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  Date / Time: 8/31/2009 5:09 AM UTC

  Obama’s AfPak war intensifies on both sides of border

  As low voter turnout in Afghanistan’s presidential election last week provided further evidence of broad hostility to the US-led occupation, the armed insurgency has continued to escalate. The number of US and NATO troops killed in the country during 2009 reached 301 yesterday—already the highest annual toll of the eight-year occupation.

  The most recent reported deaths include an unnamed soldier killed on Friday by a roadside bomb and 18-year-old Matthew E. Wildes, from Hammond, Louisiana, who was killed on August 27 when an insurgent IED (improvised explosive device) hit his vehicle.

  On August 26, 27-year-old Staff Sergeant Kurt R. Curtiss from Utah was shot dead during a raid by US and Afghan government forces to seize a wounded local Taliban leader being treated in a rural health clinic in Paktika province. A five-hour gun battle with militiamen only ended when US helicopter gunships fired missiles into the clinic, reducing much of it to rubble and killing at least 12 people, allegedly militants.

  The anti-occupation insurgency is active in at least half the country, gaining support due to popular hatred for the presence of foreign troops as well as the corrupt and ineffectual puppet government in Kabul. An element in the mass electoral abstention last week was the Taliban’s call for a boycott, underscoring its growing influence. It is estimated that barely 30 to 35 percent of the population voted. In some areas, turn-out did not reach 5 percent.

  On the eve of the August 20 election, the Taliban demonstrated its ability to strike targets in the centre of the capital, including a mortar strike on the presidential palace of Afghan president Hamid Karzai. Insurgent attacks have also increased around the strategic northern city of Kunduz, which had been relatively stable until recent months.

  Events this week testified to the worsening situation facing US and NATO forces. On Tuesday, a massive bomb loaded into a truck exploded close to the offices of a Japanese construction company in the southern city of Kandahar. At least 43 people were killed and 65 wounded. The following night, rockets struck the city centre near a branch of the Kabul Bank, causing a large fire. There were no casualties as the streets were virtually empty.

  According to an Associated Press report, the Taliban has re-established a firm foothold in Kandahar, which was once the centre of its support in the ethnic Pashtun south. An Afghan employee of an aid agency anonymously stated: “The Taliban are inside the city. They are very active. They can do anything they want.” Since Thursday, nervous Afghan Army units, backed by Canadian and US forces on the outskirts of the city, have moved to take over street security from the local police.

  The new US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, is expected to advise the Obama administration over the next several weeks that thousands of additional troops will be needed to wrest back large areas of territory from the Taliban. General David Petraeus, the head of US Central Command, has warned of “tough fighting” ahead, though it is clear that any reportage in the US and international media will be highly censored.

  A major offensive has been taking place for nearly two months in the southern province of Helmand, involving British troops and the US marine brigade that was sent by Obama to reinforce the occupation earlier this year. At least 29 of the 69 NATO deaths so far in August were in that province.

  The main cause has been roadside bomb ambushes, suggesting that Taliban guerillas are active among the civilian population. There is no independent coverage, however, of the US and British counter-insurgency operations. News of the war is confined to occasional, sanitised and often propagandistic reports filed by embedded journalists. On McChrystal’s orders, casualty figures are no longer being released, even of the number of alleged Taliban being killed or detained.

  During the surge of US troops in Iraq in 2007, McChrystal served under Petraeus and directed special forces and death-squad operations that killed thousands of men suspected of being connected to the Sunni-based insurgency or the anti-occupation Shiite Sadrist movement. He has been placed in command in Afghanistan to apply the same murderous counter-insurgency tactics.

  Over the border in Pakistan, information is leaking out from the Swat Valley district of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) concerning the brutal methods that are being used there to crush support for the Taliban among the country’s Pashtun population.

