive capacity in the United States. Corporations, Nader wrote, "receive all the benefits of American corporate personhood and avoid all the expectations of patriotic behavior and the responsibilities that go along with those privileges and immunities." Hand-over-fist they make money in the financial casinos and by defrauding workers across the world. Meanwhile, they are party to the view that the U. S. needs to balance its budget and cut "entitlements" so that the debt can be managed – but without their own positive contribution to that $14.46 trillion hole.

...

The message from this corner of America is simple: no more bombing houses in Droneland, no more foreclosing houses in America.

http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad07292011.html

Zizek on European Antisemitism

Zizek: “Antisemitism is alive and kicking in Europe”

"On Friday evening, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek gave a lecture in a bookstore in Central Tel Aviv teeming with familiar faces of leftwing activists. It was hosted by Udi Aloni, an Israeli-American artist and BDS activist, who just completed a book entitled What Does a Jew Want, which is edited by Zizek.

...

Sitting in a room full of Israeli activists, some of whom consider themselves on the forefront of the fight against Israeli occupation and apartheid; who devote much of their time going out to the West Bank in solidarity with Palestinians, in confrontation with Israeli military and who favor a total boycott of the country, I could feel the disappointment in the room from certain people that Zizek was not speaking more critically and disapprovingly of Israel. He barely said the word occupation, did not mention the word apartheid even once.  He did not directly speak that much about Israel itself or what should be done.

This was a bold move with such an audience – and I’m not sure if people got it or not, but in many ways, I think that Zizek was actually levying criticism against the very activists sitting in that room. They are so caught up with the “evils” of Israel that they have lost perspective on what is going on in the rest of the world, and may have lost sight of the very real dangers of continued antisemism, which has all sorts of consequences.

As someone familiar with Zizek’s ideas and who is well acquainted with his poignant criticism of Israel, I was quite pleased, because I didn’t need to hear over again from him how Israel is occupying the Palestinians. And really, as a philosopher who spends his time in Europe, what could he renew for us on that? But of course, an activist in the audience was not happy that he did not devote enough time to criticizing Zionism, so she asked him why that is.

He proceeded to say that Zionism is not the worst evil in the world. He mentioned the strangling of the West Bank by Israel as a colonization project and said that there should be maps everywhere hanging of what belongs to whom in the West Bank so people who  can really see Israel’s domination.

But he also stated that someone from the Democratic Republic of Congo would sell his mother into slavery in a heartbeat for the chance to move to the West Bank."

http://contested-terrain.net/zizek-%E2%80%9Cantisemitism-is-alive-and-kicking-in-europe%E2%80%9D/

Obama and the War on Drugs

Obama Administration: Pot has No Accepted Medical Use

Advocates for medical marijuana plan to appeal ruling in federal court

by John Hoeffel

"Marijuana has been approved by many states and the nation's capital to treat a range of illnesses, but the federal government has ruled that it has no accepted medical use and should remain classified as a dangerous drug like heroin.

The decision, announced Friday, comes almost nine years after medical marijuana supporters asked the government to reclassify cannabis to take into account a growing body of worldwide research that shows its effectiveness in treating certain diseases, such as glaucoma and multiple sclerosis."

DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart:  "marijuana 'has a high potential for abuse,' 'has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States' and 'lacks accepted safety for use under medical supervision.'

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/07/10-2

David Harvey: The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism

Chapter 5: “Capital Evolves” from David Harvey’s recent book The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism is now available as a free PDF download:
Chapter 5: Capital Evolves from The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (258k PDF)

Cheney: "deficits don't matter."

Vice President Cheney to Paul O'Neill, then Treasury Secretary [The Price of Loyalty]

"You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term elections, this [tax cut] is our due"

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney

Obama: A Failure of Leadership

Where is Our Crisis President?

Obama should have steered us away from disaster. Instead he drove us straight to it.

by Robert Kuttner

"For those who think that a default won’t happen because it is in nobody’s interest, think back on World War I. It was in nobody’s interest. Yet it destroyed Europe’s common civilization and ushered in nearly a century of economic instability and war. World War I occurred because both sides dug in and assumed the other would have to blink first. But that was a miscalculation. Instead of a last-minute deal, we got four years of trench warfare, economic ruin, and millions of wasted lives. Oops.

 ...


This may sound churlish at such a moment, but in addition to blaming the recklessness of today’s Republican party, the man who deserves substantial blame for this impending economic doomsday is Barack Obama. For two and a half years, he has been all but training the Republicans, Pavlov fashion, to keep rejecting compromise. He has done this by rewarding them with a treat every time they up the ante or move the goal posts."

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/28-9

Jewish Voice for Peace and UN Recognition of Palestinian Statehood by Joel Beinin

"Whatever happens at the UN in the fall, the policy of Jewish Voice for Peace will not change. We will continue seek an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem; security and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians; a just solution for Palestinian refugees based on principles established in international law; an end to violence against civilians; and peace and justice for all peoples of the Middle East. The United States has been a (the?) major obstacle to the realization of these goals. Therefore, as U.S. citizens, we will continue to demand that our government pursue a foreign policy based on promoting peace, democracy, human rights, and respect for international law."

On the American Conceptual Inspriations for the Oslo Massacre

Norwegian Shooting Suspect’s Views Echo Xenophobia of Right-Wing Extremists in U.S., Europe

Even after the massacre in Norway, right-wing pundits in the U.S. have come out in defense of Breivik’s analysis, if not actions. On Monday, Pat Buchanan wrote at The American Conservative, quote, "As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right," unquote.

