October 11, 2014, OpEdNews The Judas Goat President - Audacity, Hope, Change and the Status Quo   By Greg Maybury After the hard slog of the Bush years, the elevation of Barack Obama to the US presidency brought new hope and optimism to Americans and non-Americans alike. But after one and a half terms, the reality seems to be sinking in that for all the change promised by Obama's campaign, it's the 'same old, same old', writes Australian Greg Maybury. For folks who were fans of the late, great American comedian Bill Hicks, they likely will be familiar with one of his more memorable routines wherein he is 'riffing' on about a Global Power Elite that rules the world. In this routine, Hicks unveils a secret induction ritual of sorts, a rite of passage that takes place once new presidents are ensconced in the White House. In order to keep each president properly briefed on who actually wields power in the home of the brave and beyond, and discourage any altruistic notions about changing Washington and the world for the better via the power of the Oval Office, without any preamble, a cabal of dark-suited people representing the Powers that Be (PTBs) of the New World Order sit him down in the darkened, smoke-filled, windowless Situation Room in the White House bunker and show him hitherto unseen film footage of the actual JFK assassination. In Hicks' not-so-fevered, conspiratorial imagination, this unique piece of historical cinema verite vividly reveals the Crime of the Century from a completely different angle than seen in the famous Zapruder footage. Only this time the fatally offensive projectiles (plural) can be clearly identified as coming from behind the white picket fence atop a certain grassy knoll to the right and in front of the presidential motorcade, the scene replete with a rifle-packing assassin fleeing the area pronto. After the presentation finishes, the lights turned on, and the smoke clears, the PTBs have only one thing to say to the by now ashen-faced, freshman POTUS: "Any questions, Mr President?" Once the look of abject fear, shock and horror subsides and the blood drains back into his face, accompanied by the sudden realisation that being president isn't going to be quite what he expected, his composure regained, his response goes something like this: "Nah sh*t man, Arrhhm down with that, let's go bomb Basra!" The cigar chomping PTBs, who by now are all smiles and bonhomie, slap the freshly minted Prez on the back and say in unison: "That's our boy. Great to have you on board!" As darkly amusing as Hicks' bit is, there can be no doubt that for many of us, the scenario may be uncomfortably close to the truth, and you don't need to be a paid-up member of the 'tin foil hat brigade' to think that. With this opening in mind, it is now time to ask the following question about the incumbent POTUS. To wit: What happened Mr President? Like many folks, this writer had high hopes for Number 44, and vividly recalls the night of the election win in 2008 wherein Obama's speech to the nation was as electrifying and as inspiring as anything I can remember in the annals of US politics. And I'm not even an American! (Did we see a tear in Colin Powell's eye?) To a Blind Nation (A nod as Good as a Wink) Such was Obama's ascendancy to the highest office in the home of the brave that it seemed even for the most jaded, nay cynical, of political observers that America had taken a turn for the better, and not just for America's sake! Like many of my fellow Australians and doubtless many other non-Americans, it was hard not to feel elated about the prospect that this Sometimes Great Nation had turned the corner. America had woken up to the reality it actually could be a genuine force for good in the world, and it finally had someone in the Oval Office who both understood what was at stake and could bring that change about. Such a reaction was of course not unexpected after the Bush/Cheney years, and the message of hope and change was destined to resonate with many. By any measure the Bush regime was the most disastrous presidential 'experiment' up to that time, and we will return to George II's reign shortly. But sadly it seems increasingly obvious the buoyant expectations of the future ushered in by Barack Obama's election were misplaced after all. For those of us prepared to consider this notion, the big question is this: Was Obama co-opted by the PTBs after he was elected a la the Bill Hicks scenario? Or was he a Judas-Goat from the off? For those unfamiliar with the term and the intent of the metaphor, it's enough to know that before the slaughterhouses became all 'assembly-lined' and mechanised, the Judas-goat was used to mingle with and gain the 'trust' of the animals, whereupon it would then easily lead them up the ramps to meet their ultimate fate. Readers will get the drift. The answer to this is hard to know for certain of course, and in seeking some clues all we can do is reflect on Obama's rise to high office and especially his record. Of course there are plenty of people who have done that and continue to do so, and this is not my main purpose herein. What may be a more