Author: Dave LIndorff

Let me preface this column by saying that I don’t think all conservatives and right-wingers are stupid. In fact I have some right-leaning friends of a libertarian bent who are really smart, and a lot of fun to argue with. They may have an unquestioning faith, bordering on religious zealotry, in the wonders of the “market,” but like Jesuit-trained Catholics defending the existence of God, debating that faith with them can be entertaining and even challenging.

Having said that, I have to say that the so called “rock-ribbed” conservative crowd — let’s change that to “rock-headed” — that serves as the foot-soldiers for the Koch-brothers-funded Tea Party “movement” are really low-wattage.

Back in 2008-2010, their incredibly inane rallying cry was: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”

Never mind that the Medicare these bozos were trying to protect is a government program.

Now, after the latest Supreme Court decision, with conservative Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the four alleged “liberal” members of the court to uphold the Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare), the new cry from these dopes is that they want to move to Canada “because the US is too socialist.”

I kid you not!

Wally Weldon (@WallyWeldon), is a classic of the genre. In a Tweet, he declares, “I’m moving to Canada, the US is entirely too socialist.”

Van Summers (@VanSummers) chirps back, “Screw this commie country, I’m moving to Canada.”

Problem: Canada has what might best be described as socialized health care. Way back in 1947, Tommy Douglas, a social-democratic provincial leader of the prairie province of Saskatchewan, introduced the first public hospital insurance program in Canada. That plan was expanded nationwide in 1957 in the face of militant opposition from the Canadian Medical Association. In 1962, Saskatchewan broadened the program to cover all medical costs, making health care in that province fully funded for all by the government. A conservative Canadian national government expanded the program in Saskatchewan nationwide in 1966. Doctors fees were set buy the provinces, but doctors responded by adding on private charges called “extra billing.” That practice was banned in 1984, giving Canada the basic system it has to this day. It’s quality health care at half the cost in terms of share of GDP (10%) that it is in the US (20%).

Against all logic, Tea Party wackos see “socialism” or even communism in Obamacare (!) and in everything Obama the Democrats do (if only!).

There are two US presidents who have won the Nobel Peace Prize. Now one of those Nobel laureate leaders is accusing the other, though without naming him, of actions that qualify as war crimes and impeachable crimes against the US Constitution.

Former US President Jimmy Carter won his Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, long after his one term of office as President of the United States, which ran from 1977 to 1981. He won the honor primarily for his efforts to mediate conflicts and to advance democracy and human rights, the Nobel Committee said. It’s understandable that they didn’t say much — with the exception of his role in getting Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to sign the Camp David Accords — about his time as president, because Carter, a former US Navy officer, wasn’t such a peacenik back then. Think back to his botched effort to invade Iran and rescue the Americans being held by student activists inside the US Embassy in Tehran, or to his arming of the Afghan Mujahadeen to attack and try to bring down the USSR-backed government in Kabul.

President Barack Obama received his Nobel Peace Prize as president before he even had time to do anything significant in office. When the Nobel Committee gave him the award in 2009, during his first year in the White House, they couldn’t even offer a single concrete example of something he had done to actually earn it. Instead they only said that it was “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

If the members of the Nobel Committee thought, by awarding Obama the prize early, they might encourage him to be a peacemaker, they must wish there was a way they could revoke that prize now. Not long after receiving it, President Obama ordered a doubling of the number of US troops in Afghanistan, approved a brutal campaign of aggressive night-raid attacks on alleged Taliban leaders and their supporters, and later approved a secret raid by Navy SEAL commandos inside Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden.

Now Carter, the ex-president who earned his Peace Prize for actual peace activities, is castigating the current president who got his prize based on a “hope” that he would eventually earn it, saying that the Obama administration is “clearly violating” at least 10 of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that under Obama and his predecessor, President George W. Bush, the US has been “abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights…”

Dueling Peace Laureates: Presidents Carter and Obama
 

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF, please to go to Press TV, where this article first appeared.

Looking on the bright side, the Supreme Court has ruled that something that President Obama has done is definitively not unconstitutional.

That’s probably the best that can be said of the 5-4 decision by the High Court today in upholding the ironically named Affordable Health Care Act.

