Patrick Martin

President Obama devoted his Saturday radio and Internet address to the sequester, warning of thousands of federal layoffs or furloughs and a “huge blow to middle class families and our economy as a whole” if the cuts took effect.

In the days leading up to Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, the Obama administration has combined calls for austerity measures to slash social spending with demagogic attacks on congressional Republicans for advocating even larger cuts in domestic social programs.

Obama’s speech comes as back-room discussions continue between the White House and congressional leaders of both parties, driven by two imminent deadlines: the March 1 “sequester,” when $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts take effect, and the March 27 expiration of authorization for spending by all federal government departments.

The sequester is a consequence of the 2011 Budget Control Act, a bipartisan deal between Obama and congressional Republicans, while the March 27 cutoff comes as a result of the expiration of another bipartisan agreement, the six-month “continuing resolution” passed last October to avoid a shutdown of the federal government during the 2012 election campaign.

If the sequester takes effect, budget cuts will hit both defense spending and a wide range of domestic social programs. The military cuts would have only a marginal effect in the vast Pentagon budget, which dwarfs the combined military spending of the next 15 countries in the world. The domestic cuts largely spare the major entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but will devastate smaller programs like Head Start education for pre-kindergarten children.

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Patrick Martin

President Obama is about to sign off on a manual that will institutionalize the process by which the White House orders and approves killings by remote-controlled drones, according to a report Sunday.

The so-called counterterrorism “playbook” will define the circumstances under which the CIA and the military’s Special Forces Command, the two agencies that operate drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other parts of the Middle East and Africa, may use lethal force.

The front-page article in the Washington Post amounts to a semi-official announcement by the White House and is based on statements by unnamed government officials. Its publication, on the same day that Obama officially took the oath of office for his second term as president, demonstrates the role of his administration as an instrument of the military-intelligence apparatus.

The US government is so deeply engaged in assassinations all over the world that top officials believe a manual is required to regularize the process. According to the Post account, the drafting of the drone warfare manual has been delayed by infighting between the CIA and other agencies, with the CIA seeking greater latitude to conduct missile strikes. These include “signature” strikes, in which the target is not an identified member of Al Qaeda or some other alleged terrorist group, but individuals who appear to be engaged in activity that bears the “signature” of terrorism, such as congregating with weapons, or loading vehicles with what appear to be explosives.

This means, in practice, targeting for murder people who appear to be engaged in resistance against US occupations or military actions in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. Moreover, since most drone strikes target rural areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and other countries where tribal gatherings are common and weapons are omnipresent, the demand for “signature” strikes amounts to a license for the CIA to murder anyone in the population of these territories.

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Patrick Martin

SOS: Participants in a rally in Salem. Bargaining broke down over a state
proposal that could cut in half the number of home care workers eligible
for employer-provided health coverage. (Photo: nwlaborpress.org)

...Democrats, Republicans prepare major cuts in workers’ wages, benefits

Four days before the New Year triggers a series of tax increases and budget cuts, both the Obama administration and congressional leaders are whipping up a crisis atmosphere to justify attacks on the social benefits and living standards of working people.

Whether or not there is a last-minute deal to postpone some elements of the so-called fiscal cliff, the outcome of the political charade in Washington is not in doubt. The political representatives of the super-rich, Democrats and Republicans alike, are orchestrating events to insure that the main burden of the crisis falls on those least able to defend themselves, including the unemployed, the sick, the elderly and the poor.

All the proposals from the Obama administration and the Republican leadership to address the “fiscal cliff,” as measures that could take effect at the New Year, are premised on an historic attack on social programs that benefit the working class.

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Patrick Martin

According to a report published Sunday on the front page of the New York Times, the Obama administration is pushing ahead with plans to establish a more systematic and regular program of using unmanned drones to kill people selected by the White House for death.

The newspaper estimated that US drone strikes have killed more than 2,500 people—a death toll approximating the number killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The article was written by Scott Shane, the same reporter who was the conduit for administration propaganda last May, glorifying drone missiles as a great advance in the “war on terror” and detailing Obama’s personal role in the approval of targets.