useful exercise is to look at the Office of the President, and examine the actual power and authority the Oval One (to use Gore Vidal's priceless phrase) is capable of exercising. This hopefully might give us some useful additional insights. But as always, a little dose of history is in order. After 9/11, Bush's Pax Americana morphed very quickly into (a) Pox Amerikana, an unprecedented, raging, out of control geopolitical pandemic for the zeitgeist, and again, the consequences and outcomes of which will be with us forever and a day. That is unless the next generation beyond Obama can find and administer a cure before it is too late, because it appears even six years after Bush this virulent strain of empire mired hubris and overreach is not going to croak of its own accord anytime soon. Truth be known, even pre-'Dubya', the American Empire was probably already something of a Pox Amerikana. It had in fact been heading in that direction at a rate of knots. This was especially so since the Fall of the Wall, when it could be argued the rot of triumphalism really took hold. Bush II's true 'genius' -- his one lasting achievement and the one that almost certainly will define his legacy -- may have been bringing America's particular and peculiar malaise out into the open for us all to see. Which is not to suggest that "all" of us are "see"ing even now, as a nod is as good as a wink to a blind nation as it were. Now the spread, virulence and mortality rate of the Bush 'Pox' may not have been foreseen at the time by most. But this is surely one case where even a little objective hindsight confers great clarity, although any such "clarity" now one both expects and fears may be of the 'too little, too late' variety as distinct from 'better late than never' kind. Which brings us back to the incumbent president. Judging by his performance thus far, it would appear that the person who might have taken such 'insights' on board brought about by such "clarity" and done something with them to substantively change the status quo has in many ways, gone back to the future. Whereas Bush under-promised and over-delivered as it were, Obama has over-promised and under-delivered, and it's difficult to say which is the lesser of the two 'evils'. To take just one measure by which we might assess his presidential leadership (and one for which his administration can hardly sheet home any blame to his predecessor), we only need to look at the current situation in the Ukraine, and America's aggressive and geopolitically destabilising stance towards the Russian Federation. This Russian Standoff became especially evident with the downing of Malaysian Airlines MH 17, wherein the Obama administration immediately went into attack mode, blaming Ukrainian separatists who were supported by Russia for the disaster. For weeks on end, after dragging many other Western countries - including Australia - along with them on the "blame Russia" bandwagon, since then there has been very little evidence if any provided by the US that indeed the Ukrainian separatists and/or the Russians were responsible. And not a word has been heard now for weeks about what actually happened to MH 17; it has gone all suspiciously quiet on this front. Indeed, evidence appears to be growing that the US knows more about what happened than they are prepared to let on. There can only be one explanation for this. As for Obama's performance closer to home, his presidential report card also leaves a lot to be desired. His record here thus far underscores the contention that the presidency is no longer relevant in mapping out a more equitable society for ordinary Americans, and in articulating an achievable vision and positive future for the nation as a whole. Exhibit A in this respect is his failure to reign in the Wall Street Cowboys -- upon pain of them doing serious 'til death do us part' jail time a la Bernie Madoff -- their most reckless impulses. A GFC v.2 is not a matter of if, but when. And the presidency appears no longer powerful enough even with a popular mandate to re-gear the machinery of the National Security State towards something more simpatico with the spirit and letter of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. As for economic and social justice, the fabled American Dream has all but reached its use by date if it isn't passed it already, and Obama has done little to arrest the slide that has been admittedly in motion for two decades or more, certainly since the 'halcyon' days (daze) of The Gipper. Yet despite all this, the next presidential candidates will tell Americans they can bring back hope and change, and people will vote for either/or candidate en masse in the fervent hope that they will make good on their word. Or they won't vote at all. Other than the names on the high-security clearance ID's of the champions of the National Security State and the dog-tags of the front-line defenders of freedom and democracy in the US Military though, very little is likely change. Rethinking the Imperium In an informal interview with journalist and author Chris Hedges not long after the beginning of Obama's first term, US political philosopher Sheldon Wolin -- after indicating he did not expect much from the new Administration and that "the basic systems" [of power and influence] in the US are going to "stay in place" unchallenged -- had this to say about the new president who -- it has to be recalled at this point -- got into that position promising more change than you could poke a stick at in a month of election Tuesdays: "This [view] is shown by the [Wall Street] bailout. It [the Obama administration] does not bother with [changing] the structure at all. I don't think he can take on the establishment we have developed...