Posted Monday, June 29, 2009: Iran's "Revolution": How Much Does Obama Know?

Independent news analysts have provided some remarkable behind-the-scenes coverage of Iran's so-called Twitter-led "revolution." Just three examples: Paul Craig Roberts suggests that the so-called spontaneous protests are yet another U.S.-orchestrated "color revolution, Joe Bageant's irrepressable blog "Deer Hunting With Jesus" suggests the same, while Centre for Global Research analyst Jonathan Mowat provides the historical and strategic background for U.S.-orchestrated destablization efforts in other countries.My question is: How much does Obama know? 

Barack perplexed?

Posted Wednesday, May 20, 2009: Obama Expands the "Warfare State"

Civil rights activist and author Sherwood Ross speaks some uncomfortable truths in his article about President Obama's foreign policy. We're four months in now, friends. Can anyone point to any sort of break from the Bush/Cheney years, beyond the merely rhetorical or symbolic? Anybody? To quote Ross' conclusion:

The picture emerging is ugly. No
“victory” in its spreading wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan
or Iraq ever will begin to compensate for the vast numbers
of Middle Eastern folk needlessly maimed, killed, displaced,
and pauperized by U.S. military aggression. “Aggression”
is the only word for it and the Middle East’s oil supply
is the only reason for it. The Pentagon is on its way to
tighten its control of the world---with the help of our
newest imperial president’s enabling budget. The American
Warfare State marches
on!

Barack "War Is Peace" Obama

Posted Friday, April 17, 2009: Obamamania and the "Rhetoric of Hope"

Naomi Klein hits the proverbial nail on the head again in this Guardian article assessing the first 2 1/2 months of the Obama administration.

So, what shall it be?

Hopeover? Hoper Coaster? Hopesick? Hope fiend? Hopebreak? Hope lash?

Take your pick. 

BO and AIG.

Posted Monday, April 6, 2009: The Cybersecurity Act of 2009

Or: "Should Obama Control the Internet?" We tend to assume that the Internet in the U.S. will always be free and open, ongoing "Net Neutrality" debates notwithstanding. Here's a new legislative wrinkle...to put it mildly. Read the whole bill here. And another good reason to ensure that news journals stay in print.

Obama and the 2nd Amendment.

Posted Tuesday, March 31, 2009 - Geitner's dirty little secret revealed.

Independent researcher William Engdahl writes:

"The Government bailouts of AIG to over $180 billion to date has
primarily gone to pay off AIG’s Credit Default Swap obligations to
counterparty gamblers Goldman Sachs, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of
America, the banks who believe they are ‘too big to fail.’

"In effect,
these five institutions today believe they are so large that they can
dictate the policy of the Federal Government. Some have called it a
bankers’ coup d’etat. It definitely is not healthy." Indeed. 

Bush to Obama Masks U.S. Imperialism.

Posted Saturday, March 21, 2009 - Operation OIL 6 YEARS LATER : Perhaps the only thing more astounding than the six years of the damage and death inflicted on the country of Iraq by the US-based MIME Complex (Military/Industrial/Media/Energy) at this particular moment, is the complete mainstream media blackout this week-end on the 6th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Nothing about the war in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, let alone the corporate TV networks.Here are a couple of articles worth a critical read - Gideon Polya's "Iraq Holocaust" and Ghali Hassan's musings on "Obama's Manufactured Troop Withdrawal."

Ask any American a simple question: "How many Iraqis have died these past six years?" and you'll discover that very few have any clue. The Empire's media minions have done their job well.

Posted Wednesday, March 18, 2009: Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill asks a really good question in this Alternet article of yesterday - "President Obama, Why Did You Pay Blackwater $70 Billion In February?"

To this, we might also ask - "President Obama, Why Are You Ordering U.S. Missile Strikes On Pakistani Villages? What Strategic Goals Might You Be Hoping To Accomplish?" And NPR tell us that the U.S. Army, meanwhile, is offering GEDs in exchange for military service - now that's a creative way to convince young Americans to join the Empire's global "defense" force.