  The Pakistani military launched a major assault during April and May in the Swat Valley, to crush the Pashtun Islamist movement, Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), which led a rebellion against the pro-US government and effectively took over the district. The assault was demanded by Washington, which feared that a truce signed earlier in the year between TNSM and Islamabad would lead to hundreds of militants crossing into Afghanistan to join the insurgency.

  In the course of a month’s fighting, 1,800 TNSM fighters were allegedly killed and over 900 others captured. As many as two million civilians were forced to flee the district due to the ferocity and indiscriminate character of the military’s air strikes and ground bombardments. Hundreds of thousands have still not returned due to either the destruction of their homes or fear.

  The Swat Valley remains occupied by some 50,000 soldiers and police. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan claims to have credible evidence that the security forces are carrying out extra-judicial killings of TNSM supporters. On August 11, it announced that it had information regarding two mass graves containing the corpses of alleged militants who had been executed by government troops. Sixty-five bodies were subsequently recovered from a site near the village of Kabal.

  The corpses of men who had been detained by the security forces on suspicion of militant activity are now being dumped on the streets—blindfolded, hands tied behind their backs and shot through the head. Two corpses were discovered in the Mingora area on Wednesday, at least 15 others on Monday and 18 more last week.

  The cousin of two men whose bodies were found on August 21 told the Associated Press: “More than a month ago, they were arrested on the charge of militancy involvement.” The men’s father had previously been killed and four brothers are still in the custody of the security forces. Their mother, Bakht Begum, said: “My sons had nothing to do [with TNSM]. They had no fight, they were innocent. Even my husband had no fault. They killed my husband and my two sons, and now they should release the others.”

  General Petraeus has voiced support for the brutal campaign, hailing the “robust Pakistani military operations” that have “cleared militants” from Swat Valley and other areas of the NWFP.

  The Obama administration is now pressuring the Pakistani government of President Asif Al Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to send tens of thousands of troops into South and North Waziristan. The autonomous tribal agencies are the strongholds of the Pakistani Tehrik-e-Taliban, an Islamist Pashtun movement that gives safe haven to Afghan insurgents fighting the US-NATO occupation over the border.

  The US military is continuing its own illegal operations to assassinate insurgent leaders and terrorise the civilian population inside the Waziristans using Predator drone aircraft.

  On Thursday, a drone fired two missiles into a housing compound in South Waziristan, killing eight people. The alleged target was Waliur Rehman, who announced in a joint phone conference on Tuesday with new Tehrik-e-Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, that he had assumed command of militants in the agency. On August 5, missiles fired by a Predator killed the former head of Tehrik-e-Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, as well as his young wife and 17 others. Since August last year, over 700 Pakistani civilians have been slaughtered by US air strikes.

  The main impact of the killing of Baitullah Mehsud has been to intensify hatred in the tribal agencies toward US imperialism and the Pakistani government. On Wednesday, Hakimullah Mehsud told Agence France Presse: “We will take revenge and soon. We will give our reply to this drone attack to America.”

  The same day, a Taliban suicide bomber attacked a government checkpoint at the Khyber Pass crossing into Afghanistan, killing 22 border guards, while two trucks carrying fuel for NATO forces were set ablaze in the NWFP. One was attacked on the main Peshawar highway, the other near the border crossing into Afghanistan at Torkham.

  The next several months, before the onset of the harsh winter in Afghanistan and North West Pakistan, are looming as the most violent and deadly in the eight years of the criminal US-led military occupation.

  • Tags:
  • NORTH AMERICAN UNION
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• Date / Time: 8/31/2009 4:52 AM UTC

  THE OBESITY TIME BOMB ?GIVE US TRUE INSURANCE!

  THE OBESITY TIME BOMB

  

  Soaring number of children are in hospital for weight problems

  

  Sunday August 30,2009

  By Lucy Johnston

  Have your say(17)

  THE shocking consequences of Britain's obesity time bom are revealed today, with record numbers of overweight children being treated in hospital.

