Obama, Zionism and Arbitrary detention (the NDAA)

Early in 2011 a colleague in a political chat group wrote that President Obama was a more virulent form of Bush. After some reflection, I concluded that my colleague wasn’t exaggerating; he was right in thinking that Obama was more dangerous than Bush because he was institutionalizing some of the worst policies of the previous administration. A striking example of President Obama’s ability to enact dangerous legislation is his quiet signing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2011.

Obama’s last minute maneuver successfully minimized press coverage, as was its evident intention. Apparently the administration did not wish to highlight a contentious provision of the law which authorized the military to arrest anyone, including U.S. citizens and legal residents, and detain them, possibly for life if they were suspected of “substantially supporting” Al Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces.”[i] The effect of the new legislation was to override the jurisdiction of the FBI, apparently in order to skirt the due process that would normally be accorded a detainee if the local police or the Justice Department were involved.[ii]

It’s worth emphasizing that granting the President the power of arbitrary arrest means an end to habeas corpus, the legal right of a defendant to demand that government present evidence justifying the arrest, an indispensable barrier to the tyranny of a police state. In addition, as Alexander Cockburn pointed out (“The Man Who Shot Habeas Corpus,” The Nation, January 23, 2012), President Obama’s New Year’s Eve signature has also rendered a dead letter the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 intended to exclude the military from domestic law enforcement.

In the weeks before a bi-partisan Congress passed the NDAA into law by a Senate vote of 93-7 and by 283-186 in the House, President Obama threatened to veto the bill. Many were at first misled by this veto threat, thinking that Obama intended to defend the due process rights of U.S. citizens and others.  However, as it turned out, there was no such intention, and the President signed the bill with only minor changes, leaving its draconian and alarming provisions in full force.[iii]

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones of Infowars.com noted that the drive to remove longstanding protections came from the White House, not Congress. They point to a floor speech by Democrat co-sponsor Senator Carl Levin who said that it was the Obama administration “that demanded the removal of language that would have precluded Americans from being subject to indefinite detention.”

“The language which precluded the application of Section 1031 to American citizens was in the bill that we originally approved…and the administration asked us to remove the language which says that U.S. citizens and lawful residents would not be subject to this section,” said Levin, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee.[iv]

President Obama’s sweeping activism on this and other issues would seem to put into question conventional media characterization of him as a weak, compromising, reflective, sober, cautious, moderate executive. On the contrary, on this and many other national security and domestic priorities, he seems focused, manipulative, ruthless, even driven. In any event it may be useful to highlight the means by which the President has succeeded in implementing and “legalizing” such a radical policy as arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention.

As the leader of the Democratic Party President Obama can push through extremist legislation that a Republican president might find difficult or impossible to enact if only because of partisan politics. Obama’s chief enabler on the Senate side seems to be his reliable Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who, at least in front of the TV cameras, never seems embarrassed by whatever may be demanded by the White House.

Less obvious but arguably just as important in enabling the relatively smooth passage of “anti-terrorist” legislation is the Israel Lobby—aka the Zionist Lobby or the Jewish Lobby. It was this same pro-Israel, anti-Muslim force that infuses the mainstream media as well as making up many of the top levels of the last three administrations that assisted in producing the unpopular and disastrous Iraq war. Since the Bush’s administration’s objective was regime change in the most powerful Arab  counterweight to Israeli area hegemony, they could count on the votes of even such liberal Senators as Hillary Clinton, Diane Feinstein, John Kerry and others for the October 2002 Iraq War Resolution.

Similarly, since the targets of the arbitrary detention provisions of the NDAA policy are understood to be Muslim “terrorists,” policy makers in the Obama administration presumably considered that no perceptible hue and cry would materialize despite the apparent unconstitutionality of the law and its manifest danger to basic freedoms.

Powerful grassroots loyalty to Israel was anecdotally brought home to me not long ago in discussion with a Zionist friend when I argued that President Obama’s decision to employ drone attacks to assassinate an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki and his 21 year old son in October 2011 in Yemen, were criminal acts and a disastrous precedent. My friend responded: “Well, you know, Ron, you and I have different views on these drone attacks.”

I gathered that in my friend’s view such people as had been targeted by the Obama administration —American citizens or not—were to be regarded as “terrorists,” since by definition they were engaged in a war against Israeli as well as U.S. interests. Thus in such cases, the President should be applauded for overriding Constitutional norms.

Author and activist Naomi Wolf expressed a good deal of the anger and frustration of many who felt betrayed by this extraordinary power grab. In a blog post she argued that history showed that there would be payback to those legislators who supported such autocratic legislation, since it was likely that they would be among the first to suffer its consequences.[v]

It might be comforting to find moral shelter in the prospect of such just retribution, but I suspect that an equally persuasive case could be made that as often as not the perpetrators and handmaidens of such villainy go unpunished and live out their lives in with dignity. If, however, in this particular case, Ms Wolf should prove correct, such a turnabout would require a very messy revolution, the likes of which could be expected to shatter many innocent lives along the way.

                  

Similarly, it would seem fruitless to remonstrate with Zionists—those who believe that a Jewish state should supplant the former Palestine—and argue that support for Israel is a pernicious influence on the politics, and on the democratic freedoms enjoyed for two centuries under the U.S. Constitution.  Such arguments might fall on deaf ears because it would be understood that measures like the arbitrary detention provisions of the NDAA are directed at those perceived to be Israel’s enemies. These enemies could include many who now are free to protest what they perceive as Israeli oppression. If legalization of indefinite detention in the U.S. helps to moderate or suppress such protests, it is, from their perspective, all to the good. Supporters of Israel are not the targets of the NDAA; they will not be the victims.

***

Postscript

As I was preparing the reflections above for distribution, I came across Glenn Greenwald’s blog that happened to be on a not dissimilar topic: the victims of the U.S.’s civil liberties assaults.[vi] Greenwald has no hesitation in identifying the victims: they are, he writes,  “racial, ethnic and religious minorities: specifically, Muslims (both American Muslims and foreign nationals).” Interestingly he also points as I do to those who believe that they benefit from these assaults, although he is careful not to name them. Choosing his words carefully, he refers to  “those who dominate American political debates” and he explains that they “perceive, more or less accurately, that they are not directly endangered (at least for now) by this assault on core freedoms and Endless War.”

I thought it was remarkable that one of the most outspoken and widely read Left-wing bloggers seems to feel that it is the better part of valor not to specify Zionists, the Jewish Lobby, the Israel Lobby, the Zionist Lobby.   Perhaps he feels that he would not come out the winner from the backlash that such naming of names could produce.  In that case, his perception could be another indication of Zionist power. In any event, I respect his understanding of his self-interest.

Such reflections lead to consideration of such high profile figures on the Left as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Phyllis Bennis and others who, as far as I can tell, to this day seem to deny the power of the Israel Lobby to influence and direct U.S. Middle East policy.[vii] I gather that the reason for their position is that they view the U.S. as the mighty imperialist bully, the great font of evil. Thus, by definition a tiny client state like Israel cannot dominate the greater power in any meaningful regard.

And what are we to make of those pundits on the Left who smell the whiff of anti-Semitism in those who point to—or even mention—the existence of Jewish power (the title of a book it so happens by journalist and author, J.J. Goldberg)? Such Leftists seem to be acting as assistant enforcers, attempting to ensure that such notions are not permitted within the borders of serious policy debate.

In a recent article on “The Mess in the Middle East,” (Middle East Policy, Winter 2011) (former) Ambassador (to Saudi Arabia) Chas W. Freeman Jr. cited the 20 standing ovations, which a special session of Congress in May 2011 presented to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. In his speech, Netanyahu had openly rebuked President Obama for his “1967 Border Plan” which had outlined a proposal to resolve key differences between Israel and the Palestinians. Freeman was outraged at the “spectacle of members of Congress bouncing up and down like so many obsequious yo-yos” which he saw as “irrefutable proof of Israel’s hammerlock on U.S. policy.” 