[Obama] is probably the most intelligent president we have had in decades. I think he is well meaning, but he inherits a system of constraints that makes it very difficult to take on these major power configurations. I do not think he has any appetite for it [ideologically]. The corporate structure is not going to be challenged. There has not been a word from him that would suggest an attempt to rethink the American imperium". With this in mind, and in view of the fact we're now well into his second term, with Obama then, it appears to be Pox Amerikana redux, deja vu all over again. In short, Obama has spent little time 'rethinking' the "imperium". If Obama promised change, then his first term tenure appeared to have underscored that hoary old platitude that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Whether he instinctively knew that before he was elected is open to debate, but it is difficult to escape the conclusion he did. This would especially be the case if he was/is that "intelligent". As for Obama's purported "well meaning" predisposition, there again appears very little evidence of that. Of course its unknown what Wolin himself might now think, but it would be hard to see how he might still hold the same view. On the other hand, it may just be that Obama recognizes -- as Wolin has observed above -- that as president he represents, embodies -- and acts in the interests of -- forces that are larger, more powerful and much more immutable than the Office itself and the person who holds the Office. And catering to these forces is more important than any attempts to cater to the electorate at large, over whom it would appear certain they take precedence. In his intriguing 2010 book The Next Hundred Years -- A Forecast for the 21st Century, George Friedman underscored this premise. After noting that in the long-term at least, presidents are not especially "important or powerful" people anymore, he added the following about Obama, and by extrapolation one expects, future presidents: "[He has to] govern within the realities and constraints that [have] defined previous presidencies, and whilst he may or may not be popular, his ability to redefine anything as massive as the United States and the global system [is] severely limited". Obama may even acknowledge privately that to be 'successful' and 'effective' he needs to recognize the above reality or not harbour any illusions about it (or any ambitions of his own at odds with these forces), even if he doesn't always feel comfortable with such "recognition" and constraints. That being the case, there is at present disturbingly little sign -- especially with the lame-duck period of his second term looming -- that Obama is showing any discomfort with that recognition. No doubt there are numerous folk Stateside and beyond who believed in his message of audacity combined with his shill of hope and change would be saying 'more's the pity'. Interestingly, Obama has apparently received up to three times more death threats than Bush ever did; with that in mind, it's quite possible he realises that demonstrating too much audacity and offering too much hope could -- to use the popular contemporary vernacular -- get his "skinny black ass capped". Just like JFK did then one supposes in the Bill Hicks scenario, and of whom it is generally considered demonstrated a little too much presidential audacity and propensity for change and in doing so, paid the ultimate price for it? And when we consider the current state of play with the Secret Service, this would be neither an unreasonable concern for the president himself nor an outlandish proposition for the rest of us. Either way, when we place all this in context, and take on the perspective doing so provides, Obama may turn out to be a bigger disappointment than his still much reviled predecessor. Now who would have thought that on the night of the first Tuesday in November in 2008? No doubt there are plenty who would now say "we told you so", but I don't recall hearing too many folks doing so, as it would have been tantamount to poo-pooing Old Glory, baseball and Mom's apple pie in one fell swoop. And in the Land of Hope and Dreams, that just would not be the done thing. Greg Maybury Perth, Western Australia. Submitters Bio: Greg Maybury is a Perth (Australia) based freelance writer. His main areas of interest are American history and politics in general, with a special focus on economic, national security, military and geopolitical affairs, and both US domestic and foreign policy issues.

