George W. Bush: Assclown or Fucktard?'s topics - tribe.net

NYT: Obama admires Bush Sr.: ''no complaints about handling of Desert Storm"

2008-05-17T18:39:20Z

Support for Empire is support for Empire -- any way you cut it. There's a reason Corporate American bankrolled Obama's campaign
...
**************
"I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush. I don't have a lot of complaints about their handling of Desert Storm."

Source:
- Barack Obama, from David Brooks article, "Obama Admires Bush, NY Times, May 16, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/opinion/16brooks.html?em&ex=1211169600&en=1577a90ae5048a04&ei=5087%0A

See:
Clinton and Obama: Failures on War and Global Warming
by STEVEN ARGUE
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/02/10/18478172.php

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CBS Coverage of Anti-War Strike

2008-05-02T21:03:35Z

CBS Coverage of Anti-War Strike

West Coast Dockworkers Strike Against Iraq War
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKzLEjzvtfM&feature=related

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Poll: Bush highest disapproval rating in history

2008-05-02T15:20:14Z

I just couldn't help but share this story!

My favorite line:
"He is more unpopular than Richard Nixon was just before he resigned from the presidency in August 1974."

Read on!
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/01/bush.poll/index.html
~~~~~~~~~~

Poll: Bush most unpopular in modern history
Posted: 02:30 PM ET

New poll numbers show bad news for president Bush.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — A new poll suggests that George W. Bush is the most unpopular president in modern American history.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush his handling his job as president.

"No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup poll; in fact, this is the first time that any president's disapproval rating has cracked the 70 percent mark," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

"Bush's approval rating, which stands at 28 percent in our new poll, remains better than the all-time lows set by Harry Truman and Richard Nixon (22 percent and 24 percent, respectively) but even those two presidents never got a disapproval rating in the 70s," Holland added. "The previous all-time record in CNN or Gallup polling was set by Truman, 67 percent disapproval in January 1952."

CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider adds, "He is more unpopular than Richard Nixon was just before he resigned from the presidency in August 1974." President Nixon's disapproval rating in August 1974 stood at 67 percent.

The poll also indicates that support for the war in Iraq has never been lower. Thirty percent of those questioned favored the war while 68 percent opposed the conflict.

"Americans are growing more pessimistic about the war," Holland said. "In January, nearly half believed that things were going well for the U.S. in Iraq; now that figure has dropped to 39 percent."

The numbers on the Iraq war come on the five-year anniversary of President Bush's "mission accomplished" moment onboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, when Bush proclaimed that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

The record low support for the war in a CNN poll could be one reason behind the president's unpopularity, but it probably is not the only one.

"Support for the war, the assessment of the economy and approval of Mr. Bush are all about the same — bad," Schneider said.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted by telephone from Monday through Wednesday, with 1,008 adult Americans questioned. The poll's sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

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Join the new “Cool Earth Party” tribe

2008-04-18T20:39:31Z

Join the new “Cool Earth Party” tribe

The Democrats and Republicans are the paid agents of the oil, armament, and insurance industries. Their continued rule of America will assure a future of more imperialist war, a healthcare system that doesn't work, and no meaningful action on global warming (the single biggest threat to the future of humanity and a healthy planet).

The Cool Earth Party is being established on the principles of revolutionary democratic socialism. We call for an end to the dictatorial power of the wealthy through the nationalization of major industries and for the establishment of a planned economy run to meet human and environmental needs. This socialist society must be established within the framework of full democratic freedoms and multi-party proportional democracy. To be truly Democratic all parties running in elections will be legally guaranteed equal time in the media, big campaign spending will be outlawed, and electronic voting machines (which are presently used to rig American elections) will be eliminated.

Upon taking power the Cool Earth Party will establish a system of socialized medicine for the United States, end all U.S. military occupations of other countries, end U.S. military aid to repressive governments, and nationalize the auto and energy industries to carry out immediate emergency measures to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Cool Earth Party
http://tribes.tribe.net/coolearth

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No to Republican Ron Paul, How We Can Really End the War

2008-01-12T07:38:56Z

"I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don't want, and get it." Socialist Anti-war Candidate Eugene Debs (who garnered nearly a million votes while he sat in prison for opposition to U.S. involvement in World War One).

"Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action" wrote Ron Paul, who voted against the renewal of the Voting Rights Act in Congress, the act that gave Blacks the right to vote, quote from his “Ron Paul Newsletter”.

No to NYC Indymedia Censorship, How We Can Really End the War

By STEVEN ARGUE

