THE O BOMB: WHY IS OBAMA DOING SO BADLY?

Sam Smith
- His supporters didn't read the small type above the box marked "I
accept." If they had they would have learned during the campaign that
Obama was pro-military, anti-civil liberties and conservative on
economics. They got what they paid for, just not what they thought they
had paid for.
- Obama got where he is by repeatedly pleasing the establishment. He still
is.
- Everyone from his mother to his law professors to the Democratic
Leadership Council kept telling him how great he was. He came to believe
them. Wisdom and judgment in life requires losses as well as victories.
- He understands how to create transparent data but not how to create
visible programs. No one knows why we're in Afghanistan, what's really in
the healthcare bill, or what's being stimulated in their communities. It's
hard to argue for things people can't see and it makes it easy for your
opponents to claim that they're something awful. The best politics is the
sort you can see and feel.
- Obama's a lawyer surrounded by too many lawyers. The legalocracy has
been taking over Washington for years, but with Obama it's reached a new
peak. Lawyers do somethings well, like write contracts, sue people and
draft your will. In other matters - like actually doing whatever it is
they're providing legal support for - they are not particularly qualified.
Harry Markopolos, the Bernie Madoff whistleblower, recently described how
it works at the SEC:"The five commissioners of the SEC are securities
lawyers. Securities lawyers never understand finance. They don't have the
math background. If you can't do math and if you can't take apart the
investment products of the 21st century backward and forward and put them
together in your sleep you'll never find the frauds on Wall Street."
- Further, lawyers think truth lies in documents and not out on the
street. Which is one reason FDR did better with his stimulus package: he
put a social worker, and not a lawyer, in charge.
- Rahm Emmanuel. Hope and change don't go over so well when they are
accompanied by threats.
- As soon as Obama got elected he dumped his liberal supporters, thereby
ignoring the advice of a wiser Chicago politician, Richard Daley the
elder: "Dance with the one that brung you."
- He has too many economists. Multi-factor crises are not handled well by
one-factor thinkers.
- Obama thinks bipartisanship is great. A better politician, Harry Truman,
said that when anyone told him they were bipartisan, he knew they were
going to vote against him. My Coast Guard navigation instructor told us
that if you take a navigational fix and it puts you on one side of a rock
and then you take another fix and it puts you on the other side of the
rock, "Don't split the difference." Obama doesn't seem to grasp this
principle.
- There's nothing intrinsically wrong with compromise, but wise
compromises are made by those who know where they want to go. Using a
compromise as the starting point is a premeditated act of random, like you
know, whatever.
- Looking deeply pensive when someone else is speaking or doing a little
jog up to the podium is cute the first few times; after that it becomes
corny.
- Obama's problem is not that he uses a teleprompter but that he seems
totally dependent on it, such as using one when speaking to a group of
school children. Joe Biden should give him lessons in human conversation.
- Academic intelligence takes you only so far. At some point, you have to
apply it and that requires other skills such as social wisdom, empathy and
judgment.
- Obama, who has a hard time running those governmental functions covered
by the Constitution, can't keep his hands off things that are none of his
business like local education or how health records are maintained. The
wisest leaders know how to share power with others and to respect the 10th
Amendment.
- People don't want more laws and regulations; they want more money, help
and happiness. Obama doesn't seem to understand this.
- Everyone talks about Obama and race, but it's really class that's
causing the problem. People feel they're being talked down to, scolded,
and told what to do by people who come across as intellectual snobs. This
didn't used to be a problem, because liberals were the ones who helped the
workers and the less fortunate in society. Now they don't seem to care all
that much. If liberals, beginning with Obama, had a people-friendly
economic policy, the right wouldn't be able to get away with their
hypocritical blarney and the Democrats would have some weapons to combat
it.
- With Obama as with the rest of his party, there is no interest, concern
or respect for the local - where people really live. Getting through life
doesn't happen at a White House summit but in the 'hood.
- After you've had all your summits and your speeches and special meetings
with special people, it helps to make a decision or two that everyone can
understand and a lot of people can get excited about.

Counterpunch--Brian Cloughley: Tilting at Afghan Windmills

Don Quixote, the main character in a novel by the Spanish writer Cervantes in 1605, spent a lot of time on horseback, armed with a lance, attacking windmills which he thought were menacing giants.

“Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills . . . And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, “Fortune is guiding our affairs . . . Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich, for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.”

“What giants?” asked Sancho Panza.”

President Eisenhower inherited the Korean war from his predecessor and then negotiated a cease-fire. President Lyndon Johnson took over Vietnam from his predecessor and committed his country to eventual humiliating defeat. And almost fifty years later President Barack Obama has been gifted the Afghan debacle by a moron who spent most of his catastrophic eight years tilting at windmills in “righteous wars.”

The First, Second and Third Afghan Wars were waged by the British between 1839 and 1919 in three disastrous campaigns totaling nine years. The Fourth resulted in the degrading defeat of Russia in 1989 when its troops had to leave after a decade. And now the Fifth Afghan War is being conducted by America and some allies from 2001 to . . . Well, when? It’s seven years, and counting.

What happens now that Mr Obama is in command?

Last month the US General Petraeus said that a surge like the one he ordered in Iraq would not work in Afghanistan, and that it is essential that Afghans not view foreign forces as conquerors. “You do need to tenaciously pursue the enemy and the extremists . . . But you also need to be building, and to develop, and . . . help and to partner.”

Does anyone believe that President Karzai is an equal partner of the so-called “coalition” forces in his country? Does anyone imagine there is deference by foreign forces to the government of Afghanistan? (If President Karzai flies in an Mi-17 helicopter it is piloted by an Afghan. But if there is an American on board the pilot must be American and it must be a machine that is serviced by US technicians. Does nobody realize how much this sort of arrogant colonial condescension is resented?)

Karzai has protested about the bungled cowboy airstrikes that have killed hundreds of his people but the only effect his complaints have had is to make Afghans despise him for being feeble and to have Washington even more determined to have him replaced.

Petraeus is right, in that development is essential. But the foreigners running Afghanistan do not have enough troops to control the country and the Afghan army is nowhere near ready to do so. So there can’t be much development carried out (although billions of dollars have vanished), simply because there is a lack of stability.

There is no point in building something if the nasties can promptly destroy it.

A long time ago I served in the Australian Task Force in Vietnam. We were supposed to “win hearts and minds” but, alas, lost them completely. We went round the villages building little windmills. Splendid contraptions that pumped up water for fishponds and so forth. And on the vanes of the propellers we stenciled little yellow kangaroos, announcing that Australia supported windmill democracy (or something). And a couple of days after we erected one of them, imagining ingenuously that we were winning the hearts and minds of the local people, along would come the Viet Cong and blow it up.

Then after a while the Viet Cong became a bit more savvy. They left the windmills alone – and told the villagers that the first person to make use of one would be killed. This had the effect of leaving stark standing monuments to the total impotence of the foreign soldiers.

It was very effective psychological warfare. Even the half million foreign soldiers in South Vietnam, a country (66,000 square miles) a quarter the size of Afghanistan (250,000 square miles; 80,000 foreign troops; 17,000 more US troops to come this year), together with a Vietnamese army of 410,000 could not guarantee the existence of a few windmills.

We used to have a military principle that remains relevant : Take and Hold Ground. It comes down to this : If you can’t hold the ground you’ve taken, then what is the point in taking that ground? You can’t defend windmills if you leave the place in which you built them and then let the enemy come in to take control. In that case, your soldiers have died for nothing.

In Vietnam these windmills twirled and hummed, insensible and useless in the rustling wind, as memorials for souls.

The “coalition forces” propaganda machine in Afghanistan would have us believe that things are going fairly well. But this war is a disaster. Every other day we are told that dozens of ‘Taliban’ are killed. And for every one who is killed (and many are ordinary tribesmen who hate foreign invaders and resist them energetically, as they have done for centuries), another ten? – fifty? – hundred? – are motivated to join the resistance to the foreign intruders. Just as they did, with energetic support from Washington, when Russians occupied their territory.

