George W. Obama - Even the Village Voice is attacking the two-faced corporate puppet Obama

Before President Obama, it was grimly accurate to write, as I often did in the Voice, that George W. Bush came into the presidency with no discernible background in constitutional civil liberties or any acquaintance with the Constitution itself. Accordingly, he turned the "war on terror" over to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—ardent believers that the Constitution presents grave obstacles in a time of global jihad.

But now, Bush's successor—who actually taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago—is continuing much of the Bush-Cheney parallel government and, in some cases, is going much further in disregarding our laws and the international treaties we've signed.

On January 22, 2009, the apostle of "change we can believe in" proclaimed: "Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of my presidency." But four months into his first year in command, Obama instructed his attorney general, Eric Holder, to present in a case, Jewel v. National Security Agency, a claim of presidential "sovereign immunity" that not even Dick Cheney had the arrant chutzpah to propose.

Five customers of AT&T had tried to go to court and charge that the government's omnipresent spy, the NSA, had been given by AT&T private information from their phone bills and e-mails. In a first, the Obama administration countered—says Kevin Bankston of Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing these citizens stripped of their privacy—that "the U.S. can never be sued for spying that violated federal surveillance statutes, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or the Wiretap Act."

It is one thing, as the Bush regime did, to spy on us without going to court for a warrant, but to maintain that the executive branch can never even be charged with wholly disregarding our rule of law is, as a number of lawyers said, "breathtaking."

On the other hand, to his credit, Obama's very first executive orders in January included the ending of the CIA "renditions"—kidnapping terrorism suspects off the streets in Europe and elsewhere and sending them for interrogation to countries known to torture prisoners. However, in August, the administration admitted that the CIA would continue to send such manacled suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation.

Why send them to a foreign prison if they're not going to be tortured to extract information for the CIA? Oh, the U.S. would get "guarantees" from these nations that the prisoners would not be tortured. That's the same old cozening song that Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush used to sing robotically.

For the rest of the article please click on the link below

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-01-12/columns/george-w-obama/

30 Million Productive Jobs to Rebuild U.S. Infrastructure, Industry and Agriculture: The Program to End the Economic Depression

The US and the world are gripped by a deepening economic depression. There is no recovery and no automatic business cycle which will revive the economy. This bottomless depression will worsen until policies are reformed. The depression results from deregulated and globalized financial speculation, especially the $1.5 quadrillion world derivatives bubble. The US industrial base has been gutted, and the US standard of living has fallen by almost two thirds over the last four decades. We must reverse this trend of speculation, de-industrialization, and immiseration. Current policy bails out bankers, but harms working people, industrial producers, farmers, and small business. We must defend civil society and democratic institutions from the effects of high unemployment and economic breakdown. We therefore demand:


1. Measures to reduce speculation and minimize the burden of fictitious capital: End all bailouts of banks and financial institutions. Claw back the TARP and other public money given or lent to financiers. Abolish the notion of too big to fail; JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Wells Fargo and other Wall Street zombie banks are insolvent and must be seized by the FDIC for chapter 7 liquidation, with derivatives eliminated by triage. Re-institute the Glass-Steagall firewall to separate banks, brokerages, and insurance. Ban credit default swaps and adjustable rate mortgages. To generate revenue and discourage speculation, levy a 1% Tobin tax (securities transfer tax or trading tax) on all financial transactions including derivatives (futures, options, indices, and over the counter derivatives), stocks, bonds, foreign exchange, and commodities, especially program trading, high-frequency trading, and flash trading. Set up a 15% reserve requirement for all OTC derivatives. Use Tobin tax revenue and a revived corporate income tax to provide immediate tax relief to individuals, families, the self-employed, and small business by increasing personal exemptions and standard deductions. Stop all foreclosures on primary residences, businesses, and farms for five years or the duration of the depression, whichever lasts longer. Set a 10% maximum rate of interest on credit cards and payday loans. Re-regulate commodities markets with 100% margin requirements, position limits, and anti-speculation protections for hedgers and end users to prevent oil and gasoline price spikes. Enforce labor laws and anti-trust laws against monopolies and cartels. Restore individual chapter 11.

