Obama would rather cut Social Security and Medicare than Wars and Empire

By: Andrew Steele
Opednews.com
July 7, 2011 at 11:14:50

Obama's a socialist? Nope-- just another run-of-the-mill corporatist. Nothing better exemplifies this than the latest news coming out about the the debt talks between the President and the congressional leaders of the fake right.

From the Washington Post:

"President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue...As part of his pitch, Obama is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security, according to people in both parties with knowledge of the proposal."

Regardless of one's beliefs about the constitutionality of these programs, both sides of the debate should be quick to notice the priorities of the President, and his so called opposition, turning to programs so many Americans have already paid into and are depending on instead of first looking overseas at the corporate/U.S. military world empire that is bankrupting us all.

According to a report released last month by Brown University, the The United States will have spent a total of $3.7 trillion on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan by the time that they're over (the word "over" being loosely defined in 21st Century Amerika ). This isn't counting the war in Libya (oh, I forgot that's not a war, according to Obama) or the bases the United States maintains in nations like Germany where hostilities ended so long ago that most of the people who participated in them have either died or are living on Social Security.

Even Libertarian minded presidential candidate Ron Paul-- who is often the subject of attacks by pundits trying to imply that Social Security and Medicare would abruptly end the minute he was sworn into office-- has advocated changing foreign policy and dramatically cutting defense spending before touching Social Security and Medicare, allowing people to get what they have already paid for and not be cheated any further by their corrupt government.

Indeed, if real cuts are going to be made, they first need to be made in the areas of the budget that have not only outlived their usefulness, but are also causing the country more harm than good. Though Obama has tried to give us the impression that the wars that started under Bush are ending, his plans for withdrawal from these wars are simply diversionary games designed to keep the U.S. military as an occupying force within the targeted nations for as long as possible. (Under Obama, the U.S. has recently proposed keeping troops in Iraq past the withdrawal deadline at the end of this year.)

On top of that, like Bush's wars, Obama's new war in Libya has absolutely nothing to do with the security of the United States and certainly doesn't deserve in any way to be further from the cutting board than the programs at home he pretends to champion.

To those who believe in socialism and those who don't, look upon your president and those around him and see what they really are-- well dressed parasites feeding off your tax dollars along with their cronies, sucking out the blood of the country in order to spread a disease of empire across the globe. They are a bigger threat to the wealth and safety of ordinary, well-meaning Americans than ordinary Americans could ever be to each other.

Across the country Americans on all sides of the spectrum need to speak as one and tell the President in no uncertain terms that the promised retirement and health funds of hard working people are not the fuel of tanks and fighter jets, and certainly aren't the missiles of predator drones.

The Military as a Jobs Program: There are More Efficient Ways to Stimulate the Economy

By Ellen Brown
Global Research
June 22, 2011

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. . . . We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people."
        –Dwight David Eisenhower, "The Chance for Peace," speech given to the       American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953


In a Wall Street Journal editorial on June 8 bemoaning the failure of the Obama stimulus package, Martin Feldstein wrote:

"Experience shows that the most cost-effective form of temporary fiscal stimulus is direct government spending. The most obvious way to achieve that in 2009 was to repair and replace the military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan that would otherwise have to be done in the future.　But the Obama stimulus had nothing for the Defense Department."

You can’t make this stuff up. The most obvious way to stimulate the economy is to replace military equipment? And the Obama stimulus had nothing for the Defense Department? When veterans’ benefits and other past military costs are factored in, the military now devours half the U.S. budget. If military spending is such a cost-effective stimulus, why have the trillions poured into it in the last decade left the economy reeling?

The military is the nation’s largest and most firmly entrenched entitlement program, one that takes half of every tax dollar. Even if "national security" is considered our number one priority (a dubious choice when the real unemployment rate is over 16%), estimates are that the military budget could be cut in half or more and we would still have the most powerful military machine in the world. Our enemies (if any) are now "terrorists," not countries; and what is needed to contain them (if anything) is local policing, not global warfare. Much of our military hardware is just good for "shock and awe," not needed for any "real and present danger."

Military spending is the very essence of "built-in obsolescence": it turns out products that are designed to blow up. The military is not subject to ordinary market principles but works on a "cost-plus" basis, with producers reimbursed for whatever they have spent plus a guaranteed profit. Gone are the usual competitive restraints that keep capitalist corporations "lean and mean." Private contractors hired by the government on no-bid contracts can be as wasteful and inefficient as they like and still make a tidy profit. Yet legislators looking to slash wasteful "entitlements" persist in overlooking this obvious elephant in the room.

The reason massive military spending is considered the most "obvious" way to produce a fiscal stimulus is simply that it is the only form of direct government spending that gets a pass from the deficit hawks. The economy is desperate to get money flowing through it, and today only the government is in a position to turn on the spigots; but there is a tourniquet on government spending. That is true for everything but the military, the only program on which the government is allowed to spend seemingly without limit, often even without oversight.

Chalmers Johnson estimated in 2004 that as much as 40% of the Pentagon budget is "black," meaning hidden from public scrutiny. The black budget is so top secret that Congress itself is not allowed to peer in and haggle over the price. Democratic control of the military has broken down. The military is being used for purposes that even Congress is not allowed to know, much less vote on. The U.S. is no longer a constitutional republic but is a national security state. Foreign policy is determined behind closed doors by powerful private interests that use our military presence abroad to secure their access to cheap labor, markets and resources. At least, we assume that is what is going on. A declared objective of U.S. military policy is "full spectrum dominance." That could well mean dominance over the American people along with everyone else.

Why is the military’s half of the pie sacrosanct? Wasteful and unnecessary military programs get a pass from legislators because the military is also our largest and most secure jobs program, one that has penetrated into the nooks and crannies of Every Town U.S.A. If it were disbanded, the economy would be crippled by soaring unemployment, plant closures, and bankruptcies. Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power, writes:

"Most politicians understand . . . that weapons production is currently the number one industrial export product of the U.S. They know that major industrial job creation is largely coming from the Pentagon. Thus most politicians, from both parties, want to continue to support the military industrial complex gravy train for their communities."

That explains why the country seems to be permanently at war. If we had peace, the war machine would be out of a job. Every year since World War II, the U.S. has been at war somewhere. It has been said that if we didn’t have a war to fight, we would have to create one just to keep the war business going. We have a military empire of over 800 bases around the world. What is to become of them when the lion lies down with the lamb and peace reigns everywhere?

Military Conversion

Fortunately, there is a way to solve these problems without maintaining a perpetual state of war: keep the jobs but convert them to civilian use. Military conversion is a well thought-out program that could provide real economic stimulus and national security for people here and abroad. Existing military bases, laboratories, and production facilities can be converted to civilian uses. Bases can become industrial parks, schools, airports, hospitals, recreation facilities, and so forth. Converted factories can produce consumer and capital goods: machine tools, electric locomotives, farm machinery, oil field equipment, construction machinery for modernizing infrastructure.

It has been done before. According to Lloyd Dumas inThe Socio-economic Conversion from War to Peace (1995):

"At the end of World War II, . . . a large fraction of the nation's output had to be moved from military to civilian production. . . . Some 30 percent of U.S. output was transferred in one year without the unemployment rate ever rising above 3 percent. This experience made it clear that it is possible to redirect enormous amounts of productive resources from military to civilian activity without intolerable economic disruption."

In the early 19th century, when we had no major wars to fight, the U.S. military was turned into a civil service that built infrastructure for the nation.

A successful modern example is the　United States Army Corps of Engineers　(USACE), the world's largest public engineering, design and construction management　agency. Its mission is to provide vital public engineering services to strengthen the nation's security, energize the economy, and reduce risks from disasters. Generally associated with dams, canals and flood protection in the United States, USACE is involved in a wide range of public works both here and abroad. The Corps of Engineers provides 24% of U.S. hydropower capacity and is engaged in environmental regulation and ecosystem restoration, among other useful projects.

The late Seymour Melman, a professor at Columbia University, wrote extensively for fifty years on "economic conversion", the ordered transition from military to civilian production by military industries and facilities. He showed that a carefully designed conversion program could create more jobs than the war machine sustains now. The military actually destroys jobs in the civilian economy. The higher profits from cost-plus military manufacturing cause manufacturers to abandon more competitive civilian endeavors; and the permanent war economy takes engineers, capital and resources away from civilian production.

Bruce Gagnon writes:

"Across the nation colleges and universities are turning to the Pentagon for greater research funding as Congress and successive administrations have cut back on scientific research and development investment. As this trend worsens we find growing evidence that engineering, computer science, astronomy, mathematics, and other departments are becoming "militarized" in order to maintain funding levels."　

This research and production is not easily transferable to civilian use, since it has been designed for tasks that are radically different from civilian needs. And because we have put so many resources into military production, we have fallen behind industrially.

