19 October - Articles About 'The System' | politics

Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama
We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and progressives.

Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush. He promised us that the transfer of $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street would open up credit and lending to the average consumer. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), however, admitted last week that banks have reduced lending at the sharpest pace since 1942. As a senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA Reform Act that retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens without warrant; instead he supported passage of the loathsome legislation. He told us he would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the detention facility at Guantánamo, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new jobs. None of this has happened.

The Questions Education Reformers Aren’t Asking 
Mike Rose 
No one in power is asking the more fundamental questions like: What is the purpose of education in a democracy, and are our reforms enhancing—or possibly restricting—that purpose?
Education ‘Miracles’ Don’t Survive Scrutiny
Business Goes to School
What might the business community’s culpability be for the state of American education? And what else would a more comprehensive discussion of the school-business connection need to include?
Some businesses have a direct financial interest in matters educational, from textbook and test development to the delivery of goods and advertisements to classrooms. Less obvious is the fact that donations from business are tax-deductible, so, as policy scholar Janelle Scott points out, considerable tax revenues are diverted from the public fund and toward business-certified causes. These causes might well be laudable ones, but the channeling of revenue affects public policy and yet is not open to public deliberation.
The 1910s and 1920s, another era of strong business influence, provide a cautionary tale. In an attempt to maximize educational productivity and efficiency, some districts advocated measuring teacher effectiveness by counting the number of arithmetic combinations or grammar exercises a student could perform in one minute.  Industrial conceptions of productivity are spread throughout our educational policy, certainly in some high-stakes testing programs.  Business advocacy groups have been defining the purpose of schooling in economic terms. Kids go to school to get themselves and the nation ready for the global marketplace, and this rhetoric of job preparation and competition can play into reductive definitions of teaching and learning.
 The sad and astounding fact is that at the state and federal level there is little deep understanding of the intricacies of teaching and learning involved in the formation of education policy.
In all the public discussions I’ve heard, the focus of school-business alliances is solely on the problems with the schools and what it is that business can do to help remedy those problems. The discussion never seems to include business’s contributions to the conditions that have limited educational achievement.

When Banks Are the Robbers
Amy Goodman
The Obama administration signaled that it was not supporting a foreclosure moratorium. Not long after, Bank of America announced it was restarting its foreclosure operations. GMAC followed suit, and others will likely join in. So much for the voluntary moratorium.
GMAC Mortgage engaged in mass document processing, dubbed “robo-signing.”
Recall that GM received $51 billion in taxpayer bailouts; its subsidiary, GMAC, received $16.3 billion; and Ally Financial subsidiary GMAC Mortgage received $1.5 billion as an “incentive payment for home loan modification.”


So you as a taxpayer may have bailed out a bank that is fraudulently foreclosing on you. What recourse do you have?

Why the IMF meetings failed
17th October 2010, 08:41 am by Stan

What is to stop U.S. banks and their customers from creating $1 trillion, $10 trillion or even $50 trillion on their computer keyboards to buy up all the bonds and stocks in the world, along with all the land and other assets for sale, in the hope of making capital gains and pocketing the arbitrage [...]

A Glimpse Into the Heart of a Rotten System 
 I have now sat through Charles Ferguson’s “Inside Job”— the nonfiction version of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”— and I still don’t fully understand our endless financial crisis.

NUPGE urges Obama and U.S. legislators to give Canadian health care system a fair hearing 
Clancy said he felt obligated to write to the U.S. legislators after Prime Minister Harper and Health Minister Aglukkaq refused to step in and counter the anti-Canadian propaganda being spread by private health care interests battling health care reform in the United States.
( I know : late to the party. I just never tracked down union representations against corporate propaganda demeaning the Canadian healthcare system. Currently preparations are underway to fight to include medications in insurance coverage.)

“If you want a job, go to Asia!”

That’s Tom Brokaw’s advice to college grads…

Our politicians manipulated the laws to permit corporations to send their lower level jobs to other countries without penalty. Now even white-collar jobs are leaving the country. They wrote the laws (Clinton’s NAFTA, Bush’s CAFTA, Truman’s GATT which is now the WTO) to benefit their corporate contributors and even gave some of the companies taxpayer-funded subsidies in the process.

Who Is Responsible for U.S. Russia Policy?
Who is ultimately responsible for an American policy toward Russia that since the collapse of the Soviet Union has been aggressive, militarily overbearing and threatening to the integrity of Russia, to absolutely no useful purpose. The conventional Western comment says the NATO governments have underestimated “Russia’s determination to dominate its traditional sphere of influence.”

This is wrong. Russia has been amazingly tolerant of successful Western efforts to annex its “traditional sphere of influence,” if that term means the Warsaw Pact, which until 1991 was the Communist counterpart to NATO, lending troops to enforce the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, which held that membership in the Warsaw Pact and in the “Socialist bloc” was irreversible.
Mikhail Gorbachev reversed it. He withdrew troops from Afghanistan.