It is all very well having lots of foreign troops roaming round Afghanistan killing people (of whom many are civilians – over 700 last year), but as in Vietnam it is hearts and minds that matter. President Obama has some hard decisions to make, because the US and its allies went in to Afghanistan without doing the basic arithmetic of the number of troops required to perform the tasks the foreign politicians gave them. Unless there are enough soldiers to take and hold ground to ensure that aid projects work, there is no point in staying there.

* * *

A proposal for “civil defense forces (CDF)” in Afghanistan has been endorsed by two clever academics, Messrs Matthew P Dearing and Matthew C DuPee of the US Naval Postgraduate School. Such forces, they write, “will provide a significant measure of needed security and authority in areas of Afghanistan previously unprotected by ANSF [Afghanistan’s National Security Forces]. They will allow community leaders from a variety of tribes and clans to work together in delivering sufficient levels of security . . . ” And so on.

The US Department of the Army Field Manual 31-22 of the Vietnam years “envisions all members of a village being organized for their own mutual support into a village complex. This mutual support not only includes defense but also will include other activities, such as . . . extensions of democratic principles and procedures through such things as the formation of village and hamlet committees.” Oh how starry-eyed we were.

It has all been tried before. It didn’t work in Vietnam and it won’t work in Afghanistan. The notion that tribal militias (or even “civil defense forces”) will allow “community leaders from a variety of tribes and clans to work together in delivering sufficient levels of security” is naive.

Tribes in Afghanistan can’t agree on the time of day. They hate each other. And the only thing that is drawing them together in temporary alliance is hatred of foreign soldiers and profits from corruption, heroin production and smuggling. The hearts and minds of the tribes are otherwise engaged.

Will Mr Obama construct a new strategy? Or will he tilt at windmills?

Brian Cloughley's book about the Pakistan army, War, Coups and Terror, is to be published in the US by Skyhorse next month. His website is www.beecluff.com.

WORD

Instead of nationalizing our banks' financial principal, Tim Geithner seems to have nationalized Bernie Madoff's financial principle: just give me your money and don't ask too many questions. - Josiah Swampoodle

The Inaugural Address: the Digested Read

Of course, we can all get together and hope for change, or change for hope, or hope for change that we can really use, or change for use that we can really hope...let's just hope that the President has gone nuts temporarily and doesn't mean to increase troop levels in Afghanistan in the traditional manner of distraction politics.--Pete

By C. G. Estabrook

My fellow citizens:

We are in the midst of crisis. Our nation is at war [against an Axis...oops] against a Network of Violence and Hatred.

America's decline can be arrested, [just so long as we can scare hell out of the American people] because the challenges we face are real. [Really, they are.]

We need unity of purpose [to get rid of naysayers]. No more worn-out dogmas [like "no aggressive war"] that for far too long have strangled our politics. [Some are actually trying to stop the Mideast War.]

But we have a noble idea: [spread Freedom...oops] that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness [as we define it].

[One Nation, one People, and one President] are greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction. We must begin again the work of remaking America [in the image and likeness of the Best People.]

We'll create new jobs and lay a new foundation for growth [by paying rich people first]. The stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. [This has been called elsewhere "Gleichschaltung."]

The Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine [but we'll draw some parallels], drafted a charter to assure the rule of law [and of course their undisturbed possession of their wealth].

The justness of our cause [is so obvious it can't even be discussed]...

We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people [as split as that infinitive]. and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan, [as mixed as that metaphor].

With old friends [Israel] and former foes [Russia], we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, [of course we don't admit Israel has any nukes] and roll back the specter of a warming planet [because you know how dangerous those rolling specters are.]

We will not apologize for our way of life [even though it's fucking nuts], nor will we waver in its defense. [You do remember the Bush Doctrine, Ms. Palin?]

And for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you [i.e., no one induces terror or slaughters innocents like us.]

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. [Look how we respected those thousands of dead and wounded Gazans.]

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West [How could they do THAT?!]:

Know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. [Pay no attention to Gaza, or a million dead in Iraq; but don't plan any Afghan wedding parties.]

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent [Hey, what happened to the shoe-thrower?], know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist [and cross your palm with a little something from Gen. Petraeus].

As we consider the road that unfolds before us [actually, I'm having trouble re-folding the Road Map], we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains [in spite of what the people who live there might think].

They have something to tell us today ["Bring us home!"], just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. ["That's an ill phrase, a vile phrase...."]

We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty [exactly whose liberty are they guarding in the Mideast? ExxonMobil's?], but because they embody the spirit of service; [of course, if they don't, we'll force them to enlist because there are no jobs...]

[Several paragraphs of absolute bilge and balderdash here, ending with a demand for] a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world [which will be enforced in reverse order].

This is the price and the promise of citizenship. This is the source of our confidence -- the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny. [And you're hearing it from The One.]

This is ... why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath. ["Luo, I am your FAAATHER...."]

When the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: "the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it." ["I can feel your Paine."]

With eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of Freedom and delivered it safely to future generations. [Freedom Lives! or is that Frodo? or Fredo?...]

The Digested Read, Digested:

We're going to keep killing people, and that's OK.

C. G. Estabrook is a retired visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the host of "News from Neptune, the TV Edition," on Urbana Public Television and on the website newsfromneptune.com; he can be contacted at carl@newsfromneptune.com

The people teach their leaders how to lead

From remarks at an Inauguration Day Assembly at Lausanne Collegiate School in Memphis, Tenn.

Pablo J. Davis - We'll hear much, rightly, about Barack Obama's becoming the first president of acknowledged African descent.

We'll hear much of his electoral mandate, the strongest of any first - term president in two decades. And his thoughtful, cool, and unflappable bearing, reassuring to so many in these difficult times.

We're right to consider this day historic. But if we see the Inauguration as the end of the story, we'll be making a great mistake. We need to think of this moment as a beginning.

Why? A character in one of German dramatist Bertolt Brecht's plays laments, "Pity this land, that has no hero." To which another character replies, "Pity the land that needs a hero."

Many people, fearful of the times and dazzled by the president - elect's qualities, see him as a political savior.

But there's a trap in such thinking. The presidency is hugely important, but presidents do not achieve by themselves, or strictly from above, or following a detailed plan.

Lincoln's emancipation of enslaved Americans, Teddy Roosevelt's progressive reforms, FDR's creation of safeguards for old age and widowhood - none of these goals sprang fully - formed from the brow of any of these men, great as they were. In each case, strong pressure from the people forced greater goals on the president.

Often in history, the people have led and the leaders have followed. Or, if you prefer, the people have taught their leaders how to lead.

This president, like all others, will on Day One find his desk piled high with IOU's from people and organizations of great wealth and power.

But will he hear from all of the people? Only if we see democracy as more than just elections - as 365- days- per- year dialogue and work between the people and the government.

What I say applies to those who supported Obama in the election and those who didn't.

The issues aren't abstract. Will you have decent work in coming years -- or, indeed, any work? Will you be able to stay in your home? Will you have access to health care? Will the country continue to wage wars, and to what ends? Will our political liberties survive?

Like it or not, government's actions, in our names and with our tax moneys, will have much to say about all this.

Stay informed. Learn about public - policy organizations. And above all let the new president and the Congress hear - - by letter, by phone, by email - - from you, from us, from "We, the people."

Obama on the Gaza Massacre: "No Comment".

Excerpted and paraphrased from Wajahat Ali, Counterpunch

President-elect Obama remains inappropriately quiet on the hell that Israel rains down on Gaza with the implicit approval of BushCo, but earlier this summer he endorsed Israel's right to defend itself against Qassam rockets by stating,

"If someone were sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do anything to stop it.”

One wonders, however, if President elect Obama’s principles of safety, dignity and self defense apply to Palestinians as well? If Obama and President Bush’s daughters were forced to suspend their emergency hospital operations due to fuel shortages, beg for 300 essential medicines, drink contaminated water that causes malnutrition and anemia in children, eat bread made of animal feed, and renounce electricity because their main power plant was forced to shut down, what would they do?