A 2007 study by Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the University of Massachusetts found that government investment in education creates twice as many jobs as investment in the military. Spending on personal consumption, health care, education, mass transit, and construction for home weatherization and infrastructure repair all were found to create more jobs per $1 billon in expenditures than military spending does.

Clearly, the half of the budget now going to military pursuits could be better spent. If we are going to double exports in the next five years, as President Obama has pledged, we will need to divert some of the resources poured down the black hole of war to productive civilian industry.

The US Maxes Out Its Credit Card

Editor's NOTE:

Mr. Margolis is correct. The US maintains a "War Department" not a Department of Defense. It exists to ensure American and Western financial supremacy for the all-powerful multinational corporations. As such the US military is being utilized to build ever larger monopolies for the super-rich Plutocrats who now control the United States and Europe.

Bear in mind, these Plutocrats could care less about what happens to the United States or any other country for that matter. National boundaries are simply irrelevant to them. Should the US default, they will simply move elsewhere since the entire world is their oyster. They can live anywhere and their markets are global.

This means that the US military establishment actually exists for the benefit of the Plutocracy and therefore to the detriment of the poor and middle class even though it is the children of the impoverished by and large who make up the ranks of the armed forces. What a tragic irony that.

It should be obvious that in order for the United States not to default on its debt, the "War Department" must be slashed by at least 50%. It should be the absolute first order of business for the Congress. Unfortunately, the Executive and Legislative branches of government have been completely bought and paid for by the very Plutocrats who benefit most from the Empire which insures their wealth. Barring a massive populist revolt, nothing will change.

The United States must find a credible third party populist candidate who can bring this issue to the American public before it is too late. I nominate Jesse Ventura if he is willing to take on the challenge. He may be the only person with enough courage, understanding and name recognition to compete with President Obama and the Republican nominee in 2012.


The US Maxes Out Its Credit Card

By Eric Margolis

April 23, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --The US dollar sank further last week and gold hit $1,500 an ounce, frightening investors and destabilizing financial markets. A leading credit rating agency warned the US AAA rating might be downgraded.

While Rome burned, President Obama and the Republican-controlled US Congress traded childish taunts and hot air. Both parties refused to tell Americans the painful truth: government’s yawning $1.4 trillion US budget deficit had to be slashed to prevent a financial meltdown. That would mean pain for everyone.

But the two political parties are deadlocked: Obama’s Democrats want to raise taxes. Republicans demand tax cuts. They want to cut health, education and welfare, all three sacred cows to the Democrats, while increasing military spending when 40 million Americans draw government food aid.

This dishonest debate mostly ignores the 800-lb gorilla in the room: America’s bloated $750-900 billion annual military spending. Some experts put total annual US military and intelligence spending at $1.2 trillion.
Few American politicians dare suggest seriously trimming the Pentagon’s runaway spending.

The US National Priorities Project estimates that in 2011, out of one dollar of US federal spending, 27.4% is military; 21.5% health; 13.8% interest on the debt; 10.9% social security benefits; 3.5% on education; and 23% on everything else.

In 2010, US military spending exceeded by 50% the average spent in the Cold War years when America had a serious rival in the Soviet Union. Since 2000, US military spending has grown by 67% (all figures adjusted for inflation). Yet today America has no real military rival.

The US now accounts for almost 50% of world military spending. Add America’s wealthy allies in Europe and Asia, and the total rises to 80%. And yet Americans are incessantly barraged by wild claims their nation is under dire threat, the latest and most preposterous being that dirt-poor Myanmar (former Burma) is getting nuclear weapons. China, with a military budget only 1/10th the size of America’s, is the only future threat the Republicans can come up with.

Most Americans think of “defense” spending rather than calling it “military” spending. This gives the totally mistaken impression America’s shores are somehow being threatened by enemy invasion.

In reality, the Pentagon’s vast budget sustains US world military domination, with over 100 overseas bases, air and naval fleets, two wars, numerous smaller “police actions” in Africa and Asia, rented allies, and a strategic nuclear arsenal at least 75% larger than needed.

President George W. Bush waged two wars, cut taxes, and spent billions in farm and medical subsidies without funding them through tax increases or spending cuts. These costs were simply loaded on to America’s huge national debt. If American taxpayers had to actually pay for their $1.6 trillion wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, these conflicts would quickly end.

President Lyndon Johnson also financed the Vietnam War through debt. The result: a worldwide wave of inflation that took a decade to overcome. The same thing is happening today thanks to the profligate George Bush who doubled US government spending. The US has been exporting inflation around the globe by debauching the dollar and massive borrowing to finance its deficits.

Bush and now Obama’s unpaid-for wars, recklessly low US interest rates, commodity speculators, and China’s overheated economy are fueling the rising tide of world inflation.

The subject of modest cuts from the sacred cow of military spending is being timidly raised by politicians of both parties. But they are terrified of being accused of the ultimate sin in hyperpatriotic US politics, being unpatriotic and “not supporting our boys.”

Yet unless the Pentagon’s budget is cut – perhaps by as much as half or more – the US, dangerously top-heavy with debt, may capsize. History amply shows more empires done in by poor finances and debt than invasion by enemies.

Alas, America’s governing system, dominated as it is by such powerful special interests as the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and agriculture, can’t seem to escape from the national addiction to war and debt.

As my friend Arnaud de Borchgrave writes, while the US has spent $1.5 trillion on its Afghan and Iraq Wars, China is using US interest payments to win friends and customers around the world.

End the Empire and Build America

By Peter G Cohen

March 07, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- -It is very unlikely that the United States will cut the military budget or end our wars in Central Asia until the concept of maintaining world influence by militarily presence is discredited and abandoned. The sudden eruption of the democracy movement in the Arab nations has made it obvious that we have little control over the real world in spite of our more than 900 military bases on foreign soil. It is also obvious that our government was surprised by these events, which is a noteworthy failure of our extensive and expensive intelligence establishment to understand the world in which we live.

While we wait for the Arab peoples eruptions to settle into recognizable governments, there is little we can do to preserve our commercial and political arrangements in their world. Our first response to the demonstrations in Egypt was to send a battleship with 800 troops on board several days after most Americans had left. This ‘gunboat diplomacy’ is an indication of 19th Century thinking in response to 21st Century events.

The effort to establish worldwide influence (hegemony) by force is militarizing our society and limiting our future. For all who love peace, who want to build collective security through the United Nations, and to focus on laying the foundations for our nation’s future, the top priority must be to end our addiction to the failed promise of military domination. It should also be the top priority of those who want a reasonable national budget, a healthy economy and the funds available to deal with national and world problems.

In the National Interest

Over and over again we are told that our huge military and its worldwide distribution is in the ‘National Interest.’ This phrase is constantly used and never explained. Sometimes it means defense, sometimes it means profitable trade or access to markets and cheap labor, sometimes it means protecting energy sources, or outdated promises to defend a friendly nation. Its vagueness makes it the ideal garment to cloak any action. It should always be questioned; we must ask, what does national interest mean in this case?

Is it in our national interest to maintain over 900 foreign military bases? Why do we need them? “In fact, the purpose of our overseas bases is to maintain U.S. dominance in the world, and to reinforce what military analyst Charles Maier calls our ‘empire of consumption.’ The United States possesses less than five percent of global population but consumes about one quarter of all global resources, including petroleum. Our empire exists so we can exploit a much greater share of the world’s wealth than we are entitled to, and so we can prevent other nations from combining against us to take their rightful share.” --Chalmers Johnson in his valuable book, Dismantling the Empire.

In an effort to maintain hegemony (influence) or empire (dominance) we have been increasing the military budget, bases, technologies and plans for future wars. Meanwhile, 15 million American families suffer from being unemployed, millions more are homeless, one in five children are disadvantaged by poverty, our states are facing bankruptcy, etc. Our national infrastructure is failing and we are not making the investments necessary to maintain a decent future for our citizens.

On the Op-Ed page of the New York Times on 2-19-11 there is a chart comparing the best and worst of 33 advanced nations. The U.S. is among the “Worst of the worst” in income inequality, food insecurity, life expectancy, prison population, and math scale score. We are among the worst in unemployment. We are among the best only in level of democracy, wellbeing index and student science score.

The Results of Our Giant Military

Our huge national debt, primarily caused by our constantly rising military expenses, are now resulting in budget cuts of programs for working people, the sick and the poor. At the same time we are failing to invest in green energy systems that could replace fossil fuels and reduce the impact of damaging climate change.

Who is Served by Hegemony? Large international corporations, that are in search of energy and other resources, including minerals, cheap labor and open markets. For these giants, the presence of the U.S. Military makes it easier for them to operate. The public pays for the military and its wars, while the corporations are the major beneficiaries.


The total GDP of the European Union now exceeds that of the United States. In those nations the percentage of GDP spent on the military averages 1.6 %. Ours in 2010, counting only the Pentagon and DOE, was over 5.4% of GDP. Our total military expenditures are greater than the rest of the world taken together.