           

A measure of the depths to which U.S. political culture has fallen is that those who dominate American political debates were heartened, not dismayed, by the Congressional display.        

---

[i] See Alexander Cockburn “The Man Who Shot Habeas Corpus,” The Nation January 23, 2012, who points out that “associated forces” “can mean anything, as can the phrase, “directly supported,” referencing those alleged in support of terror groups. The substance of “directly supported,” writes Cockburn, “will adjust itself to the whim of any ingenious prosecutor.”

[ii] See Chris Hedges on Democracy Now (January 17, 2012) for press reports that the arbitrary detention provisions were opposed by elements of the security establishment “the CIA, the FBI, the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence.” “Journalist Chris Hedges Sues Obama Admin over Indefinite Detention of U.S. Citizens Approved in NDAA,”

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/17/journalist_chris_hedges_sues_obama_admin

Similarly, according to a New York Times editorial (“Politics Over Principal,” December 15, 2011) “Nearly every top American official with knowledge and experience spoke out against the provisions, including the attorney general, the defense secretary, the chief of the F.B.I., the secretary of state, and the leaders of intelligence agencies.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/opinion/politics-over-principle.html?_r=4

[iii] Drilling down into the comments section of Naomi Wolf’s article—see Note 5 below—Roger Mattingly on January 1, 2012 illuminated the weasel wording of the arbitrary detention provisions of the NDAA. He explains that while the bill seemingly inoculates U.S. citizens since it does not REQUIRE detention in those cases, yet it is PERMITTED.

[iv] “Obama’s NDAA Signing Statement Is Meaningless,” http://www.infowars.com/obamas-ndaa-signing-statement-is-meaningless/

[v]Naomi Wolf,  “How Congress is Signing its Own Arrest Warrants in the NDAA Citizen Arrest Bill,” December 12, 2011.  http://naomiwolf.org/2011/12/how-congress-is-signing-its-own-arrest-warrants-in-the-ndaa-citizen-arrest-bill/

[vi] Glenn Greenwald, “”Who Are the Victims of Civil Liberties Assaults and Endless War?” January 16, 2012.  http://www.salon.com/2012/01/16/who_are_the_victims_of_civil_liberties_assaults_and_endless_war/singleton/

[vii]  An informed observer pointed out nuance among the three. He writes that while Chomsky dismisses the notion of a powerful Israel Lobby, “Bennis and Finkelstein  minimize its influence although Bennis had acknowledged that an attack on Iran would be a war for Israel and Finkelstein has admitted that the Lobby does shape US policy regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict but, ahistorically, believes it has ‘little influence on overall US policy in the Middle East.'”

Saving Iraq:? Allawi, Hitchens, Davies, etc

Saving Iraq?

The title of the December 28, 2011 New York Times op-ed by three Iraqi politicians: “How to Save Iraq From Civil War” (see below) and the editor’s pull quote: “Unless America pushes for a unity government, violence will destroy us,” ably summarizes the gist. It would seem that in order to get their op-ed printed, the authors had to pretend that that they believe that the U.S. actively wants Iraq to succeed. But as they well know that is not correct on at least three counts, the third being recent history.

First: Would a successful and independent Iraq be good for Israel?

Second: Would an independent Iraq cohere with the permanent war agenda of Bush-Cheney-Obama?

The relevant history

The history of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 has been one of great accomplishment from the occupiers’ point of view: the sectarian division of the country in order to insure civil war and the ongoing destruction of the country. Why else was Paul Bremer sent to head the occupation forces  in 2003 other than to oversee the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the de-Bathification Program, ensuring that  there would be no competent people to promote  the civil life of the country?  He was also  well-placed to oversee the dirty tricks and special forces operations which were responsible for the instability and sectarian warfare—which continues to this day.

Just this  week (12.22.11)  a series of coordinated terror attacks killed more than  60 people. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16297707)

Coordination in these cases is often the signature of the kind of competence and resource rich assets associated with professional operatives of  agencies like the CIA, known to the corporate (and almost all of the alternative) media as Al-Qaeda (al-CIA duh). Link TV, a cable TV news program in Arabic with English translation, interviewed a man in the Baghdad  street who asked in connection with this latest attack:  “Who wants to kill the Iraqi people? We need to know.”  

Questions to the late lamented Christopher Hitchens regarding the destruction of the Iraqi Museum of Antiquities in the early days of the U.S. invasion evidently hit a nerve because he answered uncharacteristically defensively (or maybe not so uncharacteristically when it came to Iraq) in his otherwise  brilliant memoir Htich-22 with a reply approximating Donald Rumsfeld’s response to similar questions: “Stuff happens.”

As good a writer and controversialist as Hitchens was, I couldn’t help noticing that he avoided evidence that  U.S. forces had the wherewithal to prevent looting had this been their mission; that they  were warned at very high levels months before the invasion to secure the Museum and other treasures; that military commanders on the ground made a point of allowing if not encouraging  mobs to trash the Museum and many other critical sites such as the University, government buildings, key infrastructure installations, etc.

One might have hoped that Hitchens’s enthusiasm for removing Saddam would have been tempered by clear evidence that regime change was only part of the larger purpose of destroying, for a very long time, the possibility of civil life for the Iraqi people. This was achieved largely by promoting civil war in Iraq, and torpedoing reconstruction, and ditto reconciliation. Similarly Hitchens gracelessly acknowledged and ineptly defended the charge that the Iraq invasion was a giant step towards permanent war.

Nicholas J.S. Davies, author of Blood on our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq in a timely nine-page summary of his book for Z Magazine  (January 2012) explains that it wasn’t the U.S. “Surge” that reduced the violence in Iraq. He writes: “In fact, U.S. occupation forces and their allies were the perpetrators of most of the violence in Iraq throughout the war, and their invasion and occupation of Iraq was the cause of all of it. It was therefore entirely possible at any point for the occupation forces to achieve a reduction in violence by scaling back their own operations, as they finally did after the ’Surge’ in 2008.”

Davies’s testimony helps us understand how to read the very last sentence of the NYT op-ed:

“Unless America acts rapidly to help create a successful unity government, Iraq is doomed.”

***

“ How to Save Iraq From Civil War,”New York Times, 12.28,11

By AYAD ALLAWI, OSAMA AL-NUJAIFI and RAFE AL-ESSAWI

Ayad Allawi, leader of the Iraqiya coalition, was Iraq’s prime minister from 2004-5. Osama al-Nujaifi is the speaker of the Iraqi Parliament. Rafe al-Essawi is Iraq’s finance minister.

Taibbi closes in on Obama

In a recent blog, Rolling Stone contributing editor, Matt Taibbi, comes very close in his last paragraph to supporting the headline to his article: “Obama Doesn’t Want a Progressive Deficit Deal.” Taibbi calls out the Democrats for a “transparent lie” when they claim to support a progressive solution to the current economic situation.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/obama-doesnt-want-a-progressive-deficit-deal-20110711


I agree: Obama has been maneuvering much more openly, quite blatantly in fact, since at least December 2010, driving not merely a rightwing agenda, but an extremist right wing agenda, a Tea Party agenda.

Taibbi quotes from a recent Paul Krugman op-ed where Krugman couldn’t be clearer. It’s hard, Krugman begins, to trust Mr. Obama to uphold Democratic principles and a liberal, progressive view of the needs of the country. Krugman noticed that Obama’s economic rhetoric has parroted the know-nothings and the cynics.

It’s getting harder and harder to trust Mr. Obama’s motives in the budget fight, given the way his economic rhetoric has veered to the right. In fact, if all you did was listen to his speeches, you might conclude that he basically shares the G.O.P.’s diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it. And maybe that’s not a false impression; maybe it’s the simple truth.

