Afghanistan

Audio: Scott Horton Interviews David Swanson

davidswanson — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:15:06 -0500

Listen here!

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

C-Span to Show David Swanson Book Event on Cable and Online Sunday Nov. 22nd 7:45 a.m. ET

davidswanson — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:28:10 -0500

C-Span's Book TV, which can be watched on cable television on C-Span 2 or online at http://www.booktv.org plans to air a book event they recorded when I was in Miami, Florida.

Here's more info.

They'd told me they would run about 90 minutes, and so that was -- I think -- about what I did, including opening remarks and questions and answers. But their website says they're showing 1 hr and 7 min, which makes me suspect that they cut something out, most likely some of the Q&A. That's unfortunate.

I expect it to be a good show, in any case, and remember it as a good event. Please tell everyone to watch, record it, spread the word. Thanks!

Here's more about the book: "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union."

Authoritative Rejection of Afghanistan War

davidswanson — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:29:04 -0500

By David Swanson

The last time I was on Laura Flanders's GRIT tv I argued that the American public opposed the occupation of Afghanistan, but another guest -- some Washington, D.C., "progressive" -- argued that this had no relevance, since the American public didn't know anything about Afghanistan.

When the RAND Corporation held a forum on Afghanistan recently on Capitol Hill, Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed that it was uncontroversial that US troops had to stay in Afghanistan. I pointed him to polls of Americans, and he replied that Americans get fatigued and don't know any better.

When I spoke to a philosophy department at a university this month, a number of the professors objected to my advocacy of majority-rule on the grounds that experts often know best.

Let's set aside for a moment the ludicrous propaganda that maintains that the reason we occupy other people's countries is to impose democracy on them. Let's assume we're imposing the rule of elite experts. Even so, even on those terms, here are some possible responses to this line of thinking.

1.-While spokepeople for the U.S. military (including television news experts) are certainly the experts at war, they are not the experts at peace. If the question is one of choosing between war and peace, or deciding whether warlike or peacelike means will best reach some desired end, then why only include one type of expert opinion?

2.-While U.S. experts on war and peace could provide two different views, there are experts, including historians, from around the world whose knowledge should be utilized. And the experts on Afghanistan ought, by any understanding, to include the Afghan people. If the US public is irrelevant because it does not know Afghanistan (and somehow this is an argument for bombing the place rather than refraining from doing so), surely the Afghan public knows something about their nation. And they want the occupation ended. How can we so easily dismiss THAT expert opinion?

3.-Don't trust Afghan opinion? Want to save Afghanistan from the Afghans? Well, what about this: Howard Hart, a 25-year CIA veteran who ran operations in Afghanistan for three-and-a-half years during the Cold War, spoke at the University of Virginia yesterday and argued that the United States should withdraw from Afghanistan. He said that the original goal had supposedly been to destroy al Qaeda, which had long since left, and that creating a legitimate government (something most people and the law hold that a foreign occupation can NEVER do) would require hundreds of thousands of troops, cost “umpteen billion” dollars, and still be next to impossible. Watch three former high-ranking CIA officials say the same thing, and a lot more worth watching, at http://rethinkafghanistan.com

4.-Too out-dated for you? The current U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, General Karl W. Eikenberry, who was responsible for building and training the Afghan security forces from 2002 to 2003, and who was top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, has told President Obama he opposes sending more troops. He argues for sending civilians to assist with agriculture and other useful projects that would give Afghans an alternative to violence. This is a direction supported by US activist groups that have visited Afghanistan and studied the problem, such as http://jobsforafghans.org

5.-New York Times reporter David Rohde was held hostage for seven months by the Taliban in Afghanistan, and upon release reported on what motivates Afghans to engage in violence. The reasons he provided suggested that (as with most foreign occupations in any other time or place) the occupation was motivating the violent resistance to it rather than helping to ease unrelated tensions:

