The World’s Least Powerful Man – The Obama Puppet

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

It didn’t take the Israel Lobby very long to bring President Obama to heel regarding his prohibition against further illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Obama discovered that a mere American president is powerless when confronted by the Israel Lobby and that the United States simply is not allowed a Middle East policy separate from Israel’s.

Obama also found out that he cannot change anything else either, if he ever intended to do so.

The military/security lobby has war and a domestic police state on its agenda, and a mere American president can’t do anything about it.

President Obama can order the Guantanamo torture chamber closed and kidnapping and rendition and torture to be halted, but no one carries out the order.

Essentially, Obama is irrelevant.

President Obama can promise that he is going to bring the troops home, and the military lobby says, “No, you are going to send them to Afghanistan, and in the meantime start a war in Pakistan and maneuver Iran into a position that will provide an excuse for a war there, too. Wars are too profitable for us to let you stop them.”

And the mere president has to say, “Yes, Sir!”

Obama can promise health care to 50 million uninsured Americans, but he can’t override the veto of the war lobby and the insurance lobby. The war lobby says its war profits are more important than health care and that the country can’t afford both the “war on terror” and “socialized medicine.”

The insurance lobby says health care has to be provided by private health insurance; otherwise, we can’t afford it.

The war and insurance lobbies rattled their campaign contribution pocketbooks and quickly convinced Congress and the White House that the real purpose of the health care bill is to save money by cutting Medicare and Medicaid benefits, thereby “getting entitlements under control.”

Continue reading: COUNTER PUNCH

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. His new book, How the Economy was Lost, will be published in January by AK Press / CounterPunch. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts[a]yahoo[dot]com

Now Pakistan

By LIAQUAT ALI KHAN

A conspiratorial view of the world is frequently inaccurate, exposing more the paranoia of the view rather than the reality of the world. The sequential destruction of Muslim nations — Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, (and Iran is on the list) — may or may not be a conspiracy hatched in Washington D.C., but it is becoming an international reality.  It is no secret that the United States and Europe, with varying degree of mutual cooperation and some make-believe internal discord, superintend the sequential destruction of Muslim nations. This War of Sequential Destruction (WSD), despite Nobel-Laureate Barack Obama’s denials, refuses to go away.

The WSD is multi-frontal. It crosshairs Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Bashir,  Ahmadinejad, Sunni, Shia, Wahabi, Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan. Many Western policymakers rarely see Muslim nations, including allies, with any inherent respect.  Vice President Dick Cheney described the Muslim world as “brute and nasty.” Obama advisers, though more guarded in their word choices, see Muslim nations no differently. The idea that Islam is inherently violent, openly expressed during the Bush administration, continues to animate foreign policy. The White House holds a new President but Congressional leadership and Washington policymakers are more or less the same. Anti-Islamic policies of warfare and destabilization are intact.

Therefore, the WSD will continue and gather momentum. The picture is not pretty. Palestinians are penned in misery and their territorial cage is constantly shrinking to meet the “natural growth” of vociferous settlers. Oil-rich Iraq is under American occupation and its communities have been torn apart with irreversible harm. Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations in the world, is placed under the boots of Western armies. Thousands of Afghans have been murdered, their houses bombed, their villages devastated. The International Criminal Court headquartered in Holland has indicted the first sitting head of the state, the Muslim President of Sudan. The United States and Europe, themselves armed with thousands of nuclear heads, are strategizing to punish Iran for asserting a treaty-based right to produce nuclear energy, leaving open the option of attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities.

After razing Iraq and Afghanistan, the WSD has now turned to ravage an ally, Muslim Pakistan. Pakistan is a nation that the British, in 1947, carved out of India and that India, in 1971, broke into two, liberating Bangladesh from the murderous clutch of the Pakistani military. Over the past sixty-two years, Pakistan’s military and civilian rulers, one after the other, and without exception, have turned to America for military training, weapons, money, and strategic instructions.  Eager to send their sons and daughters to Western cities for education and employment, Pakistani politicians, generals, and bureaucrats all look for ways, and create the ways, to oblige Western capitals, particularly Washington D.C.  Partly for personal interests and partly out of faulty readings of geopolitical situations, Pakistani rulers, like most rulers in Muslim nations, frequently compromise national sovereignty and public welfare.

