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Noam Chomsky: "The Center Cannot Hold: Rekindling the Radical Imagination"

2010-06-01T05:34:00.000-07:00

Noam Chomsky: "The Center Cannot Hold: Rekindling the Radical Imagination"

AMY GOODMAN: We spend the hour with the world-renowned political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky, professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of over a hundred books. He spoke recently here in New York addressing more than a thousand people at the Left Forum.

NOAM CHOMSKY: One month ago, Joseph Andrew Stack crashed his small plane into an office building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide. He left a manifesto explaining his actions. It was mostly ridiculed, but I think it deserves a lot better than that.

Stack’s manifesto traces the life history that led him to this final desperate act. The story begins when he was a teenage student living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, right near the heart of what was once a great industrial area. His neighbor—I’m mostly quoting now—his neighbor was a woman in her eighties, surviving on cat food, the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for the thirty years of his service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing, because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union, not to mention the government, raided the pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was Social Security to live on. And Stack could have added that are concerted and continuing efforts by the super-rich and their political allies to take even that away on spurious grounds.

Stack decided then that he couldn’t trust big business and would strike out on his own, only to discover that he couldn’t trust a government that cared nothing about people like him, but only about the rich and privileged. And he couldn’t trust a legal system, which—in his words, in which "there are two 'interpretations' for every law, one for the very rich and one for the rest of us," a government that leaves us with "the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies [that] are murdering tens of thousands of people a year," with care rationed by wealth, not need, all in a social order in which "a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities...and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours." And much more, which I won’t repeat.

Stack tells us that his desperate final act was an effort to join those who are willing to die for their freedom, in the hope of awakening others from their torpor. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had in mind the woman eating cat food, who taught him about the real world when he was a teenager, and her husband’s premature death. Her husband didn’t literally commit suicide after having been discarded to the trash heap, but it’s far from an isolated case, which we can add to the colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism.

There are poignant studies of the indignation and the rage of those who have been cast aside as the state-corporate programs of financialization and deindustrialization have closed plants and destroyed families and communities. These studies reveal the sense of acute betrayal on the part of working people who believed they had a fulfilled their duty to society in what they regard as a moral compact with business and government, only to discover that they had only been instruments for profit and power, truisms from which they had been carefully shielded by doctrinal institutions.

There are striking similarities in the world’s second-largest economy. This has been investigated in a very penetrating study by Ching Kwan Lee into Chinese labor. Lee draws the close comparison between working-class outrage and desperation in the decaying industrial sectors of the United States and the fury among workers in what she calls China’s rustbelt, the state socialist industrial center in the Northeast now abandoned by the state in favor of state capitalist development of the Southeast sunbelt, as she calls it. In both regions, Lee finds massive labor protests, but different in character. In the rustbelt, workers express the same sense of betrayal as their counterparts here, but in their case betrayal of the Maoist principles of solidarity and dedication to development of the society that they had thought had been a moral compact, only to discover that, whatever it was, it’s now bitter fraud. In the sunbelt, workers who lack that cultural tradition still rely on their home villages for support and family life. They denounce the failure of authorities to live up even to the minimal legal requirements of barely livable workplace conditions and payment of the pittance called salaries.

According to official statistics, there were 58,000 “mass incidents” of protest in 2003 in just one province of the rustbelt, with three million people participating. Some 30 to 40 million workers who were dropped from work units—quoting Lee—“are plagued by a profound sense of insecurity,” arousing “rage and desperation” around the country. And she expects that there’s worse to come, as a looming crisis of landlessness in the countryside undermines the base for survival of the sunbelt workers, who don’t even have a semblance of independent unions, while in the rustbelt, there’s nothing like civil society support that exists, to some extent, here. Both Lee and the studies of the US rustbelt make it clear that we should not underestimate the depth of moral indignation that lies behind the bitterness about what is perceived to be the treachery of government and business power acting exactly as we should expect them to, unfortunately.

Something similar can be found in rural India. There, food consumption has sharply declined for the great majority since the neoliberal reforms were partially implemented, all of this amidst accolades for India’s fabulous growth, and indeed it is fabulous growth for some, though not for the rural areas, where peasant suicides are increasing at about the same rate as the number of billionaires, not far away. And in fact not so attractive for the workers, American workers, who are transferred to India to reduce labor costs by IBM, which now has three-quarters of its work force abroad. BusinessWeek calls IBM the “quintessential American company,” which is quite appropriate: it became the global giant in computing thanks to the unwitting munificence of the US taxpayer, who also substantially funded the whole IT revolution on which IBM relies, along with most of the rest of the high-tech economy, mostly on the pretext that the Russians are coming. Now IBM is paying them back.

There’s much excited talk these days about a great global shift of power, with speculation about whether, or when, China might displace the US as the dominant global power, along with India, which, if it happened, would mean that the global system would be returning to something like what it was before the European conquests. And indeed their recent GDP growth has been spectacular. But there’s a lot more to say about it. So if you take a look at the UN human development index, basic measure of the health of the society, it turns out that India retains its place near the bottom. It’s now 134th, slightly above Cambodia, below Laos and Tajikistan. Actually, it’s dropped since the reforms began. China ranks ninety-second, a bit above Jordan, below the Dominican Republic and Iran. By comparison, Cuba, been under harsh US attack for fifty years, is ranked fifty-second. It’s the highest in Central America and the Caribbean, barely below the richest societies in South America. India and China also suffer from extremely high inequality, so well over a billion of their inhabitants fall far lower in the scale. Furthermore, an accurate accounting would go beyond conventional measures to include serious costs that China and India can’t ignore for long: ecological, resource depletion, many others.

These common speculations about a global shift of power, which you can read all over the front pages, disregard a crucial factor that’s familiar to all of us: nations divorced from the internal distribution of power are not the real actors in international affairs. That truism was brought to public attention by that incorrigible radical Adam Smith, who recognized that the principal architects of power in England were the owners of the society—in his day, the merchants and manufacturers—and they made sure that policy would attend scrupulously to their interests, however grievous the impact on the people of England and, of course, much worse, the victims of what he called “the savage injustice of the Europeans” abroad. British crimes in India were the main concern of an old-fashioned conservative with moral values.

To his modern worshippers, Smith’s truisms are ridiculed as, quote, “elaborate theories of how world history was being manipulated by shadowy corporatist/imperialist networks.” I’m quoting New York Times thinker David Brooks. It’s one of the many illustrations of the intellectual and moral decline of what’s called “conservatism” from the understanding of its heroes.

Actually, in the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I’m identified as the villain who adopts Adam Smith’s heresy, as in fact I do.

Well, bearing Smith’s radical truism in mind, we can see that there is indeed a global shift of power, though not the one that occupies center stage. It’s a shift from the global work force to transnational capital, and it’s been sharply escalating during the neoliberal years. The cost is substantial, including the Joe Stacks of the US, starving peasants in India, and millions of protesting workers in China, where the labor share in income is declining even more rapidly than in most of the world.

Martin Hart-Landsberg has done quite important work on this, and he reviews how China is playing a leading role in the real global shift of power, not the one you read about in the newspapers. It’s become kind of an assembly plant for a regional production system. Japan, Taiwan, other Asian economies export parts and components to China and provide China with most of the advanced technology that’s used. There’s been a lot of concern about the growing US trade deficit with China, but less noticed is the fact that the trade deficit with Japan and the rest of Asia has sharply declined as this new regional production system takes place. US manufacturers are following the same course, providing parts and components for China to assemble and export, mostly back to the US. For the financial institutions, the retail giants like, say, Wal-Mart, ownership and management of manufacturing industries, and sectors closely related to this nexus of power, all of this is heavenly. Not for Joe Stack and many others like him.

To understand the public mood, it’s worthwhile to recall that the conventional use of GDP, gross domestic product, to measure economic growth is highly misleading. It’s a highly ideological measure. There have been efforts to devise more realistic measures. One of them is called the General Progress Indicator. It subtracts from GDP expenditures that harm the public, and it adds that value of authentic benefits. Well, in the US, the General Progress Indicator has stagnated since the 1970s, although GDP has increased, the growth going into very few pockets. That result correlates with others—for example, the studies of social indicators, the standard measure of health of a society. Social indicators tracked economic growth until the mid-’70s. Then they began to decline, and they reached the level of 1960 by the year 2000. That’s the latest figures available. The United States is one of the very few countries that has no government inquiry into social indicators. The correlation with financialization of the economy and neoliberal socio-economic measures is pretty hard to miss, and it’s not unique to the United States, by any means.

Now, it’s true that there’s nothing essentially new in the process of deindustrialization. Owners and managers naturally seek the lowest labor costs. Occasionally there are efforts to do otherwise. Henry Ford is the famous example, but his efforts were struck down by the courts long ago. So, in fact, it’s a legal obligation for corporate owners and managers to maximize profit. One means of doing this is shifting production. In earlier years, the shift was mostly internal, especially to the Southern states. There, labor could be more harshly repressed. And major corporations, like the first billion-dollar corporation, the US Steel Corporation of the sainted philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, could also profit from the new slave labor force that was created by the criminalization of black life in the South after the end of Reconstruction in 1877. That’s a core part of the American industrial revolution, which continued until the Second World War. That’s actually being reproduced in part right now, during the recent neoliberal period. The drug war is used as a pretext to drive the superfluous population, mostly black, back to the prisons, also providing a new supply of prison labor in state and private prisons, much of it in violation of international labor conventions. In fact, for many African Americans, since they were exported to the colonies, life has scarcely escaped the bonds of slavery, or sometimes worse.

AMY GOODMAN: MIT professor, author, activist, Noam Chomsky. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. We’ll come back to his speech given at the Left Forum just a few weeks ago in New York City at Pace University in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Today it’s Noam Chomsky for the hour, as we return to a major address he gave on the weekend of the seventh anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. It was a gathering of more than a thousand people at the Left Forum at Pace University in New York. Again, MIT professor, author, activist, Noam Chomsky.

NOAM CHOMSKY: In the ultra-respectable Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, we can read—I’m quoting—that “The prison system in America has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history,” making the US “the home to the largest custodial infrastructure for the mass depredation of liberty to be found on the planet,” mostly black, increasingly Hispanic. It’s a product of the past thirty years, the neoliberal years, as is the fact that the United States—quoting again—“leads the world not only in incarceration rates but in executive compensation.” I’m quoting a Harvard Business School professor who points out that this correlation—this is “increasingly recognized to be linked," as is the fact that the United States is lagging far behind much of the world, particularly China, but also Europe, in developing green technologies.

Well, it’s easy to ridicule the ways in which Joe Stack and others like him articulate their concerns, which are very genuine and real. But it’s far more appropriate to understand what lies behind their perceptions and actions, and particularly, to ask ourselves why the radical imagination is failing to offer them a constructive path, while the center is very visibly not holding. And those who have real grievances are indeed being mobilized, but mobilized in ways that pose no slight danger, to themselves and to the rest of us and to the world.

Joe Stack’s manifesto ends with two evocative sentences, which I’ll read. “The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.” Stack minces no words about the capitalist creed. We can only speculate about what he meant by the communist creed that he counterposed to it. I think it’s not unlikely that he saw it as an ideal with a genuine moral force. If that’s so, it wouldn’t be very surprising. Some of you may be old enough to recall a poll taken in 1976, on the year of the bicentennial, in which people were given a list of statements and asked which ones they thought were in the Constitution. Well, at that time, no one had a clue what was in the Constitution, so the answer “in the Constitution” presumably meant: “so obviously correct that it must be in the Constitution.” One statement that received a solid majority was Joe Stack’s “communist creed.”

Well, I qualified that comment with the phrase “at that time.” Today, a segment of the population memorizes and worships the Constitution, at least the words, if not the meaning. There was a Tea Party convention a week ago which produced a catechism for candidates. One requirement is that they must agree to scrap the tax code and replace it with one no longer than 4,543 words long. That’s to match the length of the Constitution, unamended. Only some amendments share this holy status, one of them the Second, under the recent interpretation by the reactionaries of the Supreme Court. Now, the First Amendment is suspect, because of what it might be taken to imply about separation of Church and state. According to the current version of conservatism, the US is to be a Christian state, kind of like the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Jewish State of Israel. In that connection, incidentally, Golda Meir is listed in the catechism as required learning for children, but no Hispanics. Well, along with normal racism, that reflects the very curious amalgam of extreme anti-Semitism and support for Israel among right-wing religious sectors. And such matters should not be lightly dismissed when we try to look ahead.

Encouraging, this anti-tax extremism that you see in the Tea Party movement is not as immediately suicidal as Joe Stack’s desperate action, but it’s suicidal nonetheless, and for reasons that I don’t have to elaborate. What’s happening right now in California is a dramatic illustration. Right there, maybe one of the richest parts of the world, the world’s greatest public education system is being systematically dismantled. And the governor, Governor Schwarzenegger, says he’ll have to eliminate state health and welfare programs unless the federal government forks over some $7 billion. And other governors are joining in. At the same time, a very powerful states’ rights movement is taking shape, demanding that the federal government not intrude into our affairs. That’s a nice illustration of what Orwell called “doublethink”—the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind while believing both of them, which is practically a motto for the times. California’s plight results in large part from anti-tax fanaticism. And that extends over much of the country.

Well, encouraging anti-tax sentiment has long been a staple of the business propaganda that dominates the doctrinal system. So people must be indoctrinated to hate and fear the government, for very good reasons: of the existing power systems, the government is the only one that, in principle, and sometimes in fact, is answerable to the public and can impose some constraints on the depredations of private power; the corollary to “getting government off our back” is groaning beneath the even greater weight of unaccountable private tyranny. So-called libertarians don’t seem to see that that’s what they’re calling for. But business anti-government propaganda has to be nuanced: business of course favors a very powerful state which serves Adam Smith’s principal architects, the owners of the society today, not merchants and manufacturers, but multinationals and financial institutions. Now, constructing this internally contradictory propaganda message is no easy task. So people have to be trained to hate and fear the deficit, which is a necessary means to stimulate the economy after its destruction at the hands of the dominant financial institutions and their cohorts in Washington. But at the same time, the population must favor the deficits. Almost half of them are attributable to the military budget, which is breaking records under Obama, and the rest of the deficit is predicted—what’s predicted to overwhelm the budget is the cruel and hopelessly inefficient privatized healthcare system, which is a gift to insurance companies and Big Pharma.

Well, that’s a tricky propaganda task, but it’s been—we can see it all the time. It’s been carried with pretty impressive success. One illustration is the public attitude towards April 15th, when tax returns are due. Well, let’s put aside the thought of a much more free and just society and just have a look at this one. In a functioning democracy of the kind that formally exists, April 15th would be a day of celebration: we’re coming together to implement programs that we’ve chosen. Now, here, it’s a day of mourning: some alien force is descending upon us to steal our hard-earned money. Well, that’s one graphic indication of the success of the intense efforts of the highly class-conscious business community to win what its own publications call “the everlasting battle for the minds of men.”

Another stunning illustration of the success of propaganda, which has considerable import for the future, is the cult of the great killer and torturer Ronald Reagan, one of the grand criminals of the modern era, who also—he also had an unerring instinct for favoring the most brutal terrorists and murderers around the world, from Zia-ul-Haq and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in what’s now called AfPak to the most dedicated killers in Central America to the South African racists who killed an estimated 1.5 million people in the Reagan years and had to be supported because they were under attack by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, one of “more notorious terrorist groups” in the world, the Reaganites determined in 1988. And on and on, with remarkable consistency. Now, his grisly record was quickly expunged in favor of mythic constructions that would have impressed Kim Il-sung. Among other feats, he was anointed as the apostle of free markets, while raising protectionist barriers more than probably all other postwar presidents combined and implementing massive government intervention in the economy. He was a great exponent of law and order, while he informed the business world that labor laws would not be enforced, so that illegal firing of union organizers tripled under his supervision. His hatred of working people was exceeded perhaps only by his contempt for the rich black women driving their limousines to collect their welfare checks.

Well, there should be no need to continue with the record, but the outcome tells us quite a lot about the intellectual and moral culture in which we live. For President Obama, this monstrous creature was a “transformative figure.” If you go over to Stanford University’s prestigious Hoover Institute, he’s a colossus—I’m quoting—whose “spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost.” Well, painfully to record, many of the Joe Stacks, whose lives he was ruining, join in the adulation and hasten to shelter under the umbrella of the power and the violence that he symbolized.

Now, all of this evokes memories of other days, when the center did not hold, and they’re worth thinking about. One example that should not be forgotten is the Weimar Republic. That was the peak of Western civilization in the sciences and the arts, also regarded as a model of democracy. Through the 1920s, the traditional liberal and conservative parties that had always governed the Reich entered into inexorable decline. That was well before the process was intensified by the Great Depression. The coalition that elected General Hindenburg in 1925 was not very different from the mass base that swept Hitler into office eight years later, compelling Hindenburg, who was an aristocrat, to select as chancellor the “little corporal,” as he called him, that he detested. As late as 1928, the Nazis had less than three percent of the vote. Two years later, the most respectable Berlin press was lamenting the sight—I’m quoting—of the many millions in this “highly civilized country” who had “given their vote to the commonest, hollowest and crudest charlatanism.” The center was collapsing. The public was coming to despise the incessant wrangling of Weimar politics, the service of the traditional parties to powerful interests and their failure to deal with popular grievances. They were being drawn to the forces that were upholding the grandeur of the nation and defending it against perceived threats in a revitalized, armed, unified state, which is going to march to a glorious future, led by the charismatic figure who, in his words, was carrying out “the will of eternal Providence, the Creator of the universe.” By May 1933, the Nazis had largely destroyed not only the traditional ruling parties, but even the large working-class parties, the Social Democrats and the Communists, which were quite strong, along with their very powerful associations. The Nazis declared May Day 1933 to be a workers’ holiday. That was something the left parties had never been able to achieve. In fact, many working people took part in the enormous patriotic demonstrations, more than a million people in what was called Red Berlin that were joining farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, paramilitary forces, Christian organizations, athletic and riflery clubs, and the rest of the coalition that was taking shape as the center collapsed. By the onset of the war, perhaps 90 percent of Germans were marching with the brownshirts.

Well, the world is too complex for history to repeat, but there are nevertheless lessons to keep in mind, and even memories. I’m just old enough to remember those chilling and ominous days of Germany’s descent from decency to Nazi barbarism, quoting the distinguished scholar of German history Fritz Stern, who tells us that he has the future of the United States in mind when he reviews what he calls “a historic process in which resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason." If that sounds familiar, it is. This is one possible outcome of collapse of the center when the radical imagination, which in fact was quite powerful at that time, nonetheless fell short.

Well, the popular mood today here is complex in ways that are both hopeful and troubling. One illustration is the attitudes toward social spending on the part of people who identify themselves in polls as “anti-government.” There’s a recent scholarly study which is kind of illuminating. It finds that, by large majorities, they support—I’m quoting it—they support “maintaining or expanding spending on Social Security, child care, and aid to poor people” and other social welfare measures, though support falls off significantly when it comes to "aid to blacks and welfare recipients.” Half of these anti-government extremists believe “that spending is too little [on] assistance to the poor.” In the population as a whole, majorities, in most cases substantial majorities, feel the government is spending too little to improve and protect the nation’s health, and on Social Security, drug addiction, and child care programs and so on, though again there’s an exception on aid for welfare and black—welfare recipients and blacks. That’s probably a tribute to Reaganite thuggery, I suppose.

Well, these results give some indication of what might be achieved by commitments that are even far short of the radical imagination, and also of some of the impediments that are going to have to be overcome for these and much more far-reaching purposes.