One striking example of this rightward shift came in last weekend’s presidential address, in which Mr. Obama had this to say about the economics of the budget: “Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.” --NYT, July 8, 2011, “What Obama Wants”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/opinion/08krugman.html?_r=2

The difficulty with Taibbi’s blog is that he muddles the issue by suggesting that Obama’s purpose is to gain political advantage ahead of the 2012 elections.
Taibbi writes:

But what is becoming equally obvious, to both sides, is that the Obama White House is using this same artificial calamity to pitch its own increasingly rightward tilt to voters in advance of the 2012 elections.

If Taibbi had stopped before his last phrase, he would have been spot on.

But what is becoming equally obvious, to both sides, is that the Obama White House is using this same artificial calamity to pitch its own increasingly rightward tilt…

In his last paragraph Taibbi comes so close to nailing it.

I simply don't believe the Democrats would really be worse off with voters if they committed themselves to putting people back to work, policing Wall Street, throwing their weight behind a real public option in health care, making hedge fund managers pay the same tax rates as ordinary people, ending the pointless wars abroad, etc. That they won't do these things because they're afraid of public criticism, and "responding to pressure," is an increasingly transparent lie.

Yes, it’s a transparent lie to think that the Democrats and/or Obama believe that by endorsing GOP anti-government, anti-civil society policies, they are gaining popular support.

Matt Taibbi is one of our clearest and most focused writers and has made important contributions, especially by documenting and elucidating many of the shenanigans that led to the financial meltdown of 2007-2008. If this particular blog is somewhat muddled, we can wonder if it is so because he’s writing for a national publication and it may not be so easy for him as it might be for others to call out Obama for who he is.

How much more clear do we need the signs to be? Obama appears to be a traitor to his party. In the last few days Obama repeated: 'I'm prepared to take significant heat from my own party.' President Obama has turned out to be a traitor to the hopes of the millions of his supporters. Obama appears to be a fraud, an imposter, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, devouring what little remains of the New Deal. Obama seems intent on keeping us on the unsustainable road of the post 9/11 world of permanent war and totalitarian government.

It’s time to seek an answer to the question: Who is Obama? And while we do so, let’s recognize that the Republicans are right. We can’t afford another Obama term.

Stalemate in Libya: Obama, Ghaddafi and Israel

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How can we explain the current heartbreaking state of the U.S./NATO campaign against Libya, which seems mired in stalemate? The evidence seems to indicate that the stalemate is a result of a decision by the Obama administration not to topple Ghaddafi’s regime despite the negative effect the inconclusive war is having on Obama’s domestic poll numbers. An American stalemate strategy would explain why the U.S. immediately handed over direction of the war to NATO and ended its briefly effective air support.

Perhaps the White House has either not found a reliable ally among rebel leaders or is not really looking. It seems as if the U.S. is prepared to allow Ghaddafi to defeat the rebellion and/or to remain in power indefinitely.

If Obama, despite his rhetoric, prefers not to remove Ghaddafi, it’s not unlikely that it is because putative Libyan rebel leaders would reflect their country’s public opinion in support of Palestinian national and human rights, including an end to the occupation. Obama’s reluctance to remove Ghaddafi may be due to his disinclination to challenge Israeli interests. The New York Times front-page headline for April 29, 2011 highlighting Egyptian moves to normalize ties with the Iranians and Hamas is an example of the sort of thing the Israelis and undoubtedly the Obama administration do not want to see repeated in Libya.

The current turmoil in the Middle East sheds light on the Israeli boast that it is the only democracy in the Middle East as it reveals its wish to maintain that position. It’s also a reminder that Israeli pressure on the Arab world has helped to sustain dictatorships in many ways, not least by persuading millions of Arabs for decades that national unity trumped democratic rights in the face of the security threat from the lone democracy.

Disappointing Obama? + Stanley Heller:One Nation Rally: Which Nation?

Included below are the first three paragraphs of Stanley Heller's excellent Counterpunch article pointing out or reminding us that the Left seems to be bereft of any mechanism or ability to lobby Obama, no matter the issue or the maelstrom that he's pouring us into.

 

One of my mantras has been that Obama has long ago shown his true colors as a Bush-Cheney manqué (unsuccessful stand-in) and so  if the Republicans don't take at least one  House of Congress, he'll be very disappointed, perhaps devastated. It's called "pulling a Clinton." Clinton left the presidency with a high degree of popularity as a direct result of Republican control of Congress midway in his first term. That way he was able to pose as a leader by vetoing a portion of the worst they had to offer.

 

Since  Obama has gone over to the dark side he'll only be comfortable when his real allies are in control.

(An interesting question is to what extent Obama intends to change course now that he's gotten rid of--if that's what happened--some of the most right-wing people in his administration: Emanuel, Jones, Summers.

 

One of the issues some have been following is the rate at which Obama has fallen behind his predecessor in filling judicial appointments. Could it be a result of his unwillingness to appoint those who would be acceptable to his base?  Until recently I found it hard to believe that he would delay and delay until the Republicans controlled the Senate. Well such has turned out to be the case. Now what's going to happen if it turns out that the Tea Party has thrown a spanner into the works by denying Republican control of the upper House?  Once again, who's going to be the most disappointed person in D.C.? 

***

 

Timidity on the Mall

October 7, 2010

http://counterpunch.org/heller10072010.html

By STANLEY HELLER

 

The “One Nation Working Together” rally was billed as a chance to “demand the changes we voted for”. That slogan was just for the suckers. There was barely any criticism of the Administration from the main stage, just bleats for jobs and justice.

 

You would think that up on the main stage there would be giant banners with progressive slogans, “Obama, Hire Millions Now” “Defend Public Education from the Privatizers”, “Why are a Million Blacks in Prison?”, “Cut the Pentagon Budget in Half”. But there were no banners at all. Instead there were flags, lots of American flags.

 

None of the rally speakers were announced beforehand. That's always a big draw. Was it stupidity or just an effort to avoid showing that “peace” would not be part of the demonstration. Bless his heart, rally speaker Harry Belafonte did vigorously denounce our wars and he actually condemned the Afpak surge saying, “The President's decision to escalate the war in that region alone costs the nation $33 billion”. He didn't challenge the President to bring the troops home, but no one else on the main stage criticized Obama on anything.

 

Read more:

http://counterpunch.org/heller10072010.html

Obama's Lies…Lead to Cheney in Iowa?

One Middle East analyst interviewed in connection with Obama's Nobel Prize award ceremony this month said that despite his good intentions, Obama hasn't accomplished much as far as resolving crises, especially on the Israeli Palestinian issue.

Good intentions? I suspect that we're beginning to see that not only are the outcomes on so many crucial issues the opposite of what we would wish, but we're beginning (we latecomers) to be forced to conclude that the intentions were not what we imagined.

Which brings us to the question of presidential lying.

All presidents lie, it comes with the territory.

Yet we wonder if  BHO’s lying is perhaps among the worst in post war history, up there with LBJ, Nixon, Reagan and Bush-Cheney?

At least with Bush Jr there was something good-natured with his lies in the sense that his pronouncements weren't intended to be taken seriously – except as media fodder. He and Cheney couldn't care less that their political opponents knew they were lying. What was important to them was their power to pursue their agenda. And as for their supporters, the regime's real agenda was always clear and the lies were viewed simply as the necessary cover story. 

The difference with Obama is that he's lying to his base, intending to fool us -- perhaps less and less successfully after about a year -- into thinking that he’s on our side. 

It would seem that the difference between Obama's rhetoric and the agenda he's pursuing, -- replicating and consolidating the worst policies inherited from the most criminal regime in U.S. history -- contributes to his falling popularity and makes him a potentially weak candidate in 2012. Perhaps that is why Art Cullen, editor of The Storm Lake (Iowa) Times is predicting that “Cheney Will Visit Iowa.” According to Cullen:

       Cheney thinks Obama is a pipsqueak and that he can beat him. Most important, Cheney believes in his bad ideas and is perfectly willing to run on them.         http://www.populist.com/09.22.artcullen.html

 We're fortunate to live in an age that has produced the first Black president, and a smart, eloquent one at that. But it appears that we're just as unlucky that our first minority president has turned out to be some combination of too young and inexperienced and too feckless to rise to the challenge of providing us with the leadership so desperately needed. 

