politics – Page 10

On that “historic” health reform bill (from hell)

By timmukyPosted on November 9, 2009Posted in health reform, politicsTagged health reform, politicsNo Comments

Chris Floyd, who declares that HR3962 will kill real health reform for a generation:

Of course, the House bill, bad as it is, will be mangled beyond all recognition in that elitist abattoir known as the Senate, where no doubt even the few milder-than-milquetoast ameliorations that survived the corporate bludgeoning in the House will be cast aside. But for now, this is how, in the words of Barack Obama, our Democratic solons “answered the call of history”: with a bill that places an onerous financial burden and threat of punishment on those least able to bear it, while stripping millions of the most vulnerable women in society from access to completely legal medical procedures easily available to the middle-class and the rich, and delivering to the corrupt, cruel and price-gouging insurance companies “50 million new consumers, many of them subsidized by the taxpayers,” in the gushing words of Nancy Pelosi, who shepherded the bill through the House — and who was responsible for stripping abortion coverage from poor women by greenlighting the single allowed amendment to the bill.

David Swanson on the “well, at least it’s something” school of thought:

And why is a bill better than no bill? Why is a bill that funds absolutely useless parasites like health insurance companies at the expense of our grandchildren’s unearned pay better than nothing? Why — when blocking a bill would almost guarantee a better debate in round 2 — is it more important to pass the bill and close off the opportunity for valuable reform?

And Arthur Silber, in a piece with the to-the-point title The Fuck You Act:

Given the nature of the corporatist system that now throttles every aspect of life in the U.S., that is how the system works. That’s how it’s set up, and that’s its purpose. The fact that insurance companies will reap huge rewards on the backs of “ordinary” taxpaying Americans is not a regrettable byproduct of an allegedly good but imperfect effort at reform, or a flaw that will be fixed at some unspecified future date. And as already powerful and wealthy interests become more powerful and wealthy, the State will also increase its already massive power over all our lives still more. None of that is incidental: it’s the point.

Earlier this summer Matt Taibbi called it pretty much exactly, and explained why thusly:

Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. The situation we have here is an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill. It expects something to be done. The task of the lawmakers on the Hill, at least as they see things, is to create the appearance of having done something. And that’s what they’re doing….

This whole business, it was a litmus test for whether or not we even have a functioning government. Here we had a political majority in congress and a popular president armed with oodles of political capital and backed by the overwhelming sentiment of perhaps 150 million Americans, and this government could not bring itself to offend ten thousand insurance men in order to pass a bill that addresses an urgent emergency. What’s left? Third-party politics?

Uh, yeah.

Gaza: “Amal, two and a half years old. All her insides were outside…”

By timmukyPosted on November 4, 2009Posted in politics, Uncategorized, warTagged gaza, israel, politics, war, war crimesNo Comments

Congress votes (334-36, with 22 “present” and 30 “not voting”) to condemn the Goldstone report. It’s nonbinding, but “[calls] on the President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the ‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ in multilateral fora.”

Amal, two and a half years old. All her insides were outside… and she was giving her last breath and she said, ‘I love you and I want sweets.’ Can you imagine, the last thing she said was, ‘I love you mom.’

Play this video from beginning to end. How can anyone oppose an investigation into how the bodies of little children came to be riddled with bullets? How can anyone oppose an investigation into a campaign in which Amnesty International states “1,400 Palestinians were killed, including some 300 children, and hundreds of other unarmed civilians, including more than 115 women and some 85 men aged over 50”?

Well, most of your Congressfolk oppose any “further consideration” of the topic. Maybe you should ask them why.

This video was even more heartbreaking. And you can read the transcript of the Bill Moyers video with Goldstone here.

The Israeli government, for its part, is indeed taking action. According to this AFP report, “The prime minister instructed the relevant government bodies to examine a worldwide campaign to amend the international laws of war to adapt them to the spread of global terrorism, his office said in a statement.”

