Just a short number again. Just flew in from tuckered-town. Man, my arms are tired!
Kopassus redux. Looks like Obama is seriously considering restoring funding to the Indonesian armed forces, including the notorious Kopassus organization, renowned for human rights violations in Aceh, East Timor, and elsewhere in and around the archipelago. The indefatigable journalist Allen Nairn has been reporting on this consistently for decades, and was recently interviewed on Democracy Now! about the administration’s flirtation with these pirates. Restoration of aid to Kopassus and other elements of the Indonesian military – responsible for killing hundreds of thousands – would not be good news, and it would be truly unforgivable for someone like Obama, who is not stupid and who spent some part of his youth in that country. There is no way that Obama doesn’t know what these people are about. And yet, he appears to be on the verge of going there anyway. What’s the excuse?
In a way, the U.S. empire is like this enormous killing machine. It’s got a thousand arms, colossal legs, and it moves across the face of the earth, crushing, grabbing, burning everything in its path. The president sits in a cockpit in its forehead and works the controls. Bush had a great time with it – invited his friends on board, and took it for a tear through Iraq. Then Obama took the helm. He promised to be more responsible. But … it’s still a killing machine, built to do only one thing. No matter what lever you pull, what button you press, it kills. So … he starts pulling, pressing, etc. Kopassus is on the other end of one of those levers, and he’s thinking seriously about pulling that one.
That’s one of our indirect wars. Then there’s the direct kind – Iraq and Afghanistan. I didn’t hear any reaction from anyone in the Obama administration to the footage released over the past week of civilians being mowed down by U.S. forces in Iraq. Pretty chilling stuff, in the sense that it gives you an idea of the rules of engagement our forces are (or were) operating under. We don’t see much of this kind of footage from these wars – once in a while, something slips out – but this is pretty horrendous. It’s ironic as hell – I read Krauthammer’s screed this week about Obama’s abandonment of America’s allies, complaining that he’s insulted the British, snubbed India, supported the wrong side in Honduras, and so on. Calm down, Chuck. He’s maintaining the empire just fine, trust me on this. He’s prolonging our pointless wars. He’s letting the Indians keep their bogus nuclear deal. And contrary to what you suggest, he certainly did not defend Manuel Zalaya in Honduras – the administration made some disapproving noises about the coup, but in essence accommodated it and its bogus election, and has since encouraged Latin American leaders to accept the successor government.
Killing machine forward, right? It’s the only direction it knows.
luv u,
jp
like no other time I can recall. America’s Oil and Gas Industry, Chevron, BP, and others, all trying to outdo one another with how dedicated they are to creating jobs, saving the environment, finding “solutions”, raising families, promoting public investment …. everything except generating massive profits, which is what they are ACTUALLY doing. I can’t imagine that, with all this promotional bullshit running on every channel, people aren’t getting more cozy with the idea of “drill, baby, drill”. (Sure, they always mention a full menu of energy options, including renewables, conservation, and others. But you and I both know they’re talking oil and gas.)
point in the ad he says, “Taxes never made anyone healthy.” Interesting statement. I guess he’s never heard of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, various Health and Human Services programs, and any number of other government services, from OSHA to the FDA, that in some respect help us stay healthier as a result of tax revenues. Yeah, I know the ad is about a “sin” tax, but you can also see how taxes on cigarettes and alcohol have had a positive effect health-wise. In a sense, it’s just a way of having the price of something reflect the true cost. Sure, we want people to be healthier. But we also want to recover some of the cost of their NOT being healthy, like emergency care costs for people who sugar themselves into heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and the like. Don’t we?
