It didn't take the Israel Lobby very long to bring President
Obama to heel regarding his prohibition against further illegal Israeli
settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Obama discovered that a mere American
president is powerless when confronted by the Israel Lobby and that the United
States simply is not allowed a Middle East policy separate from
Israel's.
Obama also found out that he cannot change anything else
either, if he ever intended to do so.
The military/security lobby has war
and a domestic police state on its agenda, and a mere American president can't
do anything about it.
President Obama can order the Guantanamo torture
chamber closed and kidnapping and rendition and torture to be halted, but no one
carries out the order.
Essentially, Obama is
irrelevant.
President Obama can promise that he is going to bring the
troops home, and the military lobby says, "No, you are going to send them to
Afghanistan, and in the meantime start a war in Pakistan and maneuver Iran into
a position that will provide an excuse for a war there, too. Wars are too
profitable for us to let you stop them." And the mere president has to say,
"Yes, Sir!"
Obama can promise health care to 50 million uninsured
Americans, but he can't override the veto of the war lobby and the insurance
lobby. The war lobby says its war profits are more important than health care
and that the country can't afford both the "war on terror" and "socialized
medicine."
The insurance lobby says health care has to be provided by
private health insurance; otherwise, we can't afford it.
The war and
insurance lobbies rattled their campaign contribution pocketbooks and quickly
convinced Congress and the White House that the real purpose of the health care
bill is to save money by cutting Medicare and Medicaid benefits, thereby
"getting entitlements under control."
Entitlements is a right-wing word
used to cast aspersion on the few things that the government did, in the distant
past, for citizens. Social Security and Medicare, for example, are denigrated as
"entitlements." The right-wing goes on endlessly about Social Security and
Medicare as if they were welfare give-aways to shiftless people who refuse to
look after themselves, whereas in actual fact citizens are vastly overcharged
for the meager benefits with a 15% tax on their wages and
salaries.
Indeed, for decades now the federal government has been funding
its wars and military budgets with the surplus revenues collected by the Social
Security tax on labor.
To claim, as the right-wing does, that we can't
afford the only thing in the entire budget that has consistently produced a
revenue surplus indicates that the real agenda is to drive the mere citizen into
the ground.
The real entitlements are never mentioned. The "defense"
budget is an entitlement for the military/security complex about which President
Eisenhower warned us 50 years ago. A person has to be crazy to believe that the
United States, "the world's only superpower," protected by oceans on its East
and West and by puppet states on its North and South, needs a "defense" budget
larger than the military spending of the rest of the world combined.
The
military budget is nothing but an entitlement for the military/security complex.
To hide this fact, the entitlement is disguised as protection against "enemies"
and passed through the Pentagon.
I say cut out the middleman and simply
allocate a percentage of the federal budget to the military/security complex.
This way we won't have to concoct reasons for invading other countries and go to
war in order for the military/security complex to get its entitlement. It would
be a lot cheaper just to give them the money outright, and it would save a lot
of lives and grief at home and abroad.
The US invasion of Iraq had
nothing whatsoever to do with American national interests. It had to do with
armaments profits and with eliminating an obstacle to Israeli territorial
expansion. The cost of the war, aside from the $3 trillion, was over 4,000 dead
Americans, over 30,000 wounded and maimed Americans, tens of thousands of broken
American marriages and lost careers, one million dead Iraqis, four million
displaced Iraqis, and a destroyed country.
All of this was done for the
profits of the military/security complex and to make paranoid Israel, armed with
200 nuclear weapons, feel "secure."
My proposal would make the
military/security complex even more wealthy as the companies would get the money
without having to produce the weapons. Instead, all the money could go for
multi-million dollar bonuses and dividend payouts to shareholders. No one, at
home or abroad, would have to be killed, and the taxpayer would be better
off.
No American national interest is served by the war in Afghanistan.