Obama's election will keep liberals happy

From Joe Bageant's Blog, Deer Hunting With Jesus - dispatches from America's class war.
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/12/obamas-election-will-keep-liberals-happy.html

Dear Joe,

It has been a very sobering experience to see all my "liberal" friends rolling on the floor in the throes of ecstasy over Obama's win. Miraculously, the democrats succeeded at what the republicans have been proficiently doing for quite a long time; convincing a large number of people to be ecstatic about voting against their own interests. Maybe the self destructive red neck paradigm needs to be adjusted to include shell shocked liberals.

My friends are so overjoyed about all the 'change' that is certainly coming our way that I can't bring myself to spoil their happiness with rude facts about what political interests Obama represents or how his advisers are responsible for many of the problems facing working class people. My lack of enthusiasm over his victory creates awkwardness among my peers and heightens my feeling of political alienation. After the election I had the queasy sense of being on the outside edge of a mass delusion.

What prompted me to write today was an article from Robert Scheer lamenting Obama's choices for cabinet positions. A few months back when Scheer spoke at our local library on his book tour, (about 20 people attended) he advocated voting for Obama. I asked him why anyone who cared about the Constitution, civil liberties, international law, etc., should vote for someone who didn't support any of that is his campaign. He replied, "It's the best we can do." Now it appears in his recent article that Sheer is not so enthusiastic anymore. I defiantly voted for Nader "without any illusions", but with apologies to Noam Chomsky.

So now Obama parades his lineup of economic advisers and, in the immortal words of Gomer Pyle, "Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!" But only if you've not been paying attention all along. The only surprise is how easily the democrats managed to get people all jacked up about pissing in their own beds. I am hoping that Thomas Frank will explain all this in his next book.

Sincerely,

Tomas

------

Tomas,

I know what you mean about the queasy experience of being on the outside edge of mass delusion. If you look around in the current national darkness, you will notice millions of us alongside you.

Consequently, we go into a new year with millions of Americans still clinging to The Audacity of Hope. And we do so because we are victims of learned helplessness. Sure we can hope. What the hell, hope is one of the few remaining free activities. We don't even have to put down the remote and get off our asses to do it. It is delivered through television.

In the end however, hope is the junk food of the mind and soul. It is the murky, undefined belief that some unknown force, perhaps Jesus or modern science or some great political leader, or other as yet unknown force will reverse our national or personal condition will deliver us from the results of living in a perpetual state of childhood. Hope is magical thinking, a sucker's game. Politicians the world round fully understand this.

Obama's election will keep millions of American liberals and much of the world deliriously happy for some time to come. And to some degree at least, Obama's victory is a national public rejection of the phony and expensive war on terror, but not necessarily a rejection by the empire's rulers. Anyway, even that is not a step forward, but rather a partial recovery from the immense and spectral folly of our needless war making -- recovery of one small bit of the immense moral ground we have ceded. But at some point we will have to cease thinking like children politically, grow up and personally accept responsibility, if we are to rescue our republic from ourselves.

Electing someone else to do it looks good on paper. But no politician can campaign on the facts. Why hell, that might not sound hopefull enough to sustain America's cupcake and bunny voters. Take the ecology and the depletion of worldresources, the collapsing planet. No presidential candidate can run on the promise that "If we do everything just right, pull in our belts and sacrifice, we can at best be a second world nation in fifty years, providing we don't mind the lack of oxygen and a few cancers here and there."

Hope is a particular vice of the liberal solar power electric car set. I suggest they turn off PBS's Nova for a while. Realize the limits of technology and quit looking for more techno solutions to what technology itself hath wrought. All the green energy sources and eating right cannot repair what has been irretrievably ruined. Species gluttony is nearly over and we've eaten the flesh of the earth and pissed upon its bones. Not because we are cruel by nature -- though a case might be made for stupidity -- but because we took the existence of individual consciousness to mean that each of us is some unique center of the world, acquisitive and deserving of all things -- $700 latte machines, $90 a night dog hotels, hard-on drugs in the bedrooms of Brentwood in place of anti-malarial drugs in African villages (though at age 62, I am sorely tempted by the promise of a four-hour boner.) One brand of this collective hallucination, although there are others, is called American exceptionalism. Liberals are as guilty of that as conservatives, simply because they partake of the American Lifestyle. We can get away with that game as long as the oil and the entertainment last. Which looks to be about another half hour.

There is quite a difference between hope and understanding the facts, then holding justified optimism. It will take quite a while for liberals wake up and meet the new boss -- same as the old boss, yada yada. Hell, most of them have not figured out Bill Clinton yet. But when and if it does happen, I wanna be in California, the land of compulsory Oprah style optimism, and where so many childish souls nurse at the ever flowing tit of hope. It's gonna be the biggest squalling diaper change in history.

In art and labor,

Joe

SWAMPOODLE REPORT: BAIT AND SWITCH

Sam Smith

Watching Barack Obama's bait and switch left me with an indefinable sense of deja vu until the parallel finally dawned. The personalities were so different that they obscured a common technique.

Marion Barry was elected mayor of Washington in 1978 thanks to a coalition of blacks and white liberals. So strong was white liberal participation that a columnist in the Washington Afro American said Barry was part of a plan by whites to take over the city.

By the end of Barry's second term, however, his constituency had shifted. The blacks were still there but the white liberals had become largely irrelevant thanks to funding from the white business community. The most integrated meetings in town were when the Barry team sat down with its campaign contributors.

His stand on development issues, in particular, had alienated white liberal support. Development, he promised blacks, was going to bring jobs. Since most of the development would be in white neighborhoods, the question of density, traffic and destruction of community would not be a black political issue.

Thus black power cut a deal with white power. The middle class and poor of either race weren't part of the deal although they were mightily affected by it.

In fact, the deal didn't bring jobs to blacks. By 1986 there were some 40,000 more private jobs in DC than in 1980, but a thousand fewer DC residents were employed. All the new jobs in that period went to mostly white suburban commuters.

Entering office with a biracial liberal coalition, Barry had converted his base into one that relied heavily on black votes and white corporate money. The former he attracted by rhetoric, the latter with the real estate at his disposal.

This is in contrast to the popular image of Barry as portrayed in the press, but when I would ask for examples of Barry doing anything that seriously jarred the agenda of the white business community, nobody could come up with an example.

If you ignore Barry's other big shift - from power to cocaine as his drug of choice - and if you substitute Wall Street and similar big lobbies for Washington's local Board of Trade, what Obama is doing to his white liberal constituency seems oddly familiar.

And Barry and Obama are far from alone. The typical black politician of modern times - i.e. a mayor - has been a king whose power has been rigorously circumscribed by a white business community serving as the local parliament. In the end it turned out to be a fool's paradise of black power because within a decade and a half, upper income whites were taking back the cities and the constituents of the black mayors were being evicted in what amounted to socio-economic urban cleansing.

Civil rights and black power - as independent movements - faded in inverse proportion to the rise of black politicians, and with this shift symbols replaced substance. The power of the many became the power of the one.

This wasn't the case of earlier political machines, but these were created upon building an organization of voters rather than of contributors. Once we dumped the old machines in favor of television and dollar driven machines, ordinary people became important only at election time, and they were easily swayed by the exploding tools of propaganda. Thus we found Obama running as a "community organizer" when in fact the only community he was organizing was a temporary one for himself.

Obama is only the latest reincarnation of this trend applied at a national level. But the local precursors are useful in understanding what's going on. And it serves as another reminder of why our system of campaign financing is so terrible.

This doesn't mean that Obama will necessarily be all bad as president. Barry's first two mayoral terms, for example, were arguably the best DC has seen in recent times, judged by the number of people in the city - including blacks, women and gays - who did better during them. My hunch is that Obama will be like the little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead: "When she was good, she was very, very good. . .And when she was bad, she was horrid."

But it does mean that Obama's liberal coalition has served its purpose - to get him elected - and will be replaced by those who will also serve their purpose - to keep him there. That's the way politics is these days. The tone and the target of the 2012 election will be strikingly different as Obama goes after his new constituency. If you don't like it, next time find out what your candidate means when he talks of "change."

