.Barack Obama

Obama Must Toss the Bums Out of Treasury, End the Wars and Start Leading

dlindorff — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:13:46 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve chosen to sit
amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don’t turn to them for help
when you can’t figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you
the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.

That’s the situation President Obama finds himself in today in the
White House. Having surrounded himself with the very Wall Street con
men who set up the crooked game that led to the current financial
crisis and economic collapse, and finding that the lousy advice they
have been giving him since last January has left the country still
mired in deepening economic decline, with the banks still not lending
and unemployment still mounting, and with growing signs that instead of
bottoming out and starting to recover, the economy is threatening to
fall a second time, to new lows and higher unemployment, Obama has
turned to the same rotten advisors for answers.

A few days ago, in an interview with Fox-TV while he was in China
off all places (a country that has made a stupendous stimulus
investment to create domestic jobs!) Obama warned, for the first time,
that America faces the possibility of a “double-dip” recession. That’s
fine as far as it goes. I agree. But what did he say the risk was? Not
that the government has been failing to put significant numbers of
people back to work, but that the government keeps piling up deficits.

This has to be the lamest economic thinking since Herbert Hoover
started tightening the screws on government spending at the onset of
the Great Depression in 1930.

Clearly the American government needs to do just the opposite of
worrying about deficits. The only growth the US economy has seen to
date has been the result of government funding—the cash-for-clunkers
program gave a brief restoration of pulse to the auto industry, and the
$8000 tax credit for buying a first home kicked up home sales briefly.
We know this because when the clunkers program ended, auto sales
crashed, and when the deadline approached for the end to the new home
tax credit, home building plunged almost 11%. The hundreds of billions
of dollars poured into so-called “shovel-ready” state and local
projects like roads, schools, etc., may have added or saved as much as
a million jobs, but the economy lost many times that many jobs over the
same period.

The problem with these stimulus programs is that they are
inefficient ways to create jobs or preserve jobs. If roughly one
million jobs were created through the stimulus spending of say $200
billion (assuming that the February $800-billion stimulus program, to
mollify Republicans, consisted of one-half tax cuts and only one-half
actual federal spending, and that this federal spending was spread
evenly over a two-year period, that’s $200,000 per job!

If, instead, Obama had chucked the dunces at Treasury and in his
Council of Economic Advisors, and instead asked your Labor Secretary to
initiate a wide-ranging $200-billion-per-year jobs program, hiring the
unemployed at perhaps $20-25,000 per person to do everything from teach
in overcrowded urban schools to laying high-speed rail trackbeds, from
cleaning up parks to putting insulation in homes, he could have given
jobs to close 8 million people—people who would have then spent their
money on goods and services and helped rally the economy from the
bottom up.

Deficits? Who gives a damn about deficits at this point! The
country is up to the gills in debt without creating any jobs. (It’s
kind of like my mortgage. Why would I worry about using my credit card
to buy food for the week if I was low on cash, when my mortgage has me
deep in the red for the next ten years? Obama’s financial advisors, on
the evidence, would tell me I should let my family go hungry, because I
need to worry about my total debt load.) If you’re worried about
deficits, Mr. Obama, end the god-damned wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is costing one million dollars a year to send one lousy grunt to
Afghanistan or Iraq. And you want to have at least 100,000 guys over
there. That’s $100 billion a year right there—enough to hire four
million unemployed Americans back here at home!

This president is well on the way to rescuing President Hoover from
history’s crap heap by one-upping him in the realm of economic
mismanagement. We already have Obamavilles springing up around the
country. We haven’t started calling them that, but Naming Day isn’t far
off.

At least Hoover didn’t mire the country in another war while the economy was collapsing around him.

President Obama is on a short leash at this point. His fans, and I
was one of those who was willing to give him a shot last November, are
mostly giving up on him. Activists are already turning on him. My union
friends are disgusted. My African-American friends just shake their
heads in dismay. Liberal friends act embarrassed. A leftist friend,
retired, who devoted a month to campaigning for Obama full time in
Pennsylvania last fall now writes angry letters almost weekly to
Obama’s former campaign manager David Plouffe and others, blasting
Obama’s handling of the bank crisis and his Afghan War plans. Clearly
Obama cannot continue to appease Republicans and cater to Blue Dogs in
Congress and expect to be re-elected in 2012.

Indeed, if he doesn’t toss the crooks and charlatans in the Fed,
the Treasury and his Council of Economic Advisers out, and doesn’t stop
listening to the self-serving crazies in the military, he won’t even
have a Democratic majority in Congress by the end of next year.

President Obama, aren’t you tired of being an embarrassment to your
friends and family? Aren’t you tired of being mocked by your foes?

Come on. We’re sick of your speeches! Suck it up, be a
leader.finally and kick some butt. Do something unconventional and
daring. End the wars, bring the troops home, announce a huge jobs
program, issue an executive order expanding the Medicare program, raise
taxes on the wealthy to back where they were in the 1960s, and let’s
get the country moving forward again.
__________________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

President Obama: Don't Lecture China on Censorship

dlindorff — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:22:53 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with
Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the
value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of
non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of
strength.”

And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president
himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US
troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk
about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian
style control over information.

Let’s just take the issue of depleted uranium weapons, over 1000
tons of which have been expended in the US invasion of Iraq, most of it
in populated areas where millions remain exposed to the radioactive
dust of the burned material. There is almost no reporting on this topic
in the US media. The Pentagon has for years lied about and hidden the
effects of this deadly substance, used in shells, bombs and bullets
because of its unique ability to penetrate hard steel armor and
concrete bunker walls. It has refused to disclose where the weapons
were fired, and has denied US troops the tests that would show if they
have been contaminated. It has even resorted to having paid Pentagon
hacks surreptitiously libel, slander and otherwise undermine those
military sources and journalists who have tried to expose this scourge
(this reporter has been the target of such disinformation attacks).