AMY GOODMAN: MIT professor, author, activist, Noam Chomsky. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. We’ll come back to his speech given at the Left Forum just a few weeks ago in New York City at Pace University in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Today it’s Noam Chomsky for the hour, as we return to a major address he gave on the weekend of the seventh anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. It was a gathering of more than a thousand people at the Left Forum at Pace University in New York. Again, MIT professor, author, activist, Noam Chomsky.

NOAM CHOMSKY: The Massachusetts election last January, which undermined majority rule in the Senate, that gives some further insight into what can happen when the center does not hold and those who believe in even limited measures of reform fail to reach the population. In the election—the elections, as you know, were to fill the seat of the Senate’s so-called “liberal lion,” Ted Kennedy. In that election, Scott Brown ran as the forty-first vote against healthcare, which Kennedy had fought for throughout his political life. A majority, it turned out, opposed Obama’s proposals, but primarily because they gave away too much to the insurance industry. And much the same is true nationally, if you look at the polls on which the headlines are based.

One interesting feature was the voting pattern among union members. That’s Obama’s natural constituency, you’d think. Most of them didn’t bother to vote. But of those who did, a majority chose Brown. And union leaders and activists explained why. They said workers are angered at Obama’s record generally, but particularly incensed over his stand on healthcare. One of them reported, “He didn’t insist on a public option nor a strong employer mandate to provide insurance. It was hard not to notice that the only issue on which he took a firm stand was taxing benefits” for the healthcare that had been won by union struggles, retracting his campaign pledge.

There was a massive infusion of funds from financial executives in the final days of the campaign. Now, that’s one part of a broader phenomenon, which reveals dramatically why Joe Stack and others have every reason to be disgusted at the farce that they were taught to honor as democracy.

Obama’s primary constituency all along was financial institutions. Their power has increased enormously. Their share of corporate profits rose from a few percent in the 1970s to almost a third today. They preferred Obama to McCain, and they largely bought the election for him. And they expected to be rewarded. And they were. I don’t have to go through the details. But a few months ago, responding to the rising anger of the Joe Stacks, Obama began to criticize the “greedy bankers” who had been rescued by the public and even proposed some measures to constrain their excesses. Punishment for this deviation was swift. The major banks immediately announced very prominently—front page of the New York Times—that they would shift funding to Republicans if Obama persisted with his offensive rhetoric.

And Obama heard the message. Within days, he informed the business press that bankers are fine “guys,” in his words, singling out the chairs of the two biggest banks, two biggest crooks, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. They got specific praise. And he assured the business world that—quoting him—“I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth,” such as the huge bonuses and profits that are infuriating the public. “That’s part of the free market system,” Obama continued—not inaccurately, as “free markets” are interpreted in state capitalist doctrine. His retreat, however, was not in time to curb the flow of cash that gained the forty-first seat.

Well, in fairness, we should concede that the greedy bankers had a point. Their task is to maximize profit and market share. In fact, as I mentioned, that’s their legal obligation. If they don’t do it, they’ll be replaced by somebody who will. These are institutional facts, as are the inherent market inefficiencies that require them to ignore what’s called systemic risk. They know full well that that’s likely to tank the economy, but such externalities, as they’re called, are not their business. It’s also unfair to accuse them of “irrational exuberance”—that’s Alan Greenspan’s phrase in his extremely brief departure from orthodoxy during the tech boom of the '90s. Their exuberance was not at all irrational: it was quite rational, in the knowledge that when it all collapses, they can flee to the shelter of the nanny state, clutching their copies of Hayek and Friedman and Ayn Rand. The same is true of the Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute and the rest of the business leaders, who are running a massive propaganda campaign now to convince the public to dismiss concerns about anthropogenic global warming—and with great success. There's been a sharp decline in people who take it seriously. Those who believe in this liberal hoax, as it’s called, have declined to about a third of the population. The executives who are dedicating themselves to this task know perfectly well that the hoax is very real and the prospects very grim. But they are fulfilling their institutional role. If they don’t do it, somebody else will replace them who will. The fate of the species is another externality that they must ignore, insofar as market systems prevail. So you can’t criticize them.

Returning—let’s go back to the very instructive Massachusetts election. It turns out that the major factor in Brown’s victory was voting patterns. In the affluent suburbs, voting was high and enthusiastic. In the urban areas, which are heavily Democratic, voting was low and apathetic. So the headlines were right to report that voters were sending Obama a message. The message was very clear. From the rich, the message was we want even more than what you’re doing for us. And from the rest, the message was Joe Stack’s: in his words, the politicians are not in “the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say,” though they’re very much interested in the voices of the masters. Well, there was no doubt some impact of the populist image that was crafted by the PR machine—you know, “I’m Scott Brown, this is my truck,” you know, “regular guy,” all that stuff. But that appears to have been a secondary role. The popular anger is very real, and it’s entirely understandable, with the banks thriving, thanks not only to the bailouts but to all sorts of other benefits that they’re getting from the nanny state, while the population remains in deep recession. Even official unemployment is at ten percent—actual, much higher—and in manufacturing industry, official unemployment is at the level of the Great Depression, one out of six unemployed, and very few prospects for recovering the kinds of jobs that are lost as the economy is being reshaped, in the manner that—with the global shift of power that I described.

Well, national polls reveal much the same phenomenon. The latest one I’ve seen was just a couple of days ago, Wall Street Journal. It shows what they call a 21 percent enthusiasm gap between the parties, with 67 percent of Republicans saying they’re very interested in the coming November elections, as compared with 46 percent of Democrats. There’s also a major shift from the norm, in that there’s a ten-point margin by which registered voters say they believe that Republicans are better at dealing with the economy. That’s a combination of a solid Republican, mostly quite affluent sector and disillusioned Democrats, who see what’s happening, the Joe Stacks. Half of Americans would like to see every member of Congress defeated in the election, including their own representative. Very remarkable picture of—it’s a remarkable picture of how the center is not holding. And it evokes memories, which we shouldn’t forget, some of which I mentioned. Now, the public conception of democracy is almost as negative as the aspirations of the business world. Of course, they hate democracy, naturally. But they’re now lobbying very fiercely. One of their highest objectives is to ensure that even shareholders should have no say in choice of managers, let alone what are called stakeholders, workers and the community. That’s out of the question. But to quote the Wall Street Journal, some liberals are seeking to find “`a fair position’ that straddles the divide between companies and shareholders.” That’s a very interesting phrase, the divide between companies and the people who own the companies, the shareholders. But they’re right. They’re recognizing the decision of the courts a century ago that the corporation should be identified with the management; the shareholders are irrelevant, just like the rest of the public.

Well, it’s true that there was a federal stimulus, and even though it was much too small, did have an effect. It’s estimated it saved about two million jobs, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But the perception of the Joe Stacks that it was a bust has a basis. Over a third of government spending is by states, and the decline in state spending approximated the federal stimulus. So the aggregate fiscal expenditure stimulus was flat. There was no stimulus. That’s according to a study, recent study, by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the standard source of economic information.

Well, the center is clearly not holding, and those who are harmed are once again shooting themselves in the foot. The immediate consequence in Massachusetts was to provide another vote to block the appointment of a pro-union voice at the National Labor Relations Board, which has been virtually defunct since Reagan’s successful war against working people. Well, that’s what can be expected in the absence of constructive alternatives.

Well, are there constructive alternatives? Take a look at the industrial heartland, in Ohio, where General Motors, among others, continues to close plants. There’s one of the few journalists in the United States who pays any attention to labor issues, Louis Uchitelle of the New York Times. He reported recently from the scene of one recently closed plant. He writes that President Obama “never sought to reopen the factory even after the federal government became controlling shareholder in GM during the auto bailout," so they could do what they wanted. What Obama has done instead is to "try to ease some of the pain by sending an ambassador as a salve for the community’s wounds, offer[ing] hope"—remember that—"and aid.” The aid is suggestions which can’t be implemented. Meanwhile, there’s another ambassador, who he doesn’t mention, the Secretary of Transportation Roy LaHood, and that other ambassador is in Spain. He’s offering federal stimulus money to Spanish firms to produce the high-speed rail facilities that the US badly needs and that could surely be produced by the highly skilled work force that’s reduced to penury in Ohio, while Obama shuts down the factories. That’s Joe Stack’s experience in Harrisburg again.

In 1999, LaHood, who was then a Republican congressman, introduced a bill that would have provided federal funding for transportation infrastructure. It would have authorized the Treasury to provide $72 billion a year in interest-free loans to state and local governments for capital investments. That includes investments in transportation, in transportation infrastructure. And interestingly, his bill called for, not borrowing the money, but using US notes. That’s much as Abraham Lincoln did to finance the Civil War and as FDR did during the Great Depression. Well, that was 1999. Today LaHood is using federal stimulus money to obtain contracts in Spain for the same purpose. It’s another sign of how the center has been disappearing in recent years, the past thirty years.

Well, the radical imagination should suggest an answer. The factory in question, and many others, could be taken over by the workforce with the support of—that would, of course, require the support of the communities that are left desolate, and in fact the rest of us. And they could be converted to production of high-speed rail facilities and other badly needed goods. Now, I said "radical imagination," but the idea is not particularly radical. In the nineteenth century, it was intuitively obvious to New England workers—quoting them, quoting their papers—that “those who work in the mills should own them,” and the idea that wage labor differed from slavery only in that it was temporary was so common that it was even a slogan of Lincoln’s Republican Party. Well, during the recent years of financialization and deindustrialization, there have been repeated efforts to implement worker and community takeover of closing plants. A few have succeeded, but not most. The ideas have immediate moral appeal to the affected workforce and the communities, and they should be quite feasible with sufficient public support. And they would be very far-reaching in their implications.

Well, for the radical imagination to be rekindled and to lead the way out of this desert, what is needed is people who will work to sweep away the mists of carefully contrived illusion, reveal the stark reality, and also to be directly engaged in popular struggles that they sometimes help galvanize. So what is needed, in short, is the late Howard Zinn. Terrible loss. Well, there won’t be another Howard Zinn, but we can take to heart his praise for “the countless small actions of unknown people” that lie at the roots of the great moments of history, the countless Joe Stacks who are destroying themselves, and maybe the world, when they could be leading the way to a better future.

Chomsky @ Brown University 4/20/10

2010-05-05T06:14:00.000-07:00

Continuing the Conversation; Moyers/Becevich

2010-04-10T03:46:00.000-07:00

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04092010/bacevichwatch.html

Andrew Bacevich: Permanent War Now the Norm

2010-04-10T03:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04092010/profile2.html

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal. The war in Afghanistan has claimed more than one thousand American lives and in the last two years alone the lives of more than four thousand Afghan civilians. It's costing American taxpayers over three-and-a-half billion dollars every month—a total of some $264 billion so far. But for all that, in the words of one policy analyst quoted by the New York Times this week, "there are no better angels about to descend on Afghanistan."

The news from that torturous battleground continues to dismay, discourage and enrage. America's designated driver there, Hamid Karzai, is proving increasingly unstable behind the wheel. The United States put Karzai in power and our soldiers have been fighting and dying on his behalf ever since. Despite widespread corrupton in his government. Now he's making threats against the western coalition that is shedding blood and treasure on his behalf.

Even more disturbing,for the moment, are the civilian deaths from nighttime raids andaerial bombings by American and other NATO troops. Just this week, we learned of an apparent cover-up following a Special Forces raid in February that killed five civilians, including three women, two of whom were pregnant. It's believed bullets were gouged from the women's bodies to conceal evidence of American involvement.

This slaughter of innocents has led the pro-American "Economist" magazine to question whether ourentire effort in Afghanistan" has been nothing but a meaningless exercise of misguided violence."

With me is a man with first-hand experience of war. Andrew Bacevich served 23 years, some of them in Vietnam, before retiring from the Army. He's now professor of history and international relations at Boston University. Just this week he was at a US Army War College symposium on the highly pertinent question, "How do we know when a war is over?" His book, "The Limits of Power," was a best-seller and his latest, "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War," comes out this summer. Andrew Bacevich, welcome back to the Journal.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Thank you very much.

BILL MOYERS: These civilian casualties that we've been hearing about, they're inevitable in war, right?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Sure they are. But I think that what's particularly important about the incidents that we're reading about is that they really call into question U.S. strategy. I mean, when General McChrystal conceived of this counterinsurgency approach in Afghanistan, one of the, sort of the core principles is that we would act in ways that would demonstrate our benign intentions. We're supposed to be protecting the population. And when it turns out that U.S. forces are killing non-combatants, and there are repeated incidents that have occurred, I think it calls into question the sincerity, the seriousness of the strategy. Or it calls into question the extent to which McChrystal is actually in control of the forces that he commands.

There doesn't seem to be any noticeable change, and any noticeable reduction in the frequency with which these incidents are occurring. So, I mean, were I an Afghan, I think I would not place a whole heck of a lot of credibility on the claims that, you know, "We're here to help."

BILL MOYERS: That nighttime incident in February that I referred to, you know, one woman killed was a pregnant mother of 10 children. Another was a pregnant mother of 6 children. And our people peddled the story at the time that they had been stabbed to death by family members on an otherwise festive occasion. Was that a lie, do you think, a deliberate lie?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Based on the reports that we read in "The New York Times," yes, it was a deliberate lie. I mean, I think one of the hidden issues here, and it's one that really needs to be brought to the surface, is we have two kinds of forces operating in Afghanistan. We have conventional forces.

BILL MOYERS: The Marines and infantry.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Right. And they are accompanied by reporters. We get at least some amount of information about what these forces are doing and how they're doing it. But in a sense, we have a second army. And the second army are the units that comprise Special Operations forces. They exist in secrecy. They operate in secrecy. Clearly there was a violation of some kind in that incident in February that killed the pregnant women.

The question is, are they being held accountable? Who's being fired? Who's being disciplined? What actions are being taken to ensure that incidents like that will not occur again? And again, this secrecy, the fact that they operate behind this black curtain, I think, makes it more difficult for that kind of accountability to be asserted.

BILL MOYERS: To whom are they responsible behind that black curtain?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, presumably they're responsible to General McChrystal, who is the senior US and NATO commander in Afghanistan. And McChrystal himself comes out of the Special Operations community. That's his entire background is in Special Operations. And you might wonder whether or not that gives him a better understanding of Special Operations to enable him to use that capability more precisely. Or you might wonder if it makes him too sympathetic to Special Operations. They're his guys, so give them a break.

BILL MOYERS: General McChrystal himself has said that we've shot - and this is his words not mine—an amazing number of people over there who did not seem to be a threat to his troops.

ANDREW BACEVICH: I think that is—that's clearly the case. When McChrystal was put in command last year, and devised his counterinsurgency strategy, the essential core principle of that strategy is that we will protect the population. We will protect the people. And the contradiction is that ever since President Obama gave McChrystal the go-ahead to implement that strategy, we have nonetheless continued to have this series of incidents in which we're not only not protecting the population. But indeed we're killing non-combatants.

BILL MOYERS: Given what's happening in the killing of these innocent people, is the very term, "military victory in Afghanistan," an oxymoron?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Oh, this is—yes. And I think one of the most interesting and indeed perplexing things that's happened in the past three, four years is that in many respects, the officer corps itself has given up on the idea of military victory. We could find any number of quotations from General Petraeus, the central command commander, and General McChrystal, the immediate commander in Afghanistan, in which they say that there is no military solution in Afghanistan, that we will not win a military victory, that the only solution to be gained, if there is one, is through bringing to success this project of armed nation-building.

And the reason that's interesting, at least to a military historian of my generation, of the Vietnam generation, is that after Vietnam, this humiliation that we had experienced, the collective purpose of the officer corps, in a sense, was to demonstrate that war worked. To demonstrate that war could be purposeful.

That out of that collision, on the battlefield, would come decision, would come victory. And that soldiers could claim purposefulness for their profession by saying to both the political leadership and to the American people, "This is what we can do. We can, in certain situations, solve very difficult problems by giving you military victory."

Well, here in the year 2010, nobody in the officer corps believes in military victory. And in that sense, the officer corps has, I think, unwittingly really forfeited its claim to providing a unique and important service to American society. I mean, why, if indeed the purpose of the exercise in Afghanistan is to, I mean, to put it crudely, drag this country into the modern world, why put a four-star general in charge of that? Why not—why not put a successful mayor of a big city? Why not put a legion of social reformers? Because the war in Afghanistan is not a war as the American military traditionally conceives of war.

BILL MOYERS: Well, President Obama was in Afghanistan not too long ago, as you know. And he attempted to state the purpose of our war there to our troops.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Our broad mission is clear. We are going to disrupt and dismantle, defeat and destroy al Qaeda and its extremist allies. That is our mission. And to accomplish that goal, our objectives here in Afghanistan are also clear. We're going to deny al Qaeda safe haven. We're going to reverse the Taliban's momentum. We're going to strengthen the capacity of Afghan security forces and the Afghan government so that they can begin taking responsibility and gain confidence of the Afghan people.

BILL MOYERS: That sounds to me like a traditional, classical military assignment, to find the enemy and defeat him.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, but there's also then the reference to sort of building the capacity of the Afghan government. And that's where, of course, the president, he'd just come from this meeting with President Karzai. Basically, as we understand from press reports, the president sort of administered a tongue-lashing to Karzai to tell him to get his act together. Which then was followed by Karzai issuing his own tongue-lashing, calling into question whether or not he actually was committed to supporting the United States in its efforts in Afghanistan. And again, this kind of does bring us back, in a way, to Vietnam, where we found ourselves harnessed to allies, partners that turned out to be either incompetent or corrupt. Or simply did not share our understanding of what needed to be done for that country.

BILL MOYERS: What does it say to you as a soldier that our political leaders, time and again, send men and women to fight for, on behalf of corrupt guys like Karzai?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, we don't learn from history. And there is this persistent, and I think almost inexplicable belief that the use of military force in some godforsaken country on the far side of the planet will not only yield some kind of purposeful result, but by extension, will produce significant benefits for the United States. I mean, one of the obvious things about the Afghanistan war that is so striking and yet so frequently overlooked is that we're now in the ninth year of this war.

It is the longest war in American history. And it is a war for which there is no end in sight. And to my mind, it is a war that is utterly devoid of strategic purpose. And the fact that that gets so little attention from our political leaders, from the press or from our fellow citizens, I think is simply appalling, especially when you consider the amount of money we're spending over there and the lives that are being lost whether American or Afghan.

BILL MOYERS: But President Obama says, our purpose is to prevent the Taliban from creating another rogue state from which the jihadists can attack the United States, as happened on 9/11. Isn't that a strategic purpose?

ANDREW BACEVICH: I mean, if we could wave a magic wand tomorrow and achieve in Afghanistan all the purposes that General McChrystal would like us to achieve, would the Jihadist threat be substantially reduced as a consequence? And does anybody think that somehow, Jihadism is centered or headquartered in Afghanistan? When you think about it for three seconds, you say, "Well, of course, it's not. It is a transnational movement."

BILL MOYERS: They can come from Yemen. They can come from—

ANDREW BACEVICH: They can come from Brooklyn. So the notion that somehow, because the 9/11 attacks were concocted in this place, as indeed they were, the notion that therefore, the transformation of Afghanistan will provide some guarantee that there won't be another 9/11 is patently absurd. Quite frankly, the notion that we can prevent another 9/11 by invading and occupying and transforming countries is absurd.

BILL MOYERS: In this context, then, what do we do about what is a real threat, from people who want to kill us, the Jihadists. What do we do about that?

ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, we need to assess the threat realistically. Osama bin Laden is not Adolf Hitler. Al-Qaeda is not Nazi Germany. Al-Qaeda poses a threat. It does not pose an existential threat. We should view Al-Qaeda as the equivalent of an international criminal conspiracy. Sort of a mafia that in some way or another draws its energy or legitimacy from a distorted understanding of a particular religious tradition.

And as with any other international criminal conspiracy, the proper response is a police effort. I mean, a ruthless, sustained, international police effort to identify the thugs, root out the networks and destroy it. Something that would take a long period of time and would no more succeed fully in eliminating the threat than the NYPD is able to fully eliminate criminality in New York City.

BILL MOYERS: You participated this week in a symposium at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on the subject, "How will we know when a war ends?" So, the boots are on the ground there. The troops are there, committed, at least through 2011. What do we do?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I have to say, and I mean, I'm sure this sounds too simplistic. It would be way too simplistic for people in Washington. But if you want to get out of a war, you get out of a war. I mean, you call General McChrystal and say, "Your mission has changed. And your mission is to organize an orderly extrication of US forces."

You know, if it were me, I'd say, "General McChrystal, call me back in two weeks and tell me what the plan is and how long it's going to take." But war termination for us has come to be very difficult, because of our inability to understand the war that we undertake.

We are now close to a decade into what the Pentagon now calls, "The Long War." And it is a war in which one-half of one percent of the American people bear the burden. And the other 99.5 percent basically go on about their daily life, as if the war did not exist.

I mean, the great paradox of the Long War, is that it seems the Long War consists of a series of campaigns with Iraq and Afghanistan being the two most important, although one could add Pakistan and Yemen to the list, in which there seems to be no way to wind down the campaign.

Or to claim from the campaign some positive benefit that allows us to say that the end date of the long war is any closer. And we do find ourselves in this circumstance where permanent war now seems to have become the norm. And we don't know what to do about that.

BILL MOYERS: There's something else that President Obama said when he was in Afghanistan. Take a look at this:
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The United States of America does not quit once it starts on something. You don't quit, the American Armed Services does not quit, we keep at it, we persevere, and together with our partners we will prevail. I am absolutely confident of that.

BILL MOYERS: How do you read that?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I think the president has, he's placed down this enormous bet. A bet involves 100 thousand American soldiers.

And the deterioration of circumstances, for example, if Karzai turns out to be an unreliable ally, even that will make it extraordinarily difficult for the president to now say, "Well, I've changed my mind. I'm going to take that, I'm going to take that bet off the table." So in that sense, the rhetoric is not at all surprising, I think. And of course, it's historically incorrect. We quit after the Mogadishu firefight in Somalia. I think that it probably was prudent to quit. That doesn't make Somalia a great place today. We quit in Vietnam, having paid an enormous cost, to try to maintain the viability of South Vietnam. So there are times actually when it makes sense to quit.

BILL MOYERS: Should we quit in Afghanistan?

ANDREW BACEVICH: I think so. I mean again, I believe that ultimately, a sound foreign policy should be informed by an enlightened understanding of one's own interests. That's what we pay people like President Obama big money to do, to advance our collective interests, what's good for this country, this people. And the perpetuation of the war in Afghanistan is not good for this country and for our people.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Because we are squandering our treasure. We are losing lives for no purpose. And ultimately, the perpetuation of this unnecessary war does, I think, serve to exacerbate the problems within the Islamic world, rather than reducing those problems.

BILL MOYERS: Andrew Bacevich, thank you for joining me on the Journal. And we'll continue this conversation on our website at PBS.org.

Bacevich's Second Principle to Abate Militarism

2010-03-06T02:44:00.000-08:00

“… revitalize the concept of the separation of powers. Here is the second principle with the potential to reduce the hazards by the new American militarism.”
“In all but a very few cases, the impetus for expanding America’s security perimeter has come from the executive branch.” “The result, especially in evidence since the end of World War II, has been to eviscerate Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution, which in the plainest language confers on Congress the power “To declare War”.”

The New American Militarism: how to abate it

2010-02-26T01:47:00.000-08:00

Andrew J. Bacevich is a Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University. A graduate of West Point and a Vietnam Veteran, he has a doctorate in history from Princeton and was a Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of colonel and is a member of the Council on foreign relations. He is the author of several books, including ‘The Limits of Power, the End of American Exceptionalism’.
He is not a liberal.
He is not a Democrat.

Having read Andrew J. Bacevich’s ‘The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War’, I would like to share his proposed means, which ‘rests on ten fundamental principles’ by which to abate ‘the present day militaristic tendencies’.

“First, heed the intentions of the Founders, thereby restoring the basic precepts that animated the creation of the United States and are specified in the Constitution that the Framers drafted in 1787 and presented for consideration to the several states. Although politicians make a pretense of revering that document, when it comes to military policy they have long since fallen into t e habit of treating it like a dead letter. This is unfortunate. Drafted by men who appreciated the need for military power while also maintaining a healthy respect for the dangers that it posed, the Constitution in our own day remains an essential point of reference.”

Whistle-Blowers: A Conversation with Ellsberg and Dean

2010-02-15T08:00:00.000-08:00

FORA.tv - Whistle-Blowers: A Conversation with Ellsberg and Dean

Impeach the Supreme Court 5

2010-02-07T23:36:00.000-08:00

Corporations are NOT the people! In fact, they are not people at all.

Get a free bumper sticker to protest the recent 5 to 4 decision by the Supreme Court to allow unlimited corporate funding for election campaigns.
src="http://www.peaceteam.net/imgs/sc_200x69.gif">

Read what Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has to say about corporate influence in Washington. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100222/lessig
And visit the 'Change Congress' website.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100222/lessig

Senator Lieberman Goes Orwellian

2009-12-27T04:26:00.000-08:00

Sen. Lieberman: “If We Don’t Act Preemptively, Yemen Will Be Tomorrow’s War”

Appearing on Fox News Sunday, independent Senator Joseph Lieberman suggested the United States should preemptively attack Yemen in light of the failed airline bombing.

Sen. Lieberman: “I was in Yemen in August. And we have a growing presence there, and we have to, of Special Operations, Green Berets, intelligence. We’re working well with the government of President Saleh there. I leave you with this thought that somebody in our government said to me in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.”

So, according to the Senator, unless we go to war - that is, engage in unlawful state aggression - we'll have to go to war.

Well, Senator, talking shite seems to have worked for your efforts to protect the massive insurance companies you serve from adverse affects of health care reform. Perhaps your military/industrial masters will reward you for similarly boosting their bottom line at the expense of the American and Yemeni people.

Noam Chomsky - The Contours of World Order: Fifty Years of the United Nations

2009-12-26T02:02:00.000-08:00

Iraq and Afghanistan wars; where's the accountability?

2009-12-16T05:30:00.000-08:00

More at The Real News

Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the "Father of Reaganomics". He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.
Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay, in Washington, DC. Joining us now from Florida is Paul Craig Roberts. He was an assistant secretary of the Treasury Department under the Reagan administration. He was an associate editor of The Wall Street Journal. Welcome, Mr. Roberts. When President Obama decided not to prosecute, there were obviously a lot of considerations, both domestic politics and otherwise. But certainly one of the critical pieces of it, if you're going to prosecute, it seems to me that you start with the question of was the Iraq war illegal, was international law violated. And if in fact the Iraq war was waged on deliberate misinformation, it's hard to think of a crime that would be more serious than that. But if Obama were to open that can of worms that the Iraq war is illegal, then the continued occupation of Iraq's illegal, and it puts the entire US foreign policy in the region in a completely different light. So speak about President Obama, his view of the world as articulated in the campaign, this decision not to prosecute, and essentially not just continuing Bush policy in Iraq, but now we can see, more or less, a Bush policy in Afghanistan.

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, ECONOMIST AND COLUMNIST: Yes. Well, I can't say why he made the decision he made. All I can say is that the consequence is that we now have a precedent that neither the president nor the vice president are subject to law, they're outside the law, they can violate the law with impunity. This is a [inaudible] development. I can't think of anything worse to happen to the United States than to establish legally that the rulers are not subject to law. The entire history of liberty in the Anglo-American world, it was to tie the rulers down and make them subject to law, to bring the king under the law. So now we've reversed this thousand-year struggle and we've made the rulers unaccountable to law. This is a terrible thing. I'm sure there are all kinds of political and other arguments made, all sorts of interest groups, but this is the outcome. But there was really no discussion of this. And what this shows is that the American people, the political people, the legal professions, that what was really at stake—they had no idea what was really at stake. And to say that some silly war, which actually probably was an act of treason, since it was apparently based on deception—. You know, the British right now are holding these inquiries. They already know that it was based on deception, and they're trying to find out how they can prevent that from happening in the future.

JAY: Part of what's come out early in the inquiry is that it was very clear that Blair and Bush had decided to invade Iraq as early, I believe, as 2002, and the idea that weapons of mass destruction would be more a rationale than an actual reason was clear as far back as 2002. But what do you make of the lack of American media coverage of the British inquiry?

ROBERTS: Well, what does the American media cover? If you're talking about the newspapers and the television, they don't cover anything. So we don't want the people to know that the war was contrived and that some other agenda was being served that we still have not been told. You know, we don't really know—the government's never told us why they invaded Iraq. They lied to us and said, oh, he has weapons of mass destruction, and yet the record is clear that the government [inaudible] did not have these weapons. This is a known fact now. We still don't know why they did it, and they're not going to tell us. And so probably if Obama was trying to gin up the war in Afghanistan, he doesn't want a lot of news coverage of the British inquiry into how Blair deceived his own cabinet in order to do Bush's bidding and provide cover for Bush's illegal war in Iraq.

JAY: How did you respond to President Obama's speech the other night on Afghanistan?

ROBERTS: Well, I didn't bother to listen to it. I mean, I already knew what he was going to do. [inaudible] interesting thing, because here we have millions of Americans, on that very day, lost their health insurance subsidies from COBRA [Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985]. So all of a sudden, millions of Americans, no health coverage that day. Or 24 hours before, The Detroit Free Press published a 127-page supplement to the newspaper, listing all of the metro area foreclosures. In Michigan, 48 percent of the mortgages exceed the value of the homes. And yet Obama thinks we have money to escalate an eight-year-old war that serves no American purpose. You know, it's like the British ambassador Craig Murray said: what the war is about is protecting the pipeline route that the Americans wanted through Afghanistan so they could get the Central Asian gas out without it passing through Iran and Russia. So is this why we should be in Afghanistan? And how do we pay for this? Well, just the other day, Obie, the Democrat chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, David Obie, says, "Oh, we're going to put an additional progressive income tax on every American earning more than $30,000 a year." So I call this trickle-up economics, where you tax the little guy and give it to [inaudible] companies and to the oil companies or the energy companies who would benefit from the pipeline.

JAY: But what do you make of the administration's argument that, one, al-Qaeda's a threat, a vital national security threat, and more than that—?

ROBERTS: That's a total lie.

JAY: And the other piece of it is the issue of dissolution of Pakistan. So what do you make of all that?

ROBERTS: Pakistan is falling apart because we forced our puppet government to attack its own people. All this stuff about al-Qaeda is a lie. It's a hoax.

JAY: Why? Why do you say so?

ROBERTS: Because it doesn't exist in any way that it means anything to us.

JAY: But what's the evidence for that? Because—.

ROBERTS: But what's the evidence that it means anything?

JAY: Well, the evidence—they say the evidence is 9/11, the attacks on the US embassies, and so on. There's certainly been attacks in Europe.

ROBERTS: Oh, you mean they object to our aggressive policies and our hegemony in their own lands. And if this organization exists, it's nothing to do with a state. It's nothing to do with Taliban. The Taliban is not al-Qaeda. Pakistan is not al-Qaeda. The whole thing is some kind of a hoax. It's an excuse.

JAY: So what's the—so the real objective is pipelines.

ROBERTS: [inaudible] the 9/11 Commission report. We've had the legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission, who apparently drafted the thing, he's written a book and said, you know, the military lied to us. People lied to us who were supposed to be helping us. We've had both cochairmen of the commission say the same thing. The 9/11 truth movement is very large. There are very many very distinguished, intelligent people—architects, engineers, scientists—and they point out all kinds of problems with this report. There's [inaudible] never been an examination. There was a political commission that was denied most of the relevant testimony and information according to their own chairman and legal counsel, and they produced a political document. We don't know what happened. I mean, people can say, "Oh, we believe this because the government did it," but it's the same government that told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein had al-Qaeda connections when we know for a fact he didn't.

TARIQ ALI: “Obama’s Afghan-Pak Syndrome"

2009-12-13T04:39:00.000-08:00

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2009/12/7/tariq_ali_obamas_afghan_pak_syndrome

US military has no business in Afghan civil war

2009-12-08T23:54:00.000-08:00

More at The Real News

"'Obama's War Choice' pure politics" - Lawrence Wilkerson

2009-12-03T08:22:00.000-08:00

More at The Real News

Lawrence Wilkerson,"Obama's campaign rhetoric and his generals put him in a corner on Afghanistan."
Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security.

British Iraq Inquiry Hears Regime Change Claim

2009-11-27T21:05:00.000-08:00

Ralph Nader on Obama's Election - one year on

2009-10-27T22:13:00.000-07:00

More at The Real News

Monty Python, Colin Powell and the Terror Industrial Complex

2009-10-18T00:19:00.000-07:00

Leave it to Monty Python's Terry Gilliam - Python's 'Yank-in-the-wood-pile', director of 'Brazil', 'Twelve Monkeys' and other cinematic adventures - to pitch a zinger to Keith Olbermann. To wit, "Why didn't Colin Powell's interview about the 'Terror Industrial Complex' become a bigger story?"

Indeed; Why? The answer, of course, is revealed by asking another question; why aren't US forces and contractors out of Iraq and Afghanistan?
(If the embedded video doesn't link to this story, use this link:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#33336509

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Financial Coup d'Etat by Wall Street?

2009-10-12T07:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10092009/watch.html

BILL MOYERS: What's your explanation as an economist. And a student of this financial system as to why the banks are taking so long to help the homeowners when Congress has allocated funds for that purpose?

SIMON JOHNSON: I'm afraid that it's pretty obvious and it's very tragic. That they have no interest in helping the homeowners. They make money with what they're doing. Bill, they'll expected a lot of these mortgages they made to default, okay? It was in their models. A high default rate. Now, they didn't expect house prices to come down so much. That's where they got their losses. But they absolutely made these loans expecting they would have to foreclose on people. And figuring they would make money on that.

These are very smart, very profit-oriented people. I can assure you, if there was money in it for them. They would be negotiating you know, very various kinds of re-schedulings of these loans. They don't want to do it. They it's not in their interest. It's not where the money is.

This is capitalism, Bill. That's what they're supposed to do. They represent their shareholders, they're appointed by the board of directors to make money for their shareholders. And the way they think that they can best make money is to shape the regulatory rules around housing around derivatives, around all everything we used to have that kept the financial sector under control. Has all been, you know, washed away, one way or another, by their efforts, right? They make money in the boom, that way. And when and when bad things happen, they shove all the downside onto the taxpayer. That's what they're doing their job.

MARCY KAPTUR: It's socialism for the big banks. Because they've basically taken their mistakes and they've put it on the taxpayer. That's the government. That's socialism. That isn't capitalism.

SIMON JOHNSON: Well people some people call that lemon socialism. So, when it turns out to be a lemon, it's you it's yours, the taxpayer. When it turns out to be good, it's mine, I'm Wall Street.

Listening to Lara Logan

2009-10-07T08:28:00.000-07:00

Listening to Lara Logan, CBS News Chief Foreign Affairs and 60 Minutes Correspondent on the Colbert Report sell not only her 3-part Special Report on CBS but throwing an impassioned (and obviously well-rehearsed) pitch for the escalation of the war in Afghanistan to the US people.

I am physically revolted by the murderous audacity of her appeal to continued slaughter and ruin in that devastated country.

Ms Logan, a South African, tells us that what “appears to be a wavering of US resolve, smells like victory to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

I must less-than-elegantly observe that her ‘wavering resolve’ line smells a lot like a blend of the verminous horse-shit that reporters and government spokes-people were spoon-feeding us during the war in South-east Asia and the pre-digested bull-twaddle of a time-share salesman trying desperately to close the deal.
This blatant propagandizing of a war increasingly unpopular with the American people (not to mention the Afghani people) by a member of what sadly passes as the Fourth Estate in the US can only be reviled and vilified by civilized, intelligent witnesses.

This despicable display of war-mongering by one who shows no sign of professional journalistic objectivity must be seen as nadir point but for the fact that the New York Times is also riding the pale horse of war.

In a review of Robert Greenwald’s documentary, ‘Rethink Afghanistan’ which opened in New York City last week, Andy Webster complained about there being too many dead and maimed in the film. He further kvetched in his thinly veiled editorial that what Mr Greenwald presents in his documentary “again and again, are terrifying images of children”. Then in a turn that would be the envy of The Exorcist special FX team, he snidely quips “Military engagements, it seems, are messy and claim innocent lives.”
One must stand dumb-founded at the callous, calculating disregard for human suffering so brazenly, disdainfully displayed by Mr Webster and his editors.

Now consider this: it is a shop-worn axiom – an article of faith - that the New York Times and CBS News are purveyors of ‘the liberal media bias’. What an evil friggin’ joke. Yes, bleeding hearts one and all. Bleeding from self-inflicted wounds to their professional integrity, whining and blustering as the circumstance dictates while thousands upon thousands of children are murdered by Minuteman missiles and Predator drones.

Thanks, Lara, Andy, for your fair, even-handed objective reporting of world events. Your checks from the Pentagon will be deposited directly to your accounts as agreed.

http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=251054

http://rebelreports.com/post/205318314/ny-times-whines-that-rethink-afghanistan-film-is-not

Property over People

2009-10-03T01:48:00.000-07:00

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Judge Goldstone Defends Gaza Inquiry Alleging Israeli War Crimes

2009-10-02T00:09:00.000-07:00

In Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council held a one-day debate Tuesday on a recent inquiry finding Israel committed a number of war crimes in its assault on the Gaza Strip. The head of the inquiry, Judge Richard Goldstone, said all but one of the individual Israeli attacks examined by investigators had no military purpose.

Judge Richard Goldstone: “We detail a number of specific incidents in which Israeli forces launched direct attacks against civilians with lethal consequences. These were, with only one exception, where the facts establish that there was no military objective or advantage that could justify the attacks.”

Around 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli attack, most of them civilians. Goldstone rejected Israel’s claim that it was targeting “terrorist infrastructure” in Gaza.

Judge Richard Goldstone: “If ‘infrastructure’ were to be understood in that way and become a justifiable military objective, it would completely subvert the whole purpose of international humanitarian law built up over the last hundred years and more. It would make civilians and civilian buildings justifiable targets. These attacks amounted to reprisals and collective punishment and constitute war crimes.”

Goldstone’s report also accuses Palestinian fighters of committing war crimes in firing rockets at nearby Israeli towns and urges both sides to conduct investigations or face prosecution by the International Criminal Court.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/30/headlines

Obama Beats the Drum on Iran - Where's the change?

2009-09-30T07:35:00.000-07:00

It's ironic and hypocritical that the USA fires off missiles as a regular part of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq for years, killing hundreds and thousands of innocent women and children and then raises a political stink about Iran test firing unarmed missiles within their own territory. The irony and the hypocrisy hardly ends there. The USA must look to its own non-compliance as a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Scott Ritter was one of the more out-spoken UN weapons inspectors in Iraq who campaigned to continue weapons inspections in order to end the murderous sanctions and avoid war. He was also very vocal about denying the Bush/Cheney claim of WMDs in Iraq.
Go to Mr Ritter's article in the Guardian entitled,
"Keeping Iran Honest; Iran's secret nuclear plant will spark a new round of IAEA inspections and lead to a period of even greater transparency."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/25/iran-secret-nuclear-plant-inspections

Then watch his interview on Democracy Now!
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Surprise! Welcome to the Third World, Des Moines!

