The Obama/GOP Consensus | Black Agenda Report

The Obama/GOP Consensus | Black Agenda Report

On the eve of President Obama’s State of the Union address, Cynthia Gordy, writer for the Blogging the Beltway column in TheRoot.com, asked the question: “Will Obama talk about black unemployment?” Of course, Gordy already knew the answer – “Hell no!” – but proceeded to discuss the horrific state of Black jobless America with someone who actually cared, Christian Weller, from the Center for American Progress. Ms. Gordy ended the piece on a plaintive note. “Here’s hoping Obama will at least have a more elaborate plan to truly lift up all communities,” she wrote. What a strange and deeply sad relationship exists between many Black Americans and the brown-skinned corporate politician in the White House. After two years, there is no longer any expectation of reciprocity, only a muted hope and prayer that Obama would behave decently.

He didn’t. In announcing a five-year freeze on domestic spending, Obama enters a new phase of aggressive – rather than furtive – collaboration with the GOP. To ensure that catastrophe cannot be avoided for the tens of millions battered and set adrift by the two (lesser and greater) recessions of the 21st century, Obama will join with Republicans to prevent the domestic arms of government from coming to the people’s aid, by freezing finances. With whole communities in a state of economic dislocation, Obama burns the rescue boats and poisons the water, all the while promising that the necessary budgetary savings will not be achieved “on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens” – as if Wall Street’s bankers will shield the helpless with their well-bonused bodies.

The First Black President had nothing new or promising of substance to offer anyone who is not rich, just repackaged items from his dismally disappointing past. No dollar signs to give meaning to the president’s mystical and misleading rhetoric on jobs, which will somehow be made to appear through a uniquely American process of “innovation” and “self-invention” inaccessible to lesser peoples.

Lawrence O'Donnell Asks Rep. Steve King if He's Got His Christian ID Card to Prove He's Not a Muslim | Video Cafe

Actually there is a "Christian ID card". Its called "Baptism". This is the rite of membership into the Christian church. Often the congregation in which this rite of baptism is performed will provide a certificate, or, at least enter the new member's name into its membership roll.

Trinity United Church of Christ is a congregation of the United Church of Christ which is a traditional mainstream denomination. If President Obama is a member of this congregation it is almost certain that he has been baptized. If he has been baptized he is a Christian and cannot be a Muslim.

I cannot believe the ignorance being displayed here over the facts of these religions being discussed, particularly by people like Kind and O Riley who claim to be defending the Christian faith. The secular liberals I can understand.

Lawrence O'Donnell Asks Rep. Steve King if He's Got His Christian ID Card to Prove He's Not a Muslim | Video Cafe

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Goodbye to All That | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Goodbye to All That | TomDispatch

Today, after almost two decades of exuberant imperial impunity, Washington finds itself in an uncomfortably unraveling situation. Think of it as a kind of slo-mo Gorbachev moment -- without a Gorbachev in sight.

What we’re dealing with here is, in a sense, the story of two “abroads.” In 1990, in the wake of a disastrous war in Afghanistan, in the midst of a people’s revolt, the Russians lost what they came to call their “near abroad,” the lands from Eastern Europe to Central Asia that had made up the Soviet Empire. The U.S., being the wealthier and stronger of the two Cold War superpowers, had something the Soviets never possessed. Call it a “far abroad.” Now, in the midst of another draining, disastrous Afghan war, in the face of another people’s revolt, a critical part of its far abroad is being shaken to its roots.

In the Middle East, the two pillars of American imperial power and control have long been Egypt and Saudi Arabia -- along, of course, with obdurate Israel and little Jordan. In previous eras, the chosen bulwarks of “stability” and “moderation,” terms much favored in Washington, had been the Shah of Iran in the 1960s and 1970s (and you remember his fate), and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s (and you remember his fate, too). In the larger region the Bush administration liked to call “the Greater Middle East” or “the arc of instability,” another key pillar has been Pakistan, a country now in destabilization mode under the pressure of a disastrous American war in Afghanistan.

And yet, without a Gorbachevian bone in its body, the Obama administration has still been hamstrung. While negotiating madly behind the scenes to retain power and influence in Egypt, it is not likely to call the troops out of the barracks. American military intervention remains essentially inconceivable. Don’t wait for Washington to send paratroopers to the Suez Canal as those fading imperial powers France and England tried to do in 1956. It won’t happen. Washington is too drained by years of war and economic bad times for that.

