Stephen Lendman

Obama Year One: Betrayal and Failure (Part II)

Promising change after eight George Bush and Republican dominated years, Barack Obama won the most sweeping non-incumbent victory in over 50 years along with congressional Democrats gaining large House and Senate majorities. In addition, at 56.8%, voter turnout was the highest since Richard Nixon's "secret plan" to end the Vietnam war and his "Southern" and "law and order" strategies beat Hubert Humphrey and independent George Wallace in 1968.

On election night, the mood celebrated hope for progressive change, an end to imperial wars, and a new day for America. When word came around 10PM, expectant thousands in Chicago's Grant Park erupted with chants of "yes we can," hoping Obama would make a difference at a time of deepening economic duress.

In its November 4, 2008 editorial titled, "The Next President," The New York Times called it "one of those moments in history when it is worth pausing to reflect on the basic facts," then listed some:

-- for the first time, Americans elected a black president;

-- his triumph was "decisive and sweeping, because he saw what is wrong with this country, (and will change direction) to regulate the economy fairly, keep the air clean and the food safe, ensure that the sick have access to health care, and educate children to compete in a globalized world;"

-- he "committed to ending a bloody and pointless (Afghan) war (and) restore Americans' civil liberties and (the nation's) reputation around the world;"

-- he must now "prevent an economic collapse fed by greed and an orgy of speculation (by) impos(ing) control, coherence, transparency and fairness," in contrast to George Bush; and

-- he "now needs the support of all Americans (to help him deal with the) many other urgent problems that must be addressed."

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Thunder Horse

Have you ever wondered how animals know when a natural disaster is coming? Why don’t people take these signs into consideration throughout their lives? These are a few questions I have often wondered about. Nature has a way of communicating through its own language. It is up to us to interpret these signs and use them to our advantage. Nature always works in harmony.

When the first European people came to North America, they saw the American Indian praying to animals, plants, rivers, lakes, the sun, the moon, the wind, the lightening, the thunder, and even the birds. They called the Indians heathens and savages. For some strange reason they developed the idea that the Indian did not believe in God, although in many different tribal languages there were references to a Great Spirit, the Great Creator, the Maker, the Great Mystery, or the Great Invisible One. The truth is that not only did the American Indians worship God, but they also respected and communicated with that which God had created.

Despite the forces of assimilation, traditional American Indians and the holy men/women still understand the sacredness of nature. They see the life giving force of the Great Spirit flowering through all things in the universe. Because of ancient beliefs, teachings, and spiritual practices, they feel and maintain a direct kinship with all creations. In the traditional American Indian belief system, everything is a source of power, and as a result it should be revered. The traditional American Indian believes that each living thing in nature has a spirit of its own, in addition to being connected to and part of the Great Mystery. This is why they pray and give thanks to the sun, moon, stars, rain, wind waters, and all those that walk, crawl, fly, and swim, both seen and unseen. We realize we cannot survive or live without our relations. We also realize that they cannot live without us; that’s why there is a reciprocal relationship.

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Chris Floyd

While we were all out doing our Christmas shopping, the highest court in the land quietly put the kibosh on a few more of the remaining shards of human liberty.

It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Here's how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president's fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a "suspected enemy combatant" by the president or his designated minions is no longer a "person." They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever -- save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

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Muhammad Sahimi

He was not willing to sell his soul to stay in power.

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the spiritual leader of the Iran's democratic movement, and one of two top ayatollahs in Shia Islam (Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq is the other), passed away in his sleep on Saturday.

Grand Ayatollah Montazeri was born in 1922 in Najafabad, a town in the province of Isfahan in central Iran. His father Ali was a farmer who also taught reading and interpretation of the Quran to the townspeople. The young Montazeri entered the seminary at Isfahan at the age of twelve. After finishing his preliminary studies in 1941, he moved to the holy city of Qom and began his theological studies. He was a student of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the future leader of the 1979 Revolution. Years after the 1979 Revolution toppled the regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Ayatollah Khomeini referred to Grand Ayatollah Montazeri as "the fruit of my life."

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Rachel Roth

Over the past year, incarcerated women and their allies have achieved a remarkable string of victories against inhumane treatment. First, they persuaded the Bureau of Prisons to issue a new policy in October 2008 limiting the use of restraints on women who are in labor, giving birth or recovering after childbirth; the Marshals Service, which transports people in federal custody, followed suit. Next, they won legislation in the spring and summer of 2009 restricting the use of restraints on pregnant women in New Mexico, Texas and New York. Finally, they successfully petitioned the US Court of Appeals Eighth Circuit for a rehearing of the full court in a case from Arkansas, which resulted in a ruling in October that shackling women in labor is unconstitutional.

These developments send a strong signal to the rest of the country to stop subjecting women to this dangerous and degrading practice. But what happens to pregnant women in prison before they wind up in chains at a hospital?

