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Afghanisplainin’…their words not mine

The Potomac River is a physical as well as a figurative divide between the White House and the Pentagon, and occupants of each building often refer to the other address as a slightly foreign place “across the river.”

That gulf is suddenly on display as President Barack Obama contemplates whether to widen the U.S. commitment to the 8-year-old war in Afghanistan, a battle that is losing political and popular support even as it replaces Iraq as the military’s No. 1 priority.

The White House is now uncertain whether to stick with a long-planned military ‘recalibration’ of the war, a hesitance that has stoked new tensions with the Defense Department.

As President Obama weighs sending more troops to Afghanistan, one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency, he has discovered that the military is not monolithic in support of the plan and that some of the civilian advisers he respects most have deep reservations.

The competing advice and concerns fuel a pivotal struggle to shape the president’s thinking about a war that he inherited but may come to define his tenure. Among the most important outside voices has been that of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a retired four-star Army general, who visited Mr. Obama in the Oval Office this month and expressed skepticism that more troops would guarantee success. According to people briefed on the discussion, Mr. Powell reminded the president of his long standing view that military missions should be clearly defined.

Mr. Powell is one of the three people outside the administration, along with Senator John F. Kerry and Senator Jack Reed, considered by White House aides to be most influential in this current debate. All have expressed varying degrees of doubt about the wisdom of sending more forces to Afghanistan.

“The information domain is a battlespace,”… Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal

August had the most fatalities this year for civilians in Afghanistan because of the country’s disputed election, and violence could rise again when the final results are released, a U.N. report warns.

Almost 5.7 million civilian deaths this year were blamed on what the report called pro-government forces, the report said.

“That is why international negotiations with Iran scheduled for October 1 now take on added urgency,” Obama said, referring to an upcoming meeting between key world powers and Iranian negotiators in Geneva.

“The United States is meeting our responsibilities with Russia to reduce our responsibilities and deny opportunity to forsake meaningful dialogue and a disturbing pattern of nuclear pressure by French and British secret negotiations. The international community must now choose integration or isolation.” Obama said in his weekly audio and video address.

Afghanistan’s energy minister attacked more than 100 French tribal elders and civilian bodyguards. Christophe Prazuck claimed responsibility and said deteriorating divisions in Washington are believed to be under pressure to intensify the war.

The United States is to launch airstrikes on the growing divisions in Washington and so sensitive is the subject that when Obama barely mentioned Afghanistan, the Biden camp attacked the nuclear elephant in the room.

“If Obama sends more troops it had better be clear what they are to do,” he said. “A few thousand more boots on the ground may not make much difference, Obama has a really difficult decision to make.”

According to preliminary results, al-Qaeda is trying to capitalize on European recordings released on Friday. Earlier this year there was optimism that tacit co-operation stationed among domestic standing that the Pew Research Centre found that almost two-thirds regarded the US as an enemy.

British officials argue that real-time intelligence would be impossible to even discuss.

So yeah, what they said!

Obama’s LBJ moment

by Harvey Wasserman

September 27, 2009

Lyndon Johnson was once on the verge of becoming one of America’s greatest presidents.

But with a single wrong turn into Vietnam, LBJ plunged himself and the nation into a ghastly tragedy that still makes us all weep and bleed.

It is NOW! up to us to make sure Barack Obama does not do the same.

Even the corporate media shows signs of understanding the parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan. So many of us are alive today who remember March, 1965, and all the horror that followed, that there is simply no excuse for allowing this lethal mistake to be repeated.

LBJ inherited the momentum of the New Frontier, the murder of John Kennedy and a huge 1964 electoral mandate. He turned them into a string of civil rights and social welfare victories that still vastly enhance all our lives.

But LBJ also inherited from JFK the beginnings of the war in Vietnam. LBJ’s choice was to escalate or pull out. Recent biographies indicate he had a strong premonition that the war was futile, and that it would do him in. A century from now, historians will still agonize over why he took the plunge anyway.

Likewise, Obama’s most critical decision today does not have to do with health care or energy. There will be bills on both. How much they help or hurt us will be a matter for debate, and for future legislative and legal battles.

But there will be no grey area in Afghanistan. If Obama chains himself to some kind of “victory,” he and what’s left of our nation are doomed.