Facing genuine shock and awe (the people’s version), the Obama administration has been shaken. It has shown itself to be weak, visibly fearful, at a loss for what to do, and always several steps behind developing events. Count on one thing: its officials are already undoubtedly worried about a domestic political future in which the question (never good for Democrats) could be: Who lost the Middle East? In the meantime, their oh-so-solemn, carefully calibrated statements, still in command mode, couched in imperial-speak, and focused on what client states in the Middle East must do, might as well be spoken to the wind. Like the Cheshire Cat’s grin, only the rhetoric of the last decades seems to be left.

Paul Craig Roberts: Kleptocrats at Work

Paul Craig Roberts: Kleptocrats at Work

The careless waste is shocking and even more so to car buffs who consider many of the ruined cars to be artistic masterpieces. This is the kind of opulent waste that we associate with family-owned countries. But before we Americans start feeling superior, consider that the U.S. government puts the Brunei finance minister to shame.

On January 29, 2002, CBS Evening News reported that the Pentagon had lost track of $2.3 trillion, yes, $2,300 billion. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld admitted, “According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” “We know it is gone,” said Jim Minnery of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, “but we don’t know what they spent it on.”

Reported thefts from Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction aid rival Brunei’s missing billions. Pallets of cash stacked high have been flown out of Afghanistan in plain view. The stories of corruption and missing funds are so numerous that they are no longer reported.

The U.S. Congress, at President Obama’s request, recently passed the largest military spending bill of all time in behalf of the share prices of the military/security complex, while many of the 50 states teeter on bankruptcy and default on pensions and municipal bonds and slash education, medical, and other services. For “our” government in Washington, it is a no-brainer that the profits of the military-security complex take every precedence over every need of the American people.

If the Brunei finance minister’s billion dollar car collection becomes an artificial reef, it will foster marine life. In contrast, Dick Cheney seriously damaged, perhaps for many years to come, the Gulf of Mexico, because Cheney believed a few extra bucks for the oil companies were more important than safety standards. The missing safety standards have cost British Petroleum $20 billion in clean up and restitution costs.

U.S. taxpayers are paying the Department of Homeland Security
$56,336,000,000 this year to porno-scan and grope them and otherwise invade their privacy, while millions of Americans are foreclosed out of their homes.

How are the priorities of the US. government superior to those of the Brunei finance minister? When it comes to waste and corruption, lies and deception, the U.S. government has no equal.

What Can We Do to Support Egypt? | CommonDreams.org

What Can We Do to Support Egypt? | CommonDreams.org: "The Anarchist Moment (Black Rose, 1984)"

Published on Monday, February 7, 2011 by New. Clear. Vision.
What Can We Do to Support Egypt?
Address in Solidarity with the Popular Revolution

by John Clark

We have all been moved by the courageous actions of the Egyptian people in recent weeks. In response to their inspiring example, we might ask the following question: What effective steps can we take to support their struggle for liberation, and to support similar struggles throughout the world?

There is a very easy, and very bad, response to this question. Unfortunately, it is also the one that is most popular. This response is to express our great sympathy and admiration for their struggle, and then to go on acting as we have in the past. I propose that a more constructive response would be, first, to become better educated about what has made their struggle necessary, and, next, to begin to act in ways that that will make it, and similar struggles, more likely to succeed in the future.

If we look at the actions and statements of the U.S. regime over the past days, we see the strategies of a system that has long supported dictatorship and oppression and now finds itself in an embarrassing situation. Its heart and soul are on the side of dictatorship, but its words must now be on the side of the people. It finds itself in the unenviable position of trying desperately to manipulate a difficult situation so that the interests it defends will not be compromised by the catastrophe at hand — the catastrophe of democracy breaking out.

Let’s look at some of the recent statements of our rulers.

Last week, Vice President Biden said, “I hope [that] President Mubarak … is going to respond to some of the legitimate concerns that are being raised. Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things and he’s been very responsible … relative to geopolitical interests in the region…. I would not refer to him as a dictator.” Thus, as late as just over a week ago, it was still acceptable to express friendship with the dictator and to hope that a few gradual reforms would appease the Egyptian people. The following day, the senator and former Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry could still call Mubarak “a friend to the United States and a friend personally.” And on the heels of this, U.S. envoy Frank Wisner could still say, “I believe that President Mubarak’s continued leadership is crucial — it’s his chance to write his own legacy.”

Soon after, however, in the face of growing mobilization by the Egyptian people, it became clear that at least some degree of significant change was necessary, so that the emerging official goal would be the containment and direction of that change to whatever degree possible. President Obama had reached the point of advising Mubarak that there must be “an orderly transition,” though a transition to precisely what was not at all clear. We were told only that “it must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.”