Obama's Surge Consolidates the Bush-Cheney Legacy

Obama's Surge Consolidates the Bush-Cheney legacy

 

What could be worse than a continuation of the Bush-Cheney administration?

What could be worse in an Obama administration than the consolidation of the worst of the Bush-Cheney  policies starting with their permanent war agenda?

Why has Obama embraced permanent war, a policy that he, as well as anyone else knows, is unsustainable, if not suicidal?

Some, if not many, agree that the twin pillars that underpin the status quo are the military industrial complex and the Zionist lobby, for which constant war is always the desideratum.

Perhaps fewer will agree that the chief way, in a post cold war age that permanent war is maintained is by funding, arming and directing the enemy.

Where and how, one might ask, do the Taliban get their weapons and wherewithal?

The enemy is the U.S. in a literal way that we have not previously imagined.

Now that Obama has moved to the consolidation of permanent war, HE is the enemy.

The first step is to know thy enemy.

***

 

("Bush &) Obama's Trillion Dollar Bailouts -- Questions that won't die

Trillion $ Bailouts  – Questions that won’t die

by Ronald Bleier

11.6.09

 

A major political question that doesn’t want to die is whether the billion and trillion dollar Wall Street bailouts that Washington handed out were necessary to keep the economy from disintegrating.  Despite the persistence of the question, the only answer seemingly allowed in the mainstream is the monotonously uniform: Without the bailouts we’d be using beads for currency -- a line I heard on TV this week. 

 

Yet there is another, rather different answer available. The alternative response is that not only were the bailouts unnecessary to save the economy, but they represent perhaps the biggest single criminal theft and transfer of wealth to the wealthy from the rest of us.

 

Some of the evidence for such an unorthodox view was presented back in September by Mike Whitney, a regular contributor to the indispensable Counterpunch.org website.

 

Whitney took the trouble to read some of the findings of independent economist, Dean Baker, who took the trouble to look at some of the relevant data.

 

According to Mike Whitney

 

Lehman Bros. didn't die of natural causes; it was drawn-and-quartered by high-ranking officials at the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Most of the rubbish presently appearing in the media, ignores this glaring fact. Lehman was a planned demolition (most likely) concocted by ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson, who wanted to create a financial 9-11 to scare Congress into complying with his demands for $700 billion in emergency funding (TARP) for underwater US banking behemoths.  The whole incident reeks of conflict of interest, corruption, and blackmail.

 

(9.15.09)“Lehman Died So TARP and AIG Might Live”) http://Counterpunch.org/whitney09152009.html)

 

Whitney explains that Lehman brothers could have been saved relatively easily if “Bernanke and Paulson had merely provided guarantees for some of their trading positions.” According to Whitney, their claim that they didn’t have the legal authority for such guarantees was “a lie.”

 

Whitney continues by quoting economist Dean Baker who explains that the $700 billion TARP authority wasn’t necessary to rescue the commercial paper market - –the market that most major companies rely on to meet their payrolls and pay other routine bills.  Dean explains that Bernanke “forgot to tell Congress…that the Fed has the authority to directly buy commercial paper from financial and non-financial companies [and thus] the power to prevent the sort of economic collapse that Bernanke warned would happen if Congress did not quickly approve the TARP.” Indeed, Dean continues, the weekend after TARP was approved the plan for the Fed to buy this commercial paper was put in motion. (emphasis mine)

 

For more on the case for criminal indictments of Messrs Bernanke, Geithner, Summers, et. al., read the work of the brilliant Matt Taibi in recent articles in Rolling Stone --  if you can deal with his liberal use of obscenities which he childishly thinks somehow improves his prose -- who has done the legwork and taken the trouble to understand and to pass along the nature of some of the frauds that have been managed – and are doubtless continuing.  

Wall Street's Naked Swindle  by Matt Taibbi -- October 2009

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30481512/wall_streets_naked_swindle/print

A scheme to sell fake stocks helped kill Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers — exposing the counterfeit nature of our entire economy.  

The Great American Bubble Machine  by Matt Taibbi  -- July 2009

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine/print

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again.

***

Why the US/NATO is in Afghanistan: A Query inspires an unconventional if not an outlandish response

JJ wonders why we're in Afghanistan

The material below is from MoonofAlabama.org. It's very interesting analysis, but it leaves me more confused than ever about the fundamental question: What is the American interest in Afghanistan? I had thought it was to pacify the country for the proposed Unocal pipeline. But I see no rational connection between war and getting that result. On the contrary, I'd expect war to ensure the unattainability of such a goal, by getting the Afghans more antagonized and sabotage-minded with each passing day.

Are we really there, then, in search of one man, Osama bin Laden? Or to suppress the Taliban or al Qaeda? I suspect bin Laden is long since dead, and I'd think war would be the perfect recruiting tool for such entities. Are we there to outflank Iran? That hardly fits with what follows. To outflank Pakistan and its nukes? That doesn't seem to make sense either, especially given the history of our involvement.

Perhaps someone can enlighten me as to what we're trying to do.

In the meantime, as I say, what follows is interesting stuff. Note the figures for the comparative costs of maintaining an army in Afghanistan and maintaining one in Iraq
***

Ronald responds to JJ:
Thanks for asking. I’m afraid my views are unconventional but – like others – I find that the evidence I choose to look at is not inconsistent with my theories.
Yes, quite the right question. What is the American interest in Afghanistan?.
First thing of course is that the Obama administration is following the Bush administration’s policy.
What was that policy? Just as it was in Iraq, to further their permanent war agenda and to cause as much pain and suffering and turmoil and tension and oppression as possible.
I submit that in Iraq it’s very easy to point to indictable evidence: namely the disbanding of the Iraqi army and the firing of virtually all the able bureaucrats –de-bathification.
Have you seen the documentary No End in Sight? (actually I’m blanking on the title. That might be a lucky guess.)
Either those two policies were mistakes or purposeful actions intended to ensure that there would be a pretext – an insurgency and the emergence of al-Qaeda in Iraq -- to keep the war going indefinitely. Take your choice. Alternately you can ask yourself if Cheney is the type to make such mistakes.
Needless to say there’s a mountain more evidence. High on the list are policies to ensure that there would be no reconstruction of the country. Talk about evidence not inconsistent: Have you seen Ragiv Chandrasekaran’s book on the Green Zone?
The same with Afghanistan. Their purpose is to destroy the country. The interesting irony there is that Taliban rule is what they wanted (there and here and everywhere) and they were unhappy to overthrow it. But as we have seen, it was done in such a way as to ensure the return of the Taliban after a few years. Karzai sort of gave the game away in a December ’08 interview to the Washington Post: He asked: How can a little group of ragtag fanatics be causing so much trouble. He was pointing to U.S. aid to the Taliban by means of the Pakistani ISI. Yup, we’re paying billions so that they can kill U.S. soldiers and thousands upon thousands of Afghanis.
We might have hoped that the Obama administration would change policy. I used to joke after Nov 4 and before Jan 20 that we had hope. It’s not such a joke anymore. It’s not the Obama administration. It’s the Rahm Emanuel –Obama administration with the latter the figurehead.
You can see why my views aren’t popular. Most people figure that there’s got to be something ---$$$$ -- in it for the policymakers. But to me it’s a question of evidence. Your astute questions are more evidence.
Ronald

William Black (Huffington Post) Geithner (Obama) Continues Bush's corruption

With Bush it was malevolence, with Obama it's apparently stupidity and ignorance. Stupidity for believing that Geithner had some answers even though he contributed to the Bush plan that many could see would only help the most corrupt elements. And ignorance in thinking that listening to such discredited veterans as Lawrence Summers would do any good. It's not too early to see that Obama is way off base and has chosen in too many cases, for reasons which are not entirely clear, people who will contribute to failure in too many critical policies. We hoped for change and we got someone in training wheels. We're wondering now if Hillary could have done any worse. --RB
***

William K. Black
Associate Professor, University of Missouri; Senior regulator during S&L debacle
February 10, 2009 |
Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/the-audacity-of-dopes_b_165637.htmlThe Audacity of Dopes





We are being played for chumps. The Bush and Obama plans could only have been designed by failed bankers -- for their principal beneficiaries are failed bankers. We already know enough to confirm that the Bush administration made us the "fool" in the market by massively overpaying for assets. The Obama administration is about to compound that scandal with a "guarantee" program. The bankers that caused the crisis designed both programs. The senior officers at big bank aren't very good lenders, but they are expert in maximizing their compensation.

