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Olbermann offers Obama an out

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Olbermann offers Obama an out

obama barack hype bondKeith Olbermann’s Special Comment on Afghanistan is being summarized as telling President Obama to Get Out Now. Olbermann’s words stir our enthusiasm, but he leaves damning loopholes as far as I am concerned. The MSNBC newsman conditions his advice to the president with “unless you are right,” then at the end, showing a tact far too reckless, he tells Obama to “listen to yourself.”

No. That’s not why we elected Barack Obama.

The inexperienced senator had no record. Our hope didn’t spring from a demonstration of ability. Obama was elected for the hope he offered because he appeared to be listening to the American people. It would probably have been inconceivable to imagine then that Obama could not but respond to the unprecedented surge of electoral participation prompted by George W. Bush’s wars.

Listen to the people Mr. Obama, and no one else. To ask Obama to listen to himself is to offer him entirely too much slack. Give an authoritarian leader too much rope, that’s more rope he has to hang you.

And then there is no “unless you are right.”

What is that but a straight man’s setup? That line is for the President to show America how sure he is of his decision. The people want a leader who’s offering supreme confidence, so Olbermann is holding the door. He goes on to frame the challenges posed by Afghanistan, as surmountable by a qualified prez. Olbermann invites the President to be “precisely right.” Isn’t that exactly what will sooth the viewers, after Obama has famously taken so much time to arrive at a decision?

But there is no “unless you are right.” Unless Olbermann meant it with an implied irony. But he didn’t. He didn’t say unless black is white, or up is down. Olbermann allowed for the possibility that an escalation could be right.

“If not, Mr. President, this way lies Vietnam.”

IF NOT Olbermann says. Doesn’t he mean no if and or buts?

When Walter Cronkite finally spoke out about Vietnam, and declared the war un-winnable, it was not because it had become un-winnable. It had not transformed into a quagmire, the chance for victory had not escaped us. The illegal and immoral subjugation of the Vietnamese people was never a winnable strategy. Like Iraq and Afghanistan, it was a predictable calamity, a crime. Moral observers knew it from the beginning.

America did not LOSE Vietnam, and we will not LOSE Iraq and Afghanistan. We DESTROYED those landscapes and millions of lives, and we continue to “finish the job.” It’s an immeasurable, apocalyptic tragedy.

If Barack Obama escalates in the footsteps of Lyndon Johnson, it will similarly be no mistake. The travesty is that the American people have once again been waylaid in their determination to find a leader to represent their desire for peace.

Here is the text of Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment:

SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, ‘Countdown’
Mon., Nov . 30, 2009

Mr. President, it now falls to you to be both former Republican Senator George Aiken and the man to whom he spoke, Lyndon Johnson. You must declare victory, and get out.??

You should survey the dismal array of options in front of you — even the orders given out last night — sort them into the unacceptable, the unsuccessful, and the merely un-palatable, and then put your arm down on the table and wipe the entire assortment of them off your desk — off this nation’s desk — and into the scrap heap of history. ??

Unless you are utterly convinced — willing to bet American lives on it — that the military understands the clock is running, and that the check is not blank, and that the Pentagon will go to sleep when you tell it to, even though the Pentagon is a bunch of perpetually 12-year old boys desperate to stay up as late as possible by any means necessary — get out now. ??

We are, at present, fighting, in no particular order, the Taliban; a series of sleazy political-slash-military adventurers, not the least of whom is this mountebank election-fixer Karzai, and what National Security Advisor Jones estimated in October was around eight dozen al-Qaida in the neighborhood.??

But poll after poll, and anecdote after anecdote, of the reality of public opinion inside Afghanistan is that its residents believe we are fighting Afghanistan. That we, Sir, have become an occupying force. Yes: if we leave, Afghanistan certainly will have an occupying force, whether it’s from Pakistan, or consisting of foreign fighters who will try to ally themselves with the Taliban.??

Can you prevent that? Can you convince the Afghans that you can prevent that? Can you convince Americans that it is the only way to un-do Bush and Cheney policy catastrophes dating back to Cheney’s days as Secretary of Defense in the ’90s? If not, Mr. President, this way lies Vietnam. If you liked Iraq, you’ll love Afghanistan with 35,000 more troops, complete with the new wrinkle, straight from the minder-binder lingo of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.”??