What Obama did not, of course, mention as he pronounced these pious sentiments, was that what U.S. regimes have supported for thirty years — up to just a few days ago, when such a policy became impossible — has been the precise opposite of what he now espouses verbally. These regimes have supported not peaceful change but rather the violent enforcement of a disastrous status quo. The many billions of dollars that the U.S. government has sent to Mubarak — which is now widely known to be $1.5 billion per year — have been primarily in military aid to keep his violent, repressive regime in power. And contrary to any ideological illusions, intimidating a people into submission through force and the threat of force is not a “peaceful” process.

As of today, the Obama administration has reached the point of expressing its support for a gradual transition of some sort under the tutelage of the dictator’s handpicked vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained regarding this necessary transition, “That takes some time. There are certain things that have to be done in order to prepare.” She did not define “certain things.” However, we can safely assume that these “things” include finding ways of assuring that a form of “democracy” emerges that has safeguards against the will of the people diverging too radically from the will of the dominant global powers.

Secretary Clinton refused to address the question of how the necessary preparations for “democracy” relate to the question of Israel and Palestine. However, her ally, Mr. Davutoglu of Turkey commented, “It is better not to talk about Israel-Palestine now. It is better to separate these issues.” It is, however, quite obviously impossible to separate these issues. Thus, the question posed is how to read this statement in support of the impossible. The obvious reading is the following. What is “better” is that the public and the press should not inquire into how the dominant forces are planning to engineer a solution to the crisis that is compatible with the goals of the U.S. and Israeli regimes and of various allied interests, whatever the views and aspirations of the Egyptian people may be.

There are many other intriguing statements by our rulers that might be analyzed — including Senator John McCain’s comparison of the movements against authoritarian regimes in the region to a “virus” that is “spreading throughout the Middle East” — but I hope that the point has been made. All of this recent history must be understood in its larger context, which includes a long history of U.S. government support for dictatorships around the world. We might refer merely to such notable examples as Francisco Franco, Ferdinand Marcos, and Suharto — one of the greatest mass-murderers of the horrifyingly genocidal 20th century. This support continues, as dictatorial conditions persist among U.S. allies including Cameroon, Turkmenistan, Equatorial Guinea, Chad, Uzbekistan, Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia (as recently documented by Joshua Holland for AlterNet).

The conclusion we must draw from this long and consistent record is that U.S. support for dictatorships is not a historical anomaly, but rather points to something systemic about the U.S. political and economic structures. If we sympathize with the liberation struggle of the Egyptian people and others around the world, it is incumbent on us to find out what that something is and to do something about it.

So what we can do? First, we might ask who we are. As I use the term here, “we” are those who believe that it is completely intolerable to live in a world of material abundance in which a billion people nevertheless live in absolute poverty. “We” are those who believe that it is intolerable to live in a world with abundant potential for freedom, justice and peace, while that same world is fraught with oppression, exploitation, and aggression. “We” are those who believe that it is intolerable to live in a world capable of providing for all while living in harmony with nature, but which nevertheless continues on a path to global ecological catastrophe.

What we can do is to become educated and to act. It is important that we find dependable sources of information and that we avoid dependable sources of indoctrination. Look to the alternatives to the dominant corporate media. As we come to understand the dominant political system, we begin to see how it is designed precisely to reproduce all those injustices and irrationalities that have been mentioned. More specifically, we begin to see how it is designed to support dictatorship and oppose struggles for liberation.

Our own ruling party is quite brilliant in that, unlike that of Egypt, it has two branches. One, called the Republicans, takes the initiative in developing the trajectory of the system. It experiments with how far the limits of that system can be pushed. When this development causes too much disorder and opposition, the other branch, called the Democrats, steps in, introduces measures to restabilize the system, diffuses dissent, and then, before long, turns power back over to Republicans.

Repeatedly, we hear well-intentioned people say, “I can’t believe that Obama has done X.” “I can’t believe that Obama has escalated the war.” “I can’t believe that Obama supports dictators.” Et cetera, ad infinitum. There is a solution to this perplexing condition. Grow up and believe it. President Obama does exactly what he has been hired to do.

Understanding presupposes that one can finally step outside the system of domination. It means that one has become conscious of the ways in which that system has colonized not only the whole world, but also our own minds. When one understands, one can then move on to action, and will indeed feel a powerful need to act.

