Wednesday, January 27, 2010

State of the Union Where's The Change Obama? :Perpetual War Kowtowing To Religious Right and Ultra Conservatives & Pentagon etc.

UPDATE: 1:01 PM ,Jan. 27, 2010

"Our God Against Their God"-Crusades continue
Trijicon Biblical references On US Military Rifles:

"Rifle known in the US military as"The Spiritually Transformed Fire-Arm of Jesus Christ"




James Cameron's AVATAR a critique of American Imperialism & symbiotic relationship between the military and Big Corporations ( which are now to be treated in Law as persons)



US Media hyping news of Al Qaeda Preparing for an attack on United States or on its overseas installations or troops etc.

How many times have the Media and the US intelligence community been involved in this bogus threats. So is Obama also part of the Military Industrial Complex. This is what he gets for surrounding himself with Hawks and those who have financial stake in ramping-up the US War Machine. The more fighting the more money to be made by the War Profiteers.

Graph below of US Government Spending in which the lion's share goes to the military -& the private contractors from Halliburton, Kellogg Brown and Root, & Other Corporate War Profiteers and of course the overpaid Christian Crusaders such as Blackwater XE Services & other mercenaries.

Today's Topics

Where's the change?

*President Obama has not yet set up an official inquiry into the wrongdoing, illegal activities and the breaching of US laws, the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights and other basic tenets of American jurisprudence besides International Laws and Agreements which are supposed to be treated as having the force of any Domestic Laws- ie torture, renditions, indefinite detention, abuse of POWs and civilians in Iraq ,Afghanistan and Pakistan ie the Drone Wars

*Obama has ramped up the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan while still threatening Iran and now Yemen. So on how many fronts can America fight.

* The Crusades continue"our God against their God" The US military still a captive of the Evangelical Fundamentalists who are Gung-ho about the war because they believe that the War on Terror is a War on Islam and therefore a continuation of the Christian Crusades


*Health Care reform undermined by phony bipartisanship-Republicans don't want any changes in health Care unless it benefits the Private Health Care industry- HMOs, Insurance companies, Big Pharma -some believe President Obama could still turn this around???


*Obama administration gives billions away to Wall Street while having little left over to help average Americans

(Why didn't he just let some of these banks and other financial institutions fail-I thought according to Capitalism it is the fit that survive and no company or corporation would stoop so low as to take a handout from the Government???)

The Long Shadow of Katrina Fiasco now hangs over Aid for Haiti

*Our God Against Their God
Rifle known in the US military as"The Spiritually Transformed Fire-Arm of Jesus Christ"
General Order #1 ignored by not just lower ranks of soldiers but also by most of the Top Brass and the Pentagon.
Those in favor of proselytizing claim the complainers about Christianization of the Military should stop causing problems or get out of the US military since they aren't wanted anyway.


"Firearms of Jesus Christ" Expose Prompts Anti-Semitic Hate Mail By Brad Friedman, Brad Blog. Posted January 25, 2010

Following the discovery that American guns were inscribed with biblical passages, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation received anti-Semitic emails.





'Christian' Crusaders and Failures of Intelligence in the US Military By Eileen Fleming

January 25, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Thirty years ago, Glyn Bindon, the founder of Trijicon, a Michigan Defense contractor, instituted the practice of stamping references to New Testament Bible verses on combat rifle sights manufactured for the U.S. military.

Trijicon has now released a statement that they will quit their three decades of practice and also provide the armed forces modification kits to remove the Scripture citations from the 300,000 telescoping sights already in use by the Marines, Army and which are being used to train Afghanistan troops.

Beyond the charges of breaking the American government rule that bars proselytizing by American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, this ABC video clip exposes a thriving Crusader mentality in the US Military and a gross failure of intelligence by Christian’s regarding their own faith.


President Obama is initiating a government spending freeze to be announced at his State of the Union address.

Thom Hartman :Has Obama just become a Herbert Hoover Republican?
& The Two Santa Clause Republican Theory
http://www.thomhartmann.com



A major problem with the spending freeze is that it does not apply to the most wasteful department that is the Department of Defense . In a militarized state the budget for the military is sacrosanct and therefore untouchable as Glenn Greenwald in his most recent article.So once again there is little hope of substantive change to reign in military spending no matter how wasteful.

" The Sanctity of Military Spending " by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com via CommonDreams.org/ Jan. 26, 2010

The facts about America's bloated, excessive, always-increasing military spending are now well-known. The U.S. spends almost as much on military spending as the entire rest of the world combined, and spends roughly six times more than the second-largest spender, China. Even as the U.S. sunk under increasingly crippling levels of debt over the last decade, defense spending rose steadily, sometimes precipitously. That explosion occurred even as overall military spending in the rest of the world decreased, thus expanding the already-vast gap between our expenditures and the world's. As one "defense" spending watchdog group put it: "The US military budget was almost 29 times as large as the combined spending of the six 'rogue' states (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $14.65 billion." To get a sense for how thoroughly military spending dominates our national budget, consider this chart showing where Americans' tax revenue goes:


and he concludes:

The clear fact is that, no matter how severe are our budgetary constraints, military spending and all so-called "security-related programs" are off-limits for any freezes, let alone decreases. Moreover, the modest spending freeze to be announced by Obama tomorrow is just the start; the Washington consensus has solidified and is clearly gearing up for major cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, with the dirty work to be done by an independent "deficit commission." It's time for "everyone" to sacrifice and suffer some more -- as long as "everyone" excludes our vast military industry, the permanent power factions inside the Pentagon and intelligence community, our Surveillance and National Security State, and the imperial policies of perpetual war which feed them while further draining the lifeblood out of the country.