Lord Vishnu

   

October 8, 2014, OpEdNews Should We Just Follow Orders? Rules of Engagement for Resisting the Police State   By John Whitehead Image by commons.wikimedia.org The perils of resisting the police state grow more costly with each passing day, especially if you hope to escape with your life and property intact. The thing you must remember is that we've entered an age of militarized police in which we're no longer viewed as civilians but as enemy combatants.          Indeed, anything short of compliance will now get you charged with any of the growing number of contempt charges (ranging from resisting arrest and interference to disorderly conduct, obstruction, and failure to obey a police order) that get trotted out anytime a citizen voices discontent with the government or challenges or even questions the authority of the powers that be--and that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario involves getting probed, poked, pinched, tasered, tackled, searched, seized, stripped, manhandled, arrested, shot, or killed. So what can you really do when you find yourself at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to "serve and protect"? In other words, what are the rules of engagement when it comes to interacting with the police? If you want to play it safe, comply and do whatever a police officer tells you to do. Don't talk back. Don't threaten. And don't walk away. In other words, don't do anything that even hints at resistance. Keep in mind, however, that this is not a fail-safe plan, especially not in an age where police officers tend to shoot first and ask questions later, oftentimes based only on their highly subjective "feeling" of being threatened. If compliance isn't quite your cup of tea--and we'd be far better off as a nation if we were far less compliant--then you've got a few more options ranging from legal-but-sure-to-annoy-an-officer to legal-but-it-could-get-you-arrested to legal-but-it-could-get-you-shot. If this is war--and a good case could be made for the fact that the government is indeed waging a war on the American citizenry--then the tactics I'm about to outline could be considered nonviolent guerilla warfare, using whatever strategic, legal, creative and nonviolent means are available. To begin with, and most importantly, Americans need to know their rights when it comes to interactions with the police, bearing in mind that many law enforcement officials are largely ignorant of the law themselves. In a nutshell, here are your basic rights when it comes to interactions with the police as outlined in the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution: You have the right under the First Amendment to ask questions and express yourself. You have the right under the Fourth Amendment to not have your person or your property searched by police or any government agent unless they have a search warrant authorizing them to do so. You have the right under the Fifth Amendment to remain silent and not incriminate yourself. You have the right under the Sixth Amendment to request an attorney. Depending on which state you live in and whether your encounter with police is consensual as opposed to your being temporarily detained or arrested, you may have the right to refuse to identify yourself. Presently, 26 states do not require citizens to show their ID to an officer (drivers in all states must do so, however). Knowing your rights is only part of the battle, unfortunately. The hard part comes in when you have to exercise those rights in order to hold government officials accountable to respecting those rights. As a rule of thumb, you should always be sure to clarify in any police encounter whether or not you are being detained, i.e., whether you have the right to walk away. That holds true whether it's a casual "show your ID" request on a boardwalk, a stop-and-frisk search on a city street, or a traffic stop for speeding or just to check your insurance. As I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, if you feel like you can't walk away from a police encounter of your own volition--and more often than not you can't, especially when you're being confronted by someone armed to the hilt with all manner of militarized weaponry and gear--then for all intents and purposes, you're essentially under arrest from the moment a cop stops you. Still, it doesn't hurt to clarify that distinction by specifically asking whether you are being detained or not and on what grounds. And whenever possible, record your encounter with police. While technology is always going to be a double-edged sword, with the gadgets that are the most useful to us in our daily lives--GPS devices, cell phones, the internet--being the very tools used by the government to track us, monitor our activities, and generally spy on us, cell phones are particularly useful for recording encounters with the police and have proven to be increasingly powerful reminders to police that they are not all powerful. That said, while members of the public have a First Amendment right to record police interactions, doing so could still get you charged with any number of trumped up "contempt of cop" charges. Clearly, the language of freedom is no longer the common tongue spoken by the citizenry and their government. With the government having shifted into a language of force, "we the people" have been reduced to suspects in a surveillance state, criminals in a police state, and enemy combatants in a military empire. In such an environment, as every resistor from Martin Luther King Jr. and on down the line has learned, there is always a price to be paid for challenging the status quo. Then again, the price for not challenging the status quo is even worse: outright tyranny, the loss of our freedoms, and a totalitarian regime the likes of which the world has never seen before. Submitters Bio: John W. Whitehead is an attorney and author who has written, debated and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law and human rights. Whitehead’s aggressive, pioneering approach to civil liberties has earned him numerous accolades and accomplishments, including the Hungarian Medal of Freedom. His concern for the persecuted and oppressed led him, in 1982, to establish The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties and human rights organization in Charlottesville, Va. Whitehead serves as the Institute’s president and spokesperson. His thought-provoking commentaries call people to action and address a wide range of contemporary issues from faith to politics and television to constitutional rights. He is also a frequent commentator on a variety of issues in the national media, as well as the editor of the award-winning pop culture magazine, Gadfly. Whitehead's book A Government of Wolves will be published in June 2013. Please visit On Target to view Whitehead's weekly video commentaries. He also blogs daily about the emerging police state at http://agovernmentofwolves.com/