Related Article From Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/early12082008.html

Obama Doesn't Plan to End the Occupation in Iraq

By Jeremy Scahill, AlterNet

Alternet article

The New York Times is reporting an "apparent evolution" in president-elect Barack Obama's thinking on Iraq, citing recent statements about his plan to keep a "residual force" in the country and his pledge to "listen to the recommendations of my commanders" as Obama prepares to assume actual command of U.S. forces. "At the Pentagon and the military headquarters in Iraq, the response to the statements this week from Mr. Obama and his national security team has been akin to the senior officer corps' letting out its collective breath," the Times reported. "[T]the words sounded to them like the new president would take a measured approach on the question of troop levels."

The reality is there is no "evolution."

Anyone who took the time to cut past Barack Obama's campaign rhetoric of "change" and bringing an "end" to the Iraq war realized early on that his Iraq plan boiled down to a down-sizing and rebranding of the occupation. While he emphasized his pledge to withdraw U.S. "combat forces" from Iraq in 16 months (which may or may not happen), he has always said that he intends to keep "residual forces" in place for the foreseeable future.

It's an interesting choice of terms. "Residual" is defined as "the quantity left over at the end of a process." This means that the forces Obama plans to leave in Iraq will remain after he has completed his "withdrawal" plan. No matter how Obama chooses to label the forces he keeps in Iraq, the fact is, they will be occupation forces.

Announcing his national security team this week, Obama reasserted his position. "I said that I would remove our combat troops from Iraq in 16 months, with the understanding that it might be necessary -- likely to be necessary -- to maintain a residual force to provide potential training, logistical support, to protect our civilians in Iraq." While some have protrayed this as Obama going back on his campaign pledge, it is not. What is new is that some people seem to just now be waking up to the fact that Obama never had a comprehensive plan to fully end the occupation. Most recently, the Times:

"On the campaign trail, Senator Barack Obama offered a pledge that electrified and motivated his liberal base, vowing to 'end the war' in Iraq," wrote reporter Thom Shanker on Thursday. "But as he moves closer to the White House, President-elect Obama is making clearer than ever that tens of thousands of American troops will be left behind in Iraq, even if he can make good on his campaign promise to pull all combat forces out within 16 months."

For many months it's been abundantly clear that Obama's Iraq plan is at odds with his campaign rhetoric. Yet, Shanker writes, "to date, there has been no significant criticism from the antiwar left of the Democratic Party of the prospect that Mr. Obama will keep tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for at least several years to come." The Times is actually right about this, in a literal sense. There has seldom, if ever, been a public peep about Obama's residual force plans for Iraq from members of his own party, including from those who describe themselves as "anti-war."

But, for those who have scrutinized Obama's plans and the statements of his advisors from the beginning, this is old news. Obama never defined "ending the war" as removing all U.S. forces from Iraq. Besides the counsel of his closest advisors -- many of whom are pro-war hawks -- Obama's Iraq plan is based on two primary sources: the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton "Iraq Study Group" and the 2007 Iraq supplemental spending bill, which, at the time was portrayed as the Democrats' withdrawal plan. Both envisioned a sustained presence of U.S. forces for an undefined period following a "withdrawal."

In supporting the 2007 supplemental, Obama said it would put the U.S. "one signature away from ending the Iraq War." The bill would have redeployed U.S. forces from Iraq within 180 days. But that legislation, vetoed by President Bush, would also have provided for 20,000 to 60,000 troops to remain in Iraq as "trainers," "counter-terrorist forces," or for "protection for embassy/diplomats," according to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies. The bill contained no language about how many "private contractors" could remain in Iraq. This helped shed light on what Obama actually meant by "ending the Iraq War."

Other glaring clues to the actual nature of Obama's Iraq plan to anyone paying attention could be found in the public comments of his advisors, particularly on the size of the force Obama may leave in Iraq after his withdrawal is complete. Obama has refused to talk numbers, saying in October, "I have tried not to put a number on it." That has been the position of many of his loyal aides. "We have not put a number on that. It depends on the circumstances on the ground," said Susan Rice, Obama's nominee for UN ambassador, during the campaign. "It would be worse than folly, it would be dangerous, to put a hard number on the residual forces."

But, Richard Danzig, President Clinton's former Navy Secretary who may soon follow Robert Gates as Obama's Defense Secretary, said during the campaign that the "residual force" could number as many as 55,000 troops. That doesn't include Blackwater and other mercenaries and private forces, which the Obama camp has declared the president-elect "can't rule out [and] won't rule out" using. At present there are more "contractors" in Iraq than soldiers, which is all the more ominous when considering Obama's Iraq plan.

In April, it was revealed that the coordinator of Obama's Iraq working group, Colin Kahl, had authored a paper, titled "Stay on Success: A Policy of Conditional Engagement," which recommended, "the U.S. should aim to transition to a sustainable over-watch posture (of perhaps 60,000-80,000 forces) by the end of 2010 (although the specific timelines should be the byproduct of negotiations and conditions on the ground)." Kahl tried to distance the views expressed in the paper from Obama's official campaign position, but they were and are consistent.

In March, Obama advisor Samantha Power let the cat out of the bag for some people when she described her candidate's 16-month timetable for withdrawing U.S. "combat" forces as a "best case scenario." Power said, "He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he's crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator." (After that remark and referring to Sen. Hillary Clinton as a "monster," Power resigned from the campaign. Now that Obama is president-elect, Power's name has once again resurfaced as a member of his transitional team.)

The New York Times also raised the prospect that Obama could play semantics when defining his 16-month withdrawal plan, observing, "Pentagon planners say that it is possible that Mr. Obama's goal could be accomplished at least in part by relabeling some units, so that those currently counted as combat troops could be 're-missioned,' their efforts redefined as training and support for the Iraqis."

Compare all of the above with a statement Obama made in July: "I intend to end this war. My first day in office I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission, and that is to end this war -- responsibly, deliberately, but decisively."

Some may now accuse Obama of flip-flopping. The reality is that we need to understand what the words "end" "war" "residual" and "decisively" mean when we hear Obama say them.

Jeremy Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army and is a frequent contributor to The Nation and Democracy Now! He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.

Ten Ways the Corporate Media Tried To Convince You That Obama Was a Progressive

1. Cherry picked a 2007 National Journal ranking which concluded that Obama was the most liberal Senator. This despite the fact that it was an outlier with a deeply flawed methodology that no other ranking confirmed, and only a true nitwit would swallow credulously the notion that Obama was more liberal than Russ Feingold or Bernie Sanders.

2. Nodded approvingly as Clinton campaign pushed "Obama is too liberal" meme. Ignored the fact that even in the National Journal ranking, of the 267 issues on which they both cast votes in 2007, they differed by only 10 votes. "The policy differences between Clinton and Obama are so slight they are almost nonexistent to the average voter," said Rutgers University political scientist Richard Lau.

3. Turned into complete bobbleheads as McCain campaign and a woman who excised the letter "g" from the alphabet endlessly repeat the same.

4. Refused to listen when "liberal bloggers" pointed out that Obama wasn't all that liberal (see video above).

5. Assumed that the only thing meaningful about Obama's expression of admiration for Ronald Reagan was that it pissed off liberal bloggers.

6. Hyperventillated over Jeremiah Wright as if he was capable of some kind of Vulcan mind control.

7. Deduced, like Larry Kudlow, that if given the chance Obama would appoint Bill Ayers Secretary of State.

8. Preached the gospel of America as "center-right nation" after the election when all evidence was to the contrary, because -- well, they and all their friends are "center right" and that must mean something.

9. Demanded that Obama must "govern from the center" to make themselves the country happy.

10. Reacted with shock and delight when Obama appoints "conservative" Hillary Clinton, a woman whose voting record on Iraq was nearly identical to his own, as Secretary of State -- repudiating liberal bloggers who were obviously hoping for Bill Ayers.

Tagged as: media, obama, bloggers, liberal, corporate media sucks

Jane Hamsher is the founder of FireDogLake. Her work has also appeared on the Huffington Post, Alternet and The American Prospect.

Obama to be next neocon US president?