What do we Get for Our Money?

In spite of our overwhelming military presence and its many “Command” areas, the Chinese economy is growing much faster than ours. China is buying the resources it needs worldwide, from oil in the Sudan to food-growing land in Africa. We could have bought vast quantities of oil for the money spent on war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, such purchases would not have inflamed Islamists and attracted more suicide bombers as our wars, bombings and drone attacks have done.

The fact is that our reliance upon a huge military to advance the “interests” of the United States has been a failure. It has drained our human and financial resources at home, and created new hostilities abroad. It is time to abandon the goal of world domination and to accept the fact that in a changing world there are new centers of power that can more effectively be approached as potential partners in building a more secure world and limiting the damages of climate change.

A New Peace Agenda

The American peace movement should work to discredit, criticize, expose and oppose the ineffective and unaffordable model of world hegemony, empire and domination. By attacking the root idea we can achieve greater cuts in military spending than by just opposing the wars and their weapons. We must eliminate most foreign bases and all super embassies. We must create new and more dramatic ways to reach out to all Americans with the truth that our world military presence and support of dictators encourages terrorism, while encouraging democracy and greater economic fairness will reduce the impulse to inflict terror.

Finally, the peace movement must project a vision of our lives and tax money invested in the welfare, education and opportunities of our children. We want to rebuild the national infrastructure for the future of the United States. We want our nation to lead the world in the production of alternative energy systems and, after replacing our own fossil fuels, export them (rather than deadly military equipment) to a world threatened by climate change.

If the Arab peoples living under dictatorships can change their societies, surely the American people can change their national priorities by peaceful action in the framework of our democracy.

Obama: ALL WAR ALL THE TIME INSURES US EMPIRE

Spiralling Defense Spending: Public Says Cut Pentagon, Obama Says Increase It

By David Swanson

Global Research
February 2, 2011
originally posted at warisacrime.org

Did you know that the U.S. public wants military spending cut? Did you know that President Barack Obama wants to increase it for his third year in a row? Actually I already know that most of you didn't know either of these things.

A poll released on Tuesday and in line with other polling over the years asked: "To ensure its safety, should the United States always spend at least three times as much on defense as any other nation?" This question mislabels the military "defense," which most of it isn't, and claims the interest of "safety," albeit in the context of other questions about spending money, and yet only 25% of voters said yes, while 40% said no and 35% were not sure.

In reality, the United States could cut its military budget (just the Department of so-called Defense, not counting the hundreds of billions spent through other departments) by 85% and still easily be the most expensive military on the planet. Taking the DOD down to merely three times the expense of China's military (the world's next largest) would mean cutting it by 55%. Taking it down to twice China's military would mean cutting it by 70%.


The same poll asked "Does the United States spend too much on the military and national security, not enough, or about the right amount?" If respondents had been informed of what the United States spends, then something smaller than 25% of them should have answered "not enough" and "just right" combined. Instead, 27% said "not enough" and 37% said "just right" while only 32% said too much. Despite 35% saying they were not sure on the other question, and nearly everyone not knowing what they were talking about, respondents all had an opinion on this one, and most of them were wrong by their own measure.

When a pollster tells Americans the facts and then asks for opinions, the results are predictably different. When told how much money goes where in the federal budget, 65% of Americans want the military cut. But only a small minority of Americans is aware of that.

And anyone paying attention at all almost certainly believes that President Obama is cutting the military. When he has increased it in the past, the media has made so much noise about particular weapons being cut, that nobody's noticed the overall increase. In Obama's 2011 State of the Union address he claimed:

"The Secretary of Defense has also agreed to cut tens of billions of dollars in spending that he and his generals believe our military can do without."

The English language is flexible enough to avoid calling this a lie if we want to avoid that. But consider these facts. Obama is not here talking about the 2012 fiscal year budget which he is about to propose and for which he will propose a larger military than ever. Instead he is talking about future years, years the budgets for which will not actually be set until they arrive -- at which point it's anybody's guess whether the "cuts" will be made. I put "cuts" in quotation marks because of this other key fact: Obama is not here talking about reducing the military budget even in future years, but rather about scaling back the military's dreams for much larger budgets. That is to say, even with these "cuts" (of $78 billion over 5 years, as proposed by Secretary Gates) the Pentagon budget will still be increasing beyond the rate of inflation. The cuts are not being imagined as made to the current budget level. Instead what's being cut are the projected budgets for future years as dreamed up by the military.

Thus is an increasing budget referred to as having been cut. The Project on Defense Alternatives has explained this trickery here, as has the National Priorities Project here, not to mention Reuters here. And yet, when I bring this up, people complain to me that Obama promised to cut the military and use the money for good things -- they heard it themselves on television.

Now, the unusual thing is that everybody in Washington (other than most Congress members or presidents) is indeed talking about cutting the military. A task force convened by Congressman Barney Frank has proposed cutting $1 trillion over 10 years. The chairs of the President's deficit commission have proposed cutting $100 billion while Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky says $110 billion, and CATO proposes $150 billion. The American Conservative Union (CPAC) has two sessions on cutting the military planned for its upcoming convention.

But Obama proposed, in that same State of the Union speech, to freeze spending on everything other than wars and the military. Contrary to myth, Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are not part of the federal budget. They are separate programs that fund themselves just fine, thank you. The money in Social Security is loaned to the government and owed back to the people with interest. Politicians have no business touching it. If it starts to run short, that can easily be fixed by asking those with large incomes to pay in at the same rate as those with small incomes. The actual budget funded by our income taxes is dominated by the military. When all types of military and war spending are added up, they amount to more than half of the budget. (editor's bold emphasis throughout) So, the proposed five-year freeze applies only to a minority of the budget, just about all of which has a superior impact on the U.S. economy to military spending.

We Will Oppose Obama As Long As He Supports War

From: Warisacrime

On-Line Petition

We the undersigned share with nearly two-thirds of our fellow Americans the conviction that our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should be ended and that overall military spending should be dramatically reduced. This has been our position for years and will continue to be, and we take it seriously. We vow not to support President Barack Obama for renomination for another term in office, and to actively seek to impede his war policies unless and until he reverses them.

Since he became president, Obama has had three opportunities to work with Congress to reduce military spending, but instead has championed increases in that spending each time, despite the fact that this spending represents a clear threat to the economic future of our country. He has continued as well to try to hide the true costs of the wars by funding them with off-the-books supplemental spending bills, despite the fact that he campaigned against this very practice.

The President has escalated a war on Afghanistan in which rising civilian deaths and atrocities have become routine.

He has given the CIA even greater freedom of action to launch lethal drone strikes against civilian houses in Pakistan on mere assumption of some connection with Taliban or other organizations, despite the warning from the U.S. Ambassador in late 2009 -- revealed in a Wikileaks cable -- that such attacks could "destabilize" the Pakistani government, despite many reports that civilians, including children, are disproportionately victims, and despite the contention of the United Nations and many U.S. allies that this practice is illegal.

Obama has approved an increase in covert operations by CIA-controlled Afghan troops into Pakistan, and his administration has remained silent while the U.S. command in Afghanistan leaked to the New York Times plans for new Special Operations Forces raids into Pakistan aimed at Afghan Taliban targets.

The President has expanded the use of Special Operations Forces (SOF), operating in virtually total secrecy and without any accountability to Congress, in one country after another. SOF troops are presently in some 75 nations -- 15 more than when Obama took office.
President Obama has, on a later schedule than he campaigned on, finally reduced U.S. troop presence in Iraq. But he has not fully withdrawn U.S. combat forces from Iraq or ended U.S. combat there, his claims to have done so notwithstanding. His vice president has suggested, without correction by the President, the possibility of a U.S. military presence in the country even after the deadline for withdrawal under the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement, if only through the use of military contractors.

The Obama administration has announced plans to form an army of mercenary troops from private military contractors in Iraq which is to have its own air force and its own fleet of mine-resistant military vehicles. The plan includes continued contracts with the company formerly called Blackwater, despite the knowledge that it was guilty of atrocities against civilians in that country, and despite the openly declared opposition of the Iraqi government to such a continued role.

Obama has overseen increased weapons sales to foreign nations, and assisting in those sales has been a major function of his State Department. He has approved increased funding for work on nuclear weapons, even while supporting an arms control treaty. He has established a policy of potential nuclear first strike against Iran or North Korea.

President Obama has argued for the justness of war-making in widely watched speeches from the Oval Office and in Oslo, Norway, where he was accepting a Nobel Peace Prize. He has, in his Oval Office speech last August, defended false statements that took our nation into the current wars and false statements that have prolonged them.


The President has supported sanctions against Iran and Syria that punish the people, especially children, and not the leadership, of those countries. He has sent ships and missiles to Iran's border. He has risked hostilities with North Korea through the ongoing construction of new military bases in South Korea and provocative war games exercises. His administration has helped a military coup succeed in Honduras.