In other words, change the rules of engagement to allow the firing of machine guns into the stomachs of three-year-old girls.

Remember These Children memorializes both Israeli and Palestinian children killed since 2000.

“all the historical foresight of Dred Scott”

By timmukyPosted on November 3, 2009Posted in civil liberties, politicsTagged civil liberties, politics, tortureNo Comments

Scott Horton, on the absolutely shameful, contemptible, disgraceful decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals stating that Maher Arar, a Canadian software engineer, had no right to sue U.S. government officials for HAVING BEEN TORTURED FOR A YEAR, for eighteen hours a day, for no reason, in Syria, after having been sent there by American officials who knew what they were doing to him.

The Canadian government admitted to their role in the episode and awarded Arar $11.5 million (Canadian) in compensation and reimbursement of legal costs. “And the United States?

The United States tenaciously refused to acknowledge ever having made any mistakes—even after its own sources did so. It stonewalled Congressional probes and issued a travel ban to stop Arar from testifying before Congress. The Bush Justice Department made aggressive representations to the courts in response to Arar’s suit that strained credulity at almost every step. As in other cases, their trump card was simple: when caught with pants down, shout “state secrets!”….

[Dissenting judge Guido] Calabresi generously accepts the suggestion that the Second Circuit acted out of concern for national security. Still, he delivers an appropriate lashing. The majority, Calabresi charges, “engaged in extraordinary judicial activism.” Its activism was aimed at extricating political actors from a precarious predicament and keeping the door firmly shut on what may well be the darkest chapter in the entire history of the Justice Department. In so doing, the court’s majority delivered an example of timidity in the face of government misconduct the likes of which have not been seen since the darkest days of the Cold War. When the history of the Second Circuit is written, the Arar decision will have a prominent place. It offers all the historical foresight of Dred Scott, in which the Court rallied to the cause of slavery, and all the commitment to constitutional principle of the Slaughter-House Cases, in which the Fourteenth Amendment was eviscerated. The Court that once affirmed that those who torture are the “enemies of all mankind” now tells us that U.S. government officials can torture without worry, because the security of our state might some day depend upon it.

Crawling toward the light?

By timmukyPosted on November 2, 2009Posted in militarism, politics, warTagged obama, poltics, quagmire, vietnam, warNo Comments

For more on the pictures go here

Dave Eggers, reviewing a collection of early Kurt Vonnegut stories, offers the obiter dictum that “Vonnegut left the planet just about the time we, as a nation, were crawling toward the light again.” Well, I wonder.

For me, it’s difficult to choose the greater disaster unwinding in this new enlightened phase in our history. Is it the health care debacle? Obama’s ongoing one-upping of Bush era Constitutional transgressions? The fact that our economy has fallen down and can’t get up? Or is it the war that nobody sees or cares about? Every day one of these becomes the leading contender. For today, arbitrarily, I’ll choose Afghanistan, mainly because of this typically insightful Tomdispatch essay, Afghanistan as a bailout state.

The state of affairs, as Englehardt writes, is dire:

Here’s a partial rundown of news from that devolving conflict: In the last week, Nuristan, a province on the Pakistani border, essentially fell to the Taliban after the U.S. withdrew its forces from four key bases. Similarly in Khost, another eastern province bordering Pakistan where U.S. forces once registered much-publicized gains (and which Richard Holbrooke, now President Obama’s special envoy to the region, termed “an American success story”), the Taliban is largely in control. It is, according to Yochi Dreazen and Anand Gopal of the Wall Street Journal, now “one of the most dangerous provinces” in the country. Similarly, the Taliban insurgency, once largely restricted to the Pashtun south, has recently spread fiercely to the west and north. At the same time, neighboring Pakistan is an increasingly destabilized country amid war in its tribal borderlands, a terror campaign spreading throughout the country, escalating American drone attacks, and increasingly testy relations between American officials and the Pakistani government and military.

