Fuck Obama

[ninakat]

Obama, the king of Africa
By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times
Oct. 18, 2011

. . . Africa has been fighting like forever against multiple strands of the great white genocidal slave master, aided and abetted by multiple strands of the subservient black dictator/kleptocrat - just to be presented in the early 21st century with an American president of direct African descent who has nothing better to offer than special forces, drones, a militarization surge and hypocrisy-laced "humanitarian" intervention.

[Simulist]

seems as appropriate a thread as any...

The Iraq War Ain’t Over, No Matter What Obama Says
By Spencer Ackerman, Wired
October 21, 2011

+ + +

Soldiers May Be Leaving Iraq, But Contractors Will Remain
Ryan J. Reilly, Talking Points Memo
October 21, 2011, 3:33 PM

A "pull out" is only half the action during the course of a long, hard fuck.

[Nordic]

Always wondered how they were going to attack Iran with all those troops right in harm's way across the border in Iraq.

Why anyone would see this as good news is kind of alarming.

Based on the records of the powers involved.

I mean, what's the rush? We were always told how LOOOONG it would take to get out of Iraq, right? Oh my gosh, we shouldn't even bother doing it, it would take so long!

Now it's like "get the fuck out of there! NOW!"

Something big is coming.

[ninakat]

Nordic, I thought the Iraq invasion was supposed to be a "cakewalk." That's what Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others were selling.

I'm hoping that this current propaganda about "war is over" in Iraq is simply another cheap campaign trick from the great and powerful O. Who knows if it's really selling though.... I think he has burned too many bridges. Time for a Republican president to set things right. Hooray for democracy. Fair and balanced.

[Nordic]

I'm actually hoping that, too, because the alternative is pretty horrifying.

[ninakat]

hat-tip to SLAD for the following article from the OWS thread:

Don't Protest, Resist
Occupy the System
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and JOSHUA FRANK

It’s not too cool to be ridiculed
But you brought this upon yourself
The world is tired of pacifiers
We want the truth and nothing else

And we are sick and tired of hearing your song
Telling how you are gonna change right from wrong
‘Cause if you really want to hear our views
“You haven’t done nothing”!

–Stevie Wonder, “”You Haven’t Done Nothing”

There is an anger running rampant across the country. Some on the right are calling it class warfare. People are enraged. Jobs are scarce, the rich continue to get richer while the poor continue to struggle to make ends meet. Indeed, it should be classified as economic warfare, Americans are sick and tired of being pushed around. It is time to shove back.

Pizza man Herman Cain is right. The problem resides in the White House. Herman Cain is wrong. The problem resides on Wall Street. They are, in fact, the same problem: a goutish economic system that enriches the wealthy and impoverishes everyone else, a system that pillages the natural world and tramples on basic human liberties, a system that treats corporations as people and people as commodities.

The victims of neoliberal economics are easy to spot. So too are the perpetrators and profiteers of privatized markets. In many ways the occupations sprouting up around the country remind us of the outpouring of opposition to the WTO that jammed up the streets of Seattle in the late-1990s. Like that organic movement, the current protests are grassroots, and fueled, not by overt political motivations, but by a sense of justice.

Like the Battle for Seattle, Occupy America is taking place during a time when a Democrat resides in the White House. There is little question that President Clinton recklessly pursued a free trade agenda that endangered the American workforce and ravaged the environment. But today President Obama’s motivations are a bit more cavalier. While he speaks of job creation and jumpstarting the struggling economy, he simultaneously ensures his pals on Wall Street that their power and profits will remain intact.

President Clinton, like his predecessor, is largely responsible for the dire economic situation we now face. It was Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin that pushed for increased deregulation, which ended up shifting jobs, and entire industries, overseas.

Rubin even pushed for Clinton’s dismantling of Glass-Steagall, testifying that deregulating the banking industry would be good for capital gains, as well as Main Street. “[The] banking industry is fundamentally different from what it was two decades ago, let alone in 1933,” Rubin testified before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services in May of 1995.

“[Glass-Steagall could] conceivably impede safety and soundness by limiting revenue diversification,” Rubin argued.

While the industry saw much deregulation over the years preceding Clintontime, the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act of 1999, which eliminated Glass-Steagall, extended and ratified changes that had been enacted with previous legislation. Ultimately, the repeal of the New Deal era protection allowed commercial lenders like Rubin’s Citigroup to underwrite and trade instruments like mortgage backed securities along with collateralized debt and established structured investment vehicles (SIVs), which purchased these securities. In short, as the lines were blurred among investment banks, commercial banks and insurance companies, when one industry fell, like mortgage lenders, others could too.

What Clinton began, President Bush only escalated with an extreme capitalist vigor. Alan Greenspan stayed as head of the Federal Reserve, continuing to press forward with his libertarian agenda of deregulation and damaging austerity measures. When Greenspan retired, Ben Bernanke, another Wall Street ally, took the Bank’s helm, and was kept in place by President Obama.

