Author: Dave LIndorff

Up on the planet Mars, there is a complex new rover named Curiosity that is driving around looking for evidence of possible life. Its every little finding is readily broadcast around the world, as was done today at a televised conference in California, to be analyzed by scientists in the US, in Europe, in China, and even in Iran.

The scientists and engineers who are managing that remarkable vehicle, as well as the fantastically successful Cassini probe orbiting Saturn, the Kepler satellite that is discovering all those planets orbiting distant stars, and all the other various satellites and space probes launched by NASA, however, are not as free as the space probes they are running.

Thanks to the zealous wackos at the Department of Homeland Security, back in 2007 during the latter part of the Bush administration an order went out that all workers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena–an organization that is run under contract to NASA by the California Institute of Technology, had to be vetted for high security clearance in order to continue doing their jobs. Never mind that not one of them was or is engaged in secret activities (NASA is a rigorously non-military, scientific agency which not only publishes all its findings, but which invites the active participation of scientists from around the world). In order to continue working at JPL, even scientists who had been with NASA for decades were told they would need a high-level security badge just to enter the premises. To be issued that badge, they were told they would need to agree undergo an intensive FBI check that would look into their prior life history, right back to college.

Not surprisingly, many scientists and engineers at JPL took umbrage at this extreme invasion of their private lives. Neighbors and old colleagues and acquaintances, ex-spouses, etc. were going to be interrogated about their drug-use history, their drinking habits, their juvenile arrest records, their sexual orientation-all those things that prying agents like to get into when doing a security clearance background check–as if they were applying for positions in the CIA or the Secret Service.

Crazed security check requirement is driving over 100 scientists to quit NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab

It is amazing to watch politicians trying to weasel their way around their promises. President Obama is providing us with a good illustration of the art.

During the latest presidential campaign and in the final televised debates, both Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were unequivocal in asserting that the US would be leaving Afghanistan and ending the war in that country at the end of 2014–a goal most Americans profoundly want. Biden, in a heated debate with his Republican opponent Paul Ryan, said the US would “absolutely” be “out” of Afghanistan at the end of 2014. Obama, a week later, said, “By 2014, this process of transition will be complete and the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security.”

I’m reminded of President Clinton, a lawyer who, when pressed under oath by a special prosecutor hounding him over the details of whether he had had sex with a young White House intern, said that the answer hinged on “what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

This past weekend, it was reported that Obama and the generals at the Pentagon are planning on keeping at least 10,000 US troops stationed in Afghanistan indefinitely after that 2014 deadline for ending the war and withdrawing from that war-torn land.

Just to make it clear what we’re talking about here, 10,000 troops would represent an army half the size of the entire military of either the Netherlands or Denmark, two countries which currently have troops assigned to the NATO forces posted in Afghanistan as allies in the 12-year-long US war there.

US military 'trainers' deplaning in El Salvador during that country's civil war in 1982

What if the leaders of the United States — and by leaders I mean the generals in the Pentagon, the corporate executives of the country’s largest enterprises, and the top officials in government — have secretly concluded that while world-wide climate change is indeed going to be catastrophic, the US, or more broadly speaking, North America, is fortuitously situated to come out on top in the resulting global struggle for survival?

I’m not by nature a conspiracy theorist, but this horrifying thought came to me yesterday as I batted away yet another round of ignorant rants from people who insist against all logic that climate change is a gigantic fraud being perpetrated, variously, by a conspiracy of the oil companies who allegedly want to benefit from carbon credit trading, the scientific community, which allegedly is collectively selling out and participating in some world-wide system of omerta in order to get grants, or the world socialist conspiracy, which of course, is trying to destroy capitalism), or all the above. (God, whenever I write anything on climate change these people hit me with flame-mail like mayflies spattering a car windshield in mating season!)

What prompted me to this dark speculation about an American conspiracy of inaction was the seemingly incomprehensible failure of the US — in the face of overwhelming evidence that the Earth is heating up at an accelerating rate, and that we are in danger of soon reaching a point of no return where the process feeds itself — to do anything to reduce either this country’s annual production of more atmospheric CO2, or to promote some broader international agreement to slow the production of greenhouse gases.