But censorship in the US goes beyond these crude efforts at
government-directed control of information. In America, some of the
most potent censorship is done by the privately owned media—supposedly
a bastion of freedom of expression.

There is no reason why the US media cannot report on depleted
uranium and its deadly legacy in places where it has been used, such as
Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Kosovo, or on and around American
military bases from Maryland to Hawaii. And yet it does not. Just
recently, stories have appeared both on Britain’s SkyTV and in the Guardian newspaper,
reporting on an alarming rise in unusual birth defects and infant
cancers in Fallujah as well as in other Iraqi cities like Basra, Najaf,
Baghdad and Samara—all urban areas where there were major assaults by
US forces both in the initial invasion, when most of the DU weapons
were used, and later during fights against holed-up insurgent groups.

In Fallujah, the Guardian reports that birth defects are up by a
staggering 15 times normal—an increase of 1400%! While the article
doesn’t mention depleted uranium specifically, and says that doctors in
Fallujah have been "reluctant to attribute" the astonishing number of
birth defects to the massive assault on that city by US forces in late
2004, they do say those doctors cite “radiation and chemicals” which
were dumped on the city.

There is no such report about this in the US media.

Is that censorship? Of course it is.

The American government doesn’t tell CBS News or CNN not to report
this story, which amounts to a US war crime. It does not (at least
generally), contact the editors at the New York Times or the Washington
Post and say, “Don’t report on the infant mortality crisis in Iraq, or
on the possible connection to US weaponry” (Though the government did
ask and successfully get the Times to hold a story about the National
Security Agency's massive electronic spying program for a year, and
managed to pressure the Times' editors to kill a Times reporter's story
about President Bush's likely use of a hidden cueing device during the
2004 presidential debates). The editors of those news organizations
themselves most of the time simply decide that either the story is of
no importance to readers or they worry that they may be criticized
either by the government or by other media organizations for being
unpatriotic, or biased.

The end result of such a process of self-censorship, however, is
that the American public is as ignorant about certain things as someone
in China.

More ignorant in fact.

One thing I learned from living and working as a journalist and
journalism teacher in China back in the 1990s is that the Chinese
people, with their long experience of living in a totalitarian
dictatorship in which all media are owned and tightly controlled by the
state and the ruling Communist Party, are acutely aware that they are
being lied to and that the truth is being hidden from them.
Accordingly, they have learned to read between the lines, to pick up
subtle hints in news articles which honest journalists have learned how
to slip into their carefully controlled reports. They have also
developed a sophisticated private system of person-to-person reporting
called xiaodao xiaoxi or, literally, “back-alley news.” This
system used to be word-of-mouth between neighbors and friends. As
telephones became ubiquitous, it was done by phone, allowing
transmission over long distances quickly. Now there is the internet,
which, while it is systematically controlled via what has become known
as China’s “Great Firewall”—effectively all of China is like a vast
corporate “intranet” which blocks access to outside websites—still
allows the flow of email. This is nearly impossible to monitor,
particularly when the messages are not bulk mailed to large numbers of
addressees.

So in China, reports of corruption, of local rebellions or strikes,
of internal struggles within the government or party, or of important
news about the outside world that the government wants to keep at bay,
manage to circulate widely inside China despite a huge state censorship
apparatus.

This alternative highly-personal news network works because the
Chinese people know they are being lied to and kept in the dark, and
they want to break through that official shroud of secrecy and control.

In the US, in contrast, we have a public that for the most part is
blissfully unaware of the extent to which our news is being censored,
filtered and controlled. Like the President (who knows better), we
boast of our “free press,” and our open society, and indeed, as a
journalist, I am free to write what I want to write.

But given that most people get their news either from corporately
owned newspapers or from corporate radio and TV stations, it doesn’t
really matter what I or other journalists critical of the Establishment
write because it won’t appear in the corporate media. Since most
Americans, unlike most Chinese people, assume that they live in a
society with a free press and no censorship or control of information,
they don’t even bother to look beyond the information that is spoon-fed
to them by corporate media sources.

The result is that in my experience I have found peasants in rural
Jiangsu or Anhwei Province to in many cases be better informed about
their own country and the world than are typical American suburbanites.
Certainly if an American wants to be informed, all the information she
or he could want is available, but one has to be first of all aware
that one isn't getting certain information via the obvious sources, and
then one has to want to get it, and make the effort to find it. For
most Americans, all three of these elements are missing.

The list of censored stories and issues in the US, about which the
American public knows almost nothing is staggering, going well beyond
just the use of nasty weapons.

Do Americans know, for instance, that all the other modern western
Democracies in the world have some form of national health care—either
a state-run system like that in the UK or a single-payer model like
that in Canada, or some hybrid like they have in France or
Switzerland—and that in all those countries, the systems are so popular
that they have survived decades of conservative governments? No. Our
corporate media instead report on the crank critics of those systems
and allow us to believe they are hated by their citizens.

Do Americans know that the US no longer boasts the best standard of
living in the world—or even close? No. Because the American media
continue to portray the US as “number one.”

Do Americans know that Al Qaeda was actually a creation of the CIA?
No. This important bit of information doesn’t get mentioned in the US
media, which always starts the organization’s history at 1988, when it
got its name, when actually, its early origins date to the arming of
the mujahadeen by the CIA and the CIA-linked Pakistani intelligence
service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, when the US wanted to create and support resistance to the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

And of course, we rarely get to see the slaughter of women and
children that our beloved soldier “heroes” are conducting in Iraq and
Afghanistan in our name.

No censorship in America?

Mr. President, please. You may fool us, but at least don’t insult the intelligence of your Chinese audience.
____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He spent seven
years in China and Hong Kong and Taiwan as a Fulbright journalism
professor and a correspondent for Businessweek magazine. He is author,
most recently, of "The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006)
and is the winner of a Project Censored award. His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Obama's War and Remembrance Day

dlindorff — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:12:43 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

With word being leaked out over the weekend that our Nobel Peace
Prize President is close to announcing plans to escalate the US troop
level in the Afghanistan War by 50%, we are about to have perhaps the
ultimate of ironies—a president announcing a big step-up in American
war-making on November 11, the day known around much of the Western
world as Armistice Day.

While modern Americans might not know it, with all the boom and
bombast and mindless flag-waving featured in the military parades
popular in today’s warrior culture, November 11 was originally
established by Congress back in 1919, a year after the day the guns of
World War I finally went silent over the blood-drenched fields of
Europe in what was once, in a naïve spasm of optimism, referred to as
the War to End All Wars. In declaring the national holiday Armistice
Day, Congress said it was to be “a day dedicated to the cause of world
peace.”

It’s hard to see how President Obama, who has yet to actually
receive his Nobel Prize as a peacemaker from Norway’s King Harald, is
contributing to peace with the addition of another 34,000 US soldiers
and Marines to the 68,000 already fighting, killing and dying on Afghan
soil. Maybe he thinks holding this escalation to 34,000 instead of
accommodating Afghanistan Theater Commander Gen. Stanley McCrystal’s
request for 80,000 more troops is an act of pacificistic moderation.

I doubt it. (Incidentally, some Pentagon and White House flaks are
referring to this escalation as another “surge,” but you can’t call a
50% increase in troop commitments a “surge.” It is what it is—a massive
expansion of the current war effort.)

No, sadly, Obama, who has declared the bloody assault on one of the
world’s most remote and impoverished lands to be a “necessary war,”
seems stubbornly and ignorantly and foolishly to be trying to emulate
the mistakes of an earlier Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson,
who turned a minor conflict in Vietnam into the biggest war, and
biggest disaster, that the US has engaged in since World War II.

Of course, the difference between the two men, Johnson and Obama,
is still enormous. While Obama may be just as bone-headed as was
Johnson in caving to the will of his generals instead of leading them,
he doesn’t hold a candle to Johnson when it comes to leading the charge
for progressive domestic legislation. While Johnson was ginning up the
war in Vietnam, he was simultaneously dragging the racist Democrats of
the southern states kicking and screaming into the post-slavery world
with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which for the first time
enabled African Americans to actually participate in voting. He also
rammed through Congress a truly innovative single-payer health
program—Medicare--to provide health care for all Americans once they
reached 65, or became disabled, as well as a second
program--Medicaid--to care for the poor.

Against these great accomplishments, Obama hasn’t even shown the
resolve to end discrimination against gays and lesbians in the
military—something he could do with a phone call to the Joint Chiefs!
That is to say, while he’s willing to pointlessly, on the basis of some
bizarre political calculus, put another 34,000 young Americans in
harm’s way in Afghanistan, he’s not willing to ban discrimination
against those of them who may not be suitably heterosexual.

The signs are grimly clear that this silver-tongued but politically
gutless president is steering the country into yet another military
disaster—one that has killed 200 young men and women under his command,
but which could easily become as costly in blood and fortune as was
Johnson’s Vietnam War four decades ago. Making matters worse is the
fact that while the Vietnam War was fought at a time when America was
at its height as an economic power, today this country is an economic
basket case.

I predict that it will not be long before protesters will be
packing the Washington Mall and jamming the streets surrounding the
White House shouting chants of “Hey, Obama, What Do You Say? How Many
Kids Have You Killed Today?”(How’s he going to explain those shouts to
his daughters, Sasha and Malia?)

The sheen has already warn off this latest huckster for American
militarism and imperial adventure, and, with his increasingly
blood-stained hands tied by the Pentagon and military quagmire, he has
nothing to show domestically to earn him public support and affection.
The man had a chance, nine months ago, to come into office and smash
the criminal banking syndicate, to put Americans back to work with a
serious jobs program, and to finally expand Medicare to all, bringing
America into the modern world on health care. Instead he turned the
financial system completely over to the banksters, helping them to grow
even bigger, left the unemployed to fend for themselves, and fobbed off
the job of health care “reform” on Congress, which predictably did the
bidding of the Medical Establishment, and deep-sixed the whole thing.

It is, I would suggest, time for progressives to start searching
for a serious, gutsy, plain-speaking candidate to challenge Obama for
the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2012. This man needs
to have a new Gene McCarthy or George McGovern breathing down his neck
for the next three years.

Armistice Day would be a good day to launch that search.

______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment,” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). He can
be reached at www.thiscantbehappening.net

2010 Looms: Democrats Crash and Burn in Virginia and New Jersey

dlindorff — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:58:27 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

It would be easy to read too much into the few statewide races that
were decided last night, but I think it’s fair to say that the results
in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates
won--in New Jersey’s case knocking off a well-funded Democratic
incumbent--that the results were a blow to the Barack Obama/Rahm
Emanuel strategy of playing to the right, of avoiding confrontation in
Congress and of ignoring the progressive voters whose enthusiasm and
effort back in the 2008 campaign put Obama in office.

Exit polls showed that many Obama voters sat out this election in
New Jersey and Virginia, with turnout low in both races. In part that
was because of local conditions, of course. In Virginia, Democrat R.
Creigh Deeds ran as a conservative, and was attacked by the Republican
candidate, former state attorney general Robert McDonnell, as a
tax-happy liberal. With liberal voters in Virginia unenthusiastic about
Deeds, and Republicans revved up, the loss was a foregone conclusion,
even with Obama making two visits to campaign for Deeds, and with the
national Democratic Party pumping in $6 million in campaign funding.

In New Jersey, incumbent Democrat John Corzine was wildly unpopular
for raising taxes, so that even with Democrats holding an almost 2:1
registration advantage in the state (half of all voters are
unaffiliated), he too had no enthusiastic backing from his former base.
No amount of money poured in by the former Goldman Sachs chief
executive could overcome the negative views of his record as governor.

But despite the lackluster candidates in both Virginia and New
Jersey, I think it’s safe to say that there was also clear evidence
that the losses, and the margins of the losses—huge in Virginia’s case,
and significant in normally safely Democratic New Jersey—provide
evidence that the Obama presidency, and the prevailing Democratic
strategy of minimalist legislative initiatives on health care reform,
global warming etc., expanded and unending war in Afghanistan, support
for Wall Street and neglect of the one-in-five Americans who are
unemployed or underemployed, are a political disaster in the making for
Democrats in general and Obama in particular.

The president came into office on a wave of populist enthusiasm and
high expectations for the “change” candidate Obama promised. No change
has been forthcoming now for over nine months, and with the president
now past the first-year anniversary of his historic election victory,
the latest election results suggest that his presidency could already
be headed for the rocks.

2010 is an election year that will see all seats in the House, and
a third of the seats in the Senate up for grabs. Typically, a
president’s party loses seats in that election even when things are
going well. When things are not going well, the losses can be
significant.

Obama had a chance, coming into Washington after a big rout of
Republicans last year, to set out an agenda of major progressive
change. He could have called for expanding Medicare to cover all
Americans. Instead he handed health reform over to Congress and
immediately put out the word that he was open to compromise with
Republicans, thus dooming reform from the outset. He could have
announced a thorough review of America’s two wars, and then set in
motion a withdrawal form both Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead he dithered
on Iraq, and added troops in Afghanistan, assuring that both these
disasters inherited from the Bush/Cheney administration became his own
disasters, which will now drag on through his whole term. He could have
declared a global climate emergency, and announced a job-creating crash
program to develop renewable energy in the US and to make the US a
leader in renewable energy R&D. Instead, he did almost nothing in
this critical area. As for the economic crisis, he could have taken a
progressive stand against the abuses of Wall Street, ordered a criminal
investigation of the banking class, broken up the big banks and
established a new regulatory system to put an end to the era of casino
capitalism. Instead, he put the bankers in charge of Treasury and
poured trillions of dollars into the largest banks, allowing them to
grow even bigger and more predatory.

Voters, their collective assets shrunken over the year by $14
trillion, understandably are left wondering how, aside from better
verbal skills, this president differs from the last one. As for the
Democratic Congress, with Democrats pretending that nothing can be done
unless they have not just 60 seats in Congress, but perhaps 70 or 75
(enough to be able to survive the inevitable defection of conservative
members of the party), they can’t do anything of consequence—a claim
that only is true if, as is the case, the party’s leadership and the
president are unwilling to punish those who break rank.

If Democratic and progressive independent voters feel the same way
about Obama and the Democratic Congress next fall, it will be curtains
for the Democrats and for Obama’s presidency, such as it is.

And you know what? It won’t matter much if that happens, because
what we’re seeing is that having Obama in the White House, and
Democrats “in control” of Congress doesn’t get you much in the way of
progressive change.
___________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Country Joe, Kenny Rogers and Obama

dlindorff — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:26:02 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Country Joe McDonald
said it best in his iconic "Fixin' to Die" Rag: "Oh, it's one, two,
three, what are we fightin' for? Don't ask me. I don't give a damn." In
fact, we were fighting for nothing in Vietnam. It was a war that
started out because the US didn't want the Commies to win a battle in
the so-called Cold War, and even though it was on the farthest side of
the world, in a poor nation of peasants, even though they had been
struggling to throw off colonialism for years and we had simply become
the new colonists, no president dared to admit the obvious--we had no
business being there, and all the killing and dying had no point.

Afghanistan is the same thing all over again. We "got in"
surreptitiously for the same reason. Russia had helped organize a coup
to take over what passed for a "central government" and had found
itself mired in a brutal war of occuptation, and the US had begun, back
in the '70s, organizing and providing arms to the forces fighting the
Russians, not because Afghanistan--a country even more remote and
meaningless in terms of US interests or security than Vietnam--had any
importance but because it was a way to "stick it to" the Russians in
the waning days of the Cold War. But things have a way of coming back
to bite you, and the folks we armed turned out not to like us very much
either. So when we helped set up the foreign fighters--mostly Arab
volunteers--in Afghanistan, we set up a force of people who saw us, in
their home countries, as the oppressor and backer of vile and corrupt
regimes back home. It was only a matter of time before they began
turning their attentions to us. When 9-11 happened, we went after these
people in Afghanistan, and the government of the Taliban, which we had
formerly helped to power. In short order, what we managed to do was
substitute ourselves for the Russians.

What are we fighting for in Afghanistan? Don't ask me. I don't give
a damn. And neither do most Americans. For a while, Afghanistan was the
"good war" in many Americans' minds, because they bought the lie that
conquering Afghanistan was necessary to defend the US from terrorism.
Of course that was silly. Terrorists don't need countries. They are as
mobile as a nuclear submarine or a flu virus. But once you put large
numbers of troops in a foreign country and have them storming around
shooting up the place, and once you start bombing the crap out of
villages and killing people indiscriminately, you create a new
situation where you become the occupier. So here we are, fighting
another war that makes no sense, has no purpose, and has no end. Good
war? Necessary war? What a joke!

What are we fighting for in Afghanistan? Don't ask us. We don't
give a damn. And yet President Obama is now on track to add more
troops--maybe 20,000, maybe 40,000. Hell his general on the ground,
Gen. Stanley McCrystal, is asking for as much as 80,000, which would
put the total up to what it is in Iraq, where we're still bogged down
in an occupation quagmire.

That's where Kenny Rogers song "The Gambler" comes in. "You've got
to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk
away, know when to run."