So what does it mean to act? To act means to organize to create another world. A world in which people will laugh when told that the way to defend “democracy” is to support dictators. A world in which people will laugh when told that a regime that refuses the majority of its people the elemental right to return to their homeland is a “democratic” regime. It means that after laughing, we will find a way out of these tragic absurdities. It means that we will find the courage to stand in the way of the genocidal, ecocidal machine, that we will finally learn how to become a collective force that blocks its advance, and that ultimately, we will change the course of history.

Today, we might say that it means not only supporting the brave people of Egypt, but following their noble example and doing the same thing here … and everywhere.
New. Clear. Vision. © 2007 - 2011

John Clark, Ph.D., is the Gregory F. Curtin Distinguished Professor in Humane Letters and the Professions and Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University New Orleans. Among his many books are The Anarchist Moment (Black Rose, 1984), Environmental Philosophy (Prentice Hall, 2004), and the forthcoming Aborder l'impossible (Taking on the Impossible). This statement was originally delivered as an address for a rally held at the Hale Boggs Federal Building in New Orleans, on the International Day of Mobilization in Solidarity with the Egyptian and Tunisian Revolutions, February 5, 2011.

Recognizing the Language of Tyranny | CommonDreams.org

Recognizing the Language of Tyranny | CommonDreams.org

Published on Monday, February 7, 2011 by TruthDig.com
Recognizing the Language of Tyranny

by Chris Hedges

Empires communicate in two languages. One language is expressed in imperatives. It is the language of command and force. This militarized language disdains human life and celebrates hypermasculinity. It demands. It makes no attempt to justify the flagrant theft of natural resources and wealth or the use of indiscriminate violence. When families are gunned down at a checkpoint in Iraq they are referred to as having been “lit up.” So it goes. The other language of empire is softer. It employs the vocabulary of ideals and lofty goals and insists that the power of empire is noble and benevolent. The language of beneficence is used to speak to those outside the centers of death and pillage, those who have not yet been totally broken, those who still must be seduced to hand over power to predators. The road traveled to total disempowerment, however, ends at the same place. It is the language used to get there that is different.

This language of blind obedience and retribution is used by authority in our inner cities, from Detroit to Oakland, as well as our prison systems. It is a language Iraqis and Afghans know intimately. But to the members of our dwindling middle class—as well as those in the working class who have yet to confront our new political and economic configuration—the powerful use phrases like the consent of the governed and democracy that help lull us into complacency. The longer we believe in the fiction that we are included in the corporate power structure, the more easily corporations pillage the country without the threat of rebellion. Those who know the truth are crushed. Those who do not are lied to. Those who consume and perpetuate the lies—including the liberal institutions of the press, the church, education, culture, labor and the Democratic Party—abet our disempowerment. No system of total control, including corporate control, exhibits its extreme forms at the beginning. These forms expand as they fail to encounter resistance.

The tactic of speaking in two languages is as old as empire itself. The ancient Greeks and the Romans did it. So did the Spanish conquistadors, the Ottomans, the French and later the British. Those who inhabit exploited zones on the peripheries of empire see and hear the truth. But the cries of those who are exploited are ignored or demonized. The rage they express does not resonate with those trapped in self-delusion, those who continue to trust in the ultimate goodness of empire. This is the truth articulated in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India.” These writers understood that empire is about violence and theft. And the longer the theft continues, the more brutal empire becomes. The tyranny empire imposes on others it finally imposes on itself. The predatory forces unleashed by empire consume the host. Look around you.

The narratives we hear are those fabricated for us by the state, Hollywood and the press. These narratives are taught in our schools, preached in our pulpits and celebrated in war documentaries such as “Restrepo.” These narratives humanize and ennoble the enforcers of empire. The government, the military, the police and our intelligence agents are lionized. These control groups, we are assured, are the guardians of our virtues and our protectors. They produce our heroes. And those who challenge this narrative—who denounce the lies—become the enemy.

Those who administer empire—elected officials, corporate managers, generals and the celebrity courtiers who disseminate the propaganda—become very wealthy. They make immense fortunes whether they deliver the nightly news, sit on the boards of corporations, or rise, lavished with corporate endorsements, within the vast industry of spectacle and entertainment. They all pay homage, even in moments defined as criticism, to the essential goodness of corporate power. They shut out all real debate. They ignore flagrant injustices and abuse. They peddle the illusions that keep us passive and amused. But as our society is reconfigured into an oligarchic system, with a permanent and vast underclass, along with a shrinking and unstable middle class, these illusions lose their power. The language of pleasant deception must be replaced with the overt language of force. It is hard to continue to live in a state of self-delusion once unemployment benefits run out, once the only job available comes without benefits or a living wage, once the future no longer conforms to the happy talk that saturates our airwaves. At this point rage becomes the engine of response, and whoever can channel that rage inherits power. The manipulation of that rage has become the newest task of the corporate propagandists, and the failure of the liberal class to defend core liberal values has left its members with nothing to contribute to the debate.