October 7, 2014, OpEdNews All Systems Go: The Elite View of the New Iraq-Syria War   By Chris Floyd The vicious civil war we have fomented in Syria has spawned an extremist militia that is using the weapons we poured into Syria to attack the corrupt sectarian regime we installed in Iraq with our illegal invasion there earlier, which gave rise to a vicious civil war that has continued to this day, with both sides using our weapons. Cross-posted from Empire Burlesque And so a new war has begun. Or rather, a new front is opened (and an old one re-opened) in an ongoing, ever-expanding war. For the new war is of course our old friend, the War on Terror. (Although it should more accurately be termed "the War on Terror Spawned by the War on Terror.") The casus belli being offered up seem even more specious and shifting than usual. The vicious civil war we have fomented in Syria has spawned an extremist militia that is using the weapons we poured into Syria to attack the corrupt sectarian regime we installed in Iraq with our illegal invasion there earlier, which gave rise to a vicious civil war that has continued to this day, with both sides using our weapons. But is "war" really the right word? "War" implies a discrete event; it has a beginning, some kind of trajectory, some kind of an end. But the fiery miasma of slaughter and profiteering that is the Terror War has no such form. It has no trajectory -- and no end, as we have been told over and over by our bipartisan Terror Barons. For the imperial American state (and its various satellites, servants and satraps), the Terror War has become a state of nature -- even THE state of nature. It is no longer an event in reality; it is the very form of reality itself. It must go on because it can't NOT go on. To our ruling classes, and their lackeys and abettors and worshippers across the commanding heights of Western society, the very idea of any alternative to ceaseless conflict is unimaginable ... Hey, it's what we do. It's what we are. As our latest temporary manager, Obama, said the other day, it's how we roll. We exist solely to assert our dominance by violent force anywhere and anyhow we see fit. It is in blood and domination that we live and move and have our being. It doesn't matter in the end who we are fighting against, or with, or if we change partners in the middle of the battle. It doesn't matter if we fight an enemy here and arm him over there, or if our allies share the same extremism we are ostensibly trying to quell. It doesn't matter what we say to justify the killing and profiteering we want to do, or that we change these justifications from day to day, even from hour to hour. And it certainly doesn't matter what "legal" basis we offer for our lawless and arbitrary actions. We are more than happy to spout some meaningless jargon, to torture and degrade the language, to openly mock the very notion of reason and law -- as long as it keeps the editorial writers and think-tank quacks happy in their shallow fantasies of "serious" policy, as long as the public in whose name we are destabilizing and devouring the earth (including their own decaying communities) can keep believing that what we are doing with our killing and looting is keeping them safe from "psychopaths" and demonic beasts. As long as they can keep believing that they are being governed by a benevolent elite, whose ultimate aim -- however badly and ineptly they sometimes pursue it -- is to secure peace, freedom and prosperity for their own people, and for the world. And thus we watch with wry bemusement how earnestly the opinion-makers and commentators -- especially on the liberal side -- debate the "issues" around our brutal and arbitrary actions (which they, sweet naifs, call "policies"). How they puzzle and puzzle til their puzzlers are sore, to make our policies better. "Oh, if only we could make our leaders see that their policies are counterproductive, that they are failing to produce the outcomes they are seeking. Oh, if only our leaders could be smarter, cleverer, more insightful -- like us! But they just keep making the same mistakes, with the same bad outcomes, which just makes it harder for them to achieve their noble goals..." It's even more amusing when they get all scornful and sarcastic, when they smirk about what incompetent fools our elites are, how they're so stupid that they can't even see that they're shooting ourselves in the foot over and over, how they couldn't find their own ass with both hands even if both hands were stapled to their ass. (Was that Maher? Stewart? One of those media millionaires with the cutesy, soundbite smarm that passes for "dissent.") We love these guys. We watch their shows. We pass around their best lines at the conference table. You can't buy that kind of propaganda, that kind of reinforcement for the status quo. No one believes more in the system than these savvy snarkmasters. "The people in power now simply don't know how to achieve their goals. They're ruining the system! We need to get some better people in office to run the system. Then things will be all right." But of course the truth is that the system works very well. It does what it intends to do, and pursues its goals with admirable, ruthless efficiency. Nothing deters the system: not facts, not law, not truth, not consequences, not appeals to reason or conscience, not concern for future -- and certainly not snark from the chattering classes. The system can't "fail" in its goals, because there are no "goals," no endpoints. There is only the process -- the endless, churning process of violent domination, and the power and profits this produces for those who join (or are born to) the elite. If one front in the Terror War produces what our naifs call a "policy failure" -- the invasion of Iraq, say -- so what? You just keep churning and fighting and profiteering on a dozen other fronts, while your "policy failure" ripens into a catastrophic societal breakdown, producing more excuses to "step back in" and resume the conflict there again. So where is the "failure"? The violent, profitable process of empire -- the shark that must keep eating or else it dies -- has not skipped a beat. It just keeps expanding its range -- and, as in Iraq now, it can always come back to an old killing field. As long as the system keeps killing and grinding and churning, it can't fail, whatever may happen on this or that patch of ground at any particular time. The process -- not the seriously analyzed "outcome" of an operation -- is the whole point. There must be blood, there must be loot, there must be expansion. When you've killed all the Indians, you go kill the gooks. If the Commies quit the field, you kill Muslims instead. This is what the system is. This is what the system does. And whoever seeks to control the system -- whoever fights and claws their way into the cockpit of this monstrous machine, to give themselves and their courtiers a few years at the wheel -- is a willing, eager part of the system. For example, there is now a great deal of liberal handwringing about the "tragedy" of Barack Obama being "sucked back" into the morass of Iraq. "He wanted change, he wanted to lead us away from this kind of thing, but now look! Despite his best intentions, here we are again." In most of these cases, Obama's predecessor gets the blame -- "Bush made a mess of Iraq, and now Obama has to clean it up." (I don't recall seeing any commentary along these lines noting that Bill Clinton -- the husband of the next president of the United States -- also did yeoman service in making a mess of Iraq, having killed some 500,000 children with his pointless, punitive sanctions. He killed those children because Saddam wouldn't give up his WMD -- you know, the WMD he didn't have. Oh, how we rightfully scorned Bush for "going to war over false pretenses" about that phantom WMD; but the good old Big Dawg killed half a million children for the same knowing lie, and left Iraqi society in chaos.) Anyway, we are now told that thanks to Bush, Obama is between a rock and a hard place, trying his dee-diddly-darndest to deal with those extremist beheaders of ISIS (with the help of the extremist beheaders of Saudi Arabia) without putting "boots on the ground." He wanted to change the system -- but it looks like the "Deep State" was too much for him. What a tragedy for him -- and for us. Can we dispense briefly but decisively with this oleaginous bullshit by making a single observation? A man who hand-picked George Bush's Secretary of Defense to serve as his own Master of War knew exactly what the system is -- and did not have the slightest intention of changing it. In fact, Obama has been phenomenally successful in expanding the system of violence and domination, extending it new areas, with new tools (Oval Office death squads! Assassinating innocent teenagers!) -- and bringing it all back home with hi-tech surveillance, whistleblower persecution and journalist prosecutions his predecessor could only dream of. And so we are at war again. But we are never not at war anymore. That's what we do. That's what we are. Submitters Bio: Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog.