2. Measures to nationalize the Federal Reserve, cut federal borrowing, and provide 0% federal credit for production: Seize the Federal Reserve and bring it under the US Treasury as the National Bank of the United States, no longer the preserve of unelected and unaccountable cliques of incompetent and predatory bankers. The size of the money supply, interest rates, and approved types of lending must be determined by public laws passed and debated openly, passed by the congress and signed by the president. Stop US government borrowing from zombie banks and foreigners — let the US government function as its own bank. Reverse current policy by instituting 0% federal LENDING with preferential treatment for tangible physical production and manufacturing of goods and commodities, to include industry, agriculture, construction, mining, energy production, transportation, infrastructure building, public works, and scientific research, but not financial services and speculation. Issue successive tranches of $1 trillion as needed to create 30 million union-wage productive jobs and attain full employment for the first time since 1945, reversing the secular decline in the US standard of living. Provide 0% credit to reconvert idle auto and other plants and re-hire unemployed workers to build modern rail, mass transit, farm tractors, and aerospace equipment, including for export. Extend 0% federal credit for production to small businesses like auto and electronics repair shops, dry cleaners, restaurants, tailors, family farms, taxis, and trucking. Maintain commercial credit for retail stores. Create an unlimited rediscount guarantee by the National Bank for public works projects to provide cash to local banks for bills of exchange pertaining to infrastructure and public works. Repatriate the foreign dollar overhang by encouraging China, Japan, and other dollar holders to place orders for US-made capital goods and modern hospitals. Revive the US Export-Import Bank. Set up a 10% tariff to protect domestic re-industrialization. Nationalize and operate GM, Chrysler, CIT, and other needed but insolvent firms as a permanent public sector. Maintain Amtrak and USPS.


3. Measures to re-industrialize, build infrastructure, develop science drivers, create jobs, and restore a high-wage economy: state and local governments and special government agencies modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority will be prime contractors for an ambitious program of infrastructure and public works subcontracted to the private sector. To deal with collapsing US infrastructure, modernize the US electrical grid and provide low-cost energy with 1,000 fourth generation, pebble bed, high temperature reactors of 1,000 to 2,000 megawatts each. Rebuild the rail system with 50,000 miles of ultra-modern maglev Amtrak rail reaching into every state. Rebuild the entire interstate highway system to 21st century standards. Rebuild drinking water and waste water systems nationwide. Promote canal building and irrigation. For health care, build 1,000 500-bed modern hospitals to meet the minimum Hill-Burton standards of 1946. Train 250,000 doctors over the next decade. The Davis-Bacon Act will mandate union pay scales for all projects. For the farm sector, provide a debt freeze for the duration of the crisis, 0% federal credit for working capital and capital improvements, a ban on foreclosures, and federal price supports at 110% of parity across the board, with farm surpluses being used for a new Food for Peace program to stop world famine and genocide. Working with other interested nations, invest $100 billion each in: biomedical research to cure dread diseases; high energy physics (including lasers) to develop fusion power and beyond; and a multi-decade NASA program of moon-Mars manned exploration, permanent colonization, and industrial production. These science drivers will provide the technological spin-offs to modernize the entire US economy in the same way that the NASA moon shot gave us microchips and computers in the 1960s. These steps will expand and upgrade the national stock of capital goods and enhance the real productivity of US labor. Return the federal budget and foreign trade to surplus in 5 years or less.

4. Measures to defend and expand the social safety net: Restore all cuts; full funding at improved levels for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, jobless benefits, WIC, Head Start, and related programs. Offer Medicare for All to anyone under 65 who wants it at $100 per person per month, with reduced rates for families, students, and the unemployed. Pay for this with Tobin tax revenues and TARP clawback, and by ending the Iraq and Afghan wars. Seek to raise life expectancy by five years for starters. No rationing or death panels; savings can come only by finding cures. Quickly reach a $15 per hour living wage. Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act and affirm the right to organize. Pass card check to promote collective bargaining.