2009-09-27T00:56:00.000-07:00

I’ve been working on an essay for several months – ruminating mostly; rolling things round in my head looking for supporting or counter-arguments. The gist of the piece is that the United States is becoming or - more nefariously - is being turned into a Third World economy.

From personal observation, I’ve seen my friends and family, by necessity, change from manufacturing jobs or occupations as skilled workers to service jobs, losing pay, perks, union representation, and a sense that the situation will improve with time. Associating those numerous anecdotes, with the dismantling of social services and the disintegration of infrastructure, I wondered what other element would further the affect the USA’s slide from First World to Third World economy in this depressing scenario.

(n.b. Scenario construction like this is one, is a technique I employ to control my natural ebullience.)

Since the time last March when this dismal thought first occurred to me, the US economy has imploded; the huge no-strings-attached bail-out funds of TARP have mostly been distributed and dispersed to some of the largest corporations on the planet. Unemployment has risen unofficially to nearly 20% and officially in double digits. Home foreclosures and bankruptcies are pandemic. The missing element that would precipitate the change in the US from a First to a Third World economy became evident; massive debt to foreign creditors. Being heavily indebted to foreign entities is an economic characteristic of all of the poverty-stricken nations of the Third World.

The unknown trillions of dollars borrowed from the Fed, the PRC, France (and who knows where else) hemorrhaging from the U.S. Treasury to pay war profiteers (e.g. Halliburton, Blackwater, et al.), Defense Contractors, corporate subsidies, and the out-and-out wholesale bail-out of the most morally destitute, most conniving, self-serving, rapaciously avaricious swindlers, scammers, hornswogglers, flim-flammers and thoroughly destructive bunch of crooks seen in nearly a century would, I judge, qualify as an over-bearing burden of debt. A perfect shit storm of financial hanky-panky, two never-ending wars and the continuing slavish dependence on petroleum just might be the fulcrum by which the middle class of the USA begin to empathize with the citizens of Nicaragua and Colombia.

This postulation was an apparent orphan, though, as far as I could tell – a depressing day-dream but nothing more. I found little real evidence supporting the idea and that offered some relief.

Until I saw a segment of "Real Time with Bill Maher" from Friday, September 25th, that is. In that segment, Paul Krugman, a Nobel Laureate in Economics said, “On bad mornings I wake up and think that we are turning into a Latin American country," Krugman said.

“If America was officially a Third World country, the international monetary fund would come in and say, “You’ve got to break the power of your oligarchs. Those banking interests; they have too much power. You’ve got to end all of this crony capitalism… We’re not in good shape.”

He went on the say that while the American dream is not totally dead, it is "dying pretty fast," particularly when it comes to social mobility.

Sometimes, I surprise myself. I only wish that the surprise was a more pleasant one.

Right this way, Mr and Mrs America. Your hovel is waiting.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/26/krugman-the-american-drea_n_300702.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman

First, Torture; Now, Disappearances?

2009-09-26T06:59:00.000-07:00

Two of the thugs in cammies are apparently wearing a black arm band similar to those worn by military police. I could see no other designation of unit or rank. None wore head-cover.

After the civilian is manhandled into the unmarked sedan, riot troops move in warning off the concerned witnesses.
I hope somebody thought to get the license number.

Are we starting to disappear our own people in broad daylight from the streets of a major city with the eyes of the world turned the G20?

Disappearances; another of the counter-insurgency 'skills' along with torture and assassination taught to fascists the world over at the School of the Americas.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/24/g20-protest-photos-vote-o_n_298692.html

Condi Rice continues her neo-Con-Job

2009-09-25T01:53:00.000-07:00

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Condi Rice Talks More Shite

2009-09-23T02:01:00.001-07:00

In a new interview with Fortune Magazine, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced the idea of withdrawal from Afghanistan with typical illogic heavily tainted with fear-mongering.

"The last time we left Afghanistan, and we abandoned Pakistan," she said, "that territory became the very territory on which Al Qaeda trained and attacked us on September 11th. So our national security interests are very much tied up in not letting Afghanistan fail again and become a safe haven for terrorists.
"It's that simple," she declared, "if you want another terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan."

Codswallop, horsefeathers, hogwash, claptrap and poppycock!

What Ms Rice is adroitly dissembling is the role the CIA and Rep. Charlie Wilson, that woefully misguided naïf, (to be kind) played in arming, funding and training the mujahidin ‘freedom fighters’ which were to be thorns in the side of the Soviet bear. These selfsame mujahidin then known as ‘the Network’ – and included Saudi millionaire, Usama bin-Laden - morphed with little effort into a larger movement to rid Muslim countries of all Western influence. That movement is now referred to as ‘Al Qaida’.

This bit of essential back-story skirts the larger issue, though. Ms Rice, like all neo-cons and many who sit on both sides of the aisles of Congress, wears the stripes of international interventionism whereby the belligerent presence of US military might is the righteous base-line upon which all foreign policy decisions are made.

Our ‘national security interests’ as Ms Rice and her ilk would have us believe would be solved by the further expansion of US military forces to encircle the globe and control by threat of force the policies of every nation and region on earth to suit the perceived needs of the United States and US-based multi-national corporations.

If one were seeking a more truthful observation of reality, it would much more appropriate to paraphrase Ms Rice’s neo-conic cant to state “Unless you want another terrorist attack in the US, abandon the policies of empire and hegemonic military dominance that breed exasperation, hopelessness and fanatical hatred of the US policy of global intervention.”

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/22/condoleezza-rice-if-you-w_n_294755.html

http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/21/news/economy/condoleezza_rice_gop.fortune/?postversion=2009092209

How do you spell 'Quagmire', again?

2009-09-22T04:50:00.000-07:00

Gen. Stanley McChrystal writes, “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term…risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

Does this sound like circular logic to anyone else?

The 'initiative' - meaning the ability to control the battle theater - is an illusion in guerrilla warfare and 'momentum' can only mean sustained and relentless, perpetual military action against the citizenry of the country.

The fact of the matter is that 'insurgency' is a code word for 'citizens of the country that resent the US military for killing their friends and family and have taken up arms to fight hostile occupation'.

Support the troops!
Bring them home to lead productive - not destructive - lives.

Breaking the Silence - John Pilger

2009-09-18T11:22:00.000-07:00

As we near the start of the 9th year of senseless slaughter in Afghanistan, take time to listen to the reasons voiced by George W, Tony B, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and the other architects of the Project for the New American Century that were meant to justify the illegal invasion and armed aggression against a sovereign people. John Pilger's documentary of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. What is the point? What is the justification 8 years on for the death and destruction?

Watch John Pilger - Breaking the Silence in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

The Real Death Panels

2009-09-06T04:40:00.000-07:00

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Torture Investigation Gets Gonzo's Okay

2009-09-03T06:51:00.000-07:00

It would seem that former Attorney General Gonzalez finally remembered something. He remembered the law and what a prosecutor is suppose to do when someone is suspected and accused of breaking it.

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Richard B Cheney: please, go back to your safe-room and await the US Marshalls

2009-09-01T21:41:00.000-07:00

Cheney's claim that his policies saved lives and foiled terrorist plots reminds me of that joke about the person shredding newspaper in NYC to keep away the tigers. When told that there are no tigers in NYC, the person rejoins,'See how well it works?'

Although correlation is not proof (as this joke illustrates), the number of plots foiled by Cheney's administration by torture and rendition are few and laughable. The heinous acts that they committed are numerous and vile.

Cheney (and Addington, Rice, Tennant, et al) were caught so flat-footed by 9-11 that they went off the moral and legalistic deep end in a frantic attempt to 1) avoid culpability and 2) make political hay.

In Cheney's own words, they went to the 'dark side' which to me indicates that he was already quite familiar with the territory having been there many times before.

Pilger: Obama a Product of Corporate Marketing

2009-08-29T10:31:00.000-07:00

Many will be abhorred by what award-winning investigative journalist, John Pilger, has to say about President Obama. Many will ignore Pilger's thesis altogether but will pounce on his cited examples as proof positive that Dubya was right all along but that Obama is still a socialist. Or a fascist. Or Kenyan. Or not really the president cuz it say so in the Bible.

Now that you've heard Mr Pilger's comments about Barak Obama, consider this: why should the idea that the US president is a product of marketing strategies, public relations tactics, and corporate planning be a surprise? The role of PR firms in US elections goes back at the very least to the Nixon/Kennedy campaigns. Joe McGinniss’s ‘The Selling of the President’ recounts Nixon’s successful re-packaging and his triumph in the 1968 presidential race following his loss to Kennedy in the nail-biter of 1960.

Winning the contest for the highest elected government office in the land (if not the world) is most assuredly a prize that corporate America and those in its thrall would do nearly anything to accomplish. This is the self-evident fact of the matter and incontestable. Putting the concepts Bernays and Lippman proposed in the early 1900’s for manufacturing consent, shaping public opinion and thereby controlling the ignorant herd is standard operating procedure. SOP. So last millennium it’s hardly worth mentioning. Nothing new here. Move along.

How many movies have come out of Hollywood –itself a creature of marketing and PR alchemy – that have told the lurid tales of backroom deals, media handlers, corporate shills, wardrobe consultants, press agents and PR strategists? How many summer-reading novels?

The notion that the US president is a corporate marketing creation should not come as a revelation. (A dispassionate observer might need look no further than the twice successful candidacy of Ronald Reagan to confirm the proposition that the quality of packaging and promotion out-weigh the quality of the candidate in a run for the White House.) Nevertheless, the truth of it is disturbing. Mr. Pilger is doing us all a favor by pointing this issue out to us and rubbing our noses in it.

The chief executive of our government – you know, the one that is of the people, by the people, for the people-is a product. A product that is shaped by focus groups and groomed by market research and then sold to the electorate by callously well-crafted media ads in combination with attractive product placement and the scripted pronouncements of pundits in the pay of corporations.

(I’m not really an expert, but I play one on TV.)

Understanding that Americans insist on feeling they are independent in their actions - exercising their freedom, in the parlance of patriotism- the marketing mavens offer a choice of products. Sales departments also know that making a choice can be daunting. Especially when there’s a lot at stake and the choice is to be made in near total ignorance; some of it willful, some by design.

In the US the electorate’s choice has been limited to two so as not to confound the troublesome herd; crispy or extra-crispy? Paper or plastic? Democrat or Republican? For here or to go?

Third-party candidates become the target of PR attack dogs and relegated to obscurity by corporate programmers and editors and made to appear an irrelevancy to the presidential contest.

And may the one with the bigger war-chest and the better sales campaign win!

What Hollywood movies do not typically deal with is nevertheless very closely scrutinized: the source of the funds in a presidential candidate’s war-chest. Although there are laws regulating campaign financing, there are many ways around those regulations. Laws, lawyers and loopholes; this is not a revelation, either. It’s axiomatic. Little could be more obvious than the fact that legal services cost money in the USA; as do the services of public relations firms, marketing consultants, ad agencies, media advisers, speech writers, press secretaries, wardrobe and make-up specialists, to name but a few that are essential to the selling of the president.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics , a research group which has tracked the money in U.S. politics for a quarter of a century and which does not accept contributions from corporations, trade associations or labor unions, Obama’s presidential war-chest was an unprecedented $745, 000,000. That astounding sum is based on the Federal Election Commission data for the 2008 election cycle. John McCain, the Republican runner-up, raised a paltry $368,000,000 according to the same sources. Third party candidates’ campaign funds were beggarly in comparison; raising a measly $5,457,000 to finance four separate campaigns. The lion’s share of which, $4,000,000 – little more than one half of one percent of Obama’s record-setting total - was raised by seasoned campaigner, Ralph Nader.

The source of campaign funds should raise no eye-brows. The money comes from the political action committees (PAC) of major corporations and institutions.
• Goldman Sachs, Morgan-Stanley, Citigroup, Inc, UBS AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co were among the top 20 contributors to Obama’s presidential bid.
• The PACs of media conglomerates National Amusements Inc (which owns media giants Viacom and CBS Corporation) and Time Warner, the world's largest media and entertainment conglomerate contributed more than a cool million.
• International business law firms, Sidley, Austin LLP, Latham & Watkins LLP, Skadden, Arps, and Wilmerhale, kicked in an even cooler $1.6 million.
• Hi-tech powerhouses, IBM, Microsoft and Google nearly doubled the lawyers’ contributions.
• Although it may prompt a warm and fuzzy feeling that Obama’s alma maters, Harvard and Columbia were major contributors along with Standford and the University of California each of these renowned educational institutions is also funded by government research contracts and should be considered part of the military-industrial complex.
• Rounding out the list is General Electric, which benefits directly from the research done by the aforementioned institutes of higher learning as one of the largest recipients of military contracts.

A pattern emerges; international law firms, mammoth media groups, financial sector behemoths, hi-tech giants and colossal military contractors were primary supporters of Obama’s presidential campaign. To risk stating the obvious once more, highly successful corporations and institutions do not go around tossing millions of dollars into wishing wells. They make well-considered and sober decisions, choosing, investments that offer low risk and high probability of profitable returns. An Obama presidency, while seen as ‘dark horse’ by the general public (if you’ll pardon the pun), was assessed as a sound political and financial investment. That these corporate and institutional entities hedged their bets by investing in Obama’s competitors is part of what is known as a balanced investment portfolio and should further negate any lingering illusions that they were foursquare supporters of his message of Hope and change.

This is not news. That this sorry reality is not news exposes the fraud of what passes as democratic process in the United States. The 2008 election campaign of the Chief Executive, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States was paid for by major corporations. That this is merely the most recent one in a long uninterrupted series of corporate-sponsored political contests leads to one incontrovertible conclusion: the US is a Corporatocracy, plain and simple. There should be no one of voting age so naïve as to cling to the fantasy, the irrational will-o’-the-wisp that Goldman-Sachs, Morgan Stanley, IBM, GE and Microsoft et al. will not claim ownership of what they have paid millions to acquire.

Should this depress Obama supporters? Only if they actually believed the PR hype. One more instance of belief as an obstacle to reason.

We should all be abhorred and politically radicalized by this truth.

To view Mr Pilger's speech 'Obama and Empire' in its entirety go to the Real News.

For more about John Pilger and his work; http://pilger.carlton.com/
To view Mr Pilger's speech

Richard Dawkins on Atheism (part 2)

2009-08-28T23:25:00.000-07:00

Richard Dawkins on Atheism (part 1)

2009-08-28T23:19:00.000-07:00

United Health Group - A story of corporate sociopathology

2009-08-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Cheney's Self-serving Disinformation

2009-08-26T00:36:00.000-07:00

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Prosecuting Torturers

2009-08-25T20:58:00.000-07:00

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Former Labour MP and Cabinet Minister Tony Benn on Health Care and Afghanistan

2009-08-18T19:27:00.000-07:00

On Health Care:
"And, you see, I suppose it’s really basically a question of, do you regard the health of the nation as a national interest? Now, in the United States, taxpayers pay for the education of children. Does that make it socialized education? The police are paid for by the taxpayers. Does that make it a socialized police force? The fire services are public services. Does that mean they are socialized fire services? You see, this is just the language of very, very rich people who don’t want to make a contribution for the healthcare of others."

"I’m afraid it’s getting an end of it, the whole argument. And the member of Parliament you quoted is being denounced by his own leader. And Mrs. Thatcher said the “Health Service is safe in our hands. And when she said that—and she was the most right-wing leader we’ve had in Britain for many years—when she said that about the Health Service, that gives you the clearest recommendation I can think of for a right-wing American audience."

"We took the view that a government had a responsibility to focus on the needs of a nation in peacetime in the way in which it does in wartime. And if that principle is followed, then all the ideological language can be set aside. You’ve got to judge a country by whether its needs are met and not just by whether some people make a profit. I’ve never met Mr. Dow Jones, and I’m sure he works very, very hard with his averages. We get them every hour. But I don’t think the happiness of a nation is decided by the share values in Wall Street."

On Afghanistan:
"But, you see, I think you have to understand the history of this. Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1839, captured Kabul, and was defeated the following year, and 15,000 British troops were killed in the retreat. Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1879. Britain was in Afghanistan in 1919. The Russians were in Afghanistan."

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/18/british_politician_tony_benn_condemns_escalation

http://www.tonybenn.com/

Armey's Incestuous Lobby Firms

2009-08-16T00:15:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Cheney's Memoirs - a pop-up book for neo-cons

2009-08-14T11:21:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I particularly love the statement made by John Dean at 3:12 "He (Cheney) is all but a self-confessed war criminal."

The Family - Totalitarianism for Christ

2009-08-13T21:52:00.001-07:00

“Christianity has gotten it wrong for 2,000 years—all this talk about the poor, the suffering, the down and out. I want you to focus on the up and out. I want you to be a missionary to and for the powerful." Doug Coe

'The Family, at other times, has called it “the totalitarianism for Christ.” What they mean is that they believe that the New Testament is primarily about power, and he (Doug Coe) illustrates this by giving Congressman Tiahrt a list of historical figures he can look to for modeling power—this is a direct quote—“Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden and Lenin.”

Jeff Sharlet on "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power"

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Blackwater's Alleged Criminal Activity (cont'd)

2009-08-08T01:06:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

More on Allegations of Criminal Activity by Blackwater/Xe Systems' Erik Prince

2009-08-06T23:32:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

One has to wonder where this particular rabbit hole will lead since Prince was a darling of the evangelic Bush 43 Administration.
Death Squads for Jesus; do none of these autocrats recognize the oxymoron thusly stated? Murder and torture in the name of Christ for big, big bucks.

Ex-Employees Link Blackwater Founder to Murder, Threats, Weapons Smuggling

2009-08-06T20:59:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

For more...
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/5/in_explosive_allegations_ex_employees_link

Read the sworn statements here:
http://www.democracynow.org/resources/83/283/john-doe-declaration-1.pdf
http://www.democracynow.org/resources/84/284/john-doe-declaration-2.pdf

Killing the Messenger: Sibel Edmonds Documentary

2009-07-31T22:37:00.000-07:00

This may be old news to many but as with so much that transpires in the New World Order, the story of FBI 'whistle-blower' Sibel Edmonds, needs to be kept in the public spotlight if we, as concerned citizens, hope to preserve, protect and expand our civic and social freedoms. The alternative is succumbing to the control of the globalized network of trans-national corporate fascism.

Here are some informative sites:

http://letsibeledmondsspeak.blogspot.com/2009/07/sibel-edmonds-on-mike-malloy.html
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/7/31/63124/3823
http://lukery.blogspot.com/2008/07/court-documents-shed-light-on-cia.html
http://nswbc.org/Op%20Ed/Op-ed-Part1-Nov15-06.htm

Full Spectrum Dominance Pt.1

2009-07-12T02:41:00.000-07:00

William Engdahl on his book Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order

More at The Real News

The Economic Crisis - Charlie Rose and guests

2009-06-19T20:51:00.000-07:00

Justice 'Thumb-on-the-Scales' Scalia

2009-06-18T20:32:00.000-07:00

First, Scalia, from the bench, declared the United States a theocracy with all power coming from '

Torturing Democracy

2009-06-11T19:23:00.001-07:00

BILL MOYERS JOURNAL presents TORTURING DEMOCRACY, a film from award-winning producer Sherry Jones which examines America's detention and interrogation practices in the "war on terror."
For more of Bill Moyer's coverage of torture go to:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05292009/profile3.html

Torturing Democracy

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The Question of Torture

2009-05-04T06:51:00.000-07:00

Rice, Ashcroft Approved Torture in July 2002

2009-04-23T07:50:00.000-07:00

More details have been revealed on high-level Bush administration involvement in authorizing torture. According to a timeline in the newly declassified Senate Intelligence Committee report, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top White House officials approved torture methods, including waterboarding, as early as 2002. Attorney General Eric Holder has described waterboarding as illegal, while President Obama now says he won’t rule out prosecuting top Bush officials who approved illegal acts. Rice’s backing came in July 2002, when she gave a green light for the interrogation of suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. One year later, the list of officials voicing approval grew to Vice President Dick Cheney, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and National Security Council legal adviser John Bellinger.