 

 

 

 

KEY DEMOCRATS, LED BY HILLARY CLINTON,

LEAVE NO DOUBT THAT ENDLESS WAR

 IS OFFICIAL U.S. DOCTRINE

 

By Glenn Greenwald, ( firstlook.org/the intercept, 10/7/2014 )

 

Long before Americans were introduced to the new 9/11 era super-villains called ISIS and Khorasan, senior Obama officials were openly and explicitly stating that America’s “war on terror,” already 12 years old, would last at least another decade. At first, they injected these decrees only anonymously; in late 2012, The Washington Post - disclosing the administration’s secret creation of a “disposition matrix” to decide who should be killed, imprisoned without charges, or otherwise “disposed” of - reported these remarkable facts:

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism.”

In May, 2013, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether it should revise the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF). A committee member asked a senior Pentagon official, Assistant Secretary Michael Sheehan, how long the war on terror would last; his reply: “At least 10 to 20 years.” At least. A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed afterward “that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today — atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted.” As Spencer Ackerman put it: “Welcome to America’s Thirty Years War,” one which – by the Obama administration’s own reasoning – has “no geographic limit.”

Listening to all this, Maine’s independent Sen. Angus King said: “This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution today.” Former Bush DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith – himself an ardent advocate of broad presidential powers – was at the hearing and noted that nobody even knows against whom this endless war is being waged: “Amazingly, there is a very large question even in the Armed Services Committee about who the United States is at war against and where, and how those determinations are made.”

