And the winner is … the Israel lobby

By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times.

WASHINGTON – They’re all here – and they’re all ready to party. The three United States presidential candidates – John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Madam House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most US senators and virtually half of the US Congress. Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. And a host of Jewish and non-Jewish political and academic heavy-hitters among the 7,000 participants.

Such star power wattage, a Washington version of the Oscars, is the stock in trade of AIPAC – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the crucial player in what is generally known as the Israel lobby and which holds its annual Policy Conference this week in Washington at which most of the heavyweights will deliver lectures.

Few books in recent years have been as explosive or controversial as The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, written by Stephen Walt from Harvard University and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago, published in 2007. In it, professors Walt and Mearsheimer argued the case of the Israeli lobby not as “a cabal or conspiracy that ‘controls’ US foreign policy”, but as an extremely powerful interest group made up of Jews and non-Jews, a “loose coalition of individuals and organizations tirelessly working to move US foreign policy in Israel’s direction”.

Walt and Mearsheimer also made the key point that “anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle East policy stands a good chance of being labeled an anti-Semite”. Anyone for that matter who “says that there is an Israeli lobby” also runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism.

All the candidates in the House say yeah
Republican presidential candidate McCain is opening this year’s AIPAC jamboree; Clinton and Obama are closing it on Wednesday. Walt and Mearsheimer’s verdict on the dangerous liaisons between presidential candidates and AIPAC remains unimpeachable: “None of the candidates is likely to criticize Israel in any significant way or suggest that the US ought to pursue a more evenhanded policy in the region. And those who do will probably fall by the wayside.”

Take what Clinton said in February at an AIPAC meeting in New York: “Israel is a beacon of what’s right in a neighborhood overshadowed by the wrongs of radicalism, extremism, despotism and terrorism.” A year before, Clinton was in favor of sitting and talking to Iran’s leadership.

And take what Obama said in March at an AIPAC meeting in Chicago; no reference at all to Palestinian “suffering”, as he had done on the campaign trail in March 2007. Obama also made it clear he would do nothing to alter the US-Israeli relationship.

No wonder AIPAC is considered by most members of the US Congress as more powerful than the National Rifle Association or the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.

AIPAC has explicit Zionist roots. The founder, “Si” Kenen, was head of the American Zionist Council in 1951. The body was reorganized as a US lobby – the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs – in 1953-4, and then renamed AIPAC in 1959. Under Tom Dine, in the 1970s, it was turned into a mass organization with more than 150 employees and a budget of up to US$60 million today. Dine was later ousted because he was considered not hawkish enough.

The top leadership – mostly former AIPAC presidents – is always more hawkish on the Middle East than most Jewish Americans. AIPAC only dropped its opposition to a Palestinian state – without endorsing it – when Ehud Barak became Israeli prime minister in 1999.

AIPAC keeps a very close relationship with an array of influential think-tanks, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, the Hudson Institute, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Middle East Forum, the The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Sprinkled neo-cons in these think-tanks can be regarded as a microcosm of the larger Israel lobby – Jews and non-Jews (It’s important to remember that Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and five other neo-cons drafted the infamous “A Clean Break” document to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 – the ultimate road map for hardcore regime change all over the Middle East.)

The house that AIPAC built
AIPAC in the US Congress is a rough beast indeed. Former president Bill Clinton defined it as “stunningly effective”. Former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich called it “the most effective general-interest group across the entire planet”. The New York Times as “the most important organization affecting America’s relationship with Israel”. Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, before his involvement in a corruption scandal, said. “Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend we have in the whole world.”

AIPAC maintains a virtual stranglehold over the US Congress. Critics of the Israel lobby other than Walt and Mearsheimer also contend that AIPAC essentially prevents any possibility of open debate on US policy towards Israel. Compare it with a 2004 report by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board, according to which “Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies”.

AIPAC should not be crossed. It rewards those who support its agenda, and punishes those who don’t. In the end, it’s all about money – specifically campaign contributions. From 2000 to 2004, according to the Washington Post, AIPAC honchos contributed an average of $72,000 each to campaigns and political committees. For pro-AIPAC politicians, money simply pours from all over the US.

Every member of the US Congress receives AIPAC’s bi-weekly newsletter, the Near East Report. Walt and Mearsheimer stress that Congressmen and their staff “usually turn to AIPAC when they need info; AIPAC is called upon to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes”.

Hillary Clinton has learned long ago she should not cross AIPAC. Clinton used to support a Palestinian state in 1998. She even embraced Suha Arafat, Yasser’s wife, in 1999. After much scolding, she suddenly became a vigorous defender of Israel, and years later wholeheartedly supported the 2006 Israeli war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Clinton may have gotten the bulk of Jewish American donations for her 2008 presidential campaign.

Rice also learned about facts on the ground. She tried to restart the eternally moribund “peace process” when visiting the Middle East in March 2007. Before the trip, she got an AIPAC letter signed by no less than 79 US senators telling her not to talk to the new Palestinian unity government until it “recognized Israel, renounced terror and agreed to abide by Palestinian-Israeli agreements”.

AIPAC and Iraq
It has become relatively fashionable for some members of the Israeli lobby to deny any involvement in the build-up towards the war on Iraq. But few remember what AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr told the New York Sun in January 2003: “Quietly lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq was one of AIPAC’s successes over the past year.“

And in a New Yorker profile of Steven Rosen, AIPAC’s policy director during the run-up to the war on Iraqi, it was stated that “AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraqi war”.

Compare it with a 2007 Gallup study based on 13 different polls, according to which 77% of American Jews were opposed to the Iraq war, compared to 52% of Americans.

Walt and Mearsheimer contend “the war was due in large part to the lobby’s influence, and especially its neo-con wing. The lobby is not always representative of the larger community for which it often claims to speak.”

AIPAC and Iran
Now it is Iran time. Walt and Mearsheimer contend “the lobby is fighting to prevent the US from reversing course and seeking a rapprochement with Tehran. They continue to promote an increasingly confrontational and counterproductive policy instead”. Not much different from the embattled Olmert, who told Germany’s Focus magazine in April 2007 that “it would take 10 days … and 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles” to set back Iran’s nuclear program.

A measure of Walt and Mearsheimer’s power to rattle reputations is that the Zionist establishment had to bring out all its big guns to refute their argument, again and again.

Walt and Mearsheimer are no ideologues. They are realpolitik practitioners – very much at ease in the top circles of US foreign policy establishment. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of their book is that they argued four points that the establishment never mentions in public. Essentially these are:

* The US has already won its major wars in the Middle East, against Arab secular nationalism and against communism, and does not need Israel quite as much.
* Israel is now so much more powerful than all Arab nations combined that it can take care of itself.
* The unconditional support for Israel, regardless of its outrageous deeds, does harm US interests, destabilizes pro-US regimes like Hosi Mubarak’s Egypt and King Abdullah’s Jordan, and plays into the hands of Salafi-jihadi radicals.
* Fighting Israel’s wars on its behalf is the surefire way to lead to the collapse of US power in the Middle East.

Walt and Mearsheimer also seem not to accept that oil, and rivalry with Russia and China, have also played a crucial part in why the US went to war in Iraq and may attack Iran in the near future. Anyway only insiders as themselves – with unassailable establishment credentials – could have started, at the highest levels of public debate, a serious discussion of extreme pro-Zionism in the public and political life of the US.

Meanwhile, the power of the lobby seems unassailable. In March 2007, the US Congress was trying to attach a provision to a Pentagon spending bill that would have required President George W Bush to get congressional approval before attacking Iran. AIPAC was strongly against it – because it viewed the legislation as taking the military option “off the table”. The provision was killed. Congressman Dennis Kucinich said this was due to AIPAC.

AIPAC made a lot of waves in 2002, when the theme of the annual meeting was “America and Israel standing against terror”. Everyone bashed Arafat, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria at the same time – just as in PNAC’s letter to Bush in April 2002 claiming that Israel was also fighting an “axis of evil” alongside the US.

During AIPAC’s jamboree in 2004, Bush received 23 standing ovations defending his Iraq policy. Last year, the star was Cheney, making the case for the troop “surge” in Iraq. Pelosi was dutifully present. But it was pastor John Hagee, whose endorsement McCain recently refused, who really made a killing – even though Hagee maintains that “anti-Semitism is the result of the Jews’ rebellion against God”.

On Iran, Hagee definitely set the tone: “It is 1938; Iran is Germany and [President Mahmud] Ahmadinejad is the new [Adolf] Hitler. We must stop Iran’s nuclear threat and stand boldly with Israel.” He received multiple standing ovations. McCain may be sure to get the same treatment this year – and he’ll certainly have no trouble remaining on message.
*******************
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Election 2008: “Fastened To A Dying Animal”

A short jeremiad regarding that affront to the nation’s dignity known as the US election process

By Phil Rockstroh, Cyrano’s Journal:

Here in this crumbling empire once known as the American republic, here in a nation that, at present, for all practical purposes, only produces Cheetos and killer drones, whose architecture is being winnowed down to thriving rural meth houses and foreclosed upon suburban mchouses, whose corrupt corporate culture has bequeathed upon our suffering planet dying oceans and the hyper-caffeinated tsunami of Red Bull Capitalism– the essential question confronts us — how does one retain (not retail) one’s humanity amid the catastrophic machinery and inane accouterment of our age?