Like the earlier report, Sunday’s article describes the assassination program in entirely uncritical terms, raising questions only over the political motivation of the decision to “develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones.” This effort was supposedly spurred by concern that Republican Mitt Romney might win the presidential election and inherit an open-ended drone missile program that he would then be able to define as he pleased.

The Times article claims that Obama and his top aides “are still debating whether remote-control killing should be a measure of last resort against imminent threats to the United States, or a more flexible tool, available to help allied governments attack their enemies or to prevent militants from controlling territory.”

The language is remarkable, since what is being discussed is nothing less than acts of political murder, and the two sides in the official “debate” are wrangling, like a Mafia council of war, over who should be targeted for “hits” and how to do it. The language used to describe various “options” in relation to the drone killings marks a further debasement in American political discourse.

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Patrick Martin

Israeli warplanes and naval gunboats intensified their attacks on Palestinian homes and institutions throughout the Gaza Strip over the weekend, bringing the death toll in the five days of aggression against the densely populated area to more than 75.

At least 29 people were killed Sunday, the majority of them women and children. There are undoubtedly more dead people, who remain buried in the ruins of dozens of houses and buildings.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that Israeli warplanes had carried out more than 1,000 strikes against targets in Gaza. Spokesmen for the Palestinian Red Crescent said at least 660 people were wounded or missing in the rubble. At least 137 children have been wounded.

Hospitals in Gaza are overwhelmed with casualties and short on essential supplies, according to the World Health Organization. The Save the Children charity said families were running out of food and water, with most trapped in their homes and enduring power cuts of up to 18 hours a day.

In the single bloodiest atrocity Sunday, nine members of the family of Mohamed Dallu, a Hamas official, were killed when Israeli bombs destroyed his home. The dead include his four small children—Sara (7), Jamal (6), Yusef (4) and Ibrahim (2). The blast was so powerful that it also killed two people who were merely walking past the house at the time.

In another incident, at Jabalya Camp in northern Gaza, a man, his wife and two small children, aged three and two, were killed when a bomb fell while they were sleeping and collapsed their small home on top of them.

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Patrick Martin

Neither candidate will tell the American people the truth: the next administration, whether headed by a Democrat or a Republican, will launch attacks on the living standards, social benefits and democratic rights of the American people on a scale never before seen. This will be combined with stepped-up military aggression overseas, from the Middle East to the Pacific.

The last weekend of the 2012 US presidential election campaign was marked by rallies for both Democratic President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney in a handful of closely contested states, while the deluge of television commercials continues right up to the opening of the polls on Tuesday.

The itineraries of the two candidates were limited to the so-called battleground states, with Obama traveling on the weekend from Ohio to Iowa, Virginia, New Hampshire, Florida, Colorado and back to Ohio. On Monday he visits Colorado and Wisconsin before a final campaign rally in Iowa.

Romney scrapped plans to visit Nevada, where Obama has pulled ahead, in favor of visits to New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado, Iowa again, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The electoral map has remained virtually unchanged since the summer, with Obama leading in 18 states and the District of Columbia, accounting for 237 electoral votes, while Romney leads in 23 states with 191 electoral votes. A majority in the Electoral College is 270 electoral votes. Of the nine remaining states, with 110 electoral votes, Obama is leading in pre-election polls in eight, all but North Carolina, but in some cases only by a narrow margin.

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Patrick Martin

Perhaps the closest the debate came to a moment of truth was when Romney observed, “High-income people are doing just fine in this economy. They’ll do fine whether you’re president or I am.” Obama smiled in response.

The first debate of the US presidential election campaign laid bare the unbridgeable gulf between the corporate-controlled political system and the concerns of the overwhelming majority of the American people.

The United States is in the grip of the worst social crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with record levels of long-term unemployment, record levels of hunger and homelessness, mass layoffs of workers in the public schools and other essential services, deteriorating public infrastructure and deepening poverty and social misery.

Aside from two sentences from Romney—in the course of proposing measures that would make the crisis even worse for working people—there was no reference to this social reality in 90 minutes of debate. The words “poverty” and “unemployment” never crossed Obama’s lips. Neither candidate offered any proposals to alleviate mass suffering, put the unemployed to work or rebuild public services devastated by budget cuts.

