War as Politics by Violent Means

No Chance Obama's War

in Afghanistan Will Succeed

 

By Sherwood Ross
L.A. Progressive

Dec. 26, 2009 - "There isn't the slightest possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his December 1 speech (at West Point) will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan," writes Thomas Johnson in the current Foreign Policy magazine. And for emphasis, he adds the word "None."

"The U.S. president and his advisors labored for three months and brought forth old wine in bigger bottles,"
Johnson goes on to write, noting, "The speech contained not one single new idea or approach, nor offered any hint of new thinking about a conflict that everyone now agrees the United States is losing."

Author Johnson is no armchair admiral. He is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, a man who has conducted his own on-site investigation in Afghanistan.

Also referring to the President's West Point address, The Nation magazine editorialized that Obama failed to explain why his goal to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan "requires 100,000 troops at a cost of nearly $100 billion. By the military's own calculation, there are at most 100 Al Qaeda operatives, mostly low-level, in Afghanistan, the leadership having fled to Pakistan years ago."

Even as the Afghan war bids to become the longest in U.S. history, The Nation adds:

    "The undeniable fact is that eight years of US
    occupation and war have led to a growing
    insurgency, fueled by anger at one of the world's
    most corrupt governments, run mostly by former and
    not-so-former warlords who were installed by the
    United States after 9/11. Many of these warlords
    are deeply involved in the opium trade, among them
    the brother of Hamid Karzai, the president, who was
    re-elected only through massive fraud."

Writing in the Miami Herald of December 20th, Carl Hiaasen says that Johnson believes "Obama knows this war is unwinnable, and that the surge is meant to provide political cover in advance of a full U.S. withdrawal before the 2012 election."

Hiaasen adds, "Obama wouldn't be the first U.S. president to let domestic political concerns affect his military moves abroad, but he certainly campaigned as a different kind of leader."

Does this mean Obama is escalating an unwinnable war for political considerations? Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in the December 14th New Yorker, thinks politics has a lot to do with it. An immediate withdrawal, he writes, would inflict "severe" political and diplomatic damage to Obama and trigger, among other things, "a probable Pentagon revolt." And the Pentagon has left no doubt about the right course. As General David Petraeus, who commands U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan forces, told The New York Times, "a sustained, substantial commitment" is required.

As the war drags on, the death toll mounts. Writing in the December 21st issue of Foreign Policy, Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard, says by his conservative count, the war has claimed 30,000 lives. And the CIA's drone warplane sorties authorized by Obama are boosting that toll.

Obama's strategy is also spreading the war ever deeper into Pakistan. As Dan Pearson and Kathy Kelly report in the December Catholic Worker, 3,000,000 people were uprooted by violence in the Swat Valley and neighboring districts and those who returned found "that their homes, crops and other means of survival had been damaged or destroyed."

They quote Dr. Aasim Saijad of Lahore University of Management Sciences as saying the attacks in Pakistan are only swelling the Taliban's ranks. "The hundreds of thousands languishing in refugee camps talk of the mortar shells that have destroyed their homes and killed their relatives," Saijad said.

"They seethe with anger and warn the government that most Taliban fighters hail from the local population.
The longer the war continues-and it has only just begun in this region-the better the chances that the Taliban will be able to recruit from the refugees," he said.

If Afghans are dying by the thousands and Pakistanis have become refugees by the millions to ensure Obama's political survival, the U.S. has lost any vestige of moral authority. Is it thinkable to ask what if the purpose of the war is not "victory" but to keep the engines of the military-industrial complex humming? If so, it is not only primitive peoples' who sacrificed the flower of their youth to ensure a good harvest.

_____________________________________________

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Carbon Bill - Doomed Without Bribes for the Banks?

Cap & Dividend:

A Clear Winner

 

By Sarah van Gelder 

Dec 11, 2009 - A new bi-partisan climate bill offers a much smarter way to cut emissions—auction off pollution permits and distribute the proceeds to everyone.

December 11, 2009. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) introduced a bill today that is a much better approach to reducing climate change than the cap and trade bill circulating in the Senate. Her bill, which she co-sponsored with Senator  Susan Collins (R-ME), uses cap and dividend to reduce climate emissions and avoids the pitfalls and boom-and-bust cycles inherent in carbon trading. (Peter Barnes proposed this idea in YES! Magazine in 2001).

Why is this a better idea?

First, polluters would pay for the right to pollute; they would buy carbon emissions permits at an auction, instead of getting the majority of them for free. This sends the right market signal—emit carbon, and you'll have to pay.

Carbon permits would be required at the point where fossil fuel energy enters the economy. The number of greenhouse gas emissions allowances is reduced regularly by amounts that businesses can plan for. There are no offsets—these would be real reductions in climate changing emissions.

Second, American families strained by the poor economy would benefit. Each person would get an equal share of the proceeds from the auction. It works like the oil trust funds in Alaska, where each resident gets about $1,300 per year for their share of the state's oil royalties. As long as our economy remains dependent on fossil fuels, prices for energy and energy-intensive products will rise. But the rebate will offset those price increases—Cantwell says it will mean most families are in about the same place financially. Those who buy carbon-free energy, drive energy efficient cars, or buy products produced locally with little fossil fuels will come out ahead, though, while those who drive gas guzzlers will pay more through the higher price of fuel. So it sends the right signal to consumers, too.

Politically, it should go over much better than cap and trade. Who wouldn't like to get a check in the mail each month that represents your share of the carbon auction revenues? Three quarters of the revenues would be distributed equally to all Americans. The other quarter will go to clean energy research and development, for projects that reduce non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, and for aid to communities and workers who need special help making the transition to a clean energy economy.

And here's the frosting on the cake. Instead of cap and trade, which would set up a massive Wall Street system of buying and selling carbon, this auction is for energy producers and importers, only—not brokers and speculators.

What's not to like? This is a far better proposal than the cap and trade proposals that has Wall Street salivating. One caveat, though. Carbon reductions proposed in the bill are probably not enough to avert dangerous climate change. But if there is flexibility to step up the reductions as the science get firmer and the public backing grows, this approach could be just right.

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Antiwar To-Do List: Getting Organized, Preparing to Mobilize

Photo: Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Antiwar Voice in Congress

What will Congressional

Democrats do now?

By Tom Hayden

Dec. 8, 2009 - Congressional Democrats held a closed caucus Dec. 8 to consider their stance on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and what to do about the president's 30,000 more troops, whose deployment will begin without a Congressional decision or funding. 

The majority Democrats are uncomfortable in being caught between their constituents' peace sentiments and the president's deployment of 100,000 American troops.
It's going to get more uncomfortable.

 
Progressives should be vociferous in opposing the slithering [as opposed to dithering] by which the official deadline for beginning withdrawal keeps being shoved back by several years, if ever, solely under political pressure.
This stretching out of Obama's withdrawal timetable eliminates the primary feature of the President's plan that is attractive to most voters, especially Democrats.

<!--more-->
Progressives also must force discussion of the secret CIA war being authorized in Pakistan, where the center of gravity is shifting. See Jane Mayer's "The Predator War" in The New Yorker.

The CIA's secret offensive in Pakistan is likely to produce blowback on a historic scale. It's no secret to the people of Pakistan, who oppose it in recent polls by 67-19 percent. It's proven an embarrassment to American diplomacy since even Hillary Clinton is barred from acknowledging it's going on. The reason for all the secrecy is not to protect American troops, but rather to avoid embarrassing Pakistan's army and government from admitting the violation of their sovereignty - and, perhaps above all, to prevent anti-war sentiment from increasing here at home.

Progressives should nail the costs of Afghanistan should on every Congressional door, if foreheads are impossible. At the present rate of killing, American deaths under Obama will be another 1,100 by the end of 2011, bringing the overall total to nearly 2,000. At the present budgetary cost, the war started by Bush will become a trillion-dollar war under Obama.
Never doubt the ability of the government and media to hide these figures from the distracted public. Apparently the dollar costs were not realized by the president himself until October 25, when his budget office sent a memo at his request. According to the New York Times, our president "seemed in sticker shock [at the news], watching his domestic agenda vanishing in front of him. 'This is a 10-year trillion-dollar effort and does not match up with our interests'", the president said, before setting the wheels in motion anyway.

Every peace advocate should post the costs of this war from their desktop to the highest billboard. Just go to the National Priorities website.

As for the Congress, every peace advocate should say loudly and clearly that two-thirds of their Democratic and independent constituents are unhappy with these wars, and that unhappiness will become a growing danger to many incumbents in 2010 and 2012. Reject the idea of a war surtax except as a rhetorical gesture. Push for Rep. Barbara Lee's bill which will prohibit funding for the additional troops. It won't pass, but is the vehicle for serious hearings and amendments - like forcing a vote on a tougher withdrawal plan. And push for Rep. Jim McGovern's exit strategy resolution. How can anyone oppose the Pentagon reporting to Congress on an exit strategy, which is all the measure does. Just watch - the hawks will go wild at the thought of plan to exit from a stalemate rather than shedding American blood until the last Taliban surrenders.

Meanwhile, keep studying this Long War because it may be around for a while. A very intelligent analysis of what Obama is trying to do - a gradual strategic repeat from an unsustainable future - comes from a pro-war advocate, Peter Beinart, in the current Time.

Step by step, in the formula of Richard Flacks, is the way of social movements that succeed.
And by the way, order, view, and distribute the Rethink Afghanistan package from Brave New Films as a holiday gesture to your friends.

Tom Hayden
The Peace and Justice Resource Center 

Article originally appeared on tomhayden.com (http://tomhayden.com/).

See website for complete article licensing information.

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Bloody Days & Big Explosions Ahead

Washington's Wars

and Occupations:

Month in Review #55

By Max Elbaum

War Times/Tiempo de Guerras

Nov. 30, 2009 - No one can predict the specifics. But Washington's current course in the Middle East is all but certain to produce one or more disastrous explosions of violence in the coming years.  And way too much blood is going to be uselessly shed even before the next big bang crisis arrives.

For obvious reasons, Afghanistan is the front-page candidate right now for the next explosion. But conditions are also ripe or ripening for a throw-everything-up-in-the-air crisis in the Israel-Palestine conflict; in Pakistan; in the Iran vs. the West/Israel stand-off; and - despite the assumption that "this one is over" - in Iraq.

As peace activists we need to look this painful reality right in the face. And then strategize and act accordingly. That's the only way to make an effective contribution to minimizing the day-to-day horrors ahead. Likewise, only if we find ways to amass far more clout than we have now can we get in position to make a major difference when future crises expose the futility of "the military option" and create new possibilities for forcing a change in the imperial course.

NO "AFGHAN PARTNER"

& NO PROSPECTS FOR SUCCESS

We don't yet know precisely what President Obama will announce tomorrow regarding Afghanistan. But it is apparent he is going to dispatch more troops, albeit with phrases about goals and "off-ramps" that leave him some wiggle room down the road. He'll need it. This escalation simply will not work.

Washington's election-stealing Afghan "partner" has no legitimacy with the majority of Afghans. Corruption and drug-dealing are not aberrations in Hamid Karzai's government; they are the lifeblood of the regime at every level. The Afghan Army to which the U.S. will supposedly "turn over security" down the road is a travesty, with a 25% annual turnover rate and soldiers as inclined to shoot at their U.S. "trainers" as at their insurgent countrymen. U.S. killing of Afghan civilians means Washington has already lost its fight for "hearts and minds." Sending more troops means civilian deaths - like U.S. casualties - will only go up. The trajectory of the last seven years, in which an initially small insurgency slowly transformed into a broad-based anti-foreign resistance anchored in Afghanistan's Pushtun majority, will only accelerate.

Only death and destruction lie down this road. The extent of the horror and the futility of military occupation can be hidden for awhile from the majority of U.S. people - though not from Afghans or people throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. But sooner or later the bubble will be punctured even more dramatically than it was by the recent blatant election fraud: perhaps a "forward base" will be over-run with large-scale U.S. casualties, or a deliberate massacre on the scale of My Lai in 1968 will get covered instead of covered up.  Or a set of "top Afghan officials" will defect to the insurgency leaving the Karzai regime teetering on collapse. When some incident like this lays bare the utter failure of Washington's occupation - and provokes wider layers of U.S. people to reconsider its moral bankruptcy as well - another moment comes when whoever is in the White House has to again "consider their options."

ISRAEL-PALESTINE: PROMISE

OF CAIRO SPEECH SHATTERED

Meanwhile in the ever-volatile Israel-Palestine conflict Israel's land-grab grinds on. The day-to-day reality of occupation here is even more hidden from most of the U.S. public than the realities of Afghanistan. But hardly a week passes that doesn't see Israeli settlers uprooting a Palestinian farmer's olive trees or attacking Palestinian children walking to school, while the Israeli government seizes a Palestinian's home in East Jerusalem or expands settlements in the West Bank. Every single day hundreds of Palestinians face humiliation and abuse at checkpoints that observers from South Africa have called more brutal than those that existed under that country's apartheid regime.

How can anyone think this colonial pattern will not result in resistance, wars and explosions? Hopes of averting worst-case-scenarios were raised among Palestinians and human rights advocates throughout the world by Obama's words about Palestinian suffering and dislocation in his Cairo speech last June, and even more by his demand that Israel halt all settlement-building. But even in the eyes of those Palestinian leaders who had been most inclined to give Washington the benefit of the doubt, Obama's retreat from that demand has now left matters worse than before. Fatah veteran and so-called "moderate" Nabil Shaath, for instance, declared:

"There was high expectation when he arrived on the scene. Now there is a total retreat, which has destroyed trust instead of building trust."

Official Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat went further: "If the U.S. administration cannot compel Israel to halt the construction of settlements, who will believe that it will be able to compel Israel to withdraw to the borders of 4 June 1967, to withdraw from Eastern Jerusalem, and to resolve the issue of the refugees according to the U.N. resolutions, with Resolution No. 194 at their forefront? The U.S. has 230,000 soldiers in the region. If it thinks that it can solve the problems through the use of Marines and wars, then it is completely mistaken."

INSTABILITY FROM PAKISTAN TO IRAQ

Matters are also touch and go on other fronts of the region's many conflicts.

Pakistan seethes with anti-U.S. sentiment. The country's majority is opposed to the reactionary-theocratic factions who use terrorism against Pakistani civilians and try to forcibly impose their repressive social/cultural agenda in areas of the country. But that same majority does not think the country's problems will be solved by launching a war on sections of their own people. And - as the reception Hillary Clinton received from Pakistani students and journalists demonstrated - they regard Washington's drone attacks within Pakistan as terrorism just as morally bankrupt as jihadi bombings of civilian marketplaces. Washington's constant pressure on Pakistan's government to use military force to address what are fundamentally political problems (many of which are a direct result of U.S. policies in the first place!) has so far been met with evasion and compromise. But that kind of pressure - especially combined with U.S. escalation in Afghanistan - could cause something to snap in unpredictable but terrible ways.

On the West vs. Iran front, it's promising that the U.S. and Iran are engaged in direct talks. But it is not going to be easy to reach an agreement on the Iranian nuclear program that both sides can tout as a victory, especially since Israel and the U.S. right wing are using every fear-mongering weapon they have to paint acceptance of a peaceful Iranian nuclear program as a betrayal of the West, the Jewish people and the world to Islamic terrorism. And if negotiations break down (the last few days news has been all bad), grave dangers right up to the prospect of an Israeli military strike and regional war immediately get catapulted center stage.

Iraq too remains a powder keg. Right now there is considerable momentum toward (long overdue) U.S. withdrawal. But because the "surge" did not solve a single one of the country's problems (despite the Neocon Big Lie), the level of violence and potential for new outbreaks of sectarian fighting remains high. That's bad enough in itself, but what makes the prospect even worse is that much of the U.S. military brass, not to mention the McCain/Palin crowd, still itches for an excuse to stop the withdrawal and stay forever.