“Show your wounds,” exhorted the late 20th Century artist Joseph Boyce. The wound becomes the womb, poets tell us. Out of painful truth, beauty is born. But, antithetical to the orthodoxies of consumer capitalism, there are no shortcuts. According to legend, Faust sold his soul for a glimpse of eternal beauty and the hidden knowledge of the world. Sadly, we’ve done likewise (but worse, pathetically) for a glimpse of Paris Hilton’s privileged (but hardly gated and guarded) cooter.

Here, now, sprawled upon the detritus of our dignity, we are confronted by the exponential dynamics of decay known as the US Presidential Election cycle. In this, all three corporate candidates are of little use to us. Although all three have done very well for themselves by the present and prevailing arrangement known as Disaster Capitalism.

What motivation do they have to change the system by which they’ve thrived? McCain, Clinton, and Obama must serve the interests of the corrupt corporate class – or else they would be marginalized. Paradoxically, as we have witnessed, as of late, if they make even the most minute rumblings to the contrary — as for example, blundering into a steaming pile of the obvious such as the observation that the battered laboring class of the nation might be embittered by their lot — they risk political immolation by being labeled an elitist.

Of course, Obama is an elitist. (As are Clinton and McCain.) And he has been put on notice by the Powers That Be that they have no problem with him being among their ranks, as long as he doesn’t go rattling off at the mouth about those the rigged system benefits and those it kicks daily in the gut. Because in a political culture as far down the rabbit hole as is this one, the surest way to be branded an elitist is to refuse to serve the elite. (Not that Obama threatened any such thing.) This is the modus operandi of the lacquered, autoerotic dudes and dolls of the corporate media and the K Street cash-flushed phonies of the American political classes: Pose as protecters of the beer-bleary multitudes, as, all the while, carrying vintage Cabernet for a privileged few.

This is not a situation fraught with layers of ambiguity in which any deeper meaning can be mined: Below the corporate media’s electronic cloud of nebulous phoniness lies a dense core of calcified phoniness. Thus it is difficult not to harbor contempt for this cartel of narcissistic strivers who have networked the nation into a perpetual state of cataclysmic ignorance. Seemingly, their creed is: Let the ignorant multitudes languish on the low nutrient, junk news we serve them from the drive thru windows of our corporate media outlets, while the political and business elite cannibalize what is left of the republic.

The ongoing tragedy in Iraq and the ecological and economic turmoil roiling the globe are consequences of the domination-driven mindset that the mainstream media protects. Ergo, increasingly violent responses from outside forces, both of the human and natural variety, are rising across the planet. America, many shocks and sorrows are coming soon (probably sooner than you think) to that vacuous bubble known as “your way of life.”

It should be increasingly clear to see that the corporate media’s job has never been to be unbiased chroniclers of the events and circumstances of a free republic. Rather, they are active agents serving to protect and promulgate the pernicious myths of free market capitalism. And they are a highly partisan lot.

Moreover, they have been highly successful in their mission. Hence, our lives, both inner and outer, have been conquered and colonized by the corporate empire, and a resultant forced occupation dominates our days determining the trajectory of our brief lives upon this earth.

“[S]ick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.” – W.B. Yeats

Yet, we, against all evidence, believe we are free actors in a spontaneous, unfolding democratic drama. When, in reality, we have been cast as dehumanized supernumeraries in a lethal farce that renders all concerned both oppressor and oppressed. This is the central paradox that binds us. And it is why the average American cannot see our imperial occupation of Iraq and our increasingly dangerous belligerence towards Iran for what it is. How can we have a modicum of empathy for the people of Iraq when we refuse to even glimpse our own degraded condition and our complicity therein?

“God Damn America,” the people of Sadr City must rage, as the bombs shake their homes and tear the flesh from their friends and family. “God Damn, America,” I mutter, echoing the good Reverend Wright, as I witness the indifference of the American people to the war crimes committed by our nation’s leaders.

By the insidious technique of propaganda by omission, the public has been manipulated into a state approaching criminal obliviousness. “What is this crazy talk about the calamity of class stratification that defines and divides the nation, and what sort of demented, leftist loser would even raise the topic among decent company?” our present mandarins of media scoff when the topic of class inequity is broached.

Add to that, the ongoing ruse of the ceaseless dissemination of fear perfected by the right-wing media noise machine and then parroted in the mainstream media that goes something like the following: “There are evil entities afoot in the nation known as radical liberals who scheme to take away your guns and give them to islamofascist terrorists so that those agents of Satan over at Planned Parenthood will be free to rip fetuses from their mothers wombs in order to expose the unborn to porn.”

This is the reason for the cacophony of inanity that dominates the coverage of the political events of our time: It serves as white noise that drowns out unpleasant truths. It is the mood music piped into our national bubble. Accordingly, trivial and specious narratives drive and dominate our national political debate and it has, as a consequence, rendered the nation’s public too shallow to even apprehend the extent of the damage inflicted by official treachery, professional cupidity, and the degree of their own degradation therein.

Otherwise, the collective psyche of the nation would be shaken to the core. Tragically, there is no longer any core to be found. There is merely the surface sheen of the American bubblescape … its surface taut with inner tension as it is stretched to its limits, as, all the while, reality bristles ever closer to its over-stretched skin.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at phil@philrockstroh.com Visit Phil’s website, http://philrockstroh.com/

Exclusive: PA’s Primary Results Website Listed Obama Three Times, With Three Differing Totals on Election Night

Source: The Brad Blog.

Oddity, Which Applied Only to Obama, Never Occurred Before, Remains Unexplained, But ‘Didn’t Make a Difference’ in Final Results, According to State Official Who Confirmed the Anomaly…

Early on election night last Tuesday, with just 18.07% of the unofficial returns from the Pennsylvania Primary in, astute BRAD BLOG reader Matt Sircely (who was aware enough to save off the HTML page locally!) noticed the following oddity on the official Dept. of State website results page…

Note the three different sets of bars and percentages representing Obama’s tally. The problem did not occur for any other candidate [Update: looks like it did, see updates at bottom of article for more info], as seen on the full web page, which was noticed early in the evening, and saved locally by the alert reader. Whatever the problem, it was eventually corrected by officials.

Today, Sircely called the PA Dept. of State to try and get an explanation of what caused the problem seen above (audio from call is posted at the end of this article)…

The Dept. of State’s Director of the Office of Communications and Press, Leslie Amorós, confirmed the Election Night problem, but was unable to explain why it occurred. She told Sircely, during the short phone call, that she’d be happy to try and get an explanation from their technical staff.

She went on to say, however, that whatever caused the anomaly, it didn’t effect the outcome of the reported results.

“I think it was just, when it was uploading…um…it didn’t make a difference though,” Amorós told Sircely during the call, though it remains unclear as to how she knows whether it actually made “a difference” or not.

When queried as to how data is gathered for use on the DoS’ results web page, the Communication Director acknowledged that it “varies” from county to county. “Some results are uploaded from counties, some results are pulled from websites and manually entered, some results are faxed to us and manually entered…some are phone called,” she noted, before acknowledging, in reference to the triple Obama listing, “that was the first time that had occurred.”

Later in the brief conversation, Amorós noted that — even with all of the media and public watching results, as they were coming in to the PA DoS website on Tuesday night — “none at all” had bothered to ask about the problem until Sircely did so today.

As The BRAD BLOG reported on Monday, due to the types of electronic voting systems used in more than 85% of the Keystone State, the bulk of results from last Tuesday’s election are 100% unverifiable for accuracy in any way, shape or form. As VerifiedVoting.org described the concern, prior to the election, the results would be “essentially unrecountable, unverifiable, and unauditable.”

Nonetheless, with mountains of documented “problems with voting machines and inaccurate voter registration rolls” which occurred across the state on Tuesday, resulting in “countless eligible voters…needlessly refused the right to vote,” as a local consortium of watchdog groups reported [WORD], Hillary Clinton was named the winner over Barack Obama by 9.2 points in the fully faith-based election.

Though the margin in the result was closer to 9 points than 10, due to some lucky math, the media would largely go on to declare her reported victory as the “10 point, double-digit” win she needed to stay in the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

At this hour, with 99.99% of results counted, according to the same official PA website which failed, as seen above, on Election Night, Clinton is reported to have won 54.6% of the votes to Obama’s 45.4%.

As Sircely’s captured webpage shows, with just 18.07% of the unofficial results reported early in the evening last Tuesday, Clinton had garnered 52.8%, while Obama had either 47.2% or 47.4% or 47.5%, depending on which of his three reported totals you may wish to choose from.