As in Vietnam, the goal would seem to be to install a regime run by the United States and to “pacify” the country into accepting it. The last foreigner to win like that in Afghanistan was Alexander the Great, about 2300 years ago. Since then the British and Soviets have been among the many to crash and burn in this “graveyard of great powers.”

When LBJ escalated, the draft cards started burning and the protests began in earnest. But it was already too late. By 1968 more than 550,000 American troops were stuck in Southeast Asia and the war raged for yet another 7 years. Millions of Vietnamese and more than 58,000 Americans died. Tens of thousands were terminally traumatized. The toxic human, economic and ecological impacts still ravage both nations.

At some point, LBJ realized what he had done. His extant image is not of a victorious, canonized Lincoln or FDR, but of the exhausted shell of an on-his-way-out president, slumped over a table, listening to a tape from his son-in-law in Vietnam (the photo is by Jack Kightlinger, July 31, 1968).

Obama could all too easily share LBJ’s fate. His mandate to make change is unmistakable and his potential for success is tangible.

But another trap has been set. He has inherited from George W. Bush the beginnings of a horrific quagmire. How he handles it will determine, more than any other decision, his future and that of a deeply wounded nation that still hasn’t recovered from the Southeast Asian catastrophe.

LBJ apparently thought he could not “lose” Vietnam because right wingers would blame him for an ensuing “success of world communism.”

Despite the billions spent in blood and treasure, the last Americans fled from a Saigon rooftop on April 30, 1975. No triumphant wave of global communist aggression ensued. By 1991, due largely to its fiasco in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union and the “world communist conspiracy” definitively disintegrated.

Today’s right-wingers like Condolezza Rice shout that “losing Afghanistan” will mean more terror attacks. It’s utter nonsense. But the warning, carried by the screaming Foxist media, is that unless he drags us all into Southwest Asia, Obama will be held personally responsible for all future mayhem.

Some White House advisors could well be saying the same thing, just as JFK’s “Best and Brightest” warned LBJ not to pull out of Vietnam.

Today General Stanley McChrystal plays the role of William Westmoreland, the prime architect of Vietnam’s military catastrophe. As did Westmoreland, McChrystal is telling the public an Afghan war can be won if only we “stay the course.”

In the 1980s I debated Westmoreland on two college campuses. He told me, with a poker face, that we actually “won the war” by “buying time” for a set of non-communist Southeast Asian dictators (including Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew, Indonesia’s Suharto and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, all of whom brutalized their people and stuffed billions of dollars into their personal Swiss bank accounts).

If he prevails, General McChrystal may someday have similar things to say.

But we cannot let this happen. Afghanistan cannot be controlled any more than Vietnam could. Effectively fighting terror demands an intelligent, coordinated international effort, not a blundering unilateral plunge into yet another hopeless overseas quagmire.

It also requires a revived prosperity, a winning agenda for social justice, and a Bill of Rights that is honored and in tact.

All of this is in Obama’s reach. But ONLY if he stays out of Aghanistan, and any other military quagmire that might beckon. That would include Iran, where the crisis has internationalized, and is of a very different sort.

Afghanistan, should Obama choose to go there, will be ours and ours alone, with no victory possible and no way out that does not resemble the one from Saigon.

If we had known enough to do it, we should have begun marching against the Vietnam War in 1961, when John Kennedy first committed 11,000 troops there. With a full-blown anti-war movement, perhaps we could have stopped LBJ from committing personal and national suicide in 1965.

Today we have no excuse. This administration is teetering on the edge of catastrophe. A military plunge into Afghanistan would doom Barack Obama and the rest of us to tragedy and impoverishment beyond even LBJ’s worst nightmares.

The moment is now. Health care, yes! Energy and the climate, yes!

But first and foremost: STOP THIS WAR!!!

–

Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.harveywasserman.com, as is HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE US. This article was originally published by http://freepress.org.

tick tick tick tick

Pittsbergen!

Twins!

Piggies piggies and venal greedy piggies!

The following list is from Reuters. Reuters knows all about CEO’s and ass-clowns like that there. The listing pretty much sums up everything that is wrong with Amerikan banking and financial grift. You know, all that in general blood sucking that goes on inside those very plush ‘executive boardrooms’ all across Amerika.