Global Research, December 1, 2008

Press TV

The next US government might not be able to keep its promise on 'Change' and might turn into a war-oriented administration, a prominent historian says. President-elect Barack Obama, who inspired Americans during his presidential campaign, defeated his Republican rival John McCain thanks to the new slogans in a historic election last month. During his transition time, Obama has been trying to name his administration among American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbyists, foreign relation advisers, and congressmen. Selecting Joe Biden as vice president who supported the Iraq war before it became unpopular was a surprising decision when Obama himself opposed the war. "He [Biden] is a strong supporter of Israel. He even made a statement 'I am a Zionist'," Stephen Sniegoski, US historian and author, told Press TV correspondent in Washington. Obama's decision to name Rahm Manuel as the White House chief of staff was another indicator of the influence of pro-Israeli lobby in his campaign. "Rahm Manuel is a very strong Zionist, even he went to Israel to help out the military during the first Persian Gulf war," said Sneigoski. On Monday, the Democrat is expected to pick former rival Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, another Democrat who has been at odds with Obama in the past over foreign policy, including Iran. "Hillary Clinton made a statement that she would if Iran attacks Israel, that the United States should annihilate Iran," said Sneigoski. Speculation runs high that despite Obama's campaign promises to open up dialogue with Iran, his policy could be changed with the new members of his cabinet and advisers who are supportive of Israel. During his campaign, the president-elect declared his full support for Israel, saying that 'I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel'. The US author, Sneigoski concluded that the Obama administration would be a war-oriented administration. Meanwhile, Dennis Ross, a former member of AIPAC, is reportedly angling for top positions in the Obama administration. Dennis Ross, an adviser to Hillary Clinton, said in a study by Bipartisan Policy Council last month that Washington 'might have little time and fewer options to deal with Iran. Military strike is feasible, but last resort'. The US and Israel accuse the Islamic Republic of making efforts to produce nuclear weapons; Iran insists its nuclear program is directed at peaceful purposes. The UN nuclear watchdog responsible for investigating Iranian nuclear activities confirmed in its latest report that it has "been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran." The body has conducted the highest number of investigations in the history of the organization on Iran's nuclear sites.

Watch out for Obama's Team Selling Conservative Policies as Progressive Politics

There seems to be a great deal of concern from the left-of-center bloggers about Mr. Obama's appointments. The quote below is a perfect distillation of my thoughts regarding presidential politics and the duopoly in general and my strong feelings regarding Obama in particular. He hasn't been co-opted by his election to the machine - he was never a progressive. That said, there will never be any significant social change resulting from establishment politics. Convince me otherwise, please.--Pete

By David Sirota, Open Left
http://www.alternet.org/story/108538/

"This is the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right."-- David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton official who wrote a history of the National Security Council, said on Friday, as news of Mrs. Clinton's and Mr. Geithner's appointments leaked.

This quote, from the New York Timesstory asserting that Barack Obama will govern from the center-right, highlights a very important dynamic in politics: the tendency of politicians to use the argot of progressivism in their public presentations (to "hold power with the left hand") -- all while wielding conservative policy ("playing the music with your right").

There's nothing surprising about this - the reason endangered politicians of both parties start airing populist progressive themes around election time is because they know those themes are popular among rank-and-file voters (thus the definition of "populism") - they know, in other words, that this is a decidedly center-left country, and when they have to answer to that country come election day, they go left. But once these politicians get into office and are far away from all of us, the unwashed masses, the pressures of money and media -- ie. the Establishment -- unleashes incredible pressure for them to actually write the details of policy in a way that preserves the conservative status quo.

Enter the Obama administration.

While there's not enough evidence to declare a full-on "trend" in the incoming Obama White House, it is notable that Obama's policy appointments (ie. Cabinet secretaries and White House policy advisers who actually craft policy) are almost all right-of-center, Establishment choices -- and almost none are, as The Nation's Chris Hayes has said, movement progressives. At the same time, many Obama appointments to exclusively political positions -- that is, positions that are focused on selling policy, whatever that policy may be -- are terrific movement progressives, people like Mike Lux (transition outreach to progressive orgs), Ellen Moran (communications director), Phil Schiliro (congressional liason) and Patrick Gaspard (political director). In other words, the initial structure seems to resemble the principle in American politics of politicians publicly selling their policies in progressive terms, while having those policies be crafted with much more conservative ideology.

Intra-administration ideological ghettoization isn't new. The last Democratic administration engaged in its share of conservative-progressive ghettoization - but rather than making the policy/politics barrier the wall of the two ghettos, it divided the two ideologies between the cabinet offices with different jurisdictions. The cabinet offices that oversaw economic regulation and defense largely went to conservatives, and the cabinet offices with powerful grassroots progressive constituencies like Labor, EPA, I and HUD went to progressives.

The potential ghettoization in the Obama administration -- and I stress again, it's only the potential -- is one where the policy sculptors are center-right Establishmentarians, and where the policy marketers (ie. the political team) is comprised of people who know how to package and sell policies in the language of progressivism, and sell those policies to progressive activists, a progressive-dominated Democratic congressional caucus and a center-left public at large. Certainly, Obama may mimic the Clinton administration and give Labor, EPA, Interior and HUD to progressives as well, but the politics-policy divide nonetheless seems to be the defining progressive-conservative boundary right now.

Obviously, the division of responsibility is never totally cut and dry. As Karl Rove showed, a White House political team can have a lot of influence over policy. So we can't draw any hard and fast conclusions about what this will mean in the Obama administration. It's very possible that the progressive political team will have a lot of policy say.

That said, I do think it is important for progressives to understand the difference between the policy and political machinery of an administration. Ghettoizing conservatives into the policy machine (to "play the music") and progressives into the political machine (to help Obama "hold power") would not bode well for all the progressive policy promises Obama made during the campaign. After all, if the details of policy are being forged by center-right Establishment insiders, those policies are more likely (though certainly not guaranteed) to represent a fairly center-right Establishment viewpoint, no matter how well those policies are draped in the salesmanship of a progressive political machinery.

This gets to the fundamental question about Obama that nobody really knows. Does Obama believe that in order to be a successful president and right the economy, he has to fulfill the decidedly progressive policy promises he made during the campaign? Or does he believe that if he combines his own personal salesmanship talents with a strong political team that is skilled at the language of progressivism, he can sell a right-of-center Establishment agenda as huge "change?"

Nobody knows the answer to this - and those who say they do are arguing with the same ridiculed faith that George W. Bush cited when he said he knew Vladimir Putin was a good guy because he looked into the Russian autocrat's eyes. The truth is, we just don't know what Obama thinks his path should be.

That's why it is important to keep a close eye on how the new administration is being constructed. The strategies we create to enact a progressive agenda (and I assume that, and not just Democratic Party dominance, is what progressives want) will have to be calibrated for the kind of administration that is ultimately built. An administration that has right-of-center policy sculptors and left-of-center policy sellers will have to be worked with differently than, say, an administration with progressive policy sculptors and conservative policy sellers.

Again, I'm not saying the administration is built yet, or that the initial staffing decisions delineate a full-fledged trend. But we should watch closely to see if a trend does, indeed, develop.

David Sirota is a best-selling author whose newest book, "The Uprising," was just released this month. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network -- both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota.

Obama Chooses Wall Street Over Main Street

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081125_obama_chooses_wall_street_over_main_street/

AP photo / Charles Dharapak

They have his ear: Lawrence Summers, left, is just one veteran of Clinton-era deregulation who has found his way into Barack Obama’s inner circle.

By Robert Scheer

Maybe Ralph Nader was right in predicting that the same Wall Street hustlers would have a lock on our government no matter which major party won the election. I hate to admit it, since it wasn’t that long ago that I heatedly challenged Nader in a debate on this very point.

But how else is one to respond to Barack Obama’s picking the very folks who helped get us into this financial mess to now lead us out of it? Watching the president-elect’s Monday introduction of his economic team, my brother-in-law Pete said, “You can see the feathers coming out of their mouths” as the foxes were once again put in charge of the henhouse. He didn’t have time to expound on his point, having to get ready to go sort mail in his job at the post office. But he showed me a statement from Citigroup showing that the interest rate on Pete the Postal Worker’s credit card was 28.9 percent, an amount that all major religions would justly condemn as usurious.