And here's some "back story" on AIG, given the current brouhaha about the "AIG Bailout." Conect the dots, shall we?

BO with troops Posted Monday, March 16, 2009: I met Paul Volcker at a cocktail party once, We talked about fly fishing. He is a tall man. Wise. Avuncular. Former Fed head, lover of anti-inflationary policies, and the scourge of the non-banking classes (which is to say, most of us.) He also just admitted that he doesn't really know what is going on with regard to this economic situation. OK, then. Good to be honest. Here's the article by Alex Messenger. I've excerpted a key paragraph here.

In a sign of the panic gripping
Washington's policy-makers, one of Barack Obama's key economic
advisors, Paul Volcker, has warned a gathering of his leading peers
that the crash of 2008 might be "the mother of all financial crises...
I don't remember any time, maybe even the Great Depression, when things
went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world". Volcker,
chairman of the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board and former
chair of the Federal Reserve, told a conference at Columbia
University's Centre for Capitalism and Society on 20 February that the
crisis was "characterised by being very international" and was the
product of deep global imbalances.

Posted Thursday, February 26, 2009: Now that "the O Team" has finagled their $1 trillion "stimulus" plan through, it might actually be worth reading the fine print. Or at least, considering some of the unanswered questions ("unasked," even) - which Richard Moore does in this fascinating analysis.

Posted Saturday, February 14, 2009: Once again, "Newsweek" magazine gets it wrong on their cover story. While I am not a socialist, I would imagine that anyone who is, or understands "socialism" as an ideology, would agree that the U.S. government "stimulating" the U.S. economy by turning over close to $1 trillion dollars of money/wealth we don't actually have to state governments and large corporations under the pretense of "job creation" is not "socialism."

Happy Valentine's Day.

Newsweek's False Socialism.

Posted Thursday, February 13, 2009: Chris Floyd, author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the American Imperium, speaks well of what he knows in this article entitled "Progressives Stunned By Obama Non-Surprises."

And nowhere is criticism like this more badly needed then here in Vermont. Reading the Green Mountain leftie blogs these days in the state that turned blue for Obama before any other on election night, one can feel all of that "hope" and "change" sentiment bleeding out of their keyboards and into the chilly floor boards. Yes, friends - an Empire, U.S. is. After Obama, then what? 

BO as Facism Incarnate? Who Comes Up With This Stuff? (Happy Lincoln's Birthday).

Posted Sunday, February 8, 2009: Progressive Democratic Party player David Sirota published this article entitled "Despite Obama's promises, rival views are scrubbed from White House" in the San Francisco Chronicle this week-end. Sirota, a consumate D.C. Insider, points out what many of us have suggested since the beginning of Obama's rise to power - the "Kleptocrats" are still running the show in the belly of the Empire. Read it closely. And then ask yourself what alternatives lie before us.

Super Obama.

Posted February 1, 2009: Over the past week or so, I have asked a number of family and friends, all of them Obama supporters, what they think of Obama's foreign policy moves so far - ordering Predator Drones to attack Afghani villages, his silence on the Gaza destruction by the Israeli armed forces, calling for deployment of tens of thousands of more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, etc. Mostly, I am met with blank stares. I am not sure why this so - perhaps the U.S. mainstream "news" media has not sufficiently covered these stories (very probable); or perhaps the economic news has drowned out most everything else; or or perhaps most are relying on Mr. Obama to simply, as Spike Lee says, "do the right thing." John Cogan spells out the implications of an Obama War Presidency in this article, entitled "Obama's Program of War." It makes for interesting reading. I don't think it is entirely fair to lump Obama and Mr. Bush into the same foreign policy category, as this particularly enterprising Photoshop enthusiast does in the photo below. But in many ways, it does seem difficult to discern Obama's foreign policy from his predecessor's.Even the much-touted closing of Guantanamo in more than one year's time masks the fact that the Bagram Air Force Base/Detention Center (Prison) is being prepared for more "inmates," and the Obama administration has not made any moves to disassociate itself from the practice of "extraordinary rendition," in which U.S. intelligence claims carte blanche power to arrest, detain, deport, and interrogate suspects in other countries where the U.S. Constitution holds no sway.