Obama wasted little time bailing out the greed-infested financial sector. When Obama took office he in 2009 he nominated Rubin-trained economist Timothy Geithner, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to serve as Treasury Secretary. Geithner, if anything, is an insider among insiders and Wall Street’s main man in DC.

It was certainly not the hope and change Obama supporters had voted for, especially in a time when the economy was suffering and jobs were scarce. Obama’s modest stimulus program did little to sustain job growth and was nowhere near the scale of the New Deal’s robust Works Progress Administration. In short, Obama has been an economic disaster for the majority of Americans, sans the Wall Street crowd that continues to profit and is protected under the guise of “too big to fail”.

Did you really expect something different from the man who begged Joe Lieberman to serve as his mentor in the senate?

It’s this entrenched, systematic refusal to challenge the status quo that is driving the animosity and outrage across the country. Wall Street is being upheld and indeed enabled by both the Democrats and Republicans, including, at the top of the stinking pile, President Obama and his administration.

The Democrats are a prosthetic party, a hollow shell for the detritus of New Deal liberalism, that maintains popular allegiance through blind inertia. For the past thirty years at least, the Democrats have functioned less as a political party driven by a tangible ideology than as a low-fat franchise of Wall Street and the defense contractors. From war to neoliberal economics, the new Democrats have pursued brutal policies, often inflicted most grievously at the party’s most devoted constituents: Hispanics, blacks, labor and the unemployed.

There’s a Wilsonian quality to Obama: trim, aloof, pedantic and shank-you-in-the-back dangerous. Obama has never wanted to be seen socializing with the poor or working class stiffs. He doesn’t even want them in his orbit, except as props behind his teleprompter. In his first three years in office, the closest the president came to such a pedestrian parlay was his famous beer summit with the Cambridge cop who manhandled Henry Louis Gates. Come to think of it, that meeting was a twofer, since it was also one of Obama’s few close encounters with a voice from black America as well.

Making the connection between the continued economic disparities on Main Street and the policies that fuel this divide is paramount to bringing about real change. As such, it’s time to Occupy Washington and make this, not only an electoral issue, but also a very real threat to our government’s consolidated power.

Obama’s first term has revealed the utter vacuity of our political system and the prodigious level of corruption eating away at the sinews of the empire. Democracy itself is being degraded. From bank bailouts and war to indemnification of corporate criminals and assassination orders against American citizens, the most urgent matters of government are now hatched without public debate in the secret chambers of power. The majestic hypocrisy of the Democrats in a time of deepening economic and environmental crisis has inflamed the spectrum of outrage now sweeping America. But where does the movement go from here?

The 99% movement needs to forsake protest for a sustained resistance and disruption of the status quo. After all, the object isn’t reform—we’re far, far beyond that–but radical, systemic change. Its structure should remain enigmatic, diffuse, protean—too slippery to be captured and co-opted by Democrats looking to hijack its momentum. In order to maintain its integrity and political power, the 99% movement must publicly shun any perilous alliance with Democratic front groups such as MoveOn and the Sierra Club. It should reject the coruscated cant of faux leftists like Bernie Sanders, Van Jones and Rachel Maddow and instead give full-voice to the intrinsic rage of the outsiders, the disenfranchised and destitute, the left behind, the new American preterite.

It’s time for the nation to hear the spooky vibrations of a home-grown and organic movement on the march, a swarming mass of discontent that will make the financial aristocrats and their low-rent political grifters tremble in their sleep.

Let’s run the bastards out of town.

[Bruce Dazzling]

hat-tip to SLAD for the following article from the OWS thread:

Don't Protest, Resist
Occupy the System
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and JOSHUA FRANK

There is little question that President Clinton recklessly pursued a free trade agenda that endangered the American workforce and ravaged the environment.

Yes, it's about time someone connected what's going on now to Clinton's NAFTA / WTO sell-outs, both of which are responsible for the current dearth of jobs, and more importantly, why there aren't even any on the horizon.

And hell, most writers even somehow manage to avoid talking about Gramm-Leach-Bliley, which this piece also nails to the wall.

Good article.

[Nordic]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/bl ... r-20111019

Obama Solicits Designers to Work - Unpaid - on ... Jobs Poster!

The Obama campaign has more than $60 million cash on hand. In an economy this bad, you'd think a presidential campaign that flush would be happy to pay good money for a talented designer to create a campaign poster.

But the folks at Obama campaign have taken a page from the Arianna Huffington book of economic exploitation and called on "artists across the country" to create a poster ... for free.

And here's the kicker. It's a jobs poster.

Yes, the Obama campaign is soliciting unpaid labor to create a poster "illustrating why we support President Obama's plan to create jobs now, and why we'll re-elect him to continue fighting for jobs for the next four years."

If you win? You get: A framed copy of your own poster, signed by the president ("approximate retail value $195").