Worse, Mr. Geithner, the senior public official who, with former Treasury Secretary Paulson, designed the failed Bush plan is the architect of the disastrous Obama plan. Indeed, as theNew York Times has just revealed, it should be called the Geithner plan. He overcame intense opposition within the Obama administration and designed a plan that is even worse than the failed Bush program. Geithner's gifts to the bankers that caused the crisis include: a unnecessary taxpayer bailout of "risk capital," a massive coverup of their banks' insolvency, gutting the proposed limits on executive compensation, and devising a "guarantee" mechanism designed to hide the expenses of the unprincipled bailouts from the American public. Remember, executive compensation is not "merely" a fairness issue. Executive compensation and the compensation systems used for appraisers, accountants, and rating agencies were designed, and served, to create the perverse incentives and ethical rot that caused the ongoing financial crises by producing a "Gresham's dynamic" in which fraudulent and abusive lending and accounting practices drove good practices out of the marketplace.

Here's the amazing part -- the bankers are so arrogant that they bragged to a sympathetic CNBC commentator they are playing us:


"

What a delicious irony this is--last week, just as President Obama was publicly bashing the stupidity of the banks ... his economic team [was] privately begging for input from Wall Street. The administration was conducting around-the-clock discussions and interviews with senior Wall Street executives, including many from the same firms he was theoretically appalled with, about how to fix the lingering financial crisis. "

There are proven ways to resolve the crisis that are far cheaper and more effective because they don't subsidize bankers and "risk capital." We know how to resolve failed banks. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) can place even the largest banks in "pass through" receiverships on Friday at the close of business and reopen them as "New Federal" bank Monday morning with minimal disruption to customers and creditors and retain "going concern" value. This is how the Reagan administration resolved failed S&Ls during the debacle.

The FDIC appoints a senior manager to ensure that "New Federal" is run prudently. There is plenty of unemployed banking talent available. Hundreds of good bankers lost their jobs during the financial bubble because they refused to make bad loans. Research has shown that its sister agency, FSLIC, appointed receivership managers that greatly reduced losses during the S&L debacle. Leaving the managers in charge of failed banks that they led into insolvency is suicidal. The new senior leader is picked based on expertise in prudent lending and integrity. If we want failed banks to return promptly to making prudent loans and help lead an economic recovery an S&L style "New Federal" is the best possible device. The existing managers have terrible incentives -- to cover up existing losses and to make bad or even fraudulent loans that produce the greatest (fictional) accounting income and to "live large" through bonuses and perks. (The Obama compensation limits are political cover. The bankers have designed the "guarantee" plan to ensure that the compensation limits will be illusory.)

The FDIC managers have the correct incentives to finally produce an honest evaluation of which assets are toxic and how much they are worth. This transparency is essential if we are to end this crisis. Under the Bush and Obama plans we retain the existing managers that have overwhelming incentives to cover up the losses. The bankers have designed the guarantee plan to encourage banks to continue to cover up their toxic assets and not recognize their losses. These cover-ups make a financial crisis last longer and increase the taxpayers' costs.

The FDIC managers preserve the going concern value by making prudent loans and get the "New Federal" in shape to be acquired. By providing reliable information about the toxic assets the managers reduce acquisition risks, which expands the number of bidders and reduces the financial assistance required to aid the acquisition.

"New Federal" receiverships dramatically reduce cash needs. Most costs are deferred until the New Federals are sold.

Pass through receiverships save the taxpayers money and prevent perverse managerial incentives because they do not subsidize "risk capital" when banks are insolvent. Common and preferred stock and subordinated debt in banks are "risk capital." Their holders are supposed to receive nothing if a bank becomes insolvent, but the Bush and Obama plans reward them. There is no need to do this. Subsidizing risk capital and maintaining the failed managers at insolvent banks creates the worst possible incentives. It will cause future crises. It will delay the recovery from the ongoing crises. It robs the U.S. taxpayers and primarily benefits the wealthy -- many of them non-U.S. citizens. The contract they made was that they would get nothing if the bank failed. It has failed, and they are often complicit in those failures. The bankers have convinced the Bush and Obama administrations that the taxpayers should be looted to bail out risk capital. We should stop listening to the folks that caused the crisis and have interests hostile to our interests. Let's stop them from using us as chumps.

Read more:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/the-audacity-of-dopes_b_165637.html

William K. Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law, University of Missouri - Kansas City. He held senior regulatory positions during the S&L debacle and is the author of "The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One" (2005)

Greg Palast: Obama's a DEMOCRAT

Greg Palast is right to point to the great change that Obama is using his political capital to enforce. Not to be a wet blanket, but if Obama didn't need any Republican votes on the stimulus bill, why did he have to put so much of it into tax cuts? Or was that somehow a good thing? The $500 credit vs. social security payments was surely good. I'm almost sorry now I retired -- how I used to resent not getting credit for those deductions. But for job creation Obama might have -- maybe he did-- give a similar deduction to employers. But what do I know?
Meanwhile we can try to enjoy the gains so far -- if Obama can get his bill passed. And we can resume worrying about Israel-Palestine/ Afghanistan/ Iraq/Pakistan the week after that.
Ronald
***


Obama is a two-faced liar. Aw-RIGHT!

by Greg Palast

January 29, 2009

Republicans are right. President Barack Obama treated them like dirt,
didn't give a damn what they thought about his stimulus package, loaded it with a
bunch of programs that will last for years and will never leave the budget, is
giving away money disguised as "tax refunds," and is sneaking in huge changes in
policy, from schools to health care, using the pretext of an economic emergency.

Way to go, Mr. O! Mr. Down-and-Dirty Chicago pol. Street-fightin' man.
Covering over his break-your-face power play with a "we're all post-partisan
friends" BS.

And it's about time.

Frankly, I was worried about this guy. Obama's appointing Clinton-droids
to the Cabinet, bloated incompetents like Larry Summers as "Economics Czar," made
me fear for my country, that we'd gotten another Democrat who wished he were a
Republican.

Then came Obama's money bomb. The House bill included $125 billion for
schools (TRIPLING
federal spending on education), expanding insurance coverage to the
unemployed,
making the most progressive change in the tax code in four decades by
creating a
$500 credit against social security payroll deductions, and so on.

It's as if Obama dug up Ronald Reagan's carcass and put a stake through The
Gipper's anti-government heart. Aw-RIGHT!

About the only concession Obama threw to the right-wing trogs was to
remove the subsidy for condoms, leaving hooker-happy GOP Senators, like David Vitter,
to pay for their own protection. S'OK with me.

And here's the proof that Bam is The Man: Not one single Republican
congressman
voted for the bill. And that means that Obama didn't compromise, the way
Clinton
and Carter would have, to win the love of these condom-less jerks.

And we didn't need'm. Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!