It seems insane that this nation’s leaders, corporate and political, would even now still be deliberately refusing to take action to protect the Earth, which of course they and their children and grandchildren will also have to live on, and yet almost to a one they are on the side of the deniers or the delayers. The business leaders for example overwhelmingly provided campaign funding to the Republicans — a party that makes jokes about global warming and openly urges more burning of coal.

Could US leaders think maybe US could gain by letting the world cook?

During the Vietnam War, which US forces fought from 1960 through 1974, and which cost the lives of several million Southeast Asians and 58,000 Americans, eight American journalists died. Not one of them was killed by American fire.

In the Iraq War, 136 journalists were killed. At least 15 of them — about 11% of the total — were killed by US forces, sometimes apparently with deliberate intent. (Consider that if some 500,000 US troops rotated through Iraq over the course of the way and 4000 of them were killed, that meant soldiers had a 1:125 chance of being killed there. With 136 dead journalists, there would have had to be more than 14,000 journalists covering the war for them to have the same odds of getting killed.)

In Afghanistan, nine journalists have been killed, at least one by US forces, and in that case, the killing was deliberate, though it is unclear whether the victim was known to be a journalist.

One thing is clear: it is dangerous in the extreme to be a journalist covering America’s wars, at least beginning with Vietnam, and in Iraq it was more dangerous to be a journalist than to be a soldier.

Why this might be the case is hard to say, but it seems that an antipathy towards journalists within the military may have something to do with it.

Back in 1983, the US, in one of the more ludicrous military actions in its long history of war, invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, on the pretext that it feared Cubans were building a military airbase there (actually Cuba had sent construction workers to the impoverished isle to help the country build a better commercial airport so as to improve its tourism business). During that invasion, which was conducted with a total media blackout despite almost no opposition (the main “enemy” putting up any resistance was the Cuban construction workers! There were no Cuban troops there), a group of seven journalists, including a reporter from the New York Times, attempted to reach the island on a small boat. They were blocked by a US destroyer, which warned them over a loudspeaker to turn around or be “blown out of the water.” The journalists gave up and retreated.

That little “war,” which was conducted from beginning to end with no reporters allowed in the battle zone, marked the beginning of a new relationship between the Pentagon and the press — one where the military maintains complete control over access and information, both what is provided to the media, and what the public gets to learn.

Wikileaks released this video of a helicopter crew slaughtering civilians and two Reuters cameramen in Baghdad

Run a google search of “World Bank” and “climate change” and you’ll discover that this month the World Bank released a major study predicting a global “cataclysm” if world-wide temperatures increase by a predicted four degrees celsius (that’s roughly 8 degrees fahrenheit).

But the articles reporting that information, at least here in the US, will be almost entirely business magazines like Bloomberg/Businessweek, or Forbes. Check the New York Times, and you won’t find the story, at least so far, and it’s already at least four days old. The Washington Post had the story on Monday, but it was tucked away in its business section, which is how it was treated by most publications that bothered to report on it. The one exception to this covereage pattern is USA Today, which on Nov. 19 ran a short piece on the World Bank report in its news pages.

Is the news that the World Bank is predicting catastrophe for billions of people and for life on this entire planet a business story?

Certainly not!

Any idiot could tell you, speaking objectively, that the so-called “Fiscal Cliff,” an entirely political crisis in which Republicans in Congress have decided to threaten to crash the US economy by cutting $600 billion from the federal budget while raising taxes on everyone unless Democrats agree to cut Social Security and Medicare spending and to extend a decade of extraordinary tax cuts for the wealthy, is a minor story compared to a report that the earth is headed towards climate disaster this century unless dramatic action is taken to reduce the pace of global warming caused by the rapacious burning of fossil fuels. Yet it’s the “Fiscal Cliff” crisis that is getting page one play, and not just on one day, but every day.

World Bank warns climate change will occur rapidly, and without quick action, irreversibly

There is a delicious irony to the story of the crash-and-burn career of Four-Star General and later (at least briefly) CIA Director David Petraeus.