The Washington Post is hyping the same report. Apparently, it's breaking news -- meriting screaming red-alert headlines -- that Al Qaeda would like to ("aims to") acquire WMDs and use them against the U.S. But we should all try to remain a little calm, at least. I'm sure if we just buy some more fighter jets, create some better underground bombs, invade a few more Muslim countries, keep more Muslims imprisoned forever with no charges, give the Pentagon, the CIA and their private contractors a lot more unaccounted-for cash and stay out of their way, expand our domestic spying networks even further through private sector telecom contracts, pour tens of billions of dollars more into the coffers of our Middle East client states, and kill a few more civilians with drones, this problem will be handled. It's just a matter of making sure we bulk up our military budget -- and Look Forward, not Backward to what was done in the past -- and we'll be able to Stay Safe from this Terrorist-WMD menace.

As for the deficit, no need to worry about that. We can just freeze programs for national parks and cut Social Security and Medicare


So where's Obama's inquiry about Iraq and those who lied to the American people to go to War with Iraq. Where are the indictments of the members of the George W. Bush Regime and for its Reign of Terror for their illegal and their traitorous actions for torture, renditions, kangaroo courts, cruel and unusual punishment, the unnecessary invasion of Iraq causing 5,000 US dead and half a million or more Iraqis killed

In Britain they are carrying out an official inquiry into the lies and propaganda produced by Tony Blair's government to make the case for a pre-emptive attack on the sovereign nation of Iraq which was in fact a War Crime and a Crime Against Humanity.

"Intelligence on WMD 'taken out of context', Iraq inquiry hears Gordon Brown offers to give evidence to Chilcot before election" By Michael Savage, at Independent .UK ,Jan. 21, 2010

Intelligence outlining the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was taken out of context when it was used as part of the Government's case for invading Iraq, a senior member of Tony Blair's intelligence team has said.

Sir David Omand, who was Mr Blair's security co-ordinator, said that including the claim that Saddam had missiles that he could launch within 45 minutes in the now-infamous September 2002 dossier on Iraq was "asking for trouble". If all the intelligence on Iraq had been published, the public reaction would have been "Is that it?", he said.

In a wide-ranging condemnation of the document, given during his evidence to the Iraq inquiry, Sir David said that the manner in which intelligence was used to make "a case" for taking action against Iraq was a "big mistake". He revealed that the 45-minute claim was included to offer "local colour", adding that such a dossier should never be produced again.

Sir David said that Mr Blair should not have been allowed to state that it was "beyond doubt" that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), a claim made in the former Prime Minister's foreword to the document. He said that the foreword was only shown to security officials "fairly late in the day" and should have been issued as a separate document. "My memory is that I didn't pay that much attention to this bit of it, which was a mistake," he said. "I totally failed to spot the potential problem that would arise."


HAITI

Max Blumenthal provides more background on Haiti's political History especially the Aristide period 1992 when the infamous extreme right winger Jesse Helms and his buddies created a group to undermine President Aristide & succeeded in doing so -President Clinton allowed Aristide back into power but only after agreeing to a free trade agreement giving the US companies free reign- meanwhile the tariff on rice was eliminated which devastated Haiti's largest export and left a large portion of the population destitute-

Max Blumenthal on Haiti's political history-Thom Hartman
http://www.thomhartmann.com


The US government appears to have learned little from its fiasco in Louisiana during Katrina. There too there were exaggerated stories about "looting", murders, rape and violence in general which was Good Business for Blackwater and other Private Contractors.

Because of the exaggerated claims of violence in Haiti by the US Mainstream Media and the American military and intelligence community and some of the Hawks surrounding Obama aid has been slow to get to those in need in Haiti.

So priority has been given to military operations and for military planes landing in Haiti- then come official visits for Photo Ops including US government officials and famous people such as John Travolta -and then foreign aid comes in last . Meanwhile most American soldiers are underutilized because instead of helping with aid distribution they are patrolling the streets looking for so called Looters and thugs while ordinary Haitians die from lack of food, water, shelter or medical aid.

" Hey Corporate Media, "Looting" Is a Racist Code Word" by Chloe Cockburn, Blog of Rights,January 25, 2010.

"Aftershock rattles Haiti, but aid flow ramps up" Reuters Jan. 20,2010

LOCALIZED VIOLENCE

Landline telephones in Port-au-Prince were still down, but two wireless networks had spotty service, said U.S. Federal Communications Commission officials helping with the relief.

While military escorts are needed to deliver relief, the United Nations said security problems were mainly in areas considered "high risk" before the disaster.

"I have seen no indications that leads me to believe that the security situation is deteriorating," said General Floriano Peixoto, chief of the Brazilian U.N. peacekeeping contingent.

Brazilian peacekeepers have helped Haitian police recapture some of the 4,000 prison inmates who escaped after the quake.

To speed the arrival of aid and stem looting and violence, the U.N. Security Council has unanimously agreed to temporarily add 2,000 U.N. troops and 1,500 police to the 9,000-member peacekeeping mission in Haiti.

Around 12,000 U.S. military personnel are on the ground in Haiti and on ships offshore including the U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort, which arrived on Wednesday to provide essential capacity for complex surgeries.


and so it goes,
GORD.

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