5. Measures to re-launch world trade and promote world recovery: Create a new world monetary system including the euro, the yen, the dollar, and the ruble, plus emerging Arab and Latin American regional currencies, with fixed exchange rates and narrow bands of fluctuation enforced by participating governments. Institute clearing and gold settlement among member states. Replace the IMF with a Multilateral Development Bank to finance world trade and infrastructure. The goal of the system must be to re-launch world trade through exports of high-technology capital goods, especially to sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia, and the poorer parts of Latin America. Promote a world Marshall Plan of great projects of world infrastructure, including: a Middle East reconstruction and development program; plans for the Ganges-Bramaputra, Indus, Mekong, Amazon, and Nile-Congo river basins; bridge-tunnel combinations to span the Bering Strait, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Straits of Malacca, the Sicilian narrows, and connect Japan to the Asian mainland; second Panama canal and Kra canals; Eurasian silk road, Cape to Cairo/Dakar to Djibouti, Australian coastal, and Inter-American rail projects, and more. American businesses will receive many of these orders, which means American jobs.
This program will create 30 million jobs in less than five years. It will end the depression, rebuild the US economy, improve wages and standards of living, re-start productive investment, and attain full employment with increased levels of capital investment per job. Most orders placed under this program will go to US private sector bidders. Because of the vastly increased volume of goods put on the market, inflation will not result.


http://tarpley.net/2009/11/16/30-million-productive-jobs-to-rebuild-us-infrastructure-industry-and-agriculture-the-program-to-end-the-economic-depression/

Tarpley.net

How to translate the news!

I thought it would be a good idea to show people how to translate a corporate media news article so we can all learn how to "read between the lines". We will be translating "The Way out of Afghanistan" by Fareed Zakaria. It's a misleading title because its actually a pro-war, pro-imperialistic article.

Hope you enjoy my commentary!

The Way Out of Afghanistan

Author: Fareed Zakaria

http://www.newsweek.com/id/215318

:Quote:
The United States, NATO, the European Union, and other nations have invested massively in stabilizing the country over the past eight years, and they will not—and should not—abandon it

The most important reality of the post-9/11 world has been the lack of any major follow-up attack. That's happened largely because Al Qaeda has been on the run in Afghanistan and Pakistan. :End Quote:

Channeling the 9/11 myth and then stating that "Al-Qaeda" (US funded) is on the run. Where are they on the run? Pakistan. Why? Because Obama wanted to and HAS BEEN bombing Pakistan because they are allies with China.

:Quote:
Were America to leave the scene, all the region's players would start jockeying for influence over Afghanistan. That would almost certainly mean the revival of the poisonous alliance between the Pakistani military and the hardest-line elements of the Taliban. :End Quote:

If we left that means that the Afghani's would have control over their own country again......What a Terrible idea, right? "Poisonous alliance" = fear mongering

:Quote:
The number of civilian deaths, while grim, is less than a 10th the number in Iraq in 2006. In the recent election, all four presidential candidates publicly endorsed the U.S. presence there. Compare this to Iraq, where politicians engaged in ritual denunciations of the United States constantly, to satisfy the public's anti-Americanism. :End Quote:

The innocent deaths continue for no reason. Wars built on lies. the Afghani president was funded into power by the US. If the new candidates speak out against the US they may get shot or the funded may be stripped away.

:Quote:
The Obama administration's answer to the worsening situation in the country appears to be: "more." More troops, civilians, tasks, and missions. There is nothing wrong with helping Afghans develop their country. But if the goal is to give Afghanistan a strong, functioning central government and a viable economy, the task will require decades, not years. :End Quote:

Translation = ENDLESS WAR, JOIN THE ARMY, ENDLESS IMPERIALISM

:Quote:
The focus must shift from nation building to dealmaking. The central problem in Afghanistan is that the Pashtuns, who make up 45 percent of the country and almost 100 percent of the Taliban, do not feel empowered. We need to start talking to them, whether they are nominally Taliban or not. Buying, renting, or bribing Pashtun tribes should become the centerpiece of America's stabilization strategy, as it was Britain's when it ruled Afghanistan. :End Quote:

Great, use a British destabilization plan to bribe the Afghani people to shoot at our troops so we can loot their land. Wonderful idea.