  Alarming research reveals the number of patients under 18 being treated for obesity has increased by more than 30 per cent in the past five years. the sharpest increase is among boys, where hospital stays almost doubled to nearly 400 in 2007-8.

  There is also a record number of hospital admissions for life-threatening weight-related diabetes among children.

  Breathing difficulties, liver and heart disease and joint problems are among the conditions suffered by overweight youngsters.

  Those with diabetes are often admitted to hospital with dangerously uncontrollable glucose levels.

  The figures, compiled by the Liberal Democrats from answers to parliamentary questions, have alarmed experts.

  Professor David McCarthy, senior lecturer in human nutrition at London Metropolitan University, said: “It is shocking that admissions to treat obesity complications like this are rising, particularly among young people.

  “The time bomb is here and the problem is going to get worse. We are less active than ever and calories from fat and sugar are cheap, so paradoxically, lower income groups are the most obese.”

  Professor Philip James, chairman of the International Obesity Task Force, a London-based think-tank, said: “This is an astonishing development of the past five to 10 years. When I was a student we saw this kind of diabetes only in 60- to 70-year-olds. It’s a nightmare.

  “When will we start tackling the underlying issue of cheap junk food and decades of inappropriate subsidies of fat, oils and meat at the expense of fruit and vegetables? The future health costs will become unsustainable, however efficient our health system.” Last year more than 800 under-18s were admitted to hospital because of their weight, a rise of 34 per cent in five years. The number of boys rose from 200 to nearly 400 over the past five years.

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  Hospital admissions for children with problems caused by weight-related diabetes also doubled. In 1997-98, 113 children were admitted, 25 of whom were under 10. Last year this had risen to 210, including 29 under-10s. The report found admissions to hospital for obesity among the rest of the population had also risen sharply, from 7,000 in 2003-04 to 14,320 in 2007-08.

  In five years, the total numbers of people admitted to hospital as a direct result of obesity rose by 190 per cent, with 5,056 admissions in 2007-08.

  Among the 18- to 30-year-olds two-thirds of obesity admissions were women. The highest rise in obesity-related hospital admissions was in the East Midlands, with a sevenfold increase, then the North-east and West Midlands with a fourfold rise, followed by London, where admissions have trebled.

  The study predicts obesity will cost the National Health Service £45billion by 2050 and Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman who compiled the report, said: “This could bankrupt the NHS.”

  An increasing number of private companies, such as the Carnegie Weight Loss camp in West Yorkshire, have begun to tackle the problem.

  Alfie Robinson, aged nine, from Sowerby Bridge, near Halifax, joined the camp to overcome a weight problem that left him gasping for breath. He has gone from 6st 8lb to 6st 2lb in four weeks.

  Alfie, whose diet was based on pizza, chips, and sausages with sweets and crisps between meals, said: “I got £10 a week pocket money but most of it went on sweets. It was difficult to do any sport because I couldn’t breathe properly.”

  Research shows a third of children are overweight or obese by the time they start secondary school. Up to 2.8million children in Britain are classified as obese, with 140,000 severely obese.

  • Tags:
  • WHY DO WE HAVE CEZAR
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• Date / Time: 8/31/2009 4:50 AM UTC

  Last Temptation

  The former mouthpiece for insurance giant Cigna divulges his role in misleading the public, the emotional day that led to his whistle-blowing, and what should really scare you.

  In June 2007, Wendell Potter was head of corporate communications at Cigna, one of the largest health insurance companies in America, when he attended the U.S. premiere of Michael Moore’s Sicko. Potter was part of the team charged with discrediting Moore’s film, which advance word said was highly critical of the health insurance industry. Potter “sat quietly in the back and took notes,” but soon realized he had a problem. “When I saw the movie, I’ll be honest: I thought it was a real good documentary. I knew from my own studies of other healthcare systems that it was an accurate portrayal of those systems and how they are able to provide universal coverage.” Yet he was being paid by Cigna to tell people the opposite, that the film was full of lies.