Sircely’s conversation with PA DoS spokesperson Leslie Amorós follows below (appx 3 mins)…

UPDATE 4/25/08, 12:44pm PT: Since publishing the above, we’ve heard from several readers who mentioned that they noticed a similar occurrence happening with both McCain and Clinton’s totals on Election Night, though we’ve got no screenshots showing that yet (anybody have one?). In the meantime, we’re trying to find out from the PA DoS as to whether they can confirm the problem also having occurred with the other candidates. So, hopefully, more soon in that regard…

UPDATE 4/25/08, 7:15pm PT: DJ Paul Edge has posted screenshots similar to the one above, but with Hillary Clinton showing multiple entries from the PA DoS site. So while we continue to await official confirmation from the PA DoS (not likely until Monday earliest), presuming those other screenshots are also legit, then it’s probably safe to assume that whatever happened did not only happen to Obama during the night, as we originally reported. Though DJ Paul sees a different oddity in his series of screenshots. Hopefully it’s all just bad web programmer/cache problems. But in the mean time, we look forward to an official explanation from state officials as to what actually happened there.

BEST OF WEB: Hillary Clinton threatens to “obliterate” Iran

By Joe Kay, World Socialist Web Site:

Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s pledge to “obliterate” Iran if it attacks Israel marks a sharp escalation of threats against that country and its entire population.

Clinton made her comments on Tuesday, the day of the Pennsylvania primaries. She was asked during an interview on ABC’s program “Good Morning America” about her previous comments that she would respond with “massive retaliation” if Iran attacked Israel. She responded by adopting an even more militarist tone.

Rephrasing the question to address a potential Iranian nuclear strike on Israel, Clinton said, “I want the Iranians to know, if I am the president, we will attack Iran. And I want them to understand that, because it does mean that they have to look very carefully at their society, because at whatever stage of development they might be with their nuclear weapons program in the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

The scenario proposed by Clinton to phrase her comments – an Iranian strike on Israel – is simply a pretext for her to assert her willingness to use overwhelming military force, including nuclear weapons, to guarantee US domination of the Middle East.

Clinton’s choice of words is significant. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “obliterate” as “to remove utterly from recognition or memory” and “to remove from existence: destroy utterly all trace, indication, or significance of.”

Moreover, she said that it is “Iran” and “the Iranians” who would face total obliteration. If one were to take her words literally, what she is saying is that she would respond to an attack by the Iranian government on Israel by completely wiping out all trace of the people and history of Iran – that is, to commit genocide against a population of some 71 million people.

It should be pointed out that Clinton’s comment comes less than two weeks after an Israeli official, National Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, made a similar warning. He declared, “An Iranian attack will lead to a harsh retaliation by Israel, which will lead to the destruction of the Iranian nation.” While Israel has never publicly confirmed the existence of a stockpile of nuclear weapons, now believed to number several hundred, Ben-Eliezer was tacitly threatening to unleash this arsenal in the event of an Iranian clash with Israel.

Clinton’s remark has received little criticism from the American media, and the most that Obama could bring himself to say was that it was it was unnecessary “saber rattling,” while pledging to respond “forcefully and swiftly” to any Iranian attack.

On Wednesday, Clinton was asked to clarify her remarks on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program. NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell noted that last year Clinton had refused to answer questions about Iran’s potential acquisition of nuclear weapons, saying that the questions were “hypothetical.” Mitchell asked Clinton what had changed between then and now.

“The facts on the ground have changed,” Clinton replied. While pledging to engage in diplomacy, Clinton insisted, “Clearly [the Iranians] continue to try to throw their weight around in the world. There is no doubt that they will pursue if they can figure out how to obtain a nuclear weapon…. They have to know from the beginning that that would be a grave, grave error.” She did not amend her previous threat of total obliteration.

Clinton’s comments continued upon threats made by both her and Senator Barack Obama during the Democratic Party debate last week. Asked if the US should treat an Iranian attack on Israel as an attack on the United States, Obama pledged direct negotiations with Iran but insisted, “I will take no options off the table when it comes to preventing them from using nuclear weapons or obtaining nuclear weapons.”

“I think it is very important that Iran understands that an attack on Israel is an attack on our strongest ally in the region, one whose security we consider … paramount,” Obama said. He added that the US would “take appropriate action” in response to any attack.

Clinton took the opportunity to try to outflank her opponent from the right. She pledged “massive retaliation” against Iran. She said that she would also adopt the same policy with regard to other countries in the region, not just Israel. “We will let the Iranians know, that, yes, an attack on Israel … would trigger massive retaliation. But so would an attack on those countries [she mentioned by name the monarchies of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait] that are willing to go under the security umbrella and forswear their own nuclear ambitions.”

In effect, Clinton was declaring her desire to create a military pact between the US and several of the semi-feudal oil sheikdoms. This would be a major commitment to increased US military involvement in the area. She went on to criticize the Bush administration from the right, saying that it “has failed in our efforts to convince the rest of the world that that is a danger, not only to us, and not just to Israel but to the region and beyond.”

There are no substantial differences between Clinton and Obama on policy. They both support the continued US occupation of Iraq. They both defend the interests of American imperialism in the Middle East and globally. There are, however, tactical differences over US policy in the Middle East, with sections of the Democratic Party establishment critical of unconditional support for Israel.

Clinton’s comments are clearly aimed at appealing to those who are concerned that Obama will be too hesitant to use military force or defend Israel. She is also attempting to make a case before that ruling elite that her campaign will more faithfully assert US military dominance.

In making this argument, Clinton is developing themes that have been introduced earlier: her assertion that both she and John McCain are experienced enough to be “commander-in-chief,” while Obama is not; her advertisements depicting phone calls at 3 a.m. – calls that would presumably demand of her a quick decision to launch military strikes in some or another part of the world.

Shortly before the Pennsylvania primary, Clinton unveiled a new advertisement depicting Pearl Harbor, Osama Bin Laden, and a quote from Democratic President Harry Truman, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

The fact that Truman was the one world leader to have ever ordered the use of a nuclear weapon in a war situation was perhaps not lost on those sections of the military and political establishment to whom the ad was ultimately directed.

Clinton’s comments are revealing not only in what they say about her own campaign, but what they say about the Democratic Party as a whole, including Obama. No one in the Democratic Party establishment challenges the basic premise underlying the threats by Clinton against Iran: that US policy in the Middle East is aimed at countering Iranian aggression. Neither of the candidates will point out that the policy of unprovoked aggression has been practiced not by Iran, but by the United States, which has killed over 1 million Iraqis, and turned 4 million into refugees, in its determination to gain control of the country and the region.

The danger of war against Iran – or against China, Russia, or some other country – does not come just from the Republican Party. While the Democrats seek to posture as critics of the Iraq war, they are just as committed as the Republicans to the aims the war was meant to secure, and they will just as surely use military force in the future to achieve these aims.

BEST OF WEB: Resurrecting Greenspan: Hillary Joins the Vast, Rightwing Financial Conspiracy

By Michael Hudson, CounterPunch:

On Monday, March 24, presumably representing Wall Street–as any New York senator must do in view of its dominant financial role in the state’s political campaigns–Hillary Clinton proposed that Congress show its bipartisan spirit by appointing an “emergency working group on foreclosures,” to be led by none other than Alan Greenspan and earlier Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Her idea was for them to come up with a plan to alleviate the subprime and financial crisis. This seems like calling in arsonists to help put out the fire that they and their own constituency had set in the first place. Their lifelong interest, after all, had been to promote deregulation and special tax favoritism for their Wall Street constituency, highlighted by repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 under Pres. Clinton. Representing the banking sector and Wall Street (and hence being essentially Republicans in spirit), they were precisely the lobbyists most in favor of anti-labor, pro-creditor policies.

Even the Wall Street Journal expressed surprise. Jon Hilsenrath noted the seeming irony: “In August 1999, as the tech-stock bubble was worsening, Alan Greenspan stood before central-banking colleagues in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and argued it wasn’t the central bank’s job to prevent asset bubbles. All it could do was clean up the mess after the bubble had burst.” On the contrary, the commentator noted, the Fed could have slowed the bubble by raising interest rates and boosting margin requirements on stock trading during the tech bubble. Mr. Greenspan could have heeded the advice of Fed Governor Ed Gramlich to slow and regulate subprime mortgage lending. Instead, Mr. Greenspan’s–and Mr. Paulson’s–idea was simply to clean up the bubble’s debt aftermath by bailing out Wall Street.

Mrs. Clinton’s logic, she explained on March 24, was simply that Mr. Greenspan had a “calming influence.” Republican Presidential nominee John McCain certainly seemed glad to propose him to head a commission to overhaul the tax code. Barack Obama’s spokesman Bill Burton said that her selection of Mr. Greenspan to head her working group featured “the same people who helped to create these problems or have a direct financial industry stake in the outcome.” Sen. Obama himself said that her crypto-Republican plan lacked credibility in view of the heavy campaign donations she received from Wall Street financial lobbyists. (As of mid-April he had raised an almost identical sum from this source.)

Elaborating her views three days later, Sen. Clinton made it seem as if it were the job of the financial victims–the mortgage debtors–to solve the mortgage crisis. “In today’s economy, trouble that starts on Wall Street often ends up on Main Street … When there’s a run on mortgage-backed securities and the bottom falls out for investment banks, the bottom falls out for families who see the value of their homes–their greatest source of wealth–decline.” To cure the problem, she endorsed the spirit of Mr. Paulson’s Wall Street bailout, including having the Federal Housing Administration, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “buy, restructure and resell these underwater mortgages.” This is a far cry from debt forgiveness.

