CEIMSA - Bulletin 421: ON A REPORT FROM THE MILKY WAY.

It is not public higher education that failed. It is Sacramento that did. We need a better Governor, a better legislature and a better state constitution. Our next governor and legislature will be decided next year, so get organized and vote. In the meantime, write them and let them know you want public universities protected, and you

state that does not tax oil drilling, a modest tax on drilling would bring in $1-2 billion. Use the internet to find out more about the issues and to connect with other bright, like-minded and resourceful people, here on campus and elsewhere. A good place to start is http://savingucsd.ning.com/ or you can contact your already active fellow students at the UCSD Coalition to Save our Futures at ucsdcoalition4future@gmail.com.

FOR QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS ABOUT CNI: JERUSALEM CALLING EMAIL: RADIO@CNIONLINE.ORG

Council for the National Interest Foundation
1250 4th Street SW, Suite WG-1 Washington, DC 20024
800.296.6958 202.863.2951 Fax: 202.863.2952
http://cnifoundation.org/

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E.
from John Gerassi :
Date: 18 October 2009
Subject: "The morning after . . . ."

Neither my students nor I had any illusions: we voted for Obama because we wanted to see a black man occupy the white house built by black slaves. But we did think that he might keep a few of his campaign promises. Did he not say over and over again that no man was above the law, meaning that he planned to prosecute those neo-cons who hate our Constitution, those who advocated and justified the torture of anyone opposed to their grandiose plans of dominating the world, or at least world trade. We did daydream of seeing Wolfowitz, Feith, Loo, Atkinson, Kagan, Gonzales and their ilk, maybe even Cheney, behind bars. Instead they are reaping millions from lectures, consulting, cushy media slots, and whatnot, while the poor vets they sent to be killed but survived are abandoned, jobless, and miserable, committing suicide at the military's highest rate.

            But, we thought, or rather hoped, that Obama was surely not a patsy of the big banks. We were wrong there too. Ok, what we really wanted, namely that he nationalize the top six banks, AIG, plus any other insurance company that had profited unethically from their strangle-hold on the poor and the innocent, was not possible in our laissez-faire capitalist system. But he could have pushed for an aid-bill that firmly specified that no institutions, which the government helped to bail out with our taxes, be allowed to grant its officers a single penny of bonus or a salary above $400,000 (which is what Obama gets) until every cent of the bailout plus interest has been returned to the tax payers.

            How did Obama decide to help our weakening economy? By appointing the same culprits who caused it in the first place, namely:

--Robert Rubin as his unofficial primary adviser. Pres. Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury, Rubin opposed regulation of derivatives, causing overexposure of mortgage-backed securities, which in turn helped cause the failure of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Washington Mutual; he pushed Mexico to accept NAFTA which ruined that country, joined Citigroup as top adviser and, with other Citigroup executives, is currently being sued by investors for allegedly selling shares at inflated prices knowing the firm was in trouble; Rubin is a member of Harvard University executive governing board.

--as director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard who was forced to resign for conflict of interest and for claiming that the reason women are almost non-existent in top academic posts is because they just can't think as well as men. Succeeding Rubin, his longtime political mentor, as Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury, Summers helped overturn the New Deal Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which had stopped banks from offering commercial banking, insurances, and investment services, thus growing to such a mammoth size that the government could insist that the big ones were too big to fail, letting them get away with loans without collateral, a major cause for our economic near-collapse. Summers also told governments fighting recession to increase their interest rates, which Nobel Timesman Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz vehemently opposed, and successfully campaigned to cut capital gains taxes helping the rich get richer. With Kenneth Lay, the convicted (for theft) boss of Enron, Summers lectured governors to drop regulations on big business.

-- Timothy Franz Geithner, the former president of NY's Federal Reserve Bank, a Rubin protege who had worked for Kissinger Associates, and was under secretary of the Treasury for both Rubin and Summers, then director of Policy Development of the International Monetary Fund, which is hated throughout the Third World for its loans always coupled with huge austerity restrictions that hurt only the poor. In 2008 Geithner arranged the rescue and sale of Bear Stearns to Bank of America and played a key role in bailing out AIG, one of the most disgusting companies in the world, so as to save Goldman Sachs, which held many of AIG's collapsing derivative contracts (alarming the meticulously cautious Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson into implying some kind of back-room shenanigans). Geithner has never helped to bail out small businesses or the thousands of folks who have lost their jobs, their homes and their pensions, nor did he object when Goldman Sachs, to which he managed to funnel $12.9 billion to erase its exposure, chalked up huge profits and awarded its officers the biggest bonus yet on record up to date..