President Obama has sought to allow more Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories. He has protected Israel's killing of activists on a humanitarian aid ship, not even protesting at the murder of an unarmed American youth. He issued a presidential memorandum on October 25, 2010, giving U.S. approval for the use of child soldiers by Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and Yemen. He has backed Indonesian armed forces that assassinated civilian activists in late 2009. He has expanded the U.S. military presence in Colombia, Costa Rica, Haiti, Guam, Italy, and Diego Garcia, as well as overseeing an enormous military base construction project in Afghanistan.

President Obama has not closed the prison at Guantanamo Bay and continues to maintain a network of detention facilities in Afghanistan through which prisoners, according to the most recent information available, are still being subjected to harsh treatment. He has claimed the right to imprison people, including American citizens, indefinitely without charge or trial, thus further cementing in place the elimination of the rights of prisoners of war and the elimination of the right of habeas corpus for anyone, as well as the rights found in the Fourth through Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The President has claimed the power of rendition. His CIA Director Leon Panetta and his senior advisor David Axelrod have asserted, without correction by the President, that the President maintains the power to torture. In the recent case of Gulet Mohamed, the Obama administration, for a time, claimed the power to forbid an American to reenter the country, absent any conviction or even any charge of a crime, and apparently collaborated with Kuwait to torture that American. The President has also openly claimed the power to order the assassination of Americans abroad. In Iraq, the U.S. military has continued to work with and protect from accountability an Iraqi military that is known to regularly use torture.

The President has expanded the use of warrantless spying. Under his leadership, the FBI has infiltrated peace groups and raided the homes of peace activists. It has set up and entrapped in terrorism charges people whose training and motivation came largely or even entirely from the FBI. He has supported the re-authorization of the PATRIOT Act, which strips away Americans' civil liberties.

President Obama, in direct violation of the Nuremberg Charter, a U.S. treaty commitment, has publicly instructed his Attorney General not to prosecute individuals responsible for crimes, including torture. His administration has worked hard to provide retroactive immunity to corporations engaged in warrantless spying and individuals engaged in sanctioning torture. He has kept secret a vast trove of documents, photos, and videos pertaining to prisoner abuse. He has advanced unprecedented claims of secrecy powers in defending the crimes of his predecessor. President Obama's White House has put great pressure on European states not to investigate or prosecute U.S. war crimes.

This president has restricted the release of the names of White House visitors and has pursued the prosecution and punishment of government whistleblowers more aggressively than any previous president. His administration is responsible for the cruel and unusual lengthy confinement in a 6' by 12' cell, prior to any trial, of alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning. His vice president, Joe Biden, has publicly labeled an Australian journalist, Julian Assange, a "terrorist." President Obama has used a private propaganda firm that had been exposed planting lies in Iraqi media, to screen potential embedded reporters for coverage of the U.S. military. He has used the military to restrict reporting by American journalists on an oil spill in American waters.


Perhaps most perilously, President Obama has claimed the right to engage in many of these activities without the authorization of Congress. He has even claimed the power first developed by his predecessor to rewrite new laws through the extra-Constitutional use of presidential signing statements. Expanded powers that are not opposed now will be far more difficult to oppose later with another president able to claim past precedent.

The President's own deficit commission recommended cuts of $100 billion to the military budget. The United States spends about $1 trillion each year on the military, through a variety of departments, and has spent over $1 trillion already on the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Over half of every U.S. dollar of income tax is going to war making. The Department of Defense budget alone is larger than the military expenditures of the next largest 16 militaries in the world combined. That budget could be cut by 85% and still be the largest in the world. In addition to the lessening of hostility toward our country that would result from a significant decrease in U.S. military presence around the world, by shifting our financial resources we could create jobs, green energy, top quality free education, public transportation and infrastructure. We could also end all talk of reducing our Social Security or health coverage. We intend to support public servants who put our money where it serves the public.

We are not concerned with whether President Obama is acting enthusiastically or reluctantly in pursuing a militaristic policy abroad and more repression of dissent at home. It matters little whether he is submitting to powerful forces or freely following his preferred course. We do not elect his soldiers or spies, his advisors, his campaign funders, or the owners of our major media outlets. We elect the president. We will not support his nomination for another term, and we believe that a large proportion of Americans who voted for him in 2008 will not do so again unless he reverses the most egregious policies to which we have referred -- especially by taking decisive steps to end the war on Afghanistan and to make deep cuts in the military and war budgets.

Add your name

It's the Occupation, Stupid

Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn't to blame -- the root of the problem is foreign military occupations.

BY ROBERT A. PAPE

October 22, 2010 "Foreign Policy" -- -Although no one wants to talk about it, 9/11 is still hurting America. That terrible day inflicted a wound of public fear that easily reopens with the smallest provocation, and it continues to bleed the United States of money, lives, and goodwill around the world. Indeed, America's response to its fear has, in turn, made Americans less safe and has inspired more threats and attacks.

In the decade since 9/11, the United States has conquered and occupied two large Muslim countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), compelled a huge Muslim army to root out a terrorist sanctuary (Pakistan), deployed thousands of Special Forces troops to numerous Muslim countries (Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, etc.), imprisoned hundreds of Muslims without recourse, and waged a massive war of ideas involving Muslim clerics to denounce violence and new institutions to bring Western norms to Muslim countries. Yet Americans still seem strangely mystified as to why some Muslims might be angry about this situation.

In a narrow sense, America is safer today than on 9/11. There has not been another attack on the same scale. U.S. defenses regarding immigration controls, airport security, and the disruption of potentially devastating domestic plots have all improved.

But in a broader sense, America has become perilously unsafe. Each month, there are more suicide terrorists trying to kill Americans and their allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Muslim countries than in all the years before 2001 combined. From 1980 to 2003, there were 343 suicide attacks around the world, and at most 10 percent were anti-American inspired. Since 2004, there have been more than 2,000, over 91 percent against U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries.

Yes, these attacks are overseas and mostly focused on military and diplomatic targets. So too, however, were the anti-American suicide attacks before 2001. It is important to remember that the 1995 and 1996 bombings of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen were the crucial dots that showed the threat was rising prior to 9/11. Today, such dots are occurring by the dozens every month. So why is nobody connecting them?

U.S. military policies have not stopped the rising wave of extremism in the Muslim world. The reason has not been lack of effort, or lack of bipartisan support for aggressive military policies, or lack of funding, or lack of genuine patriotism.

No. Something else is creating the mismatch between America's effort and the results.

For nearly a decade, Americans have been waging a long war against terrorism without much serious public debate about what is truly motivating terrorists to kill them. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, this was perfectly explicable -- the need to destroy al Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan was too urgent to await sober analyses of root causes.

But, the absence of public debate did not stop the great need to know or, perhaps better to say, to "understand" the events of that terrible day. In the years before 9/11, few Americans gave much thought to what drives terrorism -- a subject long relegated to the fringes of the media, government, and universities. And few were willing to wait for new studies, the collection of facts, and the dispassionate assessment of alternative causes. Terrorism produces fear and anger, and these emotions are not patient.

A simple narrative was readily available, and a powerful conventional wisdom began to exert its grip. Because the 9/11 hijackers were all Muslims, it was easy to presume that Islamic fundamentalism was the central motivating force driving the 19 hijackers to kill themselves in order to kill Americans. Within weeks after the 9/11 attacks, surveys of American attitudes show that this presumption was fast congealing into a hard reality in the public mind. Americans immediately wondered, "Why do they hate us?" and almost as immediately came to the conclusion that it was because of "who we are, not what we do." As President George W. Bush said in his first address to Congress after the 9/11 attacks: "They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

Thus was unleashed the "war on terror."

The narrative of Islamic fundamentalism did more than explain why America was attacked and encourage war against Iraq. It also pointed toward a simple, grand solution. If Islamic fundamentalism was driving the threat and if its roots grew from the culture of the Arab world, then America had a clear mission: To transform Arab societies -- with Western political institutions and social norms as the ultimate antidote to the virus of Islamic extremism.

This narrative had a powerful effect on support for the invasion of Iraq. Opinion polls show that for years before the invasion, more than 90 percent of the U.S. public believed that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But this belief alone was not enough to push significant numbers to support war.

What really changed after 9/11 was the fear that anti-American Muslims desperately wanted to kill Americans and so any risk that such extremists would get weapons of mass destruction suddenly seemed too great. Although few Americans feared Islam before 9/11, by the spring of 2003, a near majority -- 49 percent -- strongly perceived that half or more of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims were deeply anti-American, and a similar fraction also believed that Islam itself promoted violence. No wonder there was little demand by congressional committees or the public at large for a detailed review of intelligence on Iraq's WMD prior to the invasion.