NATO was redefined by President George H.W. Bush, as he recounts in his memoirs, as “a political instrument of European stability” rather than a force of military confrontation. On those terms Gorbachev agreed to the unification of Germany within NATO. Warsaw Pact states were invited to go their own way, and they did—into NATO.
Came the American-sponsored “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine, installing pro-American governments, followed by the Bush administration’s efforts to get NATO to give them a formal Military Action Plan for membership, an initiative fortunately blocked by Germany and France. And in February of this year, Kosovo, Serbian since the 12th century, was—illegally—declared by the U.S. and the EU to be an independent nation.

This was the turning point for Russia. Now the United States and the EU had not only unilaterally dismembered Serbia but were attempting to make two states historically part of Russia into Western satellites. Georgia and Ukraine had not simply been part of the Soviet Union, but before that of czarist Russia.

US: The dishonest broker
There are many reasons for America’s failure to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians but the most fundamental one is that it is a dishonest broker. As a result of its palpable partiality towards Israel, America has lost all credibility in the eyes not only of the Palestinians but of the wider Arab and Muslim worlds.

My Ron Paul rant…
Every liberal who ever said we can’t leave Iraq because without the Americans there the place would descend into chaos… is a passive racist. This is a white supremacist assumption.

My main point was that the biggest social catastrophe for Black and Brown folk in the US today is the criminal justice system and the American gulag that goes with it.
One candidate has quoted the figures on how this has unfairly impacted African Americans. Ron Paul. He opposes the criminalization of drugs. The issue of blanket pardons — within the President’s authority, and the de-prioritization of federal drug enforcement, are both within the Prez’s purview.

One point I emphasized in my rant is the difference between agreeing with someone’s expressed views and the net effect of someone’s likely actions.

In this case, I pose a hypothetical question. If Ron Paul were elected, what would the net effect of his policies be on the American Gulag, given the capabilities and limitations of the office?
Iraq and Afghanistan have become abattoirs. Stopping this war is an urgent and immediate moral imperative.

Let me add something to this. As an anti-imperialist, who believes US hegemony in the world is the most destructive and dangerous political force in our world, and as someone who wants to see that political power broken, for good, there is no single action that would underline an immediate and decisive loss of some of that power than US withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is exactly why whichever DLC-anointed candidate is nominated, the Democratic Party leadership has not the least intention of reversing what is going on in Southwest Asia: the permanent post-Cold War re-disposition of the imperial armed forces of the United States of America. The leadership of the Democrtatic Party is committed to American imperialism.

Hillary’s Bones – A Coup Tutorial
30th September 2010, 03:23 pm by Stan

In light of the coup attempt in progress in Ecuador at this very moment, I am posting the 2nd draft of a blog-book on the coup last year in Honduras. Patience. I’ll put some up, tidy it, then put up some more. But this is not a time to sit on something that shows the [...]

Canada, Honduras and the Coup d’Etat
Hundreds of thousands of Hondurans have protested the coup, denouncing the military, the local oligarchy and the US as the main perpetrators of Zelaya's removal.
But the extent to which countries like Italy, South Korea, Taiwan and Canada, all of which have significant trade and investment links with Honduras are connected to the coup has remained largely unexplored.

In Canada, with the exception of a few editorials in the mainstream media, little attention has been paid to what is certainly one of the most important events in the hemisphere over the last decade. While Canada’s links to Central America are much less significant than those of the US, they are still worth exploring.

Honduras

Far from calling for the return of Zelaya to power and condemning the military’s actions, Canada’s good-neighbour ambiguity has ignored the violence unleashed by the coup regime, and the position of organizations such as the UN General Assembly, whose members demanded that Zelaya be allowed to return to the presidency.

Canada also declined to condemn the military and the coup government after massive peaceful resistance marches across Honduras were violently repressed by the coup regime, which also moved to temporarily shut down radio and TV stations critical of the coup. Detentions, torture, disappearances, beatings and murders of anti-coup activists have continued unabated since the coup.

On November 29, the de facto government presided over the country's regularly scheduled presidential elections. Dr. Juan Almendares, former presidential candidate and ex-rector of the Autonomous University of Honduras, calls the November elections a "second coup."

"We are faced with a situation that’s very delicate, where there was a military coup, where a president is named, and then there is a second coup, which was the election, the fraudulent election," he said in an interview at his clinic in Tegucigalpa.

Almendares points out that the same soldiers that have beaten, tortured and killed Hondurans were responsible for guarding the ballot boxes on November 29.

"There is no doubt that there was fraud, because they were illegitimate elections," said Almendares.

Regardless, Canada’s Junior Foreign Minister Peter Kent’s praise for the country's controversial elections was glowing.

“While Sunday’s elections were not monitored by international organizations such as the Organization of American States, we are encouraged by reports from civil society organizations that there was a strong turnout for the elections, that they appear to have been run freely and fairly and that there was no major violence,” said Kent.
Canada alone in opposing the return of Zelaya in Honduras; here ... 


 USW Canada: USW’s Global Union Condemns Military Coup in Honduras