Yes, The Int'l Banking Cartel does run the Nobel Peace Prize - OBAMA WINS [duh]

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Obama's Peace


By Joseph Massad

                           
 

october 16, 2009
http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=m58970&hd=&size=1&l=e

For his continued wars against Pakistanis, Afghanis, and Iraqis, his support for the overthrow of democracy in Honduras, his abetting dictatorships across the Arab and Muslim worlds (which his government finances, arms, and trains in torture methods), his planning for a possible invasion of Iran, and his enthusiastic support for the racist Israeli settler colony (and its colonial wars and occupations against Palestinians), President Barak Obama received the Nobel "Peace" Prize. This comes as no surprise, as Obama joins a long list of recipients of this sham of a prize, who are distinguished for similar "peaceful" pursuits. These include terrorists like Menachem Begin, war criminals like Henry Kissinger, ethnic-cleansing colonial generals like Yitzhak Rabin, dictators like Anwar Sadat, corrupt politicians like Yasser Arafat, and imperial presidents like Jimmy Carter. Granting this overambitious power-hungry man the recognition of the Nobel committee is therefore most apt.

Obama's most recent pursuit of peace has been to force the corrupt Palestinian Authority to discard the United Nations-issued Goldstone Report which detailed the war crimes committed by Israel in its murderous war against Palestinian civilians in Gaza ten months ago. Indeed, the first Black American President has just enjoined the Palestinians and Arab and Muslim countries from the pulpit of the United Nations to recognize Israel's right to be a racist "Jewish State." One wonders what the American reaction would be if Palestinian and Arab leaders would call on Obama and on African Americans to recognize the right of the United States to be a white state.

This is the same Obama whose hubris was of such caliber that when he gave his infamous speech in Cairo several months ago he did not grieve the tens of thousands of Arab, including Egyptian, civilians killed by Israel's six decade-long wars and massacres against them; nor did he show solidarity with the millions of Arabs who were rendered refugees (including one million Egyptians during the War of Attrition) by Israel's barbaric bombings. Instead, Obama chose to give Arabs a lesson in European Jewish history and enjoined them to appreciate the holocaust committed by European Christians against European Jews and not the ongoing Nakba committed by European Jewish colonial settlers against Arabs. He has even forbidden Palestinians or other Arabs from ever attempting to destroy Israel's racist structures to end its racist rule. Indeed, Obama threatened Arabs that any attempt by them to destroy the racist basis of the Jewish state would be seen as tantamount to a holocaust. One wonders if he thinks ending segregation in the United States and Apartheid in South Africa were tantamount to the extermination of white people! This is also the same Obama who, in order to fend off the accusation of being Muslim, told us during his electoral campaign that not only was he a Christian, but that he prays to Jesus every night and that the blood of Jesus Christ will redeem him.

But general wisdom in the US has it that the election of Obama, even if it did not instantiate any change in US imperial policy abroad, has been the best thing that happened to most Americans, or at least to white liberal Americans and all African Americans, at the domestic level. This is a largely mistaken conclusion. Obama in my estimation is the worst thing that happened in recent years to African Americans, who continue to face institutional, structural, economic, cultural, social, and personal discrimination on a daily basis. The racism that informs US domestic policy and causes the poverty of African Americans is not unrelated to the racism that informs US imperial policies that impoverish Egyptians, Palestinians, Hondurans, Iraqis, and Afghanis.

Obama's election has been best for white liberal Americans whose conscience can be assuaged by pretending that they are not racist at all and that indeed America is no longer a racist place evidenced by the election of a black man to the presidency. The fact that today African Americans are less educated and poorer than they were in the 1960s is immaterial to this self-congratulatory logic. Neither is the fact that there are more African American men today (in relative and absolute numbers) in America's racist jails than there had been at the height of Apartheid in South Africa. As for Obama's ongoing policies on education and racialized crime, they of course continue the policies of his white predecessors in pushing for more corporatization of schools and jails and busting teachers unions in the interest of the white business class.

