In the parlor game of speculating about the real reasons for Obama's ascendancy and installation, over seeing the end of social security is a strong pick. It makes sense.Fucked economy, U.K. and U.S.: This Guardian piece offers a prediction of things to come here in the U.S.:
I suggest that Obama does not have a wellspring of trust with the American people. He has a goodwill coupon that is revocable at any time. The majority will turn on him at light speed given the right external circumstance. He set it up this way.
If "change" feels endangering in the least - there will be a revulsion against change. And specifically its messenger.
Privately, something close to desperation is starting to develop inside government. After watching the slide in bank shares on Friday, one cabinet minister did not altogether joke when he said: "The banks are fucked, we're fucked, the country's fucked."A little earlier in the piece, we read:
The tactics, however, betray a nervousness in Labour circles that the public will simply not understand why there is a second tranche of help going to Britain's bankers, who have already received billions of pounds of loans, guarantees and capital. There is also a worry that Brown's inadvertent title as saviour of the world might be slipping.(Emphasis added) In the U.K., Labor owns this recession; in the U.S., the Republicans owned it -- until a couple of days ago.
Opinion polls show government popularity falling in the new year. David Cameron may be internationally isolated in his opposition to a fiscal stimulus, but it does not seem to be hurting him. A YouGov poll in the Sunday Times showed Cameron's Tories rising four points to take a 13-point lead.
Now Obama is the proud papa of the monster baby, and the brat has yet to do his worst. (Unemployment benefits have not run out for most laid-off workers, and gas prices will surge again.) Right now, he's seen as cleaning up Dubya's mess. Pretty soon, the mess will be perceived as Obama's very own.
If the Republican party were a stock, I'd buy now.
The UN in Gaza: UN relief workers in Gaza are reporting that the devastation is far worse than they thought it would be -- which does not surprise me at all. Here's a paragraph which, if widely read (as it won't be) will explain who are the oppressors and who are the oppressed:
A key problem facing them, he said, is that the main crossing for the aid is 40km from where most of the relief is needed and is too small for the number of trucks that need to go through.This bit proves (as if further proof were necessary) that the real goal of the Israelis was and is ethnic cleansing, not self-protection:
He also urged Israel to end its policy of restricting the amount of cash Gazans can have access to, saying people in Gaza had run up "phenomenal debt" over the last few weeks, trying to buy goods that are in increasingly short supply.
In an interview with the BBC's Today Programme, he described an industrial area where every building within a square kilometre had been levelled, by bulldozers and shells.
"I'm sure the Israelis would say that's because there were people there firing shells and rockets from there, or perhaps manufacturing them.This "hiding among civilians" crap was always an excuse for making life unendurable for the Palestinians. The Israelis want to force non-Jews to leave the land they consider "theirs."
"But the nature of that destruction means that any kind of private economic activity in Gaza is set back by years or decades," he said.
As I've noted before, the Israelis themselves have placed Mossad headquarters right next to a hospital in Tel Aviv.
Prisoners: Of course I applauded Obama's reversal of Bush's torture policy. But he has not addressed the real problem. He has simply made a cynical move calculated to appease the Kos kids.
lambert's piece is a tad misleading -- it confuses the prisoners at Guantanamo with those caught up in the CIA's rendition program. Still, the basic question is worth asking: Gitmo holds only 500 prisoners, so what about the thousands sent to various hell-holes via the CIA's impromptu airline fleet?
Obama's executive order applies only to U.S. territory. It says nothing about those absconded to Torturistan, where the Torturistanis can do our dirty work for us. Despite the comforting news headlines, I doubt that the use of torture will end; it will become more covert.
Now we're in a strange situation. The American right-wing propaganda machine will blare -- is blaring -- the message that Dems are soft on terror. Doltish "progressive" hopium smokers are fooling themselves into thinking that the torture issue has been resolved. Meanwhile, the Islamic world will presume that nothing has really changed.
If a bomb goes off, if a few more building drop, the "soft on terror" message will have great resonance with dolts of all stripes. Obama will own that disaster too.
6 comments:
these truly are frightening times joseph, i'm on my extension of my extension of my extension of my u.e. benefits. thank god my wife works for a decent bank, though that could go sour anyday, who knows. liked your "HOPIUM' comment, it's refreshing to not hear kool-aid drinking drivel. keep fighting the good fight brother.
jsdude
In time the hopeheads will wake up.
As well as Torturistan, there is also the US torture facility on US-leased Diego Garcia.
b
Some comments on the UK...
The Guardian piece is full of quotes from New Labour figures making negative statements. It's not this; it's not that. They also want to have their cake and eat it, saying they feel everyone's pain caused by banks' irresponsible lending, and on the other hand the naughty banks shouldn't be running such tight lending policies.
What do they want? A fscking Greenspanian goldilocks financial sector?
But before I get into that, the first observation that cannot be stressed too much is this: anyone who takes out a mortgage now is asking for big trouble. Don't do it. Better to stay in rented accommodation. Anyone who says they want to "help" you get a mortgage is akin to a spammer offering you a larger penis.
Now consider the broader historical time-scale. The personal debt mountain has NOT been something that has accrued because the banks have been ALLOWED to do whatever they want by the government. It's accrued because the banks, and finance capital more generally, have been ACTIVELY HELPED to do what they want by the government. By their OWN government. Look at two particular extremely significant pieces of social policy over the past 30 years.