In her debate with Barack Obama on April 16, Senator Clinton once again heaped praise on Mr. Greenspan’s “bipartisan” commission that nearly doubled the tax rates that workers had to give up out of their paychecks. A token income-tax cut was offset by F.I.C.A. withholding that, for many workers, now exceeds their income-tax liability. And what certainly must be the most unmitigated gall rivaling even her notorious Yugoslavia-under-sniper-fire gaffe, Mrs. Clinton rejected Senator Obama’s policy of raising the F.I.C.A. Withholding rate above the present $97,000 level, all the way up to hedge fund managers making billions of dollars per year. Mrs. Clinton said explicitly that there were more progressive ways to resolve the Social Security and Medicare tax problem. The exchange has to be read to be believed.

OBAMA: “One of the centerpieces of my economic plan would be to say that we are going to offset the payroll tax, the most regressive of our taxes, so that families who are earning–who are middle-income individuals making $75,000 a year or less, that they would get a tax break so that families would see up to a thousand dollars worth of relief. the rules in Washington–the tax code has been written on behalf of the well connected. And that’s been a central focus of our campaign.

MODERATOR: You have however said you would favor an increase in the capital gains tax.” [It's now 15 percent, compared to 28 percent under Bill Clinton.] “It’s now 15 percent. That’s almost a doubling if you went to 28 percent. But actually Bill Clinton in 1997 signed legislation that dropped the capital gains tax to 20 percent.

OBAMA: Right.

MODERATOR: And George Bush has taken it down to 15 percent.

OBAMA: Right.

In an argumentative mode, the moderator pointed out the long-discredited “supply side” Republican rationale for tax cuts. Is it not true, he asked, that each time the capital gains tax was cut, receipts increased? He did NOT explain that asset-price inflation had gone hand in hand with tax cuts. Nor did he note the fact that some 80% of the tax is in land-price gains–gains that speculators made “in their sleep” while Mr. Greenspan at the Federal Reserve was flooding the real estate bubble with credit.

OBAMA: Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness. We saw an article today which showed that the top 50 hedge fund managers made $29 billion last year–$29 billion for 50 individuals. And part of what has happened is that those who are able to work the stock market and amass huge fortunes on capital gains are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries. That’s not fair. I want businesses to thrive and I want people to be rewarded for their success. But what I also want to make sure is that our tax system is fair and that we are able to finance health care for Americans who currently don’t have it and that we’re able to invest it in our infrastructure and invest in our schools.

In response, Sen. Clinton said:

CLINTON: I don’t want to take one more penny of tax money from anybody.”

MODERATOR: Would you say, ‘No, I’m not going to raise capital gains taxes’?

CLINTON: I wouldn’t raise it above the 20 percent if I raised it at all. I would not raise it above what it was during the Clinton administration. I don’t want to raise taxes on anybody. I’m certainly against one of Senator Obama’s ideas, which is to lift the cap on the payroll tax, because that would impose additional taxes on people who are, you know, educators here in the Philadelphia area or in the suburbs, police officers, firefighters and the like. So I think we have to be very careful about how we navigate this. So the $250,000 mark is where I am sure we’re going. But beyond that, we’re going to have to look and see where we are.

OBAMA: What I have proposed is that we raise the cap on the payroll tax, because right now millionaire and billionaires don’t have to pay beyond $97,000 a year. That’s where it’s kept. Now most firefighters, most teachers, you know, they’re not making over $100,000 a year. In fact, only 6 percent of the population does. And I’ve also said that I’d be willing to look at exempting people who are making slightly above that.

MODERATOR: But Senator, that’s a tax.

OBAMA: Well, no because the alternatives, like raising the retirement age, or cutting benefits, or raising the payroll tax on everybody, including people who make less than $97,000 a year — those are not good policy options.

Senator Clinton responded with more wishy-washy defense of her position. Sounding like an old-time Republican, she gave the old mantra of America’s fiscal class war:

“When it comes to Social Security, fiscal responsibility is the first and more important step. . . . And with all due respect, the last time we had a crisis in Social Security was 1983. President Reagan and Speaker Tip O’Neill came up with a commission. That was the best and smartest way, because you’ve got to get Republicans and Democrats together. That’s what I will do.”

She promised not to “impose additional burdens on middle-class families”–that is, implicitly defining the middle class as those who earn from $97,000 to $3,000,000,000 per year. This remarkable definition of “middle class” has yet to make it into the sociological textbooks, but I’m sure the University of Chicago will soon make the requisite adjustment.

Senator Obama was quick to respond: “That commission raised the retirement age, Charlie, and also raised the payroll tax.” He said that she was proposing a “magic solution.” (This was the equivalent of “voodoo economics” of which President Bush I accused Ronald Reagan of practicing.)

Then came Sen. Clinton’s most remarkable claim of the evening–but one that the papers have not picked up:

CLINTON: “But there are more progressive ways of doing it than, you know, lifting the cap.”

But what could be more progressive than raising the cap on F.I.C.A. withholding? What on earth could be more progressive than starting to reverse the tax shift onto labor that has been occurring ever since the Reagan and Greenspan regimes?

For that matter, how can deregulation of the financial markets be deemed fair?

In an earlier presidential primary debate Mrs. Clinton also cited the Democrats’ acquiescence in the Greenspan Commission’s 1983 tax shift off the high income brackets onto wage-earners–by increasing F.I.C.A. wage withholding for Social Security as a personal user fee rather than funding it out of the general budget–as a model of the bipartisan spirit she hoped to emulate if elected. She thus reflected the attitude of her husband, when as President, Bill Clinton appointed Mr. Greenspan to a new term as Fed Chairman, saying: “This chairman’s leadership has been good, not just for the American economy and the mavens of finance on Wall Street. It has been good for ordinary Americans.”

Yet it was Greenspan that acted as a kind of economic Karl Rove in crafting anti-labor policies favoring the very rich, above all the Social Security tax-shift onto labor’s shoulders to which Mrs. Clinton pointed. He welcomed recession as an excuse to cut taxes, ostensibly to “jump-start” economic growth but actually producing a benefit mainly for wealthy investors and property owners.

Packaging deregulation as new, more efficient regulation

The Bush Administration’s enormous commitment of public funds to support Wall Street prompted columnist Martin Wolf of the Financial Times to announce that the free market was dead. “Remember Friday March 14, 2008,” he wrote; “it was the day the dream of global free-market capitalism died. Deregulation has reached its limits.” The price for Treasury support would have to be an end to the deregulation that had permitted the debt crisis to reach such unprecedented proportions. As evidence of the new attitude Wolf cited “the remark by Joseph Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, that ‘I no longer believe in the market’s self-healing power.’”

Although more extensive public regulation was the traditional aftermath of financial crisis, the debt bubble has provided the financial sector with unprecedented wealth to translate into political law-making policy to dismantle regulation. Financial lobbyists accordingly anticipate that “the coming fight will rival the storm leading up to the 1999 passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act [which repealed Glass-Steagall]. That law made it easier for securities firms and banks to be owned by the same company, dropping regulatory barriers in place since the Great Depression. In 1998 and 1999, when Congress was finalizing passage of that law, the financial-services industry spent a combined $417 million on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In 2007, financial-services companies spent more than $402 million on lobbying, led by $138 million from the insurance industry.”

The focal point of this lobbying effort has been Mr. Paulson’s Treasury working group to draw up a Blueprint for Financial Regulatory Reform. As he explained in his speech on March 31, the Treasury Department’s Blueprint for Financial Regulatory Reform had been moving earnestly since June 2007 to “reform” the nation’s regulatory structure. He concluded his speech with a paean to the repeal of Glass-Steagall under President Clinton: “We recognize that these ideas will generate some controversy and healthy debate. This is not unlike the circumstances surrounding the 1991 “Green Book,” which after a period of constructive discussion resulted in the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, modernizing our financial services industry some eight years later.”

Repeal of Glass-Steagall gave the subprime debacle its jump start by removing the Depression-era roadblock from bank merging with brokers. This permitted financial conglomerates to be formed and gave them the ability to securitize (that is package), loans as investments. Vertical financial conglomerates were formed, starting with Citibank’s merger with Travelers Insurance, and leading up to the recent intention of Bank of America to acquire the troubled Countrywide Financial, the nation’s leading subprime lender.

Rather than seeing this as the source of the subsequent subprime problems as Senators Paul Wellstone and Byron Dorgan did at the time, Mr. Paulson explained, “I am not suggesting that more regulation is the answer.” Just the opposite. “A state-based regulatory system is quite burdensome. It allows price controls to create market distortions. It can hinder development of national products and can directly impact the competitiveness of US insurers.” The aim is to dismantle what remains of public regulation.

Reflecting the financial interests behind him, Mr. Paulson’s solution is to assign overall regulatory authority to the Federal Reserve. The Fed works for its owners, the commercial banking system, and its chairman is appointed by a government that believes in “central bank independence.” The result is a financial sector regulated by its own leaders and lobbyists, not by elected officials–seemingly a clear conflict of interest. The lobbyists evidently have decided that the best public relations wrapping is to present deregulation as “simplification,” and to claim that “streamlining” it will lower costs to investors and help prevent a loss of “competitiveness” to Europe, especially London. Especially annoying to Wall Street are the Sarbanes rules requiring full disclosure of information, passed in the aftermath of the Enron fraud. Upon taking office, Mr. Paulson claimed that these rules handicapped U.S. financial firms relative to their foreign counterparts. “In November 2006, the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation released a report concluding, ‘It is the committee’s view that in the shift of regulatory intensity balance has been lost to the competitive disadvantage of U.S. financial markets.’”