But Obama is the culmination of white liberal hopes entertained since the early seventies when the language of racism was transformed, as an effect of the cooptation of the Civil Rights movement, into a culturalist language. Black people were not inferior racially, white liberals averred, "their problem" was diagnosed as "cultural." The feeling was that if black Americans would simply speak and act like a fantasized white middle class and adopt its social and cultural values, they would cease to face discrimination and they would break the "cycle of poverty." Reform, it was decided, should aim to effect such transformation. The black middle class, formed in the late nineteenth century in the wake of the abolition of slavery, though a small minority among African Americans, was seen as a model to be emulated. Indeed white liberal remedies like Affirmative Action (the largest beneficiaries of which were and still are white women and not African Americans) when it benefited any blacks at all, it did so by benefiting the established small black middle class. It was conservative members of this class who, after reaping its benefits, would advocate against Affirmative Action. Thus, white women and middle class African Americans benefited from a program that improved little in the lives of most African Americans, while the latter would increasingly be blamed for benefiting from it at the expense of white men --a refrain used by most white conservatives and not a few white liberals!

As Derrick Bell has eloquently demonstrated, Affirmative Action is a cover for a system by which racism continues to be institutionalized and African Americans continue to be blamed for refusing to improve their lives despite alleged Herculean efforts on their behalf. Some of the culturalist arguments of white liberals centered on Affirmative Action's production of white-acting black folks who would join the ranks of "hard-working Americans," a racist code that refers to white people which Obama often invokes in his speeches. The fantasy of low-grade American television programs in the late 1970s and 1980s like "Different Strokes" and "Webster" was to demonstrate that if white families were afforded the opportunity to raise black kids, these kids would end up as model citizens; indeed, they could grow up to become presidents one day. It was culture, you see, not race!

Obama was of course not only raised by his white Christian mother and her family (something he --and Joe Biden --never tired of reminding us during his electoral campaign to fend off his paternal Muslim contamination), but even his black father was African and not African American. Passing him off as an example of what happens when African Americans are raised the "right way" is the pride and joy of white liberals enamored of their own culturalist-cum-racist ideology and inebriated by virulent American nationalism. Obama's continuation of America's imperial wars and aggressions is proof that if you put an African American in office who is raised "the right way," he will perform his imperial duties as well as any white president. Obama's winning the Nobel Peace Prize was therefore a major gain for white liberal Americans who can bask in the sun of their achievement. For after all, producing a few African Americans in the form of Barak Obama can and will silence whoever can still muster the courage to criticize this thoroughly racist system dubbed "American democracy" which continues to victimize most African Americans and much of the Third World.

The writer is associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University.



 

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Published on Friday, October 16, 2009 by The Nation


Obama's Bad Influence

by Naomi Klein

Of all the explanations for Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, the one that rang truest came from French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "It sets the seal on America's return to the heart of all the world's peoples." In other words, this was Europe's way of saying to America, "We love you again"--sort of like those weird "renewal of vows" ceremonies that couples have after surviving a rough patch. 
Now that Europe and the United States are officially reunited, it seems worth asking: is this necessarily a good thing? The Nobel Committee, which awarded the prize specifically for Obama's embrace of "multilateral diplomacy," is evidently convinced that US engagement on the world stage is a triumph for peace and justice. I'm not so sure. After nine months in office, Obama has a clear track record as a global player. Again and again, US negotiators have chosen not to strengthen international laws and protocols but rather to weaken them, often leading other rich countries in a race to the bottom.

Let's start where the stakes are highest: climate change. During the Bush years, European politicians distinguished themselves from the United States by expressing their unshakable commitment to the Kyoto Protocol. So while the United States increased its carbon emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels, the European Union countries reduced theirs by 2 percent. Not stellar, but clearly a case where the EU's breakup with the United States carried tangible benefits for the planet.