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Mick Greenhough

In his presentations on global warming Al Gore likes to use a graph similar to the one below from Vostok, Antarctica, ice cores to show apparent correlations between temperature and carbon dioxide. When pressed about cause and effect, Gore says the relationship is “complex.”

The scientists working on the Vostok ice core report that temperature changes PRECEDE changes in CO2 concentration by about 800- to 1,300 years. This should not be surprising because temperature has great influence on CO2 solubility in the ocean. Notice that the temperature cycles occur in approximately 100,000 (±20,000)-year intervals. This coincides with the variation in the precession of the Earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun. Can you think of anything that would make CO2 cycle this way if it were the driver rather than temperature? And what would stop the rise of CO2 if it were the controlling variable?

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Merv Bendle

The postmodern politics of climate change

In the realm of disinformation, the prize must go to Al Gore who appeared in front of video images of a collapsing glacier to declare that the South Pole will be ice-free within five years. Such deliberate misrepresentations are linked to a further feature of this type of postmodern politics: the assertion of a militant and intransigent stance and violent denunciation of all compromise. All of this is then cloaked with the trappings of high moralism and the attribution and acceptance of guilt and shame, especially by the leadership of Western countries, which specializes in self-laceration.

Whatever the ultimate effects of the Copenhagen Conference may be, it was an excellent example of the postmodern mode of politics that increasingly dominates contemporary societies.

Postmodernism has various characteristics, but the relevant one here is the assumption that there is no ‘real’ world and that what we take for ‘reality’ is a text, narrative, or stream of images which lack any underlying referent. Politically, this attitude manifests itself in a disconnection between the symbolism and substance of an issue accompanied by an obsessive concern with that symbolism and an ultimate disregard for the substance. Central to this literally unreal and increasingly sinister situation are the state’s efforts to deal with the omnipresent media. The latter operate on a 24 hour news cycle and myriad government agencies have been set up to manage the sort of politics this creates, in what is increasingly referred to as a ‘PR State’. Much of Australia’s extraordinarily large 114 person delegation to Copenhagen consisted of people associated with such tasks.

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Paul Driessen

As frigid Copenhagen holds its Climate Armageddon confab, a predictable barrage of hothouse horrors has been unleashed, to advance proposals to slash hydrocarbon use and carbon dioxide emissions, restrict agriculture and economic growth, and implement global governance and taxation.

CO2 has reached a new high (0.0385% of the atmosphere), we’re told, because of cars and “coal-fired factories of death.” Rising seas are forcing families to “flee their homes.” Oceans are becoming “toxic.” Climate change is driving Philippine women into prostitution. Higher temperatures will “increase the likelihood of civil war in Sub-Saharan Africa” and “bring human civilization to a screeching halt.” The Associated Press, BBC and other “mainstream” media dutifully regurgitate every press release.

However, the planet and science are not cooperating with the fear-mongering. There has been no statistically significant global warming for over a decade, despite steadily increasing CO2 levels – and for several years average annual global temperatures have actually declined.

Carbon dioxide plays only a minor role, many scientists say, and our climate is still controlled by periodic variations in the same natural forces that caused previous climate changes: ocean currents and jet streams, water vapor and cloud cover, evaporation and precipitation, planetary alignments and the shape of the Earth’s orbit, the tilt and wobble of Earth’s axis, cosmic ray levels and especially solar energy output.

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Ramesh Kumar

In Hindu religion, the corpse is cremated by burning them on funeral pyre (Wood heaped for burning a dead body as a funeral rite). This practice is prevailing since centuries along with the religious rituals and beliefs. There are several places/grounds particularly for cremation and it takes around 300-400kg of wood to burn the corpse. This tradition or practice needs to be stopped in the view of the environment degradation and deforestation. The Govt. came out with an eco-friendly solution known as - ELECTRIC CREMATOR, but it is been rarely used by the people, because of their religious beliefs do not allow them to follow so. There are many harmful effects of cremating the corpse, as they are burnt in the open area and there is no way to control the gases released from the burning corpse. As a result these gases flow into the air and pollutes the environment creates health issues, if the cremation place is near any residential area. Due to congestion in the cities most of the crematorium can be found surrounded by the residential areas. Same is the case with Christian n Islamic practice to bury the corpse under the land. This requires a lot of space and as the corpse is placed into a wooden box and then they make it to bury under, so again the boxes are wood produce and this leads to deforestation. So instead of cremating or burring the corpse, adopting electric cremation is totally an eco-friendly way, while simultaneously following the other rituals and dignity of one’s religion. And the same can be done by following Electric cremation.