And yet the philosophy continues to command respect. Somehow people like Grover Norquist and his ilk are still listened to, still asked for guidance. Meanwhile, the nation’s infrastructure is falling apart, our last major investments (beyond maintenance) in roads, bridges, tunnels, rail lines, etc., now decades old. A stiff wind storm knocks out power to whole states. Instead of investing in the future of this country, we’re putting band-aids over compound fractures. The most striking irony is that these programs are being starved by the kind of deficit hawks who constantly claim that they are doing this for our children and our grandchildren, i.e. not leaving them a huge debt. Fine. There’s a solution. Get people to understand that we need to pay for things, and that civilization is not free. That’s the central point of health reform, lackluster as it may be.
principle behind this choice – for example, the fact that the bill is flawed, that it gives too much to the insurance companies, that it doesn’t have a strong public option, that it is not a single payer plan, etc. But his reasoning appears to be based solely on political calculus. He’s reading the polling, and it’s showing a large majority of his district turning against the bill. Now, this isn’t too surprising, since the airwaves have been flooded with attack ads over the past month in particular, many sponsored by the national Chamber of Commerce (the folks who helped bring you our lack of a national health insurance plan in the first place). And, of course, they’ve stripped out some of the most popular aspects of the original plan in an attempt to please people who would never vote for the legislation in any form.
Mike’s take on this as that it should be done incrementally. Note to Congressman Arcuri: this is doing it incrementally. It would be a mistake to think of this bill as the last word on national health care. It is merely a stake in the ground, establishing the principle of a national system. Yeah, I think it’s a mess, and I’ve said so. It excludes far too many people. It preserves the profits of large sectors of our money-obsessed health care delivery system. It lacks the virtue of a public option for people who simply cannot get a decent plan in the private market. But the alternative is the wild west system (or lack of same) we have now. That is clearly unsustainable. Voting against an admittedly imperfect solution simply to please people like Don Jeror and other “tea party” basket cases is farcical, at best. 
all. Well, that may work for bread. I’m not so sure about anything else. I mean, if you need a car, and you ask your spouse to go out and find one for you, and s/he comes back with one axle, a steering wheel, three tires, and a seized engine, you still are not going anywhere. Same deal, it seems to me, with health care. For all the cautionary comments about “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good,” we really do not have a whole car here, so far as I can see. For one thing, they stripped out the most popular provisions, namely, the public option and Medicare expansion – features that would benefit people immediately, save money, and make for a much more reasonable system.
Well, let me tell you why. Because too many people would opt for it. That doesn’t work for the money-drenched cretins that the insurance companies have sent to Washington to represent us. I’m afraid I have to include my own congressman, Michael Arcuri, in that number. He has thrown up his hands on health care, and while I wouldn’t blame him for not supporting the Senate bill, he should join with progressives in trying to pass some reasonable version that has a strong public option. They put the scare into him, and the insurance lobby is buying lots of T.V. time in our market telling people to call Arcuri and have him vote against the bill (which, ironically, he has already said he will do). Don’t just sit there and vote no, Mike – pull together with some of your colleagues and make it better.
in Somalia facing possible war crimes prosecution in the United States (where he now resides). Some of his torture victims now live in the U.S. as well, and would like to get some justice. Fair enough. While the correspondent took the time to describe how heinous that regime was, she neglected to mention the fact that our government had sent them something like $1 billion over the Carter, Reagan, and Bush I years. Small detail.
Perhaps it’s unfair of me to single out NPR. I just guess I’m getting annoyed with hearing Jim DeMint, Judd Gregg, or some other “conservative” leading light every time I tune in. On Thursday I got to hear from a Democrat…. Bart Stupak. Who’s running Washington again? (Oh, yes. On Wednesday, during the “Political Junkie” segment of “Talk of the Nation”, there was an extended conversation with Mitt Romney, a.k.a. Guy Smiley, a.k.a. Bush redux.) Meanwhile, the daughter of our own Karadzic is reviving McCarthyism with a web commercial attacking what she terms “The Al Qaeda Seven” in the Obama justice department. So not only does the war criminal brag of his guilt in plain sight, but his spawn is somehow treated as possessed of some expertise by virtue of her father’s ill deeds.