NOT THE WAY TO A SOFT LANDING

The bottom line is that in every one of these conflicts, the impulse in Washington toward reliance on military force, bullying, and colonial dispossession remains powerful. In some cases it clearly dominates policy, while in others it manifests itself more subtly while remaining a constant threat.

The practical mix - and especially today's rhetoric - is different from the Bush years. The Obama administration came into office hoping to halt the rapid slide toward utter defeat and loss of global influence that Bush-era unilateral militarism and blatant torture was bringing about. The new team's preferred approach was, and is, to dispense with doomed adventurism, give diplomacy more play, and act more prudently given the changed power balance in today's multipolar world. Very sensible from an imperial point of view. At the same time, since such imperial retrenchment likely meant accepting withdrawal from Iraq, a measure of compromise with Iran, scaled down goals in Afghanistan, and putting at least a little distance between Washington and Tel Aviv, it overlapped to a certain extent with the antiwar agenda.

But the overlap is inherently unstable since, for instance, the antiwar movement believes the U.S. should get out of Iraq because it had no right to be there in the first place, while for Obama's team withdrawal is a matter of a cost-benefit calculation which could be recalculated at any time. Even beyond that, actually carrying out even a limited imperial retrenchment is not fundamentally a matter of any President's intent. Neither the power-balance in the affected countries nor in U.S. domestic politics are under administration control – and in the end it is the balance of power that determines what happens.

So we can and should appreciate the openings created by certain shifts in rhetoric and policy since Obama took office. But like the Israeli government, the Palin/Beck/Limbaugh fear-mongers, and the highly politicized Petraeus/McChrystal military brass – all of whom started gearing up for a big fight five minutes after the polls closed November 4, 2008 - we would do well to recognize that it's muscle that matters.

It is extremely difficult to orchestrate a soft landing for an empire that has suffered a big defeat even if all sections of its ruling elite recognize that defeat and believe it is urgent to adapt to it. When major sectors of that elite still believe in victory through arms and can fire up a large reactionary grassroots base; when nuclear armed zealots who believe God gave them the right to another people's land have one of the most powerful lobbies in that empire's capital; and when the chief executive trying for a soft landing is politically vulnerable and inclined toward conciliation even on issues where he personally desires change - then no soft landing is in the cards. The changing balance of power in the world and the Middle East means that the empire can be pushed back. But the harsh truth of the moment is there is going to be more bloodshed, more defeats and more crises before that comes to pass.

ANTIWAR MOVEMENT: REBUILDING FOR A LONG HAUL

The antiwar movement gears up for this next round of battle in difficult shape. Many of its organizations have shrunk in terms of numbers and resources. The attention of many activists and much of the movement's 2003-2008 base has turned to other issues. The political complexities of battling the war policies of an administration that is under constant reactionary and racist attack from the far right, and which retains the general support of most key constituencies for progressive social change, have proven extremely daunting.

There are significant pluses the movement has to work with. Public opinion has shifted substantially since 2001-2005, with opposition to or at least skepticism about U.S. wars in the Middle East far more widespread. And those parts of the antiwar movement who focus on getting antiwar messages in front of members of Congress, the think-tank/foreign policy "community," key media figures and the like are quite active and have made some substantial gains. But in terms of grassroots mobilization – the ability to turn antiwar sentiment into forms of activity that force policy-makers to react and respond – the peace movement's capacity is probably lower now than it has been at any time since early 2002, before the momentum and mobilizations of 2003.

Building/rebuilding capacity on that level is a long haul task, different from the "emergency mode" of functioning much of the movement felt obligated to take on during the Bush years. There are no quick fixes and even the best strategies are no guarantee of success since much depends on what happens with events and political forces beyond the movement's control. That said, what movement activists can do is take a long range view, work patiently, work hard, work smart, and maximize our chances to make a difference. In that framework, a few ideas strike us at War Times as worthwhile to consider.

First, nurturing, expanding and eventually galvanizing-into-action the currently passive but widespread antiwar sentiment in communities most impacted by war and militarism is a key strategic task, a route to political clout. When the Black community, the Latino and Asian communities, immigrant communities, Arab and Muslim communities, working class and poor people weigh in aggressively on the war-vs.-peace scales, those scales tip. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, these constituencies are most focused on issues other than war vs. peace as such: the economy, jobs, health care, immigrant rights and others. The way ending U.S. wars can help gain victories on these issues – indeed, is crucial for doing so – needs to be a focus for antiwar activism. We are dubious that much progress will be achieved by adding "linkage demands" to antiwar-focused actions. The process will have to be more the other way around: integrating the antiwar perspective, and antiwar movement support, into ongoing struggles already being waged by these key constituencies. There is much to learn in this regard from the work of U.S. Labor against the War, which has worked from its inception from the perspective of targeting a key constituency and over time making that constituency a bastion of antiwar sentiment and action. Likewise much to learn from Veterans for Peace, Military Families Speak Out and Iraq Veterans against the War, who have taken on the extremely important work of bringing the antiwar message to military personnel, their families and veterans. We hope that in the next period similar projects targeting other key constituencies for this kind of long haul work can be developed, while recognizing that tactics, approaches and organizational forms will vary a great deal.

Second, in a parallel vein, there are clear links "on paper" between stopping global warming, protecting the environment generally and stopping these oil-gobbling and toxic wars. But in terms of ongoing practical campaigns and development of political muscle, the antiwar movement has not found effective, sustained ways of integrating the demand for peace into the environmental and climate justice movements. Given the prominence and urgency these movements will have in the coming years, and in particular the extensive involvement of young people, this is another important area of attention.

Third, even as we shift gears to this kind of long range, base building and movement-linking work, there is a need to keep the antiwar message in the public eye. Every vigil, every letter and email to an elected official, every civil disobedience action, every article and op-ed in the local or national media makes a difference. Not all will have the exact same message. Different groups and activists will disagree on what to emphasize, exactly what demand to make, exactly what tactic is most productive at a given moment. Solidarity and cooperation across these differences is necessary for a pluralist, long haul movement.

Fourth, we could benefit from new kinds of flexibility – and experimentation – in working on many levels of politics simultaneously. For a long time ahead we will be working under conditions where the extreme racist/militarist right is a major danger, and where the complexities of Middle East politics (including the fact that U.S. imperialism is not the only reactionary force operating there) combined with media disinformation causes large-scale confusion among even progressive sectors of the U.S. population. These and other factors mandate approaches that look to finding every possible way of working with the broadest possible forces on specific issues – "meeting people where they are at" as the jargon puts it. At the same time, without a steadily expanding layer of the population that has and acts on a critique of the depth of militarism in society, and the nature of empire, we will have to keep reinventing the wheel, and have tremendous difficulty sustaining a durable antiwar movement between exceptional moments of protest. For addressing these two challenges, which sometimes pull in different directions, either/or approaches won't work. We need both/and.

Last, though achieving breakthroughs for peace is fundamentally a matter of gaining political muscle, this project is inseparable from taking a firm moral stand and gaining the moral high ground. Militarism can advance politically without a moral anchor. But anti-militarism cannot. In this or that situation an antiwar movement may appeal to one or another practical political calculation as part of its message. But if we surrender to "real politick" in the drive for political clout, we are headed down a slippery slope. We are far from a morally pure movement and each of us has the same moral failings and confronts the same moral dilemmas as other human beings. Some of us are complete pacifists and others believe resort to force is justified in some situations. All that said, only a movement that strives to keep the moral dimension integral to its message to others and to its internal workings; a movement that appeals to people's "better angels" and is infused with respect for all other human beings; a movement that that rejects of the domination of one country or group or person over another - only that kind of movement can become a force with enough support and strength to end the wars being waged by the most powerful empire the world has ever seen.

You can sign-on to War Times/Tiempo de Guerras e-mail Announcement List (2-4 messages per month, including our 'Month in Review' column), at http://www.war-times.org. War Times/Tiempo de Guerras is a fiscally sponsored project of the Center for Third World Organizing. Donations are tax-deductible; you can donate on-line at http://www.war-times.org or send a check to War Times/Tiempo de Guerras, c/o P.O. Box 22748, Oakland CA 94609.

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HR 3699: Barbara Lee's Battle in Congress

'Barbara Lee

Speaks for Me!':

Rally vs. escalation

in Afghanistan

 

By Rebecca Griffin

Nov. 24, 2009 - Yesterday I joined an enthusiastic crowd on a sunny afternoon in the courtyard of the Federal Building in Oakland to join Rep. Barbara Lee’s rally and press conference to build support for her bill to stop escalation in Afghanistan. I can’t imagine there are many members of Congress who have as devoted a following as Rep. Lee—throughout the event you saw signs and heard chants of “Barbara Lee Speaks for Me!” As we keep up the tough fight of pushing our government to support an alternative strategy in Afghanistan, I am inspired and heartened to hear the passion and commitment from politicians like Barbara Lee, and proud to have such a principled and courageous woman representing me in Congress.

Rep. Lee’s staff lined up a great list of speakers on short notice. The MC for the event was Sharon Cornu of the Alameda County Labor Central Committee, and the first speech came from Vietnam Veteran Paul Cox of Veterans for Peace, who spoke about learning the lessons of Vietnam and ensuring our government doesn’t continue to make the same mistakes in Afghanistan.

Renowned activist Tom Hayden took the stage to make the case for supporting congressional vehicles for ending the war in Afghanistan. He expressed his hope that President Obama will reject the “long war” doctrine embraced by some in the Pentagon who have talked about a 50-year war that spans several countries. He said that by his calculations, another two years of war at the current rates would mean 1,100 more US soldiers would die in Afghanistan, and said he believes these are “unsustainable policies.” Hayden noted the need for us to “define a progressive alternative” to the current plan in Afghanistan, which he emphasized should include an exit strategy, and urged us to help pressure people to become cosponsors of Rep. Lee’s HR 3699.

Rep. Lee was introduced by actor and activist Danny Glover, who pointed out that she is special not just for her lone opposition to the war in Afghanistan in 2001 but for her ongoing work to support social justice. In discussing the need to oppose the war in Afghanistan, he evoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight against militarism, racism and materialism. Glover said that Barbara Lee is about “transforming values,” and that our country needs a transformation of values, starting with all of us as citizens, but especially with our representatives in the White House and Congress.

Rep. Lee started out by thanking the crowd for “keeping hope alive.” She said that she stands “resolved to bring this chapter of American history that has been characterized by open-ended war once and for all to a close.” She encouraged us, in the words of her House colleague John Lewis, to “make some noise” in this country and said we need the “street heat,” and she laid out what she and others in Congress have done to “stir the pot” in the House of Representatives and push for an alternative in Afghanistan.

Lee outlined several letters that she signed to the President, including one with her “sisters in the triad” Lynn Woolsey (D-CA-6) and Maxine Waters (D-CA-35); one with the Congressional Black Caucus; and another with 53 other members of Congress urging President Obama to reject a request for more troops. She also cited the vote on an exit strategy in June that gained 138 votes, and her introduction of HR 3699 to prohibit funds for increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan. It’s important that we are publicizing these efforts and magnifying their impact by making sure the public is aware that there are members of Congress who are working to move the debate forward.

Rep. Lee told the cheering crowd, “We all know there is no military solution to the war in Afghanistan.” She said her legislation sends a “clear and unequivocal” message and urged us to help build support for the bill. She asked the crowd to “make some noise” and be “the wind beneath our wings” and help push Congress to speak out for a new approach in Afghanistan. You can listen to Rep. Lee’s speech here:

This is absolutely a critical time to “make some noise.” Reports today indicate that President Obama is going to announce a plan on Tuesday that will include sending around 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Join thousands of others around the country as part of our campaign to flood the White House with calls. Call 1-202-456-1111 to tell President Obama to support an alternative plan that doesn’t include an increase in troops. Click here to urge your representative to cosponsor Rep. Lee’s bill to prohibit funding for sending additional troops to Afghanistan.

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White Blindspot: GOP Teabaggers Rewrite 2008

Poll: Majority Of
GOP Think Obama
Didn't Win Election
- ACORN Stole It!

By Eric Kleefeld
TPM Talking Points

Nov. 19, 2009 - The new national poll from Public Policy Polling (D) has an astonishing number about paranoia among the GOP base: Republicans do not think President Obama actually won the 2008 election -- instead, ACORN stole it.

This number goes a long way towards explaining the anger of the Tea Party crowd. They not only think Obama's agenda is against America, but they don't think he was actually the choice of the American people at all! Interestingly, NY-23 Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman is now accusing ACORN of stealing his race, and Fox News personalities have often speculated about ACORN stealing the 2008 Minnesota Senate race for Al Franken.

The poll asked this question: "Do you think that Barack Obama legitimately won the Presidential election last year, or do you think that ACORN stole it for him?" The overall top-line is legitimately won 62%, ACORN stole it 26%.

Among Republicans, however, only 27% say Obama actually won the race, with 52% -- an outright majority -- saying that ACORN stole it, and 21% are undecided. Among McCain voters, the breakdown is 31%-49%-20%. By comparison, independents weigh in at 72%-18%-10%, and Democrats are 86%-9%-4%.

Now, the obvious comparison would be that many Democrats felt that George W. Bush didn't legitimately win the 2000 election. But there are some clear differences.

First of all, Al Gore empirically won the national popular vote in 2000, and lost in a disputed recount process in Florida. By comparison, John McCain lost the national popular vote by a 53%-46% margin.

In order to believe that Obama wasn't the true winner of the 2008 election, one would have to think that ACORN (and perhaps other groups) stuffed ballots to the tune of over 9.5 million votes, Obama's national margin.

PPP communications director Tom Jensen says: "Belief in the ACORN conspiracy theory is even higher among GOP partisans than the birther one, which only 42% of Republicans expressed agreement with on our national survey in September."

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Obama's Dilemma: Defeat Now, Bigger Defeat Later

Afghanistan:
Heads You Lose,
Tails You Lose

By Immanuel Wallerstein
Progressives for Obama

The war in Afghanistan is a war in which whatever the United States does now, or that President Obama does now, both the United States and Obama will lose. The country and its president are in a situation of perfect lockjaw.

Consider the basic situation. The Afghan government in Kabul has no legitimacy with the majority of the Afghan people. It also has no army worthy of the name. It also has no financial base. There is almost no military or personal security anywhere. It is faced with a guerilla opposition, the Taliban, who control half the country and who have grown steadily stronger since the Taliban government was overthrown by a foreign (largely United States) invasion in 2002. The New York Times reports that the Taliban "are running a sophisticated financial network to pay for their insurgent operations," which American officials are struggling, unsuccessfully, to cut off.

Pres. Hamid Karzai was reelected recently in a manifestly falsified election. The U.S. government was ready to swallow this because Karzai is the only major politician who is ethnically a Pashtun, the base of the Taliban support. He is therefore the only one who can even hope to enter into a political arrangement with some or all of the Taliban. The United States was embarrassed publicly into recognizing the electoral fraud and was pressured to put pressure on Karzai to accept a run-off second round election. Karzai will undoubtedly win the run-off. His political position, post-election, will be very weak.

The major U.S. political ally in the region, Pakistan, is clearly collusive with the Taliban - in large part to ensure its own internal survival. The U.S. military commander, General Stanley McChrystal, insists he needs 40,000 more troops right away, or it will be too late to win the war in Afghanistan. It seems unlikely he will get the full number of these troops, or fast enough, to meet his implicit deadline. There are many military figures who doubt that he is right in arguing that his 40,000 more troops, even if they arrive right away, will make the difference.

It doesn't seem very daring to suggest that the United States will have to withdraw from Afghanistan at some point. Who will really come to power in Afghanistan at that point is a very open question. There may well be civil war for a long time.

Within the United States, opinion about the "lost" war will be extremely divided. It seems clear that the Republican right is preparing the charge of a treacherous sell-out by the Democrats in general, and Obama in particular. Gen. McChrystal may well be their candidate for president, if not in 2012 then in 2016.