The implication is that anything that lowers costs to Wall Street–by rolling back regulatory bureaucracies and reporting requirements such as are called for by the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation–will be passed on to customers. Such presumptions ignore the fact that Wall Street prefers to pay out its profits as bonuses or dividends rather than pass on cost savings. What is passed onto its customers instead is runaway CEO compensation. “Market discipline” has not kept financial markets honest or low-priced. Deceptive subprime practices have made dollar investments a pariah in global financial markets. Investors have lost faith in the nation’s investment bankers, mortgage brokers and credit-rating firms, drying up the market for U.S. mortgage-backed securities and leading to their being dumped across the board.

In sum, the mid-March crisis provided an opportunity for Mr. Paulson to pull out the deregulatory plan he proposed when he became Secretary of the Treasury in summer 2006, and paste a “regulatory” cover story on it. Mr. Paulson plan for deregulation anticipates “consolidating banking and insurance regulators and potentially merging the Securities and Exchange Commission with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, then stripping the combined entity of much of its regulatory authority.” A major aim is to prevent any repeat of state attorneys general or other regulators emulating Eliot Spitzer’s $1.4 billion in fines against Wall Street companies for their improper behavior and close-down of Arthur Andersen.

Calling the federal power to annul state regulation or that of other agencies “regulation” is dependent on voters not understanding the bait-and-switch act going on. It needs the compliance of New York’s Wall Street Democrats, senators, congressmen and presidential candidates, whose campaign funding after all comes mainly from the state’s financial sector.

So where are the Democrats on this? Above all, Hillary would seem to be on the hot seat. Where was she at 3 o’clock in the morning on the day that Bill annulled Glass-Steagall?

What seems most remarkable in Mr. Paulson’s and Dr. Bernanke’s comments is the absence of quantitative discussion of just what the “systemic risk” is. The bailout is to be paid by the non-financial sector, above all labor (“consumers”) to “save the system.” But just what is the system? It certainly is not industrial production. It is more a faith that compound interest can keep on expanding ad infinitum. The reality is that the exponentially soaring debt overhead threatens to plunge the economy into chronic depression as interest and other financial charges eat further and further into the economy’s ability to spend on consumption and tangible capital investment. To ignore this financial dynamic is to turn economics into a junk science.

For the past decade the banking system and its mortgage-broker affiliates have avoided the usual wave of defaults and insolvencies by lending debtors enough money to pay the interest charges. Adding the interest onto the debt in this way is known as a Ponzi scheme. It requires an exponentially growing influx of funds to pay investors and creditors, and hence cannot be sustained for long, because no economy in history has grown at the exponential rates needed to keep up with the debt overhead. This is the basic problem at the core of today’s economic policy. It aims to save the “sanctity of debt,” that is, the financial sector’s claims on the rest of the economy. But this attempt only polarizes the economy between creditors at the top of the pyramid and an increasingly indebted base at the bottom.

A simple example may illustrate the debt treadmill. Consider a little brick home in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. There are two economic conditions under which you could own it. Choice One is to own the home free and clear of a mortgage, in an economy that values it at $100,000. Choice Two is to own it in a debt-fueled market that values it at $250,000, requiring the buyer to take on a $100,000 mortgage to afford it. This appears to maximize wealth creation inasmuch as the homeowner has $50,000 more net worth.

But the Choice Two homeowner owns only 60 percent of the property. At 6 percent interest the $100,000 mortgage absorbs $500 a month, not counting amortization payments. This $6,000 annual interest charge–plus $3,000 for self-amortization on the typical 30-year mortgage–absorbs 30 percent of gross income for a homeowner earning $30,000 per year. Net of about $10,000 in wage withholding for FICA and income tax, the homeowner must pay 45 percent of take-home pay even before property taxes, fuel and repairs.

So which homeowner is doing better: Choice Two with higher net worth on paper, or Choice One which is less debt-ridden and whose home therefore is more affordable?

The Federal Reserve’s net worth statistics give the impression that all Choice Two has more wealth creation. But most families “own” less and less, and must pay heavier carrying charges that eat into their spending power. By the end of 2007, home equity fell below 50 percent for the U.S. economy on balance–down to 47.9 percent. This means that most Americans now have less of an ownership share in their most basic asset than their bankers. On top of this, they are obliged to place their retirement savings in the hands of money managers whose fees absorb most of the income. Many pension funds are now left with substantial losses on packaged mortgages such as Bear Stearns was selling.

Germany is an example of the Choice One economy. Housing absorbs only about 20 percent of its average household budget, less than half that of most American homebuyers today. Its lower debt and property overhead, along with national health care, helps explain its competitive power in international markets. America, by contrast, is burdened with the high proportion of the cost of labor reflecting the inflation of housing prices that has forced more and more buyers into debt, while the middle class has seen its stagnant wages exacerbated by wage withholding for Social Security and medical insurance. Many have been able to maintain their living standards only by borrowing against their home equity.

Making loans is how banks make their money. As long as the loans are used to bid up property, stock and bond prices, they can claim that they are “responding to the market” by getting homeowners, commercial real estate investors, corporate raiders and financial managers to pledge their assets as collateral for yet new loans in a process that seems to be self-sustaining. But at a point the carrying charges on this indebtedness absorb all the disposable income and corporate cash flow. All it takes to upset the applecart is a major default, embezzlement or fraud.

Real estate reached this state of affairs by summer 2006. Behind the property bubble was an increasing entry price to buying a home–an access price that had to be paid in extra years of the buyer’s working life. Traditionally, economists have defined equilibrium pricing as the level at which the rental income just about covered an owner’s carrying charges. But as real estate prices exceeded the rents that could be charged to cover debt service, speculators withdrew from the market. It became much less costly to rent than to own. New buyers had to pay for their operating deficits out of income earned elsewhere.

The magic was gone once carrying charges could not be lowered any further. Interest rates had been lowered as far as they could be, down payments had been lowered to near zero, amortization had been lowered to zero (so that the mortgage loan never would be paid off, but simply carried), and fraudulent property assessment had become commonplace. Adjustable-rate mortgages were resetting at higher levels. Fuel costs were rising, increasing operating expenses for electric power and gas. Local property taxes were catching up with soaring real estate prices.

The mortgage market thus was set for a downturn. Every mortgage banker with whom I spoke by 2006 saw it coming. But until the break came, Wall Street managers wanted to get every last added fraction of a percentage point in interest that could be squeezed out. So did fund managers, who are graded every three months against the norm. This short-termism obliges them to follow the herd. They hope to reverse course in a hurry when the break comes, but financial crashes occur much faster than it takes for prices to rise. The business cycle is basically a run-up of real estate mortgage debt growing slowly but ending in a fairly rapid crash.

Bank credit–that is, debt for mortgage borrowers–was created almost without cost as the Federal Reserve held short-term interest rates quite low. An increasingly large debt overhead fueled an asset-price inflation that Alan Greenspan celebrated as “wealth creation.” Deregulated banks and other financial institutions packaged and sold mortgage loans to hedge funds, pension funds and other institutions. It seemed that a perpetual motion machine of financial wealth had been found. But it rested on the ability of the underlying “real” economy (production and consumption) to take on more and more debt and pay more and more interest.

The policies proposed by Republicans and Democrats alike treat strapped homeowners as deserving government aid only to the extent of enabling them to go pay the institutions that hold their mortgages. This fig leaf of humanitarian concern for debtors enables the government to provide public credit that ends up in the hands of the super-rich who own and manage the financial and property sector.

But one sees the dominant attitude in the vindictive rhetoric used by Sen. John McCain toward debtors he deems “undeserving” of government aid. He blames insolvent homebuyers for causing the problem for failing to calculate how deeply their adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMS) would eat into their stagnant disposable income or to anticipate how sharply property taxes, heating and electricity prices would rise as the dollar plunges in global markets.

Congress has proposed setting aside millions of dollars to provide mortgage counseling–a sanctimonious blame-the-victim re-education program to convince insolvent debtors at least that they should feel guilty if they walk away from properties worth less than the debts attached to them, as financial professionals do.

The kind of re-education program that really is needed would provide an understanding of the dynamic that threatens to lead to debt peonage. On paper, two thirds of Americans have seen their net worth grow mainly from the rising price of their homes–or more to the point, their land (“location, location, location,” magnified by the failure of property taxes to keep up with market prices). As long as mortgage lending was pushing up prices more rapidly than debt was growing all was fine. At the Federal Reserve, Mr. Greenspan took credit for orchestrating this “wealth creation.” It was a euphemism for asset-price inflation and debt creation.

It is a far cry from tangible capital formation. Instead of raising labor productivity and living standards, it is a purely mathematical dynamic that governments cannot rescue in the end. It is folly even to try to do so. Yet in March, Sec. Paulson mobilized the credit-creating power of the government’s financial and housing agencies to support the price of mortgage securities–and the land valuations that back them. The aim was not to help strapped homeowners but to save creditors who imagined that they could get rich while most of the economy was being driven into debt peonage.