On the downside for Obama, he goes into the final four months of the election campaign saddled with a decision that says he has raised taxes on some of the nation’s poorest people — for that is what the court said will be happening, 18 months from now, when the health insurance mandate part of the new Act takes effect, and people who have no employer-provided health plan, and no other kind of coverage, fail to buy a policy for themselves and their families. They will be socked with a bill by the IRS, and while the Obama administration and supporters of the act in Congress were at pains to say that the payment such people would be hit with would be a fine, the Justices in the majority were adamant that it would be a tax.

Also taking a hit were Republicans, who universally oppose what they have been deprecatingly calling “Obamacare.” Republicans, including their presidential candidate- in-waiting Mitt Romney, have vowed to eliminate the act after the November election if they win, though unless they do surprisingly well in the Senate and come up with close to a 60-40 majority — very unlikely — they will in truth be unable to do that.

Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts launched a state health plan that included an insurance mandate with a fine for not having insurance, which was clearly the model for the federal law, is in the awkward position of another Massachusetts presidential contender, John Kerry, who went down to defeat in part because he voted for an $87-billion bill funding the Iraq War and then voted against it, leaving him lamely explaining to reporters that “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” Now Mitt Romney will have to be saying, for the next four months, that “I was for an insurance mandate before I was against it.”

Not an enviable position to be in as a candidate!

Locked out of the debate by Obama and Congressional Democrats: Medicare for All

I’ve long had a fondness of Australia. Since back in the early 1980s, when I worked out of the New York City bureau of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, flagship of the Fairfax publishing company, writing for several Fairfax publications (including the sadly now defunct National Times and the magazine Business Review Weekly), and got to know a bunch of smart, funny Oz journalists, I’ve come to know the country as a place much like our own in many ways — like the friendliness and lack of artifice of its people and the stunning beauty of its still vast wilderness areas.

But where I once also admired what appeared to be a strain of independence in Australia — a willingness to stand apart from America on things like socialized medicine, the death penalty, and the use of land mines in warfare — I have seen the country fall into line with terrible US policies like the invasion of Iraq, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and most recently the posting of US marines on Australian territory.

I also envied Australia over the years for having something totally lacking in the US: a major labor-based party advocating democratic-socialist policies, that successfully vies for power in running the country. But of late, that party, now headed by Prime Minister Julia Eileen Gillard, has been a shameless and uncritical apologist for US policies, including the so-called “Global War on Terror,” and policies like rendition to and detention at torture centers like Guantanamo and Bagram Airbase.

Most recently, Australia and its Prime Minister Gillard have been strangely passive in allowing the US to attack Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange, an Australian citizen.

Despite credible reports that the US has a secret sealed spying indictment prepared against Assange, currently facing deportation from Britain to Sweden on questionable and probably politically motivated allegations of rape (there are no formal charges facing him), and concerns that the US is prepared to seek to extradite him to the US to face potential capital charges if he is extradited to Sweden, Australia has not done anything to defend its own citizen against such threats. These threats and an unsuccessful appeal of the extradition request in British courts have led to Assange’s latest decision to seek asylum in the Ecuadoran embassy in London.

Oz Wikileaks founder Julian Assange betrayed by Australian PM Julia Gillard

Reading, watching and listening to the mainstream media in America, it gets harder and harder to tell the difference between journalism and rank propaganda. Consider the coverage of the French parliamentary election currently underway.

Most Americans who read newspapers probably learned about this via the Associated Press report that went out on the weekend for Monday’s papers (AP is the de facto “foreign correspondent” for almost every newspaper in America now that all but a few papers have eliminated their foreign reporting staffs). It stated that recently elected Socialist President Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party “stands positioned to take control of the lower house of parliament.”

Okay so far, right? But then the reporter, Elaine Ganley, who may well have been writing from the US given that the article, as it appeared in my paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, didn’t carry a Paris dateline, or indeed any dateline at all, went on to say “…so he can revamp a country his partisans see as too capitalist for the French.”

Ganley went on to warn readers that “A leftist victory in the voting, five weeks after Hollande took office, would brutally jar the French political landscape.”