We had a chance to walk away from Afghanistan back in 2001. The Al
Qaeda forces had been routed, the Taliban government had collapsed, and
people in much of the country of Afghanistan, who had been largely
spared any violence during the American attacks, were largely grateful
at having the yoke of fundamentalism lifted off their backs. But the US
didn't leave. A low-level war continued. More and more innocent people
were killed, or arrested and stuffed into a concentration camp and
torture hell-hole at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul, or shipped off to
the other hell-holes in Guantanamo Bay or other CIA secret sites. And
the Taliban were able to regroup and reposition themselves as saviors
of the nation. Now the US is cast as the occupier. We can't just "walk
away" anymore. We have to "fold 'em" and "run."

Will Obama have the sense of a gambler with a bad hand? So far the
signs are not good that he will. We are now in the position of having
70,000 US troops, soon to be closer to 100,000 troops, fighting,
killing and dying in a country run by a corrupt, vote-stealing leader
whose brother has long been known to be a leading profiteer in the
global opium/heroin trade, in which Afghanistan has become the world
leader (80-90 percent of the market) and, according to the New York Times,
for eight years and counting a paid CIA asset in charge of a
nation-wide death squad that is working on contract for The Agency.
Polls show that most Afghanis, understandably, want the US out of their
country. Wouldn't you?

A hand doesn't get much worse than that.

It's time to fold and run.

If we don't get the hell out of Afghanistan, then we'll all be
singing Country Joe's song, but with modified lyrics (which I just
premiered at a solo performance at a fund-raising dinner last week in
Philadelphia for the local chapter of Veterans for Peace):

Come on all you young women and men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He's got himself into a terrible jam,
Way off yonder in Afghanistan.
You ain't got a job, so pick up a gun!
We're gonna have a whole lotta fun!

All you folks in the National Guard,
You won't be protecting your back yard.
We may have floods and hurricanes here,
But you'll be dodging bullets in the desert there.
But if that's not what you signed up for,
We'll send you there a few times more!

General McCrystal, jump right in!
Your big chance has come again.
The VC whupped us back in '74,
But now you can show some Muslims what-for,
And maybe even earn you a medal or three,
Sittin' at your desk in DC.

Chorus:
Oh it's one, two, three what are we fightin' for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn.
Next stop's Afghanistan.
And it's five, six, seven, open up the Pearly Gates.
Ain't no time to wonder why.
Whoopee! We're all bound to die!

Come on mothers, here's the plan,
Send your son off to Afghanistan.
Come on fathers, it's all cool,
Send a daughter off to Ka-Bool.
And if they die, they come home free,
And nobody has to see.

chorus

Okay Wall Street, here's the deal:
Middle East oil is yours to steal.
Afghani blood, American too, is being shed now
Just for you!
And you can charge whatever you dare,
Cuz Washington don't care.

chorus

Bush and Obama, you've done your best,
You've made the Middle East into one sweet mess!
But that's okay, there's still a plan:
To divert attention just bomb Iran!
And if that seems a bit unwise,
Well hell, you've got the Nobel Prize!

Chorus:
And it's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop's...
Pakistan?

_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and folksinger.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Our Out-of-Whack Economy and the Happy Talk Propagandists

dlindorff — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:42:23 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

If you listen to the happy-talk folks at Treasury and the Fed, and
on the tube, you’d think things had finally turned a corner. The
economy grew at a 3.5% annualized rate in the third quarter ended
September 30. “The Economy is Back in Gear” shouted the headline on an
article by CNN senior writer Chris Isadore. “The recession ended
unofficially in September,” said a reporter on NPR.

There was some mention of the fact that earlier in the week there
were reports that consumer confidence had fallen, foretelling a
sluggish Christmas retail season, and that new home sales slipped an
unanticipatedly high 3.6% in September, when analysts had been
expecting a rise in sales. Meanwhile, new unemployment claims filed
during the third week of October jumped to 531,000, well above the
predicted 520,000, indicating that the official unemployment rate is
likely to top 10% in the next Department of Labor report due out in
early November. As well, fully one-third of the nation’s homeowners
were now said to be “underwater,” meaning that their outstanding
mortgage balances are greater than the current value of their homes.
Not surprisingly, foreclosures are continuing to surge.

How to explain this seeming oxymoronic situation? Well, that
positive economic growth figure, which comes on the heels of a 6.4%
decline in GDP in the first quarter and a .7% decline in the second
quarter, is, according to government analysts, actually largely the
result of two government stimulus programs—the “cash for clunkers”
program that induced people to rush out and buy a new car (usually a
much smaller, cheaper and, for the car makers, less profitable one than
they had been buying in prior years), and the $8,000 new home tax
credit, which led a lot of people to rush out and buy a first home.

The thing about those two stimulus programs is that they don’t so
much expand economic activity as they push it forward. That is to say,
a person who takes advantage of the cash-for-clunker program is
generally someone who owns a worn-out junker and needs to buy a new
vehicle anyhow, so what the government subsidy does really is just push
that purchase forward. Once the program ended, sales of cars plummeted
(not to mention that the bulk of the payments went to people who
purchased foreign cars, so the economic boost was just for dealers in
the US, not car makers). The same is true with houses. Very few people
would make the decision about whether to buy a home or not based on
just $8000, but the availability of an $8000 government subsidy for a
limited time would lead people to push forward their plan to purchase a
home.

What that means is, don’t count on this “recovery” to last into
next year. The cars that needed to be bought have been bought, and the
homes that people wanted to buy have been bought. The car subsidy is
gone now, and even extending the home buying subsidy, as the realty
industry lobby is pressing Congress to do, isn’t going to induce that
many more people to buy.

Meanwhile it’s worth noting an oddity about this “recovery” being
trumpeted in government and media. The relationship between the dollar
and the stock market has become very strange. If you look back at
stories on these two things to 2007, before the financial crisis hit,
and earlier, you’ll see myriad articles explaining that the dollar and
the US stock market tend to move in tandem. This was always explained
as being because as the dollar strengthens, foreign investors want to
put their money into dollar-denominated assets. Similarly, if the
dollar weakened, analysts would write confidently that the stock market
would be hurt as investors pulled their money out of US equities to
invest in markets denominated in appreciating currencies.