  Just a few weeks later, Potter, who is from Tennessee, read in a local paper about a free healthcare expedition being held in Wise County, Virginia. He decided to check it out. Walking through the fairground gates, Potter saw hundreds of people waiting in the rain while physicians attended to patients in animal stalls or on gurneys lying on the rain-soaked pavement. Tents had been pitched across the fairground lawns, creating a scene “like something that could’ve been happening on a battlefield or in a war-torn country.” Tears mixed with the rain to cloud Potter’s vision. “What I thought was: ‘Is this the United States?’ It was so remote from my reality. It just seemed impossible.”
  
  In months and years prior, Potter had grown increasingly skeptical about his job as chief spokesman for Cigna. Though he insists he never intentionally lied to a reporter, he began to spout what he thought were either misleading or less than honest statements. Moreover, his job required him to hype new programs he felt were not in the best interest of patients or the U.S. healthcare system—particularly when it came to high-deductible, or “consumer driven” plans. He came to feel he was on the wrong side of the healthcare debate and would catch himself gazing into a mirror, wondering, “Who is this? How did this happen to me?” After Sicko and Wise County, he resigned.

  Since then, Potter has become an outspoken advocate for healthcare reform. Why reform? Because of statistics like these: The U.S. healthcare system is the most expensive in the world, with each person spending more than twice as much on care than people in other industrialized nations. Yet our system ranks 29th in infant mortality, 28th in healthy life expectancy, and 37th overall. In June, Potter testified before the Senate on the devastating effects that Wall Street has on our healthcare system. The overwhelming demand to satisfy investors, Potter told the committee, is what causes insurance companies to “confuse their customers and dump the sick.”

  With twenty years of industry experience—he was head of corporate communications with Humana before moving on to Cigna—Potter is an important voice in the healthcare debate. As a former insider, he is uniquely positioned to reveal the industry’s secrets, like its obsession with the medical-loss ratio—the difference between what health insurance companies pay out in claims and what it has left over—which, Potter says, causes otherwise good people in the industry to allow patients to die in order to increase profits. Yet in another sense, Potter is not so unique. We’ve seen them before, former insiders who reap huge financial benefits from an industry or system only to publicly denigrate it years later. If things were so bad, we’re left wondering, why didn’t Potter say something earlier? I recently spoke with Potter by phone.

  —Jake Whitney for Guernica

  Guernica: During your time in the industry, you created health insurance front groups to mislead the public. Can you give me an example of one of these front groups?

  Wendell Potter: When the Clinton plan collapsed [in 1994], there was an effort to pass legislation that would give enrollees in managed care more protections. The industry saw this as anti-managed care legislation, so they established a group called the Health Benefits Coalition. The Health Benefits Coalition, with the funding it got from the insurance industry, killed off the effort to get a Patient’s Bill of Rights passed. A more recent example of a front group I was involved with was trying to blunt the effect of [Michael Moore’s documentary] Sicko. Through a PR firm, the industry created a front group to disseminate misleading information about the healthcare systems featured in Sicko—particularly in Canada, the U.K., and France. This front group was set up specifically to try to counter [Moore’s positive depiction of them].

  Guernica: What were your duties with these front groups?

  Wendell Potter: To help form messaging and develop strategy with public relations firms. PR firms help create the front groups and serve as the back offices to get the work done. The insurance industry contributes advice and counsel and feedback, but the real work gets done by the PR firms that the insurance industry hires.

  Guernica: Was it difficult for you to discredit a movie you felt was accurate?

  Wendell Potter: It was very difficult. I was beginning to hate my job. I’d look in the mirror and say, “Who is this? How did this happen to you?” But I had a job to do and was being paid quite a bit, so I soldiered on. I wouldn’t have stayed as long as I did if I didn’t believe that the company I worked for was honest and trying to meet the needs of people. I believed I was making some kind of positive contribution. As I was climbing up the corporate ladder, I got to understand more about how the companies make money and how they are so beholden to Wall Street—both investors and Wall Street analysts—and the things that they do to meet Wall Street’s expectations.

