libbyliberal's blog

If Mike Whitney is right about this, we better push back the disinformation Obama and the corporate full press will be shoving down our throats. Obama's "gutless" dithering which Robert Fisk decried earlier maybe isn't dithering at all. It is pretending he cares about the millions and then "fixing their wagons" for threatening to clamor for any leader who does not meet the power and control requirements of the US/Israel coalition. Obama is no moral leader, he is a gamesman. And the game has been on. With millions dead, maimed or displaced in Iraq and Afghanistan, why would the regime of what Chris Floyd calls the "Continuer-in-Chief" care about the people of Egypt? Just a little sound bite spin and let the death squads paid for with US tax dollars do their intimidation thing for the greater good, illegitimate Western control of an Arab country.

Mike Whitney: The Blood is on Obama's Hands

Thus, the Obama administration will continue to offer lip-service to democracy and human rights, while coordinating efforts with Mubarak to maintain Washington's stranglehold on power in Cairo.

The first step in this process, is to quash the rebellion with force.

Yesterday, after promising he would not use violence against the protesters, Mubarak deployed his goons to Tahrir Square where they attacked the the assembly with batons, rocks, and clubs. Men on horseback and camels charged into the crowd sending droves of protesters fleeing in panic. Al Jazeera reported that hundreds of people were injured in the melee. It's clear that the so-called "Mubarak supporters" were not civilians at all, but members of the feared Egyptian security forces in disguise. The Obama administration is aware of the clashes but has refused to condemn the perpetrators. Obama is now sticking to a script that was written by powerbrokers in Washington and Tel Aviv.

From the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Call the White House Thursday to voice your support for accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower US Army PFC Bradley Manning, specifically that his human rights be respected by the Quantico, Virginia, brig authorities. Bradley has been held in solitary confinement-like conditions for over eight months, and his trial is still months away. This American citizen-soldier has been convicted of no crime, yet continues to endure inhumane conditions of pre-trial confinement like no other inmate at the Quantico brig. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs recently stated that the White House was not paying attention to Bradley Manning’s extreme confinement conditions, or the fact that recent pre-approved visitors of Bradley’s have been detained and interrogated by military police in order to block their scheduled visit. It is critical that we educate the White House of this ongoing injustice!

Recommended points to make:

A sign caught my eye from the crowds of protesters in Cairo on the TV screen earlier today. “WE CAN, TOO” it read. My throat caught. I felt sorry for the man carrying the sign who seemed to have an illusion of Obama and America that was undeserved. It is we who should be inspired by him and the 2 million others, willing to die for freedom. His passion, his moral and physical courage.

Obama’s “Yes, we can!” was rhetorical cotton candy, long gone. A hollow man delivered it. An actor. A salesman. An inside man for the oligarchy as Glen Ford of BAR asserted. Part of an amoral government that is impervious to the momentous teachable moments offered up from this Egyptian struggle for freedom.

As Egypt fights to assert its collective heart and soul, the Obama administration, as the Bush administration did, drains the passion from the heart, crushes the soul of America. There is no respect for morality and honor here. It is still about patriarchal gamesmanship. Might, whether financial or military, makes right. The humanity filling our screens this week is not a serious priority to the gamesmen and gameswomen of Washington. Cynical Washington players who are always so ready, willing, and able to throw people reaching for the promises of democracy, whether at home or abroad, under the bus, the tank, whatever, or let a crony proxy do it. Over 1 million Iraqis dead, nobody bothered counting Afghans. What did we expect?

The man on the Cairo street? President Obama along with the Pentagon and the gated community group-thinking neocons and neoliberals, hungry for power and control, have given full throttle support to the oppressor of this vulnerable man on the Egyptian street. The Obama administration, as the Bush administration, has provided the military weaponry and financing that may harm or kill him soon. Maybe he was killed or harmed tonight. 800 injured. 5 dead.

Marjorie Cohn in her article "U.S. Chickens Come Home to Roost in Egypt" points out that the US has supported Egyptian Prez Mubarak with $1.3 billion annually, most of it in military aid. Egypt in return collaborates with Israel to blockade Gaza and offers “logistical support” to America for its wars.

2 million Egyptians are now revolting against Mubarak and the US is being called out internationally for its own corruption and war criminality and war criminality enabling. We all know the US is eager to have a pro-US replacement for Mubarak, the best replacement US money (that US citizens desperately need) and weaponry (that humanity in general does not need) can buy.

The welfare of the Egyptian people themselves was no big priority clearly to the Mubarak regime nor to an America supporting it with this vast sum of money. Marjorie Cohn on the standard of living of the Egyptian citizenry:

Stop talking about Kucinich and the olive pit. Forget about the ride on Air Force One.

Kucinich has positioned himself to plunge a stake through the zombie heart of the arch enemy of American well being, The Federal Reserve Bank.

WE HAVE GOT TO HELP HIM AND PAY ATTENTION. The Bank Mafia of America has captured the minds, hearts and souls of almost all of our amoral leadership in the administration and Congress who have to a grotesque degree stopped watchdogging our rights and needs for a stunning amount of time now.