Whoa! Last time I looked, “brutally” was a word reserved for nasty over-the-top abusive behavior.

Hollande "partisans" cheering the election of France's first Socialist president in 17 years

There will be all kinds of dancing around the issue of why progressives lost the recall campaign against union-busting Tea Party Republican Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin on Tuesday, with the Obama campaign trying to claim that it was not a reflection on him or his popularity, the Democratic Party saying it was not their battle, and the labor movement, sadly, blaming it all on right-wing money. They’ll all be saying that it doesn’t matter, and that the important thing is to focus on helping Democrats win in November.

So let’s get it straight. The Wisconsin battle was hugely important — an existential struggle for the US labor movement and working people in general, and a critical litmus test of the real nature of both President Obama and of the Democratic Party. And both the president and the party failed that test. Completely and deliberately.

Let’s first get rid of the false Big Money argument. The truth is that no amount of money can turn an election when the public is fired up over a cause or a candidate. What Big Money on one side of an issue or on behalf of one candidate can do is rally the people who are on that side, to get them out to the polls. On the margins, it might help sway a few undecided people who can be duped or scared, but this is of very limited help, because such people tend to be disinterested in politics and voting, so even if they are convinced by the propaganda, they are unlikely to turn out. That can only make a difference if the other side fails to get all its supporters out.

The progressives who battled mightily in this campaign may have been wildly outspent, but they were hardly without resources and they certainly managed to reach every potential supporter with their message of defending working people from Walker’s attack.

What they lacked was any significant support from the Democratic Party and the party’s standard-bearer, President Barack Obama — the man who as candidate back in 2008, when he won Wisconsin, promised to put on a pair of “comfortable shoes” and to “walk the picket line” with struggling workers everywhere.
Obama never did walk the walk to back unions

My wife and I live on a 2.3-acre plot of forested land in a pre-Revolutionary house with a run-down old barn. When we first moved here, there was a rather large set of grassy areas, one in front of the house, another behind the kitchen, a large field in the back, behind the barn, a smaller lawn in front of the barn, and a hidden glen, as well as an island of grass in the middle of a circular gravel driveway.

It used to take me all day to mow all that grass, but over the years, because of my workload — particularly several books that were very time-consuming both to write and to promote — and the challenge of raising two kids, I allowed nature to reclaim much of it. Now I can mow what’s left in two hours. The glen is filled with brush, and the other lawns have shrunken dramatically as the forest has encroached in on them from all directions.

Now suddenly, I have to at least temporarily push back this march of nature, because my daughter’s getting married and she and her boyfriend have decided they’d like to have their secular jewish/hindu wedding at our place. This means that besides making the place look less derelect, I need to enlarge the big lawn out back to a size that could hold a large tent, in the event of rain, capable of accomodating 80-plus guests.

I have been struck as I set to work today by the astonishing amount of new growth that there has been this year already. Leaves on plants like the ubiquitous poison ivy and chokeberries are huge, and the asiatic bittersweet is growing so fast you can actually see its tendrils advancing out into the air as you watch them in the sun. Something frightening is clearly happening. Plants didn’t grow at this prodigious pace when we first moved here. That something, of course, is the increased CO₂ in the atmosphere, now approaching 400 ppm, a level not seen on earth in nearly a million years (and that is 14% higher than it was back in 1988, when it was at just 350 ppm).

The Lindorff barn, in the midst of a re-roofing project by the author

Whether he ever said it or not, I’m going to borrow from a quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln and alter it a bit to say: “American politicians must love war veterans — they keep making so many more of them.”

The ugly truth though, is that American politicians, and in fact the American public as a whole, don’t really give a damn about veterans. Sure, the politicians will go to the parades and wear their American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars hats (some even if they never really served in uniform or went to war), and sure ordinary Americans will applaud in the airport as a bunch of men and women in uniform walk by, but that’s about it.

When it comes to adequately funding health services and pensions for vets after they’ve put in their time, or paid a price in terms of lost limbs, disease or mental trauma, though, the government is always ducking responsibility and the public is whining for lower taxes, not calling for more money for veterans’ benefits.