  Guernica: You worked in the industry for twenty years. It doesn’t seem like it should have taken so long.

  Wendell Potter: You don’t really focus on it or understand the significance of it. I’ll admit I knew that Wall Street looked at the medical-loss ratio. I knew it was an important measure. I didn’t know until, frankly, very recently how important it was. As recently as fifteen years ago, the medical-loss ratio in this country was 95 percent. Since then, there’s been great industry consolidation to the point that now there are seven companies that dominate. They’re all for-profit. During the time that this consolidation, this shift to for-profit occurred, the medical-loss ratio has continued to drop. Now it’s around 80 percent. That means twenty cents of every dollar goes to something other than paying medical claims. Just fifteen years ago, ninety-five cents of every dollar went to paying medical claims. This trend is due to pressure from Wall Street. If a company misses Wall Street’s expectations—if the medical-loss ratio starts to inch up—the company will suffer. I’ve seen companies lose 20 percent of their stock value in one day by disappointing Wall Street with their medical-loss ratio.

  Our current reality is far scarier than the fear-mongering. What people have now is a corporate bureaucrat who stands between a person and his or her doctor.

  Guernica: So are you saying our healthcare system would be better off if medical insurance companies weren’t publicly traded?

  Wendell Potter: We would not have the same problems. Just look at what’s happened since 1993, the beginning of the conversion to for-profit status. The two biggest companies now are Wellpoint and United. In 1993, they were very small. They’ve grown to their size and influence through very aggressive acquisition strategies. In Wellpoint’s case, they bought up many non-profit Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans around the country, which have since converted to for-profit status. United has had a similar strategy. Aetna and Cigna are third and fourth in size, and they, too, have grown largely by acquisition. The fixation that Wall Street has with the medical-loss ratio has created huge problems because investors look at that measure even more than they look at earnings-per-share, which is the primary measure that investors look at in most industries.

  Guernica: Shifting to President Obama’s plan: critics often say that Obama’s healthcare plan would be detrimental to care because it would take decisions away from doctors and patients and put them in the hands of a government bureaucrat. Is this a legitimate concern?

  Wendell Potter: No. But it is one of those talking points the industry repeats every time we have a debate about reform. They said it in 1993. They say it whenever the industry is under threat of increased government involvement. What I’m telling people is that our current reality is far scarier than the fear-mongering. What people have now is a corporate bureaucrat who stands between a person and his or her doctor. That’s much scarier than the specter of more government. In any event, there is nothing in any healthcare plan that is being proposed that would put a government bureaucrat between a person and his or her doctor.

  Guernica: Why is a corporate bureaucrat scarier?

  Wendell Potter: Because every person who works for a for-profit company knows that the company has to meet Wall Street’s expectations. Every manager of the company has to pull his or her weight to make sure he and his team are doing all that they can to help the company meet that objective. That includes medical directors. Same with the nurses. They know what the company has to do to meet Wall Street’s expectations and to stay in the good graces of investors.

  Guernica: So in other words, corporate bureaucrats have a profit incentive to deny care to people who are enrolled in their plans.

  Wendell Potter: Absolutely. It doesn’t have to be stated directly to them that you will be paid a particular bonus if you deny X number of claims; it’s known, and it’s part of the culture.

  Guernica: You said you’re familiar with the healthcare systems featured in Sicko and believe them to be superior to the U.S. system.

  Wendell Potter: They’re better in many regards. No system is perfect. Every system has flaws and challenges.

  Guernica: What about the long wait times we’re warned about, and that government-run healthcare would be one step on the path to socialism? Is there any legitimacy to these claims?

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  • An interview with We
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• Date / Time: 8/31/2009 4:39 AM UTC

  Coup in Honduras enters its third month

  It is now two months since Honduran soldiers abducted the country’s elected president, Manuel Zelaya, forced him onto an airplane and flew him out of the country.