Flash forward to the high-stakes climate negotiations that just wrapped up in Bangkok. The talks were supposed to lead to a deal in Copenhagen this December that significantly strengthens the Kyoto Protocol. Instead, the United States, the EU and the rest of the developed countries formed a unified bloc calling for Kyoto to be scrapped and replaced. Where Kyoto set clear and binding targets for emission reductions, the US plan would have each country decide how much to cut, then submit its plans to international monitoring (with nothing but wishful thinking to ensure that this all keeps the planet's temperature below catastrophic levels). And where Kyoto put the burden of responsibility squarely on the rich countries that created the climate crisis, the new plan treats all countries the same.

These kinds of weak proposals were not altogether surprising coming from the United States. What was shocking was the sudden unity of the rich world around this plan--including many countries that had previously sung the praises of Kyoto. And there were more betrayals: the EU, which had indicated it would spend $19 billion to $35 billion a year to help developing countries adapt to climate change, came to Bangkok with a much lower offer, one more in line with the US pledge of... nothing. Oxfam's Antonio Hill summed up the negotiations like this: "When the starting gun fired, it became a race to the bottom, with rich countries weakening existing commitments under the international framework."

This isn't the first time a much-celebrated return to the negotiating table has resulted in overturned tables, with hard-won international laws and conventions scattered on the floor. The United States played a similar role at the UN conference on racism in Geneva in April. After extracting all sorts of deletions from the negotiating text--no references to Israel or the Palestinians, nothing on slavery reparations, etc.--the Obama administration decided to boycott anyway, pointing to the fact that the new text "re- affirms" the document adopted in 2001 in Durban, South Africa.

It was a flimsy excuse, but there was some kind of logic to it, since the United States had never signed the original 2001 document. What made no sense was the wave of copycat withdrawals from around the rich world. Within forty-eight hours of the US announcement Italy, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Poland had pulled out. Unlike the United States, these governments had all signed the 2001 declaration, so they had no reason to object to a document that reaffirmed it. It didn't matter. As with the climate change negotiations, lining up behind Obama, with his impeccable reputation, was an easy way to avoid burdensome international obligations and look progressive at the same time--a service the United States was never able to provide during the Bush years.

The United States has had a similarly corrupting influence as a new member of the UN Human Rights Council. Its first big test was Judge Richard Goldstone's courageous report on Israel's Gaza onslaught, which found that war crimes had been committed by both the Israeli army and Hamas. Rather than prove its commitment to international law, the United States used its clout to smear the report as "deeply flawed" and to strong-arm the Palestinian Authority into withdrawing a supportive resolution. (The PA, which faced a furious backlash at home for caving in to US pressure, may introduce a new version.)

And then there are the G-20 summits, Obama's highest-profile multilateral engagements. When one was held in London in April, it seemed for a moment that there might be some kind of coordinated attempt to rein in transnational financial speculators and tax dodgers. Sarkozy even pledged to walk out of the summit if it failed to produce serious regulatory commitments. But the Obama administration had no interest in genuine multilateralism, advocating instead for countries to come up with their own plans (or not) and hope for the best--much like its reckless climate-change plan. Sarkozy, needless to say, did not walk anywhere but to the photo session to have his picture taken with Obama.

Of course, Obama has made some good moves on the world stage--not siding with the coup government in Honduras, supporting a UN Women's Agency... But a clear pattern has emerged: in areas where other wealthy nations were teetering between principled action and negligence, US interventions have tilted them toward negligence. If this is the new era of multilateralism, it is no prize.

This column was first published in The Nation (www.thenation.com [1])


Copyright © 2009 The Nation
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism [2] (September 2007); an earlier international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies [3]; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate [4] (2002). See more information at her website: naomiklein.org [5]

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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/16

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War Is Peace. Ignorance Is Strength

By John Pilger

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23737.htm

October 16, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- Barack Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, is planning another war to add to his impressive record. In Afghanistan, his agents routinely extinguish wedding parties, farmers and construction workers with weapons such as the innovative Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of your lungs. According to the UN, 338,000 Afghan infants are dying under the Obama-led alliance, which permits only $29 per head annually to be spent on medical care.