The goal of transforming Arab societies into true Western democracies had powerful effects on U.S. commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq. Constitutions had to be written; elections held; national armies built; entire economies restructured. Traditional barriers against women had to be torn down. Most important, all these changes also required domestic security, which meant maintaining approximately 150,000 U.S. and coalition ground troops in Iraq for many years and increasing the number of U.S. and Western troops in Afghanistan each year from 2003 on.

Put differently, adopting the goal of transforming Muslim countries is what created the long-term military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, the United States would almost surely have sought to create a stable order after toppling the regimes in these countries in any case. However, in both, America's plans quickly went far beyond merely changing leaders or ruling parties; only by creating Western-style democracies in the Muslim world could Americans defeat terrorism once and for all.

There's just one problem: We now know that this narrative is not true.

New research provides strong evidence that suicide terrorism such as that of 9/11 is particularly sensitive to foreign military occupation, and not Islamic fundamentalism or any ideology independent of this crucial circumstance. Although this pattern began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, a wealth of new data presents a powerful picture.

More than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation, according to extensive research that we conducted at the University of Chicago's Project on Security and Terrorism, where we examined every one of the over 2,200 suicide attacks across the world from 1980 to the present day. As the United States has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, which have a combined population of about 60 million, total suicide attacks worldwide have risen dramatically -- from about 300 from 1980 to 2003, to 1,800 from 2004 to 2009. Further, over 90 percent of suicide attacks worldwide are now anti-American. The vast majority of suicide terrorists hail from the local region threatened by foreign troops, which is why 90 percent of suicide attackers in Afghanistan are Afghans.

Israelis have their own narrative about terrorism, which holds that Arab fanatics seek to destroy the Jewish state because of what it is, not what it does. But since Israel withdrew its army from Lebanon in May 2000, there has not been a single Lebanese suicide attack. Similarly, since Israel withdrew from Gaza and large parts of the West Bank, Palestinian suicide attacks are down over 90 percent.

Some have disputed the causal link between foreign occupation and suicide terrorism, pointing out that some occupations by foreign powers have not resulted in suicide bombings -- for example, critics often cite post-World War II Japan and Germany. Our research provides sufficient evidence to address these criticisms by outlining the two factors that determine the likelihood of suicide terrorism being employed against an occupying force.

The first factor is social distance between the occupier and occupied. The wider the social distance, the more the occupied community may fear losing its way of life. Although other differences may matter, research shows that resistance to occupations is especially likely to escalate to suicide terrorism when there is a difference between the predominant religion of the occupier and the predominant religion of the occupied.

Religious difference matters not because some religions are predisposed to suicide attacks. Indeed, there are religious differences even in purely secular suicide attack campaigns, such as the LTTE (Hindu) against the Sinhalese (Buddhists).

Rather, religious difference matters because it enables terrorist leaders to claim that the occupier is motivated by a religious agenda that can scare both secular and religious members of a local community -- this is why Osama bin Laden never misses an opportunity to describe U.S. occupiers as "crusaders" motivated by a Christian agenda to convert Muslims, steal their resources, and change the local population's way of life.

The second factor is prior rebellion. Suicide terrorism is typically a strategy of last resort, often used by weak actors when other, non-suicidal methods of resistance to occupation fail. This is why we see suicide attack campaigns so often evolve from ordinary terrorist or guerrilla campaigns, as in the cases of Israel and Palestine, the Kurdish rebellion in Turkey, or the LTTE in Sri Lanka.

One of the most important findings from our research is that empowering local groups can reduce suicide terrorism. In Iraq, the surge's success was not the result of increased U.S. military control of Anbar province, but the empowerment of Sunni tribes, commonly called the Anbar Awakening, which enabled Iraqis to provide for their own security. On the other hand, taking power away from local groups can escalate suicide terrorism. In Afghanistan, U.S. and Western forces began to exert more control over the country's Pashtun regions starting in early 2006, and suicide attacks dramatically escalated from this point on.

The research suggests that U.S. interests would be better served through a policy of offshore balancing. Some scholars have taken issue with this approach, arguing that keeping boots on the ground in South Asia is essential for U.S. national security. Proponents of this strategy fail to realize how U.S. ground forces often inadvertently produce more anti-American terrorists than they kill. In 2000, before the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, there were 20 suicide attacks around the world, and only one (against the USS Cole) was directed against Americans. In the last 12 months, by comparison, 300 suicide attacks have occurred, and over 270 were anti-American. We simply must face the reality that, no matter how well-intentioned, the current war on terror is not serving U.S. interests.

The United States has been great in large part because it respects understanding and discussion of important ideas and concepts, and because it is free to change course. Intelligent decisions require putting all the facts before us and considering new approaches. The first step is recognizing that occupations in the Muslim world don't make Americans any safer -- in fact, they are at the heart of the problem.

Robert A. Pape teaches at the University of Chicago and is co-author, with James K. Feldman, of Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It.

War-Monger Pushes Attack on Iran: Neocon's in Full Battle Mode

Editor's NOTE:

It appears a full court press is being applied by the Neocon's who are increasingly agitating for war with Iran. This comes as they continue to raise the heat level over all things Muslim e.g. the Community Center planned for 2 blocks from the site of the destroyed World Trade Center in New York (usually referred to as the Ground Zero Mosque initiative by Neocon's and other "war-monger's"). Graham is apparently the first US senator to recommend proceeding with war against Iran.

It should be unnecessary to point out once again that Iran represents absolutely no existential threat to the United States.  Should this nation commense an offensive (agressive) military attack against Iran (whether by air, sea or land) it would be unquestionably  immoral as well as illegal under international and US law.

Senator Lindsey Graham has engaged in extremely dangerous behavior and should be shunned for seriously attempting to involve the country in another immoral war.

Lindsey Graham says U.S. Must Prepare to Attack Iran

By James Rosen

September 21, 2010 "McClatchy " WASHINGTON — Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Monday that the United States must be prepared to use military force to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon — and added that the last-resort step should be taken with the goal of overthrowing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Graham, a military lawyer and a senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, became the first senator to support direct U.S. military intervention in Iran, saying it should not involve ground troops but be launched by U.S. warplanes and ships.

"If you use military force against Iran, you've opened up Pandora's box," Graham told the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "If you allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon, you've emptied Pandora's box. I'd rather open up Pandora's box than empty it."

Graham's unusual public support for overturning Ahmadinejad and the ruling council of Shiite Muslim clerics that he nominally heads recalled President George W. Bush's controversial policy of regime change to invade Iraq in 2003 and overthrow dictator Saddam Hussein.

Graham was a prominent supporter of the Iraq war, though he criticized Bush and former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld for sending too few U.S. troops.

Obama aides on the National Security Council declined to comment Monday on Graham's remarks about Iran.

State Department aides said Obama will discuss Iran on Thursday during his address to the U.N. General Assembly.

Graham said he believes Ahmadinejad "was lying" when he said Sunday in New York, after arriving for the U.N. General Assembly session this week, that Iran isn't building a nuclear bomb.

"From my point of view, if we engage in military operations as a last resort, the United States should have in mind the goal of changing the regime," Graham said. "Not by invading (Iran), but by launching a military strike by air and sea."

Such an attack would be aimed not only at eliminating Iran's nuclear capabilities, Graham said, but at rendering Ahmadinejad's government powerless.

In order to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, he said, a U.S. attack would be preferable to an Israeli attack because the American military is more powerful and more likely to achieve regime change.

Graham's aides later said his reference to regime change entailed both the overthrow of Ahmadinejad and the removal of the Islamic clerics that many analysts believe at least partially control him.

The U.S. opposition to Teheran's construction of a nuclear power plant in the southern Iran city of Bushehr dates to the Clinton administration in the 1990s.

Obama, like Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton before him, has failed to persuade Russia not to help Iran build the Bushehr plant and then provide fuel for it. Iran and Russia say the plant, which recently began operating, will produce nuclear-fueled electricity for peaceful use.

The United States believes that Iran's ultimate intention is to convert the fuel to weapons-grade plutonium in order to create nuclear arms.
How Dangerous is Iran Really?

The Hatred of the "Other"

Kill Them

by Linh Dinh
CommonDreams.org
Published on Saturday, August 28, 2010

Michael Enright, a 21-year-old college student, slashed a NYC cab driver in the face and neck because this man was Muslim. Enright is being held in a psychiatric ward. If he is mad, then the United States is also insane. Enright's assault merely mirrors what we, as a nation, have done for nearly a decade.

The United States has responded criminally and incoherently to what happened on September 11, 2001. Lopped of our twin members, downtown, we also lost our authoritative voice. Two days after that disaster, George Bush grimly declared, "The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him." Six months later, Bush shrugged, "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." Our current president never mentions bin Laden, yet Obama has sent many more troops into Afghanistan. We're not leaving any time soon, that's for sure. Congress has just approved 1.3 billion dollars to expand our military bases there. Our new mission, if Time Magazine is to be believed, is to defend Afghan women against the Taliban, whom we created in the first place, to fight the Soviets. America gets a kick out of these flip flops. We propped up Saddam Hussein, then we had him hanged. We fought Communist Vietnam, then we staged a naval exercise with that same regime, as happened just recently, riling up China. Tension feeds the military industrial complex. Wars are even better.