Moments earlier, Obama had put his seal of approval on the Citigroup bailout, which his new economic team, led by protégés of Citigroup Executive Committee Chairman Robert Rubin, enthusiastically endorsed. A bailout that brings to $45 billion the taxpayer money thrown at Citigroup and the guarantee of $306 billion for the bank’s “toxic securities” that would have been illegal if not for changes in the law that Citigroup secured with the decisive help of Rubin and Lawrence Summers, the man who replaced him as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration.

As Summers stayed on to ensure passage of deregulatory laws that enabled enormous banking greed, Rubin was rewarded with a $15 million-a-year executive position at Citigroup, a job that only got more lucrative as the bank went from one disaster, beginning with its involvement with Enron in which Rubin played an active role, to its huge role in the mortgage debacle. It is widely acknowledged that Citigroup fell victim to a merger mania, which Rubin and Summers made legal during their tenure at Treasury.

Yet despite that dismal record of dismantling sound regulation, Summers has been picked by Obama to be the top White House economic adviser and another Rubin disciple, Timothy Geithner, is the new Treasury secretary. Geithner, thanks in part to the strong recommendation of Rubin, had been appointed chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank after working for Rubin and Summers during the Clinton years. Once at the New York Fed, he was the main government official charged with regulating Citigroup, a task at which he obviously failed. Yet over the weekend, it was Geithner who hammered out the Citigroup bailout deal with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and a very actively involved Rubin.

As The Washington Post reported, Paulson had indicated last week that no further bailouts were planned before the new administration took office until “Rubin, an old colleague from Goldman Sachs, told Paulson in phone calls that the government had to act.” Rubin conceded in an interview with the Post that he had played a key role in the politics of the bailout.

This outrageous conflict of interest in which Rubin gets to exploit his ties to both the outgoing and incoming administrations was best described by Washington Post writer Steven Pearlstein: “The ultimate irony, of course, is that just as Rubin and Co. at Citi were being bailed out by the Bush administration, President-elect Barack Obama was getting set to announce a new economic team drawn almost entirely from Rubin acolytes.”

As opposed to the far tougher deal negotiated on the bailout of AIG, the arrangement with Citigroup leaves the executives, including Rubin, who brought Citigroup to the brink of ruin, still in charge. Nor is there any guarantee of the value of the mortgage bundles that taxpayers will be guaranteeing. That is because, as candidate Obama clearly stated in his major economics address back in March, the deregulation pushed though during the Clinton years ended transparency in banking.

Why then has he appointed the very people responsible for this disaster to now make it all better? Why not ask him? Heck, yes, it is time for the many of us who responded to his e-mails during the campaign to now challenge our e-mail buddy as to why he suddenly acts as if the interests of Wall Street and Main Street are one and the same.

Robert Scheer is editor in chief of Truthdig and the author of a new book, “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.”

Official Obama Bingo Card

Courtesy of Sam Smith, Progressive Review

Did somebody say Clinton?!

This piece by Alex Cockburn at Counterpunch is just some more of what I'm talking about, campers. I mean, what the fuck? This isn't what got Obama into office, it was the hope of change, the change of hope, or some shit like that. In any case, there was definitely change involved and his cabinet picks show him stocking up on the same old crap. Hillary? For the love of all that's right and good, she hasn't ever shown any interest in international relations whatsoever, aside from lobbing in a few missiles. Gotta tell ya guys, this is starting to smell a bit and he's not even in office yet. Sorry to rain on the parade, but I told you he wasn't a progressive. Shit, it's starting to look like he's not even liberal!--Pete

Alexander Cockburn
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11212008.html

Two years without a single leak and suddenly, last week, Obama’s operation was like a sieve. That’s what happens when you pick up the phone and call one of the Clintons. Or, to put it another way, that’s what happens when someone claims you, the president elect, picked up the phone and called Mrs Clinton to ask whether she’d like to be secretary of state.

Out the window goes the sense of purposeful strides towards a new-look Administration. In comes a dreadful feeling that somehow we’ve slipped a dimension in the space-time continuum and are heading back into the Clinton era. A couple of more weeks and the Republicans will be calling for a special prosecutor.

I’ve had people try to explain to me the political logic of Obama offering his erstwhile Democratic rival a top position in his cabinet. Better to have her inside the tent. Send her off on bouts of futile shuttle diplomacy, like Condoleezza Rice.

It still doesn’t add up. Why march back briskly into Clintontime? Besides, she’d make a lousy Secretary of State. Mrs Clinton has never displayed any talent for negotiation, nor even any conspicuous appetite to find out what is going on in the world, let alone come up with a new vision of America’s role in the 21st century. She’s an interventionist by instinct, her finger twitching over the Bomb Release lever. the She voted yes on the Iraq war. She was an ardent advocate of NATO’s onslaught on Yugoslavia. If we do get Hillary at State we may get Madeleine Albright as one of her sidekicks – the woman who said in the late 1990s that starving half a million Iraqi children was “worth it”, probably the line that the 9/11 al Qaeda hijackers were muttering to themselves when they sped on their mission of revenge towards the Twin Towers. This is change?

The answer of course is that there has to be a good deal of similarity between the Clinton and Obama administrations, because Obama is a neoliberal interventionist like Bill, and because the 45 and 50-year old veterans of the two Clinton administrations who have been cooling their heels in law firms and think tanks for eight years make up a high percentage of those in the hiring line, particularly those who placed an early bet on Obama. To round off the symmetry he new White House counsel will be Greg Craig, who defended Clinton during his impeachment.

The young people who worked for Obama and who voted for him have been feeling wan this week, amid all the retro talk about the Clintons. And the cabinet members Obama has announced or who are being bandied about are not inspiring. They’re dull like former Democratic senator Tom Daschle getting Health and Human Services. Howard Dean, who was a doctor and who hd hands-on time grappling with health insirance when he was governor of Vermont, would have been a much better choice. Janet Napolitano, the Arizona governor slated to be head of Homeland Security, horrified labor organizers at one meeting earlier this year listening to her boasting about kicking migrant workers back into Mexico. One nominee headed towards a Republican roasting in his hearings is Eric Holder, named to be Attorney General. As number 2 in Clinton’s Justice Department, Holder played a grimy role in one of the most scandalous affairs of Clinton-time, the last minute pardon by Clinton of billionaire trader and denizen of the FBI’s most wanted list, Marc Rich. (See Jeffrey St. Clair's account of the pardons for Holder's central role in the affair.)

Other possible appointments are not demonstrative of a resolute change of pace. The talk is of keeping Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary, although Gates has made no significant mark on the vast pork barrel beside the Potomac. The conversion of this mucky schemer of yesteryear into revered emblem of sound governance is one of the many marvels of our age. Somewhere down the road we’ll probably end up with another slimy fellow, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, who counts among his regular roosts CSIS and the Center for A New American Security, also decorated by the odious Robert Kaplan and Dr John Nagl.

The most significant appointment will be Treasury Secretary. On current form Obama will play it safe with the top nominees to run this Department. The trouble here is that there is no safe option and the usual suspects will have the usual limited perspective. He’d better get this one right. A conventional appointee could doom his administration right from the start.

In sum, this looks like a standard issue, business-as-usual cabinet in the making, about as exciting as looking at one of the regular network panel shows on a Sunday morning. Can’t they find anyone under 40 who looks like they might want to do things different and shake things up?