President Obama will be presenting an exit strategy for Afghanistan. The exit strategy that begins by entering still further. Lose to win, sink to swim, escalate to disengage. And even this disconnect of fundamental logic is predicated on the assumption that once the extra troops go in, when the President says “okay, time for adult swim, Generals, time to get out of the pool and bring the troops with you,” that the Pentagon is just going to say “Yeppers.”??

The Pentagon, often to our eternal relief, but just as often to our eternal regret is in the War business. You were right, Mr. President, to slow the process down, once a series of exit strategies was offered to you by men whose power and in some case livelihoods are predicated on making sure all exit strategies, everywhere, forever, don’t really result in any service-man or woman actually exiting.??

These men are still in the belly of what President Eisenhower so rightly, so prophetically, christened the military-industrial complex. Now and later as the civilian gray eminences with “retired” next to their names, formally lobbying the House and Senate and informally lobbying the nation through television and the printed word, to “engage” here, or “serve” there, or “invest” everywhere, they are, in many cases, just glorified hardware salesmen. ??

It was political and operational brilliance, Sir, to retain Mr. Bush’s last Secretary of Defense Mr. Gates. It was transitional and bipartisan insight, Sir, to maintain General Stanley McChrystal as a key leader in the field. ??

And it was a subtle but powerful reminder to the authoritarian minded War-hawks like John McCain, and the blithering idiots like former Governor Palin, of the Civilian authority of the Constitution it was a picture drawn in crayon for ease of digestion by the Right, to tell our employees at the Pentagon, to take their loaded options and go away and come back with some real ones.??

You reminded them, Mr. President, that Mr. Gates works for the people of the United States of America, not the other way around. You reminded them, Mr. President, that General McChrystal is our employee, not our dictator. You’ve reminded them Mr. President. Now, tonight, remind yourself. Stanley McChrystal.??

General McChrystal has doubtless served his country bravely and honorably and at great risk, but to date his lasting legacy will be as the great facilitator of the obscenity that was transmuting the greatest symbol of this nation’s true patriotism, of its actual willingness to sacrifice, into a distorted circus fun-house mirror version of such selflessness.??

Friendly fire killed Pat Tillman. Mr. McChrystal killed the truth about Pat Tillman. And that willingness to stand truth on its head on behalf of “selling” a war or the generic idea of America being at war to turn a dead hero into a meaningless recruiting poster, should ring essentially relevant right now.??

From the very center of a part of our nation that could lie to the public, could lie to his mother, about what really happened to Pat Tillman, from the very man who was at the operational center of that plan, comes the entire series of plans to help us supposedly find the way out of Afghanistan? We are supposed to believe General McChrystal isn’t lying about Afghanistan???

Didn’t he blow his credibility by lying, so obviously and so painfully, about Pat Tillman? Why are we believing the McChrystals? Their reasons might sound better than the ones they helped George Bush and Dick Cheney fabricate for Iraq, but surely they are just as transparently oblivious of the forest. ??

Half of them insist we must stay in Afghanistan out of fear of not repeating Iraq, while the other half, believing Bush failed in Iraq by having too few troops, insist we must stay in Afghanistan out of fear of repeating Iraq. And they are suddenly sounding frighteningly similar to what the Soviet Generals were telling the Soviet Politicos in the 1980s about Afghanistan.??

Sure it’s not going well, sure we need to get out, we all see that. But first let’s make sure it’s stabilized and then we get out. The Afghans will be impressed by our commitment and will then take over the cost of policing themselves, even though the cost would be several times their gross national product. Just send in those extra troops, just for awhile. Just 350,000.

I’m sorry, did I say 350,000? I meant 35,000. Must be a coffee stain on the paper. Mr. President, last fall, you were elected. Not General McChrystal, not Secretary Gates, not another Bushian Drone of a politician. You. On the Change Ticket. On the pitch that all politicians are not created equal.??