Responding to 9/11, America also invaded Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with that catastrophe. Since the real reasons for our two current conflicts, access to oil and natural gas, defense of the petrodollar, war profiteering, are never admitted to, many Americans have concluded that we're simply waging war against Islam, which is, frankly, not that far off the mark considering our unequivocal support for Israel whenever it attacks Gaza, Lebanon, Syria or any other Muslim population. The U.S. has also been killing Pakistani civilians and threatening Iran. It's a miracle many Muslims don't hate us more.

Without Israel and oil, it's a safe bet we wouldn't be demonizing Muslims so relentlessly. As is, this stoked hatred is bringing out the worst in our character. On Yahoo! News, many comments on the Enright story don't condemn but applaud his obvious crime, and also bash Islam.

Bruce, "Slay the infidel.....stone the rape victim......beat your wife........mate with your goat.....wipe your bu tt with your bare hand.....AHHH the joys of islam!"

David, "this guy should get a medal and be aloud [sic] to blow up the mosque at the ground zero sight, its [sic] about time someone in ny stepped up and showed some american balls!!!"

Spreading like cancer across the internet, openly hateful and racist comments are especially common after stories about Muslims, blacks or Mexicans, the top three scapegoats at the moment. Obama is a lightning rod for anti-black racism, which is ironic because he does not favor blacks in any way. Like Bush, Clinton and the rest of our bank-bailing-out, paid-for politicians, Obama couldn't care less about the little guys. Eyeing his own wallet and his future after the White House, Obama's here to defend the moneyed interest. His blackness is merely symbolic, but that's enough to enrage the racists.

After Michelle Obama went to Spain, Alternative Right, a webzine with contributions from several established authors, had an article titled, "Michelle's Vacation in Whitey World." Among the comments, one man suggested that she should have gone to a blacker destination, like "Ghana or the Maldives."

One Sheila wrote, "I cringe every time I see a photo of the Sasquatch/Wookie as purportedly "First Lady" of American women. My spouse always comments that she reminds him of a chimp with her underbite, and I am always struck by her enormous feet and trapezius muscles. Either way I feel a sort of cognitive dissonance, such as when I view old photos and see 19th century blacks dressed in Victorian clothing. As far as her amazing European adventure, she is putting herself in white people's faces. Her very presence is a way of announcing the new order."

There's no new order, lady. Obama himself is a head fake! Scratch that skin lightly, and you'll see your beloved Dubya again. Everything is still in place, including the torture chambers. After another article in Alternative Right, a reader lamented, "After 9/11, we saw the lack of a white nation identity. There was abject surrender to Islam." Only the most deluded can call the killing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, and the occupation of two Islamic countries, an "abject surrender to Islam." Although not all Americans think this way, of course, this man is hardly alone. As the world's biggest source of terror, we're posing as its most helpless victims.

The scapegoating of Muslims, blacks and Mexicans gives the appearance that we're being threatened from without and below, when we're actually being mugged from above, from the inside. It's the entrenched who are killing us, not outsiders. Even with 9/11, too many questions remain. One must remember that Bin Laden began as a CIA asset, and two months before the attack, he was at the American hospital in Dubai, where a CIA agent visited him. On September 10, 2001, bin Laden was at the Army Hospital in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, to receive dialysis treatment. Again, no attempt was made to arrest him. Today, we're also not trying to arrest this man, and that's no conspiracy theory.

The Growing US Police State Continued...

Editor's NOTE:

Intellectuals from both ends of the political spectrum are beginning to express extreme concern about the growing US police state begun under President George W. Bush and agressively continued under President Barack Obama.

This piece by Paul Craig Roberts adds to those I posted HERE... The creation of a domestic police state is the "other side of the coin" so to speak of running a militaristic global empire as numerous authors have oultined including Professor Francis A. Boyle, Joel Clarke Gibbons, Jim Marrs and others. As these writers have indicated, a constitutional democratic republic (the original American entity brought into existence in 1789) is incompatible with the maintainence of a global empire. Therefore, the fascist elites recognize the need to destroy it if their take-over is to be complete.

The only solution to the growing police state/global empire is the disinfectant of complete transparency. It behooves all those who care about the future of this country to help educate their fellow citizens. The internet should be utilized as the primary vehicle while it is still reasonably free and unencumbered. The ability to critique the "Regime" on the web will no doubt eventually be curtailed.

-Dr. J. P. Hubert


The Nazification of the United States

Death of the First Amendment

By Paul Craig Roberts

August 27, 2010 "Information Clearing House" --Chuck Norris is no pinko-liberal-commie, and Human Events is a very conservative publication. The two have come together to produce one of the most important articles of our time, “Obama’s US Assassination Program.”

It seems only yesterday that Americans, or those interested in their civil liberties, were shocked that the Bush regime so flagrantly violated the FlSA law against spying on American citizens without a warrant. A federal judge serving on the FISA court even resigned in protest to the illegality of the spying.

Nothing was done about it. “National security” placed the president and executive branch above the law of the land. Civil libertarians worried that the US government was freeing its power from the constraints of law, but no one else seemed to care.

Encouraged by its success in breaking the law, the executive branch early this year announced that the Obama regime has given itself the right to murder Americans abroad if such Americans are considered a “threat.” “Threat” was not defined and, thus, a death sentence would be issued by a subjective decision of an unaccountable official.

There was hardly a peep out of the public or the media. Americans and the media were content for the government to summarily execute traitors and turncoats, and who better to identify traitors and turncoats than the government with all its spy programs.

The problem with this sort of thing is that once it starts, it doesn’t stop. As Norris reports citing Obama regime security officials, the next stage is to criminalize dissent and criticism of the government. The May 2010 National Security Strategy states: “We are now moving beyond traditional distinctions between homeland and national security. . . . This includes a determination to prevent terrorist attacks against the American people by fully coordinating the actions that we take abroad with the actions and precautions that we take at home.”

Most Americans will respond that the “indispensable” US government would never confuse an American exercising First Amendment rights with a terrorist or an enemy of the state. But, in fact, governments always have. Even one of our Founding Fathers, John Adams and the Federalist Party, had their “Alien and Sedition Acts” which targeted the Republican press.

Few with power can brook opposition or criticism, especially when it is a simple matter for those with power to sweep away constraints upon their power in the name of “national security.” Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan recently explained that more steps are being taken, because of the growing number of Americans who have been “captivated by extremist ideology or causes.” Notice that this phrasing goes beyond concern with Muslim terrorists.

In pursuit of hegemony over both the world and its own subjects, the US government is shutting down the First Amendment and turning criticism of the government into an act of “domestic extremism,” a capital crime punishable by execution, just as it was in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.

Initially German courts resisted Hitler’s illegal acts. Hitler got around the courts by creating a parallel court system, like the Bush regime did with its military tribunals. It won’t be long before a decision of the US Supreme Court will not mean anything. Any decision that goes against the regime will simply be ignored.

This is already happening in Canada, an American puppet state. Writing for the Future of Freedom Foundation, Andy Worthington documents the lawlessness of the US trial of Canadian Omar Khadr. In January of this year, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the interrogation of Khadr constituted “state conduct that violates the principles of fundamental justice” and “offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.” According to the Toronto Star, the Court instructed the government to “shape a response that reconciled its foreign policy imperatives with its constitutional obligations to Khadr,” but the puppet prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, ignored the Court and permitted the US government to proceed with its lawless abuse of a Canadian citizen.

September 11 destroyed more than lives, World Trade Center buildings, and Americans’ sense of invulnerability. The event destroyed American liberty, the rule of law and the US Constitution.

American Empire and the New World Order

Editor's NOTE:

I am extremely pleased to be able to publish this essay by Dr. Joel Clarke Gibbons a scholar of the first order, author and private business entrepreneur. Dr. Gibbons earned double doctorates in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University respectively. His latest book entitled: The Empire Strikes a Match in a World Full of Oil is an excellent read and can be obtained through Amazon.com HERE.... I wholeheartedly recommend it to readers of this blog.

While Dr. Gibbons and I disagree on some matters, in the main I concur with his thoughts on American Imperialism and the increasingly officious domestic US police state.

--Dr. J. P. Hubert


Rethinking the New World Order

By: Dr. Joel Clarke Gibbons, PhD Economics (University of Chicago), PhD Mathematics (Northwestern U.)
Logistics Research and Trading Co. at www.logisticresearch.com
Saint Joseph, Michigan, 49085
August 17, 2010

Paul Craig Roberts writes HERE... of the dangerous overextension of American military might and of its cost. A large coterie of observers who write from many different vantage points – former C.I.A. advisors, retired military men, and journalists from around the world – make the same case. When we understand the depth of this dangerous program and its cause, we can judge fully the danger and also perhaps begin to formulate a preferable alternative. The American enterprise that goes popularly by the name New World Order – but also known more darkly as the Empire – has grown in our midst without being properly understood.