comprehensive health insurance reform? Never. Rebuild the entire thing to suit them, and they’ll still vote against it purely for spite. The problem here is, of course, the democrats themselves, who can’t seem to recognize when they’ve got something that’s both popular and worth defending. I’m referring to the public option, Medicare expansion, and other measures denounced as “socialism” by the other side (and conservative dems) but which the general public is strongly in favor of. The reason why people aren’t fired up about the current plan is that they stripped those measures out to please conservatives. Obama – congress – get a clue! Pass something that will make a real positive difference in people’s lives quickly, and they will support you.
The latest Afghan campaign continues unabated. I’ve heard the Taliban being accused of using civilians as human shields. Just a couple of weeks ago, though, the U.S. and local Afghan government leaders were encouraging people to stay in Marjah so that there would be someone to govern when they had taken over; and there have been reports of refugees being blocked from exiting by our military. Numerous civilians have been killed in what quickly became a war zone. How is this different?
raising taxes, cutting popular programs, etc. That is, however, the main reason why they have been sent to Washington D.C. – to decide where the money for the federal government comes from and where it goes. If they are unable to grapple with these issues, they might consider applying for jobs at the corporations that paid for their campaigns. What irks me about the deficit reduction commission, aside from the participation of paleocons like Alan Simpson, is that they are not directly accountable to the electorate. Even more than that, commissions are usually mustered to do particularly dirty work, like cutting or privatizing Social Security to save a few bucks.
Death and Texas. Jesus christmas. No one likes paying taxes, or going to the dentist, or taking exams, or eating their Maypo (well…. almost nobody), but this software executive in Texas who flew his plane into an IRS building should have taken an anger management seminar or something stronger.
mainstream media. This sometimes manifests itself in the form of stories that focus on a reporter’s experience rather than whatever that reporter is witnessing. (Gary Trudeau has offered an extreme example of this with his journalist character Roland Hedley and his perpetually inane Twitter feed.) There’s also the phenomenon of framing complex historical events as being largely the product of one person’s efforts. Probably the best example of this would be Reagan purportedly bringing down the Berlin Wall through the awesome power of speech. And there’s “Charlie Wilson’s War”, the namesake of which – former Texas representative Charlie Wilson – just passed away this week.
Whatever his role may have been in providing fuel to the Afghan war effort during the 1980s, this was not the work of one man, any more than the fall of the Berlin Wall was the result of one speech. This ongoing crisis was many, many years in the making, beginning in earnest with the Carter administration and the decision to begin backing the fundamentalist factions within Afghanistan because it was felt that they would prove a longer-term, more pernicious problem for the Soviets than any secularist elements. Money began flowing on a larger scale in the Reagan years as the CIA embarked on what was up to that time the largest operation in their history, conducted in cooperation with the Pakistani ISI and the Saudis. Fanatical fighters were recruited all over the Muslim world, including most notably Osama bin Laden and his cohorts. So we all had a piece of this one, and now it’s got a piece of us.
Haiti. The story is starting to get old, I can see, even though many are still waiting for help, not getting enough food, can’t find a doctor, etc. A large part of the problem is our obsession with security. I’m afraid we’ve been an occupying power for a few too many years; it has had its effect, just as it has on the Israeli Defense Forces. We take a military approach to everything, and we trust no one. The U.N., for the most part, is in the same boat, driving around in secure vehicles even before the earthquake hit. Combine this with the general decay of our emergency management capabilities over the past decade and it’s not hard to understand why even with a significant commitment of resources, people in Haiti have been waiting a long time for a helping hand.
going to kill the “Top Taliban Leader” or “#3 Al Qaeda Leader” by remote control before we realize that these guys are almost always replaced by someone younger and more militant, and that the human cost in terms of civilians killed and wounded in these operations generates many more recruits than can ever be discouraged by martyring militant leaders?