Within weeks of his inauguration, Obama started a new war in Pakistan, causing more than a million people to flee their homes. In threatening Iran – which his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said she was prepared to “obliterate” – Obama lied that the Iranians were covering up a “secret nuclear facility”, knowing that it had already been reported to the International Atomic Energy Authority. In colluding with the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, he bribed the Palestinian Authority to suppress a UN judgment that Israel had committed crimes against humanity in its assault on Gaza – crimes made possible with US weapons whose shipment Obama secretly approved before his inauguration.

At home, the man of peace has approved a military budget exceeding that of any year since the end of the Second World War while presiding over a new kind of domestic repression. During the recent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, hosted by Obama, militarised police attacked peaceful protesters with something called the Long-Range Acoustic Device, not seen before on US streets. Mounted in the turret of a small tank, it blasted a piercing noise as tear gas and pepper gas were fired indiscriminately. It is part of a new arsenal of “crowd-control munitions” supplied by military contractors such as Ray­theon. In Obama’s Pentagon-controlled “national security state”, the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, which he promised to close, remains open, and “rendition”, secret assassinations and torture continue.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winner’s latest war is largely secret. On 15 July, Washington finalised a deal with Colombia that gives the US seven giant military bases. “The idea,” reported the Associated Press, “is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations . . . nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 [military transport] without refuelling”, which “helps achieve the regional engagement strategy”.

Translated, this means Obama is planning a “rollback” of the independence and democracy that the people of Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Paraguay have achieved against the odds, along with a historic regional co-operation that rejects the notion of a US “sphere of influence”. The Colombian regime, which backs death squads and has the continent’s worst human rights record, has received US military support second in scale only to Israel. Britain provides military training. Guided by US military satellites, Colombian paramilitaries now infiltrate Venezuela with the goal of overthrowing the democratic government of Hugo Chávez, which George W Bush failed to do in 2002.

Obama’s war on peace and democracy in Latin America follows a style he has demonstrated since the coup against the democratic president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, in June. Zelaya had increased the minimum wage, granted subsidies to small farmers, cut back interest rates and reduced poverty. He planned to break a US pharmaceutical monopoly and manufacture cheap generic drugs. Although Obama has called for Zelaya’s reinstatement, he refuses to condemn the coup-makers and to recall the US ambassador or the US troops who train the Honduran forces determined to crush a popular resistance. Zelaya has been repeatedly refused a meeting with Obama, who has approved an IMF loan of $164m to the illegal regime. The message is clear and familiar: thugs can act with impunity on behalf of the US.

Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what he calls “leadership” throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee’s decision is the kind of cloying reverse racism that has beatified the man for no reason other than he is a member of a minority and attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills. This is the Call of Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded. “When Obama walks into a room,” gushed George Clooney, “you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere.”

The great voice of black liberation Frantz Fanon understood this. In The Wretched of the Earth, he described the “intermediary [whose] mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged”. Because political debate has become so debased in our media monoculture – Blair or Brown; Brown or Cameron – race, gender and class can be used as seductive tools of propaganda and diversion. In Obama’s case, what matters, as Fanon pointed out in an earlier era, is not the intermediary’s “historic” elevation, but the class he serves. After all, Bush’s inner circle was probably the most multiracial in presidential history. There was Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, all dutifully serving an extreme and dangerous power.