Obama will get no credit for anything he does. If he gives full backing immediately to McChrystal's requests, he will still be accused by the Republicans of having done it too late. At the same time, he will have angered deeply at least half, if not more. of those who voted for him in 2008.

The war in Afghanistan has become Obama's war. When the United States `loses' that war, it will be Obama who will be charged with having `lost' it. Even if he gets a health bill of some kind passed (possible), and even if the U.S. and world economic situation improves in the next several years (doubtful), the war in Afghanistan will still loom largest as the single most important element in judging his presidency.

Could Obama reverse this situation by moving dramatically in another direction - towards a rapid political deal with the Taliban and full withdrawal? Aside from the fact that there is no public evidence that he is seriously contemplating doing this, there is not yet the degree of public support within the United States to make this a feasible political option for him. He doesn't even have the necessary degree of support within his own administration for such a dramatic shift.

So the United States and Obama shall stumble on, for a year or two, while the general military and political situation deteriorates. For the United States and for Obama, it is heads we lose, tails we lose.

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Our Challenge: Defeat the Right's Militant Minority

Barack Obama,
Right Wing Frenzy
-- and the Left

By Mark Solomon
Progressives for Obama

Some have pointed at past attacks on Democratic presidents to contend that there is every little about the current hysteria that has not been seen before. But there is something different about the frenzied and relentless right wing assault on Barack Obama. The vitriolic fear mongering and lies about Obama's health care reform, the calculated fanning of racism and anti- communism, organized disruptions of congressional town meetings replete with gun-toting intimidators, slanderous and frenzied attacks without boundaries -- constitute a qualitative leap into an abyss of violent rhetoric and occasional violent acts that have rarely been seen before.

Fueling that frenzy is significant right wing corporate money that has heavily financed emerging groups that have galvanized protests on the right. Among those formations, some have cynically appropriated symbols from the American Revolution to manipulate and sustain anger against Obama and the government through contrived "tea parties" and vitriolic demonstrations freighted with racist smears.


The most reactionary sectors of the corporate elite (especially oil, gas coal and insurance money) are not impressed by Obama's cautious and at times temporizing policymaking. Obama's appeals to bipartisanship regularly fall on deaf ears. The right is not encouraged by centrist policies that fall well within sustaining the institutional domination of capital. Rather, it senses that the country is at a dangerous transformational moment -- symbolized by the Obama presidency. Eight years of right wing rule brought severe blows that led to the right's defeat in 2008. The toll of Wall Street's financial collapse and the economic crisis of rising joblessness and social dislocation, the drain of resources from the hopeless Iraq war and the more hopeless Afghan venture, health care and environmental crises, assorted scandals that shredded Washington's claim to moral authority -- all led to a powerful convergence of various forces -- labor, youth, women, African Americans, Latinos and other nationalities that responded to Obama's call for change.

It is both the potential to advance a more democratic and egalitarian society inherent in the Obama presidency and the power of an emerging progressive majority that is the target of the right wing assault. Both represent for the right a frightening promise of social transformation. Whatever the insufficiencies of Obama's health proposals, the right wing (abetted by assorted "moderates") senses in those proposals an historic effort to undermine vast privately held wealth by effecting a major redistribution of that wealth. The right rails against a tepid "public option" because it perceives an historic precedent -- a "slippery slope" according to their house intellectuals at the Weekly Standard --to government "socialist" control of the health care industry.

The heavy infusion of funds into the campaign against health care reform and against the Obama presidency has abetted the rallying of a large constituency representing a complex and often bewildering array of ideologies and programs. But some elements of that convergence of right wing forces are clear. The historic ascendancy of an African American to the presidency has stirred deep wellsprings of racism grounded in paranoid fear that racial and national minorities are taking wealth and power from whites -- ironically wealth and power that they never possessed. The wail of a demonstrator in Washington that "we want our country back" was a plea for the return of unmitigated white supremacy -- for a world unaltered by irresistible social and demographic change, for reversal of African American advance symbolized by Obama, for ending immigration spawned by the upheavals of globalization. Immigration has now broadened the range of racism, stoking the anxieties of a major sector of the right wing movement.

Anti-communism, another weapon of the right wing arsenal, deeply embedded in the country's history, has been revived to paint Obama as variously a communist or socialist (or perversely as a fascist, a hypocritical manipulation of a most frightening image by a fascist- tinged current). Anti-communism has been resurrected as "big government" driven by jack boots running health care and enforcing a a reversal of the "natural order" of white supremacy.

Finally, right wing populism has been reintroduced to exploit genuine anxieties of those who fear impending economic collapse, long-term joblessness, and a government that has, especially in the last decade, remorselessly lied to them. Right wing trends in populism of the late 19th century berated banks and railroads while directing the rage of white farmers and workers towards on African Americans (actually abetting those banks and railroads). Current rightist populism demagogically mimics working class anger at multi- trillion dollar bailouts to banks. It utilizes the old McCarthyite tactic of attacking "liberal elites" that allegedly manipulate the powers of government to coerce the mass with unwanted and repressive programs. Beneath the anti-corporate rhetoric is the real objective--to cultivate searing hatred for government --- at least government that has been obliged to seek social cohesion by pursuing modest steps towards equality.

Orchestrated by corporate and Republican operatives and Fox media, the racists, anti-communists, anti- environmentalists, anti-choice and anti-gay rights elements, "birthers," "tea baggers," religious fundamentalists, anti-taxers -- and some driven by confusion, fear and desperation in an imploding economy -- are bound together by a single, overriding factor: resentment and anger at Barack Obama as the symbol of unwelcome change and the power of liberal government. That animus towards Obama enabled a distinct minority to nevertheless galvanize its splintered constituencies, to frame the political debate and to overshadow the broad forces that drove Obama to the White House. While analogies are never perfect, it is instructive to recall that a clear minority, driven by paranoia, anti-Semitic scapegoating, racism and nationalism in early 1930s Germany was able to take power in the face of a paralyzed center and a divided left. The stakes in the current right wing drive to decapitate the Obama presidency and restore the Bush nightmare (or worse) require clear-eyed resistance to the right wing's attempts to undermine Obama and crucially, to topple the broad social movement that brought him to the presidency.

On the left, there appears to be a general understanding of the importance of stanching the right wing offensive against the present administration -- while subjecting that administration to grass roots pressure to steer it in a progressive direction. However, some influential left voices are engaging in an one-dimensional attacks on Obama that sow confusion, demoralization and demobilization that however unintentional, detract from the primary need to combat the right wing. (The pseudo-left fringe that defines Obama as a stalking horse for a ruling class conspiracy is not considered in this article.)

For example, a prominent peace activist, demonstrating against Obama at his Martha's Vineyard vacation site declared that in calling Bush a war criminal we must also call Obama a war criminal. Another voice on the left recently published a more sophisticated, but no less disorienting attack in an article titled "Bush's Third Term? You're Living It." Faithful to its title, the article, posted on prominent left websites, recites a catalog of deeply institutionalized imperial and national security polices passed from administration to administration -- the largest military budget in history, defense of executive privilege, continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a "Bush third term" honeycombed with Wall St. operatives that orchestrated the massive bailout of the finance industry. The point, of course, is that Bush's third term is Obama first term.

To reach that conclusion a selective scalpel had to be applied to Obama's brief record as President. Some comparisons with Bush ("continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition") are questionable. Torture have been formally ruled out by the present administration. But rendition, though not clearly rejected, is nearly paralyzed by hesitancy. Other aspects of military and national security policy such as complete withdrawal from Iraq, escalation in Afghanistan, release of White House visitor logs, torture indictments, claims of executive privilege -- are either yet to be finalized or are frozen for the moment by internal conflicts within the administration.

The "Bush third term" analogy also requires the omission of Obama policies that reflect the influence of the multilateralist wing of the military and foreign policy establishment -- to an extent the influence of progressive forces. Can one imagine George W. Bush opening the door to the elimination of nuclear weapons? Would Bush have canceled the provocative European missile shield that has riled the Russians? However tenuous and cautious the Obama approach, would Bush have opened the door to Cuba? Would he have condemned the Honduras coup? In the domestic sphere, it is unimaginable that George W. Bush would launch a major stimulus, however short of overwhelming need, to boost a shattered economy, to call for Wall St. re- regulation, for institutionalized consumer protection and for urgent attention to the environmental crisis?

Pointing out positive aspects of Obama's brief record is not meant to negate justified criticism or to offer a mechanical balance sheet devoid of analysis of its principal elements.Some of his administration's policy choices are riven by serious contradictions such as its claim to re-ignite a Latin American good neighbor policy that is undercut by a plan to establish military bases in Columbia or its demand for a freeze on Israeli settlements that is countered by its retreat before Netanyahu and its obstruction of the Goldstone report on Israeli crimes in Gaza. However, to close our eyes to the positive and to offer one-dimensional condemnation is to perilously neglect the internal splits in ruling circles that provide openings for progressives and to weaken the spirit and resolve of progressives to reinvigorate the social movement that brought Obama to the presidency.

Those Obama policies that reinforce imperial strategic interests and the dominance of the financial sector should be subjected to criticism and opposition -- first and foremost from the forces that put him in office. Obama the candidate promised change, but he is a cautious, pragmatic politician who bends at times to the left (especially when he feels the weight of that "bottom up" movement that he talked about when campaigning) but who carefully assesses and responds to the pressures of powerful ruling blocs that oppose his agenda. President Barack Obama understands a progressive platform. His recent media interviews demonstrated an acute understanding of single payer health care and of various forms of socially grounded health programs around the world. But given his assessment of the power of insurance and pharmaceutical interests arrayed against even tepid reform, Obama was not going to carry the ball for meaningful universal health care without a powerful, united push from his left. Standing in the wings are forces, at least as powerful as those opposed to universal health care, geared to prevent serious measures to combat the environmental crisis and to stop the Employee Free Choice Act. Defeating those forces requires the urgent unity of a reinvigorated progressive movement.

Crucial to the fight against the right wing offensive is the need to pressure the Obama administration to sharpen its policies in a progressive direction.The administration's vague and temporizing approach to vital issues like health care undermines the clarity and vitality of the majority on the left and center, thus weakening the fight against the right. Organizing for America, the 13-million-person list of Obama supporters has had little success in urging its members to mobilize to support vaguely-defined "quality health care," thus stifling efforts to counter the resurgence of the right wing and to reach out and win that large segment on the right that is motivated by deep economic insecurity and distrust of government. The task of invigorating Organizing for America falls to the left which should be involved in reawakening the progressive agenda that largely motivated the Obama coalition in the first place.

A way forward at this critical juncture is suggested by an event that took place in Boston in late September to "talk back to the G20." A packed public meeting at Northeastern University was sponsored by the Majority Agenda Project -- dedicated to the principle of the inseparability of the crises in the economy, the environment and foreign policy and need to mobilize the majority that supports progressive policies to stem those crises. The meeting before a predominantly young, multiracial audience was addressed by an economist who briefly surveyed the damaging bailout of the financial system; by a student whose parents are now jobless and who may be forced to leave college, by two Latina housekeepers at the Boston Hyatt Hotel who were replaced by contract workers at half their wages (bringing many in the audience to tears), by two African American women fighting foreclosure of their homes, by a sociologist who produced data to demonstrate the country is center-left not center- right, by a young Iraq war veteran who made the connection between wasteful military spending and the crisis at home, by a medical doctor who described through personal experience the magnitude of the crisis in health care, by an African American environmental activist who surveyed the fight against climate catastrophe in his community and a by leader of the Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party who drew together the many strands of crisis into a coherent whole. In reporting on the results small group discussion, a student pointed out that the meeting had put a human face on growing suffering, had demonstrated the inseparability of the various crises and the compelling need for all those affected by those crises and working for change to stand together.

The country is again at a critical crossroads that may well determine the outcome of the fight against the right wing and the fate of a progressive agenda. Whether the war in Afghanistan will be escalated or whether a path will be taken to ending US and NATO intervention will impact a range of issues from a a new stimulus to create green jobs, to solving the crisis of health care, to serious engagement with the impending climate catastrophe. In coming days, the rallies, protests and lobbying to end the war in Afghanistan should be the basis for the broadest movement to embrace the thousands who converged in Detroit to seek minimal aid in paying rent and utilities to the military families, to the millions of jobless, to the millions who are caught in the health care crisis and to all of us facing the environmental crisis. Now is the time to resurrect the alliance that defeated the right in 2008. That fight goes on and so must the quest for the unity of all progressive forces.

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Time To Stop The Hypocrisy on Iran

What Is NOT Being
Discussed In The
Iran Nuclear Story

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
BlackCommentator.com

Last week’s announcement of the discovery of a previously unknown but suspected nuclear research and production site became a major story in the Western media. The Obama administration, along with its allies in Europe, saw this as evidence of Iranian duplicity on the matter of its nuclear intentions. Though Iran admitted the existence of this facility, the manner in which it did so seemed to be directed at heading off the expose' from other sources.

The outrage that was expressed concerning Iran’s revelation is, at best, overstated. While no one has been able to prove that Iran’s nuclear program is anything other than what it has claimed that it is—peaceful—the assertion from most of the mainstream Western press is that it is military in intent. This, by the way, despite the 2007 intelligence report indicating that Iran dropped its military nuclear program some years ago.

The outrage against Iran is also hypocritical. While the focus of the mainstream Western media has been on Iran’s alleged intent toward a weaponized program, in another part of the Middle, East Israel appears to possess somewhere between 100-200 nuclear weapons. No one is actually quite sure precisely because (1)Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and (2)Israel refuses to confirm or deny its nuclear program.


So, as pointed out by many observers, the real nuclear issue in the Middle East is not Iran’s nuclear intent but none other than Israel’s actual possession of such weaponry. Israel not only possesses such weapons but also possesses delivery systems for these weapons. Yet, mainstream political and media personnel in the West refuse to discuss this. In a noted exchange between iconic White House reporter Helen Thomas and the then newly elected President Obama, the President refused to answer Thomas’s questions regarding Israel’s nuclear program. He did a dance around the question that would have made Fred Astaire proud.

Idiotic and anti-Jewish remarks by Iranian President Ahmedinejad have been seized upon in order to focus the world’s attention on Iran’s nuclear intent. The fact that President Ahmedinejad often seems out of touch with reality and is cavalier in his concerns and remarks is disquieting. Yet none of that speaks to the actual power structure in Iran and what Iran intends to do with its nuclear program. While Israel used its nuclear program to support apartheid South Africa, nothing of the sort can be placed at the doorstep of Iran. Iran occupies no one’s territories, while Israel occupies Palestinian territories. While Iran has been very cagey with the International Atomic Energy Agency, Israel has completely ignored any and all international inquiries into its nuclear intent.

Once again Israel is excused by mainstream Western opinion for what it does because it is all justified in the name of protecting Israel, and by implication, Jews who were the victims of the Holocaust. While Iran’s Ahmedinejad may attempt to deny or explain away the Holocaust, most sane individuals on this planet not only acknowledge it but have seen it as an indictment of Western so-called civilization and Western barbarism previously directed at the colonial world brought home to Europe.

Yet the Holocaust does not justify the possession of nuclear weapons any more than the fact that US overthrew one Iranian government (Mossadegh in 1953); supported a criminal dictatorship (the Shah); and attempted to overthrow the newly formed Islamic Republic through support for Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980, would justify an Iranian nuclear program today. Yes, the Iranians have every reason to be suspicious of US intent toward their country and their region. They additionally have every right to seek respect from Western nations, particularly after a history of abuse experienced at the hands of Western countries.

The focus on Iranian nuclear intent, however, seems completely over the top in terms of scale and possibilities. A real and scary nuclear standoff exists between India and Pakistan yet there is anything but an aggressive approach towards this situation by the USA. India, which, along with Israel, is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has had a blind-eye turned toward it as its nuclear program went forward as did, by the way, Pakistan. In fact, with regard to Pakistan the main concern has been not whether Pakistan will use nuclear weapons against India but rather whether the Pakistani security system can adequately protect the weapons from capture by terrorists. In neither case does the West seem particularly concerned that both of these countries have the capability to turn their respective capitols into glowing mounds of sand.