As the former UK Ambassador Craig Murray disclosed, the purpose of the war is to
protect Unocal's interest in the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline. The cost of the war
is many times greater than Unocal's investment in the pipeline. The obvious
solution is to buy out Unocal and give the pipeline to the Afghans as partial
compensation for the destruction we have inflicted on that country and its
population, and bring the troops home.
The reason my sensible solutions
cannot be effected is that the lobbies think that their entitlements would not
survive if they were made obvious. They think that if the American people knew
that the wars were being fought to enrich the armaments and oil industries, the
people would put a halt to the wars.
In actual fact, the American people
have no say about what "their" government does. Polls of the public show that
half or more of the American people do not support the wars in Iraq or
Afghanistan and do not support President Obama's escalation of the war in
Afghanistan. Yet, the occupations and wars continue. According to General
Stanley McChrystal, the additional 40,000 troops are enough to stalemate the
war, that is, to keep it going forever, the ideal situation for the armaments
lobby.
The people want health care, but the government does not
listen.
The people want jobs, but Wall Street wants higher priced stocks
and forces American firms to offshore the jobs to countries where labor is
cheaper.
The American people have no effect on anything. They can affect
nothing. They have become irrelevant like Obama. And they will remain irrelevant
as long as organized interest groups can purchase the US government.
The
inability of the American democracy to produce any results that the voters want
is a demonstrated fact. The total unresponsiveness of government to the people
is conservatism's contribution to American democracy. Some years ago there was
an effort to put government back into the hands of the people by constraining
the ability of organized interest groups to pour enormous amounts of money into
political campaigns and, thus, obligate the elected official to those whose
money elected him. Conservatives said that any restraints would be a violation
of the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.
The same "protectors"
of "free speech" had no objection to the Israel Lobby's passage of the "hate
speech" bill, which has criminalized criticism of Israel's genocidal treatment
of the Palestinians and continuing theft of their lands.
In less than one
year, President Obama has betrayed all of his supporters and broken all of his
promises. He is the total captive of the oligarchy of the ruling interest
groups. Unless he is saved by an orchestrated 9/11-type event, Obama is a
one-term president. Indeed, the collapsing economy will doom him regardless of a
"terrorist event."
The Republicans are grooming Palin. Our first female
president, following our first black president, will complete the transition to
an American police state by arresting critics and protesters of Washington's
immoral foreign and domestic policies, and she will complete the destruction of
America's reputation abroad.
Russia's Putin has already compared the US
to Nazi Germany, and the Chinese premier has likened the US to an irresponsible,
profligate debtor.
Increasingly the rest of the world sees the US as the
sole source of all of its problems. Germany has lost the chief of its armed
forces and its defense minister, because the US convinced or pressured, by hook
or crook, the German government to violate its Constitution and to send troops
to fight for Unocal's interest in Afghanistan. The Germans had pretended that
their troops were not really fighting, but were were engaged in a "peace-keeping
operation." This more or less worked until the Germans called in an air strike
that murdered 100 women and children lined up for a fuel allotment.
The
British are investigating their leading criminal, former prime minister Tony
Blair, and his deception of his own cabinet in order to do Bush's bidding and
provide some cover for Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq. The UK investigators
have been denied the ability to bring criminal charges, but the issue of war
based entirely on orchestrated deception and lies is getting a hearing. It will
reverberate throughout the world, and the world will note that there is no
corresponding investigation in the US, the country that originated the False
War.
Meanwhile, the US investment banks, which have wrecked the financial
stability of many governments, including that of the US, continue to control, as
they have done since the Clinton administration, US economic and financial
policy. The world has suffered terribly from the Wall Street gangsters, and now
looks upon America with a critical eye.
The United States no longer
commands the respect it enjoyed under President Ronald Reagan or President
George Herbert Walker Bush. World polls show that the US and its puppet master
are regarded as the two greatest threats to peace. Washington and Israel outrank
on the most dangerous list the crazy regime in North Korea.
The world is
beginning to see America as a country that needs to go away. When the dollar is
over-inflated by a Washington unable to pay its bills, will the world be
motivated by greed and try to save us in order to save its investments, or will
it say, thank God, good riddance.