…

AMY GOODMAN: Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly lambasted the press for referring to Anders Breivik as a "Christian terrorist," on the grounds that Breivik was not actually practicing Christianity. O’Reilly said no true Christian can be a terrorist and insisted Christian fundamentalists are essentially different from Muslim fundamentalists.

BILL O’REILLY: On Sunday, the New York Times headline, "As Horrors Emerged: Norway Charges Christian Extremist." Number of other news organizations, like the L.A. Times and Reuters, also played up the Christian angle. But Breivik is not a Christian. That’s impossible. No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder. The man might have called himself a Christian on the net, but he is certainly not of that faith. Also, Breivik is not attached to any church and in fact has criticized the Protestant belief system in general. The Christian angle came from a Norwegian policeman, not from any fact finding. Once again, we can find no evidence—none—that this killer practiced Christianity in any way.

…

Robert Spencer didn’t shoot anybody. Chuck Colson didn’t shoot anybody. And they didn’t call for shooting anybody. They do produce a rhetoric that kind of walks right up to the edge of things. I mean, if you are out there, like Robert Spencer or some of these other American conservatives, and saying, "Islam is a religion of violence. There can be no accommodation with it. They are trying to destroy us," you know, and then you sort of say, "And what to do about it? I don’t know. You decide." Well, Breivik decided. Breivik took a kind of logical next step from that rhetoric. And that’s part of why I think it’s troubling when people sort of attempt to dismiss him as a madman and not deal with the politics that are very much a part of our, unfortunately, mainstream political discourse, that walk right up to the edge of violence.

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/27/norwegian_shooting_suspects_views_echo_xenophobia

Alex Cockburn adds this:

The Norsemen, Breivik and William Lind

Incidentally, on the topic of Breivik, we have had an enquiry from a reader noting that Breivik’s “Manifesto” has plagiarized material from William Lind, erstwhile Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation, and asking that since CounterPunch published material by Lind, what is our precise relationship to this contributor. The inference seems to be that we published racist neo-Nazi propaganda which helped inflame Breivik. God knows what he would say about our contributor William Blum, considering the late Osama bin Laden famously cited Bill as one of his favorite writers.

As any CounterPuncher can quickly establish by reviewing Lind’s contributions  through our “Search” function at the top of this home page, we published columns on the conduct of America’s wars by  Lind between 2003 and 2007, in the Bush years because, from a conservative position,  he was a trenchant and knowledgeable military analyst and critic of the US onslaughts on Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. Lind had been a participant of the military reform group, trenchant critics of the Pentagon.

His column was distributed by the Center and we would pick it up if it was on themes we cared for, which did not include Lind’s commentaries on many other matters, the cultural downslide of America and so forth.

CounterPunchers should know that its editors stand responsible for pieces CounterPunch publishes – though we obviously don’t agree with every word in the roughly 3,000 pieces we put up on this site every year. We publish and where necessary edit articles for  the edification of a large and intelligent regular readership. We don’t publish anti-Semitic or Nazi propaganda, as assessed by any rational person. I add this because many people eager to throw these terms around are irrational and usually malevolent. If you read our website with any frequency you will know where we’re at, as a left, radical enterprise.   We’ve always held it as part of our brief – stemming from political appreciation of the actual prospects here in the USA – that we should acknowledge positive political work and insights on the libertarian front and the right and from original viewpoints. Every once in a while some Trotskyite purist like Louis Proyect will hoist his skirts  and jump up on the kitchen table, aghast at the sight of an “incorrect” thought or assault by CounterPunch, often specifically me, on the canons of political and cultural PC as sedulously observed by this politically and intellectually demure old Trot. Then, when I say something he likes he’ll dispense a grateful bouquet.

We  don’t hold ourselves responsible for articles our contributors publish elsewhere. We have neither the time nor inclination to dredge through their lifetime archive on the internet to scrutinize articles they may have written one, five, ten or twenty years ago.  These days we get regular requests from contributors to purge our archives of their seditious thoughts because they are up for a job, or are in a tenure battle. A new search site has just been launched to enable the internet bloodhounds to person their blacklisting tasks more efficiently. That’s not our world.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn07292011.html

Touchdown Labor!

Dave Zirin on NFL Players’ "Remarkable" Labor Victory and How the Bank Bailout Slam-Dunked the NBA

Troy Polamalu, All-Pro for the Pittsburgh Steelers, he said, "I think what the players are fighting for is something bigger. The fact is it’s people fighting against big business. The big business argument is 'I got the money and I got the power, and therefore I can tell you what to do.' That’s life everywhere. I think this is a time when the football players are standing up and saying, 'No, no, no, the people have the power.'"

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/27/dave_zirin_on_nfl_players_remarkable

John Eskow: The Fables of Obama

THE FABLE OF OBAMA AND KING SOLOMON

Two women come to King Solomon, shrieking and rending their garments. Both women claim the same baby as their own, but no-one in the village can be sure. Wise King Solomon draws his sword and tells the two women: if you can't agree on whose child this is, I will cut it in two, and you can each take half a baby! Both mothers are distraught, and screaming. But Obama comforts them: you know what? All things considered, that's not a bad deal.

John Eskow: The Fables of Obama

It takes a strong spine to carry all that water for the banks...

Obama is NOT “Caving” to Corporate Interests

by Jeff Cohen

"The sad truth, as shown by Glenn Greenwald, is that Obama had arrived at the White House looking to make cuts in benefits to the elderly. Two weeks before his inauguration, Obama echoed conservative scares about Social Security and Medicare by talking of “red ink as far as the eye can see.” He opened his doors to Social Security/Medicare cutters -- first trying to get Republican Senator Judd Gregg (“a leading voice for reining in entitlement spending,” wrote Politico) into his cabinet, and later appointing entitlement-foe Alan Simpson to co-chair his “Deficit Commission.” Obama’s top economic advisor, Larry Summers, came to the White House publicly telling Time magazine of needed Social Security cuts."

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/24

Is there Hope in Disillusion?

Disillusion Now

Is There Life After Obamamania?

By ANDREW LEVINE

"In recent weeks, as Obama has struggled to implement policies even more reactionary than Republicans proposed just a few months ago, one might conclude, facetiously but plausibly, that the man is a Republican mole.  He is not, of course; not literally.  But it is becoming ever more clear that Obama, like most Democrats, is effectively an old school Republican; that he is what a Republican would now be had the party of corporate America not been taken over first by Goldwaterites, then by Reaganites, and now by the useful idiots later-day Reaganites recruited into its ranks.  

...

Obama inspired disillusionment has been an unhappy and painful, but potentially salutary, process.  Now, having all but run its course, the need is urgent and the time is ripe for the mother of all illusions, the one that sustained the rest – the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism and that attempts to transcend its horizons are bound to come to grief and ultimately to fail -- to pass away as well.  That is the only way that even the modest changes liberals thought Obama would bring can come anywhere close to realization."

http://www.counterpunch.org/levine07252011.html

 

Obama: Worse than Bush

The numbers don't lie:

"US favourable ratings, in most Arab countries, have now fallen to levels lower than they were in 2008, the last year of the Bush administration. In Morocco, for example, positive attitudes towards the United States went from 26 per cent in 2008 to a high of 55 per cent in 2009. Today, they have fallen to 12 per cent. The story was much the same in Egypt, where the US rating went from nine per cent in 2008 to 30 per cent in 2009 and has now plummeted to five per cent in this year's survey."

James Zogby: No Standing O for Obama

The Irony of Amy Goodman

How's this for irony? I'm currently traveling so I'm consuming news and information somewhat out of order. When I got the opportunity last night, hearing Glen Greenwald analyze the media coverage of the Oslo massacre was high on the priority list. Greenwald was brilliant as usual:

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, the lack of coverage over the weekend in the United States was stunning, from Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, this story where so many young people were killed, massive terror attack, hugest terror attack in Norway in its history. Yet in this country, when you go to the networks, cable networks, known for covering a story for many hours at a time, this one almost fell from all the networks except the occasional headline.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, that was completely predictable. I mean, on Friday, when the attack actually took place, there was quite substantial and intense interest in what had taken place. Everybody was talking about it. There were complaints that—on Friday, that CNN wasn’t running continuous coverage. But in general, there was a lot of media interest, because at the time people thought, based on what the New York Times and other media outlets had said, based on nothing, that this was the work of an Islamic—a radical Islamic group. And at the time, I wrote, when I wrote about the unfolding story, that if it turns out to be something other than an Islamic group that was responsible, especially if it turns out to be a right-wing nationalist who’s anti-Muslim in his views, that interest in this story was going to evaporate to virtual non-existence.

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/26/glenn_greenwald_norway_attacks_expose_us

I generally don't consume corporate sponsored "news," so I have no idea what the coverage has been like in the States (even if I were there, I wouldn't bother with that kind of mindless blather). But a couple of days later, as I got a little more time to catch up on the week's news,  I went to Democracy Now!  and lo and behold, Amy Goodman devoted almost the entire hour to an interview with Rosanne Barr, talking about her life and time in Hollywood. I didn't have TV growing up, so I didn't have much of a frame reference for the conversation (of course, I've heard of the show "Rosanne," but I don't know that I've ever actually seen an entire program.)  I'm glad to hear that Rosanne Barr has progressive politics. That's wonderful. But isn't it just a bit ironic that on Tuesday Amy would critique the corporate news for burying the story because it didn't fit the pre-approved tropes about "Islamic terrorism" and the like when she speny the whole show on Monday doing one of her infamous hagiographies of a "movement celebrity."

Sometimes that show really makes me wonder....

Here's a brilliant critique of Chris Hedges, that takes out Goodman at the same time (Hedges "erudition" is absolutely noxious):

Apocalypse Now?

The Strange Jeremiads of Chris Hedges

By MICHAEL UHL

http://www.counterpunch.org/uhl06102011.html

President Obama's Big Deal: Cuts for Social Security, But No Taxes for Wall Street by Dean Baker

Just because this man looks like a Republican and acts like a Republican, do not be deceived. He is in fact, a Republican...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/19-1

The Korean War: A History Part 2 - Bruce Cumings

Israeli Myths & Propaganda. Ilan Pappe

Trade Deals are No Deal for US

by Steven J. D'Amico

Yet even after losing 682,000 jobs to NAFTA since it took effect in 1994, and 2.4 million to China since it joined the World Trade Organization, Washington continues in its blind faith that somehow these trade deals are good for us. This summer Congress is expected to take up three new trade deals - with Korea, Panama, and Colombia. These trade pacts are bad for American workers, bad for our domestic economy, and bad for democracy.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/10-4

House approves $649b defense budget bill

House approves $649b defense budget bill

"The House overwhelmingly passed a $649 billion defense spending bill yesterday that boosts the Pentagon budget by $17 billion and covers the costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Frank Rich, "Obama's Original Sin"

"For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama’s background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys.

...

By failing to address that populist anger, Obama gave his enemies the opening to co-opt it and turn it against him. Which the tea party did, dishonestly but brilliantly, misrepresenting Obama’s health-care-reform crusade as yet another attempt by the elites to screw the taxpayer. (The Democrats haplessly reinforced the charge with marathon behind-the-scenes negotiations with insurance and pharmaceutical-­industry operatives.) Once the health-care law was signed, the president still slighted the unemployment crisis. A once-hoped-for WPA-style public-works program, unloved by Geithner, had been downsized in the original stimulus, and now a tardy, halfhearted stab at a $50 billion transportation-infrastructure jobs bill produced a dandy Obama speech but nothing else."