Britain has seen its own Obama-like mysticism. The day after Blair was elected in 1997, the Observer predicted that he would create “new worldwide rules on human rights” while the Guardian rejoiced at the “breathless pace [as] the floodgates of change burst open”. When Obama was elected last November, Denis MacShane MP, a devotee of Blair’s bloodbaths, unwittingly warned us: “I shut my eyes when I listen to this guy and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing that we did in 1997.”

www.johnpilger.com 
   

[Republic Renewal]

"Colombian paramilitaries now infiltrate Venezuela with the goal of overthrowing the democratic government of Hugo Chávez, which George W Bush failed to do in 2002."

Any word of their success?


"Mounted in the turret of a small tank, it blasted a piercing noise as tear gas and pepper gas were fired indiscriminately. It is part of a new arsenal of “crowd-control munitions..."

Heard they were over 60 decibals too loud, causing severe ear damage to some people. An absolute outrage.

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Obama’s Prize tells world ‘War is Peace’

by Cal Colgan


                           


                                                           Cartoon by Latuff


November 6, 2009
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m59791&hd=&size=1&l=e

Last month, Barack Obama became the third U.S. president to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee lauded Obama for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

But unlike the countless followers of the lunatic Glenn Beck who think our 44th president is turning our country into Stalinist Russia, there is a more rational argument to be made against Obama’s recent award.

The Nobel Peace Prize was given to a man who, like a character in a George Orwell novel, kills in the name of peace. And as much as his doublespeak would like to drown out the cries of the victims of the sinister cadre of human rights abusers and war criminals that he supports, anyone with an elementary knowledge of current events knows that Obama’s hands are muddied by the muck his allies have thrown on the peoples of the world.

Obama’s congratulations of Afghan president Ahmed Karzai’s reelection at the beginning of this month came along with his stern declaration that Karzai must take "a much more serious effort to eradicate corruption" in the country. Yet Karzai’s very election campaign was mired with fraud, with his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, dropping out of the race because of doubts that any attempt at a runoff would be free of tampering by Karzai’s campaign officials.

Life for Afghan civilians under Karzai’s rule is so deplorable that women continue to burn themselves to death rather than live under a patriarchal society in which they have no rights.

Democracy activists like Malalai Joya have survived several assassination attempts for speaking out against the Karzai government’s human rights abuses and opium trafficking.

As of this writing, Obama is considering whether to send an additional 40,000 to 60,000 troops to a country that is run by a mirror image of the terrorists and theocracy-supporters that the U.S. military is fighting. More than 1,500 American soldiers have already died in Afghanistan, and countless Afghan civilians have been killed.

But Obama still thinks democracy and peace can be won by assault rifles and depleted uranium.

Although the Nobel Committee paints Obama as a dove of peace, within the first month of his presidency, he invaded Pakistan. The U.S. military’s efforts to annihilate the Taliban in Pakistan have resulted in 2 million displaced Pakistani civilians and countless dead.

Although Pakistani government officials have chastised the U.S. for violating the country’s sovereignty, Obama will stop at nothing to accomplish his goal of destroying the Taliban – even if it means another military quagmire like Iraq.

As much of a dove that the Nobel Committee claims Obama is, within the first month of his presidency, he invaded Pakistan. The U.S. military’s efforts to annihilate the Taliban in Pakistan have resulted in 2 million displaced Pakistani civilians and countless dead. Although Pakistani government officials have chastised the U.S. for violating the country’s sovereignty, Obama will stop at nothing to accomplish his goal of destroying the Taliban – even if it means another military quagmire like Iraq.

The relationship between the Obama administration and Israel raises the question of which country has more influence over the other. In January of this year, the Israeli government bombed the Gaza strip, killing 1400 Palestinians.

A U.N. fact-finding commission on the Gaza conflict headed by Justice Richard Goldstone determined that Israel’s attack on Palestinians were disproportional to the number of Israelis Hamas killed. What’s worse, the report found that the majority of the Palestinians that were killed in the conflict were civilians, including women and children. The Goldstone Report wanted a war crimes investigation of both the Israeli government and Hamas.