Given this perverse financial plan, it is irresistible not to finish with how Franklin Roosevelt addressed the spirit of today’s proposed reforms:

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

Today’s financial sector would turn this rhetoric of economic democracy on its head. This raises the following question: If FDR were alive and running today, would Hillary and others denounce him as an off-the-wall radical? Would he be out of touch with today’s voters? What would they say about his anger? How far would a presidential candidate get who announced at his Inauguration, as Roosevelt did on March 4, 1933, “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

So let’s start by discarding the inane propaganda about unmanaged (that is, deregulated) “free” economies, the faith-based belief that self-regulating economic systems exist that must not be “interfered with” by government bureaucrats, formerly known as regulatory agencies, attorneys general and state prosecutors, Congressional oversight committees and what remains of New Deal agencies. This anti-government, anti-regulatory propaganda has been pushed for decades so that public agencies and Congress, supposed to act as representatives of the people, remain only passive spectators to an economy left in private hands for financial profit.

The reality is that all economies are managed, either by the private sector or by government–usually by a combination of the two. Any successful economy engages in forward planning, and any well-balanced economy shapes how “the market” operates. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was all about how wise governments should shape–and tax–their markets. America’s present-day economic system didn’t evolve through natural forces, much less by divine intervention. Its industrial takeoff was subsidized by protective tariffs, internal improvements–that is, public infrastructure spending–and increasingly progressive taxation.

And conversely, the spate of tax laws, fiscal giveaways and Federal Reserve policies that helped inflate the real estate bubble since 2001 were man-made–and shaped specifically by real estate lobbyists and financial promoters. FDR fought the battle against high finance decades ago, explaining:

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

This is the dimension missing in today’s election campaign. But is not democracy economic as well as political?

—

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist specializing in the balance of payments and real estate at the Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan Chase & Co.), Arthur Anderson, and later at the Hudson Institute (no relation). In 1990 he helped established the world’s first sovereign debt fund for Scudder Stevens & Clark. Dr. Hudson was Dennis Kucinich’s Chief Economic Advisor in the recent Democratic primary presidential campaign, and has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments, as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com

Obama and Hillary Spin a ‘Big Lie’ About Iraq

From AlterNet

The two Dems lie every time they discuss Iraq on the campaign trail, but the media refuse to call them on it.

The cable news networks are happy to spend hours on the latest silly campaign squabble but can’t bring themselves to point out the plain fact that the two Democratic nominees are lying, blatantly, to the American people about one of the most important issues facing the country today.

On the stump, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are crystal clear in their rhetoric about Iraq. In a statement released on the occasion of the 4,000th U.S. combat death in Iraq, Clinton said, “I have made [a] promise. And I intend to honor it by bringing a responsible end to this war, and bringing our troops home safely.” Not to be outdone, the Obama campaign piped in with an even more definitive statement: “It is past time to end this war that should never have been waged by bringing our troops home.”

On the campaign trail, the two candidates often speak of bringing the troops home and ending the war, and Democratic primary voters, 80 percent of whom want U.S. troops out of Iraq within 12 months, reward them with boisterous applause.

It’s a Big Lie, and everyone who follows the debates over U.S. policy towards Iraq knows it, but refuses to call the candidates on it. Both Clinton and Obama (PDF) have been very clear — in the fine print — about the fact that they will leave a significant number of “residual forces” in Iraq, albeit with a more limited mission than the Bush administration has pursued. They would protect U.S. infrastructure and personnel — Obama says “the U.S. embassy” — train Iraqi forces and retain a rapid-response force to conduct “limited counter-terrorism” missions.

Although the candidates refuse to specify the exact scope and length of that mission, independent analysts say that it would require at least 40,000 and as many as 75,000 soldiers and marines. When one looks at the big picture, the end game appears to be a significant draw-down of troops — with as many as 100,000 sent home or redeployed to Afghanistan, where thin NATO troops are struggling to contain a re-emergent Taliban — calling a halt to most combat operations and patrols, and dismantling most or all U.S. bases outside of Baghdad.

They would, however, maintain the infrastructure of the U.S. occupation and provide the forces necessary to do so. As the Nation‘s Jeremy Scahill told Amy Goodman,

Both [candidates] intend to keep the Green Zone intact. Both of them intend to keep the current U.S. embassy project, which is slated to be the largest embassy in the history of the world … And they’re also going to keep open the Baghdad airport indefinitely.

Calling the massive campus the United States is building in Baghdad an “embassy” is somewhat misleading. The Associated Press described it as a “fortresslike compound rising beside the Tigris River … the largest of its kind in the world, the size of Vatican City, with the population of a small town, its own defense force, self-contained power and water, and a precarious perch at the heart of Iraq’s turbulent future.”

Obama and Clinton have co-sponsored legislation that would increase accountability for the 180,000 security contractors — some authorized to carry weapons and use deadly force — that have run around Iraq largely unaccountable under U.S. and Iraqi laws and the military justice system (Clinton only did so after coming under pressure from human rights and other activists). Creating accountability is a positive step, but neither Clinton nor Obama have said that they would discontinue the use of mercenaries and other private contractors in Iraq.

There is a mile-wide gap between the Democrats’ analysis of the war and that of John McCain, and that’s evident in the candidates’ rhetoric. Those differences are significant, in that they would lead to very different political climates in which the issue would be debated after the election.

But all three candidates have embraced the Catch-22 that assures our enduring presence in Iraq. It can be summed up like this: U.S. forces must remain in Iraq as long as an active insurgency contributes to its instability, and an active insurgency will continue to create instability until the United States makes a commitment to a full withdrawal.

Having accepted that narrative, the sad reality is that the Democratic candidates’ Iraq policies differ only incrementally from that of John McCain, or from the long-term “cooperation agreement” Bush is attempting to negotiate with the Iraqi government his administration installed in Baghdad.

McCain, like Bush, speaks only in the vaguest terms about drawing down troops “as the Iraqis stand up,” but, short of implementing a draft, a president McCain would have little choice but to make significant cuts to our current troop levels. So, the difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates is one of numbers, rather than approaches. John McCain will likely draw down fewer troops than the Democrats would, and would have them continue to patrol the streets of Iraq. But all of the presidential candidates share similar assumptions about the United States playing a central role in Iraqi affairs moving forward — all will retain the infrastructure of the occupation for the foreseeable future.

U.S. troop levels will decrease regardless of who enters the White House in 2009 because of military (and political) necessity, rather than principled opposition to the occupation of Iraq. Defense experts from across the political spectrum agree that the current scope of the U.S. commitment in Iraq is unsustainable over the long run. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 13, Gen. Richard Cody, U.S. Army vice chief of staff, made that point quite clearly:

The current demand for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds the sustainable supply … Given the current theater demand for Army forces, we are unable to provide a sustainable tempo of deployments for our soldiers and families … Equipment used repeatedly in harsh environments is wearing out more rapidly than programmed. Army support systems, designed for the pre-9/11 peacetime Army, are straining under the accumulation of stress from six years at war. Overall, our readiness is being consumed as fast as we build it.

The United States has already decreased its military footprint in the streets of Iraq — surrendering large swaths of territory to local authorities and Iraqi security forces in an effort to reduce U.S. casualties. Spun as a spontaneous Sunni (and, later, Shiite) “Awakening,” much of that territory is being turned over to whichever armed group holds the most sway in a designated area. Small fiefdoms have been built in communities across Iraq with weapons and cash provided by U.S. taxpayers — there are currently as many as 100,000 militiamen in American employ.

What’s your favorite part of the last five years?

If there were truth in advertising, the Democratic candidates would simply argue that their approach would significantly reduce the costs of the occupation (we’re spending $275 million every single day right now), result in far fewer American casualties and, if executed well, might significantly improve the United States’ image in the world. They could argue, convincingly, that a Democratic president and Congress would improve oversight of the contracting practices that have proven so disastrous in the “reconstruction” of Iraq.

All of that is true, but one can also rest assured that whatever feature one has liked best about the last five years will continue under a U.S occupation with a lighter footprint, even if, in some cases, it would continue to a lesser degree.

Anti-U.S. insurgency

The McCain campaign is quite touchy about his now-infamous remark that staying in Iraq for 100 years would be fine with him. They keep pointing out that he was simply comparing Iraq with places like Japan and South Korea, where U.S. troops have been stationed for decades. Their defense is perhaps more frightening than the original statement; it reveals a man hopelessly out of touch with the situation on the ground.

Unlike Japan or South Korea, there is an active and effective anti-U.S. insurgency in Iraq. It is popular; in a poll conducted last August, almost 6 in 10 Iraqis said that attacks on U.S. troops were “acceptable.” Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, told me last fall that more than three-quarters of those he’d polled thought the United States plans to establish permanent bases in Iraq, and “that view is closely related to support for attacks on U.S. troops.” In fact, he said, “among those who believe the U.S. will withdraw, just 34 percent favor attacks against U.S. troops, but among those who believe the U.S. will not withdraw, 68 percent favor attacking coalition forces.”