Torture Memos Released

2009-04-18T08:49:00.000-07:00

Rethinking Afghanistan - part one

2009-04-18T08:04:00.000-07:00

http://rethinkafghanistan.com/troop_trailer.php

This is the first of three installments of a very good film by Robert Greenwald and the Brave New Foundation. This documentary focuses on the financial burden of the undeclared and illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rampant criminal war profiteering.I It side-steps the cost in civilian lives, the destruction of societies and immorality and wickedness of these barbarous conflicts.

Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now!

2009-04-15T06:48:00.000-07:00

"Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War”

2009-04-04T20:00:00.000-07:00

AMY GOODMAN: The private military contractor KBR was awarded a $35 million contract for electrical work in Iraq by the Army Corps of Engineers last week. The former Halliburton subsidiary got the Pentagon contract even though it’s under criminal investigation for the deaths of at least two American soldiers in Iraq caused by improperly installed or maintained electrical equipment.

Separately, the US government charged KBR on Friday with criminal bribery charges for promising and paying tens of millions of dollars to Nigerian officials in exchange for four lucrative contracts between 1995 and 2004. Last month, Halliburton said it would pay $559 million to end the investigation if the government approved a settlement.

Another lawsuit filed last week accused Halliburton and KBR of the wrongful death of a truck driver they had employed. He was killed two years ago by US soldiers who allegedly mistook him for an insurgent at a checkpoint near Baghdad. The lawsuit accuses Halliburton and KBR of negligence.

As the allegations against Halliburton and its former subsidiary KBR, Kellogg Brown & Root, continue to grow, we turn to the award-winning investigative journalist Pratap Chatterjee, who has traced their record in Iraq for years. His latest book releases today. It’s called Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War. Pratap Chatterjee joins us now in our firehouse studio.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Thank you for having me on, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. As the US government says that the troops will draw down over the next year, year and a half, in Iraq, what’s happening with Halliburton and, as you call it, Halliburton’s Army?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, the US military is completely dependent on Halliburton. Despite all the news that you read of, you know, soldiers being electrocuted, drivers being shot, the company continues to get contracts. And it’s because half the people in Iraq are contractors, and a large number of them are KBR employees. You know, they’re South Asian workers, they’re Indians, Pakistanis, they’re Southeast Asian Filipinos. They are Halliburton’s Army, and they make this military tick. They make this army—allow this army to march forward on its stomach. It’s because they feed that stomach.

So, you had Peter Singer on last week talking about the jobs that are dirty, dull or dangerous and, you know, how they use robots to kill from the sky. Well, they still need to launch those robots, those drones, and they need to have people in place to feed them. And that’s what the Indians who—Indian—

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to P.W. Singer for a minute. We’ll play a clip of our interview. You know, he wrote the book Wired for War, about the robotics revolution in this country.

P.W. SINGER: Now, the problem is, what are the implications of that for our democracy? So, for example, if you are sending less and less Americans into harm’s way, does it make you more cavalier about the use of force? And one of the people that was fascinating that I interviewed was a former assistant secretary of Defense for Ronald Reagan, who actually had this to say about these systems. He worried that they would create more marketization of war, as he put it. We might have more shock and awe talk to defray discussion of the true costs of war.

You know, my grandfather served in the Pacific fleet in World War II. When he went to war, you know, he went to a place where danger took place, and the family didn’t know if he was ever coming back. And that’s very different than the experience of, for example, a Predator drone pilot that I met with who described that basically his experience of fighting in the Iraq war was getting in his Toyota Corolla, driving to work—he’s doing this in Nevada—driving into work, for twelve hours he puts missiles on targets, then gets back in the Toyota, commutes back home, and within twenty minutes he’s talking to his son at the dinner table.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s P.W. Singer, Wired for War. Pratap Chatterjee?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, my great-uncle actually served in Iraq under the British, and his job was to accompany the British troops. He was a doctor. Today, Indians are still serving in the war, and just as the French film that came out last year called Days of Glory, where they showed that half of Charles de Gaulle’s army was actually North African soldiers. So war has always used, you know, people from other countries to support and do the dirty, dull and dangerous work.

Today, some of that most dangerous work is done by robots, and the dirty and dull stuff that Peter Singer talks about is done by South Asians, Southeast Asians, and they comprise, you know, Halliburton’s Army. So companies like KBR, a former—Kellogg Brown & Root, a former subsidiary of Halliburton, are now able to make money by providing—my book opens with Donald Rumsfeld saying, “Why should we, you know, Americans, be doing these things like cleaning toilets? We can outsource that. We need our soldiers to be able to do, you know, the important things in war.” And really, this is only possible, because with a volunteer army, as opposed to a draft army, you can recruit people from other countries.

I talked to drivers. They’re Fijian truck drivers. I think you might even have an interview that I did with this Fijian truck driver, who—ironically, Peter Singer’s, you know, grandfather was a soldier in the South Pacific; now you have truck drivers being flown from Fiji, you know, and people being flown from Sri Lanka, to come to fight in somebody else’s war, the American war. And their job, you know, for $300 a month, is to make sure that American troops can fight in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to that clip that you describe. You can set it up for us, the clip of the Fijian driver.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: The clip—the driver’s name is Titoko Savuwati, and he’s from Fiji, from Totoya Lau, and he basically was lured to Iraq with promise of a $3,000 salary. Once he actually got there, he discovered he’s going to be paid 50 KD a trip, which is about—

AMY GOODMAN: KD are…?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: A KD is a Kuwaiti dinar, so that’s about $170.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to the clip.

TITOKO SAVUWATI: They never gave us any insurance. Most of our friends were shooting. Some was very badly shot, accident. But company never paid me anything. No single money. Like myself, I was fall down. My truck was tumbled, fall down. Yeah. So now, see my leg? I’m not going good now. I complained, but the company never gave me any money. Most of our trip to Iraq, we were only paid with 50 KDs allowance for trip. That’s all. Yeah. For 175 in one trip, they pay us 50 KD only for cross the border.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: There and back?

TITOKO SAVUWATI: Yeah. Go, come back. Yeah. I think that 50 KD is filter for the drivers to go to Iraq, come back. I was asking, if anything happened to my life, I’m shooting from the Iraq people, maybe I die, is that 50 KD can send to my family to make my family survive by that 50 KD?

AMY GOODMAN: Pratap Chatterjee?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: I mean, this is $180 he’s talking about. Now, actually, it’s $170, because of the exchange rates, that he’s getting paid. And the irony of Titoko, one day he dropped me off, and he said, “Hey, listen. Can I borrow one KD”—that was $3.50—“so I can go get some lunch?” Here’s this man driving, you know, twice—he’s driven a hundred trips into Iraq, you know, each time being paid $180 from this company, Agility. It’s a subcontractor to KBR. And at the end of the day, he’s bringing food, he’s bringing ice cream and bagels and turkey and—you know, to American soldiers. But his life, when he gets injured, nobody pays him. If he dies, you know, who’s going to take care of his family?

But that is Halliburton’s Army. It is an army of cheap labor, you know, working for big contractors in Houston that keeps the US Army—the US Army will not shut this operation down. Obama is not going to kick these guys out, because how does he ship back the equipment from Iraq to the United States? He’s going to have to use these contractors. Everything went in with the contractors. It’s like shutting down a nuclear power station. Who knows the system best, you know, to shut down a nuclear power station? You go back to the Bechtels who built it to shut it down. Same thing here. When Obama—if he moves soldiers out of that theater, he’s either going to use more contractors, or he’s going to use those contractors to bring them back. So, they’ve made $25 billion in contracts so far. They’re going to make another $10 billion, at least.

AMY GOODMAN: The title of your book is Halliburton’s Army; the subtitle, How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War. Very quickly, the history, how did this happen?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, this actually goes back many years. Most people think, you know, well, Halliburton was brought in by Dick Cheney. Not true at all. Kellogg Brown, & Root, or Brown & Root at the time, was building warships during the Second World War. In Vietnam, they built almost all the bases there. You can go to Cam Ranh Bay in Southeast Asia. I talk about Donald Rumsfeld actually arriving in 1966. He visits the bases, and then he comes back to the US Congress, and he speaks in the House of Representatives, and he says, “This company, you know, they don’t have receipts. They are wasting money, and they’re paying off the President.” This, you know—

AMY GOODMAN: And they were paying…?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: They were paying off the President.

AMY GOODMAN: Lyndon Baines Johnson.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: In this case, Lyndon B. Johnson. So, fast-forward thirty-seven years, and he is the man who’s giving them a contract. And actually, it’s Rumsfeld really; it’s not even Cheney. It’s Rumsfeld who’s looking to this system of outsourcing war, of finding Indians to clean toilets and that sort of thing, so that Americans, you know, can invade Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: But it’s Cheney who was head of Halliburton.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Cheney was the head of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000, and he made out well. He was actually a very bad CEO in some ways and a very good CEO in other ways. I mean, he took the company from making $100 million in US contracts to $2.3 billion in the five years he was there, so a large increase for the company. In fact, he made some very bad business decisions. He bought up a company that had a billion dollars in asbestos liability.

People often ask me, did Cheney get the contract—did he give the contract to Halliburton? I really think the question should be reversed: why did Halliburton hire Cheney, as opposed to why did Cheney hire Halliburton? Well, Cheney hired—Halliburton hired Cheney because of the revolving door, because they knew he could bring business to them. And once he actually became Vice President, Halliburton’s lobbying budget actually dropped by half. They stopped having to recruit—you know, having to lobby, because they already knew they were in.

They had these contracts set up from so many years ago. I mean, starting in Vietnam, building Diego Garcia. You know, I talk about them in Turkey in Adana. You know, Operation Northern Watch was supported by people working for a consortium called VBR, which was partly Brown & Root, Halliburton. So this has gone on for a long time. In Bosnia, you know, in Kosovo, under Clinton, Kellogg Brown & Root, then just Brown & Root, subsidiary of Halliburton, was, you know, cooking for the soldiers, building Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo. And today that continues. So this is not something that’s new. It is, in fact, you know, par for the course that Cheney would come in and work for them.

AMY GOODMAN: Pratap Chatterjee, we are seeing a huge discussion right now on this global economic meltdown and dealing with what is the solution to it. But rarely, in the concerns about the amount of taxpayer money that’s going out, are—is there a discussion about US taxpayer money going to corporations like Halliburton.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, $25 billion in the last five years has gone to Halliburton, now Kellogg Brown & Root, their subsidiary, in Iraq, to be able to build the bases for American soldiers and to do this war. They get a guaranteed profit; these contracts are cost plus. So whatever Halliburton, or now Kellogg Brown & Root, do in Iraq, they are going to get two percent. In Bosnia, it was seven percent, nine percent. Doesn’t matter how much they charge, they are guaranteed—how much is spent, they’re guaranteed to get a profit. They never make a loss. And so, for them, this is—you know, it’s gravy, in some ways, because whether Obama withdraws from Iraq or continues there, they’re going to get the contract to supply the military.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, I asked Obama at Cooper Union, when he was running for office, if he’s going to support a ban on the military contractors, but he said no.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: No. His point is, I will make them more accountable. I mean, in his legislation he’s promoted, he has never said that he’s going to withdraw the contractors. And in a sense, this is actually quite important, making them accountable, because this has not happened. I mean, the Iraq war, is—you know, there’s so much waste, so much incompetence there, and—

AMY GOODMAN: Afghanistan?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: In Afghanistan it’s exactly the same thing. I was just there in November for three weeks, and you have the same thing. You have, you know, troops who sit behind tanks, living on bases like Bagram, where you have, once again, workers from KBR who supply them with food and clean the toilets and that sort of thing. And nobody’s watching them, partly because—when I was in Kuwait, I asked one of the commanders there, I said, “I can prove to you that this particular subcontract by this company PWC was awarded—you know, should never have been awarded, because they lied on the paperwork. The drivers they hired from Fiji didn’t know how to drive these big reefers. You know, why are they here?” He said, “It doesn’t matter to me. It matters to me now that the soldiers are being fed.” I said, “Will you question this contract? Will you question?” He says, “No, not at all, because in order for me to send my troops into battle, I need to feed them, and I need to make sure that they’re taken care of, and KBR provides that service.”

AMY GOODMAN: Pratap Chatterjee, we just have two minutes, and I want to go to that top story, reading the introduction, how it was just awarded KBR $35 million for electrical work, despite the fact that it’s under criminal investigation for the deaths of at least two Americans, and separately, the US government has just charged KBR with criminal bribery charges for promising and paying tens of millions of dollars to Nigerian officials in exchange for lucrative contracts. Explain both of those quickly.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, the contract in Nigeria, which was a contract with a consortium called TSKJ, Albert “Jack” Stanley, who was the head of KBR at the time, worked for Cheney, paid tens of millions of dollars to Nigerian officials. So they’re paying a half-billion-dollar fine to the US government for what happened at those times. So, this is a huge—I mean, this should be a much bigger story.

AMY GOODMAN: This is money that comes from taxpayers, US taxpayers. So US taxpayers are bribing Nigerian officials, or they’re doing it in our name.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Absolutely, that is exactly how—

AMY GOODMAN: And the Americans?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: So, now, when KBR works in a place like Iraq, they are able to get away with a lot of shoddy work. And my book covers the fact that a lot of the work that was done, you know, because people weren’t watching, there wasn’t oversight, there wasn’t accountability, they were able to get away with shoddy electrical work, often bad food, overpriced items. A lot of times, there’s also a lot of detail of how, you know, people walked away with—the book opens with this guy Jeff Alex Mazon walking away with a $1 million check. And he’s paid that by a subcontractor to Halliburton. When the case came up at the Rock Island Arsenal, he said, “Look,” he says, “what’s wrong with this, getting this money? You know, this is money that is owed to me, because I did this work for Halliburton.”

AMY GOODMAN: The two Americans who died? We have twenty seconds.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, the Americans who died—Donald Tolfree was killed by the US Army when he was driving a truck. It’s extremely dangerous for the contractors who live there, because, you know, they don’t—they are effectively fighting in somebody else’s war, and they don’t wear a uniform. So when they go to work for Halliburton, many truck drivers have been killed, because they are actually civilians in a war zone fighting a war, you know, with—where, you know, uniforms don’t count for anything.

AMY GOODMAN: Pratap Chatterjee’s book is Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War.

Seymour Hersh: Secret US Forces Carried Out Assassinations in a Dozen Countries, Including in Latin America

2009-04-04T04:24:00.000-07:00

AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh created a stir last month when he said the Bush administration ran an executive assassination ring that reported directly to Vice President Dick Cheney. Hersh made the comment during a speech at the University of Minnesota on March 10th.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination wing, essentially. And it’s been going on and on and on. And just today in the Times there was a story saying that its leader, a three-star admiral named McRaven, ordered a stop to certain activities because there were so many collateral deaths. It’s been going in—under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.

AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, CNN interviewed Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser, John Hannah. Wolf Blitzer asked Hannah about Sy Hersh’s claim.

WOLF BLITZER: Is there a list of terrorists, suspected terrorists out there who can be assassinated?

JOHN HANNAH: There is clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process, as I think was explained in your piece, that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States, or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to the troops in the field and in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.

WOLF BLITZER: And so, this would be, and from your perspective—and you worked in the Bush administration for many years—it would be totally constitutional, totally legal, to go out and find these guys and to whack ’em.

JOHN HANNAH: There’s no question that in a theater of war, when we are at war, and we know—there’s no doubt, we are still at war against al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and on that Pakistani border, that our troops have the authority to go after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser. Seymour Hersh joins me now here in Washington, D.C., staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His latest article appears in the current issue, called “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace.”

OK, welcome to Democracy Now!, Sy Hersh. It was good to see you last night at Georgetown. Talk about, first, these comments you made at the University of Minnesota.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it was sort of stupid of me to start talking about stuff I haven’t written. I always kick myself when I do it. But I was with Walter Mondale, the former vice president, who was being amazingly open and sort of, for him—he had come a long way in—since I knew him as a senator who was reluctant to oppose the Vietnam War. And so, I was asked about future things, and I just—I am looking into stuff. I’ve done—there’s really nothing I said at Minnesota I haven’t written in the New York Times. Last summer, I wrote a long article about the Joint Special Operations Command.

And just to go back to what John Hannah, who is—was—I think ended up being the senior national security adviser, almost—if not the chief of staff, deputy chief of staff for Dick Cheney in the last three or four years, what he said is simply that, yes, we go after people suspected—that was the word he used—of crimes against America. And I have to tell you that there’s an executive order, signed by Jerry Ford, President Ford, in the ’70s, forbidding such action. It’s not only contrary—it’s illegal, it’s immoral, it’s counterproductive.

The evidence—the problem with having military go kill people when they’re not directly in combat, these are asking American troops to go out and find people and, as you said earlier, in one of the statements I made that you played, they go into countries without telling any of the authorities, the American ambassador, the CIA chief, certainly nobody in the government that we’re going into, and it’s far more than just in combat areas. There’s more—at least a dozen countries and perhaps more. The President has authorized these kinds of actions in the Middle East and also in Latin America, I will tell you, Central America, some countries. They’ve been—our boys have been told they can go and take the kind of executive action they need, and that’s simply—there’s no legal basis for it.

And not only that, if you look at Guantanamo, the American government knew by—well, let’s see, Guantanamo opened in early 2002. “Gitmo,” they call it, the base down in Cuba for alleged al-Qaeda terrorists. An internal report that I wrote about in a book I did years ago, an internal report made by the summer of 2002, estimated that at least half and possibly more of those people had nothing to do with actions against America. The intelligence we have is often very fragmentary, not very good. And the idea that the American president would think he has the constitutional power or the legal right to tell soldiers not engaged in immediate combat to go out and find people based on lists and execute them is just amazing to me. It’s amazing to me.

And not only that, Amy, the thing about George Bush is, everything’s sort of done in plain sight. In his State of the Union address, I think January the 28th, 2003, about a month and a half before we went into Iraq, Bush was describing the progress in the war, and he said—I’m paraphrasing, but this is pretty close—he said that we’ve captured more than 3,000 members of al-Qaeda and suspected members, people suspected of operations against us. And then he added with that little smile he has, “And let me tell you, some of those people will not be able to ever operate again. I can assure you that. They will not be in a position.” He’s clearly talking about killing people, and to applause.

So, there we are. I don’t back off what I said. I wish I hadn’t said it ad hoc, because, like I hope we’re going to talk about in a minute, I spend a lot of time writing stories for The New Yorker, and they’re very carefully vetted, and sometimes when you speak off the top, you’re not as precise.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the Joint Special Operations Command is and what oversight Congress has of it.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it’s a special unit. We have something called the Special Operations Command that operates out of Florida, and it involves a lot of wings. And one of the units that work under the umbrella of the Special Operations Command is known as Joint Special Op—JSOC. It’s a special unit. What makes it so special, it’s a group of elite people that include Navy Seals, some Navy Seals, Delta Force, our—what we call our black units, the commando units. “Commando” is a word they don’t like, but that’s what we, most of us, refer to them as. And they promote from within. It’s a unit that has its own promotion structure. And one of the elements, I must tell you, about getting ahead in promotion is the number of kills you have. Of course. Because it’s basically devised—it’s been transmogrified, if you will, into this unit that goes after high-value targets.