            Obama's electoral victories (for which he spent $30 billion) were paid by the big corporations and especially the banks, advised by, yes, Geithner and Summers, precisely those who under Bill Clinton convinced the big banks to start their sub-prime lending program. That's why they are now running Obama's economy; he owes them. And they don't care about ordinary people's mortgages: not one borrower who owed $200,000 or less mortgage on his/her home and was defaulting has been saved by Obama, not one. Citibank alone, the major recipient of Obama's "salvage" incentives, had foreclosed on 6200 such homes by June 1st and counting. As Becker and Morgenson revealed in the NY Times last April, Geithner is tied to his mentor Robert Rubin, and to Sanford Weill who pushed Geithner to head Citigroup, and to BlackRock which got a no-bid bailout contract from Geithner when he bossed New York Fed.

            One of Geithner and Summers' "modernization" programs was to shift credit functions outside regulated banks and into a variety of unregulated money pots, " the so-called shadow banking system of hedge-funds and private-equity firm," as William Greider revealed in the Nation magazine (June 24, 2009). "That was the goal of financial deregulation enacted by Bill Clinton."

            These three corporativists have never used their economic training to help the poor, being confirmed believers in the outdated and mostly discarded trickle-down theory of development (and also by FDR), whereby if the rich invest more and more, the crumbs they discard are bound to help the poor, ignoring what most of the worlds' economists today say that the rich can only get richer by making the poor get poorer.

            We did hope, my students and I, that Obama would at least put up a real fight to pass a fair and progressive health bill. If not a single payer system which all the developed countries of the world have enacted, and they work very well, at least one with a genuine public option, whereby most of the uninsured could find the medical help they need at a very small cost. In fact most of my students hoped that Obama's "change" would tax the rich to guarantee the poor and unemployed free medical service. Instead, it seems, we are going to get, at best, a very wishy-washy public option paid by the poor. Why couldn't Obama tell the blue-dog democrats that unless they fought for a decent public option, he would personally campaign against them in their next primary. Why, my students asked, is he turning out to be a great speaker who never fights for what he claims to believe, instead endlessly yaps for bi-partisanship which is completely out of the question with these retrograde neanderthals Republicans?

            Nevertheless, my students retained one basic hope: Obama will end America's terrible wars. He will end rendition, torture and the mass murder by drones and vicious military units who were taught, as one veteran said, to never make a difference between their soldiers and their civilians (see the documentary "The Ground Truth"). But no, there too, we were all disappointed. Obama claimed he would stop the war in Iraq because "that war was of choice" meaning it was a cockamamy project of the neocons and their front men, Cheney and Rumsfeld, but not the war in Afghanistan because Taliban attacked us. Every student knows that was an outlandish lie. Al Queda did attack us, and al Queda did set up its training camp in Afghanistan's Pashtun tribal area, and the Pashtuns do adhere to a culture that protects its guests. That could allow the US to bomb the camp, but not the country. Besides, Obama knows full well that the Pashtuns have an aversion to foreigners telling them what to do; they have fought and defeated every invader, from Gangis Khan to the British and the Russians. Bush knew that, so he invited their leaders to the US, gave them $44 million, and asked them to allow UNOCAL to develop a pipeline through the Khyber Pass. Bush had wanted Ahmad Shah Mansoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, which had beaten the Taliban in 2001, to be our man in Afghanistan. But Mansoud was too independent; he would gladly work with the US but not take its orders. So Bush asked Taliban's "one-eye" Omar, but got the same answer. Even if Obama did think that Taliban and al Queda were partners' in crime, does that justify murdering their children, the guests at their marriages, their farmers and goat herders in their fields? The US will never stifle the desires of independence by those it forces to become warriors. The US will never win a war against 45 million independent-minded Pashtuns, but if left alone ordinary Pashtuns who love life and show it in their dances and books, will eventually defeat the fanatic Taliban, as they did in the 1970s when miniskirted women freely attended Kabul University and American hippies, adventurous Indians, bored European mountain climbers treked absolutely safely from Afghanistan's green gorges to the snow-capped mountains surrounding them.

            Will Obama at least honor his pledge to close down Guantanamo's horrendous prison? He has already said that rendition will continue but only to countries that promise not to torture our prisoners. Come on! Why would we send our prisoners to Egypt or Syria if we didn't want them tortured? Oh, how my students were disappointed by that Obama promise. "He has started to lie, just like Bush," they wailed.