All of that received remarkably little attention given its obvious significance. But any doubts about whether Endless War – literally – is official American doctrine should be permanently erased by this week’s comments from two leading Democrats, both former top national security officials in the Obama administration, one of whom is likely to be the next American president.

Leon Panetta, the long-time Democratic Party operative who served as Obama’s Defense Secretary and CIA Director, said this week of Obama’s new bombing campaign: “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war.” Only in America are new 30-year wars spoken of so casually, the way other countries speak of weather changes. He added that the war “will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.” And elsewhere: not just a new decades-long war with no temporal limits, but no geographic ones either. He criticized Obama – who has bombed 7 predominantly Muslim countries plus the Muslim minority in the Phillipines (almost double the number of countries Bush bombed) – for being insufficiently militaristic, despite the fact that Obama officials themselves have already instructed the public to think of The New War “in terms of years.”

Then we have Hillary Clinton (whom Panetta gushed would make a “great” president). At an event in Ottawa yesterday, she proclaimed that the fight against these “militants” will “be a long-term struggle” that should entail an “information war” as “well as an air war.” The new war, she said, is “essential” and the U.S. shies away from fighting it “at our peril.” Like Panetta (and most establishment Republicans), Clinton made clear in her book that virtually all of her disagreements with Obama’s foreign policy were the by-product of her view of Obama as insufficiently hawkish, militaristic and confrontational.

At this point, it is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. U.S. officials are now all but openly saying this. “Endless War” is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy.
It’s not hard to see why. A state of endless war justifies ever-increasing state power and secrecy and a further erosion of rights. It also entails a massive transfer of public wealth to the “homeland security” and weapons industry (which the US media deceptively calls the “defense sector”).

Just yesterday, Bloomberg reported: “Led by Lockheed Martin Group (LTM), the biggest U.S. defense companies are trading at record prices as shareholders reap rewards from escalating military conflicts around the world.” Particularly exciting is that “investors see rising sales for makers of missiles, drones and other weapons as the U.S. hits Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq”; moreover, “the U.S. also is the biggest foreign military supplier to Israel, which waged a 50-day offensive against the Hamas Islamic movement in the Gaza Strip.” ISIS is using U.S.-made ammunition and weapons, which means U.S. weapons companies get to supply all sides of The New Endless War; can you blame investors for being so giddy?




I vividly recall how, in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s killing, Obama partisans triumphantly declared that this would finally usher in the winding down of the War on Terror. On one superficial level, that view was understandable: it made sense if one assumes that the U.S. has been waging this war for its stated reasons and that it hopes to vanquish The Enemy and end the war.
But that is not, and never was, the purpose of the War on Terror. It was designed from the start to be endless. Both Bush and Obama officials have explicitly said that the war will last at least a generation. The nature of the “war,” and the theories that have accompanied it, is that it has no discernible enemy and no identifiable limits. More significantly, this “war” fuels itself, provides its own inexhaustible purpose, as it is precisely the policies justified in the name of Stopping Terrorism that actually ensure its spread (note how Panetta said the new U.S. war would have to include Libya, presumably to fight against those empowered by the last U.S. war there just 3 years ago).




This war – in all its ever-changing permutations – thus enables an endless supply of power and profit to flow to those political and economic factions that control the government regardless of election outcomes. And that’s all independent of the vicarious sense of joy, purpose and fulfillment which the sociopathic Washington class derives from waging risk-free wars, as Adam Smith so perfectly described in Wealth of Nations 235 years ago:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.

The last thing the Washington political class and the economic elites who control it want is for this war to end. Anyone who doubts that should just look at the express statements from these leading Democrats, who wasted no time at all seizing on the latest Bad Guys to justify literally decades more of this profiteering and war-making.

Photo: Michael Loccisano/Getty

Cornel West on President Barack Obama (democracynow.org, 10/6/2014 )

AMY GOODMAN: We have 20 seconds, but where does President Obama fit into this picture? Or does he?

 

CORNEL WEST: President Obama is a neoliberal centrist. He is a pro-imperial president. He is brilliant, he’s charismatic, but he is the head of the American empire and sits at the center of the U.S. status quo. The black prophetic tradition is a profound critique and indictment of the system that he heads, and of course generates profound disappointment in the priorities of Wall Street, of drones, of mass surveillance that we’ve seen in his administration. But we say it in love. People say, "Oh, Brother West, you’re always putting the president down and then talking about love." I love the brother. I pray for his safety and his family. He’s wrong.

