"Don’t even hear the murmur of a prayer…." — Brother Bob
Illness and other aggravations have hindered the blogivating of late, so below are some choice items from other quarters that are well worth your attention.
The Children’s Crusade
Andy Worthington tells the truly horrendous story of Omar Khadr, who was taken captive as a child by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and has now spent eight years in the lower depths of the American gulag. He is now being "tried" in the kangaroo "tribunals" of the Bush-Obama Continuum, under arbitrarily concocted, illogical "laws" whose cruel absurdity would shame a Stalinist show trial, including this arbitary ruling by the Department of Defense: “a detainee may be convicted of murder in violation of the law of war even if they did not actually violate the law of war.” You must read the whole piece to see the abysmal depravity that now reigns supreme throughout the highest, most respectable reaches of the bipartisan American estabishment.
Uncomfortably Numb
Chris Hedges tells a few home truths about the state of the union, in the aptly titled, "No One Cares":
We are approaching a decade of war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq is in its eighth year. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands more Afghans and Pakistani civilians have been killed. Millions have been driven into squalid displacement and refugee camps. Thousands of our own soldiers and Marines have died or been crippled physically and psychologically. We sustain these wars, which have no real popular support, by borrowing trillions of dollars that can never be repaid, even as we close schools, states go into bankruptcy, social services are cut, our infrastructure crumbles, tens of millions of Americans are reduced to poverty, and real unemployment approaches 17 percent. Collective, suicidal inertia rolls us forward toward national insolvency and the collapse of empire. And we do not protest. The peace movement, despite the heroic efforts of a handful of groups such as Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Green Party and Code Pink, is dead. No one cares.
The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military. Liberals, whose children are more often to be found in elite colleges than the Marine Corps, did not fight the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the dismantling of our manufacturing base. They did nothing when the Democrats gutted welfare two years later and stood by as our banks were turned over to Wall Street speculators. They signed on, by supporting the Clinton and Obama Democrats, for the corporate rape carried out in the name of globalization and endless war, and they ignored the plight of the poor. And for this reason the poor have little interest in the moral protestations of liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate assault on workers and their families.
Our passivity has resulted, however, in much more than imperial adventurism and a permanent underclass. A slow-motion coup by a corporate state has cemented into place a neofeudalism in which there are only masters and serfs. And the process is one that cannot be reversed through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politics.
Outsourcing Pain for Insider Profit
From Corrente comes the shocking news that Barack Obama has put the voracious foxes of privilege and profit in charge of the henhouse of entitlement programs. The Correnthians point to a piece by James Ridgeway:
When Obama’s new deficit commission gets going, it intends to be “partnering“–in the words of executive director Bruce Reed – with outside groups. Among them will be the foundation run by Wall Street billionaire Peter G. Peterson, who on Wednesday will upstage the president with his own fiscal summit in Washington. Obama insists he is keeping an open mind about how to deal with the deficit and national debt–but as I’ve written before, he’s already stacked his own commission with people who lean heavily toward one particular solution: cutting entitlements. And now he is working hand-in-glove with a wealthy private organization whose central purpose is to cut Social Security and Medicare. Talk about foregone conclusions.
Not just foregone, but foreordained, as anyone who noted the herd of Big Money moose that Candidate Obama had gathered around him during his run for the White House could have foreseen. (Step forward, Arthur Silber and Pam Martens!)
Partners in Crime
As Dan Kovalik reports, the "genocidal democracy" in Colombia continues to rage on, with even more American help than ever from the progressive Peace Laureate in the White House. With up to 150,000 "extrajudicial killings" by state forces and their proxies, the Obama administration is hugging the berserkers even tighter:
Father Giraldo, citing new estimates by Colombia’s own Prosecutor General, has now shattered those original estimates, announcing that the Prosecutor General is currently investigating 150,000 extrajudicial killings by the paramilitary groups – killings which took place between the late 1980’s and the current time. … [Yet] even as the U.S. has provided Colombia with massive amounts of assistance – most of it military, of course – Colombia has continued to slip deeper and deeper into poverty, with 43% of its population now living in poverty and 23% living in "extreme poverty." As the Washington Post explained, Colombia is "the only major country in Latin America in which the gap between the rich and poor has increased in recent years, according to a report by the UN Economic Commission on Latin America."
Of course, as Father Giraldo noted … this is all according to Washington’s plan to make Colombia a compliant country open to unchecked exploitation by U.S. companies with an endless well of hunger for Colombia’s vast reserves of oil, coal, fruits, flowers and precious metals and gems, as well as for a desperate workforce willing to accept barely-subsistent wages.
With President Obama continuing to solidify the U.S.’s relationship with Colombia through a new deal which will give the U.S. access to 7 military bases, and through a Free Trade Agreement which Obama is now pushing, despite his campaign pledges to oppose it, this deadly game plan continues unabated. Only massive resistance in this country can end such destructive foreign policies.
Well, it would end such destructive policies — except for the fact that, as noted above, no one cares. After all, there has not been a single objection raised among our great and good — or the public at large — against Obama’s own embrace of "extrajudicial killing" of American citizens (and anyone else on earth our elite want to kill). So what’s a few more — or a hundred more — or 150,00 more — assassinated peasants?