The Pakistani orientation for self-destruction serves American interests. Facing a failing campaign in Afghanistan, Obama advisers decided to expand the war into Waziristan and other parts of Pakistan.  The United States desperately solicited the Pakistani military to join the Afghan war. Pakistani rulers, this time a democratically elected government, listened to the American call. They first permitted the CIA to fly drones armed with missiles, which killed a few militants but hundreds of civilians in the tribal areas. The United States later urged Pakistan to invade Swat to kill militants. Pakistan did. Millions of civilians were made homeless.

Source// COUNTERPUNCH

The assumptions most Americans hold about Iran and its policies are wrong

Thursday is a fateful day for the world, as the U.S., other members of the United Nations Security Council, and Germany meet in Geneva with Iran in a bid to resolve outstanding issues. Although Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had earlier attempted to put the nuclear issue off the bargaining table, this rhetorical flourish was a mere opening gambit and nuclear issues will certainly dominate the talks. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, these talks are just beginning and there are highly unlikely to be any breakthroughs for a very long time. Diplomacy is a marathon, not a sprint.

But on this occasion, I thought I’d take the opportunity to list some things that people tend to think they know about Iran, but for which the evidence is shaky.

Belief: Iran is aggressive and has threatened to attack Israel, its neighbors or the U.S.

Reality: Iran has not launched an aggressive war modern history (unlike the U.S. or Israel), and its leaders have a doctrine of “no first strike.” This is true of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as of Revolutionary Guards commanders.

Belief: Iran is a militarized society bristling with dangerous weapons and a growing threat to world peace.

Reality: Iran’s military budget is a little over $6 billion annually. Sweden, Singapore and Greece all have larger military budgets. Moreover, Iran is a country of 70 million, so that its per capita spending on defense is tiny compared to these others, since they are much smaller countries with regard to population. Iran spends less per capita on its military than any other country in the Persian Gulf region with the exception of the United Arab Emirates.

Belief: Iran has threatened to attack Israel militarily and to “wipe it off the map.”

Reality: No Iranian leader in the executive has threatened an aggressive act of war on Israel, since this would contradict the doctrine of ‘no first strike’ to which the country has adhered. The Iranian president has explicitly said that Iran is not a threat to any country, including Israel.

Continue reading: SALON

CNN ad responds to Fox ad’s false claim: “Fox News: distorting, not reporting”

Since their election disaster, the right has used new media to gather strength, culminating in last weekend’s huge protest

Erik Telford remembers all too vividly the dark cloud hanging over him on 5 November 2008, the day after Barack Obama was elected president. For the internet strategist at the rightwing campaign group Americans for Prosperity, election night was a double disaster. Not only had Obama won the votes, he had outwitted his Republican opponents in his use of new media tricks such as email recruiting and social networking.

“The left was far ahead of us. The efforts that Obama put into internet campaigning and what he accomplished were extraordinary,” Telford says.

That cloud hung over the conservative movement for many weeks. A sense of crisis set in, he recalls, with bloggers, strategists and Republican politicians scrambling in different directions.

“There was a real lack of leadership, a lot of confusion.”

But then, almost imperceptibly, something started to happen. Telford noticed Google groups popping up, listserves on which people would send angry emails back and forth. The anger was stimulated by Obama’s $800bn stimulus package that was introduced five days into his presidency.

With very little leadership, the Google groups began to co-ordinate their response. People took on the onerous job of poring over the bill’s hundreds of pages of small print in search of wasteful spending, following the Wikipedia model of crowd-sourcing.

They began to uncover items that looked suspicious or ridiculous: electric golf carts, snow machines, a crime museum in Las Vegas. They passed the examples on to mainstream media outlets, notably the new face of the right, snake-tongued Glenn Beck of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel, who used it as ammunition to attack the young administration. The anger grew. When Americans for Prosperity put up its own petition against the bill on its website, it had 500,000 signatures within days.