And upon arrival you were greeted by a Three Mile Island of an economy, so bad that in the most paranoid recesses of the mind one could wonder if the Republicans didn’t plan it that way, to leave you in the position of having to prove the ultimate negative, that you staved off worldwide financial collapse, that if you had not done what you so swiftly did, that this “economic cloudy day” would have otherwise been the “biblical flood of finance.”??

So, much of the change for which you were elected, Sir, has thus far been understandably, if begrudgingly, tabled, delayed, made more open-ended. But patience ebbs, Mr. President. And while the first one thousand key decisions of your presidency were already made about the economy, the first public, easy-to-discern, mouse-or-elephant kind of decision comes tomorrow night at West Point at eight o’clock.

You know this, Mr. President: we cannot afford this war. Nothing makes less sense to our economy than the cost of supply for 35,000 new troops. Nothing will do more to slow economic recovery. You might as well shoot the revivified auto industry or embrace John Boehner Health Care Reform and Spray-Tan Reimbursement.

You know this, Mr. President: we cannot afford this war. Nothing makes less sense to our status in the world than for us to re-up as occupiers of Afghanistan and for you to look like you were unable to extricate yourself from a Military Chinese Finger Puzzle left for you by Bush and Cheney and the rest of Halliburton’s hench-men.

And most of all, and those of us who have watched these first nine months trust both your judgment and the fact you know this, Mr. President: unless you are exactly right, we cannot afford this war. For if all else is even, and everything from the opinion of the generals to the opinion of the public is even, we cannot afford to send these troops back into that quagmire for second tours, or thirds, or fourths, or fifths.

We cannot afford this ethically, Sir. The country has, for eight shameful years, forgotten its moral compass and its world purpose. And here is your chance to reassert that there is, in fact, American Exceptionalism. We are better. We know when to stop making our troops suffer, in order to make our generals happy.

You, Sir, called for change, for the better way, for the safety of our citizens including the citizens being wasted in war-for-the-sake-of-war, for a reasserting of our moral force. And we listened. And now you must listen. You must listen to yourself.

HR-3962 a travesty of mockery of sham

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HR-3962 a travesty of mockery of sham

new medicare logoWhile a number of Democrats implicated themselves by joining all but one Republican to vote against the Affordable Health Care for America Act, let’s make a distinction for Representative Dennis Kucinich who had reasons the other congressmen are not prepared to articulate. For example, Colorado District 4 house rep Betsy Markey rejected HR-3962 for the usual GOP tea party bugaboos, asserting it would hurt the deficit and didn’t include tort reform. Below is the statement Kucinich released Nov 7. Chew on this, as Dems pat themselves on the back.

Why I Voted NO

We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care.  We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are.  But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit.  That is our system.

Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution.  They are driving up the cost of health care.  Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills.  The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%.  It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care.  Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick.

But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care.  In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers.  This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies — a bailout under a blue cross.

By incurring only a new requirement to cover pre-existing conditions, a weakened public option, and a few other important but limited concessions, the health insurance companies are getting quite a deal.  The Center for American Progress’ blog, Think Progress, states “since the President signaled that he is backing away from the public option, health insurance stocks have been on the rise.”  Similarly, healthcare stocks rallied when Senator Max Baucus introduced a bill without a public option. Bloomberg reports that Curtis Lane, a prominent health industry investor, predicted a few weeks ago that “money will start flowing in again” to health insurance stocks after passage of the legislation.  Investors.com last month reported that pharmacy benefit managers share prices are hitting all-time highs, with the only industry worry that the Administration would reverse its decision not to negotiate Medicare Part D drug prices, leaving in place a Bush Administration policy.

During the debate, when the interests of insurance companies would have been effectively challenged, that challenge was turned back.  The “robust public option” which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million.  An amendment which would have protected the rights of states to pursue single-payer health care was stripped from the bill at the request of the Administration.  Looking ahead, we cringe at the prospect of even greater favors for insurance companies.

Recent rises in unemployment indicate a widening separation between the finance economy and the real economy.  The finance economy considers the health of Wall Street, rising corporate profits, and banks’ hoarding of cash, much of it from taxpayers, as sign of an economic recovery. However in the real economy — in which most Americans live — the recession is not over.  Rising unemployment, business failures, bankruptcies and foreclosures are still hammering Main Street.

