The Obama Puppet

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

Rep. DeFazio: Fire “Timmy” Geithner + Larry Summers

Rep. Peter DeFazio called for the firing of President Barack Obama’s top two economic aides on Wednesday for pursuing a recovery plan skewed too heavily towards Wall Street’s favor.

The Oregon Democrat told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz that he was dismayed with the administration’s lack of focus on job creation and insisted it was time to dismiss both White House economic adviser Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary “Timmy Geithner.”

“We think it is time, maybe, that we turn our focus to Main Street — we reclaim some of the unspent [TARP] funds, we reclaim some of the funds that are being paid back, which will not be paid back in full, and we use it to put people back to work. Rebuilding America’s infrastructure is a tried and true way to put people back to work,” said DeFazio.

“Unfortunately, the President has an adviser from Wall Street, Larry Summers, and a Treasury Secretary from Wall Street, Timmy Geithner, who don’t like that idea,” he added. “They want to keep the TARP money either to continue to bail out Wall Street…or to pay down the deficit. That’s absurd.”

Asked specifically whether Geithner should stay in his job, DeFazio replied: “No.

“Especially if you look back at the AIG scandal,” he added, “and Goldman and others who got their bets paid off in full…with taxpayer money through AIG. We channeled the money through them. Geithner would not answer my question when I said, ‘Were those naked credit default swaps by Goldman or were they a counter-party?’ He would not answer that question.”

DeFazio said that among he and others in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, there was a growing consensus that Geithner needed to be removed. He added that some lawmakers were “considering questions regarding him and other economic advisers” — though a petition calling for the Treasury Secretary’s removal had not been drafted, he said.

“[Obama] is being failed by his economic team,” DeFazio concluded. “We may have to sacrifice just two more jobs to get millions back for Americans.”

Continue reading: HUFFINGTON POST

Maddow Puts ACORN Scandal In Perspective

Rep. Alan Grayson: “Has the Federal Reserve Ever Tried to Manipulate the Stock Market”

Seven Former CIA Directors Want To Bury The Truth

Last week, seven former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, who made their own contributions to the CIA’s low esteem over the past 35 years, asked President Barack Obama to make sure there is no criminal investigation of the crimes associated with the Agency’s detentions and interrogations policies over the past eight years.

Their letter to the president is particularly self-serving for three of the directors (Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, and George Tenet), who would presumably be the subject of any investigation, and simply self-aggrandizing for the others (John Deutch, James Woolsey, William Webster, and James Schlesinger), whose stewardship of the CIA since the early 1970s has contributed to the Agency’s loss of influence and credibility.

The key to managing a complex organization such as the CIA is based on the integrity and competence of the director and his senior management. These traits were certainly lacking during the two decades these “magnificent seven” were at the helm.

The letter itself represents a stunning display of irrelevance and wrong-headedness. The former directors argue, for example, that any reopened investigation would damage the intelligence community’s ability to obtain cooperation of foreign intelligence agencies.

In fact, the opposite is the case. Foreign intelligence agencies have been holding back their liaison activities and their cooperation with the CIA because of the crimes associated with secret prisons, torture and abuse, and extraordinary renditions. It is quite unbelievable that CIA leaders decided to compromise the governments and intelligence services of the European community by locating secret prisons and using logistical facilities within their borders. It is very unlikely that any member of the European Union will cooperate with such CIA activities in the future.

The seven directors argue predictably that career prosecutors have already investigated the relevant cases where “Agency officers appeared to have acted beyond their existing legal authorities,” but with the exception of a prosecution of a CIA contractor there was a determination that prosecutions were not warranted. They do not mention that a political appointee in the Bush administration, Paul McNulty, was responsible for these decisions and they do not refer to the unconscionable politicization of the Bush administration’s Justice Department.

Continue reading: THE PUBLIC RECORD

Republicans steal Barack Obama’s internet campaigning tricks

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

Keith Olbermann Special Comment: Rep Joe Wilson – You’re Wrong!

Keith Olbermann Special Comment: Republican South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson – You’re Wrong! – 09/10/09

Kucinich Responds To Obama’s Address To Congress

Correspondent Jack Rice speaks with Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) following President Obamas address to Congress. Distributed by Tubemogul.

After Obama

by David Michael Green

Eight months into it, it now seems pretty clear that the Obama administration is finished.

There were some of us — indeed, many of us, myself included — who thought there was a possibility that Barack Obama might seize this moment of American crisis, twinned with the complete failure for all to see of the regressive agenda, to become the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt.