And if you don't win? Well, that's too bad. You've not only lost the contest, you've also surrendered your intellectual property. "All submissions will become the property of Obama for America," according to the fine print.

The campaign presents a "creative brief" that offers potential slogans for the poster, including: "Fighting for jobs," "Get America back to work," "Made in the USA," and "Support small business."

To this list, let us helpfully suggest adding the tagline of San Francisco designer Mike Montiero: "Fuck You. Pay Me."

[Bruce Dazzling]

To this list, let us helpfully suggest adding the tagline of San Francisco designer Mike Montiero: "Fuck You. Pay Me."

The Labor-exploiting Racketeer in Chief.

[Bruce Dazzling]

[Gouda]

A Massive Bluggy Failure

Does no one on earth read books anymore? I've been going through Confidence Men by Ron Suskind, and it's full of amazing things that have barely been discussed anywhere—not just in reviews but even on blugs.

For instance, there's this description of Obama's March 27, 2009 meeting with the heads of thirteen major banks:

The discussion moved swiftly across topics, such as the general soundness of the overall system and how to jump-start lending, before it came around to what was on everyone's mind: compensation.

The CEOs went into their traditional stance: "It's almost impossible to set caps; it's never worked, and you lose your best people," said one. "We're competing for talent on an international market," said another. Obama cut them off.

"Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn't buying that," he said. "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

It was an attention grabber, no doubt, especially that carefully chosen last word.

But then Obama's flat tone turned to one of support, even sympathy. "You guys have an acute public relations problem that's turning into a political problem," he said. "And I want to help. But you need to show that you get that this is a crisis and that everyone has to make some sacrifices."

According to one of the participants, he then said, "I'm not out there to go after you. I'm protecting you. But if I'm going to shield you from public and congressional anger, you have to give me something to work with on these issues of compensation."

No suggestions were forthcoming from the bankers on what they might offer, and the president didn't seem to be championing any specific proposals. He had none; neither Geithner nor Summers believed compensation controls had any merit.

After a moment, the tension in the room seemed to lift: the bankers realized he was talking about voluntary limits on compensation until the storm of public anger passed. It would be for show.

This has appeared almost nowhere online, and I'm personally responsible for most of the places where it shows up.

Blugs could actually serve a useful purpose just by reading through books and picking out the things that matter. There's apparently no better place to hide things in 2011 America than in a book.

—Jonathan Schwarz
Posted at November 3, 2011 09:33 PM

[smiths]

There's apparently no better place to hide things in 2011 America than in a book

great line,
and good to see you still around Gouda

[Hammer of Los]

Darn right. I love Gouda more than words can say.

Very, very smart guy, that Gouda.

[norton ash]

According to one of the participants, he then said, "I'm not out there to go after you. I'm protecting you. But if I'm going to shield you from public and congressional anger, you have to give me something to work with on these issues of compensation."

Piece of shit mob mouthpiece.

Thanks, Gouda. That Ron Suskind segment should indeed be broadcast, shouted from the rooftops.

[Gouda]

to smiths, hammer, and norton

***

DEA CIA Drug Flow Management and Revenue Assurance Squads: providing technical support and strategic solutions for our joint trafficking needs.

Obama used uses Bush program to send DEA commandos abroad

By Agence France-Presse
Monday, November 7, 2011

The US Drug Enforcement Agency has five commando-style squads it has been quietly deploying for the past several years to various countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean, the New York Times reported Monday.

The countries where the commando teams have been deployed include Haiti, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Belize, all countries struggling to combat drug trafficking, the daily wrote.

The program, known by its acronym FAST — Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team – dates back to the George W. Bush administration. It was created originally to investigate Taliban-linked drug traffickers in Afghanistan.

But US President Barack Obama beginning in 2008 broadened its mandate beyond the Afghan war zone, according to the Times.

The newspaper reported that the program reflects Washington’s growing reach in combating drug cartels, amid concerns by some policy makers that the line between law enforcement and military activities is becoming increasingly blurred.

But Michael Braun, a former head of operations for the drug agency who helped design the program, told the Times that the military-trained commandos are exactly what is needed for often dangerous drug interdiction activities.

“You have got to have special skills and equipment to be able to operate effectively and safely in environments like this,” he told the newspaper.

“The DEA is working shoulder-to-shoulder in harm’s way with host-nation counterparts,” he said.

Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami professor who specializes in Latin America and counternarcotics, said the US commando teams could help arrest kingpins, seize drug stockpiles, disrupt smuggling routes and help train security forces in small drug-trafficking plagued countries.

But he said such operations on foreign soil are inherently sensitive, and risk a possible backlash if operations go awry.

“It could lead to a nationalist backlash in the countries involved,” he told the Times.

“If an American is killed, the administration and the DEA could get mired in Congressional oversight hearings,” he said.

“Taking out kingpins could fragment the organization and lead to more violence. And it won’t permanently stop trafficking unless a country also has capable institutions, which often don’t exist in Central America.”