“It was a huge wake-up call to all of us,” Telford says. “On the right, people had known new media was important but they were still hesitant about it. After the stimulus experience, no one was left in any doubt about its power.”

Continue reading: THE GUARDIAN

In a minimally rational world, this extraordinary passage, from the new book by Scott McClellan, would forever slay the single most ludicrous myth in our political culture: The “Liberal Media”:

If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. . . . In this case, the “liberal media” didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.

Just consider how remarkable that is. George Bush’s own Press Secretary criticizes the American media for being “too deferential” to the Government. He lays the blame for Bush’s ability to propagandize the nation on the media’s uncritical dissemination of the Republican administration’s falsehoods. And most notably of all, McClellan actually uses cynical scare quotes when invoking the phrase which, in conventional political discourse, is deemed the most unassailable truth of all: The Liberal Media.

How much longer can this preposterous myth be sustained when even the White House Spokesman not only mocks the phrase but derides the media for being “too deferential” to the right-wing Government “in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during [his] years in Washington”? If one were to set about with the goal of debunking the “Liberal Media” myth — as Eric Alterman specifically did four years ago and other media critics have more generally done before that — one couldn’t dream up evidence more conclusive than McClellan’s admissions.

Blindingly conclusive evidence which would — for any rational person — forever negate the “Liberal Media” myth has been piling up for years. The extraordinary (though woefully incomplete) 2004 mea culpa from The New York Times acknowledged that not just Judy Miller, but the paper as a whole, re-printed pro-war government claims that were “allowed to stand unchallenged.” The Washington Post’s own media critic, Howard Kurtz, documented that anti-war views were systematically buried at that paper. The NYT recently exposed that network and cable news shows for years continuously allowed Pentagon-controlled operatives to masquerade as “independent analysts” spouting the pro-government line with virtually no challenge. And the media’s pathological fixation on the Clinton sex scandals — which led to his impeachment — stood in stark contrast to the widespread indifference among the citizenry.

Beyond all that, are there any reporters left who deny that the campaign-covering media in 2000 was gushingly enamored of George Bush and oozing with contempt for Al Gore? Identically, their intense affection for John McCain is something they openly proclaim; as they shamelessly acknowledge, they’re his “base.” And while some journalists undoubtedly harbor admiration for Barack Obama, the non-stop coverage of one anti-Obama narrative after the next — Jeremiah Wright, lapel pins, patriotism “questions,” “Bittergate,” “problems” with Jewish and white voters — simply has no parallel in any coverage of McCain.

(Continue reading: Glen Greenwald-Salon.com)

I’ve been watching the steady decline of journalism since the Internet began replacing print and television as the main provider of news, with a seething disgust.

Today’s CNN top story put me over the edge.

Here’s the title and article summary for those of you without images in their feed readers:

But if you read the actual article you see not a story about a 6-year-old being raped, but the following:

This bait-and-switch is so misrepresentative as to be grotesque. The story changes from “Humanitarian workers pay teenagers for sex” to the more sensationalist “6-year-olds forced into sex for food.”

The biggest problem with news being disseminated online is that there is no geographic isolation (as is the case with both print and tv), which means that every local news network is in competition with every other news site on the planet. Ratings are driven by attracting as large an audience as possible… and most people care more about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s married life than how many people vanished from a Darfur town this week (hint: all 30,000).

(Continue reading: Aviary)

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has written an unusual open letter to all those in uniform, warning them to stay out of politics as the nation approaches a presidential election in which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be a central, and certainly divisive, issue.

“The U.S. military must remain apolitical at all times and in all ways,” wrote the chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, the nation’s highest-ranking officer. “It is and must always be a neutral instrument of the state, no matter which party holds sway.”

Admiral Mullen’s essay appears in the coming issue of Joint Force Quarterly, an official military journal that is distributed widely among the officer corps.

The essay is the first Admiral Mullen has written for the journal as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and veteran officers said they could not remember when a similar “all-hands” letter had been issued to remind military personnel to remain outside, if not above, contentious political debate.

The essay can be seen as a reflection of the deep concern among senior officers that the military, which is paying the highest price in carrying out national security policy, may be drawn into politicking this year.