Many think that was a naïve position from the get-go.  I disagree.  Not only do I believe that it was a legitimate possibility, I would argue that it was the logical choice even just from the narrow perspective of Obama’s personal fortunes.  The president is every day committing political suicide by a thousand cuts because he chose not to take that track.

That’s certainly his prerogative, and at this point I wish him all the worst of luck in whatever comes next.  Since I never assumed he would be a progressive once elected, any bitterness that I feel is not rooted in his failure to become the new FDR.  However, I am irate that, in domain after domain, President Obama has become the personification of the very Bush administration policies that Candidate Obama so roundly criticized.  And I feel deep hostility toward him about the betrayal of legions of voters — especially the young — who believed his message of hope and thought they were getting a president on their side, not Wall Street’s.

More on that in another column.  Right now, the question is what comes next?  The Obama presidency is probably already toast, though of course anything can happen in three or seven years.  But he is on a crash course for a major clock cleaning and, what’s worse, he doesn’t seem to have it remotely within him to seize history by the horns and steer that bull in his preferred direction.  Indeed, near as I can tell, he doesn’t even have a preferred direction.

Obama was complete fool if he ever believed for a moment that his campfire kumbaya act was going to bring the right along behind him.  Even s’mores wouldn’t have helped.  These foaming-at-the-mouth lunatics have completely lost all sense and proportion, and were bound to viscerally hate any president left of Cheney, let alone some black guy in their white house.  Meanwhile, centrist voters in this country seem pretty much only to care about taxes and spending, and so he’s lost them, too, without the slightest rhetorical fight in his own defense.  And he’s blown off a solid progressive base by spitting in their eyes at every imaginable opportunity, beginning with the formation of his cabinet, ranging through every policy decision from civil rights to civil liberties to foreign policy to healthcare, and culminating with his choice not to even mobilize his email database in support of his policies.

So if he’s lost the left, right and center, just who does he think is going to be clamoring to give him a second term three years from now, especially if the economy remains lousy for most people in the country, as it’s likely to do regardless of GDP or Dow Jones growth?

There is the possibility that Obama could change course significantly, just as Bill Clinton did in 1995, following the mid-term election in which his most astute political stewardship managed to turn both houses of Congress over to the Republican Party.  But Clinton turned to the right and became just a less snarly version of the Republicans, while Obama is already there.  I don’t really think he could conceivably turn further rightward at this point, and I don’t think he has anywhere near the guts to turn to the left and do what he should have done in the first place.

What all this suggests to me is that Obama and his party will manage by 2012 to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and return the GOP — and probably an even nastier version of it than the Bush-Cheney junta, at that — to power.  It suggests that the Democrats, who were riding high six months ago over an all but destroyed Republican Party, will be switching places with them within three years time, if not sooner — and all because of their own cowardice, corruption and ineptitude.  This outcome is hardly inevitable, but it is fast approaching. Looking out over the horizon, I see five key factors most likely to effect the health and longevity of the Obama administration, and not one of them looks positive.

Continue reading: COMMON DREAMS

Probe in to C.I.A. torture

“President Obama banned torture but officials say terrorist interrogation techniques prevented attacks, Bob Orr reports. Analyst Dan Bartlett spoke on the possibility of a criminal prosecution.”

0:42 – A C.I.A. contractor beat a prisoner with a heavy flash light and that prisoner died in custody.

…Since when do we call murder a “harsh tactic”? and the point that some (i.e. Dick Cheney) try to push down our throats that these “harsh tactics” saved lives is just plain silly and really belongs only on the 24. It’s silly for two reasons; we are Americans and do not torture, well at least not until Bush II. As a global power in this unipolar world we set the standard for the rest of the world–and what type of standard is this anyways. Secondly, if one were tortured while under investigation it is only logical to satisfy the your interrogators by answering with whatever they wanted to hear as to end the torture process. Eventually everyone will break if they are tortured for an extended period of time (like Khalid Sheik Mohammad being waterboarded 183 times), by break I don’t mean they will necessarily give actual, true insight into their activities. Indeed, KSM later boasted that he wasted our time/resources by giving false information and therefor sending agents after empty events.

Tom Ridge: I Was Pressured To Raise Terror Alert To Help

In a new book, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge reveals new details on politicization under President Bush, reports US News & World Report’s Paul Bedard. Among other things, Ridge admits that he was pressured to raise the terror alert to help Bush win re-election in 2004.

HUFFINGTON POST

In 1994 Bill Kristol pitched a plan to defeat health care reform that led to 14 years of Conservative Rule in this country. The strategy he proposed: Unrelenting, condescending stupidity.