Now, the analysts say that as equities strengthen, the dollar will
fall, but if equities fall, the dollar will appreciate. The reason for
this new inverse relationship should be cause for considerable alarm.
Why? In fact, it turns out that the last eight months of a rising
equities market has been largely the direct result of a shrinking
dollar. This is because so much of the sales and earnings of companies
in the S&P 500 and the much narrower Dow Index are earned overseas,
denominated in foreign currencies, but accounted for on the books of
these US-incorporated firms in dollars, that as the dollar declines in
value, corporate sales and earnings appear to be growing. Reportedly,
as much as 80 percent of the appreciation in the S&P Index since
last March 9 when the market hit bottom can be attributed to the
dollar’s fall against major world currencies.

Financial writers and reporters on TV don’t mention this tectonic
shift. They just report the new relationship (Stocks up, dollar down,
stocks down, dollar up) as though that’s they way it’s always been. But
actually, this is a phenomenon has normally ben characteristic of Third
World, so-called “developing” economies. That since the end of 2008 it
has become characteristic of the US economy should be cause for concern.

So don’t be conned by the happy talk salesmen at the Fed and
Treasury and in the White House, or by their propagandists in the
newsmedia, who are trumpeting the latest GDP growth figure as a sign
that the recession is over, apparently in the hopes that people will
run out to the mall and start spending (in those remaining stores that
don’t have their windows taped or covered in plywood). What we’ve seen
was a blip on the chart, engineered by a couple of “going out of
business” sales by the car and housing industry.

Real unemployment—measured the honest way it used to be 30 years
ago, to include those who have given up looking for work or who are
working part time involuntarily—is hitting 20% (for those who are bad
at math, that’s one out of five working-age Americans). Foreclosures
are hitting a record. Half of laid-off workers are cashing out their
401(k)s in order to buy food. State and local governments, both major
employers, are hitting a wall as tax collections plummet and federal
stimulus funds run out. This is not the foundation for a renewal of
economic growth; it is the precondition for a renewed or prolonged
recession.

And if the dollar continues its slide, which is likely given the
US’s huge budget deficits and trade deficits, as well as the Federal
Reserve’s inability to raise interest rates (a move that could
strengthen the dollar but which would crush the economy), all those
things that Americans buy abroad which are no longer made at home, as
well as the oil that is imported, will cost that much more, driving
consumers further into the hole. And remember, 70% of US GDP is
consumer spending, a result of our decimation of our industrial base.

Recession ending? Don’t bet on it.

_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Agent Orange in Vietnam: Ignoring the Crimes Before Our Eyes

dlindorff — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:51:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story headlined
“Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange,” which was sure to
be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It
reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly
dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was
acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13
ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also
responsible for three more dread diseases—Parkinson’s, ischemic heart
disease and hairy-cell leukemia.

Under a new policy adopted by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the VA
will now start providing free care to any of the 2.1 million
Vietnam-era veterans who can show that they might have been hurt by
exposure to Agent Orange.

This is another belated step forward in the decades-long struggle
by Vietnam War veterans to get the Defense Department and the VA to
acknowledge the American government’s responsibility for poisoning them
and causing permanent damage to them and often to their children and
grandchildren. Dioxin, one of the most poisonous substances known to
man, is known to cause many serious systemic diseases, autoimmune
illnesses, cancers and birth defects. (It is also a warning about the
general Pentagon and government approach to other hazards caused by its
battlefield use of toxins—most significantly the increasingly common
use of depleted uranium projectiles in bombs, shells and bullets—an
approach which features lack of concern about health effects on troops
and civilians, denial of information to troops, and denial of care to
eventual victims.)

Missing from the Times article, written by military
affairs reporter James Dao, which did include mention of the
obstructionist role the government has played through this whole sorry
saga, was a single mention of the far larger number of victims of Agent
Orange in Vietnam—the people on whose heads and lands the toxic
chemical was actually dropped, or of the adamant refusal by the US
government to accept any responsibility for what it did to them.

Thai Thi Nga, 16, 2nd-generation victim of US Agent Orange use in Vietnam

According to the article, the VA estimates that there may be as
many as 200,000 US veterans who are suffering from Agent Orange-related
illnesses. But according to a court case brought on behalf of
Vietnamese victims, which was dismissed by a US Federal District Judge
who ruled that there was “no basis for the claims,” there are at least
three million Vietnamese, and possibly as many as 4.8 million, who are
suffering the same Agent Orange-related illnesses as American veterans
and their children. It is estimated that as many as 800,000 Vietnamese
in the country’s south currently suffer from chronic health problems
due to Agent Orange exposure, either to themselves, or to a parent or
grandparent. Most of these victims, some of whom are retarded, and
others of whom cannot walk or have no use of their arms, need constant
care.

Veterans for Peace,
an organization whose membership includes a large number of Vietnam War
veterans, has issued a call for the US to provide funds for health
care, education, vocational education, chronic care, home care and
equipment to clean up hotspots of dioxin in Vietnam—a call which
Congress and the White House have consistently ignored. Tests have
found dioxin levels around the sites of the three main former US bases
in what was South Vietnam to be 300-400 times recognized safe levels.
The US dumped huge amounts of Agent Orange for miles around those bases
to kill off jungle cover that Vietnamese fighters could use to approach
the bases, but it was never cleaned up when the US pulled out.

One organization that includes a number of American veterans of the
way, including former military doctors or soldiers who later became
physicians, is the Vietnam Friendship Village Project USA Inc., which raises funds to help establish communities in Vietnam to care for the victims of Agent Orange.