The man who was elevated to the ethereal ranks of a General Eisenhower or Robert E. Lee by swooning corporate myth makers like the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin, the Washington Post’s David Iglesias, and the NY Times’ Michael Gordon, was never really that brilliant. It wasn’t his “surge” after all that quieted things down (temporarily) in Iraq; rather it was a deal to pay off the insurgents with cash to stand down until the US could gracefully pull out without the departing troops having to be shoot their way down to Kuwait in full retreat. As for his allegedly “brilliant” counterinsurgency policy of “winning hearts and minds,” we have already seen how well that has worked in Iraq, which is now basically a client state of Iran, and the writing is already on the wall in Afghanistan, where the US is almost universally loathed, with US forces spending most of their time looking out for Afghan soldiers who might turn their guns on their supposed ally and “mentor” American troops.

For a real measure of Gen. Petraeus, go to Admiral William Fallon — that rare military leader who had the guts to tell President Bush and Cheney he would not allow an attack on Iran “on his watch,” thereby quite possibly saving us all from being at war with Iran years ago. Fallon, who at the time in 2007 was head of Centcom, the military command region covering the entire Middle East, once reportedly called, Petraeus, who was being put in charge of the Iraq theater, an “ass-kissing little chicken-shit” — to his face.

Waiting for the movie 'All In: The rise and fall of General Petraeus'

One little-noted but important result of the November election in the US that returned President Barack Obama to the White House for another four years is that the right-wing Israeli government and the Zionist lobbying organization AIPAC (for American Israel Public Affairs Committee) took a surprising drubbing and emerge a much weaker political influence going forward in US politics.

According to the recently created liberal Jewish lobbying organization J-Street, which advocates a peacefully negotiated two-state solution to the decades-long Israel-Palestine issue, Jewish voters in the US did not flock to the Zionist cause this election. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds from AIPAC and some wealthy Jewish Americans that were contributed to back hard-line Zionist or pro-Zionist political candidates for president and Congress, and despite a vicious anti-Obama ad campaign in southern Florida and in New York City targeting Jewish voters, exit polls the organization commissioned show that 70% of Jewish voters nationwide cast their ballots for Obama — the same percentage that has historically voted Democratic. Perhaps more important, given the current bluster by the Netanyahu government in Israel about the urgency to attack Iran, exit polls showed that 90% of American Jews list domestic issues as their main concern, not Israel. As one example of the kind of fear-mongering ad campaigns Zionist funders were running in Florida and New York, there was a large billboard put up along the state’s main north/south interstate highway, which showed an Iranian missile heading towards the state of Israel, with the message: “Friends don’t let friends get nuked. Stop Obama!”

The biggest blow to the Israeli government and to AIPAC, of course, was the defeat of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

This billboard was placed all around south Florida before the last election. It didn't work.

Okay, the etch-a-sketch vulture capitalist who would have given us four years of that smarmy missionionary-at-your-door smile, was thankfully sent packing by the voters, and Barack Obama gets four more years in the White House.

It was less an election than a contest between two hugely financed products. There was no “movement” for either candidate (though Romney actually claimed to be heading one) — the president made only one televised ad endorsing a member of his party running for Congress — a last minute promo for Chris Murphy, the representative in Connecticut who ultimately defeated wrestling magnate Linda McMahon for the seat of retiring former Democrat Joe Lieberman.

In the end, after both parties spent a combined record of over $2 billion in the presidential race, and another $4 billion on the Congressional races, we have ended up more or less with the same balance of power between the two corporatist parties, with the House having a few more Democrats in the minority and the Republicans still in control, the Senate with the Democratic caucus picking up perhaps two seats, and the president back in the White House.

So in a sense nothing has changed, but then actually, there are a lot of things that have changed. Let’s look at some of the implications of this election:

First off, most of that staggering $6 billion came from corporate funders and rich people, and those donations came with the expectation of a payback. Starting today, we citizens, and those of us who are still journalists, will have to watch and ferret out who’s looking for a favor, and what those paybacks are, and we’ll have to fight to prevent them.