On the contrary, more than four years into an economic crisis brought on by the greatest financial collapse of the profit system since the 1930s, both candidates pledged their loyalty to Wall Street and hailed capitalism as the greatest boon to mankind.

Obama declared in his two-minute summation, clearly prepared in advance, “The genius of America is the free enterprise system.” Romney, himself the possessor of a huge personal fortune based on stripping the assets of companies and speculating in the financial markets, repeatedly argued that the “private sector” had to be given free rein in every sphere of life, from job-creation to education to health care.

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Patrick Martin

Code Pink anti-war protesters march before the start of the
Democratic National Convention on Sep. 2, 2012 in Charlotte,
North Carolina. (Tom Pennington/Getty Images)

President Barack Obama’s speech Thursday night accepting the Democratic Party nomination for reelection brought two weeks of political demagogy at the Republican and Democratic national conventions to a shameful and repulsive conclusion.

In its banality, hollowness, self-glorification and unadulterated lying, Obama’s address was typical of those delivered by the politicians of the two corporate-controlled parties that are vying for power in the 2012 election.

Neither in Tampa nor in Charlotte was there any serious discussion of the actual conditions facing tens of millions of working people four years after the Wall Street collapse triggered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Still less was any program elaborated by either capitalist party to provide jobs for the unemployed or alleviate the mass suffering created by the crisis of the profit system.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact of the two conventions is that not a single significant political difference was articulated by either party. In a country with more than 300 million people, riven by social and economic polarization, the two officially recognized parties proceed with unanimity on all essential questions.

To call either Tampa or Charlotte a political convention amounts to false advertising. These assemblies decided nothing and discussed nothing. The delegates served not as representatives from states and regions across a vast continent, but as spectators and props in a political infomercial featuring appearances by politicians and celebrities.

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Patrick Martin

Michelle Obama 'loves her husband more now than she did four
years ago'? The wives & family of all the people that have seen
their loved ones tortured and killed by Obama during his presi-
dency, what would they think about this tasteless spectacle?

The platform is discreetly silent on Obama’s claim of presidential authority to assassinate American citizens. Indeed, the word “drone” makes no appearance in the 80-page document.

As the Democratic National Convention went into its second day Wednesday, the predictable and banal character of this event became increasingly evident. Representing one of the two parties of American big business, the delegates assembled in Charlotte are a million miles away from the real conditions of life facing working people in the United States.

Speaker after speaker has sought to present the Democrats as the party more sympathetic to the plight of workers, young people, the unemployed, the poor, the sick and the elderly. But the speeches, devoid of any actual political content, have only demonstrated the vast social gulf separating the delegates, drawn largely from the more privileged layers of the upper-middle class, and the masses of working people.

Some speakers attempted to bridge the gulf with demagogy, usually of a right-wing populist and nationalist character, like the remarks of former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland and Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley on Tuesday.

Others told personal stories aimed at demonstrating their own rise from humble beginnings, like the keynote speaker, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro. These accounts, usually of cloying sentimentality, aimed only to distract attention from the right-wing, pro-corporate policies of the Democratic Party.

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Patrick Martin

The opening night of the Democratic National Convention provided a grossly distorted picture of the Obama administration, presenting a right-wing, pro-corporate, anti-working-class government as though it was the second coming of the New Deal.

Speaker after speaker bashed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as the candidate of wealth and privilege and portrayed Obama as the advocate of working people and his reelection as the key to social and economic progress.

The utter cynicism of this claim was demonstrated by the continual references to Obama’s bailout of the auto industry as the high point of his concern for the working class. This action supposedly “saved a million jobs,” but there was no examination of the actual impact of the government intervention into General Motors and Chrysler on autoworkers.

Using the threat of imminent liquidation of the two companies, Obama’s auto task force, drawn from the top circles of investment banking, cut the wages of new hires by 50 percent, released the auto bosses of their obligation to pay healthcare benefits to retirees, and even stole dental and optical care from retired workers and their families.

White House officials—themselves largely drawn from Wall Street—spoke with contempt about the “unsustainable” pay and “gold-plated” benefits for which autoworkers had fought over two generations.

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