Iran, on the other hand, knows fully well that any attempt to use nuclear weapons against its neighbors, not to mention against Israel, would result in an immediate retaliation. There would be no percentage in such a game, not to mention that Iran lacks a full delivery system that could get its weapons across US-dominated Iraq, US puppet Jordan and into Israel.

Each time the focus turns to Iran and its alleged intent I become nervous, largely because the specter of an Israeli or US military strike seems a possibility. There are those in both of those countries who believe that a quick air strike can teach Iran a lesson. It probably would; perhaps a lesson like how to shut off oil from ever leaving the Persian/Arabian Gulf. I suppose that would equally be a lesson for us in the West.

[BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and co-author of, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher.]

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Conflict Over Afghan War Sharpens Among Dems

A Bold Sen. Feingold
Could Lead the Way
Out of Afghanistan

By Tom Hayden
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Sept. 21, 2009 - The United States Senate is our version of a house of lords, where time slows down in the name of a "deliberative process" even when the world seems on fire to the ordinary eye.

And so the other day, with concern about Afghanistan rising, with American troops dying at record rates, with the U.S.-supported Kabul regime in tatters, it was typical of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to declare that "the thing I'm going to do and recommend to my caucus is let's just take it easy. I'm going to wait until the president makes up his mind as to what he thinks should be done."

Then there is Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold. By everyday standards, he is a cautious person, calling for a "flexible timetable" for American troop withdrawals but also for "continued strikes on Taliban and al-Qaida leaders." Sounds like an uncertain trumpet. But in the culture of the Senate, Feingold is considered downright hyperactive, often accused of being a loner who doesn't play well with the senior oligarchs.


The truth is that Feingold has learned to play the Senate game when it comes to new proposals. Like chess, when a single senator moves, other senators follow or readjust. That's what is happening. Not a single senator had spoken out against the war until Feingold said in an Aug. 24 interview in Appleton that the U.S. should consider a flexible timetable.

Feingold amplified his views in a Sept. 17 interview I held with him, asserting that he will vote against any troop escalation, "unless I hear some very different arguments than what I've already heard." He also will vote against the coming defense authorization bill if it "follows down this misguided path." He said he might offer amendments to the bill, perhaps on the timetable.

Feingold's timetable proposal triggered a stampede, or at least a crawl, to the microphones. Sen. Carl Levin said an increase of U.S. troops should be delayed for one year, proposing a buildup of Afghan troops instead. Sen. John Kerry said he was rethinking Afghanistan. So did senators Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Robert Casey, Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders. Speaker Nancy Pelosi opined that votes for another year of war might not be there in the House.

That was a pretty fast response for a senator the critics describe as isolated. The label is perhaps the price Feingold pays for being prematurely right.

We have been here before. In 2005, Feingold was the first senator to propose a specific withdrawal deadline of one-year from Iraq. I wrote at the time that his suggestion, while too modest, was a "brave departure from the ice house of the Senate." By 2006, Feingold was joined by 13 senators on his withdrawal proposal and had prompted a proposal from Levin for a more gradual phased withdrawal. By July 2007, Reid had joined the entire Democratic Senate bloc in supporting an amendment to phase out the U.S. occupation.

Feingold now stands in a Democratic tradition that includes Sens. Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and Robert F. Kennedy, all the way back to Wisconsin's Sen. Robert LaFollette. The major difference is that those recent Democratic candidates were running for president in the wake of a passionate "dump Johnson" movement, whereas the challenge for Feingold and other Democrats today is to dump the Afghanistan war without dumping President Barack Obama and the party's congressional majorities.

Military leaders and Republicans are sure to weigh in that they see "light at the end of the tunnel." Feingold has tried to armor himself with the argument that America is becoming weaker in the war against al-Qaida as long as it occupies Afghanistan. As for firing drones into Pakistan, he told me, "We will always reserve the right to act in the national security interests of the American people including targeting al-Qaida and Taliban leadership." Civilian casualties, he argues, can best be avoided "if we reduce our military footprint in that country."

The conflict is intensifying. Seventy percent of Democrats oppose the war. Wisconsin Rep. David Obey, the House appropriations chair, has given the president one year to show progress or face funding cuts. The Pentagon and national security hawks argue that there must be 18 to 24 months of "hard fighting" followed by 10 to 12 years of continued nation-building. At the present rate, that means 1,100 more American soldiers will die in Afghanistan by the end of 2011, as Obama faces re-election. More than 700 died during the Bush presidency. Although budget figures are foggy, Afghanistan is likely to become another $1 trillion war over a two-term Obama presidency.

That's why the Democrats already are facing a voter mandate, similar to those in 2006 and 2008, to somehow end the war and turn to more urgent priorities on the home front.

Feingold could be the Gene McCarthy of our time, though one seeking to end a war to save a presidency, not the other way around. But his inherent caution could leave the anti-war public wanting a bolder leadership. A flexible timetable is a talking point, not a proposal. The further use of Predators is likely to inflame anti-American sentiment to the benefit of insurgents. Why he lumps al-Qaida with the Taliban will need clarification.

The opening for Feingold may lie in the utter collapse of the Kabul government, a Humpty Dumpty that all the king's men will not be able to put back together with any legitimacy. Having failed to produce a credible client in Kabul, it could be time for the U.S. to launch all-party talks, including the Taliban and regional powers, in a diplomatic surge to stabilize Afghanistan. What Feingold needs to define is a face-saving exit strategy to complement his proposal for a troop withdrawal. For now, he only says he is "concerned" and "closely monitoring" the mounting evidence of fraud in Kabul, which could leave the United States without a partner that Americans - not to mention Afghans - can believe in.

[Tom Hayden is the author of 17 books, a former California state senator and a longtime peace activist.]

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Public Must Force an End to Afghan War

What is Obama's
Real Plan for
Afghanistan?

By Tom Hayden

Sept. 14, 2009 - What is Obama's real plan for Afghanistan? Surely he sees all the signs of quagmire that we do. So why is this happening?

The key to Obama is that he often assumbles what he considers "best practices" into new packages he then tries to promote. The other key is that like any President, he wants to avoid the appearance of losing, even if escalating doesn't assure winning. So here is what he is doing:

[1] Repeating the 2007 Iraq surge strategy of Gen. Petraeus. This was designed for political reasons, to lessen the Iraq violence in order to suppress the Iraq issue as the defining one in the presidential elections. As Petraeus said at the time, he wanted to speed up the Iraq clock to slow down the American one. Anti-war critics were caught off balance. The surge "worked" in ways that were under-reported. First, nearly 100,000 Sunni insurgents were put on the American payroll if they agreed not to shoot American troops. Second, the same McChrystal who now commands Afghanistan was in charge of a massive top-secret extra-judicial killing operation that devastated the remaining insurgents and gave a leading US operative "orgasms" [details in Bob Woodward's last book].

[2] Repeating Richard Holbrooke's diplomatic role in the Balkans where he presided over the complicated Dayton all-party talks on Bosnia, which cobbled together a fragile peace of sorts for the next decade. Holbrooke even negotiated with Slobodon Milosovic over pear brandy and in hunting lodges while the US military campaign was tightening against the Serbian leader. Holbrooke has been managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, and a director of Lehman Bros. and AIG. He is a symbol of so-called "soft power." As Obama's special ambassador to Afghanistan and Pakistan, he has assembled a large team of diplomatic, political, commercial and agricultural advisers who serve as a shadow neo-colonial state ready to assume responsibility for a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan. He famously said last month that it was impossible to define "success" in Afghanistan "but we'll know it when we see it."

In summary, the Obama plan is to use escalating military force to weaken - but probably not defeat - the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, largely based among Pashtun tribes. According to the plan, the next 12-18 months are the "critical window" for "demonstrating measurable progress" in disrupting and dismantling al Qaeda "and its allies" in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As the escalation kills and wounds greater numbers of Taliban, the violence will be described as declining, and Holbrooke's soft-power infrastructure will take over the role of nation-building, including standing up a newly-trained police force and army of hundreds of thousands of Afghans. In this plan, US casualties then will decline after the first 18-24 months and a phased withdrawal can proceed, ending in five, ten or 12 years.

The latest version of the plan is contained in the August 10 Pentagon "sensitive but unclassified" report, "United States Government Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Support to Afghanistan", by generals Karl Eikenberry [chief of mission in Kabul] and Stanley McChrystal, US commander. Their document is laced throughout with references to "civ-mil" strategies and "civ-mil" units, as if to emphasize the seamless connections between hard power and soft.

Perhaps it is a tribute to American and global public opinion, but the military strategy lacks any bloodthirsty references to combat, instead describing goals in sanitized language such as this: "International security forces [aka US troops] in partnership with Afghan security forces reverse security trends especially in Helmand, Kandahar, Khost Paktya and Paktika, facilitating GIRoA [Kabul government] presence at sub-national level."[p.17] the only slip came last week when the generals openly talked of using more "trigger pullers" on the ground and outsourcing more non-combat duties.

Have no doubt, they will kill a lot of Afghans and Pakistanis without press releases. Given unlimited time, troops and funding, it is possible that the US strategy can succeed in suppressing a restless Afghanistan/tribal Pakistan, though at the expense of numerous other American priorities. But with a majority of Americans and 70 percent of Democrats opposed to the war and occupation, with similar anti-war majorities rising in NATO countries, the question is whether the Obama strategy can appear to "succeed" in the short run.

The brief answer is no.

First, the current military surge is resulting in higher American troops losses than at any time since the beginning of the war. At the July-August 2009 rate, another 1,100 American troops will die by the end of 2011, on top of some 700 who were killed on Bush's watch. The American death toll inevitably has to rise before it ever begins to subside, if it even does by the end of Obama's first term. The dispatch of more American troops will increase the American casualty rates in the short term, stirring more questions from the public and Congress.

Similarly, the civilian casualty rates in Afghanistan and Pakistan will still increase in an escalated war, inflaming public opinion, even if the Pentagon's tighter guidelines are actually followed. The latest controversy over air strikes called by German forces shows the impossibility of truly "surgical" strikes, pits most Afghans against the foreign forces, and is having an unsettling effect on the Merkel coalition.

Second, unlike Iraq or the Balkans, the longer the foreign occupation, the more the Afghanistan client state weakens. The same is proving true in Pakistan, where the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas [FATA] and Baluchistan [homeland of Pakistan's Pashtun] show signs of breaking from the grip of the centralized state. The most immediate crisis is the discrediting of the Afghan government in the presidential election on which the entire American strategy depends. The civ-mil strategy paper sets a near-term goal of a "capable, accountable and effective government" in Afghanistan, and states that the "most important component [of the plan]", according to the document, "is a strong partnership with the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan [GIRoA]." But the US government was unable either to [1] fix the recent elections to benefit its client in Kabul, or [2] unable to prevent its own client from engaging in the most blatant of vote-rigging tactics.

We should not be surprised at this catastrophe. The same US government ignored, or was ignorant of, the "Lord of the Flies" behavior rampant among the private security contractors in charge of security at the American embassy in Kabul.

Now the US has dwindling choices. Ahmad Karzhai and his main opponent, Abdullah, are made of the same cloth. Any foreign plan to impose another leadership is sure to be rejected. The entire US plan to combine military and civilian tracks is derailed.

Whoever was responsible for this failed US strategy, from Karzhai to his American consultants at the highest levels, should be forced to resign. President Obama should retreat with his most trusted advisers to his most secluded study to ask who led him to this place, and quietly plan to slip out of the untenable position he is in. When President Kennedy realized that he could not trust his advisers during the Cuban missile crisis, he turned to his brother Bobby to open a second, secret track. Obama needs a Bobby.

The Democratic-led Congress, which is hardly known for a consistent anti-war stance, may be better able to see the quagmire in the making, and begin hearings on an exit strategy if only to avoid political consequences to their self-interests down the road.

The indispensible factor- never consulted by the experts but never ignored by the consultants- is the 70 percent of Democratic voters who, having no stakes in a failed enterprise, are the difference between winning and losing for the Congress and administration in 2010 and 2012. The public is the only force capable of making Congress step back from the brink.

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First Blood: GOP vs. Van Jones & Team Obama

Graphic: Fascist 'Anti-Fascist' Poster

The Afrikaner Party
Draws First Blood:
Van Jones, Obama
and the Audacity
of Capitulation

By Tim Wise

September 7, 2009 - Van Jones, special advisor to the President's Council on Environmental Quality, has resigned from the administration. To be honest, he was forced out. Oh, perhaps not directly, but if not, then by the stunning silence of his employer. An employer more concerned about appeasing the right-wing bullies who sought to make Jones a liability for him, than about standing up for a brilliant thinker on both economics and ecological issues, and confronting the conservative talk-show hosts who have libeled and slandered Jones (literally) over the past month.

The right has shown no shame in their relentless pursuit of Jones's political scalp. They have fabricated from whole cloth details of his life, calling him a convicted felon and instigator of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. This, in spite of the fact that he has no criminal record whatsoever and wasn't even in Los Angeles when those riots were happening. His arrest at that time was part of a sweep of dozens of peaceful marchers in San Francisco, involved in a protest at the time of the riots. He was released, charges were dropped, and he was paid damages by the city. This is not what happens to criminals, but rather, innocent people who have done nothing wrong.



Jones should sue the living shit out of Glenn Beck, his employers at Fox News, and every other prominent liar who has repeated the baseless allegations of his criminal record in recent weeks. He should wipe them out, take their money, leave them penniless and begging on the streets, without health care. They would deserve it. Perhaps Beck's AA sponsor or the Mormons who he credits with "saving" his wretched soul can then take care of him and his family. Since surely he wouldn't want the government to lend a hand.

They have twisted other aspects of Jones's past, suggesting his brief stint with a pseudo-Maoist group makes him a secret communist in the heart of government, this despite his more recent break with such groups and philosophies, in favor of a commitment to eco-friendly, sustainable capitalism. They have called him a black nationalist, which he admits to having been for a virtual political minute in his youth, and have suggested he's a "truther" (one who believes George W. Bush masterminded the 9/11 attacks as an "inside job"). As for this last charge, their evidence consists of Jones's signature on a petition, which originally called merely for more openness about the pre-9/11 intelligence available to the former administration, but which was later altered to reflect the conspiratorial lunacy of its creators. Jones, and many others who reject the truthers' nonsense, were tricked into signing and were appalled by the final product. But none of this matters to the right. Because after all, none of it was ever the point.

This is not about convicted felons. The right loves convicted felons, as long as their names are Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy. The former of these (whose convictions were eventually vacated on a technicality) helped direct an illegal war from the Reagan White House, which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Nicaraguans. And the latter helped plan the Watergate break-in, advocated political assassination during his time in the Nixon White House, and even advised folks on how to kill federal agents several years ago, from his radio show perch ("head shots" he roared). But none of his friends on the right ever suggested that such talk put him beyond the pale, or should result in him being silenced.

This is not about having an arrest record. After all, there are many anti-abortion zealots with arrest records, hauled in and then ultimately released after blocking access to family planning clinics. But Glenn Beck doesn't make them public enemy number one. Nor would he, or any of his political soulmates, seek to prevent such persons from having roles in a future Presidential administration. Indeed, they would likely consider such a record a bonafide qualification for higher office.

This is not about believing in conspiracy theories. Surely not. Beck of all people can hardly condemn anyone for that--even if Jones did subscribe to such things, which he doesn't--for it is he who believes, among other things that Obama is planning on a mandatory civilian defense corps, which will be like Hitler's SS, that Obama "hates white people" and has a "deep seated hatred for white culture," that Obama is pushing health care merely as a way to get reparations for black people, and that he secretly wants to bankrupt the economy to force everyone to work for ACORN. It is Beck who is among the leading voices suggesting that the President's upcoming speech to schoolchildren--in which he will implore them to study hard--is really just an attempt to indoctrinate them into a new version of the Hitler Youth. No, these people love to push nonsensical conspiracy theories. It is their bread and butter. It is all they have, in fact.