  The June 28 coup installed a right-wing regime backed by the military, the country’s native oligarchy and the multinational corporations that reap hefty profits from the exploitation of Honduran workers.

  Despite mass popular resistance and formal condemnations of the coup by Washington, the Organization of American States and various Latin American governments, the coup regime headed by Roberto Micheletti remains in power and is preparing to stage rigged elections to choose Zelaya’s successor.

  The regime has maintained its rule, in the first place, through brutal and escalating repression. In recent weeks, reports issued by several human rights organizations have documented the state violence unleashed against Honduran working people, who in their overwhelming majority have opposed the dictatorship.

  Amnesty International documented wholesale arrests and beatings of demonstrators, along with killings and “disappearances.” The human rights group charged that the coup regime is “using excessive force and mass detentions as a policy to manage demonstrators and peaceful protestors,” while “denying the right to freedom of expression and information, through the closure of media outlets, the confiscation of equipment and physical abuse of journalists and camera persons.”

  Similarly, a delegation from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an arm of the OAS, found “a pattern of disproportionate use of public force, arbitrary detentions, and the control of information aimed at limiting political participation by a sector of the citizenry.”

  The agency said it had “confirmed the use of repression against demonstrations through the placement of military roadblocks; the arbitrary enforcement of curfews; the detentions of thousands of people; cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment; and poor detention conditions.” It estimated that up to 4,000 people have been subjected to arbitrary detention.

  The commission cited the shooting deaths of at least four demonstrators, savage beatings of protesters, including elderly people and women, with “police truncheons and other blunt objects made of rubber, iron and wood,” and police gang rapes of women detained at demonstrations.

  In the face of this brutality, Honduran workers, peasants and students have continued to carry out strikes, mass demonstrations and other acts of resistance in a sustained mass movement without precedent in the country’s history.

  This heroic struggle has helped expose two great political fictions. The first is the pretense that the Obama administration has inaugurated a new era of non-intervention and mutual respect in US-Latin American relations. The second is that the region’s bourgeois regimes of a nationalist or populist stripe—from Venezuela’s Chavez to Zelaya himself—offer any way forward for the working class and oppressed masses.

  Obama’s formal statements opposing Zelaya’s ouster notwithstanding, two months after the June 28 military overthrow, the US State Department has yet to rule on whether the events of that day constituted a coup. Such a finding would trigger requirements to cut off US aid to the Honduran regime.

  Even more telling, neither Obama nor anyone else in his administration has uttered a word of criticism of the killings, disappearances, torture or mass detentions in Honduras. For its part, the US mass media has virtually blacked out these crimes.

  The Pentagon, meanwhile, continues military operations at the US base in Soto Cano—its largest in the region—where some 600 American troops and hundreds of US civilian contractors work closely with the Honduran military that carried out the coup.

  The likelihood is nil that the Honduran military and the country’s ruling oligarchy, US imperialism’s most servile clients for over a century, would carry out such an action without a green light from Washington.

  Far from ushering in a new era of peace and harmony, the Obama administration is embarked on a campaign to reassert US domination in Latin America, utilizing military means to offset growing economic challenges from China, Europe and emerging competitors within the region itself. The recent furor over Colombia’s agreement to provide the Pentagon with bases capable of deploying US “rapid reaction forces” anywhere in the hemisphere and the continuation of plans for a revival of the US Fourth Fleet are indications of this strategy.

  Washington’s primary response to the coup has been its instigation of the mediation efforts by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias—a longtime Washington asset—and support for his so-called San José Accord.

  This proposal would return Zelaya to the presidential palace as a powerless president, subordinated to a government of “national unity and reconciliation” dominated by the military and political elements that overthrew him. Those who carried out the coup and the vicious repression that followed would be granted a full amnesty. Any attempt to convene a constituent assembly for the purpose of amending the reactionary 1982 constitution imposed by the US and the Honduran military would be forbidden.