Claiming that only an alliance with Ron Paul conservatives can end the war, New York City Indymedia volunteers have allowed blatant slander against Liberation News and have censored attempts to respond to those lies. Among the slanders posted were accusations that Liberation News is opposed to Ron Paul because we support Hillary Clinton and her healthcare program. I tried posting the following response, but it was censored on the site:

Ron Paul supporter: “it's pointed out that yes Ron Paul is a racist but Stevies candidate Hillary is even worse.”

Steven Argue: “I don’t support Hillary Clinton. Never have, but you don’t listen. This is pure slander.”

They then repeat their slander that I support Hillary Clinton for her healthcare plan saying, “It's pointed out that Stevie is willing to sacrifice liberty for a bogus health care plan”

Steven Argue: “Hillary Clinton opposes both socialized medicine and single payer healthcare. She supports insurance company healthcare, the kind that is killing untold millions in the United States. This is one of many reasons I oppose her.”

“And no, I don't see Clinton as a first step towards socialized medicine. Her promise to force people to buy insurance has nothing in common with socialized medicine, nor partially socialized medicine (i.e. single payer). I’m clear about this in my article:

The Case for Socialized Medicine in the United States, and the Struggle to Achieve It, By STEVEN ARGUE
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/01/02/18469739.php

“As for Ron Paul, he wants to privatize everything, including public education, Social Security, and Medicare, eliminate the Voting Rights Act and Roe V Wade in the name of "states rights", signed on to the "Marriage Protection Act", would eliminate every environmental and labor protection, etc. etc. etc. This is a prescription for the slavery of the majority to protect the “liberty” of a tiny handful of capitalists to exploit.

“I oppose both Hillary Clinton and Ron Paul. But I’ve already made that clear as being my position. These accusations are slanderous.”

Ron Paul supporter: “Then Stevie moves the goal posts again. Waaa. He's being censored.”

Steven Argue: “I repeatedly posted a response to the slander that I support Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan, and the response is censored every time. I have no motive to make that up. I mentioned it because I wanted people to see my response. Frankly, I’m quite surprised it is happening. Let’s see if this one goes up.”

That response, as I feared, was also censored. Revealing the reasons behind the Ron Paul censorship at the site, the Ron Paul backers posted the following:

“Get off your sectarianism.

“What you don’t get is that there are only two ways we're going to end the occupation of Iraq:

“1.) A recession, and a bad one.

“2.) Convincing the vast majority of conservative Americans it's wrong. Ron Paul reaches these people. The guy with the Free Mumia shirt selling the "Socialist Worker" doesn't.

“To get anything done in a democracy you're going to have to work with people you don't agree with and people you might not even like. People in grown up countries do this all the time. They're called "coalitions".

“The Labor Party in Israel, for example, makes alliances with the ultra orthodox. The Liberal Democrats have made common cause with the Tories in the UK. The left made common cause with Vicente Fox to get the PRI out of power in Mexico.

“It's only in the puritan USA where everybody thinks you have to like all your political allies and agree with them on everything.”

Besides the fact that the majority of Americans already oppose the war; and besides the fact that these points show a total lack of understanding of the bourgeois nature of the coalitions in the countries mentioned; and besides showing a total lack of understanding of what it will take to end the war (I discuss this at the end of the article); New York City Indymedia’s lack of confidence in the ability of people to change has caused them to build a coalition with a capitalist politician who is a racist, homophobic, anti-worker, anti-environmental, bible thumping, sexist, anti-labor, anti-poor, free-market privatization fanatic. On top of that, they censor the left in order to achieve that coalition.

While a Ron Paul presidency would likely end the war, at what price would this come?

Ron Paul uses the term liberty a lot, so let’s take a look at what he means by liberty.

The liberty Ron Paul demands is:

The liberty of the capitalists to exploit without labor laws and environmental protections;

The "state’s right” to prevent Blacks from voting without the interference of the Voting Rights Act (voted against its renewal in Congress);

The "states right" to ban abortions without the interference of Roe v Wade;

The freedom of the government to deny same-sex rights (was an original sponsor of the "Marriage Protection Act");

The freedom of children not to attend schools (would abolish public education);

The freedom of the elderly and disabled to starve (would abolish Social Security);

The freedom of the sick to die (would abolish Medicare);

The freedom of the U.S. to destroy the planet without even the most basic limits on carbon emissions (opposes signing on to Kyoto and all other carbon limitations);

This is, in short, the liberty of a wealthy minority to make their money from the exploitation of labor and the environment with zero interference from labor laws, environmental laws, and the IRS. While his program is liberty for a minority of rich white heterosexual males, it is slavery for the majority.

Simply put, Ron Paul’s promises to end the war are not enough when one looks at the fact that he would eliminate two centuries of hard fought social progress in the United States.

Some of the anti-war backers of Ron Paul argue that we don’t have to worry about these things because Ron Paul will never be elected. They think that backing his campaign is a way to win over his supporters. What is clear is that such arguments could only come from people who are utterly lost and rudderless, which leaves unclear the question of what they are winning Ron Paul supporters over to. They are supporting a candidate whose program is George Wallace on crack cocaine! Yet, the ultimate absurdity is the fact that they are backing a candidate whose most reassuring feature is that he won’t get elected! Is this point lost on these people? And is the chance that their support may help him get elected a chance they really want to take? Nobody thought that third party candidate Jesse (the body) Ventura would get elected in Minnesota either, but he was, and as soon as he was elected he discarded his libertarian values on drug legalization and prostitution and instead proceeded to carrying out attacks on labor and carrying out disastrous cuts in education and other social spending.