Nor is this about Jones's remarks in a speech, given prior to becoming part of the administration, to the effect that the reason Republicans get things done is that they're willing to be "assholes," while many Democrats, including Obama, aren't. Conservatives don't mind that kind of talk. They loved it when Dick Cheney said go "fuck yourself" to Senator Patrick Leahy in 2004. Not to mention, right-wingers say far more offensive things than that, on a regular basis, but remain in good standing, and are surely never condemned by their fellow reactionaries. What's worse: Jones calling Republicans assholes, or Rush Limbaugh saying that most liberals should be killed, but that we should "leave enough so we can have two on every campus--living fossils--so we will never forget what these people stood for?"**
What's worse, Jones's asshole remark, or Anne Coulter saying, among the many venomous syllable strings that have toppled from her lips, that the only thing Tim McVeigh did wrong was choosing to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, rather than the New York Times building?

This is not about socialism, as Jones is not a socialist. Oh sure, he's associated with some, and might still be friends with several to this day. And so what? Martin Luther King Jr. associated with socialists and communists because they supported the civil rights struggle and the black freedom movement at a time when the rabid anti-communists were at the forefront of attempts to maintain formal white supremacy. Which is to say that the socialists and the communists were on the right side, and the red-baiters were on the wrong one. Which was also true about the fight for the 40-hour work week, the 8-hour day, the end of child labor, the right of women to vote, and every other advance for freedom and justice in this nation in the past 100 years. But of course, Glenn Beck explained on the radio this past July 4th that he "hates the last 100 years of American history," so I guess we know what side he would have been on in all those battles.

Let's be clear, this is about one thing only: namely, the attempt by the right to exploit white reactionary fears about black militancy. It is the same tactic they tried with Rev. Jeremiah Wright in 2008. They did not confront Wright's narrative--the accuracy of which was far stronger than they would like to admit--nor do they actually grapple with Jones's ideas (it is doubtful that Beck has even read Jones's best-selling book, for instance). Rather, they present a caricature, a bogey man with black skin, an occasional scowl, and an attitude. Angry, confrontational, "uppity," and too close to the President. Which means that Wright=Obama=Jones=Malcolm X. It's a trope the right has banked on for years: using racial memes and symbols to scare Jim and Susie Suburb. Put the face of black anger out there and watch your devotees respond like Pavlov's dog.

It's something I first saw up close and personal in 1992. The woman I was dating at the time was an interior designer and had scored a contract to decorate the VIP lounges at the Houston Astrodome for the GOP National Convention. I viewed it as a great opportunity to do some enemy reconnaissance, so I lurked around the literature tables and took in the imagery beamed from the jumbotrons to the assembled conventioneers. One afternoon, we arrived before the main hall was opened to the delegates, and as I looked up at the screens above the floor, I saw the image that would be there to greet them as they entered a half-hour later: a massive, pixillated image of hip-hop artist Ice-T, whose speed metal band Bodycount had recently gotten in trouble for their song, "Cop Killer." The Republicans wanted their delegates to know who the enemy was. Not just Ice-T, but anyone who listened to his music, anyone who looked like him.

And that is what the attack on Van Jones is about: exploiting white fears and anxieties. Anxieties about a black President, anxieties about a basket-case economy (which they're trying to blame on the black President even though it was well in the crapper before he came along), anxieties about a changing demographic balance in the nation (which animates their fear and anger over immigration), anxieties about a popular culture whose icons look less and less like them as the years go by. And so they play up the militant black guy image, turning a low-level bureaucrat into a "Green Jobs Czar," (the latter of which term they have sought to spin into a communist thing, despite the fact that the Russian Czars were actually the royalist pigs who were thrown out by the Russian left, a small historical detail which doesn't matter to illiterate people of course), and making him the bad guy who's running the Obama administration from behind the scenes.

No, it's not only about race. But if you think it's merely a coincidence that the right has sought to make Jones such an issue--rather than some of the other administration officials they are now threatening to "expose" (two of whom are white)--then you haven't been paying attention to Republican and conservative politics for the past forty years. This is what they do. It's the only language they speak, at least fluently. Which is why when John McCain--to his credit--tried to move away from this method a bit, and refused to push the Jeremiah Wright theme during the general election campaign, so many on the hard-right criticized him. They didn't want him to talk about Bill Ayers: they wanted him to talk about Wright. Even though Ayers was the one with the criminal record and the links to political violence, while Wright was the military veteran and preacher with a storied history of community contributions. Why? Because they knew that Wright would be the better image. To link Obama to a white radical is one thing. But to link him to a black one? Oh, much, much better. This is why, in the instant case, they kept pushing Van Jones's non-existent connection with the Los Angeles riots, and his supposed felony record. Nothing better than a marauding criminal black man to get white fears into the stratosphere.

This is, it appears, the emerging political agenda of the Republican Party, and certainly its right-wing: a group that has decided, apparently, to go all in as a party of angry white people (and the few folks of color willing to look past their incessant race-baiting). They have circled the wagons, all but given up on reaching out to black and brown voters, and are putting all of their chips on white.
And everything they are saying about Van Jones was what people like them said about civil rights leaders in the 50s and 60s: about Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy, and John Lewis, and Fannie Lou Hamer. They were communists, and revolutionaries, and a danger to the republic. Make no mistake, had they been old enough in those days, Beck and every modern-day movement conservative would have stood with the segregationists, with the bigots, with the mobs who burned the buses carrying freedom riders. They would have stood with the police in Philadelphia, Mississippi, even as they orchestrated the killing of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner. They would have stood with Bull Connor in Birmingham. How do we know? Easy. Because not one prominent conservative spokesperson of that time did the opposite. Not one. That's who they are. And the minute you forget that, the minute you insist on treating them better than they would treat you, the minute you insist on playing by rules that they refuse to as much as acknowledge, all is lost. They do not believe in democracy. They believe in power. White power. They believe in the past. They are Afrikaners, and it's about time we started calling them that.

(**) This quote, which appears in David Neiwert's book The Eliminationists was reported originally in the Denver Post, December 29, 1995.

Tim Wise is the author of four books on race. His latest is Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama(City Lights: 2009).

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Get Clear and Organized on the Rising Danger

Photo: Armed far rightist at Town Hall event

Don't Wait for
Obama To Take On
the Political Right!

By Bill Fletcher

Executive Editor Black Commentator

September 2, 2009 - Over the last number of months, as the political Right has intensified its vicious campaign against President Obama and some of his reform efforts, there has been increasing frustration in progressive circles with the failure of the Administration to regain its stride and move a counter-offensive. A Washington Post op-ed by Peter Dreier and Marshall Ganz ["We have Hope; Now where's the Audacity", August 30, 2009] summarizes both this frustration but also offers a useful critique. That said, I believe that it is worth offering two additional concerns.

The first is historical. The outrageous activity that we are witnessing on the part of the political Right is not a new phenomenon. The political Right in the USA has demonstrated time and again an ability to engage in brutal, defamatory and highly repressive activity since the formation of this country. Such activity, of course, includes the highly repressive McCarthy Era, but it also includes periods such as the notorious 1919 Red Scare, with the repression of the Left and progressives soon followed by the Sacco & Vanzetti sham trial and execution. The 1930s was not all fun and games, despite the activity of a well organized political Left. Union organizing efforts were regularly attacked, and not just through harsh language. The appearances of employer-sponsored paramilitary outfits like the "Black Legion" were aimed at undermining the efforts by workers at self- organization. And, who can forget the notorious Father Coughlin, the right-wing radio priest?



There is a tendency to overlook these moments in US history, particularly on the part of white activists. There are myths regarding periods of normal bi- partisanship and rational discourse that allegedly contrast with today. While there are differences between today and earlier periods, we should keep in mind that today's political Right stands on the shoulders of their predecessors, having new technology but often conveying very similar messages.

What is it about today's Right? Among other things they are "irrationalists." Just so that there are no misunderstandings, this does not mean that they are simply irrational, which many of them are. Instead, the message that much of the political Right articulate is drawn from an ideology that has no relationship to the truth, scientific investigation, history or critical reasoning. Instead, the appeal is to frustration, anger, resentment, myths and scapegoating. Again, this is not particularly new when one views the history of the political Right in the USA.

What we are seeing, however, is an attempt to overturn the entire history of the 20th century by the political Right. A few years ago, a right-wing commentator suggested that government needed to be reduced to the size and role that it occupied at the time of President McKinley (circa, Spanish-American War, 1898). Such a suggestion, as outrageous as it sounds, is only the tip of the ice-berg. What the political Right, and particularly the right-wing populists, aims to accomplish is not only to narrow the scope and role of government, but to beat back the various advances by progressive social movements. In this sense it is almost misleading to refer to them as "conservatives," a term that generally suggests going slow. Rather the right-wing populists, including but not limited to crypto-fascists, wish to turn back the clock totally, albeit with slick language and suggestions of race neutrality, only to cover a far more devious set of objectives.

The second point or concern is that the Obama administration has been very slow to respond to the intensity of the campaign being carried out by the political Right. Part of this may be a reflection of underestimating the nature of this right-wing, white backlash against his election (and all that it represented). Part of this may also be a reflection of the fact that his is an effort to reform neo-liberal capitalism not, at least at this point, to challenge neo-liberalism (even in the name of defending capitalism!). Thus, combined with Obama's personality to begin negotiations from the middle and to seek bi- partisanship, he and his administration have been quite reluctant to go on the warpath against the irrationalist Right.

Commentators on the progressive side of the aisle have been pointing to the fact that something needs to be done in the face of this right/white backlash. The assumption is that we must lay out a set of tactics for President Obama to choose from such that he can take the lead. I would suggest an alternative course.

In the wake of death of Senator Ted Kennedy I found myself thinking about the relationship of the Civil Rights Movement to President John Kennedy. Using the logic of many of today's progressives, the focal point of the Civil Rights Movement would have been appeals to President Kennedy. That was, in fact, exactly what the Civil Rights Movement did NOT do. The Civil Rights Movement had a set of objectives, with the idea of outlawing Jim Crow segregation at the center. Demands were placed upon President Kennedy, but the movement did not wait for Kennedy to act. Instead, they created an environment in which he had to act.

This is a critical lesson today. Progressive forces should not be waiting for President Obama to act. Many people realize this implicitly, such as those who continue to demand Medicare for all, despite the fact that President Obama removed that from the table. Yet in the face of the irrationalist Right, progressives must mobilize on different fronts. We see evidence that this is happening, but we need to up the tempo. The developing campaign against the inflammatory right- wing pundit Glenn Beck is a case in point. Pressuring his sponsors to drop him is of incredible importance, yet we must go further. Progressives must debunk, in the public arena, everything that comes out of his mouth. We must put him on the defensive such that regular, everyday people question his sanity and not just the accuracy of his remarks.

In the face of the disruptions of the healthcare town halls, there could have been greater progressive mobilization. While it was great that Congressman Barney Frank took on some of the idiots, progressives needed to be inside and outside these town halls, not only holding signs but blocking attempts at disruption. Frankly, if we have the numbers, the irrationalist Right will shrink, but they will not shrink simply because we plead for rational debate. They are not interested in rational debate; they are interested in destabilizing the Obama administration and blocking any efforts at progressive change.

The other day I had a discussion with a progressive individual who attended one of those town hall meetings. He noted that otherwise reasonable people seemed quite willing to believe completely irrational and illogical assertions from the political Right. In periods of crisis, such a phenomenon arises from the deep, sort of along the lines of a red tide coming ashore. Regular people are looking for answers, and they tend to look for answers that correspond to the belief system which has shaped them. This is what makes the language and message of the right-wing populists so tempting.

Beating the Right cannot rely on Obama. It necessitates a level of self-reliance among progressives that focuses on identifying the nature of the crisis; moving real struggles for significant structural reforms, struggles that involve regular people rather than lobbying campaigns; and efforts to expose and crush the political Right. The Right must be understood at a mass level for what they are, harbingers of hell. That will only happen when progressives offer genuine alternatives and mechanisms for achieving them.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and co-author of, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA.

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White Flags & Blue Dogs Useless vs the Right

Photo: William Greider

Squandered
Opportunity

By William Greider
The Nation

After his brilliant beginning, the president suddenly looks weak and unreliable. That will be the common interpretation around Washington of the president's abrupt retreat on substantive heathcare reform.

Give Barack Obama a hard shove, they will say, rough him up a bit and he folds. A few weeks back, the president was touting a "public option" health plan as an essential element in reform. Now he says, take it or leave it. Whatever Congress does, he's okay with that The White House quickly added confusion to the outrage by insisting the president didn't really say anything new. He's just being flexible. He still wants what most Democrats want--a government plan that gives people a real escape from the profit-driven clutches of the insurance companies. But serious power players will not be fooled by the nimble spinners. Obama choked. He raised the white flag, even before the fight got underway in Congress.

He hands the insurance industry a huge victory. He rewards the right-wing frothers who have been calling him Adolph Hitler or Dr. Death. He caves to the conservative bias of the major media who insist only bipartisan consensus is acceptable for big reform (a standard they never invoked during the Bush years). Obama is deluded if he thinks this will win him any peace or respect or Republican votes.
Weakness does not lead to consensus in Washington. It leads to more weakness. The Party of No intends to bring him down and will pile on.

Obama has inadvertently demonstrated their strategy of vicious invective seems to be working.

Barack Obama mainly did this to himself. To avoid the accusation of socialized medicine, he intentionally shrouded his objectives in bureaucratic euphemisms like "public option." What the hell does that mean? It doesn't mean anything. The vagueness allowed anyone to fill in the blanks and anxious people did so in apocalyptic ways. The original idea, after all, was making something similar to Medicare available to anyone between childhood and old age who was either shut out by high prices or abused by insurance companies policing the system. This approach--call it Medicare Basic--would in theory give government the greater leverage needed to control the price inflation and reshape the system in positive ways. If you told people "public option" was a Medicare equivalent, the polls would demonstrate the popularity. Instead, that objective is now at risk. The right still calls Obama a covert socialist.

There is a more cynical interpretation of Obama's flexibility. He is coming out right about where he wanted to be. Forget the good talk, it is said, this president never really intended to do deep reform that truly alters the industrial power structure dominating our dysfunctional healthcare system. He just wanted minimalist reforms he could sell as "victory." Not until years later would people figure out that nothing fundamental had been changed.

In this scenario, Obama has always been more comfortable with the center-right forces within the Democratic party--Senator Max Baucus and the Blue Dogs--and the Clintonistas of DLC lineage who now fill his administration. His real political challenge was to string along the liberals with reassuring talk until they were stuck with lousy choices-- either go along with this popular president's pale version of reform or take him on and risk ruining his presidency. This sounds a lot like the choices Democrats faced during the Clinton years.

Candidate Obama said it was "time to turn the page." We are still waiting to see what he meant.

I do not subscribe to the manipulative, deceptive portrait (not yet), but you can find lots of supporting evidence in Obama's behavior. His response to the financial crisis demonstrates a clear desire to restore Wall Street power, not to change it. His war strategy in Afghanistan looks like the familiar trap of open-ended counterinsurgency. The trap may soon close on him when the generals announce their need for more troops. Will this president dare to say no? Obama negotiated a truly ugly deal with the pharmaceutical industry--a promise not to use government bargaining power to bring down drug prices. His lieutenants still yearn to demonstrate "fiscal responsibility' by taxing the health-care benefits of union members or whacking Social Security.