This health care bill continues the redistribution of wealth to Wall Street at the expense of America’s manufacturing and service economies which suffer from costs other countries do not have to bear, especially the cost of health care.   America continues to stand out among all industrialized nations for its privatized health care system.  As a result, we are less competitive in steel, automotive, aerospace and shipping while other countries subsidize their exports in these areas through socializing the cost of health care.

Notwithstanding the fate of H.R. 3962, America will someday come to recognize the broad social and economic benefits of a not-for-profit, single-payer health care system, which is good for the American people and good for America’s businesses, with of course the notable exceptions being insurance and pharmaceuticals.

This Israel public relations jig is up

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This Israel public relations jig is up

Colorado College lecture in Gaylord HallCOLORADO COLLEGE- The news from the ISRAEL TODAY lecture is all good. If you’d been there, you might wonder how my takeaway from such a bilious gathering could be upbeat. I’ll tell you. The Palestinian voice was well represented, Israel’s presentation was Old Testament, and the writing on the wall grows ever more clear. And I got a few nice pics.

The Audience
To begin, I would certainly have preferred everyone had acted with more decorum. That is, if there had been impressionable attendees there. As it was, the seats were only half occupied. Except for the young men with “JEW CREW” on their backs, or girls with Hebrew script across their pullovers, there were almost no CC students. The audience was one third voices for Palestine, and two thirds vitriolic Jew, amazingly indignant to disruption of their world view. No one was there to listen, except to cheer for what they already believed. But I’m certain it was an eye opener for all.

My friends and I were sure to supplement the speaker’s pauses with color to augment his heavily loaded statements. For example, when Gil Artzyeli described the objective and feat of Israel’s 2006 incursion into Lebanon “to silence them,” and did that not prove effective? Who could refrain from adding “you killed them.” The 2/3 supporters grew more and more angry. But the speaker had an inopportune manner of posing rhetorical questions, which we couldn’t resist answering.

It almost got us kicked out. I spent the duration with security guards poised right behind me, ready to escort me out of the room. I learned it would be more prudent to avoid the back row at opportunities like this, because you can be pulled out of your chair, or distracted into involuntary conversation with security personnel more readily than if you were well ensconced among the other attendees.

Those voicing support for Palestinians were made to wait until question and answer portion to voice their objections. Even then, the pro-Israel audience would cut them off. It became impossible to ask a complex question without interruptions of “What is your question? State your question!” They hounded everyone who wasn’t setting the speaker up for a softy. It was a ruthless crowd with the civility of Tea Partiers. When the pro-Israel attendees took their turn posing questions, no one interrupted. When it was a detractor, their time suddenly became too valuable to entrust to us. Even a CC student from Gaza, who hasn’t been permitted to visit his family in two years, was not given a hearing.

I’m positive that as these rude people think on how the event transpired, they will not be able to help feeling ashamed. Our interactions were spirited and engaging, addressed to a speaker with the hubris to take us on. We interrupted the speaker, but never tried to drown him out. Our adversaries on the other hand tried to flat out shut their fellow audience members up.

That crowd is immovable. I’ve no optimism for influencing their resolve. On the other hand, their rigidity was laughable. Their logic will not sway anyone new. They were positively shrill about their speaker being permitted to deliver his message as abridged. “Let him speak!” they shouted, as if their attention was rapt by information they’d never heard before, a preposterous notion. I’m neither Palestinian nor American Jew, but this was Israel Foundation Myth for Dummies. I can only think that this crowd sat tightly clenched, thrilled that the others among the audience were forced to listen to their dogma.

The Presentation
Old school. Palestinians offered their own statehood, but rejected it. Israel is pretext for Arab countries to oppress their peoples. No such thing as a Palestinian, Jewish presence in Judea has been continuous, Palestinians teach their children to hate, Israelis teach love, etc, etc. The old greenhouses of Gaza story was the example given to show that Palestinians don’t want to help themselves. Arab neighbor states are blamed for not resettling the Palestinians. Gaza is free, it is not occupied.