The Belgian King Leopold, promising to abolish slavery and usher the Congolese into the “modern” era, was permitted by his European allies to form the Congo Free State in 1885. It was touted as a humanitarian gesture, as was the Spanish conquest of the Americas, as was our own occupation of Iraq. Leopold organized a ruthless force of native and foreign overseers—not unlike our own mercenary armies—to loot the Congo of ivory and rubber. By the time the Belgian monarch was done, some 5 million to 8 million Congolese had been slaughtered. It was the largest act of genocide in the modern era until the Nazi Holocaust. Leopold, even in the midst of his rampage, was lionized in Europe for his virtue. He was loathed in the periphery—as we are in Iraq and Afghanistan—where the Congolese and others understood what he was about. But these voices, like the voices of those we oppress, were almost never heard.

The Nazis, for whom the Holocaust was as much a campaign of plunder as it was a campaign to rid Europe of Jews, had two methods for greeting arrivals at their four extermination camps. If the transports came from Western Europe, the savage Ukrainian and Lithuanian guards, with their whips, dogs and clubs, were kept out of sight. The wealthier European Jews were politely ushered into an elaborate ruse, including fake railway stations complete with flower beds, until once stripped naked they became incapable of resistance and could be herded in rows of five under whips into the gas chambers. The Nazis knew that those who had not been broken, those who possessed a belief in their own personal empowerment, would fight back. When the transports came from the east, where Jews had long lived in fear, tremendous poverty and terror, there was no need for such theatrics. Mothers, fathers, the elderly and children, accustomed to overt repression and the language of command and retribution, were brutally driven from the transports by sadistic guards. The object was to create mass hysteria. The fate of the two groups was the same. It was the tactic that differed.

All centralized power, once restraints and regulations are abolished, once it is no longer accountable to citizens, knows no limit to internal and external plunder. The corporate state, which has emasculated our government, is creating a new form of feudalism, a world of masters and serfs. It speaks to those who remain in a state of self-delusion in the comforting and familiar language of liberty, freedom, prosperity and electoral democracy. It speaks to the poor and the oppressed in the language of naked coercion. But, here too, all will end up in the same place.

Those trapped in the blighted inner cities that are our internal colonies or brutalized in our prison system, especially African-Americans, see what awaits us all. So do the inhabitants in southern West Virginia, where coal companies have turned hundreds of thousands of acres into uninhabitable and poisoned wastelands. Poverty, repression and despair in these peripheral parts of empire are as common as drug addiction and cancer. Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis and Palestinians can also tell us who we are. They know that once self-delusion no longer works it is the iron fist that speaks. The solitary and courageous voices that rise up from these internal and external colonies of devastation are silenced or discredited by the courtiers who serve corporate power. And even those who do hear these voices of dissent often cannot handle the truth. They prefer the Potemkin facade. They recoil at the “negativity.” Reality, especially when you grasp what corporations are doing in the name of profit to the planet’s ecosystem, is terrifying.

All tyrannies come endowed with their own peculiarities. This makes it hard to say one form of totalitarianism is like another. There are always enough differences to make us unsure that history is repeating itself. The corporate state does not have a Politburo. It does not dress its Homeland Security agents in jackboots. There is no raving dictator. American democracy—like the garishly painted train station at the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka—looks real even as the levers of power are in the hands of corporations. But there is one aspect the corporate state shares with despotic regimes and the collapsed empires that have plagued human history. It too communicates in two distinct languages, that is until it does not have to, at which point it will be too late.
Copyright © 2011 Truthdig, L.L.C.

CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names: "The God That's Failing

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Turn on the tv and you hear the predictable bray from predictable types like Mort Zuckerman, Zbigniev Brzezinski, John Bolton and the Israel Lobby passim that, say what you will, Mubarak and Tunisia’s ejected president Ben Ali and other prospectively tottering tyrants are “our sons of bitches”, as FDR put it, and we should stand by them in recognition of decades of useful service to the Empire. Republicans will be hammering Obama for “losing” Tunisia and maybe Egypt etc., through this coming election cycle."