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/04-1

Notes on the Academic Job Market

 "Stop Admitting Ph.D. Students"

By, Monica J. Harris, August 18, 2010

"I have served as chair or co-chair of 13 Ph.D. students in my career, a number I’m guessing is typical of most research faculty. Population growth of that magnitude is a Malthusian melt-down in the making and simply isn’t sustainable. We’re not creating enough academic jobs to absorb all those Ph.D.s, and in today’s economy, applied jobs are disappearing as well.

Of course, it is possible, as my coffee buddy assures me, that the market will start improving in a couple of years and we will need all the Ph.D.s we’re churning out. Maybe so, and if it does, I can always start accepting students again. But I’m no longer willing to pin my students’ prospects for their futures on an ephemeral job market that shines in the distance like a mirage."

http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2010/08/18/harris

"The Long-Haul Degree," The New York Times, April 16, 2010

By PATRICIA COHEN

"Law students get a diploma in three years. Medical students receive an M.D. in four. But for graduate students in the humanities, it takes, on average, more than nine years to complete a degree. What some of those Ph.D. recipients may not realize is that they could spend another nine years, or more, looking for a tenure-track teaching job at a college or university — without ever finding one."

Adam Kotsko, "The ritual satisfaction of stating the Grim Facts about the job market"

Wednesday, October 27, 2010 —

My approach has been that the job market is apparently very random. We can follow all the best advice in the world, but it still comes down to the preferences of a handful of people at some randomly-chosen department and the outcome of a power struggle that probably no one outside the situation could ever fully understand or predict. So aside from broad guidelines (try to publish in good journals! present at conferences! get teaching experience! finish!) that 95% of PhD candidates are following anyway, there’s essentially no way of tailoring yourself to the job market. 

http://itself.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/the-ritual-satisfaction-of-stating-the-grim-facts-about-the-job-market/

Anthony DiMaggio: Mediated Ignorance

Why Jon Stewart and Politifact are Wrong About Public Misinformation

"Stewart is a liberal pundit operating in the mass media, and his program tends to privilege Democratic and mainstream liberal points of view, while skewering conservative ones.  As a result, his limited insights are unlikely to uncover the larger problem in the American political-media system.  This larger problem, simply stated, is the consistent correlation between political attentiveness and media consumption across all media outlets, and the corresponding increase in political misinformation resulting from this exposure. ...

Of course Fox viewers display a staggering ignorance; but at the end of the day, that ignorance is not substantively different from that seen among most media consumers."

http://www.counterpunch.org/dimaggio06242011.html

Phyllis Bennis: Token Withdrawals

"What President Obama announced tonight is not a strategy, there still is no clear definition of a "military victory" in this endless war. In the first weeks after his inauguration, the new commander-in-chief announced he was sending 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and "then" he would decide on a strategy. ...That 21,000 was followed, after months of discussion, another 33,000 (it was first going to be 30,000, but you know how it goes…) that made up the official "surge." The first 21,000 apparently weren't to be counted at all. So in his first year in office, President Obama escalated the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan from a little more than 30,000 to almost 100,000 troops (along with the 100,000 mercenaries) – tripling the troop numbers. With a token pull-back of 10,000 troops over the next six months, and maybe another 23,000 by the end of 2012 (presumably timed for maximum pre-election publicity) that still will leave almost 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan for years ahead – almost twice the number there when he took office. Not to mention the 100,000 Pentagon-paid contractors and 50,000 NATO soldiers, who apparently aren't going anywhere."

http://www.counterpunch.com/bennis06232011.html

The Militarized Surrealism of Barack Obama
Signs of the Great American Unraveling
By Tom Engelhardt

And yet who living in this riven, confused, semi-paralyzed country of ours truly believes that, in 2011, Americans can achieve whatever we set out to accomplish?  Who thinks that, not having won a war in memory, the U.S. military is incontestably the finest fighting force now or ever (and on a “climb to glory” at that), or that this country is at present specially blessed by God, or that ours is a mission of selfless kindheartedness on planet Earth? 

 

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/30-3

Bill Clinton/Paul Ryan Conspire Against Medicare 5-25-2011

Ron Paul and the Welfare State

‘Meet the Press’ transcript for Dec. 23, 2007

MR. RUSSERT:  When I looked at your record, you talked about big government and how opposed you are to it, but you seem to have a different attitude about your own congressional district.  For example, "Congress decided to send billions of dollars to victims of Hurricane Katrina.  Guess how Ron Paul voted.  `Is bailing out people" that choose--"that chose to live on the coastline a proper function of the federal government?' he asks." And you said no.  And yet, this:  "Paul's current district, which includes Galveston and reaches into" the "Brazoria County, draws a substantial amount of federal flood insurance payments." For your own congressional district.  This is the Houston Chronicle:  "Representative Ron Paul has long crusaded against a big central government.  But he also" "represented a congressional district that's consistently among the top in Texas in its reliance on dollars from Washington.  In the first nine months of the federal government's" fiscal "2006 fiscal year," "it received more than $4 billion." And they report, The Wall Street Journal, 65 earmark-targeted projects, $400 million that you have put into congressional bills for your district, which leads us to the Congressional Quarterly.  "The Earmark Dossier of `Dr. No.' There isn't much that" Ron--Dr. "Ron Paul thinks the federal government should do. Apparently, though, earmarks" for his district "are OK.  Paul is the sponsor of no fewer than 10 earmarks in the water resources bill," all benefiting his district.  The Gulf Intercoastal Waterway:  $32 million.  The sunken ship you want to be moved from Freeport Harbor.  The Bayou Navigation Channel.  They talk about $8 million for shrimp fishermen.
REP. PAUL:  You, you know...