Would you believe Israel justifies the force it used in Lebanon and Gaza based on what NATO was permitted to do in Bosnia? Those were war crimes too! Israel accuses its critics of anti-Semitism because they don’t take other militaries to task for their crimes. But really Israel gives itself the latitude to commit crimes commensurate with the worst.

And here’s a wild gem! Israel owes its enormously successful economy (no mention of US foreign aid or direct sponsorship by Jewish American interests) to, among progressive business practices, the fact that all Israelis, both men and women, have to serve compulsory military service. It gives them the skills and discipline to excel in business and strengthen Israel. Mr. Artzyeli showed a video clip taken from CNBC, recommending that such a policy in American would certainly greatly improve its prospects for an economic recovery!

A word about the delivery of the presentation. Though impeccably dressed Gil Artzyeli affected the presence of someone wearing a Tony Soprano tracksuit. He sat back on his heels, his eyes directed to the ceiling as he dismissed his questioners. When a Palestinian girl raised a specific instance of an IDF strategy deployed in Lebanon, wondering how it was not a war crime. Artzyeli ignored it completely, making an aside to someone up front that the he wasn’t about to dignify that accusation with a response.

It’s kinda the problem Israel is having, isn’t it?

The Jig is Up
Over the last weeks I’ve had a chance to participate in three presentation by Israeli officials. The sum experience has fortified me with hope. With world opinion against them, and now the Goldstone Report, Israel is on the run.

The first lecture by Uzi Landau was on the offensive, directed toward Iran. It went over poorly. The Q&A revealed that Landau hadn’t connected the dots at all. The audience he had hoped to rally became only more concerned about Israeli nukes than Iran’s.

The second presentation delivered by Nir Barkat was an encouragement to the Denver Jewish community to support Jerusalem, with donations, travel, and by encouraging emigration. There the audience was equally smug and oblivious to the notion that increased settlements constituted violations of international law. But Israel’s continuous push for Jewish immigrants provides the clue to what Barkat inadvertently confirmed. Jews are leaving Jerusalem. The balance of the population is shifting toward the non-Jew.

This third event with the Deputy Consul General took the rhetoric down to basics, a demonstration of how far Israel is slipping. The dogma behind Zionism’s right to its own state, and their right to defend themselves, used to go without saying. Today Gil Artzyeli was forced to defend the most basic assumptions. The Jewish diaspora, their right to return, the expanding borders, the wall, the military retaliation. I was thrilled to see arguments slip back past the basics.

The Jewish American communities may still be a resolute, but their numbers are not large. It appears to me that the compatriots they’ve recruited, from the Christian right and the neoliberal conservatives are receding quickly.

The image of the much-oppressed Jew is becoming eclipsed by the militant arrogant Zionist, earning no one’s sympathy.

A few pictures from the event:
Deputy Consul General Gil Artzyeli lecture November 12, 2009
Castigated for raising his voice, Ed Nace insisted on standing for the duration of the lecture, to lend omniscience to his objection.

Deputy Consul General Gil Artzyeli lecture November 12, 2009
Colorado College Poli-Sci professor, and Middle East specialist Bob Lee rose several times to forbid the impromptu participation by the audience. Here he calls for security to remove Ed.

Deputy Consul General Gil Artzyeli lecture November 12, 2009
Security reconsidered asking Ed Nace to leave as he informed them in his booming voice that he was a Colorado College alum.

Deputy Consul General Gil Artzyeli lecture November 12, 2009
Would you believe Mr. Artzyeli trotted out the old Farfur the Mouse clip, depicting Muslim children being taught to admire suicide bombers. It’s a favorite example whose relevant context was long ago dismissed.

Footnote
One lamentable observation I had regarded a member of the chaplain’s office at CC, who is also a peace community activist. She was not at liberty to take sides on the Palestinian – Israel discussions for fear of alienating the Jewish students. I do not personally doubt her motives, nor her sympathies for the victims of injustice in Palestine.

However, when our 85 year-old Ed Nace raised his voice, or stood angrily, the chaplain’s assistant moved to calm him down. She may have thought he needed assistance, but in reality his stubborn act was working. His offense at the slanders against Palestinians, his incredulity that such a one-sided presentation was being allowed, and his indignation at the ferocity with which he was being silenced, expressed itself as a hard-of-hearing old man who was not about to be bullied. His performance, even inadvertent, worked to disrupt the lecture and temper the smug untruths being passed as academic fact. But Ed’s act was not made any easier by a colleague trying to calm him down. To his credit, Ed persevered and was able to put a human emotional context to Mr. Artzyeli’s slick propaganda.

The chaplain is no doubt schooled in nonviolent communication. She needs to bone up on effective nonviolent theater. Non-confrontational communication isn’t going to bring racist bullies like Artzyeli to heel. Zionist Apartheid is going to fall when it is condemned and pilloried.

Turning the economic corner to what?

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economic indicators
The US media is now full of optimistic assurances to ‘We, The People’, that ‘the economy is turning the corner’ and all will be well once again as if that was ever all that much the case! Certainly it has been better though, yet today the US does not, and cannot, operate in isolation from the world downturn of Big Business. So how’s it going elsewhere? Take a look at our friends the British, and you will see just how they are doing? …and it’s not so good.

From the conservative and hallowed British newspaper, the Telegraph, you can read that the British economic collapse rivals Great Depression, and that British output fell 5.6 % over the last year! That’s a -5.6% GDP, so why is the American press so full of bullshit about ‘turning the corner’? A short stock market rally is no turning of any corner, but a negative rate of GDP for the last year is definitely an ominous sign. It will simply take more than positive spin or pep talks to turn any corner yet ahead.

The desire to paint such a big happy face comes about when corporate leadership has no plans to alleviate any misery anywhere these days. If anything, they remain absolutely fixated on spreading more misery through more war, rather than improving the economic welfare of people through PEACE and a productive society run by a productive economy. Capitalism simply is not a productive economy, but rather is merely a route for and elite to get rich off the rest of us and through a looting of Nature. Changing that would be turning a corner but capitalist elites are not going to change The-ir System.

King Sooper UFCW members hang tough

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King Sooper UFCW members hang tough

King Sooper grocery workers
COLORADO SPRINGS- King Sooper UFCW Local 7 members vote this week. Local activists are ready to join their brethren at the picket line. If the supermarket giants persist in their efforts to deny workers benefits and living wages, they might be surprised to see how far customers will be willing to go to support their friends in the business.

Managers Lie, Benefits DieThis letter just in from the United Food and Commercial Workers:

Dear Friend,

You might be surprised to learn that despite the economic downturn, the national grocery chains in Colorado continue to rake in large profits as more and more people choose not to dine out.

What’s really shocking (or…frankly…not so shocking) is that the profitable national grocery chains are pushing cuts on our friends and neighbors who are working harder than ever at these stores. When profitable grocery chains ask their 17,000 workers in Colorado to make financial sacrifices, it doesn’t just hurt those workers, it hurts all of us, and hamstrings Colorado’s economic recovery.

So what can you do about it?

Your neighborhood grocery workers are in the midst of negotiations that could very well lead to a strike or a lockout. It’s not something anyone wants to happen. There are a lot of tough kitchen table conversations going on right now about what might happen if a family member has to give up a paycheck to take a stand for a fair deal.

Grocery Worker Without Benefits, Please HelpThese workers need to know that they have friends –that there are people out there who will respect a picket line.

Take the pledge today to support workers, and respect the picket line should a strike or lockout happen.

Please join us in support of Colorado’s grocery workers as they negotiate to get a fair deal and pledge to not cross the picket line if a strike becomes their only option.

Please sign the petition and share your comments.

We might add, let them know you will JOIN THE WORKERS ON THE PICKET LINE! The grocery worker’s resources may be thin, but yours and mine are not. WE will not stand for businesses who seek to impoverish our friends and neighbors.

Raytheon makes most popular US export

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Raytheon makes most popular US export

RaytheonA middle aged tourist whom I met in Costa Rica told me that he was an engineer for Raytheon. He was anticipating cutbacks like everyone else facing the economic climate, but he really hoped that lawmakers would come to their senses and recognize that the weapons industry was America’s most reliable profit center. Without any sense of the inhuman destructiveness of his products, he explained how an economic recovery would do better to rely more heavily on businesses like Raytheon.