Now I understand Obama's weird moves: dinner with those creepy conservative
columnists, earnest meetings at the White House with the Republican
leaders, a dramatic begging foray into Senate offices. Just as the Republicans say,
it was all a fraud. Obama was pure Chicago, Boss Daley in a slim skin, putting
his arms around his enemies, pretending to listen and care and compromise, then
slowly, quietly, slipping in the knife. All while the media praises Obama's
"post-partisanship."
Heh heh heh.

Love it. Now we know why Obama picked that vindictive little viper Rahm
Emanuel as staff chief: everyone visiting the Oval office will be greeted by the
Windy City hit man who would hack up your grandma if you mess with the
Godfather-in-Chief.

I don't know about you, but THIS is the change I've been waiting for.

Will it last? We'll see if Obama caves in to more tax cuts to investment
bankers. We'll see if he stops the sub-prime scum-bags from foreclosing on
frightened families. We'll see if he stands up to the whining, gormless generals who
don't know how to get our troops out of Iraq. (In SHIPS, you doofusses!)

Look, don't get your hopes up. But it may turn out the new President's ... a Democrat!

******

Greg Palast's investigative reports for BBC and Rolling Stone can be seen
at www.GregPalast.com.
Palast is the author of New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy
Money Can
Buy and Armed Madhouse.

Ken's comment:

Who cares about any of this when O-BOMB-A is busy killing Palestinians and Afghans?

Peace,
Ken

Sara Roy: Manufacturing Genocide in Gaza + false flags, Afghanistan, more + Rick Warren via Left I on the News

Sara Roy’s important article should not be missed for its clear summary of the humanitarian crisis that U.S/Israeli policy is imposing on a million and a half or more people in Gaza. Here’s the first paragraph.
If Gaza Falls . . .; by Sara Roy


I

srael's siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then. Israel's siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt. That is why the Israelis tolerate the hundreds of tunnels between Gaza and Egypt around which an informal but increasingly regulated commercial sector has begun to form. The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.

Read more:



Published December 23, 2008 by London Review of Books

*
As Roy suggests in her first sentence, the mechanism driving the Hamas rocket attacks is clear. To insure that rockets keep coming from Hamas, Israel provokes them by murdering Palestinian activists and civilians. And if one Israeli attack isn’t sufficient, the Israeli attacks just keep coming. When the Hamas rockets finally fall the Israelis have an excuse to close the borders. (I noticed on Link TV that one such rocket displayed by an Israeli official had Hebrew markings.)

Roy’s article also suggests an answer to how the Palestinians obtain at least some of their rockets -- by means of the tunnels to Egypt, the last and unofficial lifeline the Israelis allow and which the Israelis could cut off at any time.

Israel can’t abide Hamas because Hamas has still retained its nationalism, and won’t bow to many of Israel’s demands. That’s why Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PNA, gets an easier ride: because like Arafat before him, he’s a collaborationist. As they did for decades with Arafat, Israel permits or encourages his corruption in return for following their orders.

In a quibble, we could take issue with Roy’s suggestion that Israel’s purpose is to foist Gaza on Egypt. Hardly. Although a Gaza free of Palestinians which they could take over for themselves may be slightly over the horizon, the Israeli leadership requires the continued immiseration of Gaza and the continuation of the rocket attacks for domestic political reasons. While the rockets fall, Palestinian rockets continue to unify and strengthen the Israeli Jewish community behind the dominant and ever increasingly right wing leadership. The rocket attacks push aside domestic demands for reform. All the air is sucked out of any other positive agenda.

If Israel wanted an end to the Hamas rockets, all they’d have to do is suspend their attacks on Palestine. An agreement could be worked out in less than 24 hours. So we have a clear example of manufactured “terrorism.”

The same manufactured terror is largely true with regard to the Bush-Cheney “war on terror” especially in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. For the most part, all the high profile terror attacks starting from the Clinton years, and the fall of the Soviet Union when such attacks had to be manufactured as a substitute to sustain Cold War ideology and U.S. military and intelligence budgets, were the product of Western and Israeli intelligence services. The terror events of 9/11 sit at the pinnacle of such false flag attacks.

The point is there’s no threat to Israel or to the West outside of those they create in order to sustain their military pathology.

One thing that will change with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis when Obama takes over is that Elliot Abrams, the most vicious of the vicious will no longer be in charge of U.S. Middle East policy. But the pressures on Obama will be intense not to take steps to relieve the current genocidal level of starvation and immiseration in Gaza. Any attempt at amelioration by an Obama administration will likely be attacked by the usual Lobby suspects, doubtless with Dershowitz in the lead as giving in to Hamas terror.

Thinking of the Rick Warren debacle (see just below for blogger Left I’s economical screed on the subject), with about 25 days left before inauguration, is it too early to conclude that Obama is constitutionally unable to show any moral courage or leadership? But to realize how scary it’s going to be after Jan 20 all you have to do is say one word: Afghanistan. Everybody knows: current Obama plans for Afghanistan = a failed Obama presidency.

Afghanistan is going to be a failure in part because Obama and his team don’t want to know and are shielding themselves from the knowledge that the U.S. is funding the Taliban to kill NATO soldiers, civilians, Indian engineers, road-builders, schoolteachers, schoolgirls and more through the Pakistani ISI. It’s one of those anomalies that we know and simultaneously don’t know. For example, in a November 25, 2008 interview for NPR's popular Fresh Air program, Terry Gross asked Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid point blank: Isn’t the U.S. funding the Pakistani ISI? It was interesting to hear Rashid try to squirm out of that one.

It can’t be squirmed out of. The U.S. controls not only the major operations of the ISI like the funding and the care and upkeep of the Taliban, and chooses ISI leaders, and directs much of Pakistani policy, but the U.S. also undoubtedly controls also their false flag operations like the Mumbai terror attacks (see Michel Chossudovsky, "India's 9/11. Who was Behind the Mumbai Attacks? Washington is Fostering Political Divisions between India and Pakistan" 2008-11-29, http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11217 )

We know and we don’t want to know. And as we have learned over the decades this is just as true of the Left, as it is the Right.

Why should we expect any better from Obama?

PS. In a bibliographical note, the phrase “Manufactured Terrorism” is the title of a breakthrough article by Gerard Holmgren explaining what really happened on 9/11/01. (See “Manufactured Terrorism – The Truth About Sept 11," (2004, revised 2006).



Holmgren’s title apparently echoes Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s important Manufactured Consent (1988).

Ronald

***

Blogger Left I on the News on the Rick Warren affair wrote:

12.17 08

Will Rick Warren wake up the liberals?

With every appointment of a war-loving Hillary Clinton/Robert Gates/James Jones or a nuclear power-loving Steven Chu or a Monsanto-loving Tom Vilsack and on and on, liberals keep telling themselves that it's ok, it's just that old "Team of Rivals" thing, and that Barack Obama the supposed antiwar liberal is really the one calling the shots and the others will just be implementing his vision.

And what will they say to the announcement that anti-abortion homophobe Rick Warren will be delivering the invocation at Obama's inauguration? True, it is just "symbolism." One large symbolic slap in the face of every supporter of women's rights and LGBT rights who supported Obama in this election.

Stephen Zunes: Rahm Emanuel: Single Loyalty? --To Israel

The choice of Rahm Emanuel as Obama’s chief of staff is scary, Emanuel is hardly a voice for change. It’s hard to distinguish many of his policies from Bush’s.

I’ve been trying to discern a silver lining. Could it be that, like Lincoln, Obama is cleverly including opposition to change within his administration. Also by choosing Emanuel, Obama might be trying to soften blows he might otherwise receive from AIPAC and the Israeli lobby in case he hints at a more just U.S. Mideast policy.

Yes, we can hope, but it’s hard now to imagine Obama moving away from the right on crucial issues. Didn’t I already read in the New York Times a reaffirmation of Obama’s promise to add to the devastatingly bloated “Defense” budget?