Project for a Republican Future

December 2, 1993

MEMORANDUM TO: REPUBLICAN LEADERS
FROM: WILLIAM KRISTOL
SUBJECT: Defeating President Clinton’s Health Care Proposal

The Mega-Pentagon: A Bush-Enabled Monster We Can’t Stop

The Pentagon has developed a taste for unrivaled power and unequaled access to the treasury that won’t be easily undone by future administrations.

A full-fledged cottage industry is already focused on those who eagerly await the end of the Bush administration, offering calendars, magnets, and t-shirts for sale as well as counters and graphics to download onto blogs and websites. But when the countdown ends and George W. Bush vacates the Oval Office, he will leave a legacy to contend with. Certainly, he wills to his successor a world marred by war and battered by deprivation, but perhaps his most enduring legacy is now deeply embedded in Washington-area politics — a Pentagon metastasized almost beyond recognition.

The Pentagon’s massive bulk-up these last seven years will not be easily unbuilt, no matter who dons the presidential mantle on January 19, 2009. “The Pentagon” is now so much more than a five-sided building across the Potomac from Washington or even the seat of the Department of Defense. In many ways, it defies description or labeling.

Who, today, even remembers the debate at the end of the Cold War aboutå what role U.S. military power should play in a “unipolar” world? Was U.S. supremacy so well established, pundits were then asking, that Washington could rely on softer economic and cultural power, with military power no more than a backup (and a domestic “peace dividend” thrown into the bargain)? Or was the U.S. to strap on the six-guns of a global sheriff and police the world as the fountainhead of “humanitarian interventions”? Or was it the moment to boldly declare ourselves the world’s sole superpower and wield a high-tech military comparable to none, actively discouraging any other power or power bloc from even considering future rivalry?

The attacks of September 11, 2001 decisively ended that debate. The Bush administration promptly declared total war on every front — against peoples, ideologies, and, above all, “terrorism” (a tactic of the weak). That very September, administration officials proudly leaked the information that they were ready to “target” up to 60 other nations and the terrorist movements within them.

The Pentagon’s “footprint” was to be firmly planted, military base by military base, across the planet, with a special emphasis on its energy heartlands. Top administration officials began preparing the Pentagon to go anywhere and do anything, while rewriting, shredding, or ignoring whatever laws, national or international, stood in the way. In 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld officially articulated a new U.S. military posture that, in conception, was little short of revolutionary. It was called — in classic Pentagon shorthand — the 1-4-2-1 Defense Strategy (replacing the Clinton administration’s already none-too-modest plan to be prepared to fight two major wars — in the Middle East and Northeast Asia — simultaneously).

Theoretically, this strategy meant that the Pentagon was to prepare to defend the United States, while building forces capable of deterring aggression and coercion in four “critical regions” (Europe, Northeast Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East). It would be able to defeat aggression in two of these regions simultaneously and “win decisively” in one of those conflicts “at a time and place of our choosing.” Hence 1-4-2-1.

And that was just going to be the beginning. We had, by then, already entered the new age of the Mega-Pentagon. Almost six years later, the scale of that institution’s expansion has yet to be fully grasped, so let’s look at just seven of the major ways in which the Pentagon has experienced mission creep — and leap — dwarfing other institutions of government in the process.

(Continue reading: AlterNet)

Scott McClellan on the “liberal media”

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)

John Bolton Escapes Citizen’s Arrest in Wales

Sadly, the brave Guardian columnist could not get his hands on Bush’s lap dog, John Bolton.

Unbiased Guardian columnist George Monbiot was blocked from making a citizen’s arrest of John Bolton today in Wales. (Telegraph)
FOX News reported:

John Bolton managed to escape a British journalist’s attempt to place him under citizen’s arrest Wednesday evening at a festival in Wales.

The Telegraph newspaper reported that Guardian columnist George Monbiot, a critic of the Iraq war, tried to arrest the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations as he was exiting the stage at the Hay Literary Festival. The Telegraph earlier reported that Monbiot would try to arrest Bolton for war crimes.

According to the article, Monbiot was blocked by two security guards, and Bolton was ushered away even as Monbiot attempted to dart after him once he was released. Monbiot reportedly said he was “disappointed” he was unable to make the arrest.

“This was a serious attempt to bring one of the perpetrators of the Iraq war to justice, for what is described under the Nuremberg Principles as an international crime,” he was quoted as saying.

George Monbiot was led away as the tried to make his citizen’s arrest. (BBC)

Monbiot posted the charges against John Bolton on his blog.

(Continue reading: Gateway Pundit)