"Some of the consequences of Washington’s antiterrorism policies had galvanized the Taliban. Commanders fixated on the deaths of Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian civilians in military airstrikes, as well as the American detention of Muslim prisoners who had been held for years without being charge. . . . They said large numbers of civilians had been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Palestinian territories in aerial bombings. Muslim prisoners had been physically abused and sexually humiliated in Iraq. Scores of men had been detained in Cuba and Afghanistan for up to seven years without charges. To Americans, these episodes were aberrations. To my captors, they were proof that the United States was a hypocritical and duplicitous power that flouted international law. When I told them I was an innocent civilian who should be released, they responded that the United States had held and tortured Muslims in secret detention centers for years. Commanders said they themselves had been imprisoned, their families ignorant of their fate. Why, they asked, should they treat me differently?"

6. The senior U.S. civilian diplomat in Zabul province, a former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq named Matthew Hoh, not only agrees with the U.S. Ambassador that escalating the war in Afghanistan makes no sense. He resigned in September in protest of the continued occupation. He wrote in his resignation letter:

"The U.S. and NATO presence and operations in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified. In both RC East and South, I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul. The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency. In a like manner our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people. . . . Our support for this kind of government, coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency's true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam."

7. A career diplomat and former Army Colonel who helped reopen the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Ann Wright, similarly resigned in protest of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. She now agrees with Hoh's assessment on Afghanistan. It is to such authorities, who have been right years ahead of any permissible schedule, that we should turn for guidance. Also of note, the United Nations has withdrawn much of its international staff and threatened to withdraw entirely from Afghanistan. NATO allies are scheduling the end of their participation as well.

8. U.S. President Barack Obama's national security adviser, James Jones, says there is no guarantee that sending troops to Afghanistan would accomplish anything useful, and that they could just be "swallowed up". Is the National Security Advisor's advice worthless? What about Vice President Biden who never saw a war he didn't like? He doesn't like this one and wants to move it somewhere else (like Pakistan).

9. Mikhail Gorbachev has some experience with occupations of Afghanistan. He advises withdrawal.

10. Increasingly, U.S. military veterans are advocating for withdrawal, and -- in small but rapidly growing numbers -- active duty soldiers (in the UK as well as the US) are refusing to comply with the illegal order to participate. If the military is an authority, are its members -- rather than its top commanders alone -- not a part of that authority?

11. The money to pay back the loans and the interest on those loans that are used to fund this war must come from the American people. There is no higher authority on where the American people choose to spend their money than the American people. So, at some point we must return to them as the rightful deciders.

12. Those who opposed attacking Afghanistan in the first place, including Congresswoman Barbara Lee, and those who opposed attacking Iraq as well, included long-time diplomats, historians, public commentators, journalists, bloggers, activists, politicians, and scholars. The extraordinary degree to which they got things right is routinely treated as reason to exclude them from public debate. We take as authoritative the opinions of people who are usually wrong, but censor the latest views of those who are usually right. We do this at our peril. Instead, we would be well advised to get some real news from RealNews.com: http://tr.im/ETuV And if we have to watch television, watch Bill Moyers who says he would support a draft if it would end these wars. Or listen to Norman Solomon, Ray McGovern, Tom Hayden, Gareth Porter, and all the valuable reports not shown on Fox or MSNBC: http://afterdowningstreet.org/taxonomy/term/110

13. Ought not the highest authority for non-criminals to be the law? It is illegal to invade and occupy other nations. It is illegal to target civilians. It is illegal to use depleted uranium. It is illegal to imprison people without charge or trial. It is illegal to torture. An unelected government supported by a foreign occupying army has no legitimacy. The damage we are doing to the rule of law cannot be overstated. The United Nations has warned the United States about its ongoing illegal use of drones.

14. Just ask some of the more courageous members of the Afghan Parliament, who have been locally elected. Ask Malalai Joya.