The Zunes article is so good it’s hard to excerpt. I’ve also added a couple of paragraphs from Alex Cockburn’s very good article on the same subject.
Ronald
***


Is Obama Screwing His Base with Rahm Emanuel Selection?
By Stephen Zunes, AlterNet
November 7, 2008,
http://www.alternet.org/story/106189/

Stephen Zunes writes:

I had really wanted to celebrate Barack Obama's remarkable victory for a day or so before becoming cynical again. I really did.

And yet, less than 24 hours after the first polls closed, the president-elect chose as his chief of staff -- perhaps the most powerful single position in any administration -- Rahm Emanuel, one of the most conservative Democratic members of Congress.

The chief of staff essentially acts as the president's gatekeeper, determining with whom he has access for advice and analysis. Obama is known as a good listener who has been open to hearing from and considering the perspectives of those on the Left as well as those with a more centrist to conservative perspective. How much access he will actually have as president to more progressive voices, however, is now seriously in question.

Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel is a member of the so-called New Democrat Coalition (NDC), of group of center-right pro-business Congressional Democrats affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Conference, which is dedicated to moving the Democratic Party away from its more liberal and progressive base. Numbering only 58 members out of 236 Democrats in the current House of Representatives, the NDC has worked closely with its Republican colleagues in pushing through and passing such legislation as those providing President Bush with "fast-track" trade authority in order to bypass efforts by labor, environmentalists and other public interest groups to promote fairer trade policy.

Emanuel began his political career as a senior adviser and chief fundraiser for the successful 1989 Chicago mayoral campaign of Richard M. Daley to seize back City Hall from reformists who had challenged the corrupt political machine of this father, Richard J. Daley. Emanuel later became a senior adviser to Bill Clinton at the White House from 1993 to 1998, serving as Assistant to the President for Political Affairs and then Senior Advisor to the President for Policy and Strategy, and was credited with playing a major role in shifting the Clinton administration's foreign and domestic policy agenda to the right. Emanuel was the single most important official involved in pushing through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the bill ending Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and Clinton's draconian crime bill, among other legislation.

Leaving the administration in 1998, Emanuel worked as an investment banker in Chicago, where he amassed an $18 million fortune in less than three years prior to being elected to Congress.

As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee since 2004, Emanuel has promoted pro-war and pro-business center-right candidates against anti-war and pro-labor candidates in the primaries, pouring millions of dollars of donations from Democrats across the country into the campaigns of his favored conservative minions to defeat more progressive challengers.

Emanuel was a major supporter of the Iraq War resolution that authorized the invasion of Iraq. Indeed, he was the only one of nine Democratic members of Congress from Illinois who backed granting Bush this unprecedented authority to invade a country on the far side of the world that was no threat to the United States at the time. Even more disturbingly, when asked by Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" whether he would have voted to authorize the invasion "knowing that there are no weapons of mass destruction," Emanuel answered that he indeed would have done so, effectively acknowledging that his support for the war was not about national security, but about oil and empire. Not surprisingly, he has also voted with the Republicans in support of unconditional funding to continue the Iraq War and has consistently opposed efforts by other Democrats to set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces from that country and related Congressional efforts to end the war.

At a time of record budget deficits, Emanuel has been a passionate supporter of increased spending for the Pentagon and has resisted efforts by fellow Democrats to trim excesses in the Bush administration's bloated military budget. For example, he has repeatedly voted against amendments to cut funding for Bush's dangerously destabilizing missile defense and even voted against an amendment to identify unnecessary Pentagon spending by examining the need, relevance and cost of Cold War weapons systems designed to fight the former Soviet Union.

A major hawk regarding Iran, Emanuel has also voted against Democratic efforts to prevent the Bush administration from launching military action against that country and has joined the administration in exaggerated claims about Iran's alleged nuclear threat. He is not opposed to nuclear proliferation if it involves U.S. allies, however. Emanuel has consistently voted against a series of Democratic amendments that would have strengthened safeguards in the Bush administration's nuclear cooperation agreement with India to prevent U.S. assistance from supporting India's nuclear weapons program.

Emanuel is also a prominent hawk regarding Israel, attacking the Bush administration from the right for criticizing Israel's assassination policies and other human rights abuses. He was also a prominent supporter of Israel's 2006 attacks on Lebanon, even challenging the credibility of Amnesty International and other human rights groups that reported Israeli violations of international humanitarian law. Emanuel's father had emigrated from Israel in the 1950s, where he had been a member of the terrorist group Irgun, which had been responsible for a series of terrorist attacks against Palestinian and British civilians in mandatory Palestine during the 1940s. Emanuel himself served in a civilian capacity as a volunteer for the Israeli army in the early 1990s.

It is unclear how serious of a blow Obama's selection of Emanuel is to those who hoped that Obama might actually steer the country in a more progressive direction. It's easy to see it as nothing less than a slap in the face of the progressive anti-war elements of the party to whom Obama owes his election, particularly following his selection of Sen. Joe Biden as vice president. (See my articles "Biden's Foreign Policy 'Experience'" and "Biden, Iraq, and Obama's Betrayal.")

However, this does not necessarily mean that Obama as president will pursue nothing better than a Clintonesque center-right agenda. Someone with Obama's intelligence, knowledge and leadership qualities need not be unduly restricted by the influence of his chief of staff as less able presidents have. At the same time, this shocking appointment of Emanuel is illustrative of the need for the progressive base that brought him to power to not celebrate too long and to refocus our energies into pushing hard to ensure that the change Obama promised is something we really can believe in.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/106189/
***


November 7 / 9, 2008
CounterPunch Diary
From
Hail to the Chief of Staff

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Working in the Clinton White House, Emanuel helped push through NAFTA, the crime bill, the balanced budget and welfare reform. He favored the war in Iraq, and when he was chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006 he made great efforts to knock out antiwar Democratic candidates. On this site in October and November, 2006, John Walsh documented both the efforts and Emanuel’s role in losing the Democrats seats they would otherwise have won.

In 2006 Emanuel had just published a book with Bruce Reed called The Plan: Big Ideas for America, with one section focused on “the war on terror”. Emanuel and Reed wrote, “We need to fortify the military's ‘thin green line ‘around the world by adding to the U.S. Special Forces and the Marines, and by expanding the U.S. army by 100,000 more troops. …Finally we must protect our homeland and civil liberties by creating a new domestic counterterrorism force like Britain's MI5.” Recall that Obama has been calling throughout his recent campaign for an addition of 92,000 to the US Army and US Marine Corps.

Emanuel and Reed had fond words for the mad-dog Peter Beinart, neocon warrior theoretician for the Democrats, roosting Marty Peretz's The New Republic, and author of The Good Fight where Beinart explained why a tough new national security policy is as essential to the future of progressive politics as a united front against totalitarianism and communism was to the New Deal and the Great Society. Emanuel and Reed also commended Anne-Marie Slaughter's proposal for "a new division of labor in which the United Nations takes on economic and social assistance and an expanded NATO takes over the burden of collective security." In other words, let NATO shoot the natives and the UN clean the floors.

Read more: www.counterpunch.org

Mark Crispin Miller: Why Karl Rove Pulled the Plug (and allowed Obama to win)

Here's Professor Mark Crispin Miller's theory as to why this election too wasn't stolen, and why Karl Rove, in the space of two weeks, changed his prediction from a McCain to an Obama victory. -- RB

11/5/08:
Mark Crispin Miller wrote:
Why Karl Rove Pulled the Plug;
Finally, An Elected President


Barack Obama was overwhelmingly elected by citizens in all regions of the country. Unlike the past two elections where the results were contested in two states run by partisans who rigged the results, this election was won hands down by the person who ran the best campaign. This is not to say that there were not massive problems with voting systems in many states. But this election did not come down to one state or county controlled by corrupt officials.

Four years ago, Velvet Revolution [VR] was formed out of the chaos of the 2004 election. Since then, we and all of you have fought a long battle to ensure that our elections are fair, honest and transparent. We demanded accurate voting machines and paper ballots. In this election, both Florida and Ohio, now with paper ballots, went Blue and there is no one questioning that result.