MR. RUSSERT:  Why, why would you load up...

REP. PAUL:  You got it completely wrong.  I've never voted for an earmark in my life.

MR. RUSSERT:  No, but you put them in the bill.

REP. PAUL:  I put it in because I represent people who are asking for some of their money back.  But it doesn't cut any spending to vote against an earmark. And the Congress has the responsibility to spend the money.  Why leave the money in the executive branch and let them spend the money?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22342301/ns/meet_the_press/t/meet-press-transcript-dec/

Michael Uhl: The Strange Jeremiads of Chris Hedges

Apocalypse Now?

The Strange Jeremiads of Chris Hedges

By MICHAEL UHL

"The thoughts and words above, whether quoted or paraphrased, are representative of Hedges blend of mysticism and muddled thinking, sprinkled with flashes of erudition and much poetic elegance. Some of his millennial comparisons and historical readings – the simile linking Obama to Herod – elsewhere equating the U.S. political system to Egypt under Mubarak – are downright bizarre. But I'm really stuck on that startling revelation that hope's potency rests upon futile, useless, irrelevant and incomprehensible acts of rebellion. Really? Does that mean failure will make better people of us? This strikes me as stuff for the sectarian pulpit, not the public forum." 

http://www.counterpunch.org/uhl06102011.html

Ron Paul on Foreign Policy

REP. RON PAUL: Not quite. You know, I served five years in the military. I’ve had a little experience. I’ve spent a little bit of time over in the Pakistan-Afghanistan area, as well as in Iran. But I wouldn’t wait for my generals. I’m the commander-in-chief. I make the decisions. I tell the generals what to do. And I’d bring them home as quickly as possible. And I would get them out of Iraq, as well. And I wouldn’t start a war in Libya. I’d quit bombing Yemen. And I’d quit bombing Pakistan. I’d start taking care of people here at home, because we could save hundreds of billions of dollars. Our national security is not enhanced by our presence over there. We have no purpose there. We should learn the lessons of history. And the longer we’re there, the worse things are, and the more danger we’re in, as well, because our presence there is not making friends, let me tell you.

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/14/first_major_republican_presidential_debate_focuses

Andrew Levine: Who's Afraid of the Israel Lobby?

Andrew Levine: Who's Afraid of the Israel Lobby?

"It is important to remember that, from the time of the French Revolution, right-wing politics and anti-Semitism have enjoyed a close and symbiotic relationship. It is important to remember too that modern Zionism emerged in reaction to an up-tick in European anti-Semitism – to the Dreyfus Affair and to pogroms in the east -- and therefore that before the movement became immersed in identity politics or (later still) took on a theological coloration, anti-Semites and Zionists implicitly agreed that assimilation was impossible or undesirable and therefore that Jews would do well to have a country of their own. On the Jewish side, the further idea that this solution to the Jewish Question implies the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine soon followed."

Gainful Unemployment and the Decline of Predatory Colleges For Profit, For Shame

 By ANTHONY DiMAGGIO 

"Increasingly we are seeing the emergence of an entire generation of students that are shackled with unsustainable debt in an economy that is providing few well-paying or secure jobs."

http://www.counterpunch.com/dimaggio06032011.html

Arundhati Roy on Violence

"Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation."

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/05/arundhati-roy-keep-destabilised-danger

Is the Dramatic Increase in Baby Deaths in the US a Result of Fukushima Fallout?

By JANETTE D. SHERMAN, MD
and JOSEPH MANGANO
http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html

"The recent CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report indicates that eight cities in the northwest U.S. (Boise ID, Seattle WA, Portland OR, plus the northern California cities of Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Berkeley) reported the following data on deaths among those younger than one year of age:

4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 - 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week)
10 weeks ending May 28, 2011 - 125 deaths (avg.12.50 per week)

This amounts to an increase of 35% (the total for the entire U.S. rose about 2.3%), and is statistically significant."

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1826/three-powerfully-wrong_and-wrongly-powerful_americ

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1826/three-powerfully-wrong_and-wrongly-powerful_americ
It is impossible to speak of interests in the absence of collective identities. One can describe the interests of a group, or identify one’s interest as a member of a collective, but the idea that individuals (let alone states) have interests that exist outside of these categories of belonging just doesn’t hold up. Speaking of “US interests” masks this fact with what sounds like a commonsensical idea: we have to look after our interests first. But in whose interest—precisely—does the government of the United States pursue a given policy? The “average” citizen (as if there is such a thing)? Congressional lobbyists? The contractors who directly profit from our relations with foreign regimes? Rather than viewing this as a polemical bête noir, this is a question that we should be asking regularly, as part of the practice of engaged citizenship.

Nye on the components of world power

Has Economic Power Replaced Military Might?

Wednesday 8 June 2011

by: Joseph S. Nye, Project Syndicate

Political observers have long debated whether economic or military power is more fundamental.  The Marxist tradition casts economics as the underlying structure of power, and political institutions as a mere superstructure, an assumption shared by nineteenth-century liberals who believed that growing interdependence in trade and finance would make war obsolete.

http://www.truth-out.org/has-economic-power-replaced-military-might/1307539510

Obama Hides Meeting with Top Bahraini Leader—And Mutes Criticism of Ongoing Crackdown

SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON:

"Bahrain is a partner, and a very important one to the United States, and we are supportive of a national dialogue and the kinds of important work that the Crown Prince has been doing in his nation, and we look forward to it continuing."