A short excursion in a most bizarre bit of economic policy serves to put the matter in perspective. For many years now – I don’t know exactly when this began but figure something like twenty to twenty-five years ago – our Export-Import Bank has laid out billions of dollars to promote a rather surprising program: a program to maximize imports! Any manufacturer of goods in America could arrange to have his goods made anywhere else. He would them buy them from the foreign manufacturer and become their distributor in America, and the Ex-Im Bank would make it happen. Specifically, the foreign manufacturer would have to put up ten per cent of the investment capital to get up and running, and the Ex-Im Bank would lend the new joint venture the other ninety per cent of the required capital. It was shall we say, not unheard of that the silent partner in the new venture would happen to be perhaps the vice president of the benefiting country. The foreign partner would have its risk removed by virtue of a long term purchase agreement from the American manufacturer/distributor. Why would we pay well connected foreign capitalists to take our industries away from us?

Let me introduce you to a new class of persons: Citizens of the Empire. They come from every nation, though not from every condition of life. They come from the elite of every nation, and their loyalty is owed to that empire. As the saying goes, “Where their treasure is, there also will their heart be.” They are by no means all foreign born of course. Americans are not so foolish or so self-sacrificing as to provide this cushy status only to others. By far the largest number are Americans, Americans who work in a few fields of utility to the empire, and most notably on Wall Street. One thing is certain: they don’t make anything. Their motto is “We think; they sweat.” In writing this I do not want to diminish their work. This worldwide economic system, this “empire,” is in its way a brilliant innovation, and it has certainly served its citizens very well while it has also served the rest of us rather well too. We live extraordinarily well even when we have to pay our children’s college tuition ourselves. Never has the world been so prosperous because never have the productive capacities of the peoples of the world been so effectively harnessed in the service of all. We have opened the whole world and it has opened before us like a beautiful flower. Not only trade, but tourism and resettlement bespeak a world without borders. So while the world of economic affairs is by conventional standards quite bizarre, it works in surprising ways.

At the same time, it visibly does not work, in rather more conventional ways. It has bequeathed an America military burden that is totally unsustainable. Endless acreage of overseas military bases, endless wars, echoing whispers warning of hidden enemies lurking in every airport and even here at home. Countless spy cameras peering down on seemingly innocent shopping malls and street corners. Above all, endless mistrust and fear. There is something fundamentally inconsistent about this kind of empire. Something that pretends to defy the simple laws of something: economics? Sociology and anthropology? Human nature? The empire has triggered forces of unknown magnitude that we think are being kept at bay, but only at a cost that we cannot continue to pay indefinitely. The more smoothly and efficiently the empire functions, it seems, the more people hate it and us. More to the point, the more people seem willing to strap on bombs to kill their equally poor neighbors just to spite us.

We know that our eight-hundred-something foreign military installations cost too much and make too many enemies. If this empire is really to be the great benefactor of the world, why does it survive only at the point of a bayonet? It seems rather implausible that it would be the rather backward foreign workers who have at last gotten work in a factory or workshop somewhere who are the enemies of this empire. Compared with their former station, they are among the greatest beneficiaries. Human nature being what it is, it is hardly surprising that there are going to be malcontents and rabble-rousers and opportunists who want a bigger slice than chance has apportioned to them. At worst however they would be a police problem. After all, we have our bank robbers too. Above all, at worst they would be a local problem to be dealt with by local police and courts. What are our soldiers, and German soldiers and Italian soldiers, doing policing their streets and rounding up – or simply immolating – their miscreants? What are our drones doing patrolling their skies? An army has only one job: to confront and defeat other armies. Defeating the public is never a military mission, and that truth cuts across not only military practicality but natural law and rights as well.

What seems hard to fathom is how is it that anyone, anyone at all, could have become so deluded as to think that defeating civilians could ever be a military mission. It is at this point that we confront the logic of this empire: the steel underneath the velvet glove as it were. As it is presently constituted, the empire is Our empire. We built it and we run it. There are other centers of power who, while by no means hostile to the benefits that the world without borders provides, would rather it not be ours. Whether they dream of replacing us, or merely of sharing it with us is a mystery, but above all they don’t want it to be Ours. Any large and advanced country would naturally see things that way: Russia, China, India, perhaps Brazil. Let’s say that they just want to share. We don’t want to share. I think I speak for the American people in that matter, though quite obviously I do not actually speak for myself. It is not in some narrow sense a cost of the new world order that is too high; it is the cost of attempting to monopolize it that is too high. The very same empowerment of people all over the world, or drawing them into our technological civilization, that accelerates their development and makes more serious competitors. As but one little example, the day is not far off when China will be the source of computer chips to rival Intel Corp, and computers based on them to rival Microsoft. Russia has always had its own designs, and only their lack of infrastructure for mass production of both hardware and software have kept their computers of our shelves.

We find ourselves the greatest beneficiaries of a unified world, but a world that is also becoming, or seen as becoming, a growing threat to our hegemony. We are, in a word, in precisely the situation that the Athens of long ago, the Athens of Pericles and Socrates, found herself in. Master of the seas at that time; with trading outposts stretching from the Spanish coast to the Crimea and the eastern shores of the Black Sea, but gripped with fear that this all of this could be taken away at any time. The fall of Athens is now understood to have been not a murder but a suicide. Murdered by fear.

There are too many other powers for us to control even with ten times our number of bases. In fact, the bases have long since become counterproductive because their expense is draining our wealth. Our defensive actions are not limited to arms and wars. We have pursued a program of reducing the population of the world, especially the poorest parts of the world, by “family planning.” Why is it that this new world order, this great engine of advancement of every sort, this world without borders, should require eliminating the people it benefits – why does it not work better the more people it benefits? This is also a fundamental contradiction.

More recently another presumed inherent limitation has been advanced: it is supposed to be some sort of threat to the climate of the whole planet, of such great extent that fundamental freedoms must be surrendered to Save us from ourselves. The exposure of the scientific hoax of “global warming” perpetrated by a small coterie of ambitious climatologists and exploited by cunning and unprincipled political leaders is warning enough of this contradiction. (Editor's NOTE: Dr. Gibbons and I apparently disagree on the issue of climate change) In summary, whether it is because the new world order has enabled our rivals to gain the technological and economic tools to challenge us, or has enabled the poor of the Earth to outnumber us, or has enabled all of us to suffocate us – the story goes – the order cannot continue. This is the greatest contradiction: that our success is killing us.

Well, it is a contradiction. Our success is not our enemy. Neither foreign powers nor abundant foreign peasants nor foreign SUVs are plotting our ruin. If that is not our fate, what is the alternative? Two principles have to be accepted. The first is that this is a multipolar world. It is already a multipolar world even though no single rival can challenge us. If we want this to be Our empire we will have to fight for it, but it is a fight that will destroy the very way of life we would be fighting to preserve. The other principle is that, since we will not be empowered to make the laws and impose them, everyone including us will need to submit to a true Rule of Law in which all are equal before the law. This law is not just an ephemera. It needs courts and administrators of justice, just as our courts do now. I can think of few greater services that our leaders and legal experts could offer the new world order than to actually deliver the legal framework for keeping order.

To contact Joel Clarke Gibbons, E-mail him at: jgibbons@logisticresearch.com

"War is the Business of America"

Down To The Last Trillion in Red Ink:
US Treasury Running on Fumes

By Paul Craig Roberts

July 27, 2010 "Information Clearing House" --The White House is screaming like a stuck pig. WikiLeaks’ release of the Afghan War Documents “puts the lives of our soldiers and our coalition partners at risk.”

What nonsense. Obama’s war puts the lives of American soldiers at risk, and the craven puppet state behavior of “our partners” in serving as US mercenaries is what puts their troops at risk.

Keep in mind that it was someone in the US military that leaked the documents to WikiLeaks. This means that there is a spark of rebellion within the Empire itself.

And rightly so. The leaked documents show that the US has committed numerous war crimes and that the US government and military have lied through their teeth in order to cover up the failure of their policies. These are the revelations that Washington wants to keep secret.

If Obama cared about the lives of our soldiers, he would not have sent them to a war, the purpose of which he cannot identify. Earlier in his regime, Obama admitted that he did not know what the mission was in Afghanistan. He vowed to find out what the mission was and to tell us, but he never did. After being read the riot act by the military/security complex, which recycles war profits into political campaign contributions, Obama simply declared the war to be “necessary.” No one has ever explained why the war is necessary.

The government cannot explain why the war is necessary, because it is not necessary to the American people. Any necessary reason for the war has to do with the enrichment of narrow private interests and with undeclared agendas. If the agendas were declared and the private interests being served identified, even the American sheeple might revolt.

