1. “Imperial Democrats Line Up for War
That is the way the game is played. So long as the war machine does not need the votes of congressmen with strong antiwar constituencies, these representatives are free to cast a vote to mollify their voters. But when the chips are down and every vote is needed, the charade is called to a halt and these counterfeit progressives cast their votes as instructed by Pelosi or whatever gauleiter happens to be in charge at the moment. Thus the empire rules by demanding loyalty to one of the two War Parties over the will of antiwar constituents. Of course, this emerges even more clearly in presidential elections, when each and every Democrat, even the nine mavericks of winter 2007 – Kucinich, Woolsey, Waters, et al. – line up to dutifully support pro-war candidates such as Kerry or Obama.
As the late Eugene McCarthy pointed out in 1968 in the snows of New Hampshire, drawing on the words of Daniel Webster, wars of empire continue because the people’s “representatives” put loyalty to party over loyalty to the people and to principle. Thus the Vietnam War ground on, and thus does the U.S. empire’s deadly game in Central Asia continue.”
http://original.antiwar.com/john-v-walsh/2009/12/07/imperial-democrats-line-up-for-war/
2. “Left, right, left, right, left, right, left … who can tell the difference these days? The party in power — whichever party that may be — makes policy on the basis of precedent, not ideology. Old programs are preserved, perhaps “reformed.” The opposition party fights tooth and nail against new programs — then keeps and expands them when it comes out of opposition and into power. Government gets larger, never smaller, and as President Barack Obama’s speech at West Point last Tuesday demonstrates, politicians are at least as likely (if not more so) to double down on their predecessors’ bad ideas as on any stray good ones which might have accidentally worked their way into the program.
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The incentives of politics all point toward war, or at least the constant will to war.
Since politics — both domestically and internationally — is ultimately no more than a turf contest between street gangs, it’s only natural that jingoism plays well and that the advantage goes to the “strong man” candidate in the first place. Politics is about force. A bona fide “peace candidate” in such a contest is about as viable as Mother Teresa in the selection process for head of the Gambino crime family.
The existing warlike tendency of politics is fertilized and watered by the truckloads of cash poured into the political process by “defense” contractors and other parasites of the state capitalist system’s digestive tract. They spend a great deal of money attempting to get you and your wealth into one end of that tract in the expectation of dropping your bare bones out the other end. In Iraq and Afghanistan, they’ve thus far skinned you to the tune of about a trillion dollars, above and beyond the 5,000+ American lives directly taken.
Even “mainstream” politicians have had occasion to warn us of the dangers this system entails, as Dwight D. Eisenhower did in his 1960 farewell address. What they’re unwilling to admit — and what we must at some point come to grips with — is that those dangers are inherent, congenital, unavoidable and progressive. We can have politics or we can have peace. We can’t have both.”
http://c4ss.org/content/1505
3. “Militaristic, corrupt America increasingly resembles a Third World state.
The U.S. is third worlding.
That statement may smack of hyperbole. It may also understate the phenomenon, for many of the countries that the United States increasingly resembles are not only Third World—they are authoritarian, even rogue.
This is not to say the U.S. will be indistinguishable from a Third World country any time soon. We’re clearly nowhere near Sudanese levels of violence or Bangladeshi depths of poverty. But in terms of institutional structure, financial stability, and even national spirit, the U.S. looks little like the country it was a generation ago and more like nations it has long condemned.
The turning point came on 9/11. Terrorism is now a weary concern: other issues dominate the headlines—stimulus, healthcare, climate change. Yet the attacks were a pretext for a host of foreign and domestic policies that promised to secure America against its hell-bent enemies but have instead dragged the country down, eroding the qualities that distinguished it from the rest of the world.
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As George W. Bush was fond of doing, Barack Obama looks penetratingly into the camera, addressing all the South Asian terrorists watching CNN from their burrows. He vows to defeat them—using other people’s lives. With demagogic mastery, he, too, has tapped America’s proud warrior culture, a latent force before the age of terror.
This emphasis on offended honor—particularly male honor—is an integral part of life in the Third World. Where the rule of law is weak, men learn to fend for their own charges, and humiliation must be quickly avenged to uphold street cred. This cultural strain exists even among educated elites, who dress and sound much like their American counterparts, but harbor ingrained machismo.
A repressive leader quickly realizes that the best way to unite his countrymen is to rally them against an outside threat—actual or invented.
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As the martial spirit rises, soldiers are necessarily heroes, even though they are treated as expendable. Patriotism is defined in militaristic terms. And it’s not unusual for an American president to wear a jacket with “Commander in Chief” emblazoned across the chest—an only slightly subtler version of Chavez and Castro couture.
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The U.S. media has long enjoyed an independence that even its European counterparts, with their strict defamation laws, don’t have. In terms of objectivity and freedom, Third World media has always been the weaker cousin of America’s Fourth Estate. Journalists do not come from the moneyed class and are routinely bullied by high-ranking officials who have accrued generations of privilege.