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/9/obama_hides_meeting_with_top_bahraini

http://www.thenation.com/blog/161180/ollanta-humalas-win-peru-joins-latin-americas-left-turn

http://www.thenation.com/blog/161180/ollanta-humalas-win-peru-joins-latin-americas-left-turn

Stephen Walt on Netanyahu and the U.S. Congress

'The smallest minds and cowardliest hearts': Is Congress clapping for apartheid?

Posted By Stephen M. Walt

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/05/25/the_smallest_minds_and_cowardliest_hearts_is_congress_clapping_for_apartheid

Alperovitz on the "New-Economy Movement"

Published on Friday, May 27, 2011 by The Nation

The New-Economy Movement

by Gar Alperovitz

 

The idea that we need a “new economy”—that the entire economic system must be radically restructured if critical social and environmental goals are to be met—runs directly counter to the American creed that capitalism as we know it is the best, and only possible, option. Over the past few decades, however, a deepening sense of the profound ecological challenges facing the planet and growing despair at the inability of traditional politics to address economic failings have fueled an extraordinary amount of experimentation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders.

Why the Rich Love High Unemployment

Why the Rich Love High Unemployment
Tuesday 24 May 2011
by: Mark Provost, Truthout

"The administration's problem is not a question of economics, but a matter of values and priorities. In the first Great Depression, President Roosevelt created an alphabet soup of institutions - the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) - to directly relieve the unemployment problem, a crisis the private sector was unable and unwilling to solve. In the current crisis, banks were handed bottomless bowls of alphabet soup - the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP) and the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) - while politicians dithered over extending inadequate unemployment benefits."

Former economic adviser to Obama, Steven Rattner:

"Perversely, the nagging high jobless rate reflects two of the most promising attributes of the American economy: its flexibility and its productivity. Eliminating jobs - with all the wrenching human costs - raises productivity and, thereby, competitiveness."

Hedges on "the liberal class"

Why Liberal Sellouts Attack Prophets Like Cornel West
by Chris Hedges

"The destruction of the old radical and militant movements—the communists, socialists and anarchists—has left liberals without a source of new ideas. The link between an effective liberal class and a more radical left was always essential to the health of the former. The liberal class, by allowing radical movements to be dismembered through Red baiting and by banishing those within its ranks who had moral autonomy, gradually deformed basic liberal tenets to support unfettered capitalism, the national security state, globalization and permanent war. Liberalism, cut off from the radical roots of creative and bold thought, merged completely with the corporate power elite. The liberal class at once was betrayed and betrayed itself. And it now functions like a commercial brand, giving a different flavor, face or spin to the ruthless mechanisms of corporate power. This, indeed, is the primary function of Barack Obama."

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/23-4

Of course, for a prophet, West was caught rather flat-footed by Obama's "betrayals"...

Vijay Prashad: The World We Want is the World We Need

Vijay Prashad: The World We Want is the World We Need
"I too believe in the End Times. In the End Time for Capitalism, a system rooted in the destruction of the human spirit. Democracy is our prejudice, but it does not fully exist yet. It is an idea, it provides space for action, but it has not yet been incarnated fully: the secular Rapture will be the day when Democracy will come into its own."

John Mearsheimer: Obama and the Iron Cage

John Mearsheimer: Obama and the Iron Cage
Many Palestinians, on the other hand, did not like Obama's assertion that it made little sense for them to go to the UN General Assembly this September and win recognition for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. Surely they also noticed that shortly after saying that "every state has the right to self-defense, and Israel must be able to defend itself," the president said that the Palestinians would have to be content with "a sovereign non-militarized state," which means that they will not be able to defend themselves against Israel or any other state for that matter. Hypocrisy appears to be wired into the DNA of American foreign-policy makers.

Western Media Fraud in the Middle East

Western Media Fraud in the Middle East

Too many journalists report official narratives of the powerful, missing the stories of working class people.

by Nir Rosen

"The American media always want to fit events in the region into an American narrative. The recent assassination of Osama bin Laden was greeted with a collective shrug of the shoulder in the Middle East, where he had always been irrelevant, but for Americans and hence for the American media it was a historic and defining moment which changed everything."

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/05/201151882929682601.html

Tomgram: Nick Turse, Obama and the Mideast Arms Trade | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Nick Turse, Obama and the Mideast Arms Trade | TomDispatch

"Along with Ashton Carter, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, and Brett Lambert, the deputy assistant secretary for industrial policy, Lynn is creating a comprehensive plan to sustain and enrich weapons makers and other military contractors in the coming years. “We’re going sector by sector, tier by tier, and our goal is to develop a long-term policy to protect that base as we slow defense spending,” Lynn said. America’s Middle Eastern allies are seen as a significant partner in this effort."

Actually, "the Rich" Don't "Create Jobs," We Do

Actually, "the Rich" Don't "Create Jobs," We Do
by: Dave Johnson

Lots of regular people having money to spend is what creates jobs and businesses. That is the basic idea of demand-side economics and it works. In a consumer-driven economy designed to serve people, regular people with money in their pockets is what keeps everything going. And the equal opportunity of democracy with its reinvestment in infrastructure and education and the other fruits of democracy is fundamental to keeping a demand-side economy functioning.

http://www.truthout.org/actually-rich-dont-create-jobs-we-do/130538074

Israeli Myths & Propaganda. Ilan Pappe

Oil Wealth, U.S. Backing Enables Saudi Arabia to Crush Dissent in Bahrain and at Home

Toby Craig Jones on Democracy Now!
Oil Wealth, U.S. Backing Enables Saudi Arabia to Crush Dissent in Bahrain and at Home

The Internet as Playground and Factory: Jonathan Beller

http://vimeo.com/7449081

See also:

Jonathan Beller, Digital Ideology Presentation

http://www.slideshare.net/JonathanBeller/jonathan-beller-digital-ideology-presentation