Meanwhile, the U.S. command in Afghanistan is considering a strategy that involves pulling back from the countryside and focusing on protecting more heavily populated areas (which might be called, with the first U.S. Afghan War of the 1980s in mind, the Soviet strategy). The underpopulated parts of the countryside would then undoubtedly be left to Hellfire missile-armed American drone aircraft. In the last week, three U.S. helicopters — the only practical way to get around a mountainous country with a crude, heavily mined system of roads — went down under questionable circumstances (another potential sign of an impending Soviet-style disaster). Across the country, Taliban attacks are up; deadly roadside bombs or IEDs are fast on the rise (a 350% jump since 2007); U.S. deaths are at a record high and the numbers of wounded are rising rapidly; European allies are ever less willing to send more troops; and Taliban raids in the capital, Kabul, are on the increase. All this despite a theoretical 12-1 edge U.S., NATO, and Afghan troops have over the Taliban insurgents and their allies.

A rational person, or nation, would see such a state of affairs and declare that it’s time to cut one’s losses. But that ain’t gonna happen with a president who only wants to please. As Englehardt has written, the only options he’s contemplating include the word “more.” This invokes comparisons to, er, a previous military engagement that didn’t end well. But even that might not convey the scale of catastrophe we’re courting:

In the Vietnam era, there was a shorthand word for this: “quagmire.” We were, as the antiwar song then went, “waist deep in the Big Muddy” and still wading in. If Vietnam was, in fact, a quagmire, however, it was so only because we made it so. Similarly, in changed circumstances, Afghanistan today has become the AIG of American foreign policy and Obama’s team so many foreign policy equivalents of Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. And as with the economy, so with the expanding Af/Pak war: at the end of the day, it’s the American taxpayer who will be left holding the bag.

Let’s think about what this means for a moment: According to the U.S. Congressional Research Service, the cost of keeping a single American soldier in Afghanistan is $1.3 million per year. According to Greg Jaffe and Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, it costs the Pentagon about $1 billion per year to station 1,000 U.S. troops in that country. It’s fair to assume that this estimate doesn’t include, among other things, long-term care for wounded soldiers or the cost of replacing destroyed or overused equipment. Nor do these figures include any civilian funds being spent on the war effort via the State Department, nor undoubtedly the funds being spent by the Pentagon to upgrade bases and facilities throughout the country. In other words, just about any decision by the president, including one simply focused on training Afghan soldiers and police, will involve an outlay of further multi-billions of dollars. Whatever choice the president makes, the U.S. will bleed money.
…..
The United States lived through all the phases of escalation, withdrawal, and defeat in Vietnam without suffering great post-war losses of any sort. This time we may not be so lucky. The United States is itself no longer too big to fail — and if we should do so, remind me: Who exactly will bail us out?

Crawling toward the light? I’ll agree with the crawling part…..

Killing hundreds of innocent civilians, with robots, in a country we’re not at war with

By timmukyPosted on October 28, 2009Posted in aerial warfare, militarism, politics, warTagged politics, Predator, warNo Comments

I realize that in the “Chair Force” post below I might have lost some of the moral perspective Chris Floyd lends in this piece:

Again, the point here is that a truly serious and sophisticated analysis of the situation would have stopped at the very beginning: “We are killing hundreds of innocent civilians, with robots, in a country we’re not at war with — one of our allies, in fact. What in the name of all that’s holy – and all that’s human – is driving our nation to commit these monstrous crimes, and how can we stop it?” That would be the issue under discussion. A truly serious and sophisticated analysis would not accept the hideous assertions and assumptions of state terrorists at face value, would not concern itself with the “process” by which imperial factions fight it out for the honor of perpetrating these atrocities – and would certainly not offer as its conclusion the earnest hope that the authors of these war crimes will find some way of doing them better….

In fact, losing moral perspective is the one thing Floyd finds wanting in Mayer’s piece. But would she be staff writer for the New Yorker with all the access that implies if she screamed out the obvious? Probably not….

