Politics 2010

An exquisite diamond has 32 highly-polished facets that together create the beauty of the end product which many admire. On the dark side of the same idea the War-on-Us has become a black-diamond that also is many faceted; but with an exactly opposite effect: The more finished-facets there are in this war; the less chance there is for us to defeat this global threat to all of human existence.

Yesterday, John Pilger described in detail some of the international wars that the US has been creating as aggressors around the planet; wars that continue to devour vast sums of money and manpower (both military and mercenary) which is not sustainable for any real length of time.

“March 25, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and “bunker-buster” bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of “defense” Robert Gates complains that “the general [European] public and the political class” are so opposed to war they are an “impediment” to peace. Remember this is the month of the March Hare.

According to an American general, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a “war of perception”. Thus, the recent “liberation of the city of Marja” from the Taliban’s “command and control structure” was pure Hollywood. Marja is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and parades of flag-wrapped coffins through the Wiltshire town of Wooten Basset were not a cynical propaganda exercise.

“War is fun”, the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is revealed as having no purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons.”

“This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of a military that is now a state with the state, set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent. More nuanced perhaps, but the results are both unambiguous and familiar. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the senior United Nations officials in Iraq during the American and British-led blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious, undeclared, even presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, the Third World War and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being.” ⁽¹⁾

However the wars mentioned are only some of what Obamanation has been funding and advocating. His latest moves in Indonesia are designed to reactivate the death squads there and reinitiate “aid” to the military Junta that is pivotal in that ongoing war against Muslims in the Far East.

“ “ALLAN NAIRN: In the article, I described how the Indonesian armed forces, which are armed and trained by the United States, have been running a program of assassinating political activists, and I described in detail their assassinations in Aceh in 2009 in the run-up to the local elections there, where at least eight activists for the pro-independence PA, Partai Aceh, were assassinated. And I quote senior Indonesian officials saying that these assassinations were coordinated on the regional level by a general named Sunarko, a Kopassus general. I reached Sunarko on the phone, and he acknowledged to me that his men were involved in these assassinations. But he said, “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that this was a project of the military as an institution.”

He also, this general who ran the assassination program, told me that he was an enthusiastic supporter of President Obama’s plan to restore full aid to the Indonesian armed forces, and he then went on to describe in detail his own training by the United States. He says they’ve been training him since the 1980s. He regards them as close partners, and he loves Obama’s plan because he says it will make the partnership still more intimate, in his words. General Sunarko, the Kopassus general who in Timor in 1999 helped run the militias that burned 80 percent of the buildings in Timor, that conducted church massacres, etc., and who now has been running this assassinations program in Aceh, he said that he was trained by the US military, the US Pacific Command, mobile training teams in jungle warfare, logistics and many other subjects, and he said that he was most recently trained by the US in 2006. So he’s a very enthusiastic backer of Obama’s plan to restore aid for the US military, and specifically for Kopassus, the special forces, the most notorious unit of that military.” ⁽²⁾

In addition to the above there are the continuing threats of war from Israel against Lebanon, Syria, and others including a broad and apparently open ended threat of nuclear conflict with Europe over radical Zionist policy points in Palestine; this amounts to blackmailing the world into allowing the barbarity of Zionist polices to remain unopposed among the community of nations.

These ‘Wars and Rumors of Wars’ amount to only one of the very public facets of this global New World Order war against people everywhere. The second phase of these overt wars are being fought behind the scenes here inside the USA. We have now privatized medicine (forced purchasing of medical insurance - without enforced ‘CARE’ from the companies that are to reap a massive new number of policy-holders). The US is also privatizing education using shock-doctrine principles to shift public education from the public sector into private and sometimes military-led schools. This began with New Orleans after Katrina, and has now moved into Detroit and Chicago, buttressed by invading many of the low-income neighborhood school-districts under the guise of improving the social environment through more formally regimented training to prepare the disadvantaged for their future in the armed forces, as this is seen by many as the only choice open for many of the poor. Basically there is an open class-war being fought here using students in the inner-cities as test-marketing subject’s without-a-choice, while the entire social landscape continues on track toward privatizing every aspect of American society.

“AMY GOODMAN: Bob Peterson, talk overall about the growth of the public charter school movement.

