Gary Null - The New American Folly in Libya

Progressive Radio Network, April 1, 2011

“I call them (the Libyan rebels) freedom fighters… now they are retreating… after all that, does the world community stand by and watch the freedom fighters get crushed? The president [Barak Obama] pledged that there would be no US troops on the ground.. but today we learned that CIA operatives are on the ground, so what does that all mean? Still it looks like the freedom fighters only shot for survival at this point is a real injection of military hardware that they say they desperately need… whether or not we arm rebels, freedom fighters, whatever you want to call them,  is a very hard decision. But I think we have to do it… it is a moral decision at this point… we have a state, New Hampshire, (with the motto) ‘live free or die.’ What do you think that Libyan freedom fighter wants?”  - Ed Schultz, MSNBC, March 30, 2011

What happens when we extend the logic and beliefs of Ed Schultz and others, including Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, who accept Obama’s rationale for intervening militarily in Libya, which mirror those of the neocons and personalities like O’Reilly and Hannity on the radical right?  For the reason that Gaddafi was responsible for the bombing of the Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland, killing 259 passengers, we are being told that arming, funding and training any opposition factions in Libya is perfectly justified. But then, is it not also true by that same logic that any civilians or innocent bystanders that were killed, tortured or disappeared as a direct result of America’s interventions in other nations are also justified to attack Americans and US interests globally?  It is this old adage of “an eye for an eye” reactionary posturing that repeatedly leads us into multiple disasters, wars, revolutions, regime changes and a trail of failed foreign policies.

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Ralph Nader - Waiting for Obama, Democrats Will Lose the House of Representatives

Will the Congressional Democrats recover the House of Representatives from the clutches of the cruelest, most corporately monetized, anti-people Republican Party since 1858? (see the House Democratic Caucus report) Amazingly, the answer, less than a week before the election, is no, according to veteran House Democrats, pollsters and the Washington D.C. punditry. In fact, that negative prediction has been consistent for at least 8 months.

Two more years of Reps. John Boehner, Eric Cantor and their gang blocking Barack Obama (if he gets elected), should he want to champion any significant legislation. Why can’t the Democrats landslide these Republicans as FDR, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson would surely have done?

The answers lie in the grotesque unmentioned ways that the incumbent Democrats have tied themselves up in knots that spell centralized paralysis. The following highlights how they have made themselves dysfunctional.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/02-1

Greg Kaufmann - Romney Declines as Obama Answers Poverty Questions

Three months ago, anticipating that the media and presidential campaigns wouldn’t focus on the struggles of the poor and near poor in a substantive way, TheNation.com kicked off a new campaign: “#TalkPoverty: Questions for Obama and Romney.”

In an effort to push the issue of poverty into the mainstream political debate, I profiled and polled five experts who have devoted their lives to fighting poverty—and individuals who have lived in poverty—giving them the opportunity to ask the presidential candidates the questions that they want answers to.

A thriving #TalkPoverty community developed online, and the Half In Ten coalition—comprised of 200 national and local organizations across the country—ran an excellent spin-off campaign to pressure debate moderators to ask President Obama and Governor Romney about their plans to address child poverty. Despite this vibrant campaign—and the outsized focus of the debates on the domestic economy—the moderators never asked a single question about poverty.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/02-2

Robert Reich - Obama Is Back

He’s back.

Tuesday night, our president was articulate and forceful — in sharp contrast to his performance in the first presidential debate. He stated his beliefs. He defended his record. He told America where he wanted to take the nation in his second term.

And he explained where Romney wanted to take us.

For example: “Romney says he’s got a five-point plan. Governor Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan; he has a one-point plan. And that plan is to make sure that folks at the top play by a different set of rules. That’s been his philosophy in the private sector; that’s been his philosophy as governor; that’s been his philosophy as a presidential candidate. You can make a lot of money and pay lower tax rates than somebody who makes a lot less. You can ship jobs overseas and get tax breaks for it. You can invest in a company, bankrupt it, lay off the workers, strip away their pensions, and you still make money.”

Read More:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/obama_is_back_20121017/

Ryan J. Reily - Supreme Court Turns Down Ohio Early Voting Case

The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned aside a request from Ohio to hear a case in which a lower court ruled the state couldn't stop early voting during the three-day period before the election. The decision is a victory for the Obama campaign, which had successfully argued that Ohio could not allow military and overseas voters to vote during the three day period unless that opportunity was available to all voters.

Secretary of State Jon Husted announced he was appealing the case to the Supreme Court last week, arguing the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals decision didn't make legal or practical sense. 

Read More:

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/supreme-court-turns-down-ohio-early-voting-case

William Pfaff - Arab Awakening and a Failed European Aeronautics Merger

It has been a bad week for American policymakers concerned with the Middle East (as for the Middle Easterners themselves), and it will be important to see what Mitt Romney and Barack Obama make of it in their second debate (which occurs after this writing).

From the beginning of the Arab Awakening (“Arab Springtime,” as it was, but alas two springtimes have already passed), my opinion has been to stay out of these events, as far as possible, and certainly not to attempt to control them. To do so has seemed certain to fail and leave the Western countries suffering serious collateral damage.

Read More:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/arab_awakening_and_a_failed_european_aeronautics_merger_20121016/

Mark Vorpahl - Pensions Under Attack in America

On Friday, July 6, President Obama signed into law a bill that would renew transportation programs and extend low interest rates on student loans for one year. While this minimal gesture resulted in, no doubt, sighs of relief from those burdened by student debt, tucked away within the bill's pages was a little-noticed proposal to further erode the funding of workers' pensions. The bill was a brilliant sleight of hand where what it appeared to be giving with one hand distracted the public from what it was taking away with the other. 

Aside from the more publicly known parts of this bill, it also reduced the amount that corporations pay into an already grossly underfunded pension system. The way it achieved this is with a complex equation factoring in interest rates, changes in how businesses calculate what they must contribute to retirement premiums, and how these contributions are tax deductible. The end result of this opaque process of number crunching is that, according to the Society of Actuaries, employer pension contributions will be reduced overall from a mandatory $80 billion to $45 billion this year alone. Next year this amount will be slashed by $73 billion. (1)

Read More:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31895

Shamus Cooke - Obama's Second Latin American Coup

The recent coup against Paraguay's democratically elected president is not only a blow to democracy, but an attack against the working and poor population that supported and elected President Fernando Lugo, whom they see as a bulwark against the wealthy elite who've dominated the country for decades.

The U.S. mainstream media and politicians are not calling the events in Paraguay a coup, since the president is being "legally impeached" by the elite-dominated Paraguayan Congress. But as economist Mark Weisbrot explains in the Guardian:

"The Congress of Paraguay is trying to oust the president, Fernando Lugo, by means of an impeachment proceeding for which he was given less than 24 hours to prepare and only two hours to present a defense. It appears that a decision to convict him has already been written...The main trigger for the impeachment is an armed clash between peasants fighting for land rights with police...But this violent confrontation is merely a pretext, as it is clear that the president had no responsibility for what happened. Nor have Lugo's opponents presented any evidence for their charges in today's ‘trial.’ President Lugo proposed an investigation into the incident; the opposition was not interested, preferring their rigged judicial proceedings."

What was the real reason the right-wing Paraguay Senate wanted to expel their democratically elected president? Another article by the Guardian makes this clear:

Read More:

http://www.countercurrents.org/cooke240612.htm

Matt Stoller - Wisconsin Recap: Thanks to Obama, American Left Lies in Smoldering Wreckage

On Tuesday, Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker humiliated his Democratic opponent, Tom Barrett, by easily turning back a popular recall attempt sponsored by unions and liberal activists.  The numbers in the election, which were supposed to be close, were ugly, in favor of the Republican.  But this wasn’t just any Republican, Scott Walker is THE Republican, the politician who made his governorship a referendum on a hard right agenda, in a blue state.  Walker waged a direct and very public attack on the major constituencies of the Democratic Party, rolling back rights for women, the working class, and the young with measures such as ending collective bargaining for state employees, privatizing state assets, and repealing Wisconson’s equal pay provisions for women. His agenda provoked a fierce reaction – – Wisconsin citizens occupied the Statehouse for months -  and then a recall.

Yesterday, Walker’s agenda was ratified by the voters of Wisconsin, the state where public sector unions were born.  It’s hard to overstate how bad this is – Wisconsin is now on the road to becoming a right-to-work state, in what is likely to become a right-to-work country.  Right-to-work laws are provisions that allow individual employees to withdraw from unions, and they make it much harder for unions to organize.

And the deeper you look into the race, the worse it looks.   By calling for a recall instead of a general strike after Walker stripped collective bargaining rights and cut benefits for workers, labor and Democratic leadership in the state diverted and then subverted populist energy, channeling it into an electoral process (at least one union, one very active in the occupation of the Capitol, stood apart from the electoral stupidity).  Then, Barrett, an anti-labor centrist, won the Democratic primary by crushing his labor-backed opponent, Kathleen Falk.  Finally, Barrett himself was destroyed by Scott Walker, who outspent Barrett 7-1 with corporate money.  In other words, first, liberals lost a policy battle, then they failed to strike, then they lost a primary election, then they lost a general election to the most high-profile effective reactionary policy-maker in the country.  The conservative beat the moderate who beat the liberal.  And had Barrett won, he wouldn’t even have rolled back Walker’s agenda.  Somehow, in a no-win electoral situation, Democrats and labor managed to lose as badly as they possibly could.

Read More:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/06/wisconsin-recap-thanks-to-obama-american-left-lies-in-smoldering-wreckage.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Mike Whitney - The short and uninspiring "one term" career of Barack Obama

Be sure to jot-down June 1, 2012 on your calender. That's the day that Barack Obama's reelection chances went up in smoke. Friday's report from the Labor Department showed the US economy added just 69,000 jobs in May which pushed the unemployment rate back up to 8.2 percent, the first rise since June 2011. Unfortunately for Obama, there's not much he can do to turn things around before the November balloting. GOP deficit hawks are dead-set against more stimulus, so he won't be getting any money from congress. He'll just have to muddle-through as best as he can hoping that the economy picks up in the meantime. But the slowdown in China and the deteriorating debt crisis in the eurozone make that unlikely, which means that Obama's approval ratings will continue to slide until election-time, when high unemployment and flagging growth put corporate raider, Mitt Romney, in the winner's circle.

Let's face it, Obama hasn't lifted a finger to help the economy since he passed his $800 billion fiscal stimulus bill in 2009. For the last 3 years we've heard nothing but endless blabber about the phantom "recovery" and "green shoots". Blah, blah, blah. It's sickening! Meanwhile 20 million people waste their time in unemployment lines or shredding beef at Arby's for $7.50 an hour. What has Obama done to help them?

Nothing. Nada. Zippo.

Have you been following the news since the job's report came out? Obama's trying to pass the blame off on Congress. Here's what he said on Friday:

"My message to Congress is now is not time to play politics. Now is not the time to sit on your hands."

Read More:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/mike-whitney/43554/the-short-and-uninspiring-one-term-career-of-barack-obama