Yet here she is blatantly contradicting her own reportage, the indisputable facts that she herself has uncovered. But such are the inevitable, wrenching cognitive dissonances that arise when you accept the basic assumptions of the militarist system — which you must do, to some extent, to get a seat at the “serious” table in America’s media-political establishment. She is probably not even aware that she is doing it; she is simply following the standard template for “process stories,” which require stark contrasts between the protagonists, who are usually cast in good guy-bad guy mold. In this case, the protagonists are the two state apparatuses — the Pentagon and the CIA — who wield the power of faceless, remote-control death over innocent, undefended human beings. In this “process,” it is the unregulated CIA killers who are the bad guys, and so the Pentagon must be recast as a stickler for accountability all the way up the line, despite the mountain of evidence against this ludicrous interpretation — evidence which, we must emphasize again, Mayer herself has been instrumental in compiling.

Floyd’s written a very good piece here. Where’s the outrage on the Predator story? Right here. Read the whole piece.

Populism 101

By timmukyPosted on October 27, 2009Posted in economy, politics, populismTagged economy, politics, populismNo Comments

Matt Taibbi calls this viral video from last week “like the most awesome thing ever.” As much as I like Taibbi, I can’t really go along all the way with him on that one. I like that this mad batsman has done his homework (and he has a damned nice stroke). The guy apparently has a head for numbers and he sees quite clearly that the numbers for the economy don’t come close to adding up. But he sort of loses me when he says no one with a name “like” Barrack Hussein Obama is going to solve our problems. Still, I chucked at a lot of this, was frightened by even more of it.

This is more evidence of a new populism that I can go along with about 90% (which is about as far as I can go with any movement/party). Dylan Ratigan is probably the public face of it, and he will only grow in stature, or get fired. He too is majorly pissed off and quite articulate, and has a bully pulpit. There are real protests in the streets of Chicago, and not by the usual suspects either. It’s not left wing or right wing. It’s kind of outsider vs. insider. And I think its adherents are onto something.

Populism often involves a fair bit of misdirected rage and scapegoating–at Obama personally, at immigrants–but a lot of it is spot on, targeting the bipartisan effort to steer absolutely massive amounts of money to the big banks and the weird organism that Wall Street has become (Taibbi’s notorious “vampire squid” image* comes to mind). The bailouts and the health reform (all but certain to be complicated and low impact, even if passed), trivial pursuits in a time of great crisis, show both parties to be entrenched, dedicated opponents to the common good. Whether a viable alternative presents itself is an interesting question to be watched over the next couple of elections. Or it might be something even worse. That’s in the populist DNA as well.

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* “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”

Let’s stop showering the world with Bomb Love

By timmukyPosted on October 24, 2009Posted in militarism, politics, warTagged iran, militarism, politics, warNo Comments

Jeff Huber is a retired Naval commander who provides a pretty refreshing insiderish perspective on our runaway military culture. This is a typical offering. He is also one of the few writers who have mentioned the one thing that makes our insane military state superfluous. Two things, actually: the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

The oceans and our size provide us with ample security protection, just as they did in the day of Washington and Jefferson and Franklin. No one can invade and occupy us. Nobody would ever be crazy enough to pop a nuclear missile off in our direction, or in the direction of any of our friends (do we have any of those left?)

No one is interested in competing with us militarily, not even Russia or China. Let’s start coming home and fixing our own problems, and take the world off our shoulders. It will get along fine without us bombing it on a regular basis.

He also is nicely succinct in dismissing the Iran hysteria that afflicts both parties

Iran serves a vital role in the Pentagon’s long war strategy. It’s a neo-East Germany; a pseudo-client state of Russia, plopped in the middle of the Middle East. It gives us a reason to keep troops located in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though none of the 9/11 attackers came from Iraq or even Afghanistan and certainly not from Iran.

Iran is an excuse to keep the war machine rolling.

Iran’s defense budget is less than one percent of ours. It can’t project conventional land power much beyond its borders. Its navy is a coast guard and its air force is a junkyard. It doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program. Yet we’re up in arms about it. How senseless.