And where Cheney comes in and the idea of an assassination ring—I actually said “wing,” but of an assassination wing—that reports to Cheney was simply that they clear lists through the Vice President’s office. He’s not sitting around picking targets. They clear the lists. And he’s certainly deeply involved, less and less as time went on, of course, but in the beginning very closely involved. And this is the elite unit. I think they do three-month tours. And last summer, I wrote a long article in The New Yorker, last July, about how the JSOC operation is simply not available, and there’s no information provided by the executive to Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: What countries, Sy Hersh—what countries are they operating in?

SEYMOUR HERSH: A lot of countries.

AMY GOODMAN: Name some.

SEYMOUR HERSH: No, because I haven’t written about it, Amy. And I will tell you, as I say, in Central America, it’s far more than just the areas that Mr. Hannah talked about—Afghanistan, Iraq. You can understand an operation like this in the heat of battle in Iraq, killing—I mean, taking out enemy. That’s war. But when you go into other countries—let’s say Yemen, let’s say Peru, let’s say Colombia, let’s say Eritrea, let’s say Madagascar, let’s say Kenya, countries like that—and kill people who are believed on a list to be al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-linked or anti-American, you’re violating most of the tenets.

We’re a country that believes very much in due process. That’s what it’s all about. We don’t give the President of United States the right to tell military people, even in a war—and it’s a war against an idea, war against terrorism. It’s not as if we’re at war against a committed uniformed enemy. It’s a very complicated war we’re in. And with each of those actions, of course, there’s always collateral deaths, and there’s always more people ending up becoming our enemies. That’s the tragedy of Guantanamo. By the time people, whether they were with us or against us when they got there, by the time they’ve been there three or four months, they’re dangerous to us, because of the way they’ve been treated. But I’d love to move on to what I wrote about in The New Yorker.

AMY GOODMAN: One question: Is the assassination wing continuing under President Obama?

SEYMOUR HERSH: How do I know? I hope not.

Spanish Court May Indict Bush Officials

2009-04-01T08:29:00.000-07:00

From "Indict Bush Now.org":

The indictment and prosecution of Bush administration officials is becoming a reality.

"A Spanish court has agreed to consider opening a criminal case against six former Bush administration officials," the Associated Press confirmed.

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes are under scrutiny for sanctioning torture in violation of the Geneva conventions. Under Spanish law, the courts have jurisdiction to prosecute war criminals and torturers anywhere in the world. A judge has already called on prosecutors to review the charges.

Clearly, millions of people worldwide stand with the mission of IndictBushNow and all those who are fighting for accountability.

First, you go after the smaller fish. Then, the bigger fish are easier to nail!

The Old Bastard Squawks on, Cooking his Own Goose (part 6)

2009-03-18T03:00:00.000-07:00

The Annotated Interview Vice President Richard Cheney by Jon Ward and John Solomon, The Washington Times

Office of the Vice President
December 22, 2008
Vice President's West Wing Office

Q You would disagree that policy on detainee treatment was made opaque enough that these abuses at Abu Ghraib were–
(WTF am I trying to say without saying it?)
-- obviously not directed from the top,
(No. Obviously not from the top… cuz then that would mean that you and the ‘Dee-cider’ made the wrong dee-cisions. Better to lay the blame on a handful of moronic, under-educated yokels who don’t know any better than to follow orders.)
but under pressure for more intelligence
(More pressure but NOT from the top, aheh-heh…, like we said. Gotta get more intelligence, better intelligence. )
-- were allowed -- not allowed, but basically
(Oh, cripes, I’m in deep doo-doo and you got the shovel. Eeep…)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Abu Ghraib, like I say, I don't think had anything to do with policy, as I understand it.
( I say, ‘I don’t think’ but actually you know, it’s more like ‘I think but don’t say’. And as I understand it, I can say whatever the fuck I want because you two dweebs ain’t gonna press me on anything. Otherwise I would never have set up this phoney-baloney Q&A session with your bosses.)
And the people that they were –
(We’ll call them ‘people’ for the sake of their mothers.)
the people that were subjected to abusive practices there
(Not torture or cruel and inhuman punishment – ‘abusive practices’.)
I don't think had any special intelligence understandings, or if you will, special intelligence information that we needed.
(But since we couldn’t torture the ‘special intelligence understandings’ out of them, who’s to say?)
I mean, this was not --
(Maybe I’d better not bring that up…)
as I say, I don't think it was related to policy.
(And as I say, I think my opinion is Law around here so if it were policy – or related to policy – than that policy is Law and therefore I can do whatever the fuck I want to do and not worry about trifles like ‘legality’.)
I think it was, in fact, a case of individual personnel
(Not even members of a group; just individuals in a military hive.)
who were perhaps not properly supervised.
(I’m banking on you being so stupid as to ignore what patent nonsense this is: improperly supervised, individualistic, military security personnel who were acting outside of the chain of command even though they were constantly monitored by the CIA and their own superior officers in direct contact with the Pentagon on an almost daily basis. To put it another way – everybody knew about it from top to bottom but it’s nobody’s fault. Nevertheless, we’ll blame the enlisted bastards. )
And I think the military deserves a lot of credit for the way they handled it because they're the ones that cleaned it up.
(Like they had any choice in the matter.)

Q Foreign perception of the United States as we've had to fight these dual wars,
(Forced upon us as they were by unfortunate unforeseen circumstances, our own righteous honor and sense of duty as the appointed guardians and saviors of the Free world compelled us to use military force. If only those ‘Foreigners’ would come to realize how much America sacrifices for the common good the weight that we’ve been ordained to bear would feel lighter. Sigh…)
can you talk -- what you think has happened?
(Oops, I dropped my syntax again and it’s shattered to smithereens.)
Why has America – the perception of America changed so much in the last eight years?
(After all, in your administration, we’ve invaded two separate sovereign nations under the flimsiest of pretenses which were supported by bold-faced lies, overthrown the respective governments, slaughtered tens of thousands, forced the displacement, starvation and destitution of hundreds of thousands, destroyed the lives of millions more. Why would they change their perception of us? )
And what do you think will happen over the next few years?
(Oh, Great and Knowledgeable OZ! [Stoop here to lick boot])

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, has the perception of America changed?
(Didn’t think I’d turn the question back on itself, now, did you? Oh… you expected that, eh? Right…)
I suppose it has in some quarters.
(The hind-most, heh-heh.)
I think that some of the things we had to do after 9/11
(We were forced by panic, fear and greed. We had no choice.)
to respond to it and to protect the nation against a further attack
(Since we hadn’t see 9/11 coming, we were flying blind in a shitstorm.)
clearly generated controversy in some quarters.
(Limp-dicked, bleeding-heart liberals. Always whining about civil rights and due process. Makes me sick.)
But what a lot of our friends overseas never really understood,
(Because so many of them cling hopelessly to a shared outmoded concept of international law.)
at least not initially,
(Not until we agreed to spread the profits around.)
was that 9/11 fundamentally changed the way we looked at this question of terror attacks.
(Since this is one of the lynch-pins of our over-arching rationalization of the horrific and unlawful things we’ve done, let me recite it chapter and verse. Ahem…)
Prior out-of-date 9/11,
(Say what?)
we looked upon terrorist incidents as a law enforcement problem.
(Got that?: international terrorists; Black September, Bader-Meinhoft, Hamas, the PLO, Hezbollah, the IRA, al Qaeda, etc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist_organization ; the Cole, the embassy bombings, the first WTC, the whole violent enchilada was left to the cops – not the Marines, or the Army or the Air Force, the Navy or the CIA . Can you swallow that?)
You go out and find the bad guy, try him and put him in jail.
(Simple as a Tom Mix movie.)
That's the way we dealt with the World Trade Center bombing in '93.
(Never mind all of the other governmental organizations (State Department, CIA, etc) that went into the tracking, arming and infiltration that went before and after the act and the apprehension of the perpetrators. This was strictly ‘Barney Miller/Joe Friday stuff. Try to keep in mind these two gross distortions of facts that we’ll distill into this little catch phrase, ‘cops & robbers’. Otherwise the next set of bull-shit will leave you in the dust and I hate to repeat myself. )
After 9/11, we made a decision, and I think it was exactly the right decision,
(Of course it was exactly the right decision because I made it. Ergo: it was the Right one.)
and that when you -- when these actions result in the deaths of 3,000 people here on the homeland,
(Again, who’s counting ? The real emotional hook is that it happened on our homeland! The one we stole from the red savages and the Mexicans.)
more than we'd ever before lost in this kind of incident, more than Pearl Harbor,
(Actually, 2,402 were killed and 1,282 were wounded in that ‘Day of Infamy’. So, the 9/11 attacks yielded a roughly similar level of death and mayhem. No need to quibble, though. Both were disastrous. We just don’t want to cloudy the murk with verifiable information when falsely aligning two completely dissimilar events.
The apples-to-oranges elephant that you’ll have to ignore in the room, is the fact that Japan, a sovereign, imperialistic nation, attacked colonial military installations and targets with its own imperial military forces under its national battle flag whereas, al Qaeda, which is not a sovereign country or governmental or diplomatic entity, hijacked 4 commercial airliners with a force of 19 civilians armed with box-cutters.
Are you keeping the ‘cops & robbers’ concept in mind? Now, we’ve juxtaposed the Pearl Harbor ‘meme’ with all its strong emotive qualities with the false comparison of that event to attacks on 9/11 to shut down logical thought completely. A skillful blend of ‘Does not compute’ and cynically manipulated cinematic patriotism. Here comes the kicker - )
then this was a strategic threat to the United States.
(There’s no need to justify, quantify or in any way substantiate or support this preposterous statement with fact or argument. If I say, it was a strategic threat, that’s just what it was. Even though, tragic as the loss of 3,000 people is, their loss and the destruction of property did not cripple the functioning of state, local or federal government, the economy, nor the preparedness of the national armed services. Americans were stunned – the whole world was shocked – but the loss of less than 3,000 people from a population of over 200,000,000 does not constitute a strategic threat. )
And when you view it in those terms,
(Which are in near total disregard to the facts...)
then we believed we were fully justified, and indeed obligated, to use all the resources at our command
(And many that were legally outside of our command…)
to defeat that enemy so that they couldn't do it again.
(Which on the face of it – apart from the byzantine illogical blend of sophistry, non sequitur and red herring - would seem a reasonable aim.)
And that means you're prepared to use military force,
(No need to justify this statement for the reasons cited above. But if you idiots had brain ‘One’ between you, you’d have asked yourselves: ‘Why would the 9/11 attacks mean we’d prepare to use military force to forestall subsequent attacks by an undetermined group or groups of expatriated, stateless militant radicals who have no central command, air or naval forces when obviously the attacks of 9/11 were not deterred by the mightiest, best equipped military juggernaut in human history.)
use your intelligence asset
(Military intelligence; the original oxymoron.)
to go after those who support terrorism financially,
(Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, for example but never mind that or why two ill-advised and illegal invasions and two violent coup d’états were necessary to ‘go after those who support terrorism financially’.)
to go after those states that sponsor terror and provide sanctuary or safe harbor to terror. And that's what we did.
(Even though proof for such sponsorship by either Iraq or Afghanistan was tenuous at best at the times of the respective invasions.)
I think some of our friends overseas didn't agree with those policies.
(Most of the member countries of the United Nations, as a matter of fact.)
I think over time that has -- the situation has improved.
(But don’t quote me on that. I give two shits either way.)
And after people saw what happened here, but then saw what happened in London when the -- I guess the subways were bombed and buses and so forth,
(I wasn’t paying much attention to the internal security matters of our closest lap-dog... uh… ally. Of course, the bombings in July, 2005 were a direct response to Britain choice to go to war in Iraq.)
or what happened in Madrid, the train bombings,
(In 2004, also as a direct result of the Spanish joining the ‘Coalition of the willing’. After massive demonstrations against the ruling party, Spain withdrew from the coalition, so I’m really stretching the argument by referencing this.)
or more recently, what's happened in Mumbai,
(Though not on the same scale of any of the aforementioned attacks .)
that this kind of international terrorism is indeed a threat to those of us who lived in the developed world.
(Lived? Did I just let that slip? Lived?)
And tough, aggressive policy is what's required to succeed against it, and that's what we put in place.
(And if we get tough enough and aggressive enough with a large enough military force we could lock down the world and dare anybody to raise their head to protest. The fact that it hasn‘t worked so far should be proof that we aren’t tough or aggressive enough yet. Global gulags – that’s the answer; built by Halliburton.)
As I say, some of our friends weren't all that happy with it, but a lot of them were, in fact, and supported it.
(Our noble ‘Coalition of Patsies’)
And even as we went into Iraq, while some of our historic friends and allies criticized that, an awful lot –
(The pussies with their goofy ‘international law’ and stupid ‘multi-lateralism. Diplomacy is for the weak.)
for example, the NATO states, especially the new member states,
(The ones feeding at the trough of US ‘aid’ that we bought memberships for.)
sent troops to serve alongside our guys.
(Our guys. Oh, yeah, I guess there are girls there, too. Probably dykes, But that’s better than faggots, so far as I’m concerned.)
So I think it's evolved over time.
(From being a disaster in the making to a grade ‘A’ double-prime generational cluster-fuck.)
I think that it's less controversial now than it was,
(When we were still able to keep a tight lid on the whole mess.)
although there's still, obviously, controversy about things like Guantanamo and so forth.
(Silly, foreigners and their antiquated sense of morality and due process.)

End of part 6

Indict 'W' Now

2009-03-18T02:44:00.000-07:00

Bush Guilty by His Own Admission of War Crimes

2009-02-15T01:46:00.000-08:00

I'm not a big Olberman fan. But this 'Special Comment' is well worth watching.

Regarding the GOP and Bipartisanship

2009-02-14T00:19:00.000-08:00

To quote George Carlin…

"F*@K ‘em!"

For more than 8 years the Grand Old Putzes have been sticking it to us. They lost. They’re out of the White House and in the minority in both Houses. Let them go lick their wounds and plot their seamy revenge.

It was a gentlemanly gesture of magnanimity on Obama’s part to promote bipartisanship and attempt to work with the other side of the aisle. Very mature and wise. Now, it’s time to sit their pudgy asses on the back bench (to use a British term) and let them play mumbly-peg with their pages.

The GOP never gave the same consideration to the Dems. In fact, once the GOPs were in power they banished Dems from participation in a series of procedural power grabs.

Enough ‘Mister Good-guy-winner’. That move to put GOPs in the cabinet sickens me. It’s tantamount to putting the fox in charge of the henhouse; relying on the fox’s better nature to leave the hens alone.

I have an idea! Let’s put Karl Rove in the cabinet and just wash our hands of ever getting the US back on a democratic course.

Naw, let’s not and say we didn’t.

Tell all those money-grubbing, power-grabbing neo-cons and their slimy sycophantic associates to take a flying leap through a rolling loophole.

Peace Through Justice

2009-02-06T19:31:00.000-08:00

Ask Eric Holder to Appoint a Special Prosecutor for Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, et alia

2009-02-04T08:10:00.000-08:00

Copy this and email it the new Attorney General:
AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Mr Eric Holder
Attorney General of the United States
950 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530-001
Dear Eric Holder
As President Barack Obama took his oath of office on Tuesday, January 20, 2008, and assumed the total responsibilities of his high office, tackling the absolute mess left to him by his predecessor, George W. Bush got to fly out of town in style on Air Force One, never being held accountable for any potential and probable high crimes, misdemeanors, and misdeeds, during his two terms.
George W. Bush will now get to live a life of comfort, safety, and security, most probably believing he is beyond the reach of the law, having concealed his dastardly crimes by a long trail of deception, lies, and the deceptive use of his former high position as president.
Over 4,100 brave American soldiers, and over 1,000,000 innocent Iraqis, were killed in George W. Bush's war against Iraq on false pretenses, his big lies, which are unlawful deaths, each and every one, requiring that George W. Bush be indicted and prosecuted on murder and conspiracy to commit murder charges, as noted and carefully documented by former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi in his book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder".
This is to implore you to indict, prosecute, and charge George W. Bush with one or more of four charges: conspiracy to commit crimes alleged in other counts; crimes against peace; war crimes; or crimes against humanity.
Specific charges include the murders of over 4,100 brave American soldiers, and over 1,000,000 innocent Iraqis, pursuing an aggressive war, the brutality of the invasion, occupation, and detention centers, and the use of illegal weapons.
Sincerely,
Reference:
1. It was not faulty intelligence, it was not an innocent blunder, it was not even self-defense, it was his deliberate big lies that took our deceived nation to war with Iraq on false pretenses. George W. Bush made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda and 9/11 in his diabolical orchestrated campaign of deception and lies on his path to war with Iraq, Link http://projects.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/
2. "The preferable venue for the prosecution of George W. Bush for murder and conspiracy to commit murder would be in the nation's capital, with the prosecutor being the Attorney General of the United States acting through his Department of Justice. This book, however, establishes jurisdiction for any state attorney general (or any district attorney in any county of a state) to bring murder and conspiracy charges against Bush for any soldiers from that state or county who lost their lives fighting Bush's war, which as you can see applies to every state in this nation", excerpt from "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder".
3. In October, 1946, the victorious Allies executed ten former Nazi leaders in Nuremberg following their trial for war crimes. Each defendant was charged with one or more of four charges: crimes against peace; war crimes; or crimes against humanity, United States Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson prosecuting, Link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSJcXPCxlzI

From Our Favorite Dick's Own Pie-hole (part Five)