My mom, a WWII Navy veteran who in 1944 selflessly answered the call for women to sign up so that more men would be freed up for combat duty, currently suffers from Alzheimer’s and other health problems. She has a modest pension from my late father’s job, and from his Social Security, but that’s all eaten up by the cost of her live-in companion and other health care assistance that is not covered by Medicare. We helped her apply for a veteran’s pension that could provide another up to $17,000, but were told it could take up to a year from the time of filing the rather simple paperwork before she’ll see a dollar.

Vets for Peace join in support of the Occupy protests

It seems pretty clear by now that the three young “domestic terrorists” arrested by Chicago police in a warrantless house invasion reminiscent of what US military forces are doing on a daily basis in Afghanistan, are the victims of planted evidence — part of the police-state-style crackdown on anti-NATO protesters in Chicago last week.

The Chicago Police clearly realized that it would be hard to convince a jury that the homemade beer-making equipment in the house was some dreaded bio-terror weapon, so for good measure they apparently dropped off some glass jars with gas in them and tried to make out that the kids were preparing molotov cocktails. That’s the word from National Lawyers Guild attorneys representing the men. They say their clients and others like them coming into Chicago from out of town to join in protests against the NATO summit were “befriended” by police informants and undercover Chicago Police, who then offered to obtain gasoline or explosive materials like toy rocket motors, and who proposed actions like firebombing police stations.

This kind of entrapment and official deceit by police should alarm every American. It’s bad enough when police plant evidence and lie about evidence in order to win convictions, since it means innocent people will be sent to prison or worse. But with the new post 9-11 terrorism laws, like the state terrorism statutes in Illinois being applied in these cases, it becomes far more difficult for a victim of such police and prosecutorial misconduct to challenge the case against her or him. In terror cases, the government can claim “national security” to hide the evidence and even the identity of the witnesses from the defendants and the courts, the jury and the public, and can avoid ever being questioned about it publicly. In a worst case, the federal government doesn’t even need to bring the case to trial. If the victim is accused of being a terrorist, under the latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and various executive orders, that person can be locked away indefinitely without trial — exactly the kind of abuse that led American colonists to rise up against their British colonial overlords 237 years ago.

Residents like me from Philadelphia know all about this stuff. Planting evidence on people you want to lock away has a venerable history in this once revolutionary town.

Who are the terrorists in Chicago? Peaceful demonstrators or thug cops who entrap and who plant bogus evidence? (photo by Damon J Hartley)

John Kerry, back before he was a pompous windsurfing Senate apologist for American empire, back when he wore his hair long and was part of a movement of returned US military veterans speaking out against the continuation of the Vietnam War, famously asked the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a hearing, “How do you ask a man to be the last one to die for a mistake?”

That was 1971, and the Vietnam War continued to drag on for two more years, with more Americans dying, and with many more Vietnamese being killed, until finally the last US combat troops were gone. But even then the fighting continued, with the Army of South Vietnam armed and financed by the United States, until April 30, 1975, when the last resistance ended and Vietnam was liberated and reunified and finally at peace.

During those two terrible years between Kerry’s statement and the end of US combat operations, American soldiers stationed in Vietnam knew that the war was lost, and knew they were there for no reason other than keeping President Nixon from looking like he had lost a war, particularly as he faced re-election during the campaign year of 1972. There was, understandably, massive resort to drugs, including marijuana, opium, heroin, LSD and others, as well as alcohol. There was the fragging of commanding officers who were too aggressive about sending their troops into danger. There was insubordination and insurrection and there was desertion.

Now consider the situation in Afghanistan. Once again a war has been lost by the US, this time to forces far weaker and more poorly organized than the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army.
Once again American troops are being asked to keep fighting for a mistake — this time the 2001 fantasy of the Bush/Cheney administration that it could make a client state out of Afghanistan, a mistake that President Obama doubled down on after taking over the White House, when he called Afghanistan the “good war” and committed another 30,000 troops there, plus ordering up an aggressive kill campaign of night raids, assassinations and the heavy use of pilotless armed drone aircraft.

John Kerry (l) testifying at the Senate in '71 and Iraq/Afghan War vets lining up to return medals to NATO in Chicago a few days ago