milltownwolf

Is this still "the change you can believe in" .... ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhYzOni6tbw&feature...

OK, so we all know that politicians make a lot of promises during the election cycle and Obama made quite a few big ones .... now let me preface this by stating that I am not a Republican nor a Democrat, actually a member of a Communist party .... I was truly dismayed by the election of Obama because of the sheer numbers of otherwise intelligent (in hindsight naive) young people that once supported causes such as ending the war, fighting for single payer universal health care, promoting the employee free choice act, and a number of other important issues ... suddenly dropped off, attendance at our meetings dropped during the campaign season (it has since significantly rebounded) as people seemed to have somehow been lulled into believing Obama would resolve these issues .... so, now that it has been a couple of months I just wanted to check up on people and see if their view of Obama has changed (perhaps become more in line with reality)

to better answer this question I would like people to respond to several facts (all of which are independently verifiable) concerning campaign promises and actual actions taken by the president:

1) He vowed to end the USA PATRIOT Act, which he then helped to renew.

2) He said that the Bush Warrentless wiretapping program was illegal, recently he pledged to continue the program and sought to dismiss lawsuits that challenged it.

3) He “symbollically” closed Gitmo on his first day of office, Guantenemo Bay isn’t really closing for at least another year, and he is still allowing renditions (secret abductions) to take place.

4) He promised to allow five days of comments on bills pending his signature, then pushed a bailout that gave 700$ billion dollars of working peoples tax dollars to rich capitalists

5) Obama promised to keep lobbyists out of Washington. Don’t you remember the “cleaning up Washington” rhetoric we heard all campaign long? Since being elected, he has done a complete 180, and has filled all levels of the federal government with donors, lobbyists, and wall street executives. including

* Timothy Geithner - Secretary of the Treasury - Former President of the Private Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Geithner has filled the treasury department with lobbyists, such as his Chief of Staff Mark Patterson, who is formerly the top lobbyist for Goldman Sachs.

* Leon Panetta - CIA Director - King of Wall Street Lobbyists

* George Mitchell - Middle Eastern Envoy - Top Lobbyist to the Saudi Family

* William Lynn - Deputy Secretary of Defense - Top Raytheon Lobbyist

* Tom Daschle - Department of Health and Human Services - Top Lobbyist of Health Care Firms

* Rob Emanuel - Chief of Staff - Former Wall Street Executive

6) He promised to negotiate health care reform in public sessions televised on C-SPAN, which did not happen and instead resulted in more then a hundred so-called experts called to comment by invitation only, not one of the "experts" was an advocate of single payer health care

7) promised to bring the troops home from Iraq within 6 months of his election, he then changed this to 16 months, and now to 23 months ... on top of that he has confirmed that up to 50,000 troops will remain in Iraq after the 23 months, he has also escalated the war in Afghanistan by increasing the number of US troops.

it occurs to me that every time I punch the clock i am entering into a fascist state .... anyone else feel the same way?

"a group called North Star Republic, with a mission to establish a socialist republic in what today is Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan."

from the Wall Street Journal (June 13th, 2009), story by Paul Starobin.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240529702044...

http://northstarrepublic.com/

Ok, i know this is a little long but i wanted to highlight a few of Obama's advisers who i found to be rather surprising picks ...

I want to preface this by saying that i am not a Republican nor Democrat ...

John Brennan and Jami Miscik, both former intelligence officials under George Tenet, are leading Barack Obama’s review of intelligence agencies and helping make recommendations to the new administration.

Brennan has supported warrantless wiretapping and extraordinary rendition, and Miscik was involved with the politicized intelligence alleging weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the war on Iraq. She helped with the drafting of the speech that Colin Powell gave to the United Nations— 2003, which made the phony case for war to the international community.

Obama’s top adviser is Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski gave an interview to the French press a number of years ago where he boasted about the fact that it was he who created the whole Afghan jihadi movement, the movement that produced Osama bin Laden. And he was asked by the interviewer, “Well, don’t you think this might have had some bad consequences?” And Brzezinski replied, “Absolutely not. It was definitely worth it, because we were going after the Soviets. We were getting the Soviets.”

Another key Obama adviser, Anthony Lake, he was the main force behind the US invasion of Haiti in the mid-Clinton years during which they brought back Aristide essentially in political chains, pledged to support a World Bank/IMF overhaul of the economy, which resulted in an increase in malnutrition deaths among Haitians and set the stage for the current ongoing political disaster in Haiti.

Another key Obama adviser, Dennis Ross. Ross, for many years under both Clinton and Bush 2, a key—he has advised Clinton and both Bushes. He oversaw US policy toward Israel/Palestine. He pushed the principle that the legal rights of the Palestinians, the rights recognized under international law, must be subordinated to the needs of the Israeli government—in other words, their desires, their desires to expand to do whatever they want in the Occupied Territories. And Ross was one of the people who, interestingly, led the political assault on former Democratic President Jimmy Carter.