An Open Letter to Barack Obama: Between Hope and Reality

By Ralph Nader

Global Research, November 4, 2008

Dear Senator Obama, In your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words "hope and change," "change and hope" have been your trademark declarations. Yet there is an asymmetry between those objectives and your political character that succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not "hope and change" but the continuation of the power-entrenched status quo. Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys. Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart. Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man? To advance change and hope, the presidential persona requires character, courage, integrity-- not expediency, accommodation and short-range opportunism. Take, for example, your transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights in Chicago before your run for the U.S. Senate to an acolyte, a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby, which bolsters the militaristic oppression, occupation, blockage, colonization and land-water seizures over the years of the Palestinian peoples and their shrunken territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Eric Alterman summarized numerous polls in a December 2007 issue of The Nation magazine showing that AIPAC policies are opposed by a majority of Jewish-Americans. You know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a detailed two-state solution (which is supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians), will there be a chance for a peaceful resolution of this 60-year plus conflict. Yet you align yourself with the hard-liners, so much so that in your infamous, demeaning speech to the AIPAC convention right after you gained the nomination of the Democratic Party, you supported an "undivided Jerusalem," and opposed negotiations with Hamas-- the elected government in Gaza. Once again, you ignored the will of the Israeli people who, in a March 1, 2008 poll by the respected newspaper Haaretz, showed that 64% of Israelis favored "direct negotiations with Hamas." Siding with the AIPAC hard-liners is what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating dialogue and peace with the Israeli people was describing when he wrote "Anti-semitism today is the persecution of Palestinian society by the Israeli state." During your visit to Israel this summer, you scheduled a mere 45 minutes of your time for Palestinians with no news conference, and no visit to Palestinian refugee camps that would have focused the media on the brutalization of the Palestinians. Your trip supported the illegal, cruel blockade of Gaza in defiance of international law and the United Nations charter. You focused on southern Israeli casualties which during the past year have totaled one civilian casualty to every 400 Palestinian casualties on the Gaza side. Instead of a statesmanship that decried all violence and its replacement with acceptance of the Arab League's 2002 proposal to permit a viable Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in return for full economic and diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, you played the role of a cheap politician, leaving the area and Palestinians with the feeling of much shock and little awe. David Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, described your trip succinctly: "There was almost a willful display of indifference to the fact that there are two narratives here. This could serve him well as a candidate, but not as a President." Palestinian American commentator, Ali Abunimah, noted that Obama did not utter a single criticism of Israel, "of its relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for millions of Palestinians. ...Even the Bush administration recently criticized Israeli's use of cluster bombs against Lebanese civilians [see www.atfl.org for elaboration]. But Obama defended Israeli's assault on Lebanon as an exercise of its 'legitimate right to defend itself.'" In numerous columns Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, strongly criticized the Israeli government's assault on civilians in Gaza, including attacks on "the heart of a crowded refugee camp... with horrible bloodshed" in early 2008. Israeli writer and peace advocate-- Uri Avnery-- described Obama's appearance before AIPAC as one that "broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning, adding that Obama "is prepared to sacrifice the most basic American interests. After all, the US has a vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the Muslim world and mortgaged his future-- if and when he is elected president.," he said, adding, "Of one thing I am certain: Obama's declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace. And what is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the Palestinian people." A further illustration of your deficiency of character is the way you turned your back on the Muslim-Americans in this country. You refused to send surrogates to speak to voters at their events. Having visited numerous churches and synagogues, you refused to visit a single Mosque in America. Even George W. Bush visited the Grand Mosque in Washington D.C. after 9/11 to express proper sentiments of tolerance before a frightened major religious group of innocents. Although the New York Times published a major article on June 24, 2008 titled "Muslim Voters Detect a Snub from Obama" (by Andrea Elliott), citing examples of your aversion to these Americans who come from all walks of life, who serve in the armed forces and who work to live the American dream. Three days earlier the International Herald Tribune published an article by Roger Cohen titled "Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque." None of these comments and reports change your political bigotry against Muslim-Americans-- even though your father was a Muslim from Kenya. Perhaps nothing illustrated your utter lack of political courage or even the mildest version of this trait than your surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National Convention. This is a tradition for former presidents and one accorded in prime time to Bill Clinton this year. Here was a President who negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt, but his recent book pressing the dominant Israeli superpower to avoid Apartheid of the Palestinians and make peace was all that it took to sideline him. Instead of an important address to the nation by Jimmy Carter on this critical international problem, he was relegated to a stroll across the stage to "tumultuous applause," following a showing of a film about the Carter Center's post-Katrina work. Shame on you, Barack Obama! But then your shameful behavior has extended to many other areas of American life. (See the factual analysis by my running mate, Matt Gonzalez, on www.votenader.org). You have turned your back on the 100-million poor Americans composed of poor whites, African-Americans, and Latinos. You always mention helping the "middle class" but you omit, repeatedly, mention of the "poor" in America. Should you be elected President, it must be more than an unprecedented upward career move following a brilliantly unprincipled campaign that spoke "change" yet demonstrated actual obeisance to the concentration power of the "corporate supremacists." It must be about shifting the power from the few to the many. It must be a White House presided over by a black man who does not turn his back on the downtrodden here and abroad but challenges the forces of greed, dictatorial control of labor, consumers and taxpayers, and the militarization of foreign policy. It must be a White House that is transforming of American politics-- opening it up to the public funding of elections (through voluntary approaches)-- and allowing smaller candidates to have a chance to be heard on debates and in the fullness of their now restricted civil liberties. Call it a competitive democracy. Your presidential campaign again and again has demonstrated cowardly stands. "Hope" some say springs eternal." But not when "reality" consumes it daily. Sincerely, Ralph Nader November 3, 2008

More bad news with possible Obama appointments

Lawrence Summers, mentioned as a possible Treasury Secretary, is a managing director at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw Group.

Robert Rubin, mentioned as a possible Treasury Secretary, has been temporary chair of Citgroup (and a current director) and co chair of Goldman Sachs. He also was a founder of the conlib economic group, the Hamilton Project.

Top Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett was a member of the board of the Chicago Stock Exachange from 2000 to 2007 and was chair from 2004-2007

Top Obama advisor John Podesta has a lobbying firm that has represented BP, Lockheed Martin, National Association of Broadcasters, Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, Sunoco and Wal-Mart

Bill Daley, advisor to the transition team, is mid west chairman of JP Morgan Chase.

Rahm Emanuel, whom Obama selected to be chief of staff, earned, according to Fortune magazine, $18 million between 1999 and 20002 working as a managing director for the investment banks Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein

Tim Geithner, a possible Treasury Secretary, is head of the NY Federal Reserve. His first boss was Henry Kissinger and he has close ties to the Wall Street players.

John Corzine, now governor of New Jewrsey and possible Treasury Secretary and CEO of Goldman Sachs before Hank Paulsen staged a coup and got rid of him

Richard Holbrooke, mentioned for Secretary of State, is vice president of Perseus, a major private equity firm. He was a member of the board of AIG until July when he resigned. He has also been vice chair of Credit Suisse First Boston, and managing director of Lehman Brothers.

Other names dropped:

John W Rogers Jr runs a mutual fund company in Chicago where Obama spent much of the day after the election.

Otto Kramer is a financier at Boston Provident.

Robert Wolfe is an investment banker and CEO of UBS Americas

Mark Gallogly is a private equity expert who funded the firm Centerbridge after working at Blackstone.

Jim Torrey is a fund manager.

Brian Mathis works for the Provident Group

Frank Brosens runs Taconic Capital Advisors

Josh Gotbaum formerly with Lazard Freres

Obama and the Empire

By William Bum, Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/blum08072008.html

The New Yorker magazine in its July 14 issue ran a cover cartoon that achieved instant fame. It showed Barack Obama wearing Muslim garb in the Oval Office with a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall. Obama is delivering a fist bump to his wife, Michelle, who has an Afro hairdo and an assault rifle slung over her shoulder. An American flag lies burning in the fireplace. The magazine says it's all satire, a parody of the crazy right-wing fears, rumors, and scare tactics about Obama's past and ideology.

The cartoon makes fun of the idea that Barack and Michelle Obama are some kind of mixture of Black Panther, Islamist jihadist, and Marxist revolutionary. But how much more educational for the American public and the world it would be to make fun of the idea that Obama is even some kind of progressive.