George W Obama?

Posted January 22, 2009: In this article, Bill Blum of the Anti-Empire Report asks a question on the minds of many - who exactly is Barack Obama, a "young politician of such little achievement" who "got so far so fast" - from state senator to president of the United States in four years? While not exhaustive, Blum does raise some questions about the missing holes in Obama's own account of his life and work, including his connection with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Columbia University professor, well-known neo-conservative, and author of The Grand Chessboard, a book that lays out a road map for U.S. Empire globally.

Obama as Roman.

Posted January 19, 2009: Who is funding Obama's $50 million inauguration? Check out this Wall Street Journal article for some interesting answers to this question.

President Obama - official White House portrait.

Posted January 16, 2009: Alternet's Charlie Cray makes a strong case in this essay for what he calls a "triple failure" in the wake of President-elect Obama and U.S. Congressional "tinkering"with the economy while Big Finance collapses. 

Posted January 13, 2009: Are more lefties figuring out that Obama's administration will play status quo ball? To read "The Progressive" Matthew Rothchild's latest editorial, baldly entitled "Obama's Scary Economic Team," it appears to be so. Geithner, Summers, Greenspan, Bernanke, Greenspan - what do all these guys have in common?

Posted January 9, 2009: Obama Quote of the Moment: "I love Barack Obama. I'd pay money just to shine the brother's shoes. But I'll tell you this. Do you hear me? One man is not going to save us. I don't care who that man is. He's not going to save us. And, in fact, if you want to be real about this - can y'all take it? I'm going to be real with y'all. Not only is Barack Obama not going to be able to save you - you are going to have to save Barack Obama."

- Van Jones, as quoted in Elizabeth Kolbert's January 12, 2009 New Yorker article entitled "Greening the Ghetto."

Posted January 5, 2009: Investigative journalist and Mother Jones co-founder Jeffrey Klein over at Alternet has penned an essay today entitled "Obama's Perilous Compromise with Wall Street Looters," which makes for eye-opening reading, at least for anyone who doesn't own a subscription to Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence news journal or doesn't read our blog, where we've been reporting on this emerging fiscal coup d'etat for months now. Always good to see the national lefty Web 2.0 press catch on - more of that, we can only hope, for 2009.

Obama and Superman.

Posted January 1, 2009: Glenn Greenwald's Salon editorial is uncharacteristically
clear and cogent for a news source that spends too much time engaged in
imperial obfuscation. His major point, that the Democrats (including Mr. Obama) have been complicit in much of the Republicans' worst imperial excesses - is not news to anyone who reads this site. But he does a nice job of summarizing some of the major moments, in case we've forgetten them. Happy new year, and long live the UNtied States.

Obama's Shades.

Posted December 19, 2008: Stephen Lendman explores Obama's newest appointments - agriculture, energy, and education - in this article, while a "disappointed" Omnivore's Dilemma author Michael Pollan weighs in on Iowa governor Tom Vilsack as head of the Department of Agriculture on National Public Radio. 

Barack and Abraham.

Posted December 8, 2008: American Empire Project co-founder Tom Englehardt on why Americans should "not let Obama break your heart," while AEP co-founder Steve Fraser provides an in-depth analysis comparing Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Brain Trust" with Barack Obama's "Brainiacs" in this article called "Beyond The Bailout State." 

Posted December 5, 2008: Stephen Lendman can be caustic, but he is a seasoned political and economic observer, and he pulls no punches. Read his analysis of Obama's "War Cabinet" and "Economic Dream Team."