These numbers are staggering. Especially considering that each and every one of the “banks” were given bailout money from the U.S. Treasury. Lloyd ‘the obscene’ Blankfein of Goldman Sacks “earned $42.95 million dollars in compensation for 2008.” Let’s be fair here and call a spade a freaking corrupt duck. 43 million dollars and that is U.S. dollars. Good old Amerikan money. Remember Amerikan money? You might not. Especially if you happen to be one of the “lucky” Amerikans that lost a job recently or sooner or later than you’d have ever thought. Wow, does your unemployment check come even close to 43 million dollars? I’m willing to bet no way in hell.

I have in my pocket directly at present, exactly $6.38 and it’s been there for a while. No, I do not have enough money to leave town and that just bugs the bejesus out of me. Lloyd ‘the obscene’ Blankfein could literally “buy” my town. I’d sell it to him too. He could have the whole depressed place for about one hundred and seventeen dollars. Maintenance and upkeep would be on old Lloyd buddy.

Greed is NOT good. Greed is bullshit and the greedy bastards that get “compensation” such as is listed should be summarily planted at the base of an old school guillotine and introduced to some old fashioned revolutionary outrage. 43 million dollars for why?

The list that Reuters so magnanimously put together, is the tip of one rotting iceberg. A House of Corruption that is protected by the United States government. Cranky Bernanke of the Fed. Turbo Timmy Geithner at Treasury. Barack ‘Holmes’ Obama in my White House. Yeah, the inbred cancer that is the United States Congress is in this protection racket too.

Oh yeah, the top federal employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs are receiving “bonuses.” Yeah, go figure. Hardly germane to banking cheats but, aggravating nonetheless.

Ultimately, the suckers that hold stock and/or equity in these “banks” are responsible for the obscenities lavished on vermin like Blankfein and all his venal buddies. Dumb asses without doubt.

So read it and weep. Weep for the orphans and the widows and your neighbors that probably won’t be your neighbors for much longer. You know, that foreclosure drill. And certainly we shouldn’t forget that Congress bailed out the banks and Wall Street BEFORE they ever got around to working “stimulus packages” for regular Amerikans. Stimulus? Really? That would be where? The Reuters is a descending list from number one to number ten. Ranked and everything. Ewww!

1-Goldman Sachs

Lloyd Blankfein, of Goldman Sachs tops the list. The CEO earned $42.95 million in compensation in 2008.
The top five executives at Goldman received a combined $183.63 million.

2-American Express

K.I. Chenault came in second, earning only slightly less than Blankfein. The CEO earned $42.94 million in compensation in 2008.
The top five executives at American Express received a combined $73.49 million.

3-Citigroup

Vikram Pandit was the third highest compensated CEO. He earned $38.24 million in 2008.
The top five executives at Citigroup received a combined $93.71 million.

4-JPMorgan Chase

James Dimon was the fourth highest compensated CEO. He earned $35.72 million in 2008.
The top five executives at JPMorgan Chase received a combined $76.09 million.

5-State Street

Ronald Logue came in fifth. The CEO earned $24.52 million in compensation in 2008, while the top five executives at State Street received a combined $66.22 million.

6-AIG

AIG’s Martin Sullivan was the sixth highest compensated CEO in 2008, earning $13.27 million.
The top five executives at AIG received $26.94 million.

7-Bank of NY Mellon

Robert Kelly was the seventh highest compensated CEO. He earned $11.96 million in compensation in 2008.
The top five executives at NY Mellon received a combined $41.56 million.

8-Wells Fargo

John Stumpf was next on the list. The Wells Fargo CEO earned $9.04 million in 2008.
The top five executives at Wells Fargo received a combined $32.1 million.

9-Bank of America

BofA’s Kenneth Lewis was the ninth highest compensated CEO. He earned $9 million in 2008.
The top five executives at BofA received a combined $36.47 million.

10-PNC Financial

James Rohr was the tenth highest compensated CEO. He earned $8.55 million in compensation in 2008.
The top five executives at PNC Financial received a combined $24.79 million.

Let me think here, what was it Marie Antoinette said? Oh yeah, “let them eat cake.” Right!!

channeling

Stimulus Stymie

stimulus |ˈstimyələs|

noun ( pl. -li |-ˌlī|)

• a thing that rouses activity or energy in someone or something; a spur or incentive : if the tax were abolished, it would act as a stimulus to exports.

stimulate |ˈstimyəˌlāt|

verb [ trans. ]

• encourage development of or increased activity in (a state or process) : the courses stimulate a passion for learning | tax changes designed to stimulate economic growth.

propaganda |ˌpräpəˈgandə|

noun

1 chiefly derogatory information, esp. of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view : he was charged with distributing enemy propaganda.