Abandon all hope that Obama or the legacy Democratic Party will rally to save Americans from economic terrorism. In fact, trust that they will rally to enable the economic terrorists.

We’ve got Dennis Kucinich. We’ve got Ron Paul. We’ve got the Green Party. We’ve got those citizens finally rising above the media-inflaming Blue v. Red, divide-up-and-conquer hype that is earnestly trying to distract America from its economic raping, from facing down the real enemy of Americans, the oligarchs.

I made up a riddle the other day. What’s the difference between a Republican and a Democratic politician? Answer: Whether the knife goes into your front or your back.

The following are excerpts from Danny Schechter’s article, “We Can't Let the Banksters Walk Away from Their Crimes”:

Although the financial crisis that swept the world may have started on Wall Street, it has brought down governments and shredded economic security worldwide, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs and homes as businesses collapse, foreclosures grow, credit tightens and communities are devastated.

Estimates of the damage run into the trillions.

The Pew Economic Policy Group reports the average U.S. household lost $66,000 in stock holdings and $30,000 in real estate values from June 2008 through March 2009 due to the upheaval in world markets. This brings us close to $100,000 per family.

[snip]

Some compelling quotes from Yvonne Ridley, a British journalist and also the European President of the International Muslim Women's Union, in her article, “Sleeping Giant Wakes Up.”

The Arab world’s sleeping giant has finally woken from its slumber after years of being drugged and mugged by the West.

Having witnessed -- and experienced –- first-hand the brutality of the Egyptian and Tunisian police and their undercover stooges, I can tell you that the uprisings of the masses took real courage.

Over the years, dictator Hosni Mubarak has traded on their fear, using some of the foulest methods of intimidation imaginable.

[snip]

This email came from Howie Hawkins and the Green Party of New York:

Hawkins Opposes Cuomo's Proposals for Tax Cuts to the Rich, Job Cuts, Says Single Payer Health Care is the Solution to Medicaid

Howie Hawkins, the former Green Party candidate for Governor, said today that Cuomo's proposals to resolve the state's alleged $9 billion state budget deficit by giving a $5 billion tax cut for the wealthy and laying off more than 10,000 state workers was doomed to failure and would be rejected by state lawmakers.

Hawkins challenged Cuomo's claim of transparency, saying Cuomo's penchant for micromanaging was freezing out the public and was at least partially to blame for Cuomo's inability to attract qualified Commissioners and senior staff. Most of his Cabinet remains unfilled a month into his administration.

John Grant has a wry, clear way of framing the moral vacuum that is America and its ferocious military status quo that steamrolls ever onward, contrary to all logic, justice and empathy.

Grant contends that the U.S.'s Middle East influence has profoundly waned, as opposed to Turkey’s and Iran’s, despite “hundreds of thousands of soldiers and billions of dollars of equipment and bases." “And a lot of face to save,” he adds. The 2003 U.S. Iraq invasion and occupation was what “boosted” Iran to strong regional influence he emphasizes.

John Grant on George W. Bush's reflection on his war (or lack of reflection):

Still, you have to admire US leaders for their talent and tenacity in never publicly recognizing the obvious. George Bush, of course, was an underestimated master at this.

He and his gang of cutthroats stumbled around in the world like drunken fat men knocking over furniture and vomiting on the couch. Then, at the press conference when a reporter asked if there was anything he could say had been a “mistake,” he'd give us that famous vacant look.

“Gee. I’m thinking,” he’d say with an aw-shucks grin and a shy chuckle. “I’m trying but I just can’t come up with anything right now.” Another chuckle and a little shrug. Then: “I’ll take it under advisement and get back to you in a couple decades.”

In other words, “Buzz off and leave me alone. I’m the leader of the free world. I don't make mistakes. I make history.”

Grant also takes on the present do-nothing reality of Obama and his continuation of Bush-Cheney policies:

I picked up a provocative book by John J. Mearshimer in B&N today, “Why Leaders Lie -- The Truth About Lying In International Politics” (Oxford, 2011). I highly recommend it. Mearshimer rationally but bluntly explores past and current deadly global military crises promoted by the mendacity of leading “players.”

As Mearshimer points out below, the major incendiary lying that occurs from leaders is often not found in nation-to-nation communication but in said leaders lying to their own people. Additionally heart-troubling is how some craven, demonizing, nationalistic “myth-making” takes hold so strongly it takes decades, or even future generations, for this demonization, at least by some, to be called out. Another insight explored below concerns how leaders who lie often enough about international situations to their citizenries will lapse more and more into lying about domestic issues as well.

Here are some thought-provoking passages from Mearshimer on the profound manipulative powers of “nationalist mythmaking” and “fearmongering” that contribute to national group-think and the enablng of the psychopathological, massive brutality of wars within the human family.

page 6

Furthermore, leaders appear to be more likely to lie to their own people about foreign policy issues than to other countries. That certainly seems to be true for democracies that pursue ambitious foreign policies and are inclined to initiate wars of choice, i.e., when there is not a clear and imminent danger to a country’s vital interests that can only be dealt with by force. Of course, that description fits the United States over the past seventy years ...