  Such an agreement would secure the key aims of the June 28 overthrow and have the effect of legitimizing military coups throughout the hemisphere.

  Zelaya’s acceptance of this scheme is a measure of his own inability and unwillingness to challenge the framework of the bourgeois political setup and imperialist domination in Honduras. Indeed, his entire strategy for securing his return to office has been based on appeals to the Obama administration to impose stiffer sanctions on the regime headed by his old Liberal Party political ally, Roberto Micheletti.

  The Latin American governments—including that of Chavez in Venezuela—have demonstrated similar impotence, providing only verbal condemnations of the coup, while also appealing to Obama to call the Honduran oligarchs and generals to order.

  With the events in Honduras, the class lines have emerged starkly. It is the Honduran workers, backed by students and peasants, who have fought intransigently against the coup regime, even as Zelaya has sought a US-brokered deal with its leaders.

  Zelaya’s willingness to participate in such a settlement confirms the bitter lessons of the past period of defeats in Latin America, from Brazil in 1964, to Chile in 1973, to Argentina in 1976. The working class cannot defend itself from military coups and dictatorship by subordinating its struggle to a supposedly “progressive” faction of the bourgeoisie.

  Only the working class, mobilizing its independent political strength against the coup regime and the capitalist order that it defends, can prevent a counterrevolutionary settlement in Honduras. This struggle must be carried forward through the demand for a workers’ and farmers’ government, the expropriation of the oligarchy’s “ten families” and the multi-national corporations that backed the coup, and the socialist transformation of Honduras and the entire region.

  In this fight, Honduran workers will find support neither in sanctions from Obama nor in aid from Chavez and other Latin American regimes, but rather from working people in Latin America and the US itself, who are being driven into class battles by the historic crisis gripping world capitalism.

  • Tags:
  • USA SUPPORTS THE CRI
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• Original Air Date: 8/31/2009 2:30 AM UTC

  WHAT WAS MEANING OF OBAMAS CHANGE ? I AM SURE BY NOW ALL HAVE REALLY KNOW WHAT IT MEANS?

  OBAMA CHANGE WHAT WE DID NOT ASKED HIM? WHAT IT MEANS FOR ALL AMERICANS?1-347-884-9191 PRESS 1
  
  Create
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  • Tags:
  • OBAMA CHANGE SUCKS
  • FEAR MONGERING
  • CHANGE THAT YOU DO NOT BELIEVE IN
  • OBAMAS HEALTH CARE SUCKS
  • LETS MAKE SURE YOU CALL TALK TO ME
  Comments (3)

• Date / Time: 8/28/2009 5:08 AM UTC

  PLEASE READ THIS ?KEEP DOWNLOADING MY PAST SHOWS?

  Hello to all of my beloved listeners , we want truth news information that will
  be needed , to survive the change that we all asked for it?i will be coming
  some times soon 2-8 weeks.just keep cheking my blogs. I love you all from
  all over world.Please keep downloading my past shows.
  Reza AshkehNazi
  
  
  • Tags:
  • I WILL COME BACK SOM
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• Date / Time: 8/28/2009 4:59 AM UTC

  Cindy Sheehan's Lonely Vigil in Obamaland

  Cindy Sheehan will be at Martha’s Vineyard beginning August 25 a short way from Obama’s vacation paradise of the celebrity elite but very far from the Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq where the body bags and cemeteries fill up each day as Obama’s wars rage on.    She will remain there from August 25 through August 29 and has issued a call for all peace activists to join her there.  For those of us close by in the New England states and in New York City, there would seem to be a special obligation to get to Martha’s Vineyard as soon as we can.