The Democrat Party’s magic math

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magic mathUS House passes economic package without a single Republican vote reads the Headline. The Republicans also have their own magic math ‘economic recovery’ giveaway for the super rich, but they are smart enough not to be caught together with the Democrats ‘winning’ now, but later to be caught by the public holding the burglary bag of new national debt created! They can say they ‘opposed’ The Grand Give Away, and they will have, too, since they were not in charge of doing it their way.

So let’s take a look at how the Democrats are using their magic math to try to deceive the newly going-to-be-unemployed/ underemployed.

In 2008, 2.6 US jobs were lost. This year the loss will be 3 million or more per relatively optimistic forecasts. Barack Obama’s most recent victory in the House called for spending greater than $800 billion to create what he says could be up to 4 million jobs (his words, not mine). Wait a sec? Then where will all the other money be going to be spent?

Let’s imagine these new jobs paying $20,000 per year and times that 4,000,000, shall we? That’s only $80 billion and the Feds could just give that money away to these 4,000,000 happy theoretical new workers for 10 years for a cost of 800 billion? Is that Obama’s plan? No, it is not. He is not even going to create 4 million new jobs for one whole year with that $800 billion of tax money obtained, and where will that money come from anyway? Eventually it has to come from public taxes.

But wait a second now? Most of that money will actually go to financial bailouts of institutions going under, as the Federal Government takes on their bad debts AND their top execs’ ill gotten profit making, all bills now due. The government will be ‘giving’ with one hand (a little to the small fok, and a much greater amount to the really large folk) and taking away yet more with the other hand, and almost all of that to be taken coming out of the small folks accounts! And then there will be the interest to forever pay back…

So this whole new Obama game plan will become the financial re-foundation of the New World Economy restabilization? Hardly! It can only be the new foundation for a total disintegration of the entire US national government into having to make foreign debt payments for an eternity. Forget the mirage of 4 million new jobs which is nothing more than a sugar coating for the Grand Theft. It’s not icing onhte cake but the cover-up for the theft!

It is increasingly becoming clear worldwide, that the business community has no real answers for anything these days. All problems the world faces are without current economic leadership having any real solutions to propose. They are simply glued into The System and the System is simply glued into one of its gigantic and periodic downturns. And since the Chinese and Russians are now glued into that System themselves, they have little to nothing constructive to offer as alternative either. In fact, their world looks even grimmer than ours does.

Now here’s the real math from Barack Obama… New bank bailout could cost up to $2 trillion: report from the Wall Street Journal. I thought these were the fundamentalists who were utterly opposed to just throwing money at problems? I guess not. And after the thrown money fails to solve anything, then what? Well it might come down to many people wanting to hang Obama in a couple of years? Why? Because then all there will be is a huge governmental debt on the $2 trillion spent, and a still totally dysfunctional economy. Beware the man who’ll leave you with just small change. It’s still welfare time for the elite guzzlers of that most important commodity.

ZIONISM IS TERRORISM!

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“The current Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.” —Sir Gerald Kaufman, Jewish member of British Parliament

Jewish protesters shut down Israeli consulate in Los Angeles in support of Gaza.

Qatar and Mauritania expel Israeli diplomats and cut all diplomatic ties over NAZI genocide in Gaza.

PictorIal: Germany 1940 = Israel 2009? You decide.

Demonic Nazis use 9 year old boy for target practice.

Reich-wing terrorist Hal Turner threatens to attack crowds at inauguration!

Clueless. Obama says Bush was “a nice guy.”

The Satanic Party: RNC Chair candidate Blackwell (the guy who helped Bush steal the ’04 election in Ohio) says
GOP must block economic recovery, to help Republicans’ chances in the next election.

America organizes going away tribute for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Excerpts from Thomas McCullock’s Jan 19 notes, thomasmc.com.