15. Ask experts on occupations and insurgencies like William Polk, who says the United States should withdraw.

16. Ask Congress, where members are speaking out for withdrawal, signing bills in support of exit plans and against escalation, and committing to voting No on any funding bills to continue the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq: http://afterdowningstreet.org/whipwars Even former Congressman Charlie Wilson says: Get out of Afghanistan. Even Congressman David Obey has expressed concern, and he chairs the committee that writes the checks.

17. Shouldn't reverse experts be considered as well? Those pushing to continue and escalate our wars have been endlessly wrong and indisputably dishonest. Shouldn't any elite in-the-know expert think twice before agreeing with Dick Cheney?

I'm not accepting the notion of just rule by experts. I favor majority rule, with minority rights protected, and freedom of the press made real. My point is that even on its own terms defending the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq as validated by experts is a miserable failure.

David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book.

Video: Bruce Gagnon Interviews David Swanson

davidswanson — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:50:13 -0500

This is the latest from Bruce Gagnon's cable TV show, which is shown all across the state of Maine, and which you can ask to have shown in your part of the country.

Watch Video.

(It's way better quality than the internet requires, so please be very patient for it to start. Then ask your local cable station to play it.)

Here's the source with more information. And we expect smaller versions to be posted there soon for those of you not working at super computers.

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

How to End Wars

davidswanson — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 08:46:22 -0500

By David Swanson

Around the United States, peace groups are engaged in effective campaigns against proposed new military installations, local funding of weapons companies, and the routine destruction of the environment and of workers' health by such companies. Activists are building better media outlets, educating young people, educating old people, keeping military testing and recruiting out of schools, and discouraging the Army from building real-weapon video arcades in shopping malls. But when it comes to stopping our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, our citizens are less clear how to go about it.

The peace movement was defunded and demobilized by the absurd belief that an election alone would make a difference, and now there is widespread desire to tell everyone that it didn't. Certainly, it didn't. We have a larger military budget, bases in more nations, and more troops and mercenaries on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq combined now than before the election. We need to understand that this was entirely predictable and predicted. Those who expected something from an election alone need to be clear that such expectation was entirely - not just partially - misguided. Disappointment with a president needs to be replaced with acknowledgement of strategic error. The latter generates less despair and allows clearer thinking about strategy going forward.

There is still and will always be a role for journalists, bloggers, authors, and pundits to expose the abuses of any and all government officials, including the president. But the primary role of peace activists should have nothing to do with presidents, or with senators. We have virtually no ability to influence them. When you're invited to discuss these wars on a television show, by all means expose what the president is doing. But asking members of an activist group to spend their time writing or calling the White House is a waste of energy that could be better used. It should be directed at the House of Representatives.

And when we look at the House, we see that the easiest way to quickly generate a large list of cosponsors is to propose bills. This pleases our closest allies in the House and impresses funders and allies in Washington, D.C. But it is not the easiest way to use the House to actually end wars. A bill with no teeth to it instructing the Pentagon to produce a plan to exit Afghanistan someday is something that one could almost imagine passing the Senate and being signed by the president. At best that process might move public opinion a bit more in the right direction. But it would further enforce in the public's minds, and Congress's, the idea that when and where wars are fought should be determined by the president or the Pentagon.

Passing a bill barring the spending of any money on an escalation in Afghanistan shifts the discussion to one of opposing an escalation rather than demanding withdrawal. This has led many peace groups to self-censor their demands for withdrawal. And passing such a bill through the Senate and persuading the President to sign it, or overriding a veto is a beautiful fantasy, but a far, far, far more difficult undertaking than a simpler and more direct approach.

If you want to stop funding wars, or even just the escalation of wars, the easiest way is to just not fund them. This can be done in the House alone. The Senate is not needed. The president is not needed. Rather than passing a bill stating that you won't fund wars, and then dreaming about getting the Senate to pass it too, you can choose to not pass bills that fund the wars. If the House makes clear that it will not fund an escalated war, then the war cannot be escalated. If the House makes clear that it will not fund a continued war, then the war cannot be continued.