Next, the people, mostly on the left, who keep claiming that elections are a fraud and that they will be stolen by a secret cabal of Republican operatives and the corporate crooks who own and run the makers of the computerized voting machines, have a lot of explaining to do, since this incredibly close election, in which winning margins in states like Ohio, Florida, Virginia and other jurisdictions were decided by one or two percentage points, were ideal places for electronic voter theft to have occurred. It did not happen.

Karl Rove lamely disputing Fox's calling of Ohio for Obama. Where was his vaunted vote-stealing magic?

(A version of this article first appeared on the website of PressTV)
 

Tuesday’s national election in the US is shaping up to be a bruising affair, with both parties hiring armies of lawyers to fight over likely contentious battles over voter access to polling stations, dealing with long lines that could prevent people from voting after polls officially close, the counting of votes cast, and now, the right of international inspectors from the respected Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to monitor the process.

The OSCE, a 56-member international organization (including the U.S.) which routinely sends observers to monitor and oversee elections in countries around the world, has been monitoring US elections since the highly controversial presidential election of 2000, which ended up having the presidential race decided by a split 5-4 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. (The OECD was invited to start monitoring US elections in 2004 by none other than President George W. Bush, who was handed the presidency in 2000 by the Supreme Court.) Until this year, its monitors have had no problems doing their job, but this year hard-right officials in at least two states — Texas and Iowa — have threatened to have the international observers arrested and criminally charged if they attempt to monitor any polling places in those two states. Other states may join them.

“The OSCE’s representatives are not authorized by state law to enter a polling place,” said Texas Attorney General Greg Abott, an activist in the right-wing Tea Party movement who is in his first term as the state’s top law enforcement officer.  “It may be a criminal offense for OSCE representatives to maintain a presence within 100 feet of a polling place’s entrance. Failure to comply with these requirements could subject the OSCE’s representatives to criminal prosecution.”

Abbot’s threat to arrest OSCE poll watchers was echoed a few days later by Iowa’s secretary of state, Matt Schultz, who warned that any international monitors who came within 300 feet of voting stations in his state would be “criminally prosecuted.”

Meanwhile, in Florida, Congressman Connie Mack, the Republican candidate for US senate in that state, playing to widespread antipathy among right-wingers towards the United Nations, which the more fevered among them believe is trying to take over the US, angrily denounced the monitors saying, “The very idea that the United Nations — the world body dedicated to diminishing America’s role in the world — would be allowed, if not encouraged, to install foreigners sympathetic to the likes of Castro, Chávez, Ahmadinejad, and Putin to oversee our elections is nothing short of disgusting.” (Mack needs to do his homework: The OSCE is a European-based organization, not a UN organization, and in any case, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran are not members. Only Russia is, and it allows monitors — including US monitors — at its elections.)

Years ago, voter suppression was overt. Now it has become more sophisticated, but more widespread

I, for one, can’t do it.

As much as I loathe the Republican Party and its standard bearer, the incredibly smarmy shape-changing one-percenter and serial prevaricator Mitt Romney, I cannot bring myself this Nov. 6 to vote for the re-election of President Barack Obama, the Nobel Peace Laureate with the mushrooming Kill List on his desk.

First, by way of full disclosure, let me state that I did, with misgivings and angst, vote for Obama in 2008. I did it with eyes open, based upon a (you’ll excuse the expression) “hope” that the many progressive voters, including a huge cadre of idealistic young people voting for the first time, and an unprecedented wave of minority voters, as well as working-class people of all races, religions and ethnicities, would come together after the vote and press him to be a progressive president, much as the working people of America back in the early 1930s had pressed a new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the bankers’ candidate from New York, to be a progressive president.

Boy was mine a vain hope!

What we got instead was a president who backed down in advance at almost every challenge, telegraphing his fall-back position, whether it was pulling troops out of Iraq or defending Social Security and Medicare, or even his supposed signal “achievement,” the passage of the so-called “Affordable Care Act,” now known as Obamacare.

There are good third party alternatives in the Presidential race. It's not just Tweedle Dem or Tweedle Lie