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William A. Cook

"The white civilized man (is) the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth." (Herman Melville, 1840s)

In 1841, Melville sailed aboard the Acushnet, a whaling vessel, on a three year trip to the South Seas. By July of 1842, Melville and a shipmate, Toby Greene, jumped ship revolting against the tyrannical powers that brutalized the crew by oppressing these men of many races. Having witnessed American warships firing their guns at naked islanders in the Marquesas, Tahiti, and Hawaii and watched "rapacious hordes of enlightened individuals" seizing the "depopulated land" from the natives, reducing them to starving "interlopers" in their own country, he realized that the superior white Christian civilization epitomized absolute savagery and that cannibals treated others with more humanity than these self-identified enlightened men. That understanding of the civilized white man struck me with its absoluteness, its certainty, its expressive force the moment I opened my file of little four year old Kaukab Al Dayah, whose tender face rests on top of the rubble of her home, an unsuspecting victim of white Zionist brutality that delivered her family a missile as a Christmas gift just over a year ago. (See Salaman, "The true Jew is the European Ashkenazi … of whitish appearance," in Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People). (To see the picture of Kaukab Al Dayah, google her name. Two sites have photos: Getty Images and Laweranceofcyberia).

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Dr Titine Kriesi

About the historical situation with the EU Reform Treaty taking effect

Recent events demonstrated once more to the world how European Union executives would like their citizens to behave. Many people witnessed how entire nations and personalities were abused if lobbyists had reason to suspect dissent regarding the EU treaty and a voting result other than the desired one. Defamation and the pressure imposed were unprecedented. Was that not in contradiction to the statement of the German Constitutional Court which named the European Union member states – not the Brussels officials! – the “Sovereigns of the treaty”? The court also attested both institutional and structural deficits in democracy to the treaty. After all that should not come as a surprise considering that this treaty is the final outcome of a sinister concept pursued for 50 years aiming from the start for power to control Europe in America`s interest. And democracy never had a place in this concept. It fits the plan that the functionaries would love to apply the treaty to Switzerland straightaway, although they know well that a majority of the Swiss say, No, we do not want that. The EU style sham democracy procedures, in which political positions and institutions are only too often more important than people will make sure that citizens with a true feeling for self-rule and independence will realize only after some time where the democracy deficits are after the treaty takes effect.

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David Kerans

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed…. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. –President Dwight Eisenhower

Eisenhower’s warnings regarding the insidious influence of the military are some of the best known of all reflections on American society, owing to their prescience. Diligent observers have kept a close watch on the manner in which the swelling military-industrial complex has been shaping the country’s economy and affecting its foreign policy, such that a significant portion of the public is at least somewhat aware of the relevant issues. Much less well known, however, are the ways in which the long hegemony of the military-industrial complex has allowed it both to expand its influence and to rot. As we shall see, the last decade of military adventurism has revealed alarming new processes at work, raising problems which not even Eisenhower anticipated.

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Najwa Sheikh Ahmed

At the age of 80 my father passed away, after a long journey of suffering, and working hard to obtain a decent life for his children, a life that better than the one he had. As many refugees my fathers’ life was neither normal nor easy. He had to work harder than everyone else to change a reality that he could do nothing about, the reality of losing his home, the land, the reality of being a refugee. This meant the loss of all his rights as a human being, the rights to having a home, and living in dignity and respect.

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Ellen Hodgson Brown, J.D

Europe’s small, debt-strapped countries could follow the lead of Argentina and simply walk away from their debts. That would shift the burden to the creditor countries, which could solve the problem merely by a change in accounting rules.

Total financial collapse, once a problem only for developing countries, has now come to Europe. The International Monetary Fund is imposing its “austerity measures” on the outer circle of the European Union, with Greece, Iceland and Latvia the hardest hit. But these are not your ordinary third world debtor supplicants. Historically, the Vikings of Iceland successfully invaded Britain; Latvian tribes repulsed the Vikings; and the Greeks conquered the whole Persian empire. If anyone can stand up to the IMF, these stalwart European warriors can.

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Lord Monckton
From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in Copenhagen

In the Grand Ceremonial Hall of the University of Copenhagen, a splendid Nordic classical space overlooking the Church of our Lady in the heart of the old city, rows of repellent, blue plastic chairs surrounded the podium from which no less a personage than Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, was to speak.

I had arrived in good time to take my seat among the dignitaries in the front row. Rapidly, the room filled with enthusiastic Greenies and enviro-zombs waiting to hear the latest from ye Holy Bookes of Ipecac, yea verily.

The official party shambled in and perched on the blue plastic chairs next to me. Pachauri was just a couple of seats away, so I gave him a letter from me and Senator Fielding of Australia, pointing out that the headline graph in the IPCC’s 2007 report, purporting to show that the rate of warming over the past 150 years had itself accelerated, was fraudulent.

Would he use the bogus graph in his lecture? I had seen him do so when he received an honorary doctorate from the University of New South Wales. I watched and waited.

Sure enough, he used the bogus graph. I decided to wait until he had finished, and ask a question then.

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