I'm more concerned here with foreign policy than domestic issues because it's in this area that the US government can do, and indeed does do, the most harm to the world, to put it mildly. And in this area what do we find? We find Obama threatening, several times, to attack Iran if they don't do what the United States wants them to do nuclear-wise; threatening more than once to attack Pakistan if their anti-terrorist policies are not tough enough or if there would be a regime change in the nuclear-armed country not to his liking; calling for a large increase in US troops and tougher policies for Afghanistan; wholly and unequivocally embracing Israel as if it were the 51st state; totally ignoring Hamas, an elected ruling party in the occupied territory; decrying the Berlin Wall in his recent talk in that city, about the safest thing a politician can do, but with no mention of the Israeli Wall while in Israel, nor the numerous American-built walls in Baghdad while in Iraq; referring to the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez as "authoritarian", but never referring similarly to the government of George W. Bush, certainly more deserving of the label; talking with the usual disinformation and hostility about Cuba, albeit with a token reform re visits and remittances. But would he dare mention the outrageous case of the imprisoned Cuban Five[1] in his frequent references to fighting terrorism?

While an Illinois state senator in January 2004, Obama declared that it was time "to end the embargo with Cuba" because it had "utterly failed in the effort to overthrow Castro." But speaking as a presidential candidate to a Cuban-American audience in Miami in August 2007, he said he would not "take off the embargo" as president because it is "an important inducement for change."[2] He thus went from a good policy for the wrong reason to the wrong policy for the wrong reason. Does Mr. Obama care any more than Mr. Bush that the United Nations General Assembly has voted -- virtually unanimously -- 16 years in a row against the embargo?

In summary, it would be difficult to name a single ODE (Officially Designated Enemy) that Obama has not been critical of, or to name one that he has supported. Can this be mere coincidence?

The fact that Obama says he's willing to "talk" to some of the "enemies" more than the Bush administration has done sounds good, but one doesn't have to be too cynical to believe that it will not amount to more than a public relations gimmick. It's only change of policy that counts. Why doesn't he simply and clearly state that he would not attack Iran unless Iran first attacked the US or Israel or anyone else?

As to Iraq, if you're sick to the core of your being about the horrors US policy brings down upon the heads of the people of that unhappy land, then you must support withdrawal –- immediate, total, all troops, combat and non-combat, all the Blackwater-type killer contractors, not moved to Kuwait or Qatar to be on call. All bases out. No permanent bases. No permanent war. No timetables. No approval by the US military necessary. No reductions in forces. Just OUT. ALL. Just like what the people of Iraq want. Nothing less will give them the opportunity to try to put an end to the civil war and violence instigated by the American invasion and occupation and to recreate their failed state.

George W. Bush, 2006: "We're going to stay in Iraq to get the job done as long as the government wants us there."[3]

George W. Bush, 2007: "It's their government's choice. If they were to say, leave, we would leave."[4]

Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, 2008: "said his government was 'impatiently waiting' for the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops."[5]

Barack Obama, 2008: We can "redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month that would remove them in 16 months."[6]

Obama's terms of withdrawal equals no withdrawal. Literally. Has he ever said that the war is categorically illegal and immoral? A war crime? Or that anti-American terrorism in the world is the direct result of oppressive US policies? Instead he calls for a troop increase and "the first truly 21st century military ... We must maintain the strongest, best-equipped military in the world."[7] Why of course, that's what the people of the United States and the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and the rest of the people in this sad world desperately desire and need -- greater American killing power! Obama is not so much concerned with ending America's endless warfare as he is with "succeeding" in them, by whatever perverted definition of that word.

And has he ever dared to raise the obvious question: Why would Iran, even if nuclear armed, be a threat to attack the US or Israel? Any more than Iraq was such a threat. Which was zero. Instead, he has said things like "Iran continues to be a major threat" and repeats the tiresome lie that the Iranian president called for the destruction of Israel.[8]

Obama, one observer has noted, "opposes the present US policy in Iraq not on the basis of any principled opposition to neo-colonialism or aggressive war, but rather on the grounds that the Iraq war is a mistaken deployment of power that fails to advance the global strategic interests of American imperialism."[9]

He and his supporters have made much of the speech he delivered in the Illinois state legislature in 2002 against the upcoming US invasion of Iraq. But two years later, when he was running for the US Senate, he declared: "There's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage."[10] Since taking office in January 2005, he has voted to approve every war appropriation the Republicans have put forward. He also voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State despite her complicity in the Bush Administration's false justifications for going to war in Iraq. In doing so, he lacked the courage of 12 of his Democratic Party Senate colleagues who voted against her confirmation.

If you're one of those who would like to believe that Obama has to present moderate foreign policy views to be elected, but once he's in the White House we can forget that he lied to us repeatedly and the true, progressive man of peace and international law and human rights will emerge ... keep in mind that as a US Senate candidate in 2004 he threatened missile strikes against Iran[11], and winning that election apparently did not put him in touch with his inner peacenik.

When, in 2005, the other Illinois Senator, Dick Durbin, stuck his neck out and compared American torture at Guantanamo to "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings", and was angrily denounced by the right wing, Obama stood up in the Senate and ... defended him? No, he joined the critics, thrice calling Durbin's remark a "mistake".[12]

One of Obama's chief foreign policy advisers is Zbigniew Brzezinski, a man instrumental in provoking Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, which was followed by massive US military supplies to the opposition and widespread war. This gave rise to a generation of Islamic jihadists, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and more than two decades of anti-American terrorism. Asked later if he had any regrets about this policy, Brzezinski replied: "Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, in substance: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war."[13]

Another prominent Obama adviser -- from a list entirely and depressingly establishment-imperial -- is Madeleine Albright, who should always wear gloves because her hands are caked with blood from her roles in the bombings of Iraq and Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

In a primary campaign talk in March, Obama said that "he would return the country to the more 'traditional' foreign policy efforts of past presidents, such as George H.W. Bush, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan."[14] Use your imagination. Bloody serial interventionists, all.

Why have well-known conservatives like George Will, David Brooks, Rush Limbaugh, Joe Scarborough, and others spoken so favorably about Obama's candidacy?[15] Whatever else, they know he's not a threat to their most cherished views and values.

Given all this, can we expect a more enlightened, less bloody, more progressive and humane foreign policy from Mr. Barack Obama? Forget the alleged eloquence and charm; forget the warm feel-good stuff; forget the interminable clichés and platitudes about hope, change, unity, and America's indispensable role as world leader; forget all the religiobabble; forget John McCain and George W. Bush ... All that counts is putting an end to the horror -- the bombings, the invasions, the killings, the destruction, the overthrows, the occupations, the torture, the American Empire.

Al Gore and John Kerry both took the progressive vote for granted. Neither had ever been particularly progressive themself. Each harbored a measure of disdain for the left. Both paid a heavy price for the neglect. I and millions like me voted for Ralph Nader, or some other third-party candidate, or stayed home. Obama is doing the same as Gore and Kerry. Progressives should let him know that his positions are not acceptable, keeping up the anti-war pressure on him and the Democratic Party at every opportunity. For whatever good it just might do.

I'm afraid that if Barack Obama becomes president he's going to break a lot of young hearts. And some older ones as well.

Writer Norman Solomon has written: "These days, an appreciable number of Obama supporters are starting to use words like "disillusionment." But that's a consequence of projecting their political outlooks onto the candidate in the first place. The best way to avoid becoming disillusioned is to not have illusions in the first place."

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power. and West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.

He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com

NOTES

[1] William Blum, "Cuban Political Prisoners ... in the United States"

[2] Washington Post, February 25, 2008; p.A4

[3] New York Times. December 1, 2006, p.1

[4] White House press conference, May 24, 2007

[5] Washington Post, July 9, 2008

[6] Obama's website: www.barackobama.com/issues/iraq/

[7] Speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, April 23, 2007

[8] Haaretz.com (leading Israeli newspaper), May 16, 2007

[9] Bill Van Auken, Global Research, July 18, 2008 -- http://www.globalresearch.ca/

[10] Chicago Tribune, July 27, 2004

[11] Chicago Tribune, September 25, 2004

[12] Congressional Record, June 21, 2005, p.S6897

[13] For the full Brzezinski interview see http://members.aol.com/bblum6/brz.htm

[14] Associated Press, March 28, 2008

[15] See, for example, Peter Wehner, "Why Republicans Like Obama", Washington Post, February 3, 2008, p.B7