But the U.S. Congress called the Goldstone Report "pre-judged" and "one-sided," and Obama has done nothing to defend the U.N. commission. Obama previously chided Israel on its ruthless pursuit of establishing illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, saying that Israel must stop all settlement building before negotiations resume between Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, however, recently declared that the Obama administration has reversed its policy, effectively kowtowing to its law-breaking buddy.

You would think Obama would at least try to compensate for his warmongering and support of bloodthirsty and vindictive foreign governments by rolling back the fascistic policies of the Bush administration.

You would be wrong.

Although Congress has recently passed a bill that modifies some of the more draconian tactics the military commissions system uses at Guantanamo Bay like coerced testimony and restrictions on prisoners’ accesses to eyewitnesses, prisoners at Guantanamo are still tried by the military and not by a jury of their peers. During his election campaign, Obama declared the eventual closing of Guantanamo Bay. And yet the American prison in Cuba remains, still holding more than 220 detainees, many of whom were never formerly charged with being "enemy combatants."

And Big Brother still infringes upon the rights of American citizens with the PATRIOT Act. The Senate recently rejected an amendment to the law that would stop the surveillance of individuals with no links to terrorist groups.

As the Obama administration asked the Senate to continue these measures, it is doubtful that Obama will have any objection to the Federal Government’s trampling on the Bill of Rights.

The Norwegian committee awarded Obama the Nobel Peace Prize in the hope that the award will give him the incentive to promote peace across the globe. But our president’s support of corrupt human rights abusers and war criminal foreign governments, as well as his endorsement of Bush-era policies at home, raise doubts that Obama will be a savior.

But perhaps the scariest aspect of Obama’s so-called "peace" record is that for all of his military bullying, liberals will continue to support him, and conservatives will continue to hope that he becomes more like Bush.

It seems like the conservatives are going to get their wish.



 

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November 12, 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff11122009.html

Echoes of Remembrance Day

President Peacenik's War


By DAVE LINDORFF

Word leaked out last weekend that our Nobel Peacenik President is close to announcing plans to escalate the US troop level in the Afghanistan War by 50%, we appear to be about to have perhaps the ultimate of ironies—a president announcing a big step-up in American war-making near the 90th anniversary of the the day established in much of the Western world as Armistice or Remembrance Day.

While modern Americans might not know it, amid all the boom and bombast and mindless flag-waving featured in the military parades popular in today’s warrior culture, November 11 was originally established by Congress one year after the day the guns of World War I finally went silent over the blood-drenched fields of Europe in what was once, in a naïve spasm of optimism, referred to as the War to End All Wars. In declaring the national holiday Armistice Day, Congress said it was to be “a day dedicated to the cause of world peace.” (The day's name was changed to Veterans' Day in 1954 by President Dwight Eisenhower, to honor veterans of all America's many wars.)

It’s hard to see how President Obama, who has yet to actually receive his Nobel Prize as a "peacemaker" from Norway’s King Harald, is contributing to peace with the addition of another 34,000 US soldiers and Marines to the 68,000 already fighting, killing and dying on Afghan soil. Maybe he thinks holding this escalation to 102,000 instead of accommodating Afghanistan Theater Commander Gen. Stanley McCrystal’s request for 80,000 more troops for a total of 148,000 is an act of pacificistic moderation.

I doubt it. (Incidentally, some Pentagon and White House flaks are referring to this likely escalation as another “surge,” but you can’t call a 50% increase in troop commitments a “surge.” It is what it is—a massive expansion of the current war effort.)

No, sadly, Obama, who has declared the bloody assault on one of the world’s most remote and impoverished lands to be a “necessary war,” seems stubbornly and ignorantly and foolishly to be trying to emulate the mistakes of an earlier Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who turned a minor conflict in Vietnam into the biggest war, and biggest disaster, that the US has engaged in since World War II.