1) the running down of social housing provision (or council housing as it's known here, i.e. accommodation owned by local government and let to tenants at subsidised rents), replaced for millions of people by debt-fuelled purchases of privately-owned housing. This not only massively expanded average personal debt; it also helped bury anything that was worthy of the name "workers' movement", under a vile culture of "fuck you, I'm all right, Jack". Yes folks, the striking miners were right: chuck working class community in the bin and you hurtle towards horrendous social degradation and catastrophe.
2) the expansion of the 'higher education' system, based not on any encouragement of real educational values, but on debt, debt, and more debt - from the very first age at which people are legally allowed to sign contracts (18). Thus you had the disgraceful policy of abolishing student grants, whereby the New Labour puppets took up the stage act of their Tory predecessor puppets and took it considerably further... This also goes together with the widespread association in the media of studying with drinking copious quantities of alcohol - thus promoting a) a non-serious view of university education and the possibilities it could really offer, with b) SPEND SPEND SPEND during people's student years, fuelled by - you guessed it - DEBT DEBT DEBT - not at all a sensible attitude to foster, but absolutely PAYDAY for the banks.
Your median person in the UK takes out thousands of pounds of debt soon after their 18th birthday and is lucky to get out of debt a few years before the time they leave work, probably ill, some time in their late 50s. Is this what anyone wanted?
Peter Mandelson's words about the banks and the oh-so techical problems that are so hard to understand (yeah, right), boil down to an effort by finance capital to loot MORE in the last few months before large parts of the economy start shutting down. That's what tends to happen in most financial heists. The most recent government hand-out to the banks (and that's precisely what it was) won't be the last. There will be a crescendo, and then BANG! Hundreds of billions, or even trillions, will go WHOOSH!
(I recently read Nick Leeson's autobiography. He may have got himself into the mess at the beginning, but he knows damn well that near the end - and as I recall, most of the money was actually 'lost' in the last few days - he was set up by interests who knew exactly what was going on, and made very effective use of the power their knowledge provided).
Mandelson's pal the billionaire NY mayor Bloomberg (note his opposite number in Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, another billionaire big-city mayor) sings from the same songsheet as he does on this. Must enable punters to take out loans to buy new cars, otherwise there'll be mass unemployment, was Bloomberg's line when he came to London and was given a platform outside 10 Downing Street as bank shares plummeted. Yeah, right - if workers don't get into increasing debt, they might be out of a job. This is the sick, sick, sick pass to which we have come.
The 'wise heads' are saying the government can't let a major bank go bust, but I think that's crap. It's all about looting money. The next Iceland will be...well, I don't know where...but somewhere with a bigger population than Iceland's 300,000, I reckon...
b
Thanks for the link. The size of the entire gulag and who's accountable for it is the issue, and, of course, nobody wants to talk about it. And if you check the links, you'll see that the evidence for the idea that there are, indeed, thousands of prisoners comes not only from counting the planes (as we did) but from Colin Powell's chief of staff. So.
That said, I think the post could only "confuse" somebody who don't read the lead from the original in 2006:
"Let's do some arithmetic on how many prisoners Bush is holding in his gulags...."
Or the new lead yesterday:
"Nobody should think that Gitmo is the whole of America's problem with torture and executive lawlessness."
In no sense does the post "confuse the prisoners at Guantanamo with those caught up in the CIA's rendition program." Rather, the number of prisoners whose location we know, at Gitmo, is contrasted with the number of prisoners whose location we do not know. We are well aware of the difference between Gitmo and rendition; see our many posts tagged gulag or torture, especially those from 2006 and 2005, where we worked out the scale of the program from hints in our famously free press; there's a wealth of material there, even if only in the form of contemporary press acounts.
Of course, at a very high level there is no difference between the two: Both are examples of the cancer of tyranny that needs to be cut out if Constitutional government is to be restored.
You appear to be wrong about the anti-torture orders only applying to prisoners in US territory.
Rather, it applies to those in US military and CIA CUSTODY for interrogation, without regard to any national siting issue, restricting methods to those prescribed in the Army Field Manual, rvsd. '87.
Admittedly, those who were subjected to rendition are not in US military or CIA custody, per se, so you do point out an area where this order has questionable or no application. But you've framed it imprecisely.
Whatever merit remains in your point, you're doing a bit of mind-reading, and of course, ascribing cynical and mendacious intent to Obama, without much to support such a claim other than your previously existing animus over campaign tactics.
If you KNOW this to be the case, please explain what evidence you have that cinches the case in your view. If not, then it's simply your opinion based on your bad feelings about BHO, correct?
XIslander
EXECUTIVE ORDER -- ENSURING LAWFUL INTERROGATIONS
By the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, in order to improve the effectiveness of human intelligence gathering, to promote the safe, lawful, and humane treatment of individuals in United States custody and of United States personnel who are detained in armed conflicts, to ensure compliance with the treaty obligations of the United States, including the Geneva Conventions, and to take care that the laws of the United States are faithfully executed, I hereby order as follows:
Section 1. Revocation. Executive Order 13440 of July 20, 2007, is revoked. All executive directives, orders, and regulations inconsistent with this order, including but not limited to those issued to or by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from September 11, 2001, to January 20, 2009, concerning detention or the interrogation of detained individuals, are revoked to the extent of their inconsistency with this order. Heads of departments and agencies shall take all necessary steps to ensure that all directives, orders, and regulations of their respective departments or agencies are consistent with this order. Upon request, the Attorney General shall provide guidance about which directives, orders, and regulations are inconsistent with this order.
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