Marjorie Cohn: Assassinating Bin Laden‏

Osama bin Laden and the "suspected militants" targeted in drone attacks should have been arrested and tried in U.S. courts or an international tribunal. Obama cannot serve as judge, jury and executioner. These assassinations are not only illegal; they create a dangerous precedent, which could be used to justify the targeted killings of U.S. leaders.Osama bin Laden and the "suspected militants" targeted in drone attacks should have been arrested and tried in U.S. courts or an international tribunal. Obama cannot serve as judge, jury and executioner. These assassinations are not only illegal; they create a dangerous precedent, which could be used to justify the targeted killings of U.S. leaders.

http://www.counterpunch.com/cohn05102011.html

William J. Astore: The Crash and Burn of Old Regimes‏

"In this sense, our wars are eerily like those pursued by European monarchs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: conflicts carried out by professional militaries and bands of mercenaries, largely at the whim of what we might now call a unitary executive, funded by deficit spending, for the purposes of protecting or extending the interests of a ruling elite."

http://www.counterpunch.com/astore05122011.html

Walden Bello: Bin Laden's Game‏

"But one cannot escape the fact that he succeeded in unleashing a chain of events that led to his nemesis, the United States, becoming a diminished power compared to what it was in the halcyon days of unilateralism at the end of the last century. In the duel between Washington and Osama, the latter was, at the time of his death, far ahead on points."

http://www.counterpunch.com/bello05122011.html

Mike Whitney: A Short History of Bubblenomics‏

"It might surprise you to know that the Fed has become so skilled at bubble-making, that the condition of the underlying economy doesn't really matter any more. By fixing interest rates below the rate of inflation and attaching a liquidity-tailpipe to the stock market (QE2), the Fed has been able engineer a boom in equities, while the so-called "real" economy languishes in a near-Depression. In fact, consumer credit is actually shrinking (excluding student loans) while margin debt (the amount that speculators borrow to buy stocks) continues to soar. This is an astonishing development. The Fed has created a bifurcated market where bankers and hedge fund managers are able to rake in billions off their gaming operations while 300 million working Americans remain mired in debt."

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney05062011.html

Patrick Cockburn: Portrait of the US Press in the Hour of Its Fall‏

"The media is often credited or blamed for an independent sceptical spirit which it seldom shows in reality. In wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan effective media criticism has tended to follow rather than precede public opinion. Even then it usually needs important politicians to be standing on the same side of the fence. The Afghan war is unpopular in the US, but there is no effective anti-war movement because the Democrats, once so critical of the Iraq war, are now in the White House and, if Obama goes on being presented with targets as vulnerable as Trump, are likely to stay there."

http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick05092011.html

Andy Kroll: The McJobs Economy‏

"Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald's launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that's more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire U.S. economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald's franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald's was more selective than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices."

http://www.counterpunch.org/kroll05092011.html

Robert Lipsyte: Why the NFL Would Do Us a Favor by Canceling the Upcoming Season‏

"It's not exactly a fair fight, which of course is why unions were invented. It's estimated that half of the NFL owners are worth at least a billion dollars each, while slightly less than half of NFL players make more than a million dollars annually. The average player's career lasts fewer than four years."

http://www.counterpunch.com/lipsyte05102011.html

Pierre Rimbert: Can France's Left Thinkers Escape the Ivory Tower?‏

"Back in the 1930s, Paul Nizan depicted academia as conservative and filled with “watchdogs”. Then in the radical 1960s and 1970s, human sciences, social critiques and revolution seemed to go together. Their connection has enlivened an institution riven with tensions, designed to back the bourgeois regime but also capable of nurturing revolutionaries. This contradiction may explain why critical publishing is both fascinated and repulsed by academia and lecturers or researchers. The stereotype of the independent publisher suggests a 30-40 year-old who has begun, or even finished, a doctorate in human sciences but hasn’t found a research or higher education post that allows him or her to combine academic work with anti-Establishment action. Though this picture fails to take account of the diversity of the new “militant” publishers, it captures their conflicted environment, falling somewhere between the scholarly and the political."

http://www.counterpunch.com/rimbert05112011.html

Are We Still on an Imperial Planet?

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Are We Still on an Imperial Planet?

TomDispatch‏

"What if this isn’t an imperial planet any more? What if, from resource scarcity to global warming, humanity is nudging up against previously unimagined limits on unbridled growth? From at least the seventeenth century on, successive great powers have struggled over the control of vast realms of a globe in which expansion seemed eternally the name of the game. For centuries, one or more great powers were always on hand when the previous great imperial power or set of powers faltered.

In the wake of World War II, with the collapse of the Japanese and German empires, only two powers worthy of the name were left, each so mighty that together they would be called “superpowers.” After 1991, only one remained, so seemingly powerful that it was sometimes termed a “hyperpower” and many believed it had inherited the Earth.

What if, in fact, the U.S. was indeed the last empire? What if a world of rivalries, on a planet heading into resource scarcity, turned out to be less than imperial in nature? Or what if -- and think of me as a devil’s advocate here -- this turned out not to be an imperial world of bitter rivalries at all, but in the face of unexpectedly tough times, a partnership planet?"

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175386/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_are_we_still_on_an_imperial_planet/#more

Exploring Capitalism Through the Lens of the Big Lebowski: Part I, Man

"Their are two key moments to understanding Mr. Lebowski. The first is his first meeting with Dude in which he says, “Every bum’s lot in life is how own responsibility, regardless of who he chooses to blame.” To which Dude puts on his bullshit-resistant shade and does not respond. Mr. Lebowski continues as Dude exits, “Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost! The bums will always lose!” Brandt approaches from the opposite end of the hall, asks how the meeting went, and Dude replies, “The old man told me to take any rug in the house.” Here Dude reveals himself to be an Illegalist of sorts."