Posted December 1, 2008: MIT linguist and intellectual Noam Chomsky muses on the (non) significance of the Obama election in this Z Net article, in which he suggests that Americans ought to expect little in the way of substantive changes in either the domestic sphere or foreign policy arenas under an Obama administration. For anyone at all familiar with his exhaustive work in analyzing the U.S. political arena, we'd expect this argument of Chomsky - his usual attention to details and dry sense of humor are present here in spades. He's not a secessionist - but his arguments certainly add to the case for Vermont independence.

Obama and the Old White Guys.

Posted November 23, 2008: Jeremy Scahill, independent journalist and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, wrote an article last week for Alternet called This is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites, and Neocons to Watch for in Obama's White House. Not surprisingly, Scahill points out that team Obama/Biden are recycling the same top level advisors who've been running the Empire for decades now to serve in the highest level positions in DC come January 2009. We're not at all surprised that the Empire is working hard to perpertuate itself at this tenuous and fragile moment, but many observers seem to be. 

Posted November 11, 2008: Richard Sanders, coordinator of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade, pens a stunning indictment of Obama's regressive domestic and foreign policy positions in an article entitled A Rough Guide to Obama On $2.3 Billion A Day.

FDR Obama.

Posted November 11, 2008: Sam Smith's Undernews is an accessible and hard-hitting Beltway-based progressive blog. Here's an article called "Can We Talk About The Real Obama Now?" Smith quotes from another observer quoting Obama's book The Audacity of Hope, in which Obama explains: 

"I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a
blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes
project their own views."

By his own definition, Obama is a national Rorschach Test, of sorts. Or, less flatteringly, as Smith suggests, Obama and Vanna White have some similarities. More significantly, on a whole raft of domestic and foreign policy issues, Obama's positions are, by definition, status quo, even regressive positions. The Empire lives.

Barack Abe

Posted November 10, 2008: The Black Agenda Report's "The Audacity of Deception: The Manufacture of Progressive Illusion."

Fascinating article from a African American/radical left perspective.

Apparently not all African-Americans think Barack Obama is
their guy.

(Shocking, I know, given the incessant MSM coverage of elated
citizen voters of color after Obama's election.)

Posted November 5, 2008: The following four-part analysis is provided by Vermont Commons and Truth To Power blogger Carolyn Baker. 

Part 1: An Obama Presidency - Who Owns the White House Now?

Part 2: An Obama Presidency and U.S. Empire Dot-Connecting

Part 3: An Obama Presidency and the Middle East

Part 4: An Obama Presidency and Domestic Policy Realities

--- snip ------

Here's Rob's November 5 original post - the day after Election Night 2008.

Here's a little joke.

Q. Who were the loneliest people in the U.S. Empire the day after the 2008 Election?

A.  Vermont secessionists.

On election night, Vermont was the first state to go for the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, with 2/3 of our Green Mountain electorate throwing their weight behind the young and charismatic candidate.

With regard to race and U.S. electoral politics, there is no question that the election of Barack Obama is one for the ages. One cannot but be moved by the appearance on the Chicago stage of Obama, his wife Michelle, and their two beautiful daughters.

And, talking with my Vermont friends and neighbors - principled progressives, liberals and republicans among them - we all agree that the best candidate of the two won both the popular and electoral vote (for the first time in three presidential elections, mind you).

As I've acknowledged here over the past several months, Barack Obama's personal story is deeply moving, and his soaring rhetoric on the campaign trail have inspired many at a time when all Americans are looking for some hope.

However, while we savor this sweet symbolic moment - a presidential candidate of color has attained the highest elected office in the United States - let us, too, be honest about asking the hard questions.

First and foremost - after endless talk of "change" for the United States, how much of a significant change will be ushered in by an Obama Presidency?

When the euphoria wears off, we urge citizens of good will to start
asking some hard questions of the U.S. Empire's next executive leader.