Of course, the difference between the two men, Johnson and Obama, is still enormous. While Obama may be just as bone-headed as was Johnson in caving to the will of his generals instead of leading them, he doesn’t hold a candle to Johnson when it comes to leading the charge for progressive domestic legislation. While Johnson was ginning up the war in Vietnam, he was simultaneously dragging the racist Democrats of the southern states kicking and screaming into the post-slavery world with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which for the first time enabled African Americans to actually participate in voting. He also rammed through Congress a truly innovative single-payer health program—Medicare--to provide health care for all Americans once they reached 65, or became disabled, as well as a second program--Medicaid--to care for the poor.

Against these great accomplishments, Obama hasn’t even shown the resolve to end discrimination against gays and lesbians in the military—something he could do with a phone call to the Joint Chiefs! That is to say, while he’s willing to pointlessly, on the basis of some bizarre political calculus, put another 34,000 young Americans in harm’s way in Afghanistan, he’s not willing to ban discrimination against those of them who may not be suitably heterosexual.

Former Afghanistan theater dommander and now US ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry has reportedly sent a message to the president arguing against any troop increase, but the likelihood is still that Obama will go for at least a significant step-up in the US troop commitment and the level of fighting. The signs are grimly clear that this silver-tongued but politically gutless president is steering the country into yet another military disaster—one that has killed 200 young men and women under his command, but which could easily become as costly in blood and fortune as was Johnson’s Vietnam War four decades ago. Making matters worse is the fact that while the Vietnam War was fought at a time when America was at its height as an economic power, today this country is an economic basket case.

If the war is ramped up, I predict that it will not be long before protesters will be packing the Washington Mall and jamming the streets surrounding the White House shouting chants of “Hey, Obama, What Do You Say? How Many Kids Have You Killed Today?”(How’s he going to explain those shouts to his daughters, Sasha and Malia?)

The sheen has already warn off this latest huckster for American militarism and imperial adventure, and, with his increasingly blood-stained hands tied by the Pentagon and military quagmire, he has nothing to show domestically to earn him public support and affection. The man had a chance, ten months ago, to come into office and smash the criminal banking syndicate, to put Americans back to work with a serious jobs program, and to finally expand Medicare to all, bringing America into the modern world on health care. Instead he turned the financial system completely over to the banksters, helping them to grow even bigger, left the unemployed to fend for themselves, and fobbed off the job of health care “reform” on Congress, which predictably did the bidding of the Medical Establishment, and deep-sixed the whole thing.

It is, I would suggest, time for progressives to start searching for a serious, gutsy, plain-speaking candidate to challenge Obama for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2012. This man needs to have a new Gene McCarthy or George McGovern breathing down his neck for the next three years.

The 90th anniversary of Armistice Day would be a good day to launch that search.

[L2Design]

I'm sure Hillary will win the next one... LOLLLLLL

[bigron]

Who’s Afraid of Hiroshima?

Obama's Nuclear Hypocrisy


BY James Corbett

                             
 

November 19, 2009
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m60255&hd=&size=1&l=e

When the Nobel Prize committee announced their choice for this year’s Peace Prize winner, they stressed that a key factor in awarding Obama the prize had been the commitment to a nuclear-free world he had outlined in speeches such as the one he delivered in Prague earlier this year. "The committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons," said the committee chairman when announcing that Obama had won the prize.

Assuming that the committee truly believed that the Obama presidency would signal a meaningful change in American nuclear policy, they did not have long to wait for a clear refutation of that thesis. Having learned in advance that Obama would be visiting Japan ahead of last week’s APEC summit in Singapore, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki extended formal invitations for Obama to visit their cities. Had he done so, he would have become the first U.S. president to visit the cities since they were the victims of the world’s first nuclear attacks. However, Obama turned down the requests, citing scheduling concerns and offering vague promises to visit the cities sometime in the future.

While such a move may come as a surprise to the Nobel committee, it is decidedly less shocking to those who have been studying American nuclear policy for decades. One such man is Motofumi Asai, the President of the Hiroshima Peace Institute, who noted in a recent interview with The Corbett Report that, while surprised that Obama says he intends to visit Hiroshima one day, "anyhow, it is clearly not now."