October 6, 2014, OpEdNews Why We Allow Big Pharma to Rip Us Off   By Robert Reich Big Pharma is spending more on advertising and marketing than on research and development -- often tens of millions to promote a single drug. And, it's spending heavily on political campaigns. In 2012, it shelled out over $36 million, making it the biggest political contributor of all American industries. Cross-posted from Robert Reich Blog According to a new federal database put online last week, pharmaceutical companies and device makers paid doctors some $380 million in speaking and consulting fees over a five-month period in 2013. Some doctors received over half a million dollars each, and others got millions of dollars in royalties from products they helped develop. Doctors claim these payments have no effect on what they prescribe. But why would drug companies shell out all this money if it didn't provide them a healthy return on their investment? America spends a fortune on drugs, more per person than any other nation on earth, even though Americans are no healthier than the citizens of other advanced nations. Of the estimated $2.7 trillion America spends annually on health care, drugs account for 10 percent of the total. Government pays some of this tab through Medicare, Medicaid, and subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. But we pick up the tab indirectly through our taxes. We pay the rest of it directly, through higher co-payments, deductibles, and premiums. Drug company payments to doctors are a small part of a much larger strategy by Big Pharma to clean our pockets. Another technique is called "product hopping" -- making small and insignificant changes in a drug whose patent is about to expire, so it's technically new. For example, last February, before its patent expired on Namenda, its widely used drug to treat Alzheimer's, Forest Laboratories announced it would stop selling the existing tablet form in favor of new extended-release capsules called Namenda XR. The capsules were just a reformulated version of the tablet. But even the minor change prevented pharmacists from substituting generic versions of the tablet. Result: Higher profits for Forest Labs and higher costs for you and me. Another technique is for drug companies to continue to aggressively advertise prescription brands long after their 20-year patents have expired, so patients ask their doctors for them. Many doctors will comply. America is one of few advanced nations that allow direct advertising of prescription drugs. A fourth tactic is for drug companies to pay the makers of generic drugs to delay their cheaper versions. These so-called "pay-for-delay" agreements generate big profits for both the proprietary manufacturers and the generics. But here again, you and I pay. The tactic costs us an estimated $3.5 billion a year. Europe doesn't allow these sorts of payoffs, but they're legal in the United States because the major drug makers and generics have fought off any legislative attempts to stop them. Finally, while other nations set wholesale drug prices, the law prohibits the U.S. government from using its considerable bargaining power under Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate lower drug prices. This was part of the deal Big Pharma extracted for its support of the Affordable Care Act of 2010. The drug companies say they need the additional profits to pay for researching and developing new drugs. But the government supplies much of the research Big Pharma relies on, through the National Institutes of Health. Meanwhile, Big Pharma is spending more on advertising and marketing than on research and development -- often tens of millions to promote a single drug. And it's spending hundreds of millions more every year lobbying. Last year alone, the lobbying tab came to $225 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That's more than the formidable lobbying expenditures of America's military contractors. In addition, Big Pharma is spending heavily on political campaigns. In 2012, it shelled out over $36 million, making it the biggest political contributor of all American industries. Why do we put up with this? It's too facile to say we have no choice given how much the industry is spending on politics. If the public were sufficiently outraged, politicians and regulatory agencies wouldn't allow this giant ripoff. But the public isn't outraged. That's partly because much of this strategy is hidden from public view. But I think it's also because we've bought the ideological claptrap of the "free market" being separate from and superior to government. And since private property and freedom of contract are the core of the free market, we assume drug companies have every right to charge what they want for the property they sell. Yet in reality the "free market" can't be separated from government because government determines the rules of the game. It determines, for example, what can be patented and for how long, what side payoffs create unlawful conflicts of interest, what basic research should be subsidized, and when government can negotiate low prices. The critical question is not whether government should play a role in the market. Without such government decisions there would be no market, and no new drugs. The issue is how government organizes the market. So long as big drug makers have a disproportionate say in these decisions, the rest of us pay through the nose. Submitters Website: http://robertreich.org/ Submitters Bio: Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, has a new film, "Inequality for All," to be released September 27. He blogs at www.robertreich.org.