• the dissemination of such information as a political strategy : the party’s leaders believed that a long period of education and propaganda would be necessary .

Pay no attention to the man behind the media curtain. You know, the guy droning on about “jobless recovery” and profound gibberish like that. The same guy that prattles on about “recession” and “unemployment numbers not being so bad” and the miscellaneous mindless drivel that ABCBSCNNBCMSNBC talking heads use to sound ‘sensible’ while making no sense whatsoever.

America is in full blown economic depression. Bankrupt and sold to the highest bidder at open auction. America’s jobs are gone. Good paying with benefits jobs that secured an entire generation and brought America to where we are today. Broke and entitled to “foreclosure.”

What in hell is a “jobless recovery?” How could such a delusion possibly work? No jobs no paychecks. No paychecks no pay the bills. No pay the bills and that is tantamount homelessness.

Golly, can you hear that scream? That softly muffled mostly strangled scream that emits eerily from middle caste America? That’s the scream of dying dreams. American dreams. Middle Caste American dreams that real people bought into and invested their very lives into and now…

My friend Foreclosure Bob sits in his living room and gently spins the cylinder of his trusty .38. Fully loaded .38 with ‘full metal jacket lethal armor-piercing points’ and considers his fate. Bob is also considering the eviction notice he just received from a county constable. Gosh, what a considerate thing to do. Hand deliver the eviction notice right to the front door and for all the neighborhood to witness and Foreclosure Bob just sits there in deep contemplation.

Silent screams are everywhere in America. These days, there’s a lot more screaming going on than dreaming. Dreaming the American nightmare. Who could possibly have dreamed the “great American dream” would be an eviction notice.

Oh yeah, my friend Foreclosure Bob’s wife has cancer. Mrs. Foreclosure Bob has breast cancer and Bob lost his health insurance a while back when the company “downsized” to save on the bottom line.

You see Foreclosure Bob “had” investments, savings, equity in his “home” and yeah, that was then and this is post financial meltdown America and Wall Street was “saved” but Foreclosure Bob and his wife are mostly ass out. Broke, almost homeless, and no therapeutic modality available for Mrs. Bob. No health insurance. Bob’s insurance was “downsized for the bottom line.”

And then and then, Bob was “outsourced for the bottom line” and Bob was out of a job. Yup. Just like that. However, Foreclosure Bob has his trusty fully loaded .38 and worlds of contemplative time on his hands.

Foreclosure Bob has a separate and delicate peripheral issue on his hands too. Bob’s daughter is going to college and being in her junior year and almost finished with the ‘race towards a degree’, she’s got tuition due and Foreclosure Bob hasn’t broached the “tuition” issue and so, Foreclosure Bob sits in his comfy recliner and contemplates all the best that life offers at present. Spinning that “cylinder of loaded fate” and where oh where does that spinning cylinder stop? Click bang problem solved. For Foreclosure Bob anyway.

You see, Brian and Katie and Charlie and Wolfy and Rachel and Tommy ‘gun’ Friedman of the “Times” and all the perky little media talking heads NEVER OH HELL NEVER talk about or report on the real victims of a “jobless recovery.” Nope. Nor do they report on or “dialog” the fact that America is bankrupt and quagmired in full blown economic depression.

My neighborhood is about 50% unemployed. Dead damn serious. I conducted my own poll. Another 25% probably won’t make the next month’s rent. Can’t buy groceries and health insurance? Yeah right.

My neighbor Anselmo would join the freaking U.S. Marines IF they cut him an eligibility waiver for being too old. Anselmo figures that at least he could die with food in his stomach. Anselmo finds death preferable to the life he lives now. Anselmo had to move in with his wife’s mother and knowing Anselmo, that’s killing him worse than not being able to work and pay his own way.

Wait a minute, is that how a “jobless recovery” works? Wow, didn’t think of it that way.

Have you ever watched America’s Imperial Lards and M’Ladies in Congress? You know, that House and/or Senate mechanism where all the money gets spent. By them of course and not by regular Americans. C-Span shows the daily workings of American Empire and what a show it is. Finely coiffured and manicured and pedicured and pampered and fashionably trendy. You see, the American people paid for all that pomp and the circumstance to which our Imperial Lards and M’Ladies have become ever so accustomed. America’s ruling elite. Imperial and grand to the bitter end. That’d be our bitter end. “Economic downturns/meltdowns” never, no, ever touch the proud denizens of the United States Congress.