And he saves some choice words for a former ~~Vice~~Co-President:

Speaking of senseless, Dick Cheney is on the rampage again. He is the most dishonest, most misguided villain of the 21st century, but when he speaks, he gets more bandwidth than the World Series, the Super Bowl and Internet porn combined. He’s not even attractive to look at or listen to, and he has a proven track record of not knowing what he’s talking about. He’s a militaristic dipswitch.

Huber is often on antiwar.com, and has a blog at Pen and Sword. He is also one of the few writers to follow the grotesque acts of insubordination and/or treason by top military brass. See General Treachery.

“They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that”

By timmukyPosted on October 23, 2009Posted in politics, Uncategorized, warTagged politics, unspeakable evil, warNo Comments

“Problems with killer drones” is the tepid headline of a summary article at AtlanticWire, collecting responses to Jane Mayer’s typically thorough investigation into Obama’s “weapon of choice”–deadly rocket attacks launched by Predator drones. (The link is to an abstract. Unfortunately, the entire article is behind the New Yorker’s firewall.)

The liberal response, represented by Lisa Schrich at HuffingtonPost, points out that ten civilians die for every militant killed in a drone strike and that they “undermine both Pakistani and Afghan state sovereignty and legitimacy, stir political unrest, and challenge alliances.”

Which is fine, as far as it goes, but she might go even further: it’s murder without any sort of due process. When did America decide it could kill anyone on the planet, without a peep of opposition from its media outlets or political class?

Actually, you can put a date on it. September 11, 2001. Before that, as Mayer relates, our government criticized Israel’s targeted killings of Palestinian militants. Martin Indyk, then ambassador to Israel, actually said, in June of that year, “the United States government is very clearly on record against targeted assassinations…. They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that.”

But September 11 Changed All That. And blowing suspected militants, and anyone in the neighborhood, to smithereens from two miles up in the sky became an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Think about that. Never mind that there are many more misses than hits, or that a “kill” with ten additional corpses is cause for high fives all around, or that the most celebrated kill of recent times, of Baitalluh Meshud, the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, only came after fifteen failed strikes, killing up to 321 additional people. “We”–our government–have no right to do anything like that. Right? Right? Even if we “take out” the target with the precision that so often claimed but never demonstrated, there’s no due process, no evidence whatsoever that the target is guilty of the crimes, or dark thoughts (the same thing in recent times) we accuse him of. In a terrific essay last month, Tom Englehardt made the case that to the rest of the world, we have become the Martians of HG Wells’ fiction, who, with “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic,” destroy human bodies and lives and communities without a second thought.

We go about our comfortable lives and rarely have cause to think about the women, children, and noncombatants who live in daily fear of being vaporized, torn apart, crushed or poisoned by the high-tech weaponry of a nation half a world away. This suits the politicians and the generals just fine, for whom it is almost literally a video game. Few American lives are at risk, the victims are invisible, both parties can appear to be taking a stand against terror, and the money to the military machine keeps flowing.

I think the last word should go to Harry Lime of The Third Man, who defends his death-dealing black marketeering (an operation that seems almost quaint today) while high in a Ferris Wheel overlooking Vienna with the words: “Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?”

“Path of war is a surefire loser”

By timmukyPosted on October 23, 2009Posted in politics, warTagged politics, warNo Comments

Turse and Englehardt offer one of the best explanations I’ve seen for the strange Nobel decision, and a good summary of the limits of military power:

Now, the Nobel Committee has made a remarkable gamble. It has seen fit to offer Barack Obama, who entered the Oval Office as a war president and soon doubled down the U.S. bet on the expanding conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan, an opportunity for a lasting legacy and real achievement of a sort that has long escaped American presidents. Their prize gives him an opportunity to step back and consider the history of American war-making and what the U.S. military is really capable of doing thousands of miles from home. It’s an unparalleled opportunity to face up honestly to the repeatedly demonstrated limits of American military power. It’s also the president’s chance to transform himself from war-maker by inheritance to his own kind of peace-maker, and so display a skill possessed by few previous presidents. He could achieve a more lasting victory, while limiting the blood, American and foreign, on his — and all Americans’ — hands.