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/79176/exploring-capitalism-through-the-lens-of-the-big-lebowski-part-i-man/

Alan Nasser: Putting People to Work

Alan Nasser: Putting People to Work

"Looking at the business cycle over the last forty years, a striking and ominous trend emerges: in each business-cyclical expansion, the long-term unemployment rate remains either at or above the level of the previous expansion."

Terry Eagleton, In Praise of Marx

 Terry Eagleton, "In Praise of Marx," The Chronicle Review
http://chronicle.com/article/In-Praise-of-Marx/127027/

The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition.

Terry Eagleton is a visiting professor at Lancaster University, in England; the National University of Ireland; and the University of Notre Dame. His latest book, Why Marx Was Right, was just published by Yale University Press.

Capitalism's Dismal Future

Paul Mattick, "Capitalism's Dismal Future,"  The Chronicle Review
http://chronicle.com/article/Capitalisms-Dismal-Future/126659/

From Paul Mattick, Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2011):

"In fact, the crisis looming before us is likely to be, if anything, more terrible than the Great Depressions of 1873-93 and 1929-39. The continuing industrialization of agriculture and urbanization of population—by 2010, it is estimated, more than half the earth's inhabitants lived in cities—has made more and more people dependent upon the market to supply them with food and other necessities of life. The existence on or over the edge of survival experienced today by the urban masses of Cairo, Dhaka, São Paulo, and Mexico City will be echoed in the capitalistically advanced nations, as unemployment and government-dictated austerity afflict more and more people, not just in the developed world's Rust Belts but in New York, Los Angeles, London, Madrid, and Prague."

...

"While at present they are still awaiting the promised return of prosperity, at some point the newly homeless millions, like many of their predecessors in the 1930s, may well look at newly foreclosed, empty houses, unsaleable consumer goods, and stockpiled government foodstuffs and see the materials they need to sustain life. The simple taking and using of housing, food, and other goods, however, by breaking the rules of an economic system based on the exchange of goods for money, in itself implies a radically new mode of social existence.

The social relation between employers and wage earners, one that joins mutual dependence to inherent conflict, has become basic to all the world's nations. It will decisively shape the ways the future is experienced and responded to. No doubt, as in the past, workers will demand that industry or governments provide them with jobs, but if the former could profitably employ more people, they would already be doing so, while the latter are even now coming up against the limits of sovereign debt. As unemployment continues to expand, perhaps it will occur to workers with and without jobs that factories, offices, farms, schools, and other workplaces will still exist, even if they cannot be run profitably, and can be set into motion to produce goods and services that people need. Even if there are not enough jobs—paid employment, working for business or the state—there is plenty of work to be done if people organize production and distribution for themselves, outside the constraints of the business economy. This would mean, of course, constructing a new form of society.

Capitalism has been around for so many generations now, proving its vitality by displacing or absorbing all other social systems around the globe, that it seems a part of nature, irreplaceable. But its historical limits are visible in its inability to meet the ecological challenges it has produced; to generate enough growth to profitably employ the billions of people accumulating in slums in Africa, South America, and Asia, along with growing numbers in Europe, Japan, and the United States; and to escape the dilemma of dependence on a degree of state participation in economic life that drains money from the private enterprise system. Just as the Great Recession has demonstrated the limits of the means set in place during the last 40 years to contain capitalism's tendency to periodic disaster, it suggests the need finally to take seriously the idea, as the saying goes, that another world is possible."

Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Obama Still Hammering Away | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Obama Still Hammering Away | TomDispatch

"Perhaps Barack Obama found his political soul mate in Samantha Power, making her determination to alleviate evil around the world his own. Or perhaps he is just another calculating politician who speaks the language of ideals while pursuing less exalted purposes. In either case, the immediate relevance of the question is limited. The how rather than the why is determinant.

Whatever his motives, by conforming to a pre-existing American penchant for using force in the Greater Middle East, this president has chosen the wrong tool. In doing so, he condemns himself and the country to persisting in the folly of his predecessors. The failure is one of imagination, but also of courage. He promised, and we deserve something better. "

Jean-Pierre Séréni: Why the Oil Companies Decided Qaddafi Has to Go

Jean-Pierre Séréni: Why the Oil Companies Decided Qaddafi Has to Go

William Blum: Libya and the Holy Triumvirate

William Blum: Libya and the Holy Triumvirate

The problem, I'm increasingly afraid, is that the man doesn't really believe strongly in anything, certainly not in controversial areas. He learned a long time ago how to take positions that avoid controversy, how to express opinions without clearly taking sides, how to talk eloquently without actually saying anything, how to leave his listeners' heads filled with stirring clichés, platitudes, and slogans. And it worked. Oh how it worked! What could happen now, having reached the presidency of the United States, to induce him to change his style?

Remember that in his own book, "The Audacity of Hope", Obama wrote: "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."

Obama is a product of marketing. He is the prime example of the product "As seen on TV".

Writer Sam Smith recently wrote that Obama is the most conservative Democratic president we've ever had. "In an earlier time, there would have been a name for him: Republican."

Indeed, if John McCain had won the 2008 election, and then done everything that Obama has done in exactly the same way, liberals would be raging about such awful policies.

I believe that Barack Obama is one of the worst things that has ever happened to the American left. The millions of young people who jubilantly supported him in 2008, and numerous older supporters, will need a long recovery period before they're ready to once again offer their idealism and their passion on the altar of political activism.

If you don't like how things have turned out, next time find out exactly what your candidate means when he talks of "change".