In other words, this is really a decisive test for the Democratic party and its main constituencies. Will they go along with the president or push back and reject his misdirections? The burden will fall mainly on Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House majority. They will be under intense pressure from the White House to stay "on message" with the president. Organized labor seems to be breaking out of the go-along passivity. Richard L. Trumka, soon to be president of the AFL-CIO, promises to blackball Blue Dogs or anyone else who double-crosses the working people who faithfully financed their election campaigns.

Taking the high road will be hard and divisive. But maybe this is at last the season when Democrats reveal which side they are on.

[© 2009 The Nation William Greider is national affairs correspondent for The Nation. He is author of "Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country" and, most recently, "Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country."]

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When 'Socialism' Isn't Really About Socialism

Red-Baiting and Racism:
Socialism as the
New Black Bogeyman

By Tim Wise
Progressives for Obama

August 10, 2009 - Throughout the first six months of his administration, President Obama--perhaps one of the most politically cautious leaders in contemporary history--has been routinely portrayed as a radical by his opponents on the far-right. In particular, persons who have apparently never actually studied Marxism (or if they did, managed to somehow find therein support for such things as bailing out banks and elite corporations) contend that Obama is indeed a socialist.

Reducing all government action other than warmaking to part of a larger socialist conspiracy, the right contends that health care reform is socialist, capping greenhouse gas emissions is socialist, even providing incentives for driving fuel efficient cars is socialist. That the right insists upon Obama's radical-left credentials, even as they push an Obama=Hitler meme (something they apparently think is fair, since, after all the Nazis were National Socialists, albeit the kind who routinely murdered the genuine article) only speaks to the special brand of crazy currently in vogue among the nation's reactionary forces.

As real socialists laugh at these clumsily made broadsides, and as scholars of actual socialist theory try and explain the absurdity of the analogies being drawn by conservative commentators, a key point seems to have been missed, and it is this point that best explains what the red-baiting is actually about.

It is not, and please make note of it, about socialism. Or capitalism. Or economics at all, per se.

After all, President Bush was among the most profligate government spenders in recent memory, yet few ever referred to him in terms as derisive as those being hurled at Obama. Even when President Clinton proposed health care reform, those who opposed his efforts, though vociferous in their critique, rarely trotted out the dreaded s-word as part of their arsenal. They prattled on about "big government," yes, but not socialism as such. Likewise, when Ronald Reagan helped craft the huge FICA tax hike in 1983, in a bipartisan attempt to save Social Security, few stalwart conservatives thought to call America's cowboy-in-chief a closet communist. And many of the loudest voices at the recent town hall meetings--so many of which have been commandeered by angry minions ginned up by talk radio--are elderly folk whose own health care is government-provided, and whose first homes were purchased several decades ago with FHA and VA loans, underwritten by the government, for that matter. Many of them no doubt reaped the benefits of the GI Bill, either directly or indirectly through their own parents.

It is not, in other words, a simple belief in smaller government or lower taxes that animates the near-hysterical cries from the right about wanting "their country back," from those who have presumably hijacked it: you know, those known lefties like Tim Geithner and Rahm Emanuel. No, what differentiates Obama from any of the other big spenders who have previously occupied the White House is principally one thing--his color. And it is his color that makes the bandying about of the "socialist" label especially effective and dangerous as a linguistic trope. Indeed, I would suggest that at the present moment, socialism is little more than racist code for the longstanding white fear that black folks will steal from them, and covet everything they have. The fact that the fear may now be of a black president, and not just some random black burglar hardly changes the fact that it is fear nonetheless: a deep, abiding suspicion that African American folk can't wait to take whitey's stuff, as payback, as reparations, as a way to balance the historic scales of injustice that have so long tilted in our favor. In short, the current round of red-baiting is based on implicit (and perhaps even explicit) appeals to white racial resentment. It is Mau-Mauing in the truest sense of the term, and especially since Obama's father was from the former colonial Kenya! Unless this is understood, left-progressive responses to the tactic will likely fall flat. After all, pointing out the absurdity of calling Obama a socialist, given his real policy agenda, will mean little if the people issuing the charge were never using the term in the literal sense, but rather, as a symbol for something else entirely.

To begin with, and this is something often under-appreciated by the white left, to the right and its leadership (if not necessarily its foot-soldiers), the battle between capitalism and communism/socialism has long been seen as a racialized conflict. First, of course, is the generally non-white hue of those who have raised the socialist or communist banner from a position of national leadership. Most such places and persons have been of color: China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, assorted places in Latin America from time to time, or the Caribbean, or in Africa. With the exception of the former Soviet Union and its immediate Eastern European satellites--which are understood as having had state socialism foisted upon them, rather than having it freely chosen through their own revolutions from below--Marxism in practice has been a pretty much exclusively non-white venture.

And even the Russians were seen through racialized lenses by some of America's most vociferous cold warriors. To wit, consider what General Edward Rowney, who would become President Reagan's chief arms negotiator with the Soviets, told Manning Marable in the late 1970s, and which Marable then recounted in his book, The Great Wells of Democracy:

"One day I asked Rowney about the prospects for peace, and he replied that meaningful negotiations with the Russian Communists were impossible. 'The Russians,' Rowney explained, never experienced the Renaissance, or took part in Western civilization or culture. I pressed the point, asking whether his real problem with Russia was its adherence to communism. Rowney snapped, 'Communism has nothing to do with it!' He looked thoughtful for a moment and then said simply, 'The real problem with Russians is that they are Asiatics'."

In the present day, the only remaining socialists in governance on the planet are of color: in places like Cuba or Venezuela, perhaps China (though to a more truncated extent, given their embrace of the market in recent decades) and, on the lunatic Stalinist fringe, North Korea. These are the last remaining standard-bearers, in leadership positions, who would actually use the term socialist to describe themselves. Given the color-coding of socialism in the 21st century, at the level of governance, to use the label to describe President Obama and his administration, has the effect of tying him to these "other" socialists in power. Although he has nearly nothing in common with them politically or in terms of his policy prescriptions, he is a man of color, so the connection is made, mentally, even if it carries no intellectual or factual truth.

Secondly, and even more to the point, we must remember what "socialism" is, especially in the eyes of its critics: it is, to them, a code for redistribution. Of course, some forms of socialism are more redistributive than others, and even late-stage capitalism tends to engage in some forms of very mild redistribution (as with the income tax code). But if you were to ask most who grow apoplectic at the mere mention of the word "socialism" for the first synonym that came to their mind, redistribution is likely the one they would choose. Surely it would be among their top two or three.

Now, given the almost instinctual connection made between socialism and redistribution, imagine what many white folks would naturally assume when told that this man, this black man, this black man with an African daddy, was a socialist. Even if those using the term didn't intend it to push racial buttons (and that is a decidedly large "if"), the fact remains that for many, it would almost certainly prompt any number of racial fears and insecurities: as in, the black guy is going to take from those who work and give to those who don't. And naturally, we all know (or at least our ill-informed prejudices tell us) who's in the first group and who's in the second one. Thus, the joke making the rounds on the internet, and likely in your workplace, about Obama planning on taxing aspirin "because it's white and it works." Or the guy with the sign at the April teabagger rally, which read, Obama's Plan: White Slavery. Or others who have carried overtly racist signs to frame their message: signs suggesting that Obama hopes to provide care for all brown-skinned illegal immigrants, while simultaneously murdering the white elderly, or that cast the President in decidely simian imagery, and refer to him, crudely but clearly as a monkey. Or Glenn Beck's paranoid screed from late July, which sought to link health care reform, and virtually every single piece of Obama's political agenda to some kind of backdoor reparations scheme. This, coupled with Beck's even more unhinged claim to have discovered a communist/black nationalist conspiracy in the administration's Green Jobs Initiative. All because the initiative is headed up by author and activist Van Jones: a guy whose recent book explains how to save capitalism through eco-friendly efforts at development and job creation. So even there, it isn't about socialism, so much as the fact that Jones is black, and was once (for a couple of months) a nationalist, and has a goatee, and looks determined (read:mean) in some of his more contemplative press photos.

Fact is, the longstanding association in white minds between social program spending and racial redistribution has been well-established, by scholars such as Martin Gilens, Kenneth Neubeck, Noel Cazenave, and Jill Quadagno, among others. Indeed, it was only the willingness of past presidents like FDR to all but cut blacks out of income support programs that convinced white lawmakers and the public to sign on to any form of American welfare system in the first place: a willingness that waned as soon as people of color finally gained access to these programs beginning in the 50s and 60s. But even as strong as the social program/black folks association has been in the past, it has, until now, never had a black face to put with the effort. With a man of color in the position of president, it becomes far more convincing to those given to fear black predation already. It isn't just that the government will tax you, white people. It's that the black guy will. And for people like him. At your expense.

Much as the white right blew a gasket at the thought of bailing out homeowners with sub-prime and exploding mortgages a few months back (and if you listened to the rhetoric on the radio it was hard to miss the racial animosity that undergirded much of the conservative hostility to the idea, since they seemed to think only persons of color would be helped by such a plan), they now too often view Obama's moves to more comprehensive health care as simply another way to take from those whites who have "played by the rules" and give to those folks of color who haven't. Even as millions of whites would stand to benefit from health care reform--and all whites, as with people of color would enjoy greater choices with the very public option that has drawn the most fire--the imagery of the recipients has remained black and brown, as with all social programs; and the imagery of the persons who would be taxed for the effort has remained hard-working white folks.

By allowing the right to throw around terms like socialist to describe the President and socialism to describe his incredibly watered-down, generally big business friendly approach to health care, while not recognizing the memetic purpose of such arguments is to ensure that the right will succeed in their demonization campaign. To respond by pointing out how the plan really isn't socialist, or how Obama really isn't a socialist misses the point, which was never, in the end, about economic systems or philosophies: none of which the folks on the right raising the most hell show any signs of understanding anyway. This noise is about race. It is about "othering" a President who is seen as a symbol of white dispossession: dispossession of white hegemony, white entitlement, white expectation, and white power, unquestioned and unchallenged from the darker skinned other. This is what animates the every move of the angry masses, individual exceptions notwithstanding. Unless the left begins pushing back, and insisting that yes, the old days are gone, white hegemony is dead, and deserved its demise, and that we will all be better off for it, the chorus of white backlash will only grow louder. So too will it grow more effective at dividing and conquering the working people who would benefit--all of them--from a new direction.

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As Obama's Support Erodes, Right is Resurgent

Will Progressives
Respond to the Attempt
to Overthrow The President?

By Danny Schechter
CommonDreams.org

August 1, 2009 - The tide of public opinion may be turning against the President. Pollsters report growing skepticism about health care reform, and more active hostility on racial matters, thanks to that "uncalibrated" expression of opinion on the arrest of Professor Gates in his own home. That remark turned him, in the eyes of some, from a small b black President into a militant Black Panther, or at least someone who can bashed as such.

These are the new controversial issues with no one right answer, and a noisy debate everywhere, but something else is also going on.



With Democrats fussing among themselves, with Obamacrats forced to rely on corporate media, the right-wing TV and radio stations close ranks behind the most self-righteously-correct ranters having a filed day poking, prodding, pummeling, and peeing into cups of their own resentment, hate and venom.

There is no smear that is beneath them, no inference or insult out of bounds. Lou Dobbs blesses the birthers while that Elmer Gantry of demagoguery, Glenn Beck, meditates on his mountain and pronounces Obama a racist. An Israeli settler refers to our President as "that Arab," and worse.

These are the nattering nabobs of negativity of our times, to resurrect an old canard once aimed at the left. The Yes We Can advocates seem to be taking refuge in the No We Won't center. The next thing you know, the removal of a democratically elected President that worked in Honduras might be attempted here at home.

Some of us are still singing "We Shall Overcome" when our adversaries are chanting "We Shall Overthrow."

If Barack's legitimacy as a citizen won't bring him down, his actions---moderate if not reactionary as they
are--- unites the crazies against him and drives them even more beserk. The contentious Congressman who vowed to "break him," should be taken seriously

This relentless riposte is having an effect on a demoralized and economically challenged population that is not well informed in the first place-except perhaps about Michael Jackson's dubious doctor who may have done the dirty deed. Sensing possible victory-whatever that means--- the Angeroid microfactions that lost the election are now seeking to polarize the public to topple the Administration with an electronic coup d'media. It is all that serious.

Only Jon Stewart seems to be calling them on their game, while at the same time despairing about the obvious missteps and mistakes that the White House is making. They may be a garden outside the Oval Office but there is a minefield inside it.

At the same time, another enemy is mounting a counterattack, perhaps in a more stealth manner, not by what it says, but by what it does The banks are deploying regiments of lobbyists and PR firms to defeat proposed new financial rules and an agency to protect consumers. They are escalating the gouging of the public.

Emboldened by billions in bailout monies, and funds from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, the Bankster are in full loot mode. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo reports that extravagant bonuses at some banks now outstrip revenues. The financial elite takes our money--and tells us to shove it.

As a new wave of foreclosures threatens, the banks are not willing to modify most mortgages-even those sold fraudulently, because they make more money forcing families out and reselling their homes.

The pace of regulatory reform, meanwhile is a slow-go, with few calls for more radical measures like a moratorium on foreclosures of the kind declared by FDR during the last Depression.

Are you aware that outside of the government, a not for profit called NACA (The Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America) is touring the country mobilizing homeowners to demand financial relief. I was at their original "Save The Deam" event in Washington last summer where members of Congress and officials like FDIC chairman Sheila Bair pledged support, but little happened.

Government help as only reached 200,000 of the more than 12 million families in need. If you are not familiar with this issue or the role of devious mortgage servicers like Litton, owned by Goldman Sachs, see these You Tube videos on the PACFILM Channel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVyahxDc5OU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mov0AVLsvQg

According to FEED News, NACA is doing better-even though they are not getting the national publicity they deserve, perhaps because media outlets don't want to send the few staffers they have to the heartland,

"About 50,000 people attended the second Save the Dream event in Chicago. This is a dramatic increase over the 25,000 people who attended NACA's first two Save the Dream events last year in Columbia, SC, and Washington, DC.

"One of the reasons why turnout has increased this year is NACA's use of optimized press releases, blog outreach, and YouTube videos to let people know that the national non-profit community advocacy and homeownership organization offers unprecedented solutions for homeowners caught up in the current mortgage and economic crisis. During the Save the Dream events, borrowers can get mortgages restructured the same day."

If the Obama Administration is to survive an ongoing assault still building steam, it needs a grass roots action-oriented army like the one NACA is building.
They can't just rely on the Netroots activists who prefer emails to organizing. They can't rely on that co-opted in-house DNC arm, Organizing for America either. That is there only to rally support for the White House.

A new movement has to develop outside the Democratic party in the same way that the right acts outside the GOP, and has built a capacity for independent action with echo chambers, message points and personalities.
Their ideas may be backward but their dedication can't be denied.

We can defend Obama's ideals, and also press for more action. As Jeff Cohen reminds us, we have a "president whose instinct is toward conciliation and splitting the difference with big business and the right wing. Sure, Obama was a community organizer once. That was decades ago when Russia was still our mortal enemy, Nelson Mandela was still an official State Department terrorist threat and the White House was still funding Islamist fanatics in Afghanistan. For the last dozen years Obama has been a politician -- and a consummate compromiser at that. Have we failed to notice?"

Can progressives fight a three front war---against the vicious right, against the slippery center, and for a more comprehensive and empowering agenda? Can they finally realize that all politics does not occur in DC, and that being tethered to the denizens on the Hill can be a liability at a time when most political chameleons enjoy so little respect.

Will they ever realize that they have to get into the economic trenches and fight the power of the banks with groups like A New Way Forward? Why is economic justice a priority for so few activists when these issues impact millions?

Knock, Knock, anyone there?

[Mediachannel's News Dissector Danny Schechter investigates the origins of the economic crisis in his new book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal (Cosimo Books via Amazon). Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org ]

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Note to Obama: No 'Wiggling' on Honduras

Revenge in Latin America:
The Right Strikes Back!