  A funny thing has happened on Cindy Sheehan’s long road from Crawford, Texas, to Martha’s Vineyard.   Many of those who claim to lead the peace movement and who so volubly praised her actions in Crawford, TX, are not to be seen.    Nor heard.  The silence in fact is deafening, or as Cindy put it in an email to this writer, “crashingly deafening.”  Where are the email appeals to join Cindy from The Nation or from AFSC or Peace Action or “Progressive” Democrats of America (PDA) or even Code Pink?   Or United for Peace and Justice. (No wonder UFPJ is essentially closing shop, bereft of most of their contributions and shriveling up following the thinly veiled protest behind the “retirement” of Leslie Cagan.)   And what about MoveOn although it was long ago thoroughly discredited as principled opponents of war or principled in any way shape or form except slavish loyalty to the “other” War Party.  And of course sundry “socialist” organizations are also missing in action since their particular dogma will not be front and center.  These worthies and many others have vanished into the fog of Obama’s wars.

  Just to be sure, this writer contacted several of the “leaders” of the “official” peace movement in the Boston area – AFSC, Peace Action, Green Party of MA (aka Green Rainbow Party) and some others.  Not so much as the courtesy of a reply resulted from this effort - although the GRP at least posted a notice of the action.  (It is entirely possible that some of these organizations might mention Cindy’s action late enough and quickly enough so as to cover their derrieres while ensuring that  Obama will not be embarrassed by protesting crowds.)   We here in the vicinity of Beantown are but a hop, skip and cheap ferry ride from Martha’s Vineyard.   Same for NYC.  So we have a special obligation to respond to Cindy’s call.

  However, not everyone has failed to publicize the event.  The Libertarians at Antiwar.com are on the job, and its editor in chief Justin Raimondo wrote a superb column Monday on the  hypocritical treatment of Sheehan by the “liberal” establishment.  (1)  As Raimondo pointed out, Rush Limbaugh captured the hypocrisy of the liberal left in his commentary, thus:

  “Now that she’s headed to Martha’s Vineyard, the State-Controlled Media, Charlie Gibson, State-Controlled Anchor, ABC: ‘Enough already.’ Cindy, leave it alone, get out, we’re not interested, we’re not going to cover you going to Martha’s Vineyard because our guy is president now and you’re just a hassle. You’re just a problem. To these people, they never had any true, genuine emotional interest in her. She was just a pawn. She was just a woman to be used and then thrown overboard once they’re through with her and they’re through with her. They don’t want any part of Cindy Sheehan protesting against any war when Obama happens to be president."

  Limbaugh has their number, just as they have his.  Sometimes it is quite amazing how well each of the war parties can spot the other’s hypocrisy. But Cindy Sheehan is no one’s dupe; she is a very smart and very determined woman who no doubt is giving a lot of White House operatives some very sleepless nights out there on the Vineyard.  Good for her.

  Obama is an enormous gift to the Empire.  Just as he has silenced most of the single-payer movement, an effort characterized by its superb scholarship exceeded only by its timidity,  Obama has shut down the antiwar movement, completely in thrall as it is to the Democrat Party and Identity  Politics.   Why exactly the peace movement has caved to Obama is not entirely clear.  Like the single-payer movement, it is wracked by spinelessness, brimming with reverence for authority and a near insatiable appetite to be “part of the crowd.”  Those taken in by Obama’s arguments that the increasingly bloody and brutal AfPak war is actually a “war of necessity,” should read Steven Walt’s easy demolition of that “argument.” (2) Basically Obama’s logic is the same as Bush’s moronic rationale that “We are fighting them over there so we do not have to fight them over here.”  There is a potential for “safe havens for terrorists,” as the Obamalogues and neocons like to call them, all over the world; and no one can possibly believe the US can invade them all.  However, the ones which Israel detests or which allow control of oil pipelines or permit encirclement of China and Russia will see US troops sooner or later.

  The bottom line is that everyone in New England and NYC who is a genuine antiwarrior should join the imaginative effort of Cindy Sheehan in Obamaland this week and weekend.  We owe it to the many who will otherwise perish at the hands of the war parties of Bush and Obama
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