So the interest in repealing Obamacare means some strident Republicans claim it is too unfair to corporations and want to eliminate the pathetically limited protections it offers the citizenry.

It is chock full of citizen pitfalls and corporate aggrandizements but that is not enough for the corporate overlords who want the last molecule of profit-making they can on the backs of American citizens or the Republican kabuki artists who wail just to wail because that is how they play the game.

The tepid media response from those who now pass as "progressives" (since real progressives have been disenfranchised long ago by the Obama administration and the corporate media) is Obamacare must be defended. Tepid, because it is hard to get passionate about a Trojan Horse law that aids and abets the profit-making of the insurance industry vendors. That blocked a universal health care system that would have been the tide that raised all citizens' boats in these dark times. That would have cost us all a hell of a lot less, 6% out of our payroll taxes, wasn’t it? That would have saved us and our families the upcoming economic and physical slings and arrows -- expensive and possibly critical (as in gratuitous suffering and death) ambushes -- those realists among us are having nightmares about.

But the disinformation campaigns of both parties aided by a craven corporate media worked their evil magic on a citizenry that got played, played, played. That turned on each other and lost the benefit of universal health care that most every other industrialized nation enjoys, while paying a lot less for it. Listening to Keith Olbermann and Howard Dean last night express impatience with the “repealers” rang hollow for me when it was the Obama administration and a Congress on both sides of the aisle that aided and abetted the collective screwing of the citizenry in terms of affordable health care. Along with the lemming mentality of the obtuse tea partiers on one side and the public option pragmatists on the other.

In July of last year Dr. John Geyman in pnhp (Physicians for a National Health Program) did a concise assessment of the Orwellian-named “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010” (PPACA).

Below is the powerful 1967 speech delivered by Martin Luther King protesting the Viet Nam War.

But first, another mention of that presumptuous Pentagon official who recently asserted that King would have been in favor of the present MidEast wars.

Sahil Kapur reports in RawStory that a Pentagon official this past week said that Martin Luther King would understand and recognize the need for the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Department of Defense's general counsel Jeh C. Johnson was a graduate of King’s alma mater, Morehouse College. He attended the school at the same time as King’s son.

"I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack," Johnson said.

Kapur:

Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill called it "[o]ne of the most despicable attempts at revisionist use of Martin Luther King Jr. I've ever seen."

I notice my titles are getting longer and more bitter. I found I lacked the space, but this one should have read:

OBAMA’S REAGANOMICS ON STEROIDS: “Entitlement Reforms” a/k/a Ruthless Back-stabbing of Middle and Lower Income Americans by Raping and Disabling Their Social Safety Programs and Forcing Them To Postpone Retirement (Pretending They Could Manage to Stay Employed, Anyway)

I have just read a distressing article on Obama’s toxic Reaganomics sensibility by Eric Laursen in the indypendent.

The ever-hurtful coalition of what Laursen labels deficit hawks and free-market conservatives are having a field day during these dark and dirty Obama years. Obama and his administration amiably talk the talk of bipartisanship as they ruthlessly continue the Reagan and Bush devastation of the non-elite classes. Laursen calls out Obama for engineering us into a fatal economic direction that will damage Social Security for decades to come.

Laursen:

Last night Obama looked Amnesiac Americans in the eye and re-won their hearts, apparently.

Yes, indeedy, he scored. He seems from the a.m. media buzz today to be out-teflon-ing Reagan. With a lot of help from his vast corporate media enablers, jumping the shark imho in their triangulation of Palin to eclipse the darker reality of the Obama regime.

This is where Obama can flex. He can afford to be sentimentally expansive because it costs him nothing with the corporate overlords. He can re-seduce with his words. I am not surprised by Obama. I am surprised by the numbers who still buy it. Do they or not? The media will tell us that they did. Gamesmanship over statesmanship. Style over substance every time. To paraphrase the title of a wonderful book I am reading by Megan Stack, "Every Man and Woman in the Beltway Village is a Liar."

You don’t think that being a rogue war criminal nation, droning, assassination, death squads, no habaes corpus, massive suicides, homicides of civilians, rapes in the military might also contribute to our culture of violence?

I know this may seem like an odd week for me to float this assertion given the nightmare murders and attempted murder in Arizona. But I am asking for a coalition for communication between the Far Left and the Far Right. An exploration of common, angry ground.

I am advocating communication between the the citizens most frustrated and hurting, one highlighted non-stop by the press, the other totally ignored by it. Not to mention the two citizen groups most handily used for "divide up and conquer" triangulation and thus disempowerment by Obama and his amoral administration, a bloodsucking, opportunistic Congress, and a craven media. Aren't those of us on the far flanks of the highly celebrated ideological divide tired of being played by these rabid rat bastards. (I used to call out psuedo-progressive politicians and -media talking heads as rat bastards and those Republican ones as "rabid" rat bastards. As far as I'm concerned, the rabidity has now spread beyond redemption.)

Our Constitution, our Democracy are circling the bowl! Time for desperate, out of the box, measures. I for one might be interested in brewing a strong concoction of Green (Party) Tea (Party) Tea to do all I can to stop the obscene madness.