US and Britain are starving Zimbabwe to death

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zimbabwe currencyThe so-called US government’s ZIMBABWE DEMOCRACY AND ECONOMIC RECOVERY ACT passed in 2001, began the US/ British efforts to starve Zimbabwe to death in a form of war called “Economic Sanctions.” This was a process similar to how the Clinton Administration began to kill off Iraq with economic sanctions that served to soften that country up for the Bush Administration invasion and subsequent occupation of that country, now to be managed once again by a Democratic Party presidency under Barack Obama.

The results in Zimbabwe have been equally as appalling as to what has been done to Iraq as inflation now runs at 231,000,000%! That’s right, you read that correctly. See BBC’s report Zimbabwe inflation hits new high

The background can be read about, too, at newzimbabwe.com… Economic sanctions undermine Zimbabwe’s economy, where one can find out about the role the International Monetary Fund played in beginning the warfare against Zimbabwe’s now starving people.

That’s right, and as people are starving to death in Zimbabwe due to the British and US government war against that country,there are those liberal fools who, ignoring the lessons of Somalia, Congo, and Zimbabwe, actually want the British and US governments to increase their military interventionism into Sudan! They call that humanitarian, too! In fact, our own local Colorado Springs ‘Peace’crats of the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission are just some of those people, who call for interventionism even as they parade themselves off as pacifists. Not heard one word from them about Zimbabwe though. And mums the word for them about Afghanistan and Somalia, too, countries which are in similar dire straights due to US government imposed wars.

The US Antiwar Movement needs to wake up to where the wars are on fast, and to who’s the government pushing this stuff (their own). I’m from Texas and though I like the group ‘Asleep at the Wheel’, but when you see DP voting liberals driving while as asleep at the wheel as the local pacifists are, then it just makes one want to throw up IMO. Very sad, because the people of Zimbabwe, as elsewhere, certainly need some coherent support for their liberation. And I don’t just mean from Mugabe either, but from the US government and all its vampirish European government allies, too.

‘Change’ that isn’t change: Cronyism trumps empty rhetoric of Obama

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changePromises of ‘change’ empty of all real content followed by cronyist selections of long time Democratic Party hacks to replace the Republican hacks of the last 8 years. Yes, it is change of a sort.

We will no longer have the direct thuggishness of the likes of Rumsfeld, Gonzalez, and Cheney in high office to focus on as targets against America’s ruling class viciousness. It’s back to the Slick Willie model of reactionary policies and talking heads. But is back to the Clintonist model of imperial rule ‘CHANGE’?

The latest empty rhetoric of Obama is focused on the promise of a ‘jobs program’, and is designed to take our minds off the hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars of give-aways to the biggest corporations the Democratic Party is underwriting with government funds. Obama will introduce his new economic leadership team Monday, a key step toward enacting a huge new economic recovery plan that aims to save or create 2.5 million jobs over the next two years Truth be told, this ‘jobs program’ sounds and looks like more of the Republican Party same, just couched in a different sales pitch.

Obama’s earliest measures have been to load the new Administration with long term Illinois political hacks and tag alongs of Obama, pairing them up with old Clinton regime standbys. It’s not a pretty picture, and when the inevitable failures of the DP Big Federal Government give-aways fail to revive the Pentagon welfare based US capitalist model, the populace of our country will certainly be turned back towards the Republicans who will become labeled by the corporate media as being the future ‘change’. vehicles Meanwhile… the Obama game is starting! It’s the change without change team at work!

The economy stupid

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Are we in a recession? Could it be a depression? A crash? Does the economy have a hope of recovery without help? The Bush administration doesn’t want to call the EMTs just yet, they prefer to tone down the rhetoric:

HELP! I’ve fallen and
I can’t improve the momentum of my recovery?

HELP! I’ve fallen and
my confidence about getting up needs a boost?

HELP! I’ve fallen and
I’m double-dipping on floor time?

HELP! I’ve fallen and
I’m despairing that my getting-up ability isn’t what it was?

HELP! I’ve fallen and
everyone wants to pretend I can get up! Or that I haven’t fallen, or that it was only a shallow fall.

A jobless recovery:
Telling a patient he’s already recovering to induce him to recover. Or pretending there’s an economic recovery to boost consumer confidence and generate an actual recovery.

I heard a spokesman say today that this recession has been the shortest in human history. In its first year the hundred year war was short.