More than 100 years after their early counterinsurgency efforts on two tiny islands in the Philippines, U.S. troops are still dying there at the hands of Muslim guerillas. More than 50 years later, the U.S. still garrisons the southern part of the Korean peninsula as a result of a stalemate war and a peace as yet unmade. More recently, the American experience has included outright defeat in Vietnam, failures in Laos and Cambodia; debacles in Lebanon and Somalia; a never-ending four-president-long war in Iraq; and almost a decade of wheel-spinning in Afghanistan without any sign of success, no less victory. What could make the limits of American power any clearer?

The record should be as sobering as it is dismal, while the costs to the peoples in those countries are as appalling as they are unfathomable to Americans. The blood and futility of this American past ought to be apparent to Nobel Peace Prize-winner Obama, even if his predecessors have been incredibly resistant to clear-eyed assessments of American power or the real consequences of U.S. wars.

Two paths stretch out before this first-year president. Two destinations beckon: peace or failure.

Disentangling the giant

By timmukyPosted on October 9, 2009Posted in politics, warNo Comments

Glenn Greenwald sums up nicely the objection to Obama’s Peace Prize shocker:

Beyond Afghanistan, Obama continues to preside over another war — in Iraq: remember that? — where no meaningful withdrawal has occurred. He uttered not a peep of opposition to the Israeli massacre of Gazan civilians at the beginning of this year (using American weapons), one which a U.N. investigator just found constituted war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. The changed tone to Iran notwithstanding, his administration frequently emphasizes that it is preserving the option to bomb that country, too — which could be a third war against a Muslim country fought simultaneously under his watch. He’s worked tirelessly to protect his country not only from accountability — but also transparency — for the last eight years of war crimes, almost certainly violating America’s treaty obligations in the process. And he is currently presiding over an expansion of the legal black hole at Bagram while aggressively demanding the right to abduct people from around the world, ship them there, and then imprison them indefinitely with no rights of any kind.

It’s certainly true that Obama inherited, not started, these conflicts. And it’s possible that he could bring about their end, along with an overall change in how America interacts with the world in terms of actions, not just words. If he does that, he would deserve immense credit — perhaps even a Nobel Peace Prize. But he hasn’t done any of that. And it’s at least as possible that he’ll do the opposite: that he’ll continue to escalate the 8-year occupation of Afghanistan, preside over more conflict in Iraq, end up in a dangerous confrontation with Iran, and continue to preserve many of the core Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies that created such a stain on America’s image and character around the world.

Through no fault of his own, Obama presides over a massive war-making state that spends on its military close to what the rest of the world spends combined. The U.S. accounts for almost 70% of worldwide arms sales. We’re currently occupying and waging wars in two separate Muslim countries and making clear we reserve the “right” to attack a third. Someone who made meaningful changes to those realities would truly be a man of peace. It’s unreasonable to expect that Obama would magically transform all of this in nine months, and he certainly hasn’t. Instead, he presides over it and is continuing much of it. One can reasonably debate how much blame he merits for all of that, but there are simply no meaningful “peace” accomplishment in his record — at least not yet — and there’s plenty of the opposite. That’s what makes this Prize so painfully and self-evidently ludicrous.

It’s quite possible that, as many have suggested, this is the Nobel Committee trying to force Obama to live up to his very nice rhetoric, which to date has not been matched by his actions. And I will say that I understand the case Gary Wills was trying to make in the Oct. 8 New York Review of Books:

A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire’s secrets. He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.

The world has just put a little pressure on Obama to disentangle himself. By making some very nice speeches about new beginnings with the Islamic world and nuclear disarmanent, he’s indicating that he’s interested in trying. We’ll see what comes of all this.