:Quote:
First, increase American troops. Second, increase Afghan troops. Third, shrink the number of enemy forces by making them switch sides or lay down their arms. That third strategy is what worked so well in Iraq and urgently needs to be adopted in Afghanistan. A few years from now, we can be sure that Afghanistan will still be poor, corrupt, and dysfunctional. But if we make the right deals, it will be ruled by leaders who keep the country inhospitable to Al Qaeda and terrorist groups like it. That's my definition of success. :End Quote:

Translation = Increased number of body bags, pay off Afghan troops to subjugate their own people, and shrink the number of civilians through Obama Predator drone attacks on villiages, wedding parties, friendly sports games, and all of this while siphoning all the natural resources and heroine away from their country.

War......What is it good for? Absolutely Nothing.

I never thought in my life that I would have to live through another Vietnam. At first I tried to compare it to Desert Storm 1 as an example but that skirmish didn't linger half as long as the nightmare that perpetuates on a daily basis in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Pakistan.

What's the reason for this article?

Well, I'm sick and tired of seeing mountains of fluff and entertainment. Yes, I do them as well but I also know how to balance them with the cold hard ugly reality that we need to gaze into every once in a while.

I guess the next question I should ask myself would be why do I care?

No one else does. People love to wave around their chinese made American flags and drink beer and obsess about their material posessions. Well I'm not going to be like that, I remember the first time the war(s) hit home for me. I turned on the television and we saw the portraits of dead soldiers recently blown to bits in the pointless wars. The same wars that were built on paranoia and lies. Most of the visages I let pass by without even glancing at their once smiling faces until just then a young blonde haired boys mug centered on the screen. Until this very day I hear the media announcer stating his age as his face continued to stare back at me through the television screen.

21 years old......21 years old...... the voice echoed.

I was twenty one as well at the time and for some reason I put myself in his position. I pictured myself shot to pieces in some desert wasteland by a bunch of Iraqi people that didn't want us there to begin with. I saw the anger in their faces of what we were doing to them, bombs dropping on suburban areas, my troops and private mercenary groups shooting civilians for no reason. Then I pictured the black rubber body bag bring zipped around me and the bouncing around on the cargo deck of a plane heading back home. To the land of the free. I didn't stop there either. I went even farther with my thoughts. I pictured my mother in pain and misery looking at me inside the shiny casket. The child which she once gave birth to dead prematurely because of lies....... because of deceit........ because of greed of the wealthy war profiteers.

I still hold those feeling with me every time I come home. Every time I see my father screaming at the TV because he disagrees with the news reporter. Every time I see my Mother cooking dinner. I then think of the Fathers and Mothers of the children who were led to the slaughter because Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, GE, Halliburton, Blackwater, and now Obama wanted to make a profit off the Human sufferage. I sometimes think of Colin Powell holding up the fake "anthrax" vial and shaking it around as if Saddam Hussein the nefarious substance at his disposal. I think of how President Bush kept envoking the 9/11 myth over and over again to fool the American people into fighting a war of imperialism. How they played upon their irrationality, their emotional weakness convince them to offer up themselves and their children on the to alter for the good of corporate monopolies.

It still continues to this day. Obama is no different. He promised an end to the war but then starts a new one with Pakistan. Obama's predator drones are the bane of peaceful Pakistani villages all over the country. Civilians are prey for our souless flying machines. Commanded cynically by some brainwashed 19 year old service member in some far off air conditioned bunker.

I now invite all of you to look at Mrs. Sheehans website and continue the anti-war sentiments until this useless chaos stops. Please visit the link below and realize that Obama and Bush are controlled by the same people. The same people who killed that 21 year old soldier and ruined the lives of his family.

http://www.cindysheehanssoapbox.com/