"In a very long historical term, his speech in Prague in April may be remembered as a departure from the nuclear century to the non-nuclear century," Asai said about the nuclear rhetoric that won Obama the Peace Prize. But, he added, "I am rather sober about the prospects of a change of U.S. nuclear policy."

Observers of the Obama administration’s actions on the nuclear front would indeed have good reason to be ’sober’ about the prospects of Obama living up to his nuclear disarmament rhetoric. As the Washington Times reported last month, the Obama administration has reaffirmed an unspoken decades-old U.S. policy to officially ignore Israel’s nuclear stockpile. This support ensures that Israel does not have to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would require them to relinquish their hundreds of nuclear bombs. As the Washington Times report makes explicit, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu accidentally revealed in a television interview that Obama’s rhetoric about a nuclear-free world is not meant to apply to America or its allies:

"It was utterly clear from the context of the speech that he was speaking about North Korea and Iran," the Israeli leader said. "But I want to remind you that in my first meeting with President Obama in Washington I received from him, and I asked to receive from him, an itemized list of the strategic understandings that have existed for many years between Israel and the United States on that issue. It was not for naught that I requested, and it was not for naught that I received [that document]."

The report exposing Obama’s nuclear hypocrisy was printed just one week before he received the Nobel Prize for his valiant efforts to bring about a "nuclear-free world". Even Obama’s most logical political allies have questioned the sincerity of his "commitment" to the abolition of nuclear weapons. As Joseph Gerson wrote on CommonDreams.org earlier this year:

…there appears to be less to Obama’s 'perhaps not in my lifetime’ commitment to nuclear weapons abolition than the adoring press has let on. It is no accident that in his message to the NPT Preparatory Conference earlier this month that he made no reference to abolition. Similarly, the subject did not arise when President Obama and former Secretary of State George Shultz spoke with the press following their meeting at the White House.

Now Obama’s most fervent supporters are noting that his actual actions on nuclear disarmament so far have amounted to a series of token gestures and empty platitudes. Even basic steps like affirming a no-first strike nuclear policy have not been forthcoming. Obama’s nuclear promise, it seems, can be added to the bonfire of dashed hopes along with his broken promise to end warrantless wiretapping, his broken promises to close Guantanamo and end secret detentions, his broken promise to not use signing statements, his broken promise to allow voters time to read legislation before it gets signed, and his broken promise not to appoint lobbyists to his administration.

Sadly, this is not the first time the Nobel committee has erred so badly in its judgement of a world leader promising nuclear eradication. In 1974, Japan’s Prime Minister Eisaku Sato won the prize for his formulation of the so-called Three Non-nuclear Principles that every Japanese government has paid lip service to since they were first adopted by the Diet in 1971: that Japan will neither develop nor possess nuclear weapons, nor allow them in their territory.[16] It has since come to light that Sato himself broke the third principle when he negotiated secret agreements with the Nixon administration that allowed the U.S. to bring nuclear weapons into Japanese territory.

Now, with President Obama’s nuclear abolition rhetoric turning out to be more hot air, it seems the Nobel Peace Prize committee once again has egg on its face. Unless of course it is the intention of the committee not to reward Obama for his non-nuclear words, but to shame his administration into living up to its lofty language. Perhaps the Nobel committee is in fact using their prize as a tool for offering an ultimatum to the Obama administration: Follow through on your promises or be exposed as a fraud for all the world to see. If this is indeed the case, then Obama’s White House should be shamed into peace and disarmament. The fact that this "man of peace" is in fact every bit the warmonger his presidential predecessor was presents perhaps the largest chink in his fast-disintegrating corporate media-supplied "president of the world" armour. Those who are truly interested in bringing about a nuclear-free world can start simply enough by condemning Obama for his failure to visit Hiroshima.