2009-01-29T04:38:00.000-08:00

Q So much of the debate on the war on terror,
(Well, not exactly debate – blather, rather; hand-wringing.)
particularly as Democrats
(Damned Dems…)
have encapsulated in Congress,
(to encapsulate: to epitomize, to express in brief summary. So WTF?)
is focused on the legality of the tactics.
(Legality – you say po-tay-to and I say ‘spud’.)
Could you talk a little bit behind the scenes
(Where you’re most comfortable – living on the ‘Dark Side’.)
of some of the discussions that might have focused on the morality and the ethics of the tactics,
(Not that you’d have even the most tenuous gasp of the concepts…)
and whether those things weighed into the discussions that went into --
(Oh, I’m getting lost in my own fractured syntax!)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: What kind -- which tactics?
(You better re-phrase that or I’ll have you head, you friggin’ mutt!)
Q Oh, anything from rendition to waterboarding to --
(Gawd, I hope he doesn’t snarl at me. I’ve heard he snarls!)
Q Sleep deprivation.
(Gulp!)
Q -- to deprivation, tactics that were used at Gitmo. Is there any -- I'm sure –
(Fake a weak chortle here.)
were there discussions that also focused just on American values
(Hay-rides, quilting parties, lemonade at the July Fourth picnic… We’re looking for a Norman Rockwell moment.)
and whether those can be preserved in the course of trying to protect the country from terror attacks?
(There, have we left you enough wiggle room to sufficiently dodge the question?)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, let me, before I respond to that,
(Since that’s why you’re paying me the honorarium.)
let me state a proposition.
(So as to side-track you and avoid actually giving an answer.)
It's very important to discriminate between different elements of -- or issues that are often at times conflated and all joined together and balled up.
(Like the following non-answer is obviously going to be.)
People take Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib
(with a double-dose of Pepto-Bismol)
and interrogation of high-value detainees
(a delightful euphemism; ‘high-value detainees’- sounds much better than prisoners)
and sort of throw that all together
(in a big naked goose-pile…)
and say, characterize it as torture policy.
(snort! Preposterous, what the simple-minded John and Jane Q Public come up with.)
You've got to, I think,
(I know it’ll be a strain for you two knuckle-draggers)
back off and recognize that something like Abu Ghraib was not policy.
(Even though there’s ample proof that it was policy, we’d prefer it wasn’t recognized as such.)
It was, in fact, uncovered and then exposed by the military.
(With the New York Times and 60 Minutes giving them a gentle assist.)
There were people involved in that activity who were not conducting themselves in accordance with the standards that we would have expected,
(The standards we expected were much lower and more brutal. Underwear on the head? Naked goose-piles!? Come on! That’s kid stuff. We were thinking more of bamboo-under-the-fingernails and electrodes-on-the-genitals - you know. School of the Americas techniques.)
and they've paid the price for it.
(And luckily – knock wood – those of us who made the executive decisions to flout international law haven’t.)
Guantanamo I believe has been a first-rate facility.
(As a symbol of the American iniquity and neo-conic depravity.)
It's one we absolutely needed and found essential.
(By ‘we’ of course I mean those in the Bush administration; it was essential for us to cover our asses for criminal activity.)
It's been primarily a military facility.
(Even you dorks probably know that. But did you know that it’s held in violation of treaty?)
If you're going to evaluate how it's functioned,
(And I strongly advise that you do NOT.)
the policy that we adhere to at Guantanamo basically is the U.S. Army Field Manual.
(Although most of what is done there is in direct violation of the Field Manual in regard to torture or detainment.)
With respect to high-value detainees and enhanced interrogation techniques,
(The euphemistic jargon is so vital to the proper functioning of propaganda. Don’t you think?)
totally separate proposition under the jurisdiction of the Central Intelligence Agency
(They had carte blanche with the blessing of John Yoo and Gonzo.)
and applied to only a few people who were individuals like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
(a few hundred or so)
the mastermind of 9/11,
(Keep repeating that. It takes away some of the P.R. sting from the horrific things we authorized done to him.)
who we believe possessed significant intelligence about the enemy,
(Whoever we say that is on any given day.)
about al Qaeda,
(Which means ‘network’ and the title of a CIA databank used in recruiting Islamic extremists to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.)
about their future plans, about how they were organized and trained and equipped, where they operated.
(Since we were- ahem - totally in the dark (wink-wink) about all of this even though, as mentioned, the CIA ran and funded the Mujahidins in the jihad against the Soviets which became the al Qaeda network – if you’ll pardon the redundancy.)
And after 9/11, we badly needed to acquire good intelligence on the enemy.
(Since we had no good intelligence in Washington DC. None that we wanted to pay any attention to, anyway.)
That's an important part of fighting a war.
(So I’m told.)
What we did with respect to al Qaeda high-value detainees, if I can put it in those terms,
(And since that’s the standard party line we’ve been using for years, don’t even think of denying me.)
I think there were a total of about 33 who were subjected to enhanced interrogation;
(A magical term, isn’t it: enhanced interrogation. A good quick round of ’20 Questions’ followed by tea and cucumber sandwiches.)
only three of those who were subjected to waterboarding -- Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and a third, al Nashiri. That's it, those three guys.
(It’s not like we did to thousands or millions. So, since it was only those three guys –and we all know what nasty dudes those guys were (take our word for it) - international law and the US Constitution outlawing torture can be waived under those conditions. Right? Ask John Yoo.)
Was it torture?
(Of course it was. Oh, sorry. That was meant to be rhetorical, wasn’t it.)
I don't believe it was torture.
(“And what a fool believes… no wise man has the power to reason away”.)
We spent a great deal of time and effort getting legal advice,
(To cover our asses…)
legal opinion out of the Office of Legal Counsel, which is where you go for those kinds of opinions,
(Otherwise we’d have called it something different like the Office of Obfuscation or the Department of Dissemblance.)
from the Department of Justice as to where the red lines were out there in terms of this you can do, this you can't do.
(That’s how we asked them to lay it out for the Frat-boy Brush-cutter – color coded. He still couldn’t follow it. )
The CIA handled itself, I think, very appropriately.
(They were doing what they do best after all – torture and undermining democratic process.)
They came to us in the administration, talked to me, talked to others in the administration,
(Of course, they talked with me first since I’d summoned them to my office. Addington was there along with those other knuckle-heads – they always reminded me of those little toy dogs in the back windows of cars, their heads bobbing up and down, up and down… very gratifying.)
about what they felt they needed to do in order to obtain the intelligence that we believe these people were in possession of.
(Since, as I said, we had none of our own in DC.)
I signed off on it;
(Gulp!)
others did, as well, too. I wasn't the ultimate authority, obviously.
(George W Bush.)
As the Vice President, I don't run anything.
(LOL!)
But I was in the loop.
(Hell, I WAS the loop.)
I thought that it was absolutely the right thing to do.
(Which goes to show I haven’t the foggiest notion anymore about what is right or wrong.)
I thought the legal opinions that were rendered were sound.
(Because we had lawyers write down what we wanted in legalese.)
I think the techniques were reasonable in terms of what they were asking to be able to do.
(Reasonable as far as criminal activity and in terms of what we demanded that the CIA do.)
And I think it produced the desired result.
(Although we got nothing as far as actionable intelligence as a result of our non-torture torture.)
I think it's directly responsible for the fact that we've been able to avoid or defeat further attacks against the homeland for seven and a half years.
(That and the fact that I’ve had interns continuously shredding newspapers in my office, lighting incense and ringing a little silver bell. Oh, and the monkey paw blessed by Alexander Haig that I wear under my shirt.)
And come to the question of morality and ethics, in my mind,
(Comes up blank…)
the foremost obligation we had from a moral or an ethical standpoint was to the oath of office we took when we were sworn in on January 20th of 2001,
(What was it again…?)
to protect and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
(Actually, it’s ‘protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic’ – not the neo-conic ideology.)
And that's what we've done.
More or less. Probably less than more.)
And I think it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to do everything we could in order to protect the nation against further attacks like what happened on 9/11.
(In hopes that we could somehow make up for the fact that we didn’t do diddley-squat – ethical, immoral or fattening – to stop those attacks in the first place despite multiple reports, memoranda and advisories warning us of imminent attack.)
We made the judgment, the President and I and others, that that wasn't going to happen again on our watch.
(Not again. Getting caught flat-footed with our pants down once was enough. Heh-heh.)
And I feel very good about what we did.
(And so do the stock-holders of Halliburton, etc)
I think it was the right thing to do.
(Whatever that means to you. It means shit to a tree.)
If I was faced with those circumstances again, I'd do exactly the same thing.
(Because I am that freaking stupid, insane or obstinate.)
To be continued...

Bush Used Domestic Spy Program On American Journalists

2009-01-22T05:43:00.000-08:00

Go to:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/vp/28781200#28781200
Former NSA analyst gives shocking testimony on Olbermann's show.

We Interrupt this Interview...

2009-01-20T09:40:00.000-08:00

...to bring an important message:
The Bush/Cheney era is over. The wanna-be king and his 'Richelieu' are gone. Long live the Republic!

The Annotated Cheney Interview (part 4)

2009-01-17T06:21:00.000-08:00

For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
December 22, 2008
The Annotated Interview Vice President Richard Cheney by Jon Ward and John Solomon, The Washington Times
Vice President's West Wing Office

Q Sort of along those lines,(see part three of this interview) you've been a long-time fiscal conservative.
(Except of course when you’ve thrown money by the tractor-trailer load at the conflict in Iraq and the ill-suited, woefully mismanaged Coalition Provisional Authority (CPI) or whatever corporation, industry or project would best be served by tax-cuts and federal subsidies. )
How do you feel,
(The quintessential wishy-washy no-brain TV interview soft-ball)
what do you think about the markedly larger size of the government that this administration is leaving behind
(a huge hulking behemoth of bureaucracy worthy of Orwell or Stalin)
-- the size of the deficit,
(Ballooned past all control, past all conception, spiraling past fiscal irresponsibility into a macro-economic insanity; a mind-numbing level of deficit spending whereby you squandered the vast surplus that was the Clintonian legacy – the legacy of what you would call ‘tax and spend liberals’ – and mortgaged the future of the USA to the People’s Republic of China.)
from the financial commitments that the government now has to a lot of private industries?
(Not that so much has changed except for the fact that the ‘bail-outs’ are a lot more visible than the SOP of gratuitous subsidies, tax breaks given on silver platters to the corporate sponsors of election campaigns.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, given your druthers,
(That’s a ‘home-spun’ word I learned from the Brush-clearer-in-chief. Makes me sound kind of loveable, don’t you think? Like Wilford Brimley as the Grand Inquisitor.)
you'd rather not have a growing government in terms of spending,
(Growing in terms of executive power, sure. That was the center-piece of the plan.)
or in terms of authority over the economy.
(Not legislative control but executive control. As St Ronnie said, “The trouble is the government.” And so, we’ve always striven to dismantle and undermine the government of the Republic whenever and wherever we can. )
But there are exceptions.
(And you must admit we’ve been exceptional.)
And the exceptions historically have been wars.
(Luckily. Like the Frat-boy-in-Chief quipped, "We hit the Trifecta.")
We've been faced since 9/11 with a war,
(Of our own making and design.)
more than one in the sense that you count Iraq and Afghanistan separately.
(Assuming that you two goof-offs can count that high. It’s all the same ball of wax to me; defense contracts and bonuses from Halliburton.)
Defending the nation against further attacks from al Qaeda has been a preeminent concern of ours,
(Since we really dropped the ball on in 2001.)
and we've spent a lot of money doing that:
(Papering our asses with your hard-earned dollars)
creating the Department of Homeland Security,
(Which Clinton had in the works already to thwart terrorist attacks - we were too busy dismantling regulatory agencies and passing tax cuts for the rich to bother with until after the Towers fell. Lucky for us it was on the shelf, waiting for us to take credit for it.)
enhancing the security of our shipping container business and the airlines,
(It all comes back to taking care of business – Big Business, that is.)
and all of the other things we've done that have made us a safer nation.
(I feel safer knowing that firms like Halliburton, Blackwater, Bechtel and so on will be safe to profit from unending war as a result of the Muslim world hating our guts.)
And then when you talk about what we've had to do in Afghanistan and Iraq
(Which I trust you will not do but in glowing terms and with patriotic platitudes.)
of the commitment of troops,
(We commit the troops, when they get killed or wounded, the Taliban and Al Qaeda’s to blame.)
the cost of those wars,
(In dollars and cents – not inhuman lives. That’s of secondary concern to us, at best.)
those have all added to the burden.
(The rich, white-man’s burden.)
But I think it's better to do that than it would be to have ignored those needs and requirements,
(Q.E.D.: eo ipso – whatever we did was the right thing to do because doing nothing would have been the wrong thing.)
and seen us not respond the way that the President and I believed we needed to respond to those basic fundamental threats to our nation.
(Say, the EPA and the FCC running amuck with stifling regulation. How can anybody make a buck when you have to worry about wet-lands preservation or public commons. But I digress…)
I think
(So therefore, it's true.)
what al Qaeda represents is a strategic threat of considerable significance.
(Which we have greatly enhanced by the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.)
What happened on 9/11
(Even you dim-wits probably remember the official version of what happened.)
was you had 19 guys armed with airline tickets and box cutters
(Which explains why we need new fighter jets, bombers, nuclear subs, bunker-busters, tactical nukes and missile defense systems. How else do you expect to stop fanatics with box-cutters but by invading two countries that had little or nothing to do with the attacks?)
come into the country,
(where the CIA lost their trail and the FBI ignored them)
destroy 16 acres of downtown Manhattan,
(Prime real estate – figure in insurance pay-offs and re-sale; what a wind-fall!)
do major damage to the headquarters of our military over here at the Pentagon,
(Of course, if it actually had been a 737 the damage would have been truly horrific. Donnie’s office might have had to be redecorated. That’s why we decided to use the weaponized drone. Oops. I think I let one slip.)
and kill about 3,000 people.
(Give or take. Since no bodies were ever found at the Pennsylvania crash site or from ‘plane’ that hit the Pentagon, it’s hard to say.)
and If they had been armed or equipped with a deadly biological agent or a nuclear weapon,
(Or a zombie-making machine or a doomsday device like in ‘Dr Strangelove’ - I love that movie.)
we'd have a much larger problem than we did.
(Duh… )
So I fully support the spending we did because I think it was essential.
(Because it wasn’t my money and it was essential to the industries I serve.)
And it obviously has, as a byproduct,
(A byproduct of incompetency, failures in judgment and a willful and arrogant disregard of human life and rule of law.)
the fact that it increases the deficit and the overall size of government,
(etc, etc… blah, blah blah. How many times have I got to repeat myself? We did what we had to do to ram through our authoritarian agenda. Let’s move on.)
but I think this is one of those occasions like World War II when that was appropriate.
(Except of course that WWII was an actual declared war (i.e a declaration of war was passed by the House and Senate) in response to an attack on US colonial territory by a sovereign nation for the sake of territorial conquest; entirely unlike the Al Qaeda attacks. Not to mention the fact that after the cessation of hostilities, the surviving leaders of those Fascist states which had invaded various countries in Europe, Africa and Asia were brought to trial and executed as war criminals. Let’s be sure not to mention that.)
(to be continued)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081222.html

Putting Words in Dick's Mouth - the annotated interview (part 3)

2009-01-12T00:41:00.000-08:00

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081222.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
December 22, 2008
The Annotated Interview of almost former Vice President Richard Cheney by Jon Ward and John Solomon, The Washington Times
Vice President's West Wing Office –
(the one with the man-sized safe)
3:20 P.M. EST
December 17, 2008

Q: As a former CEO,
(Of Halliburton, one of the corporations which has profited enormously from the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan through ‘no-bid, cost-plus’ contracts.)
as you look out at the auto industry,
(Just over there beyond the amber fields of grain.)
an iconic industry of America
(What’s good for General Motors is good for America.)
that is struggling, so difficult,
(Can I get an ‘Amen’?)
if you were going to wave a magic wand,
(Here’s we go with the Neo-Cons’ magic wand, again.)
what would you recommend?
(Let’s pretend you’re getting stock options and $1 million in consulting fees?)

What needs to be done to change that industry?
(Besides expanding federal subsidies and possibly hiring you as a consultant.)

And also, can you give us some sense of what the Bush administration might still be able to do?
(While you guys still have it in your power to screw it up even more than it is.
And… Please don’t bring up any of that tired old clap-trap pipe-dreaming about promoting alternative fuels programs and blah, blah, blah.)

Will the loans really occur before you leave office?
(It’s not that I’m gullible enough to think I’ll get a straight answer to a straight question but my editor suggested it and your office approved it so…)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I can't tell you at this stage precisely what we're going to do,
(Actually I wouldn’t tell you bozos the right time of day if I could help it.)
because the President hasn't decided yet.
(keeping that little white lie alive…)
We're working on it,
(when it doesn’t interfere with lunch.)
and we had a session just yesterday on it,
(While the Frat Boy was clearing brush or whatever…)
looking at the options and so forth.
(It’s come down to just what my ‘cut’ will be of the ‘loan’. I don’t work cheap, you know.)
In terms of looking at the industry generally, I think that obviously it's a very, very important part of the global economy.
(Very, very, very important in that I own stock in that industry.)
I believe that there are a number of companies out there,
(And they know who they are…)
some of them operate in the United States,
(Even though most of their plants are outside the US…)
who are profitable,
(Because of huge, bloated Pentagon contracts)
who are producing products people want to buy.
(People other than the kleptocrats in the Pentagon. Of course, now I’m referring to Japanese and German auto companies.)
And increasingly, we're seeing in places like China and India, and so forth,
(Where there are lax labor laws and no unions…)
a steady increase in the demand for the production of automobiles.
(by US-based manufacturers eliminating the American worker from the equation)
I had a guy in here yesterday from China
(He fit in my man-sized safe beautifully.)
who was talking about the fact that they've quickly reached the point where they'll soon be producing almost 10 million cars a year.
(at least that’s what I thought he said. He was yammering on in Chinese but he wrote down some numbers for me.)
Then it won't be that far down the road
(Get it? I made a pun. And they say I don’t have a sense of humor…)
when China will be producing 20 million units a year
(That’s only 100% increase in production. Should be easy for those godless, Commie slave-drivers.)
-- this contrasted with good years here, we've been doing about 16 million.
(If only we had more godless slaver-driver of our own, our economy would be right as rain. Makes me nostalgic for the days when we could call in the Army to do some good, old-fashioned union busting.)
And so I think there are, apparently, just looking at it from a distance and not being a expert by any means in the automobile industry,
(In other words, I don’t have any more of a friggin’ clue than you nincompoops do.)
about that the American elements of General Motors, Chrysler, and I suppose to a lesser extent Ford, have encountered significant difficulties,
(They are coming with their hands full of ‘gimme’ and their mouths full of ‘much obliged’.)
I think for a number of reasons.
(They make cars nobody wants to buy, for a starter.)
But I'm told they are profitable in many places around the world,
(But I have no idea where that might be.)
but not profitable in the United States.
(Go figure...)
And then I think you've got to analyze
(I know that analysis is way above you pay grade, but I’m speaking figuratively here.)
-- if you're going to try to solve that problem, you've got to analyze why that might be,
(Pretty clever, right? In order to solve a problem, you have to understand what the problem is. I’m pretty sure I figured that out myself.)
and see what changes need to be made in order for those U.S. companies to become economically viable.
(Since they are ‘very, very important part of the global economy’ and all that. Or on the other hand, forget the analysis part of it and just throw huge wads of money at them willy-nilly, and ignore the fact that the industry is lead by avaricious incompetents who have driven their companies into bankruptcy.)

And we
(meaning ‘I’)
-- the President,
(that pampered wanna-be Marlboro-man…)
as he's made clear,
(by reading from the notes I’ve written for him)
doesn't want to see any more economic disorder added to the current problems we've got out there
(Which are nearly entirely due to our party’s own rampant de-regulation of industry and under-funding of over-sight boards and commissions.)
of both the financial crisis and being on the downside of the recession.
(We’ve been floating the concept of there being an ‘upside’ to a recession which we can claim credit for. We’re trying to spin this so that no matter what Obama does, the melt-down is all the Democrats fault.)
So he's looking at all the options.
(By which I mean, he’s screwing off as a lame duck until it’s not our problem anymore.)

(to be continued…)

VPs Say the Darndest Things (part 2)

2009-01-10T02:26:00.000-08:00

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081222.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
December 22, 2008

The Annotated Interview of almost former Vice President (and soon to be convicted felon if there is a speck of justice in the world) Richard Cheney by Jon Ward and John Solomon, The Washington Times (well-known brown-nosers and sycophants.)
Vice President's West Wing Office –

3:20 P.M. EST
December 17, 2008

Q You've been described
(By us...)
and attributed to be (sic) one of the most powerful and influential Vice Presidents in history.
(Mind if I gush?)
How would you describe your influence, your power, and your contribution to this administration?
(And please do feel free to be as candid and forthright, as brutally honest in your assessment as you wish. You really, deep down know that you and the ‘Frat Brat’ screwed the figurative pooch. Right!?)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: In terms of whether or not I'm the most powerful and influential,
(I’m glad you asked that question… precisely as Addington wrote it…)
I'll let somebody else make those judgments.
(Someone well-paid.)
I think
(Something I’m very good at if I do say so myself. And I do…)
-- I do believe
(I do. I do. I do. I do believe in pardons. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do.)
that the vice presidency has been a consequential office, if I can put in those terms,
(And of course, I can; seeing as I got me a ‘consequential office’. And you young putzes aren’t about to contradict me for anything I say.)
in this administration.
(Mine.)