BOB PETERSON: Yeah, the charter school movement started, I think, with very well-intended individuals who wanted to be free from what they considered bureaucracy and some rigid union contracts and that their core beliefs or their assumptions were that once they had that freedom, they would increase academic achievement and that they would be innovative and that, furthermore, that those lessons would be shared with the public schools. That just hasn’t been the case. There’s no state or district where charter school policies have really been transformative in that way. And that, in fact, is why we need a public education. In a democracy, we have to service all kids. And oftentimes we find in charter schools there is some picking and selecting of children through rigorous or complicated application forms, and so on and so forth.

The other thing that’s really important to keep in mind is that while the charter school movement includes some very well-intended individuals and some quality schools, it’s also become a favorite of conservative forces and conservative foundations that have really championed charterizing and the marketizing, as I say, the whole public sphere of public education. And so, they would like to see more private control of schools, less union, quote, “interference.” And it’s a very disconcerting problem, because those of us who have the interests of all kids at heart know that there’s inherent problems in a market solution.

And so, what we really need to do is to challenge this notion that the charters are the engine of reform. There are a lot of different ways that schools can be reformed. There’s no silver bullet. But it’s not—unfortunately, it’s not the charter movement, which apparently Obama and Duncan have seen fit to say is the silver bullet.

Arne Duncan, we did a cover story in our Rethinking Schools magazine, “The Duncan Myth,” just in our spring issue. And Duncan was basically the CEO, as they’re called, of the Chicago school system. He championed—he worked with the mayor, of course, and in fact he says that he’s for mayoral control of many school districts—in my mind, an anti-democratic tendency, if we’ve ever seen one. He did a number of things. His claim to fame was really closing down schools that didn’t work, although, in the process, he alienated huge swaths of the community in Chicago. There were supposed to be public hearings, which he never attended. I mean, there were hearings, but he didn’t go, his people didn’t go. And these number—over twenty schools were closed down and then reopened up under a plan of Renaissance 2010. The problem is, a lot of the neighborhood kids who were served by these schools, whose parents wanted them to stay open, were excluded through a variety of means in the new schools that opened up, the more boutique charter schools that sometimes occur throughout this country.

The question—and the other thing that he did that’s of interest to many of your viewers, I’m sure, is that he opened up five military academies, schools, and expanded the ROTC program in middle school or junior high school, something which some of us have some serious concerns about, whether or not that should be how we channel students through the public schools.” ⁽³⁾

Now we must add to the above, the most crucial aspects of this ongoing war: The 2010 Census and what that will mean once the entire nation is listed, house by house on GPS for disarming the public. This will be done in tandem with collecting evermore punishing taxes and fines and liens, in connection with the new healthcare bill that will be using the new 16,500 IRS agents to prosecute-fully the lowest members of this society for debts which, given a choice, they would never have incurred in the first place. ⁽⁴⁾

From a reader: “I'm scared by our President signing the "law" regarding health insurance, one which becomes obligatory soon with huge cash/jail penalties. Are US citizens REQUIRED to purchase insurance under threat of criminal prosecution? ANSWER: If so then there's a substantial problem as it pertains to CONTRACT LAW. No CONTRACT is valid if one is FORCED to sign one. No CONTRACT is valid if there's FRAUD in the inception/inducement or within the CONTRACT itself. No contract is valid absent a "meeting of the minds". How can there be a "meeting of the minds" when one party "CONSENTS" UNDER DURESS OR THREAT OR COMPULSION? "A statute does not trump the Constitution."”

How will this nation be able to afford to continue doing all these things simultaneously, (internationally, nationally and locally) especially when our national debt now stands at over $300 Trillion – while our Gross National Product is somewhere around one tenth of that impossibly large number? Think about it: It's not just a handful of wars that we are losing overseas, that continue to suck up both men and money at horrendous rates: But in the middle of all that, the US apparently wants to declare open war on the majority of its "citizens" here at home? The strategy and the tactics involved in something this obviously impossible cannot possibly succeed; so why are we allowing them to even attempt this? This goes beyond fantasy and has now become part of that literal Twilight Zone wherein everything very soon must collapse from within because of the sheer amount of illegality and hubris which is all that is propping up this insanity that some still want to dignify by calling it US policy!

Jim Kirwan

NOTES: