NATO STILL PUSHING RENEWED COLD WAR
Russians are furious that NATO is now planning to do training in Georgia, right on the border with South Ossetia, where Russians claim that Georgia committed genocide three years ago, slaughtering thousands.
South Ossetia and Abkhazia, whose citizens fear Georgia and do not wish to be part of it (Stalin forced them to become a part of Georgia, his place of birth), were recognized as independent nations by Russia in August of 2008, after Georgia's military invasion of South Ossetia.
This militarization on Russia's border is seen by Russians as a provocation by NATO, and we assume at LUV News, one more attempt to return to the Cold War by our government in its subservience to the Nuclear Mafia, when coupled with the addition of former Soviet Republics and Warsaw Pact nations on Russian borders into NATO, and the building of the Star Wars ABM System on Russia's borders.
In recent years Russians, who had been reducing weapons stocks and downsizing its military, have been frightened by all of the NATO activity on their borders into modernizing their military forces. They have made it clear they would prefer to reduce their military, if NATO would stop its provocations. The Nuclear Mafia stands to make trillions of dollars if they can return us to the Cold War.
INSIDE THE WAR IN PAKISTAN
Muhammad Idrees has the best piece we've seen about the US war in Pakistan, where our corporate media put out ridiculous propaganda likening the drone bombings to video games, calling those slaughtered "fighters," "al Qaeda," "Taliban," or "terrorists." No evidence is presented by corporate media to verify their use of these terms, but eyewitnesses often describe many of those slaughtered as women and children.
Idrees personalizes the dead and takes them beyond the corporate media video game presentations. More importantly, he exposes the Pakistani government as "Gurkhas," the term historically used for Indians who were subservient to the British crown-- the allegiance this time of Pakistan's government to the American Empire.
In another piece this morning Zofeen Ebrahim goes inside the thousands of dead and wounded Pakistani soldiers who are victims of this Gurkha mentality of serving the USA, even as our corporate media tell us Pakistan is not cooperating and must be punished with the loss of foreign aid for not being subservient enough in allowing its people to be slaughtered.
AS THE MURDOCH EMPIRE (HOPEFULLY) CRUMBLES
Kevin Zeese appeared on Democracy Now yesterday to take us into the latest charges brought against Rupert Murdoch in the USA (transcript and video).
When Senator Obama was in the primary race for the White House, Glen Ford was one of his most vocal Black critics, pointing out his record of voting for war and corporate greed at any cost, while showing who was funding Obama's campaign, the ruling Forces of Greed, their Nuclear Mafia branch, bankster branch, polluter branch-- the scum of the earth, who don't throw away money on candidates for office casually. They were making a secure investment for their future, and have been handsomely rewarded. One may consider the following piece Ford's "I told you so" follow-on.
Glen Ford signed on early with me, as did nearly all of our favorite writers at LUV News, to be there on October 6th when the revolution begins in Washington. Please come and join us. It could very well be history in the making --Jack
Obama's "Big Deal": Wallowing with Pigs in Search of a Grand Center-Right Coalition
by Glen Ford
Barack Obama is salivating at the prospect of concluding his Big Deal with the Republicans, the one that will move the center robustly – even transformatively – to the Right, where this president really lives. The debt-limit deadline is Obama's big chance to panic a significant part of the Democratic Party into joining in the rape of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. "When the debt-limit showdown arrives, pray for gridlock, which would at least mean there is still resistance to Republican extortion."
President Obama says he's determined to make the "big deal" with the Republicans – not like the little, piddling deals he has been cutting all along to benefit the corporate classes, but the BIG deal, the grand consensus he believes he was born to forge with the GOP. Although it's true that it will take a whopper of a deal to outclass the bipartisan joint venture that transferred $14 trillion to Wall Street, the vast bulk of it on Obama's watch, the First Black President is nothing if not ambitious. Obama's Big Deal is actually the coup de grace for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society – relics, like Black activism, standing in the way of a post-everything world.
Obama has been savoring the big moment since last November, when the Republicans seized control of the House and sidelined the president's main opposition: the left wing of his own party. Delusional Obamites, especially Blacks, are fond of saying their guy really wants Democrats and activists to force him to take a more progressive path – to "make him do it." It's actually the other way around. Obama depends strategically on Republicans to "make him do it" – to push him inexorably rightward with their brinksmanship and constant threats of gridlock. It is an intricate and intimate dance, with Obama and the GOP moving and grooving to the same music. Obama often gets so caught up, he mouths the Republicans' lyrics.
"The reason to do Social Security" – by "do," Obama means "cut" – "is to strengthen Social Security to make sure that those benefits are there for seniors in the out-years," says Obama, an exact echo of the apocalypse-soon Social Security scare propaganda perfected over the years by the GOP. Obama has been promising to "do" Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid since just before he was sworn into office in January, 2009, when he announced that these entitlements would be "on the table" in his administration. His deficit reduction commission last year did indeed put the programs on the operating table, with Obama's corporate surgeons tracing dotted lines around the organs to be excised under the irresistible imperatives of austerity – the Republicans' copyrighted anthem.
"Obama depends strategically on Republicans to push him inexorably rightward with their brinksmanship and constant threats of gridlock."
Last November 3, I wrote: "The best outcome that could result from Tuesday's Democratic debacle is that the Republicans overreach and, in their white nationalist triumphalism, make it impossible for President Obama and congressional Democrats to reach an accommodation with rampaging reaction and racism." In other words, when the debt-limit showdown arrives, pray for gridlock, which would at least mean there is still resistance to Republican extortion.
The showdown is nigh, although Obama is squeezing every Democratic arm and groin in reach to ensure that he and the Republicans are able to walk down the dusty street arm-in-arm at high noon, so that the outcome can be billed as a grand consensus, a Big Deal for Obama. This requires that he gather Democratic accomplices in the gang rape of entitlements. "So we might as well do it now," says Obama, while people are panicked by the prospect of a technical U.S. "default." "Pull off the Band-Aid, eat our peas," he commands, as if the death blow to the last vestiges of the New Deal and the Great Society is just a short, sharp pain, after which the boo-boo will heal just fine.
The real Obama is a cold, cynical bastard. He is not a wimp, but rather, has plenty of spine to face down and brow-beat the remaining defenders of the social safety net in his own Democratic Party, who have always been the most immediate dangers to his grand center-right coalition. But it must be done quickly, quickly, quickly, to capture the debt-limit panic opportunity.
Half or more of the Congressional Black Caucus will do whatever the White House asks of it, will sacrifice anything and everything dear to African American interests in order to preserve this particular Black family in the executive mansion for as long as possible. But many of Obama's white groupies are facing the fact that they backed a corporate Trojan Horse. Paul Krugman, the columnist for the New York Times, should not have needed a Nobel Prize in economics to realize that Obama "basically shares the GOP's diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it," or that the president's eagerness to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid "is something Mr. Obama and those he listens to apparently want for its own sake."
In other words, this guy works for the other side because that's where his soul is – if he has one. He advocates policies that serve corporate pigs because he's one of them. He harms poor people because he is contemptuous of them, just like his Wall Street friends and patrons. His administration is negligent or hostile to Black aspirations for the same reasons as his white business buddies, with whom he shares a worldview. He is every bit as much a war criminal as Bush, and as morally debased.
The last thing we need is to allow this guy to conclude his long-sought Big Deal with the GOP under cover of a debt-limit crisis.
© 2011 Black Agenda Report
Back Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
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