It may seem a pathetic stab at principle given America’s use of two
nuclear weapons against civilian targets in Japan a few years later,
but back in World War II, in the midst of the most brutal
island-to-island fighting during the Pacific War, a US Judge Advocate
General in the Pentagon ruled that a military request for permission to
use herbicides against the Japanese on Pacific islands would be illegal
under the Hague Convention (forerunner of what are now called the
Geneva Conventions). He ruled that trying to destroy the crops of
civilians on those islands to deny food to the Japanese troops would be
a war crime. The US went ahead and used the herbicides anyway, arguing
that even though it was illegal, the US was free to go ahead, since the
Japanese had already broken the laws of war by using strychnine to kill
military guard dogs in Siberia. Under the rules of war, if one side
breaks a rule, the other side is no longer bound by it.

But the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese never used toxic materials
against US forces or against South Vietnamese forces. And the Pentagon
in the Vietnam War never even considered whether spraying a highly
toxic herbicide over 1.4 million hectares—12% of the total land area of
Vietnam and almost 25% of the southern half of the country—might be a
war crime.

Moreover, the Pentagon knew, before it began its massive
defoliation campaign, about studies showing that Agent Orange was
heavily laced with deadly dioxin, but covered up those studies, some by
the chemical’s makers, Dow Chemical and Monsanto, and never even warned
the troops who handled the material daily, or who were sent out to
fight in areas that had been heavily sprayed.

The ongoing medical disaster in Vietnam caused by America’s
criminal use of Agent Orange to defoliate a nation would be a good
place for President Obama to start earning his just-awarded Nobel Peace
Prize. He could kick off his peace campaign by finally honoring
President Richard Nixon’s immediately broken promise to provide several
billion dollars in reconstruction aid to Vietnam at the conclusion of
peace talks at the end of the war. Not a dollar of such aid was ever
given.

Meanwhile, perhaps the New York Times could salvage a bit
of its journalistic reputation by having Dao or some other reporter
write a piece about the impact of America’s Agent Orange use on the
people of Vietnam.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The Democrats: Really, You Just Gotta Laugh

dlindorff — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:46:07 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The Democrats in Congress, and their main man Barack Obama in the
White House, have taken tens of millions in legal bribes from the
health insurance industry over the past year, and have obligingly been
hammering out in Congress a health “reform” bill that, instead of
helping people, has been designed to help the insurance industry.

They started out by immediately blackballing any discussion of real
health reform in the form of an expansion of Medicare to cover everyone
of every age, which of course would have ended the problem of the
uninsured, while cutting the nation’s overall health bill by at least a
third, but in the process shutting down the private health insurance
business.

Then they chipped away and are at this point on the verge of
eliminating any so-called “public option” or government-run health
insurance plan to even compete with the private insurance sector.

Finally, in a move as breathtakingly accommodating of the insurance
industry as was the multi-trillion-dollar bailout financial bailout of
Wall Street’s biggest banks, they proposed to require (on pain of a
$3800 fine by the IRS) to require everyone in America to buy a health
insurance plan from the private sector—a gift to the industry of some
40-50 million new captive customers.

But a combination of public outrage at this forced program of
compulsory insurance and recognition that the inevitable government
subsidy of low-income insurance buyers would be humongous has led
Congress to backtrack, and start backing away from the mandatory aspect
of this plan.

And now the private insurance industry, not satisfied that it has
managed to practically dictate the terms of the health reform
legislation so far, and angry that it might not get those 40-50 million
new forced customers, is reportedly threatening to turn around and
knife the president and the Democratic Congress in the back,

They’re threatening to (gasp!) start running attack ads on the “reform” legislation.

Remember the old “Harry and Louise” ads the industry ran attacking
Hillary and Bill Clinton’s health reform proposal back in the early
1990s? Well, this time, it’ll be Harry and Louise attacking ObamaCare.

I can see it now. America’s Health Insurance Plans, the lobby for
the insurance industry vultures, will set up some nice-sounding front
group with a name like People for a Healthier America, and they’ll fund
a new ad campaign like this:

Harry will be sitting at the breakfast table, reading the local
paper. He’ll look up from his coffee as Louise is puttering around by
the sink.

“This ObamaCare looks like it’s gonna drive up our insurance premiums, hon.”

“What do you mean Harry?”

“Well it says here that they’re not going to force the poor
folks to buy insurance, so most of ‘em will probably wait until they
get sick and then buy it.”

“Well what’s wrong with that, dear?”

“Nothin’ ‘cept that the law would also prohibit the insurance
companies from charging those sick folks higher premiums when they do
finally come in to buy insurance.”

“Well, wouldn’t it be unfair to charge them more, when they need it?”

“It might seem that way Louise, but if the insurance company
has to take a loss on them, they’re going to make it up by charging us
good folks who have insurance more.”

“Oh my god, Harry! We’re already paying $6,000 a year for our insurance. What will our premiums go up to?

“Says here they could go up by another $1000 a year!”

Announcer: Don’t let Congress make you pay for the uninsured.
Call your Senators and Representatives and the White House, and tell
them to demand that every American be required to buy insurance
immediately! This announcement is brought to you by People for a
Healthier America.

It’s funny really, to see Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana), the biggest
recipient in Congress of insurance industry money, who has spent the
last few months working hand-in-glove with the insurance industry
lobbyists to craft a bill to their liking, suddenly accusing his
erstwhile financiers of doing a “hatchet job” on his bill. Actually,
his bill has been a hatchet job itself on the whole concept of health
care reform.

All of this, of course, was entirely predictable. Like HillaryCare
before it, ObamaCare has been doomed from the start by its
unwillingness to address the basic issue behind America’s twin crisis
of health care: lack of access for those with lower incomes, and
absurdly high cost for everyone.

What makes it all so pathetic is that America already has
an excellent model for delivering quality health care: a single-payer
system called Medicare. Everyone in America gets this program, just
like in Canada, Germany, France, Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere. The only
difference is that in those other countries, people get it from the day
they’re born. In America, you have to wait until you are permanently
disabled, or until you reach the age of 65.

