- 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 in 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.
-
- _________
-
-
- Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the
US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has
held numerous academic appointments. He has been reporting shocking cases
of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new (<http://www.opednews.com/author/author12492.html>more...)
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