The war in Iraq has already exceeded the length of World War II and is the nation’s longest conflict fought with an all-volunteer military since the Revolutionary War.

In particular, members of the Joint Chiefs have expressed worries this election year about the influence of retired officers who advise political campaigns, who have publicly called for a change in policy or who serve as television commentators on the war.

Among the most outspoken were those who joined the so-called generals’ revolt in 2006 demanding the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, as well as former officers who have written books attacking the Bush administration’s planning for and execution of the war in Iraq.

(Continue reading: New  York Times)

CBS Evening News medical correspondent Dr. Jonathan LaPook calls out the New York Post today on the Couric & Co. blog on CBSNews.com, for their front page headline yesterday regarding Sen. Ted Kennedy.

“As a physician, I was deeply offended,” he writes. “Even if they don’t care about the feelings of the senator, his family, his friends, or any of the rest of us, there’s no reporting in the article to justify the headline.”

LaPook is currently fronting the series, “The War on Cancer: Where We Stand,” during the Evening News.

“If a patient’s illness turns right when I’ve predicted left, I’m always reminded of what I was taught in medical school over thirty years ago: ‘maybe your patient’s disease didn’t read the textbook,’” writes LaPook. “Now, I need to add, ‘or The New York Post.’”

(Continue reading: TVNewser)

On the fifth anniversary of George W. Bush’s infamous stroll across the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, The New York Times asked a group of “experts” how they would accomplish the mission in Iraq. Unfortunately, the newspaper turned to some of the same geniuses who thought the war was a good idea in the first place.

(Continue reading: Truthdig)

Both considered ‘bona fide newscasts’

It might come as news that talking about gossip or God on television qualifies as news.

The Federal Communications Commission has ruled as such in the cases of Fox’s “TMZ” and the Christian Broadcast Network’s “The 700 Club,” declaring Friday that each show meets the test for “a bona fide newscast” and therefore would not trigger political equal-time requirements.

Those requirements hold that “if a licensee allows a legally qualified candidate for public office to use a broadcast station, it must afford equal opportunities to other such candidates for that office,” according to FCC regs.

Congress defined “bona fide newscast” as one that holds “genuine news value” and is not intended to boost or aid any particular political candidate.

Celebrity ambulance-chaser “TMZ” argued that it contained genuine news value similar to that of “Entertainment Tonight,” which received bona fide newscast status in 1988.

The FCC also considers whether a program “reports news of some area of current events, in a manner similar to more traditional newscasts,” according to the agency. CBN argued “The 700 Club” does precisely that.

In both cases the commission agreed.

Ultimately, the beneficiaries of the FCC ruling are the broadcast stations and channels that carry the programs, since it is the stations (licensees) to which the equal-time requirements apply.

(Source: Variety)

During an appearance on Fox News Sunday this morning, Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean said that Fox’s news coverage has at times been “shockingly biased, and I think that’s wrong and I just say so right up front.” Dean also said he agreed with the netroots campaign to boycott the Democratic debates on the network.

Host Chris Wallace tried to get Dean to bash MoveOn and Daily Kos, saying they were “using words about you guys showing up here as weak, idiotic, stupid. How do you respond to the left wing?”

(Continue reading: Huffington Post)

Is TV censorship in Kabul really a sign of ‘re-Talibanization’?

online.wsj.com

The Wall Street Journal’s Managing Editor Marcus Brauchli is said to be announcing his departure Tuesday after 24 years at the paper—an unexpected resignation that media-watchers are attributing to conflict over new owner Rupert Murdoch’s future plans for the Journal.

Time via Gawker:Brauchli (pronounced Brock-lee) started at Dow Jones as a copyreader in 1984 and rose through the ranks from foreign correspondent to global news editor, overseeing the paper’s successful Asian and European redesigns in 2005. He was named to the paper’s top job almost exactly a year ago, replacing Paul Steiger, who had held the job since 1991. Brauchli received a standing ovation in the newsroom when his appointment was announced and was viewed as someone who would safeguard the paper’s credibility in the face of Rupert Murdoch’s ultimately successful attempt to purchase Dow Jones.

(Continue Reading: Truthdig-Gawker-Time)