The process of signing congress members onto a bill against funding or a bill requiring an exit plan is not counterproductive. It nudges them in the right direction. It creates a discussion about the possibility of including such measures in funding bills. It identifies lists of congress members to target in lobbying for stronger commitments. But when these bills are all we ask for, then they are not compromises or middle-ground. They are harder to move forward when they are all we ask for. And moving them forward without a broader vision of how we actually end the wars doesn't get us anywhere in the end.

Our primary demand must be: publicly commit to voting no on any bill that funds these wars. If unrelated measures are included in such bills, they must still be voted down and those other measures passed separately. If your representative is worried about funding a withdrawal itself, assure them that a bill to fund purely withdrawal has our support. If they are worried about abandoning foreign nations, assure them that we support diplomacy and aid. But we need them to join the list of their colleagues who have committed to voting no on bills that fund the wars. And we need them to lobby their colleagues to join them on that list.

By moving our focus to Congress we do something else useful. We allow people to protest wars who refuse to protest a president. By identifying wars with a president, we grant all future presidents the power to make wars, and we discourage participation in citizen activism by people who fantasize about the president being their friend or who think it's not wise to protest a popular president.

Our focus on Congress should include their responsibility on Iraq as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan. Congress has now required the Pentagon to provide it with monthly reports on its progress toward fully withdrawing from Iraq by the end of 2011. When those reports are not forthcoming or do not credibly suggest progress toward that goal, congressional committees must be forced by us to subpoena Secretary of "Defense" Robert Gates. And in fact, the House Judiciary Committee must be compelled by us as soon as possible to restore the checking power of impeachment by opening an impeachment inquiry into Jay Bybee, a federal judge who, while employed by the Justice Department, signed memos purporting to legalize torture and aggressive war. At the very least, Bybee must be subpoenaed, and Congress must use the Capitol Police to enforce that subpoena rather than futilely asking the Justice Department to do it.

If Congress asserts the power to hold war criminals accountable (which, again, can be done without the Senate or the president), we will be in a far better position to deter further wars and escalations, and Congress will be in a better position to cut off funding.

In June, 32 congress members voted No on war funding. They should be thanked and rewarded. But they should, above all, be asked and pressured to make a commitment to join this list of members committed to voting No from here on out: http://afterdowningstreet.org/whipwars

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said that he'd like to see another $50 billion passed in another supplemental war spending bill in the next few months. This is money to fund an escalation that we are supposed to believe has not been decided upon yet. This must be stopped. Some congress members are speaking against it. Even the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee David Obey has suggested he might oppose this. He very much needs to be encouraged by people around the nation to not put our money where his mouth isn't.

I just had the privilege of speaking at a rally in Portland, Maine, where an enthusiastic crowd of Mainers demanded the actions I'm proposing here. Their two congress members voted the right way in June, and they are working to win their public commitments to continue that practice and to lobby their colleagues to join them in that commitment.

Resources to help in this effort (and a place to report your results) in your congressional district can be found at http://afterdowningstreet.org/whipwars. Here's a flyer on ending the war in Vietghanistan: PDF. Here's how to step up your activism. Here's what's needed instead of bombs and guns. Here's a way to nonviolently resist.

Here's a very useful list of top targets and multiple ways to contact them. You can help with that even if they are not your representative.

What I am proposing is not easy. It's just the easiest path we have. It will be easier, the more of us get involved, the more of us refrain from discouraging each other with our knowledge of how hard the struggle will be, and the more of us who are willing to go beyond lobbying to nonviolently disrupting, including by sitting in our congress members' offices and refusing to leave until they agree to leave Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. These wars, like all wars, are Congress's wars. The blood is on their hands and they represent us.

Video: Maine Demands End to Wars

davidswanson — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:02:33 -0500

Five Videos:

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