The Obama regime has made war the business of America. Escalation in Afghanistan has gone hand in hand with drone attacks on Pakistan and the use of proxy forces to conduct wars in Pakistan and North Africa. Currently, the US is conducting provocative naval exercises off the coasts of China and North Korea and instigating war between Columbia and Venezuela in South America. Former CIA director Michael Hayden declared on July 25 that an attack on Iran seems unavoidable.

With the print and TV media captive, why doesn’t Washington simply tell us that the country is at war without going to the trouble of war? That way the munitions industry can lay off its workers and put the military appropriations directly into profits. We could avoid the war crimes and wasted lives of our soldiers.

The US economy and the well-being of Americans are being sacrificed to the regime’s wars. The states are broke and laying off teachers. Even “rich” California, formerly touted as “the seventh largest economy in the world,” is reduced to issuing script and cutting its state workers’ pay to the minimum wage.

Supplemental war appropriations have become routine affairs, but the budget deficit is invoked to block any aid to Americans--but not to Israel. On July 25 the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reported that the US and Israel had signed a multi-billion dollar deal for Boeing to provide Israel with a missile system.

Americans can get no help out of Washington, but the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, declared that Washington’s commitment to Israel’s security is “not negotiable.” Washington’s commitment to California and to the security of the rest of us is negotiable. War spending has run up the budget deficit, and the deficit precludes any help for Americans.

With the US bankrupting itself in wars, America’s largest creditor, China, has taken issue with America’s credit rating. The head of China’s largest credit rating agency declared: “The US is insolvent and faces bankruptcy as a pure debtor nation.” (Editor's bold emphasis throughout)

On July 12, Niall Ferguson, an historian of empire, warned that the American empire could collapse suddenly from weakness brought on by its massive debts and that such a collapse could be closer than we think.

Deaf, dumb, and blind, Washington policymakers prattle on about “thirty more years of war.”

____________


Pentagon Papers’ Ellsberg weighs in on WikiLeaks

John Nichols,
Capital Times associate editor | Posted: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 6:23

The Obama White House was quick to condemn the publication Sunday evening of more than 91,000 secret documents detailing the monumentally misguided and frequently failed attempt by the United States to occupy Afghanistan.

National Security Adviser James Jones took the lead in attacking the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks for making the details of the war available to the American people -- who are, ultimately, supposed to define the direction of U.S. foreign policy -- by declaring: “The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security.”

Despite the fact that the Afghan War Diary records, which are being published by the New York Times, The Guardian and Der Speigel, detail the mess in Afghanistan, and point to the bigger mess that will be made if the occupation is expanded as the Obama administration proposes, Jones offered a classic don’t-confuse-us-with-the-facts response to the release. “These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people.”

The echo you are hearing is that of the Nixon administration responding to the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

We can only hope that Obama and his aides have read enough history to recognize that Nixon’s over-reaction to the Pentagon Papers began a process that would lead -- at least in part -- to a House Judiciary Committee vote to impeach him, and to the only presidential resignation in the country’s history.

It happens that, on the eve of the publication of the Afghanistan logs, I was with Daniel Ellsberg, the prime player in the release of the Pentagon Papers. We were in Cleveland at the Progressive Democrats of America conference, where a terrific documentary on Ellsberg, “The Most Dangerous Man in America,” was screened, and I then interviewed the man who exposed the truth about the Vietnam War.

Ellsberg is a fan of WikiLeaks in particular and whistle-blowers in general. He argues that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “is serving our democracy and serving our rule of law precisely by challenging the secrecy regulations, which are not laws in most cases, in this country.”

Of Obama administration attacks on Assange and others, and the administration’s broader crackdown on whistle-blowers, Ellsberg says wryly: “That’s not the kind of change I voted for when I voted for him.”

What’s the right response from officials who take seriously their oaths to obey a Constitution that places all power with the people -- and that necessarily requires that the people get information about wars being waged in their name but without their informed consent?

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., did a whole lot better than the administration.

“However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan,” said Kerry, whose discomfort with the Afghanistan operation has grown increasingly evident. “Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent.”

Kerry should hold hearings with regard to the Afghan War Diary.

Other members of the House and Senate should respond as the late Vermont Republican Sen. George Aiken did to the publication of the Pentagon Papers -- with an objection that “for a long time, the executive branch has tended to regard Congress as a foreign enemy -- to be told as little as possible,” Aiken charged.

Already, there are those who are trying to distinguish between the Pentagon Papers case and the Afghan War Diary. The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus argues that we all should “pause for a moment before accepting the comparison that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange makes between his release of more than 90,000 secret military documents about the Afghan fighting to that of the Pentagon Papers back in 1971.”

Pincus makes a credible point. Of course there are differences in content, and the character of that content, in the timing of the release and the identities of those responsible for the leaks.

But there is a fundamental similarity that makes Assange right when he tells The Guardian: “The nearest analogue is the Pentagon Papers that exposed how the United States was prosecuting the war in Vietnam.”

Ellsberg said in 1971, when he surrendered to authorities who planned to try him: “I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public.” Ellsberg’s argument was that the oaths he had sworn as a Marine and a military analyst were to the Constitution, a document that Jefferson said in his first inaugural address is best defended by “the diffusion of information and the arraignment of all abuses at the bar of public reason.”

WikiLeaks says today: “We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information.”

Ellsberg has frequently noted “immediate parallels” between the people who these days provide information about the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations to WikiLeaks and the leaking he did during the Vietnam War to the New York Times.

Those who get the truth to the American people, Ellsberg says, “(show) better judgment in putting it out than the people who keep it secret from the American people.”

____________


U.S. Congress Passes $59 Bn Afghan War Funding Bill
7/28/2010 6:51 AM ET

(RTTNews) - The U.S. Congress on Tuesday approved $59 billion to pay for troop increase in Afghanistan and other emergency spending, sending the bill for President Barack Obama's signature.

The bill includes $37.1 billion to pay for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, $2.9 billion for earthquake relief in Haiti and other money for domestic programs. Provisions not related to the war brought the bill total to nearly $59 billion.

The new funding is on top of the $130 billion Congress already approved for Afghanistan and Iraq this year. The Congress has appropriated over 1 trillion dollars for the two unpopular wars since 2001.

House Democrats initially included $20 billion in domestic spending to the measure, but the Senate stripped it out, a process that took several weeks.

The House of Representatives approved the spending measure with a 308 to 114 vote after it passed the Senate earlier. While 102 Democrats, who have stalled the measure for months, voted against the bill, 160 Republicans supported it despite their frequent opposition to Obama's policies.

The Democrats, who want a more definitive timetable for withdrawing troops, in their opposition to the measure said the country should be addressing pressing needs at home rather than a futile conflict thousands of miles away.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus said Congress could not continue to write a blank check for a war in Afghanistan that had ultimately made our county less safe.

"What has changed in my mind is I am so discouraged at the chances of our commitment in Afghanistan succeeding that I think it's time to say, no more," said Congressman Henry A. Waxman.

Senator Russ Feingold said the House vote showed growing concern with the President's flawed Afghan strategy.

"Unfortunately, the outcome of this vote means this war will continue to cost billions of taxpayer dollars, and more importantly, more American lives, for a strategy that is counterproductive in our global fight against al-Qaeda," he said.

He said rather than adding billions to the deficit for an open-ended war in Afghanistan, the administration should set a flexible timetable for ending US' massive and open-ended military presence in Afghanistan.

The growing number of Democrats opposing funding-- double the number who voted down a similar measure last year-- illustrates the widening divide between Obama and members of his party about Afghanistan, The Washington Post said.

However, Congressman Howard P 'Buck' McKeon, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee who backed the war funding, said he was confident General David Petraeus and his men would succeed in Afghanistan, if given the time, space and resources they needed.

"By passing this supplemental, we can continue funding a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan: a clear strategy after years of neglect under President Bush, and a strategy that can prevent Afghanistan from re-emerging as a terrorist-dominated state that poses a threat to the American people," said Senate Majority Leader Steny H Hoyer.

Asserting that under President Obama's renewed focus on Afghanistan, the United States has killed or captured hundreds of terrorist leaders, including much of the top leadership of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Hoyer said the President, at the same time, had also committed us to a clear time-frame to evaluate the effectiveness of our efforts and to change our approach if it proved ineffective.

"The President is taking a wise and balanced approach in Afghanistan, and it deserves our support. The supplemental also funds our troops as they make a responsible redeployment from Iraq, allowing the Iraqi government to stand on its own two feet," he added.

"The delay in passing this legislation was caused by one thing and only one thing—the House Democratic majority's continuing and unwavering appetite for spending," said Rep. Jerry Lewis (R., Calif.), the top Republican on the Appropriations Committee.

The funds were requested in February, and the Pentagon warned Congress that it would run out of money for the wars by August if money was not appropriated by then.