Over the past several months, we have raised the specter of a Man in the Middle computer attack on the vote tabulators controlled by partisan evangelicals. We identified Michael Connell as the key GOP IT expert who created these nefarious networks. We took legal action against Connell in the form of a federal deposition. Karl Rove responded by threatening Connell to either take the fall or keep his mouth shut. Connell's Bush/Cheney attorneys did everything possible to keep Connell from testifying.

Two weeks ago, Rove was confidently saying that John McCain could win ten battleground states to become President. McCain was confidently telling everyone that he would win with a surge in the wee hours of election night.

Well, last Friday, something important happened: Michael Connell was forced to appear before Solomon Oliver, a Clinton appointed Afro-American federal Judge in Cleveland. After Attorney Cliff Arnebeck accused Connell in open court of rigging elections for Karl Rove, the judge ordered Connell to submit to a sworn deposition 18 hours before the polls were to open. On Monday at noon, Connell was placed under oath and grilled about election fraud, Man in the Middle attacks, Trojan horse manipulations and threats from Rove.

And guess what happened? Connell didn't know a thing! He had no knowledge of any secret steps
to change the vote-counts, in any past elections--or in the election to come. He stonewalled like a champion, denying everything.

It was a remarkable performance; but what was even more remarkable was the abrupt reversal, just hours later, by Karl Rove. Rove wrote on his blog late Monday that Obama would win by a landslide--even in those states he had previously predicted McCain would win.

In other words, Rove pulled the plug, because he felt the heat, and knew that using Connell to rig
this election too would be too risky.

In short, at VR, with all the help from you, our affiliates, our supporters and others, we played a role in helping to make this presidential election more fair than the past two. Our education campaign, our paper ballot campaign, our whistleblower campaign and our legal strategies worked. That's what democracy is all about.

Thank all of you for your confidence in our work, your dedication and your kind and generous support. We hope to continue to do our small part to make our government more accountable to everyone.


--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
Subscribe to Mark Crispin Miller's "News From Underground" newsgroup. Visit http://markcrispinmiller.com

Obama's Election Too big to steal? + Addendum

There's complacency and there's worry.I go back and forth. Sometimes it seems obvious enough that Obama's lead is too big to steal for which there is plenty of evidence. Real Clear Politics (an invaluable website, it has everything including latest polls, national and state maps and much more http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/maps/obama_vs_mccain/ )
gives Obama 259 solid electoral votes + 52 leading, vs., 127 solid +30 leaning for McCain with 70 toss up.

I just spoke to a Democratic operative who's pretty good at predictions who feels sure it'll be a landslide, and I also noticed a NYTimes article chortling about the broadcast media having trouble infusing suspense or even interest in their election coverage because there's no doubt in their minds that Obama will win.

And then there's election fraud. I get unremitting email from Mark Crispin Miller's (MCM) invaluable list like the one from which I've excerpted below.

Here Professor Miller is forwarding material from Election Justice News.
( Did they really say MILLIONS of (mostly Democratic) voters have been removed from the polls?)

Researchers have found that in 2004, 9 million mostly Democratic voters were removed from the lists in 13 states which was part of the reason that Bush officially "won" by 3 million votes.

We also learned from MCM's book, Loser Take All that in 2004 Bush got fewer votes from rural areas than he did in 2000 --which stands to reason. (It's interesting also to learn that the evangelical vote both in 2000 and 2004 played much less of a role than it is generally credited with.) So how did Bush win? According to the exit polls which were forced to fudge their numbers to get into line with later official statistics, Bush improbably IMPROVED his numbers in heavily populated urban areas. Such was the transparency of the fraud and the unaccountability of the official numbers.
(Reminds me, if you have 4 or 6 hours to donate on Nov 4, to help with exit polling (most usefully in a toss up or leaning state), feel free to follow up and I can dig out an email calling for volunteers.)

Addendum: So many of us have been racking our brain about COG, Cheney and Bush's plans to stay in office beyond January 20, 2009. And if an attack on Iran is off the table -- not that it's !00% off and won't be until and unless they give up power --then how could they change the political atmosphere sufficiently to pull it off?
All of a sudden it hit me: They steal enough of the election to throw it to the courts, and at a certain moment they say, enough of this nonsense, we'll stay in office. Just like that.
Let's hope this is just another nightmare from the Bush years -- characterized by an attack, a largely successful attack on civil life.
Ronald
“The use of recriminating about the past is to enforce effective action at the present.”
--Winston Churchill, 1936.
***
Election Justice News
October 28, 2008 http://solarbus.org/nletters/ejn-080916.html


Election Complaints Are Pouring In

With somber concern for our democracy and our country, I send out this edition of Election Justice News. Early voting is well underway in many states, and reports are literally pouring in that portray an organized effort by the GOP to steal yet another election. Taken one at a time, they are easy to discount as mistakes, but the pattern is overwhelming. We're seeing many reports of touchscreen voting machines flipping from Obama to McCain in several states, on different types and brands of voting machines. Millions of eligible voters have been purged from the voter rolls in the last few weeks.
The reports are coming in so fast I can't keep up with it all. Every time I think I have this newsletter ready to go out, another report of vote flipping or voter suppression starts to break. It's enough to really get you down. Compared to 2004, it's a little different because more people are aware of the problems, and a few more reporters are willing to talk about it. But the big news agencies are still busy creating a controversy about ACORN that doesn't exist.
The question now that people are starting to ask is, what are we going to do on November 5th, if it looks like the election was stolen? I still have hope, that the sheer numbers will make it difficult if not impossible to overtake, even with the extensive fraudulent efforts we're seeing. But the reality is, yes it could happen again. The answer to the question of what we do next, is not for me to answer at this time, but it is something that every one of us should start thinking about. There are still some things we can do to try to prevent it from happening. It begins with vigilance, which means that as depressing as it can be, we must pay attention and spread the word, so that people know what's going on. From there we can all take specific steps to try to safeguard our votes.
The influx of reports and proximity to the election are causing us to completely revamp the Election Justice Center website. We are moving everything prior to October into the archives, focusing on this election, and grouping reports by category. Please check the website often for daily updates.
You will find this newsletter to be a bit overwhelming. My advice is to read all the headlines to get a feel for what is happening, and then pick a handful of articles you wish to read in more detail. We must stay informed and we must be vigilant. Read on...
--Gary Beckwith, Editor
Help get the word out - forward this newsletter!
1. Growing Reports of Vote Flipping
We all know those touchscreen voting machines are bad news. Once you cast your vote, it disappears forever into computer "La La Land" where Diebold and ES&S decide what to do with it. You want a recount, or audit? Fuggetaboutit... Well what do you do when you actually see your vote being flipped, right before your eyes on the machine? You'd think that the programmers would at least try to cover up what they're doing and flip the vote after you walk away, but evidently they're not that smart, at least some of the time. The reports are now trickling in of many people clicking on the vote for Obama and seeing it register as a vote for McCain. Not surprisingly, we're still waiting for the first real report of the reverse. If the past is any indication, there won't be many - in 2004 there were thousands of vote flipping incidents reported, and nearly every single one was a person trying to vote for Kerry but seeing their vote flipped to Bush.
[snip]

Table of Contents
1. Growing Reports of Vote Flipping
2. More Problems with E-Voting Systems
3. Massive Voter Purging and Suppression
4. WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP PREVENT ANOTHER STOLEN ELECTION
5. Polls Show McCain "Win" Would Point To Fraud
6. Diebold Whistleblowers tell how previous elections were stolen
7. The Red Herring Attacks on ACORN
8. Multimedia: Videos and Movies Cover Election Fraud
9. All books and films on election issues marked down!
10. More Ways To Stay Informed

http://solarbus.org/nletters/ejn-080916.html