But that's, first and foremost, because that's what the President wanted.
(Ever since I told the little screw-off that’s precisely what he wanted if he harbored having even a snowflake’s chance in hell of getting and keeping the White House. And still have time to clear brush and play golf.)
He's the one who asked me to take the job.
(Right after he hired me to find him a running mate. I told him that I was my first choice and his only choice if he wanted to do any brush-clearing.)
He's also the one who decided
(He is the decider, after all.)
during the course of his search process eight years ago
(When I told him to hire me. See penultimate annotation above.)
that he wanted somebody who could be another member of the team,
(Team Arbusto; the ‘A’ team.)
who had a certain set of experiences
(…which had lead to anti-social behavior, a loss of moral compass, frequent psychotic episodes of paranoia, an authoritarian mind-set, delusions of grandeur, megalomaniacal tendencies, rapacious greed…)
and so forth, and could be an active participant in the process.
(…of ruining nearly every aspect of the United States; its economy, its environment, its reputation, its institutions, its government, its political position in the world, …)

I know the job of vice president has been terribly frustrating for a lot of people.
(Especially those who felt consigned to a traditional role or one who felt the Constitution a constraint on their ability to grab power.)
Jerry Ford once told me it was the -- the worst nine months of his life were the years he lived, the months he spent -- it seemed like years -- but the months he spent as Vice President.
(Or something like that. Jerry wasn’t much of a story-teller. You get the idea.)

I watched Nelson Rockefeller in the Ford administration
(Not his best role, in my estimation.)
- - he was never happy with the post.
(4 shows a week for three years. Matinee on Saturday. That close to the Oval Office. It broke him.)

And everybody is familiar with the history that it has not been a consequential office in the past.
(Right? Dan Quayle ring any bells for you dim-wits?)
I think that began to change, I think in particular, during the Carter years.
(Blaming it on the Democrats is a tried and true spin to put on anything, don’t you know.)
I didn't agree with much of what Jimmy Carter did,
(Duh… )
but I thought Mondale as Vice President was a good choice for him,
(He sure was easy for Big Ron to thump in the election, that’s for sure.)
and that the office began to have a more significant role in those days.
(How, for example? Better PR? More press conferences? Bigger desk?)
And I think that's gradually grown over time.
(Like a cyst.)
And I think, as I say,
(and I will, and I do, as I have in the past, and will have done in the future, when history looks back at what I thought, and, as I say, I said, time and again.)
I do believe
(I do. I do. I do. I do believe in pardons. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do.)
in this administration it's been a consequential post,
(More like a pillar than a post. A stanchion. A shaft, even.)
because that's what the President wanted to have happen,
(or at least so I told him every morning before the briefings.)
and he's been true to his word for eight years.
(Unless you count all that campaign guff about smaller government, personal privacy, lack of foreign entanglements, taking a more humble international role, lower taxes for the middle-class, other similar malarkey, he’s been true blue.)

(to be continued)

From Our Favorite Dick's Own Pie-hole

2009-01-07T08:16:00.000-08:00

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081222.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
December 22, 2008

The Annotated Interview of almost former Vice President (and soon to be convicted felon if there is a speck of justice in the world) Richard Cheney by Jon Ward and John Solomon, The Washington Times (well-known brown-nosers and sycophants.)

Vice President's West Wing Office –
(the one with the man-sized safe)

3:20 P.M. EST
December 17, 2008
Q: Sir, let me ask one first,
(that is after all why I’m paying to be here…)
literally talking about your own public service
(pardon if I fawn),
seven presidencies.
(Seven? No wonder things are so screwed up!)
You left one presidency before where the President afterwards, Gerald Ford, became much more popular than he was when he left office.
(Say what? Try writing these questions down first.)
And I'm kind of curious,
(I’m purported to be a journalist, after all!)
as you look at this presidency ending now and where you are in popularity,
(the crapper…)
what you think will happen
(Besides the huge ‘Thank Gawd They’re Gone’ parties world-wide)—
how history might look back at this presidency
(Yours)
and President Bush compared to where he is now?
(deep in the crapper, kind of like my ability to formulate a proper question.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I think there is a parallel in a sense with my experience during the Ford years in that President Ford made a decision that was extraordinarily unpopular at the time when he pardoned former President Nixon.
(But that ain’t nothing compared to Iraq, Afghanistan and the economic disaster we perpetrated, so forget parallels.)
He suffered from it,
(Awww…)
and he dropped to about 30 points in the polls in one week, as I recall.
(About twice what I’m at now.)
By the time of his passing a couple of years ago, opinion had totally turned on that.
(So, I’m really looking forward to when I kick the bucket; my popularity should surge like crazy.)
In fact most people by then, even many who had been very critical 30 years before, were in agreement that, in fact, it was a good decision;
(Just don’t ask me to name names cuz I made that up)
it was the right thing to do from the standpoint of the country.
(Not THIS country, but we’re hoping that it works again, if you know what I mean.)
I don't want to compare the pardon to what we've been doing.
(Gawd, knows it’s apples to road-apples, but the pardon sounds good right now.)
It's just the fact of Presidents making tough decisions and how they are perceived contemporaneously
(good word, right?)
versus what they look like 20 or 30 years down the road.
(Fat, old, bloated, wrinkled and smelling of urine.)
And I myself am personally persuaded
(by I, myself)
that this President
(whatshisname)
and this administration
(Mine!)
will look very good 20 or 30 years down the road,
(when it's really hit the fan and everything is commodified and owned by Halliburton)
in light of what we've been able to accomplish with respect to the global war on terror,
(I mean look how many more terrorists there are now! That’s an accomplishment.)
keeping the nation safe for the last seven and a half years against further attacks by al Qaeda,
(Too bad we missed that first one despite all the warnings but hey! Nobody bats 1.000, right?)
administering, I think, a very significant defeat to al Qaeda over the course of the last few years,
(and by defeat, I mean exponential growth and influence)
of liberating 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
(Not counting the dead. Death is a very liberating experience, I’m told.)
I just –
(farted)
I think the set of accomplishments there –
(meaning ‘absolute debacles that would shame anyone with a conscience or morals’.)
establishing democracies in both places with constitutions and free elections
(if by ‘democracy’, you mean puppet states with no choice at all.)
-- those are major, major kinds of changes in the course of history that I think this President deserves credit for.
(Or blame. Ranks right up there with Pol Pot and that Old Joe Stalin.)
And I think they'll be recognized as such in the future.
(And with luck, we’ll die before we’re brought before the International Court.)

(too be continued)

Keeping Terrorists Away

2008-12-27T09:53:00.000-08:00

Just read an article entitled ‘Two Dangerous Bush-Cheney Myths’. One is that ‘the Surge’ worked. The other is that torture – or something very much like it - is rationalized (justified?) by the fact that there have been no more attacks on the US since Bush II militarized the war on terror.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/122608.html

This strikes me as much the same rational as related in an old anecdote:

A man is observed shredding newspapers every day in Central Park. After witnessing weeks of this behavior, a passer-by finally asks, “Why are you shredding all that newspaper, day after day?”

The compulsive shredder replies matter-of-factly, “To keep the tigers away.”

To which the passer-by retorts, “There are no tigers in New York.”

The shredder winks and says conspiratorially, “Works pretty well, doesn’t it?”

This is the sort of insane pretzel logic Bush and Cheney are dishing out for us swallow.

I guess we're to assume that attacks on US service personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan are not to be considered in this most preposterous syllogism.

Prosecute these people and make them account for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis that have been murdered and the thousands of Americans who have died as a direct result of their insanity.

Prosecute Bush, Cheney and Co.

2008-12-24T04:12:00.000-08:00

I'm beginning to take this very personally.

First, at 18, I had the escalating Vietnam conflict to darken my youthful days.
Then Watergate, the Pentagon Papers and Elsberg break-ins to sour the political brew.

Then, Reagan and the Contras with Ollie North and Adm Poindexter cooking up schemes to derail the power of Congress and establish an imperial presidency with 'neat ideas' whereby they sell drugs and run guns to finance the murder of innocent people.

Next up, Bush I with his 'New World Order' and Gulf War v1.0 which didn't need to be fought but looked real good with the marketing groups and played well to the Bible Belt.

Now during the past 8 years, Bush the Lesser, Cheney the Snide and and their Machiavellian band have brought the economy to the brink of ruin, destroyed two Asian countries and is working on the third (Pakistan), brought about the death of hundreds of thousands of people as a result of two undeclared (and therefore illegal) wars which in turn has bankrupted the nation, enthusiastically engaged in torture and kidnapping (known euphemistically as 'enhanced interrogation and 'extraordinary rendition') undermined habeus corpus, the foundation of English Law, eviscerated the Constitution of the US twelve ways to Sunday, and brought shame and opprobrium upon the people of the United States.

If we don't bring these 'evil-doers' to justice, what is to deter the next round of megalomaniacs from breaking the law, degrading our Republic and moving further towards establishing a dictatorial regime in the place of democracy in the USA?

This is no time to let by-gones be by-gones. We must prosecute Bush, Cheney and Co for crimes against the people of the United States and Crimes against Humanity.

Prosecute them and hold them accountable. It's called justice.

http://www.democrats.com/john-dean-wants-prosecution-not-commission

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) Calls for Independent Counsel to Investigate Cheney and Rumsfeld for Violating Torture Laws

2008-12-23T08:11:00.000-08:00

Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler of New York has urged Attorney General Michael Mukasey to appoint an independent counsel to investigate Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other senior Bush administration officials for violations of the law relating to the torture of prisoners in US custody. Nadler is the chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/23/rep_jerrold_nadler_d_ny_calls

A Not-So-Modest To-Do List for Obama's First Term

2008-12-20T21:41:00.000-08:00

Here's a not-so-modest list of actions that should be taken by Obama in his first term in order to right the ship of state and return the United States to the path of a true democratic republic – of the people, by the people and for the people. This is by no means complete or comprehensive; nor are the items listed by priority or expediency.

1. End the illegal war in Iraq and remove all US personnel and contractors other than those necessary for manning and securing the US embassy at levels consistent with other embassies in the Middle-east.

2. End the illegal war in Afghanistan and remove all US personnel and contractors other than those necessary for manning and securing the US embassy at levels consistent with other embassies in the Western Asia.

3. Begin formal process for the providing war reparations to the people (not the governments) of Iraq and Afghanistan through NGOs. (e.g. Red Cross/Red Crescent, CARE, Doctors Without Borders, etc)

4. Arrange a series of formal meetings between the high-level US State Department officials and high-level Iranian officials.

5. Bring the US into full compliance with the IAEA and the non-proliferation treaty.

6. Fund and promote alternative energy sources, comprehensive energy and resource management policies and ‘Green’ product development.

7. Bring the US into reasonable accord with the international community regarding war, human rights, economic policy, etc and assume a temporary non-voting seat on the UN Security Council.

8. Withdraw unconditional support for State of Israel. France, the oldest ally of the United States does not have that permanent status. American foreign policy is NOT Israeli foreign policy and vice versa.

9. End the bloat at the Pentagon; keep our armed forces strong but keep them at home. (Homeland Security... get it?) Reduce the Pentagon budget by at least 50% over the next four years.

10. End the Federal Reserve's strangle hold on the economic lives of the US people. Make the Federal Reserve directly accountable to Congress by placing it within the Treasury Department. Limit each term of the Federal Reserve Board Chairman to 4 years with a limit of two consecutive terms.

11. Amend the fractional reserve system and return to the gold and silver standard.

12. Remove corporate entities from Constitutional protection as individuals. Corporate entities are NOT individuals any more than any organization (e.g. the Catholic Church, the Lions Club, the Republican Party, etc) is an individual but rather a formal association of individuals comprising a group. If an entity does not develop from a human fetus then the entity is not, CANNOT be a citizen and therefore is NOT entitled to the rights of citizenship.

13. Stop all of this blather about the Free Market as if it's Holy Writ. Regulation of industry, business enterprises and corporations are as necessary as regulation of government and therefore in a democratic society must be primarily for the benefit of the people.

14. Let failing commercial enterprises fail but provide workers a safety net. The bosses responsible for the failure of the enterprise are guaranteed ‘Golden Parachutes’ why shouldn’t the workers who toiled and gave their sweat, blood and life-force as wage-slaves be afforded the same guarantee?

15. Social services must come before service to commercial enterprises including the military-industrial complex (i.e. the Pentocracy).

16. Dismantle the Patriot Act brick by brick and restore the constitutional rights of citizens and residents.

17. Abrogate the Imperial presidency and restore the Constitutional balance of power.

18. End signing statements and restrict the power and number of presidential orders per term.

19. Declassify all documents related to the events of 9/11.

20. Declassify all documents related to the Torture Programs, Rendition and Black Sites.

21. Declassify all documents related to the illegal wire-taping of US citizens.

22. Repeal and renege on the order of amnesty to those companies which participated in any illegal wire-taping.

23. Establish a bi-partisan commission to re-investigate the 9/11 attacks.

24. Establish bi-partisan commissions to investigate the possible War Crimes committed by members of the Bush/Cheney administrations.

25. Establish bi-partisan commissions to investigate the possible crimes committed by members of the Bush/Cheney administrations against the Constitution and civic law.

26. Name independent prosecutors with full subpoena powers for each of the aforementioned commissions cited on this list.

27. Last but not least, repeal the National Security Act of 1947 and the subsequent mis-named security acts and dismantle the Security State for the sake of the republic, the people and the world.

Speaking of Bail-outs and Nautical Allusions...

2008-12-14T18:38:00.000-08:00

A Japanese company (Toyota) and an American company (Ford Motors) decided to have a canoe race on the Missouri River. Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance before the race.

On the big day, the Japanese won by a mile.

The Americans, very discouraged and depressed, decided to investigate the reason for the crushing defeat. A management team made up of senior management was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action.

Their conclusion was the Japanese had 8 people rowing and 1 person steering, while the American team had 7 people steering and 2 people rowing.

Feeling a deeper study was in order, American management hired a consulting company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion.

They advised, of course, that too many people were steering the boat, while not enough people were rowing.

Not sure of how to utilize that information, but wanting to prevent another loss to the Japanese, the rowing team's management structure was totally reorganized to 4 steering supervisors, 2 area steering superintendents and 1 assistant superintendent steering manager.

They also implemented a new performance system that would give the 2 people rowing the boat greater incentive to work harder. It was called the 'Rowing Team Quality First Program,' with meetings, dinners and free pens for the rowers. There was discussion of getting new paddles, canoes and other equipment, extra vacation days for practices and bonuses. The pension program was trimmed to 'equal the competition' and some of the resultant savings were channeled into morale-boosting programs and teamwork posters.

The next year the Japanese won by two miles.

Humiliated, the American management laid off one rower, halted development of a new canoe, sold all the paddles, and canceled all capital investments for new equipment. The money saved was distributed to the Senior Executives as bonuses.

The next year, try as he might, the lone designated rower was unable to even finish the race (having no paddles,) so he was laid off for unacceptable performance, all canoe equipment was sold and the next year's racing team was out-sourced to India.

Sadly, the End.

Here's something else to think about: Ford has spent the last thirty years moving all its factories out of the US, claiming they can't make money paying American wages.

TOYOTA has spent the last thirty years building more than a dozen plants inside the US. The last quarter's results:

TOYOTA makes 4 billion in profits while Ford racked up 9 billion in losses.

Ford folks are still scratching their heads, and collecting bonuses...

IF THIS WEREN'T SO TRUE IT MIGHT BE FUNNY

Thanks to David Chard of www.deadhorses.org

Bail-outs and other nautical allusions

2008-12-13T01:01:00.000-08:00

All this talk about 'bail-outs' is begging the real issue.
Bail-outs are a total waste of reserves if the hole in the boat is not being repaired. What is being done to right the ship of state and the correct the course of the economy?
The citizens of the US are simply expected to float billions in loans to the Big 3 and the Wall Street scoundrels - billions which are not in the Treasury - which are never meant to be paid back and for which no account will be demanded.
If hope for our economy is based on the magnanimity, honesty and fair-mindedness of corporate leaders, we are sunk. It would be better to scuttle this ship and let the rats drown.

Phun Presidential Phacts: not-so-trivial trivia

2008-10-27T01:40:00.000-07:00

Here's a little brain-teaser the answer to which will make any Liberal or Progressive suffer gastro-intestinitis and probably make many Libertarians and old-school Conservatives blanch.

On Hardball - in case you missed it - Chris Matthews brought forth this little bar-bet fodder:

"When was the last time the Republican party won the White House without Nixon or a Bush on the ticket?"

For the answer go to:

http://votersthink.org/?p=664

Get your Pepto ready...

Is there anyone in this country that hasn't yet gotten the idea that the USA is very flawed as an example of a truly Democratic Republic? This nation is governed by the business elite through their appointed lackeys - and Bush I & II and Nixon are only three on a long list of Oval Office stooges.

Should Obama win (knock wood), he will be castigated by the Righteous Right for simply out-spending poor Sen McCain in a further attempt to undermine the legitimacy of his presidency.

(They will of course fail to mention that Bush II set the bar that Obama bested because that would negate their point and rob Bill-O and Rash Limberger of an opportunity to riff and rant)

The Right will be (gulp) right. It takes a bloody fortune to gain occupancy of the White House. Is another metric necessary to convince Americans that we are governed by the elite? You have got to be super rich or make lots of back-room deals with those who have the money to burn because they have even vaster amounts to make should their candidate win.

Is it any wonder that social programs get such short shrift?

How IS the Weather underground, anyway?

2008-10-25T07:50:00.000-07:00

I just watched the documentary 'The Weather Underground' - good stuff. That time was part of my political awakening - anti-Nixon/anti-war leaflet passing, anti-war rallies, the 'good old days' of political activism.

I distinctly remember attending a rally in Lincoln Park in Chicago when I was bewildered and taken aback by the change in temperment of the whole 'Movement' (as it was called then) when the 'peace sign' turned into the Power to the People salute.

What disturbed me then and still disturbs me today is that the sign of peace was replaced by the clenched fist and a call for violent action.

Back to our story...

The Weathermen split from the already radicalized Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to be even more radical and preach the violent over-throw of the US government. They started vandalizing and aggressively challenging and provoking violent police reaction, the Days of Rage and other bad moves.

Amateur, wanna-be revolutionaries going up against the police and the National Guard in a head-to-billy-club match-up? What were they thinking...?

What I distinctly remember is that later, it was revealed that FBI agents had infiltrated the SDS and the Weather faction and had actually promoted and instigated the radical change from peaceful to violent action. The FBI went so far as to supply explosives and other stuff from the revolutionary starter-set. (This is well-documented, so before I get challenged on this, I ask that you do your own research. Thanks)

No excuses for the actions of the Weathermen but when Palin and McCain start bringing up domestic terrorist-has-beens, someone in the media and the public should make comment that the FBI (and probably the CIA) were actively working with the Bill Ayers and company as co-conspirators and terrorists during the Weather faction's most violent days.

Hope is a man called 'Ralph'

2008-10-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

If Obama can avoid the stumble at the finish-line - a Dem tradition - he should name Ralph Nader to his Cabinet.
For an entertaining and informative video, go to
http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=KR-V6bl41zU

Ralph gabs with the folks at Google. Level-headed, clear-eyed observations of the American political scene.