By overwhelmingly large margins, Iraqis believe the United States makes the final decisions in the Green Zone, not their nominal “sovereign government”; in late 2006, more than seven of ten Iraqis said that if their government demanded that the U.S. leave their country, we would refuse to do so.

Last June, when Bush first spoke of a “Korea Model” for Iraq, Raed Jarrar, my frequent writing partner, spoke with several Iraqi lawmakers from across the political spectrum, including Nassar al-Rubaie, the head of the Al-Sadr bloc in Iraq’s parliament, who told us: “There is no Iraqi who will agree to keep permanent U.S. bases. Even the ones who are against the timetable for withdrawal oppose a long-term U.S. presence.”

As long as there is a walled city-within-a-city in the heart of Baghdad, where Westerners eat Kentucky Fried Chicken and dictate — or are perceived to dictate — the terms of Iraq’s future, the insurgency will continue. Whether that “Emerald City” is guarded by 40,000 U.S. troops or 140,000 is irrelevant to that reality.

Propping up an unpopular government

Under a lighter occupation, the United States would continue to prop up, by force when necessary, an Iraqi government with little legitimacy and an agenda that is deeply unpopular with a majority of the Iraqi population.

The U.S.-backed regime favors an extended American presence; 70 percent of Iraqis want a complete withdrawal of foreign troops within 12 months (PDF). Maliki and his supporters favor a loose federal system in which powerful regional governments oversee most domestic issues; 66 percent of Iraqis favor “one unified Iraq with a strong central government” (PDF). The Maliki regime favors the wholesale privatization of Iraq’s oil sector; two out of three Iraqis want their country’s oil wealth to be controlled by the state (the norm throughout the Middle East).

This explains, to a large degree, why “victory,” as defined by the American foreign policy elite, is structurally impossible — if the United States and the Iraqi minority it supports “win,” then most Iraqis will lose by definition.

Cutting the number of combat troops by half — or by two-thirds — won’t change this dynamic in the slightest bit.

Marginalizing indigenous efforts towards political reconciliation

The flip side of backing an unpopular government is that inevitably it will be challenged by populists with an agenda that is supported by a broad swath of the population, and an occupying power must work to marginalize them, which has been the case over the past five years. As Jarrar and I wrote last May, Iraqi nationalists “have proposed a series of comprehensive peace deals that might unite the country’s ethnic and sectarian groups, and result in an outcome American officials of all stripes say they want to achieve: a stable, self-governing Iraq that is strong enough to keep groups like al Qaeda from establishing training camps and other infrastructure within its borders.”

But these plans are unacceptable to the coalition because they (a) affirm the legitimacy of Iraq’s armed resistance groups and acknowledge that the U.S.-led coalition is, in fact, an occupying army, and (b) return Iraq to the Iraqis, which means no permanent bases, no oil law that gives foreign firms supersweet deals and no radical restructuring of the Iraqi economy.

The United States and its allies in the Maliki government have marginalized, rejected or ignored these indigenous efforts towards reconciliation, and at times attacked or imprisoned their authors. That dynamic won’t change as long as the United States maintains the infrastructure of the occupation and continues to back the regime with air power; on the ground, the strength of the pro-government militias — aka the “Iraqi army” — means that the exact number of U.S. troops is essentially irrelevant to this issue.

Violence in the streets

Last week, these dynamics were thrown into sharp relief as politically divided Shiite parties battled it out throughout southern Iraq.

Lacking a central government with broad legitimacy among different Iraqi constituencies, Iraq’s political conflicts are not a matter of academic debate. Every influential political party in Iraq has an armed wing — a militia — and decreasing the number of combat troops in Iraq will not help bring those parties to the table to come to a real accommodation.

In fact, Iraqis believe the opposite to be true; last December, the Washington Post reported on a series of Iraqi focus groups conducted by coalition officials, which concluded that “Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them and see the departure of ‘occupying forces’ as the key to national reconciliation.” It’s safe to say that they didn’t have a partial withdrawal in mind.

Chilean-style economic experiments

One might find the devastating economic “shock therapy” imposed on the Iraqi people the most appealing aspect of the Iraq occupation. As I’ve written before, Iraqis have been brutalized not only by bombs and bullets; they’ve also been the victims of economic violence in the form of the “free market reforms” cooked up by a firm in Virginia on a $250 million no-bid contract before the U.S. invasion.

The economic policies we imposed on Iraq were not some generic form of “capitalism”; they included the most radical business-state rules imaginable — policies that developing countries have vehemently resisted for over a decade. Transforming Iraq’s economy overnight was a matter of ideology trumping common sense, and it’s shattered a way of life for hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and fanned the flames of the anti-U.S. insurgency.

A good example of that ideological rigidity is Iraq’s new flat tax, established by Order No. 37 (now Law No. 37). As the Washington Post reported: “It took L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Baghdad, no more than a stroke of the pen … to accomplish what eluded [Republicans] over the course of a decade and two presidential campaigns.”

Former Reagan and Bush 41 official Bruce Bartlett said, with no small amount of envy, that an occupation government doesn’t have to “worry about all the political and transition problems that have made adoption of fundamental tax reform here so difficult,” and Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, called the move “extremely good news.” Meanwhile, one Middle East expert briefed on the plan told the Post, “A piece of social engineering is being done on Iraq, but it has almost no support from other members of the” Iraqi elite.

The economic model favored by the Bush administration is deeply unpopular with the Iraqi people, and many of its most destructive features would likely be undone following a U.S. withdrawal. The business community certainly wants to maintain a U.S. force in Iraq to prevent that from happening, and Obama and Clinton appear willing to comply. That dynamic won’t change as long as U.S. forces protect the infrastructure of the occupation, regardless of how many are used to do so.

Perceptions

A cross-country study of political attitudes in several predominantly Muslim countries found that 8 in 10 respondents believe that the American “War on Terror” — symbolized by its invasion of Iraq — is intended to “weaken and divide the Islamic world.” This helps explain why most U.S. foreign policy experts — more than nine in ten in a survey conducted last summer — believe the Iraq war has made America less safe.

It’s reasonable to expect that a lighter footprint, with fewer Iraqis killed and dismissed as “collateral damage” — and especially a reduction of aerial bombardments of civilian centers — would improve the United States’ standing in the eyes of the world, but nothing short of a commitment to end the occupation of Iraq by a date certain will rehabilitate it.

Relieving political pressure

Again, a significantly reduced U.S. presence, as envisioned by the Democratic candidates, would have a positive impact. Troop deaths — now averaging about nine per week — would be significantly reduced, as would the sky-high costs of the occupation. The pressure on the military caused by repeated troop rotations would ease as well.

But those improvements, while real, will come with an enormous cost: the end of all political pressure for a more constructive and less militaristic foreign policy in the United States.

Media coverage of just those things — American casualties, the exorbitant costs of maintaining the occupation and the stress it’s placing on the military — are responsible for the lion’s share of anti-war sentiment here at home, not the struggles of the Iraqi people. Since last summer, when a ceasefire by Muqtada al-Sadr and a U.S. policy of paying Iraqi insurgents to stop shooting at our troops resulted in a sharp decline in the number of U.S. military fatalities, Americans’ interest in the conflict has waned. A Pew study released last month found that just “3 percent of news stories in February were devoted to the Iraq war, compared with around 15 percent in July last year, and the U.S. public has not perceived the war, which began nearly five years ago, as a top news story since October.”

If Clinton or Obama is elected, he or she will maintain a cheaper, smaller and wholly bipartisan occupation of Iraq, and that will essentially render the conflict out of sight and out of mind.

Don’t be hoodwinked

Just before the Texas primaries, Hillary Clinton told a crowd in Austin that the United States had given Iraqis “the gift of freedom, the greatest gift you can give someone. Now it is really up to them to determine whether they will take that gift.” That’s as far from reality as Baquba is from Georgetown; we gave Iraqis the gift of freedom from a brutal dictatorship and replaced it with the curse of a widely loathed and often brutal foreign military occupation. And, since then, we have systematically prevented Iraqis from realizing the “gift” of self-governance.

If it were “really up to them” — to the Iraqi people — to take that gift, the United States would already be long gone from Iraq.

It’s impossible to “win” an occupation; the question now is whether we will end it on negotiated terms before a Tet Offensive, or whether we’ll help fuel a long, drawn-out civil conflict until the situation finally becomes untenable and we’re forced to pull American personnel off the roofs of Baghdad as we did in Saigon. Those are our choices, and, tragically, all three presidential candidates appear to favor the latter option.

By Joshua Holland

The Voice of the White House

http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a2827.htm

Washington , D.C. , March 27, 2008 : “Any number of interesting subjects today. First, we have incoming gen that the top Clinton people have been holding “substantive talks” with the McCain people, trying to stop Obama’s lead. Much speculation on how they plan to do this, in stupid defiance of Obama’s unquestioned popular support. If they pull off a typical back door coup, they could risk a serious public explosion from millions of people who are sick to death of their lies and thieving manipulations.