            And now Honduras: first, all senior Honduran military officers are graduates of the Pentagon's School of the Americas, which even Robert Kennedy denounced as the School of Assassins. As Michael Parenti reported accurately: "The Honduran military is trained, advised, equipped, indoctrinated, and financed by the United States national security state. The generals would never have dared to move without tacit consent from the White House or the Pentagon and CIA." And of course the US does not want to lose its favorable trade with Honduras: according to the US Census Bureau in 2008, the US exported $4,846 million worth of goods to Honduras, and imported $4,041. As The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) reported, "within days following coups in both Mauritania and Madagascar, MCC commitments in Honduras, worth more than $190 million, have not been put on hold," ignoring the law passed by Congress that any coup-makers who overthrows a legally elected democratic government is to be denied any aid until the democratic government is restored. As mustard on theonduras, worth more than $190 million have notHondured, Honduras, worth more than $190 million, have notbeen put on hotdog, the hot-shot lobbyist firms of The Cormac Group and Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter & Associates, which first worked for Sen. McCain, then for Hilary, at the service of AT&T which wanted Honduras' president Zelaya crushed to pieces because he dared to be in favor of publicly-owned communications systems, are now employed by the Honduran military. And the relish is that Lanny Davis, Hillary's personal friend, has hired out to the Honduran military for a good cut of the $600,000 that it is spending in Washington (according to the DC Post) to convince Congress, the administration, indeed the world that they are not fighting Zelaya but Chavez, winning guffaws of praise by Congress' most fanatic ultraconservative, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, whose top election contributions were from, guess!, AT&T

            The only difference between Bush and Obama, said my students finally last week, seems to be their speeches. That's why Europeans like Obama; they don't care about acts, they care only about words. But, to quote my mentor, Jean-Paul Sartre, it's what you do that determines you, not what you say.

tito

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F.
from Edward Herman :
Date: 20 October 2009
Subject: The Iran Versus U.S.-Israeli-NATO Threats.

The Iran Versus U.S.-Israeli-NATO Threats
by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/hp201009.html

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G.
From: Al Burke
Date: 18 October 2009
Subject: "Gracias" from Sweden.

Francis!
Thanks for this and all the other good stuff you circulate. Below, something that you may wish to include with your next mailing.
Cheers,
Al

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Sweden: From Neutrality to NATO
by Al Burke

In his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Harold Pinter excoriated the U.S. empire and noted that it now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course.

Alas, he was misinformed about the honourable exceptionalism of Sweden. Around the same time that the mortally ill Pinter was video-recording his speech, an official of its Defence Ministry correctly observed that Sweden was already so deeply involved in USA/NATO that no one would be able to tell the difference if it were to formally become a member.

As yet, no U.S. military installation has been established within Swedens borders, but that is hardly necessary. The Swedish armed forces are now almost completely incorporated into the USA/NATO system; and joint military exercises are carried out in the air, on the land and in the territorial waters of Sweden with increasing frequency. This past June, for example, a huge area of northern Sweden and adjoining Baltic waters were devoted to a war game that was dubbed Loyal Arrow and clearly aimed at Russia.

The process by which Sweden has been transformed from a comparatively independent nation with a strong peace tradition to just another vassal-state within the U.S. empire is the subject of From Neutrality to NATO, a review of the various large and small steps involved during the period from World War II to the present.

Although the focus is on Sweden, the process reflects some basic trends in Norden and Europe, including the ever-deepening crisis of social democracy and of democracy in general, the furtive methods used by USA/NATO to absorb additional member-states, the complicity of mainstream media, etc.

The historical review is part of a developing movement, in which I am involved, to extricate Sweden from the claws of USA/NATO. We are eager to enlist the advice and support of knowledgeable and sympathetic souls from all over the world -- for our own sake, but also because the fate of Sweden in this matter has potentially large implications for the rest of the world. Anyone who is interested in the issue and would like to learn more is urged to read the review via the links below and/or to contact me at this e-mail address: <samordna@stoppanato.se>

Best regards,

Al Burke
E-mail: samordna@stoppanato.se

From Neutrality to NATO
Complete document (8.2 MB)
http://www.stoppanato.se/utred/steps.pdf

The PDF document can be downloaded in its entirety or in five smaller parts via these links:
Five separate documents
Part 1 (1,7 MB):   http://www.stoppanato.se/utred/steps-1.pdf
Part 2 (1,6 MB):   http://www.stoppanato.se/utred/steps-2.pdf
Part 3 (1,7 MB):   http://www.stoppanato.se/utred/steps-3.pdf
Part 4 (1,8 MB):   http://www.stoppanato.se/utred/steps-4.pdf
Part 5 (1,7 MB):   http://www.stoppanato.se/utred/steps-5.pdf