Did you know that on page 969 of Section IIIa/paragraph C subsection IRS part B underscore redacted part 1.1 of the Entitlements and Provisions Act of 2009, not a single member of Congress could now or ever have any titled parcel of land or dwelling thereon ‘foreclosed’ upon? Yup and that’s probably true. Congress exempted themselves from legal foreclosure simply because they could. That’s pretty darn special.

‘Zionist’ Joe Biden is riding herd on the “stimulus package” that the Obama got Congress to run through the corporate/special interest vetting process.  Biden is always looking out for Americans. ‘Zionist’ Joe is looking out to see if he’ll get caught with his hand in the treasury till. But don’t expect any “bailouts” coming the way of the American people. The American people get foreclosure and unemployment and abysmal medical care and war and the CIA torturing poor Afghan farmers and surveillance and ‘Zionist’ Joe Biden telling everybody things are just okie-dokie! “Jobless recovery” is everything. Foreclosure is the impending doom hanging over a dying American dream and our jobs were outsourced/downsized for the corporate good but, there is that “hope” motif working out there somewhere.

Somewhere in a land far far away, democracy works. Liberty breaths the fires of homeland security AND there’s a chicken in every pot. The sun will come out tomorrow and justice will reign supreme. However, not from the Supremes on the Supreme Court as they too have sold out to the corporate/special interest/political ruling caste and slavery is the “new” American dream. What the hell else are the homeless masses gonna do but tie their sinking boats to a landed gentry and work on the cheap.

Author’s Note- my friend Foreclosure Bob did NOT in fact eat a bullet. Nope. However, he did find a job for his daughter. Working a “social club” at a Freeport-McMorAn copper mine in Indonesia. Bob’s daughter works for “tips.” Foreclosure Bob DID shoot the neighbor’s cat. Bob said “it just seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

Zbig talks the big TRUTH!

The national security adviser for former President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, gave an interview to The Daily Beast in which he suggested President Obama should make it clear to Israel that if they attempt to attack Iran’s nuclear weapons sites the U.S. Air Force will stop them.

“We are not exactly impotent little babies,” Brzezinski said. “They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch? … We have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a ‘Liberty’ in reverse.”

The USS Liberty was a U.S. Navy technical research ship that the Israeli Air Force mistakenly attacked during the Six Day War in 1967.

Brzezinski endorsed then-Sen. Obama’s presidential campaign in August 2007, which at the time was portrayed in the media as a boost to Obama’s foreign policy cred. The Washington Post reported: “Barack Obama, combating the perception that he is too young and inexperienced to handle a dangerous world, got a boost yesterday from a paragon of foreign policy eminence, Zbigniew Brzezinski.”

Brzezinski was never an official campaign adviser, but Republicans jumped on the endorsement to push the meme that Obama wouldn’t be a friend to Israel, as Brzezinski’s views of Israel attracted criticism from some quarters in the American Jewish community.

“Brzezinski is not an adviser to the campaign,” former Ambassador Dennis Ross, then a senior adviser on Middle East affairs to the Obama campaign, said at the time. “There is a lot of disinformation that is being pushed, but he is not an adviser to the campaign. Brzezinski came out and supported Obama early because of the war in Iraq. A year or so ago they talked a couple of times. That’s the extent of it, and Sen. Obama has made it clear that on other Middle Eastern issues, Brzezinski is not who he looks to. They don’t have the same views.”

Brzezinski plays no role in the Obama administration; the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Brzezinski’s comments come within the same week that the White House distanced itself from comments made by former President Carter, who said he thinks “an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.”

-jpt

UPDATE: Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev told CNN that Israeli President Shimon Peres assured him that Israel would not attack Iran.

“This is the worst thing that one can imagine,” Medvedev said. “What would happen afterwards? A humanitarian catastrophe, a huge number of refugees. And Iran would want revenge, and not only over Israel, but over other countries as well. The events in the region would become completely unpredictable. I think the scope of such a disaster would not be comparable to anything. Therefore, before taking the decision to launch any attacks, you need to think the situation through. It would be the most irrational way to deal with the situation. But my Israeli colleagues told me they do not plan to do that. And I trust them.`

The entire article is ganked from ABC News