But even of more interest is the subject of a trip the nutty Cheney made to Saudi Arabia recently. While there, he told the Saudis that there was an “excellent chance” that the U.S. would “launch aerial strikes against Tehran and that nuclear weaponry could not be ruled out.” The Saudis at once sent out warnings to their various diplomatic missions, warnings intercepted by the Army’s special unit. This is the same unit that has broken Israeli diplomatic codes and reads their incoming and outgoing mail.

The Pentagon is furious over this because Cheney or Bush never bothered to mention this putative attack to them. Cheney is a flaming nut and the sooner his pump gives out, the better the world will be. Bush is only a hand puppet for Cheney and the neocons but he is very stupid and very stubborn, hence very dangerous. The Army and the Marines have too much on their plate to get involved in any kind of a military adventure but the Air Force is unscathed. Cheney told an aide yesterday that if we did nuke Tehran , he hoped the large staff at the Russian embassy there “got fried” for daring to oppose American policies.

None of this means that the United States is going to attack Iran but shows the mindsets of the nuts running the country. The Monkey Palace rumor is that McCain was told about this and just loved it.

Aren’t these wonderful people? Hillary is a nasty, spoiling bitch, McCane is a stone nut (pre-Alzheimer’s), Bush a small-minded and vicious asshole and Cheney a monster. And these are our leaders? I think the American people deserve far better than these losers and I am sure the, at least, 4,000 dead soldiers ought to have a better memorial than to be known as Cheney’s executioners.”

New Papers Expose the Clinton Machine’s NAFTA Lie

http://action.credomobile.com/sirota/2008/03/clinton_nafta.html

David Sirota
SirotaBlog
Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:21 EDT

Finally, the dishonesty is being unmasked. Finally, we see just how much we’re being lied to when it comes to economic policy. Finally, we see it hasn’t just been Hillary Clinton lying about her role in championing NAFTA, but we see it is the entire Clinton machine.

For the last few weeks, Hillary Clinton has been claiming that she never supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). She has explicitly claimed “I have been a critic of NAFTA from the very beginning.“

Clinton’s record of speeches over the last decade, of course, tells a much different story. In 1996, she toured Texas to promote NAFTA. In 1998, she visited Davos, Switzerland to thank corporations for mounting “a very effective business effort in the U.S. on behalf of NAFTA.” In her memoir a few years ago, she touted NAFTA as one of her husband’s big successes. In 2004, she told reporters that “NAFTA has been good for New York and America.”

And yet, despite all of this evidence, Clinton has worked to confuse voters by insisting that she has always been fighting against NAFTA. As I’ve written in another post, it is a tactic reminiscent of Joe Lieberman denying he supported the Iraq War in the lead up to his 2006 election contest with Ned Lamont. And it is a tactic that Establishment shills have tried to embolden. As just one example, the esteemed David Gergen has used his television platform to back up Clinton’s historical revisionism – and Gergen has been cited by others as “proof” Clinton’s claims are true – despite, of course, her very own words.

But now with the release of Clinton’s White House schedules, the veneer has been torn off, and the brazen dishonesty is finally on display for everyone to see. As Reuters reports:

“Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton now argues that the North American Free Trade Agreement needs to be renegotiated, but newly released records showed on Wednesday she promoted its passage…Among the thousands of details of daily life for Clinton, there was a November 10, 1993, entry — a ‘NAFTA Briefing drop-by,’ in Room 450 of the executive office building next door to the White House, closed to the news media. Approximately 120 people were expected to attend the briefing, and Clinton was to be introduced by White House aide Alexis Herman for brief remarks concluding the program.”

ABC’s Jake Tapper digs even deeper, noting that at one of the meetings, Gergen “served as a sort of master of ceremonies as various women members of the Cabinet talked up NAFTA.” In other words, Gergen has been on television deliberately lying for the Clinton campaign, as he was actually running these NAFTA-promoting events with Clinton. Tapper goes on to interview people who were in the room.

This revelation comes just as the other appendages of the Clinton machine attempts to revise history even further. This week, Rahm Emanuel – the chief White House lobbyist who rammed NAFTA through Congress – authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed praising candidates for indicting NAFTA and claiming “I share their concern for Americans who have lost their jobs to global competition.” To quote my book Hostile Takeover, this is “the same Rahm Emanuel who penned an op-ed in the conservative Wall Street Journal pressuring Democrats to capitulate and pass the 2000 China trade deal – a move perfectly timed to help secure the critical votes that ultimately passed the deal.”

The facts are clear: The Clinton machine joined with K Street to manufacture the very international economic policies that are destroying the economy. And yet, this same machine now claims to have had nothing to do with those economic policies – at the very moment, the machine is pushing a NAFTA-style Colombia Free Trade Agreement in Congress. We are, in short, experiencing the renaissance of “Clintonism” – an ideology that treats Americans like we are stupid and treats basic undebatable facts as commodities to be manipulated and perverted for personal gain. And that renaissance should make everyone question all the recent promises by Clinton about changing NAFTA.

Had she simply acknowledged she was for NAFTA and that now she’s not for NAFTA, that might give her some credibility. But, then, this is a candidate who just a few months ago laughed at a serious question about NAFTA, claiming “all I can remember are a bunch of charts.” In other words, this is a candidate and a campaign machine that is absolutely uninterested in how these policies have devastated the middle class – and hostile to an honest discussion about those policies. So the question now is simple: Can a Wall-Street backed candidate who denies the undeniable past be trusted with the future?

UPDATE: Just to show you how complacent the media is in the face of lies, the New York Times’ headline about the papers is “The Early Word: Clinton Papers Reveal Little.” Yes – the fact that the papers directly refute the very claims about NAFTA she used to win Ohio is not news to the New York Times.

UPDATE II: Jake Tapper has more on how the “schedules show her holding at least five meetings in 1993 aimed at helping to win congressional approval of the deal.” Clinton’s official defense is now that “numerous contemporary accounts make clear that Hillary Clinton was personally opposed to NAFTA, and her position on NAFTA was and remains consistent.” That’s nice “contemporary accounts” as a euphemism for “historical revisionism” – and, of course, those accounts come from people like David Gergen, who we now know is lying.

MoveOn Pressure the Democrats on Iraq? Don’t Hold Your Breath

http://www.prwatch.org/node/7143

Two leading anti-war journalists are challenging MoveOn, one “of the most prominent anti-war voices,” to turn its activism against Democratic Party presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Jeremy Scahill and Naomi Klein write, “we should direct our energy where it can still have an impact: the leading Democratic contenders. … While Clinton and Obama denounce the war with great passion, they both have detailed plans to continue it.”

But why would MoveOn pressure the Democrats or Barack Obama? Blaming the Iraq war on the Republicans and avoiding criticism of Democrats has been MoveOn’s strategy for years. MoveOn is now raising and spending millions of dollars to elect Barack Obama, but has made it clear it will support Clinton if she is the nominee.

Furthermore, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes of Hildebrand Tewes Consulting simultaneously run MoveOn’s anti-war coalition, Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), while also employed by Obama as two of his top campaign officials. Tom Matzzie, previously the top lobbyist for MoveOn and AAEI, is trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the Campaign to Defend America, a new organization run by him and MoveOn’s founder Wes Boyd to attack John McCain. Simply put, MoveOn refuses to pressure the Democrats because they are the Democrats.

NAFTA: Clinton Will Sell Us Down the River Again

http://www.infowars.com/?p=919

It’s true. Clinton has experience Obama does not. She was in the White House and an enthusiastic supporter of NAFTA. Hillary and her husband oversaw the deindustrialization of America. Of course, as Bill Clinton admitted to a truth activist recently, NAFTA was signed, sealed and delivered without his input, he was simply trotted out in ceremonial fashion to give the impression that an imprimatur was attached, as if we live in a democracy or something.

Regardless, Reuters tells us: “The NAFTA agreement, linking trade between the United States, Canada and Mexico, was considered a major accomplishment by President Bill Clinton in 1994″ and once secret documents “clearly indicated that Clinton had a powerful role at the White House, frequently meeting foreign leaders and presiding over meetings” as instructed by his handlers.

It came back to bite his wife in the posterior, as many Americans “blame the agreement for the loss of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs.” Try at least three million, not “thousands,” but then that’s the job of the corporate media, to lie and muddy the water, especially when the anointment of another Bilderberger blessed selectee is at hand. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 2.4 million jobs were eventually lost, mostly in the manufacturing sector. In addition to deindustrializing the country and “outsourcing” jobs, NAFTA has increased trade deficits.“NAFTA has become such an issue on the Democratic presidential campaign trail that both Clinton and rival Barack Obama have vowed to renegotiate it,” Reuters insists. “The former first lady’s records showed first lady Clinton worked on behalf of the accord.”

Of course she did, as instructed. And if you think she will “renegotiate it” if selected, I have a bridge for sale. She will continue the process of turning the United States into a third world country, eventually indistinguishable from Mexico — or China and India for that matter.

Clinton, Obama, McCain — it makes precious little difference who is installed. So-called “free trade deals” will continue no matter who is in office, and no matter what the candidates say on the campaign trail. For as Bill Clinton’s mentor, Carroll Quigley, explained, elections are all about fooling the people. In his book, Tragedy and Hope, Quigley said “the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.”

And as should be obvious, that “policy” is about rendering the United States into a slave labor gulag, virtually identical to China.