That independence eroded dramatically after Sept. 11. Americans tuning in to the evening news saw flags undulating in the background of war reports, often coupled with a subtle, flapping sound-effect tying war to patriotism. State TV it was not—not yet anyway. But just when the media’s role became most critical, it turned uncharacteristically compliant.
Recall May 1, 2003, the “Mission Accomplished” moment, when coverage sounded more like unmodified PR than impartial reporting. An equal participant in the pageantry, CNN informed viewers that Bush had made a “picture-perfect landing,” was greeted by the roar of the seamen’s approval, and had underwater survival training to prepare for his flight. All that was missing was a reverential bow to “Dear Leader.”
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The far Right wallows in paranoia with its dreams of overturning an election by discovering a Kenyan birth certificate. Most on the Left seem too mesmerized by the president to hold him accountable. The media ranges from insipid to hysterical. This country may never see the reasons for—and the parallels to—its disintegration. “
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2010/jan/01/00006/
Paul Krugman argues that cap and trade worked to reduce sulfur dioxide and stop acid rain, and so it will work to reduce C02.
However, two EPA lawyers with more than 40 years of cumulative experience – including the guy who has been head of California’s cap and trade offset programs for more than 20 years – say that sulfur dioxide was different, and that cap and trade for climate is a scam which only benefits the financial players.
Specifically, they point out that:
- Cap and trade was tried in Europe, but ended up raising energy prices, creating volatility, produced few greenhouse gas reductions, but made billions for the financial players
- Even the guy who invented the cap and trade concept doesn’t think it will work in regards to climate change (see this and this)
- Carbon offsets – which are part of the cap and trade plan – increase pollution
- One reason that offsets lead to more pollution is that investors fight to keep toxic chemicals legal, so they can make more money off of trading the offsets
- Like subprime mortgages and other creative financial instruments which brought us the economic crisis, carbon offsets lack integrity and don’t work (see this)”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/12/head-of-californias-cap-and-trade.html
5. “Over the past couple of days, Andrew Sullivan has linked to and published protests from various individuals who are quite angry that people “on the left” are being so mean to President Obama, and several of them are so upset that they have decided they are “leaving the left,” whatever that might mean. What’s most striking about these valiant defenses of Obama is how utterly devoid they are of any substantive points and how, instead, suffuse with weird, even inappropriate, emotional attachments they are. These objections are grounded almost exclusively in (a) a deep-seated conviction that President Obama is a good and just man who means well; (b) their own rather intense upset at seeing him criticized; and (c) a spitting ad hominem fury of the type long directed by Bush followers at any critics of their leader, and generally typical of authoritarian attacks on out-groups critics.
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These outbursts include everything other than arguments addressed to the only question that matters: are the criticisms that have been voiced about Obama valid? Has he appointed financial officials who have largely served the agenda of the Wall Street and industry interests that funded his campaign? Has he embraced many of the Bush/Cheney executive power and secrecy abuses which Democrats once railed against — from state secrets to indefinite detention to renditions and military commissions? Has he actively sought to protect from accountability and disclosure a whole slew of Bush crimes? Did he secretly a negotiate a deal with the pharmaceutical industry after promising repeatedly that all negotiations over health care would take place out in the open, even on C-SPAN? Are the criticisms of his escalation of the war in Afghanistan valid, and are his arguments in its favor of it redolent of the ones George Bush made to “surge” in Iraq or Lyndon Johnson made to escalate in Vietnam? Is Bob Herbert right when he condemned Obama’s detention policies as un-American and tyrannical, and warned: ”Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House”?
Who knows. Who cares. According to these defenders, it’s just wrong — morally, ethically and psychologically — to criticize the President. Thus, in lieu of any substantive engagement of these critiques are a slew of moronic Broderian cliches (“If Obama catches heat from the left and right but maintains the middle, he is doing what I hoped he would do (and what he said he would do) when I voted for him”), cringe-inducing proclamations of faith in his greatness (“I am willing to continue to trust his instinct, his grace, his patience and his measured hand”), and emotional contempt for his critics more extreme than one would expect from his own family members. In other words, the Leave-Obama-Alone protestations posted by Sullivan are fairly representative of the genre. How far we’ve fallen from the declaration of Thomas Jefferson: “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
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Those who venerated Bush because he was a morally upright and strong evangelical-warrior-family man and revere Palin as a common-sense Christian hockey mom see Obama as an inspiring, kind, sophisticated, soothing and mature intellectual. These are personality types bolstered with sophisticated marketing techniques, not policies, governing approaches or ideologies. But for those looking for some emotional attachment to a leader, rather than policies they believe are right, personality attachments are far more important. They’re also far more potent. Loyalty grounded in admiration for character will inspire support regardless of policy, and will produce and sustain the fantasy that this is not a mere politician, but a person of deep importance to one’s life who — like a loved one or close friend or religious leader — must be protected and defended at all costs.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
6. “Iraqi cab driver was source for Iraq WMD claim, British MP says
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24129.htm
7. “The US Cash Behind Extremist Settlers
The Hebron Fund is raising vast sums for Israeli settlements that violate the Geneva convention, with little scrutiny”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24134.htm