By Immanuel Wallerstein
Progressives for Obama

July 15, 2009 - The presidency of George W. Bush was the moment of the greatest electoral sweep of left-of-center political parties in Latin America in the last two centuries. The presidency of Barack Obama risks being the moment of the revenge of the right in Latin America.

The reason may well be the same - the combination of the decline of American power with the continuing centrality of the United States in world politics. At one and the same time, the United States is unable to impose itself and is nonetheless expected by everyone to enter the playing field on their side.

What happened in Honduras? Honduras has long been one of the surest pillars of Latin American oligarchies - an arrogant and unrepentant ruling class, with close ties to the United States and site of a major American military base. Its own military was carefully recruited to avoid any taint of officers with populist sympathies.

In the last elections, Manuel ("Mel") Zelaya was elected president. A product of the ruling classes, he was expected to continue to play the game the way Honduran presidents always play it. Instead, he edged leftward in his policies. He undertook internal programs that actually did something for the vast majority of the population - building schools in remote rural areas, increasing the minimum wage, opening health clinics. He started his term supporting the free trade agreement with the United States. But then, after two years, he joined ALBA, the interstate organization started by President Hugo Chavez, and Honduras received as a result low-cost oil coming from Venezuela.

Then he proposed to hold an advisory referendum as to whether the population thought it a good idea to convene a body to revise the constitution. The oligarchy shouted that this was an attempt by Zelaya to change the constitution to make it possible for him to have a second term. But since the referendum was to occur on the day his successor would have been elected, this was clearly a phony reason.

Why then did the army stage a coup d'état, with the support of the Supreme Court, the Honduran legislature, and the Roman Catholic hierarchy? Two factors entered here: their view of Zelaya and their view of the United States. In the 1930s, the U.S. right attacked Franklin Roosevelt as "a traitor to his class." For the Honduran oligarchy, that's Zelaya - "a traitor to his class" - someone who had to be punished as an example to others.

What about the United States? When the coup occurred, some of the raucous left commentators in the blogosphere called it "Obama's coup." That misses the point of what happened. Neither Zelaya nor his supporters on the street, nor indeed Chavez or Fidel Castro, have such a simplistic view. They all note the difference between Obama and the U.S. right (political leaders or military figures) and have expressed repeatedly a far more nuanced analysis.

It seems quite clear that the last thing the Obama administration wanted was this coup. The coup has been an attempt to force Obama's hand. This was undoubtedly encouraged by key figures in the U.S. right like Otto Reich, the Cuban-American ex-counselor of Bush, and the International Republican Institute. This was akin to Saakashvili's attempt to force the U.S. hand in Georgia when he invaded South Ossetia. That too was done in connivance with the U.S. right. That one didn't work because Russian troops stopped it.

Obama has been wiggling ever since the Honduran coup. And as of now the Honduran and U.S. right are far from satisfied that they have succeeded in turning U.S. policy around. Witness some of their outrageous statements. The Foreign Minister of the coup government, Enrique Ortez, said that Obama was "un negrito que sabe nada de nada." There is some controversy about how pejorative "negrito" is in Spanish. I would translate this myself as saying that Obama was "a nigger who knows absolutely nothing." In any case, the U.S. Ambassador sharply protested the insult. Ortez apologized for his "unfortunate expression" and he was shifted to another job in the government. Ortez also gave an interview to a Honduran TV station saying that "I don't have racial prejudices; I like the sugar-mill nigger who is president of the United States."

The U.S. right is no doubt more polite but no less denunciatory of Obama. Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, Cuban-American Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and conservative lawyer Manuel A. Estrada have all been insisting that the coup was justified because it wasn't a coup, just a defense of the Honduran constitution. And rightwing blogger Jennifer Rubin published a piece on July 13 entitled "Obama is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong About Honduras." Her Honduran equivalent, Ramón Villeda, published an open letter to Obama on July 11, in which he said that "This is not the first time that the United States has made a mistake and abandoned, at a critical moment, an ally and a friend." Meanwhile, Chavez is calling on the State Department to "do something."

The Honduran right is playing for time, until Zelaya's term ends. If they reach that goal, they will have won. And the Guatemalan, Salvadorian, and Nicaraguan right are watching in the wings, itching to start their own coups against their no longer rightwing governments.

The Honduran coup has to be placed in the larger context of what is happening throughout Latin America. It is quite possible that the right will win the elections this year and next year in Argentina and Brazil, maybe in Uruguay as well, and most likely in Chile. Three leading analysts from the Southern Cone have published their explanations. The least pessimistic, Argentine political scientist Atilio Boron, speaks of "the futility of the coup." Brazilian sociologist Emir Sader says that Latin America faces a choice: "the deepening of antineoliberalism or conservative restoration." Uruguayan journalist Raúl Zibechi entitles his analysis "the irresistible decadence of progressivism." Zibechi in effect thinks it may be too late for Sader's alternative. The weak economic policies of Presidents Lula, Vazquez, Kirchner, and Bachelet (of Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile) have strengthened the right (which he sees adopting a Berlusconi style) and split the left.

Myself, I think there's a more straightforward explanation. The left came to power in Latin America because of U.S. distraction and good economic times. Now it faces continued distraction but bad economic times. And it's getting blamed because it's in power, even though in fact there's little the left-of-center governments can do about the world-economy.

Can the United States do something more about the coup? Well, of course it can. First of all, Obama can officially label the coup a coup. This would trigger a U.S. law, cutting off all U.S. assistance to Honduras. He can sever the Pentagon's continuing relations with the Honduran military. He can withdraw the U.S. ambassador. He can say that there's nothing to negotiate instead of insisting on "mediation" between the legitimate government and the coup leaders.

Why doesn't he do all that? It's really simple, too. He's got at least four other super-urgent items on his agenda: confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court; a continuing mess in the Middle East; his need to pass health legislation this year (if not by August, then by December); and suddenly enormous pressure to open investigations of the illegal acts of the Bush administration. I'm sorry, but Honduras is fifth in line,

So Obama wiggles. And nobody will be happy. Zelaya may yet be restored to legal office, but maybe only three months from now. Too late. Keep your eye on Guatemala.

[Commentary No. 261, July 15, 2009, Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein, distributed by Agence Global. For rights and permissions, including translations and posting to non-commercial sites, and contact: rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.336.286.6606. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically, or e-mail to others, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To contact author, write: immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu.

These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]

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Time to Stop Being 'Nickled and Dimed'

Left Margin Column

Message
to Obama:
We Need
a New Deal

By Carl Bloice
BlackCommentator.com

July 9, 2009 - Now they are out to nickel and dime us to death. Here in my home town the traffic and parking department has been prevailed upon to "step up" its enforcement activity - and maneuvering to have parking meters work far into the night - in order help cover some of the city's budget deficit. In Massachusetts, legislators have slapped a tax on candy. The California state legislature recently endorsed a $1.50 tax on a bottle of alcohol and added an additional $15 to the vehicle license fee.

The astonishing thing is that such measures, being undertaken across the country, are being approved and even plotted by some liberals and progressives. It's high time we all recognize that the people who get hit by traffic fines are the ones without garages and "sin taxes," by and large, target working people. They are not the ones who got the economy into the current mess but if some people have their way, they will pay through the nose for it. This, at a time when unemployment is soaring, working hours are being cut and paychecks are shrinking.


Nor is there anything good to be said for pitting the budgets for police and fire services against health and welfare services. That's not the way to nurture the progressive political majority needed to really address the current crisis. Yet, in the absence of measures to bring in new sources of revenue to run our cities and states, well-meaning people are maneuvered into challenging each other for pieces of the shrinking pie.

All across the nation, schools are being shuttered, senior meal programs decimated, community health centers eliminated and legal aid for the poor hammered.
We are being told there is no other way and that we should stoically accept this austerity and count what blessings we have left. The problem is that if the sacrifices being forced upon our families and communities are really necessary, then they are not being doled out with anything approaching equity.
They're still living it up big time in some parts of town.

"The mood among financiers is suddenly more cheery,"
wrote John Plender in the Financial Times the other day. In London and New York "trading profits are up and bonuses are back" And, rather than being reduced to something more reasonable, executive compensation packages are on the way up. "There is also a growing suspicion on both sides of the Atlantic that bankers, a lethal breed whose activities have pretty much throttled the global economy while causing government deficits to balloon, are going back to business as usual - a frightening prospect for taxpayers everywhere," he wrote.

Meanwhile, the country's employment crisis continues to worsen. When wandering in the desert, beware shimmering water on the horizon," read the Financial Times' Lex Column, July 2. "If May's better than expected jobs report offered the dehydrated US labor market hope of succor, June's miserable effort was a mouthful of sand." The June jobs data from the Labor Department contained "few signs of life at all,' it said adding, "Slowing growth in weekly earnings, now at 2.7 per cent year on year, is another serving of angst. And falling hours plus sluggish wages mean a further drag on US consumption - already constrained by debt-laden household balance sheets and tight credit. The mirage, and with it hopes of a speedy recovery, has vanished."

"The entire growth in jobs over the last nine years has now been wiped out - the economy currently has fewer jobs than it had in May 2000," says Economic Policy Institute economist Heidi Shierholz. "The labor force, however, has grown by 12.5 million workers since then.
"This is the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all jobs growth from the previous business cycle, a devastating benchmark for the workers of this country and a testament to both the enormity of the current crisis and to the extreme weakness of jobs growth from 2000-2007."

As economist Dean Baker notes in his Jobs Byte column, the percentage of the unemployed who have been out of work for more than 26 weeks increased by 2 percentage points to 29.0 percent in June and "Many of these workers will soon be exhausting even their extended unemployment benefits."

When drawing up the economic stimulus plan, the Obama Administration relied on a projection of an 8 percent jobless rate this year. It became clear a couple of months ago that figure would miss the mark. It now stands at 9.4 percent and the consensus is that it will reach 10 percent by Christmas. Pimco CEO and chief investment officer, Mohamed El-Erian, now suggests that it may go as high as 10.5-11 percent sometime next year. "Economists are currently spreading the word that the recession may end sometime this year, but the unemployment rate will continue to climb," Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times last week "That's not a recovery. That's mumbo jumbo."

"There are now more than five unemployed workers for every job opening in the United States," wrote Herbert.
"The ranks of the poor are growing, welfare rolls are rising and young American men on a broad front are falling into an abyss of joblessness.

The "broad front" to which Herbert refers may relate to what I consider some of the worst mumbo jumbo floating around out there: the idea that education guarantees a good job or any job at all. One of the striking aspects of the job stats so far this year is the number of out-
of-work college graduates. It keeps on growing. The percentage of unemployed people with some college or an Associate degree was 4.4 percent last June, 7.7 this May and now stands at 8.0 percent. For those under 27 years old with a Bachelors degree or better, it's 5.9 percent. "Everyone is worse off in the current downturn, and young college grads are no exception,"
writes Kathryn Edwards of the Economic Policy Institute. adding, "Although still better off than their peers without a higher education, young college graduates face challenges unique to their age and situation - it is likely that they have considerable debt from financing school, have had no time to build up savings, and, if looking for their first job, are not eligible for unemployment benefits."

"The tough economy and tight labor market have tarnished the luster of a bachelor's degree for young college graduates seeking employment, wrote Tony Pugh for the McClatrchy newspapers. "New monthly survey data from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston finds that during the first four months of 2009, less than half of the nation's 4 million college graduates age 25 and under were working in jobs that required a college degree.
That's down from 54 percent for the same period last year."

"The problem is most acute in the 25-and-under age group among Asian female graduates and black and Hispanic male graduates," wrote Pugh. "The survey, of
60,000 households, found less than 30 percent of Asian female grads, 32 percent of Hispanic male grads and just over 35 percent of young black male grads working in jobs that require a bachelor's degree."

Of course, a young graduate working at a low-paying job means one less job opening for a kid with no degree.

The figures for unemployment among college graduates are, of course, relatively low percentages; the greatest burden of joblessness is falling on those without a high school diploma (15.5 percent) and high school graduates (9.8 percent) - especially young African Americans (37.9 percent - seasonally adjusted)
and Latinos (31 percent in May). The figure for 20-24 year old Latinos was 16.5% in May.

"Why this rampant joblessness is not viewed as a crisis and approached with the sense of urgency and commitment that a crisis warrants, is beyond me,' wrote Herbert, one of the very few mainstream commentators to consistently deal with this crisis in minority communities. "The Obama administration has committed a great deal of money to keep the economy from collapsing entirely, but that is not enough to cope with the scope of the jobless crisis."

In a clear and hard hitting piece July 2, Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times Columnist, Paul Krugman, laid out the challenge the worsening jobs picture places before the Obama Administration and the nation. He wrote that "as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms" and "So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it's essential."

"Obama administration economists understand the stakes," wrote Krugman. "Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the "lessons of 1937" - the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda.

"What I don't know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far."

"So here's my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don't, you'll soon be facing your own personal 1937."

As he prepared to depart on a foreign trip last week, the President issued a Fourth of July Message to the country that contained the words: "as long as some Americans still must struggle, none of us can be fully content." So true. As the Times put it in an editorial a few days earlier: "The jobs report for June should put a chill on hopes for an economic recovery anytime soon." And it makes a compelling case for more government stimulus, as unpopular as that idea may be in Washington. Americans all over the country are struggling."

Petty and punitive taxes falling on working people is not the answer. Nor is robbing Peter to pay Paul.
What's needed to get us out of this mess is a unified message to the people who run our cities, states and those in Washington charged with protecting the general welfare, that we need a new deal.

[BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union.]

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Obama's Talk With Chavez: Something New?

The Possibility of
an Obama-Chavez
Understanding

By Tom Hayden

July 2, 2009 - The media is full of speculation about President Obama's deft "deflection" against President Hugo Chavez' maneuvering and finger-pointing in the Honduras crisis. But another narrative is possible, of an undisclosed new diplomatic collaboration replacing the constant tensions and CIA foreknowledge of the brief 2002 coup against the Venezuelan leader.

It is too early to define a new era, but something profoundly new began developing between Obama and Chavez at the hemispheric conference in April in Trinidad.


According to eyewitness sources, under the apparently blind eye of the global media, the two leaders had lengthy conversations. The media covered the friendly photo of the initial handshake between the two leaders, then made much ado about an apparently-impertinent Chavez handing Obama a book in Spanish by Eduardo Galleano.

What has not been reported is that Obama, leaving his advisers behind, held lengthy private conversations with Chavez where only an interpreter was present.

It is not known what occurred in the secret talks. But sources in Caracas say that Chavez has become fascinated with Obama, seeking to understand the new US president and the forces around him, partly with advice from Brazil's president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The Honduran crisis has been mounting for weeks. According to the New York Times', Chavez "had his playbook ready", planning to blame the CIA. But Obama, according to the Times' headlines, "deflected" the Venezuelan president by coming out strongly against the coup.

The real story is that a gradual rapprochement - not an alliance but a dialogue - is happening between the US and Venezuela, and it began in Trinidad, was pushed by Latin American leaders and welcomed by those like Obama, who prefer diplomacy over a return to US Cold War isolation.

It was no accident that Venezuela's ambassador to Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, returned to Washington in recent days after his expulsion several months ago.

The rapprochement, if it holds, would seem to be welcome news. The fact that is has occurred so silently is evidence that peace has its enemies.

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Stopping 'The Long War' -- What It Demands of Us

The Long War
Needs a Long
Peace Movement

By Tom Hayden

The simultaneous conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond are all connected to the Pentagon strategy of "the Long War" projected to last fifty years in "the arc of crisis" that just happens to stretch across Muslim lands where there are oil reserves and plans for Western-dominated pipelines. The term "Long War" was introduced by Gen. John Abizaid in the 1990s and is the perspective of counterinsurgency experts around the Pentagon and think tanks led by the Center for New American Security.

The Long War will require a long peace movement, and a different one.