Far from having to “start from scratch,” as Obama duplicitously
claimed in his last address to Congress in explaining why he was not
proposing a single-payer solution despite its obvious success in other
countries, solving America’s health crisis by adopting a single-payer
system would be a simply matter of taking a well proven system that
works and is popular, and expanding it to cover everybody.

But of course that would have made the insurance industry furious.
They’d have to go back to just selling life insurance and homeowners
insurance and car insurance.

And so we can expect a new round of “Harry and Louise,” and ObamaCare will go down in flames.

You have to laugh at these Democrats. Even when they brazenly try to sell out, they get screwed.

________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author
of “Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains”
(Bantam Books, 1992) and most recently of “The Case for Impeachment”
(St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

WTF? Obama Gets the Nobel Peace Prize?

dlindorff — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:13:53 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

It’s not as much of a travesty as when Henry Kissinger, a war criminal of the first order who was an architect of the latter stages of the Indochina War, and was personally responsible for the slaughter of well over a million innocent people, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, while that war was still raging, but the awarding of the latest Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama is travesty enough.

We’re talking about a man whose practically first act upon taking office early this year was to escalate the ugly and pointless war in Afghanistan with the addition of some 20,000 troops, and who, even as the Nobel committee was discussing his award, was meeting with his military and political advisors to consider expanding that war even further, both in Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan.

The Nobel Committee claimed that during Obama’s short period as president, the US “is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened."

Well, certainly when compared to the prior presidency of George W. Bush, that statement is correct, but that’s not saying much. After all, under President Obama, Guantanamo’s terrorist prison is still in operation and is holding people whom even the government admits are guilty of nothing. Under President Obama, the US has also blocked the Goldstone Report which condemns Israel of war crimes in its recent assault on Gaza. And under Obama, the US military in Afghanistan has continued to slaughter disproportionate numbers of civilians through its wanton use of aerial bombardment, pilotless Predator drones, and antipersonnel weaponry.

President Obama may have, as the Nobel Committee states, put forward a vision of nuclear disarmament, but his administration at the same time continues to refuse to sign the international anti-landmine treaty (putting America in the wretched company of just Russia, India and China). And under Obama, the US continues its role as not only the leading producer and exporter of arms, but also as the major initiator of wars in the world. Under Obama the US continues to outspend the rest of the world’s nations combined on its military. And don’t forget, Obama, like President Bush before him, continues to threaten to attack Iran, over that nation’s alleged nuclear weapons program—a program the very existence of which remains highly debatable.

As for climate change policy, President Obama in practice has taken a largely hands-off approach to getting Congress to act, not using his considerable political clout to force action on climate change legislation. It is now conceded that the US will go to the international climate conference in December with no bill passed to limit or reduce the nation’s CO2 emissions. Nor is the Obama administration likely to push for any significant program of CO2 reductions in the future.

Nominations for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize closed on Feb. 1, less than two weeks after Obama took the oath of office as President, but the Nobel Committee in Norway had a good nine months since then to observe this president’s actions—and his lack of actions—on the key issues weighing on the decision. In the end, committee members were bamboozled by this president’s rhetoric of hope just as were the American people during the election campaign. As the committee wrote in announcing its decision: "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future."

If Nobel Peace prizes are being awarded to people who are simply giving the world hope, surely the judges could have found any number of worthy speechifiers. Hell, even the dictatorial leaders of China and North Korea can make flowery speeches about peace and human dignity. More to the point, the committee had under consideration at least two far more deserving nominees for the award who were actually acting at great personal risk to further peace and human rights: Chinese freedom-fighter Hu Jia and Afghani women’s rights advocate Simi Samar. It is an insult to the memory of former award winners like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jody Williams, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa, and others who put their lives and careers on the line to struggle for peace and human dignity to give this award to a man who has accomplished so little, and who, in fact, in his short time in office, has managed to expand one war, to block the international condemnation of the brutality of another, and who has done nothing to reverse his own country’s leading role as a promoter of war and international violence.

Henry Kissinger hung his blood-drenched Nobel Peace Award on his office wall on Wall Street and continued to make obscene sums of money off human suffering in his dotage. One can only hope (ah, that intoxicating word!) that President Obama will take his award seriously, and will use his new status as official man of peace to halt America’s campaign of violence in Afghanistan, calling a regional peace conference to settle that conflict instead of simply expanding the war, that he will announce a major cut in American military spending and a halt to arms exports, that he will sign the landmine treaty and voluntarily end the production and use of antipersonnel weapons of all kinds, and that he will finally have the US join the International Criminal Court of Justice.

Right. Now that’s the audacity of hope.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Obamanologues at Flashpoint

obamanologues — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:26:07 -0400

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Obamanologues at Flashpoint
Theater (916 G Street NW,
Washington DC)

Written by R.M. Peete

Directed by
R.M. Peete

September 25
at 7 p.m.

September 26 at 7
p.m.

September 27 at 2
p.m.

September 30 –
October 3 at 7 p.m.

October 4 at 2 p.m.

October 7 at 7 p.m.

October 8 at 8:30
p.m.

October 9 – 10 at 7
p.m.

October 11 at 2 p.m.

[Pay-What-You-Can Previews: September 23 and 24 at
7:00 p.m.]
Tickets: available www.obamanologues.com and at the door

Ten, twenty, or thirty years from now, what
will you recall about the election of President Barack Obama?

Obamanologues provides a unique, historical account of a
one-of-a-kind event in U.S.
history with characters that represent diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds,
political affiliations, and socioeconomic groups.

With stories ranging from conversational
to rebellious to scholarly, Obamanologues
depicts emotions and behaviors displayed
by people in living rooms, classrooms, bus stops, and churches throughout the country.

This political theatre production is one
you do not want to miss!