Another Obama adviser, Sarah Sewall, who heads a human rights center at Harvard and is a former Defense official, she wrote the introduction to General Petraeus’s Marine Corps/Army counterinsurgency handbook, the handbook that is now being used worldwide by US troops in various killing operations.

That’s the Obama team.

He condemned Palestinian rocket attacks on southern Israeli towns, but didn’t criticize the US-backed Israeli bombings of densely populated Gaza.

In Pakistan, outrage continues to mount over a US military attack approved by President Obama, killing as many as twenty-two people, including at least three children.

and here is vice president Joe Biden dodging a related question:

BOB SCHIEFFER: It’s my understanding that the President, the previous president, gave our US forces and the CIA permission to go across that border, to go after al-Qaeda if it became necessary on the ground. Does President Obama—will he continue that policy?

VICE PRESIDENT JOSEPH BIDEN: Bob, as you know, I can’t speak to any particular attack. I can’t speak to any particular action. It’s not appropriate for me to do that.

Ok ... the question is ... first off did you know about this before you voted? then, are you happy about this (or general thoughts on the matter)? and finally, would you have voted differently if you had known and why or why not?

and the big question:

is peaceful revolution possible within our current electoral system?

as an American Communist i am pretty sick of hearing Obama, a capitalist boot licker, being called a communist ..... a Communist is foremost a materialist not a stinking starry eyed idealist (like Obama) that tricks the workers into thinking that collaboration with the boss is the only way to make the country work ...

Obama as a capitalist elite has no interest in emancipating the working class from wage slavery .... in fact if you ever watch the news all of his comments seem to reinforcing a fascistesque strategy of "class collaboration" in which workers are compelled to prop up their bosses with public money ....

in conclusion ... quit calling Obama a communist, he is a liar and a showman, just like any other politician, no better or worse then George Bush... his job is to protect the interests of his class, the petty small business owners, he is not a revolutionary ...

John Brennan and Jami Miscik, both former intelligence officials under George Tenet, are leading Barack Obama’s review of intelligence agencies and helping make recommendations to the new administration.

Brennan has supported warrantless wiretapping and extraordinary rendition, and Miscik was involved with the politicized intelligence alleging weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the war on Iraq. She helped with the drafting of the speech that Colin Powell gave to the United Nations— 2003, which made the phony case for war to the international community.

Obama’s top adviser is Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski gave an interview to the French press a number of years ago where he boasted about the fact that it was he who created the whole Afghan jihadi movement, the movement that produced Osama bin Laden. And he was asked by the interviewer, “Well, don’t you think this might have had some bad consequences?” And Brzezinski replied, “Absolutely not. It was definitely worth it, because we were going after the Soviets. We were getting the Soviets.”

Another key Obama adviser, Anthony Lake, he was the main force behind the US invasion of Haiti in the mid-Clinton years during which they brought back Aristide essentially in political chains, pledged to support a World Bank/IMF overhaul of the economy, which resulted in an increase in malnutrition deaths among Haitians and set the stage for the current ongoing political disaster in Haiti.

Another key Obama adviser, Dennis Ross. Ross, for many years under both Clinton and Bush 2, a key—he has advised Clinton and both Bushes. He oversaw US policy toward Israel/Palestine. He pushed the principle that the legal rights of the Palestinians, the rights recognized under international law, must be subordinated to the needs of the Israeli government—in other words, their desires, their desires to expand to do whatever they want in the Occupied Territories. And Ross was one of the people who, interestingly, led the political assault on former Democratic President Jimmy Carter.

Another Obama adviser, Sarah Sewall, who heads a human rights center at Harvard and is a former Defense official, she wrote the introduction to General Petraeus’s Marine Corps/Army counterinsurgency handbook, the handbook that is now being used worldwide by US troops in various killing operations.

That’s the Obama team.

He condemned Palestinian rocket attacks on southern Israeli towns, but didn’t criticize the US-backed Israeli bombings of densely populated Gaza.

In Pakistan, outrage continues to mount over a US military attack approved by President Obama, killing as many as twenty-two people, including at least three children.

and here is vice president Joe Biden dodging a related question:

BOB SCHIEFFER: It’s my understanding that the President, the previous president, gave our US forces and the CIA permission to go across that border, to go after al-Qaeda if it became necessary on the ground. Does President Obama—will he continue that policy?

VICE PRESIDENT JOSEPH BIDEN: Bob, as you know, I can’t speak to any particular attack. I can’t speak to any particular action. It’s not appropriate for me to do that.

I have been reading a lot about the riots in Greece recently, now granted the murder of a 15 year old kid is not the sole cause of the riots in Greece, but police violence is nothing new in this country (USA) and occurs on a regular basis, according to a 2006 Department of Justice report, which showed that out of 26,556 citizen complaints about excessive use of police force among large U.S. agencies (representing 5% of agencies and 59% of officers) in 2002, about 2000 were found to have merit.

the question is fairly straight forward, why are people in the United States unwilling to assert themselves (through riots, protests, or otherwise) in the face of government violence?