Many veterans of the movement against the Iraq War, impacted by the multiple wars, the financial and budget crises, and confused about the Obama era, are pondering the question of what to think and do. The following are brief notes outlining a possible strategy:

Counterinsurgency goes back to Malaysia and Algeria. It has never "worked", except in Malaysia where conditions were unique.

Counterinsurgency is aimed at the home front, to keep American casualties low and, as Kagan writes, "off camera, so to speak."

In Iraq, it's hardly "victory" when the client government is bragging about the American withdrawal and the future is totally uncertain. The "surge" delivered as CNAS and Gen. Petraeus wished, by keeping the war out of the election [their words, not mine]. Now counterinsurgency can't help them. They are pledged to withdrawal without having won the war, without having secured Western oil contracts, and without having reliable Iraqi client allies.

In Afghanistan, counterinsurgency is at cross-purposes with the drone attacks which kill the civilians who are supposed to be protected [which is why David Kilcullen writes against the continued use of Predators]. 21,000 more American troops mean more visible American casualties. The US is at fundamental odds with Karzai, who represents the growing mainstream Afghan distrust of the US. American troops can never "protect" Afghanistan civilians from American troops! The contradictions between the US versus Europe, NATO versus the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, will increase and cannot be bridged.

In Pakistan, the US has succeeded in forcing Pakistan troops into fighting the domestic Taliban, partly because of the Taliban's relative unpopularity. But in the process, 2-3 million refugees have been generated in the past few weeks alone, the greatest refugee crisis since Pakistan's bloody origins. There will be more upheaval soon in South Waziristan. How on earth is this "protecting the civilian population"? Again it is the contradiction at the heart of counterinsurgency.

I would keep a focus on the need for an exit strategy, because the Pentagon and CNAS don't believe in an exit strategy short of "victory", which is most likely unachievable. Even the Center for American Progress [CAP] proposes a 10-12 year occupation, speaking only of Afghanistan. Add up and project the casualties and budget costs, and you have a trillion dollar war with several thousand American casualties. You will antagonize more Muslims and drive them into anti-US nationalism and extremism. You will be running a gulag of barbaric detention camps in these countries, multiplying the Guantanamo and Bagram crises. You will add to the collapsing dream of funding for health care, education and stimulus spending here at home. Obama will be burdened with wars and occupations during his entire presidency. We will not be safer.

My advice:

--Read and study the Long War. It's not paranoia, it's a Pentagon strategy.

--Understand that the Long War is against Muslim countries and over oil and pipelines. It spreads terrorism.

--Understand the need to link with human rights, and anti-torture coalitions, especially the clergy.

--Understand the need to link with groups focused on domestic budget priorities, especially labor and people of color.

--Understand why Alternative Energy is a priority for the peace movement and a threat to the Long War's premises.

--Obtain and continually spread information on the real costs in American blood, taxes and civilian casualties.

--Work around the clock on the media, convincing them to report a rationale critique with special emphasis on resisting the growing secrecy of these special operation strategies.

--Spend the next six months preparing to expand the 132 House votes for an exit strategy into critical hearings and 230 votes by next spring as Congressional elections approach.

--Don't attack President personally. He is trapped between the Long War and his promise of an exit strategy, but attack the occupations and include the argument that the Long War might doom Obama's domestic priorities and even his presidency.

--Build a giant constituency base in Congressional districts. Employ field organizers by regions to run anti-war campaigns on a community-organizing model. Avoid Beltway faction fights by focusing on what the grass-roots needs.

The CNAS is the new "best and brightest" group, and we should remember what happened to them in Vietnam.

The Long War will fail because the US is overextended militarily and economically, and the world is more multi-polar than unipolar. The world does not share the US Long War agenda. This over-extension will cause worsening problems at home, become a threat to the open society, and lead to serious political challenges down the road.

The choice is always empire versus democracy.

Tom Hayden is the author of Ending the War in Iraq. His writings can be found at www.tomhayden.com

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Iran: Setting Dogma Aside for a Little Clarity

Insurgent Iran
and Leftist
Confusion

By Reese Erlich
CommonDreams.Org

June 29, 2009 - When I returned from covering the Iranian elections recently, I was surprised to find my email box filled with progressive authors, academics and bloggers bending themselves into knots about the current crisis in Iran. They cite the long history of U.S. interference in Iran and conclude that the current unrest there must be sponsored or manipulated by the Empire.

That comes as quite a shock to those risking their lives daily on the streets of major Iranian cities fighting for political, social and economic justice.

Some of these authors have even cited my book, The Iran Agenda, as a source to prove U.S. meddling. Whoa there, pardner. Now we're getting personal.

The large majority of American people, particularly leftists and progressives, are sympathetic to the demonstrators in Iran, oppose Iranian government repression and also oppose any U.S. military or political interference in that country. But a small and vocal number of progressives are questioning that view, including authors writing for Monthly Review online, Foreign Policy Journal, and prominent academics such as retired professor James Petras.

They mostly argue by analogy. They correctly cite numerous examples of CIA efforts to overthrow governments, sometimes by manipulating mass demonstrations. But past practice is no proof that it's happening in this particular case. Frankly, the multi-class character of the most recent demonstrations, which arose quickly and spontaneously, were beyond the control of the reformist leaders in Iran, let alone the CIA.

Let's assume for the moment that the U.S. was trying to secretly manipulate the demonstrations for its own purposes. Did it succeed? Or were the protests reflecting 30 years of cumulative anger at a reactionary system that oppresses workers, women, and ethnic minorities, indeed the vast majority of Iranians? Is President Mahmood Ahmadinejad a "nationalist-populist," as claimed by some, and therefore an ally against U.S. domination around the world? Or is he a repressive, authoritarian leader who actually hurts the struggle against U.S. hegemony?

Let's take a look. But first a quick note.

As far as I can tell none of these leftist critics have actually visited Iran, at least not to report on the recent uprisings. Of course, one can have an opinion about a country without first-hand experience there. But in the case of recent events in Iran, it helps to have met people. It helps a lot.

The left-wing Doubting Thomas arguments fall into three broad categories.

1. Assertion: President Mahmood Ahmadinejad won the election, or at a minimum, the opposition hasn't proved otherwise.

Michael Veiluva, Counsel at the Western States Legal Foundation (representing his own views) wrote on the Monthly Review website:

"[U.S. peace groups] are quick to denounce the elections as ‘massively fraudulent' and generally subscribe to the ‘mad mullah' stereotype of the current political system in Iran. There is a remarkable convergence between the tone of these statements and the American right who are hypocritically beating their chests over Iran's ‘stolen' election."

Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, James Petras wrote:

"[N]ot a single shred of evidence in either written or observational form has been presented either before or a week after the vote count. During the entire electoral campaign, no credible (or even dubious) charge of voter tampering was raised."

Actually, Iranians themselves were very worried about election fraud prior to the vote count. When I covered the 2005 elections, Ahmadinejad barely edged out Mehdi Karoubi in the first round of elections. Karoubi raised substantive arguments that he was robbed of his place in the runoff due to vote fraud. But under Iran's clerical system, there's no meaningful appeal. So, as he put it, he took his case to God.

On the day of the 2009 election, election officials illegally barred many opposition observers from the polls. The opposition had planned to use text messaging to communicate local vote tallies to a central location. The government shut down SMS messaging! So the vote count was entirely dependent on a government tally by officials sympathetic to the incumbent.

I heard many anecdotal accounts of voting boxes arriving pre-stuffed and of more ballots being printed than are accounted for in the official registration numbers. It seems unlikely that the Iranian government will allow meaningful appeals or investigations into the various allegations about vote rigging.

A study by two professors at Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies at University of St. Andrews, Scotland, took a close look at the official election results and found some major discrepancies. For Ahmadinejad to have sustained his massive victory in one third of Iran's provinces, he would have had to carry all his supporters, all new voters, all voters previously voting centrist and about 44% of previous reformist voters.

Keep in mind that Ahmadinejad's victory takes place in the context of a highly rigged system. The Guardian Council determines which candidates may run based on their Islamic qualifications. As a result, no woman has ever been allowed to campaign for president and sitting members of parliament were disqualified because they had somehow become un-Islamic.

The constitution of Iran created an authoritarian theocracy in which various elements of the ruling elite could fight out their differences, sometimes through elections and parliamentary debate, sometimes through violent repression. Iran is a classic example of how a country can have competitive elections without being democratic.

2. Assertion: The U.S. has a long history of meddling in Iran, so it must be behind the current unrest.

Jeremy R. Hammond writes in the progressive website Foreign Policy Journal:

"[G]iven the record of U.S. interference in the state affairs of Iran and clear policy of regime change, it certainly seems possible, even likely, that the U.S. had a significant role to play in helping to bring about the recent turmoil in an effort to undermine the government of the Islamic Republic.

Eric Margolis, a columnist for Quebecor Media Company in Canada and a contributor to The Huffington Post, wrote:

"While the majority of protests we see in Tehran are genuine and spontaneous, Western intelligence agencies and media are playing a key role in sustaining the uprising and providing communications, including the newest electronic method, via Twitter. These are covert techniques developed by the US during recent revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia that brought pro-US governments to power."

Both authors cite numerous cases of the U.S. using covert means to overthrow legitimate governments. The CIA engineered large demonstrations, along with assassinations and terrorist bombings, to cause confusion and overthrow the parliamentary government of Iran' Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. The U.S. used similar methods in an effort to overthrow Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 2002.

(For more details, see my book, Dateline Havana: The Real Story of US Policy and the Future of Cuba.)

Hammond cites my book The Iran Agenda and my interview on Democracy Now to show that the Bush Administration was training and funding ethnic minorities in an effort to overthrow the Iranian government in 2007.

All the arguments are by analogy and implication. Neither the above two authors, nor anyone else of whom I am aware, offers one shred of evidence that the Obama Administration has engineered, or even significantly influenced, the current demonstrations.

Let's look at what actually happened on the ground. Tens of millions of Iranians went to bed on Friday, June 12, convinced that either Mousavi had won the election outright or that there would be runoff between him and Ahmadinejad. They woke up Saturday morning and were stunned. "It was a coup d'etat," several friends told me. The anger cut across class lines and went well beyond Mousavi's core base of students, intellectuals and the well-to-do.

Within two days hundreds of thousands of people were demonstrating peacefully in the streets of Tehran and other major cities. Could the CIA have anticipated the vote count, and on two days notice, mobilized its nefarious networks? Does the CIA even have the kind of extensive networks that would be necessary to control or even influence such a movement? That simultaneously gives the CIA too much credit and underestimates the independence of the mass movement.

As for the charge that the CIA is providing advanced technology like Twitter, pleaaaaaase. In my commentary carried on Reuters, I point out that the vast majority of Iranians have no access to Twitter and that the demonstrations were mostly organized by cell phone and word of mouth.

Many Iranians do watch foreign TV channels via satellite. A sat dish costs only about $100 with no monthly fees, so they are affordable even to the working class. Iranians watched BBC, VOA and other foreign channels in Farsi, leading to government assertions of foreign instigation of the demonstrations. By that logic, Ayatollah Khomeini received support from Britain in the 1979 revolution because of BBC radio's critical coverage of the despotic Shah.

Frankly, based on my observations, no one was leading the demonstrations. During the course of the week after the elections, the mass movement evolved from one protesting vote fraud into one calling for much broader freedoms. You could see it in the changing composition of the marches. There were not only upper middle class kids in tight jeans and designer sun glasses. There were growing numbers of workers and women in very conservative chadors.

Iranian youth particularly resented President Ahmadinejad's support for religious militia attacks on unmarried young men and women walking together and against women not covering enough hair with their hijab. Workers resented the 24 percent annual inflation that robbed them of real wage increases. Independent trade unionists were fighting for decent wages and for the right to organize.

Some demonstrators wanted a more moderate Islamic government. Others advocated a separation of mosque and state, and a return to parliamentary democracy they had before the 1953 coup. But virtually everyone believes that Iran has the right to develop nuclear power, including enriching uranium. Iranians support the Palestinians in their fight against Israeli occupation, and they want to see the U.S. get out of Iraq.

So if they CIA was manipulating the demonstrators, it was doing a piss poor job.

Of course, the CIA would like to have influence in Iran. But that's a far cry from saying it does have influence. By proclaiming the omnipotence of U.S. power, the leftist critics ironically join hands with Ahmadinejad and the reactionary clerics who blame all unrest on the British and U.S.

3. Assertion: Ahmadinejad is a nationalist-populist who opposes U.S. imperialism. Efforts to overthrow him only help the U.S.

James Petras wrote: "Ahmadinejad's strong position on defense matters contrasted with the pro-Western and weak defense posture of many of the campaign propagandists of the opposition...."

"Ahmadinejad's electoral success, seen in historical comparative perspective should not be a surprise. In similar electoral contests between nationalist-populists against pro-Western liberals, the populists have won. Past examples include Peron in Argentina and, most recently, Chavez of Venezuela, [and] Evo Morales in Bolivia."

Venezuela's Foreign Ministry wrote on its website:

"The Bolivarian Government of Venezuela expresses its firm opposition to the vicious and unfounded campaign to discredit the institutions of the Islamic Republic of Iran, unleashed from outside, designed to roil the political climate of our brother country. From Venezuela, we denounce these acts of interference in the internal affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran, while demanding an immediate halt to the maneuvers to threaten and destabilize the Islamic Revolution."

From 1953-1979, the Shah of Iran brutally repressed his own people and aligned himself with the U.S. and Israel. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran brutally repressed its own people and broke its alliance with the U.S. and Israel. That apparently causes confusion for some on the left.

I have written numerous articles and books criticizing U.S. policy on Iran, including Bush administration efforts to overthrow the Islamic government. The U.S. raises a series of phony issues, or exaggerates problems, in an effort to impose its domination on Iran. (Examples include Iran's nuclear power program, support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and support for Shiite groups in Iraq.)

During his past four years in office, Ahmadinejad has ramped up Iran's anti-imperialist rhetoric and posed himself as a leader of the Islamic world. That accounts for his fiery rhetoric against Israel and his denial of the Holocaust. (Officially, Ahmadinejad "questions" the Holocaust and says "more study is necessary." That reminds me of the creationists who say there needs to be more study because evolution is only a theory.) As pointed out by the opposition candidates, Ahmadinejad's rhetoric about Israel and Jews has only alienated people around the world and made it more difficult for the Palestinians.

But in the real world, Ahmadinejad has done nothing to support the Palestinians other than sending some funds to Hamas. Despite rhetoric from the U.S. and Israel, Iran has little impact on a struggle that must be resolved by Palestinians and Israelis themselves.

So comparing Ahmadinejad with Chavez or Evo Morales is absurd. I have reported from both Venezuela and Bolivia numerous times. Those countries have genuine mass movements that elected and kept those leaders in power. They have implemented significant reforms that benefitted workers and farmers. Ahmadinejad has introduced 24% annual inflation and high unemployment.

As for the position of Venezuela and President Hugo Chavez, they are simply wrong. On a diplomatic level, Venezuela and Iran share some things in common. Both are under attack from the U.S., including past efforts at "regime change."

Venezuela and other governments around the world will have to deal with Ahmadinejad as the de facto president, so questioning the election could cause diplomatic problems.

But that's no excuse. Chavez has got it exactly backward. The popular movement in the streets will make Iran stronger as it rejects outside interference from the U.S. or anyone else.
This is no academic debate or simply fodder for bored bloggers. Real lives are at stake. A repressive government has killed at least 17 Iranians and injured hundreds. The mass movement may not be strong enough to topple the system today but is sowing the seeds for future struggles.

The leftist critics must answer the question: Whose side are you on?

[Freelance foreign correspondent Reese Erlich covered the recent elections in Iran and their aftermath. He is the author of The Iran Agenda: the Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis. (Polipoint Press). In the 1960s, he was one of the Oakland Seven, put on trial for antiwar and antifraft protests.]

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