Others argue that if Ron Paul is elected, he will easily be able to pull the troops out of Iraq, but congress will block him on the other issues. There is no doubt that they would block parts of Ron Paul’s program in order to prevent the social unrest such measures would cause, but with the ruling class’s desire to step up the exploitation of labor and the environment through eliminating regulation and through privatization, there can be little doubt that if he is able to maintain his presidency without being shot, aspects of Ron Paul’s domestic program would be implemented.

Today, in the United States we have two rightwing capitalist parties that rule. The activists who run New York Indymedia are floating around utterly lost and rudderless. On the one hand, their anarchist philosophy prohibits them from putting forward their own leadership or supporting socialist candidates; and on the other hand, they are stuck in the “real politic” of supporting “lesser evil” capitalist politicians. It is these characteristics that made them susceptible to being swept up on the Ron Paul band wagon. Despite their “libertarian” values of “freedom”, they have now taken this to the point where they are even willing to censor critics of Ron Paul on their website.

While Ron Paul, the only Republican candidate opposed to the war, is not worth supporting, the front running Democrats are also very bad. Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, are all pro-war. Both Edwards and Clinton voted for the war. Obama supporters claim that Obama never supported the war. While Obama was not yet in the Senate at the time of the Iraq war vote, Obama, Edwards, and Clinton have all voted for war appropriations. This puts them all in the position of having supported the war. Over a million Iraqis are dead due to the U.S. invasion and occupation, and billions of dollars have been squandered. Obama, by helping pay for the war, has his hands in this mass murder just as Clinton and Edwards do.

Obama’s Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007 supposedly would have begun troop withdrawal in May 2007. Yet, it didn't call for full nor immediate withdrawal. In addition, under the bill, the withdrawal could be halted if the Iraqi government met a number of criteria laid out by the Bush administration. These included a broad number of things such as changes in the use of oil revenue, government reforms, an end to sectarian violence, and other economic and reconstruction criteria. In Obama’s bill we have a crystal ball into the future. The excuses laid out in the bill will be heard once again as Obama, Clinton, or Edwards explain why they are keeping the troops in Iraq for their entire presidency; that is unless other actions are taken by the people to stop the war.

This brings us to the fundamental question of how to stop the war. If we are to listen to the Ron Paul censors / supporters at NYC Indymedia the only thing we can do to stop the war is support Ron Paul or hope for (pray for?) economic collapse. Yet, this ignores other less damaging possibilities. These include the troops refusing to fight, a general strike, strikes against the movement of war materials, or socialist revolution.

1. The troops refusing to fight. This worked in the struggle to end the U.S. aggression against Vietnam. It was the socialist movement who were the primary organizers of the anti-Vietnam War movement. That movement, immediately after the government’s murders at Kent State in May 1970 had 8 million students out on strike, and some Universities, such a Berkley, were taken over by students and faculty as anti-war universities. After May 1970, the majority of those drafted were already opposed to the war before they got to Vietnam. Refusal to fight was widespread, and the fragging of pro-war officers was common. Nixon could not continue to wage a war with soldiers who refused to fight. This, along with the heroic resistance of the Vietnamese, brought an end to the war in Vietnam.

Troops refusing to fight also helped bring an end to Russian involvement in the First World War, and helped bring down two pro-war governments in 1917.

2. A general strike or strikes against the movement of war materials. Strikes with such political demands have a long history of success. France has many good social programs because the workers there were willing to shut down their country to achieve them; and they are still willing to do the same to protect those hard fought gains.

3. Socialist revolution. The October Russian Revolution achieved an end to Russian involvement in the First World War. This was a good thing, despite the undemocratic nature of the revolution. Learning from those lessons, Liberation News opposes the dictatorial system of one party rule and raises the banner of revolutionary democratic socialism, while at the same time learning from many of the revolutionary strategies of Lenin and Trotsky.

Protests, pickets, information distribution, building a socialist movement, and answering pro-Ron Paul and pro-Obama-Clinton-Edwards propaganda all help towards building the momentum needed in achieving the kinds of actions that can end the war. Putting support behind Ron Paul only helps an extreme rightwing movement achieve the mantel of leadership for an anti-war sentiment that already represents majority public opinion. In addition, backing a guy like Ron Paul who just crossed a picket line to appear on Jay Lenno’s “Tonight Show” destroys the anti-war strategy of reaching out to the working class, as does backing a racist candidate like Ron Paul hurt the ability to reach out to the multi-racial working class.

No to the Democrats and Republicans!

U.S. Out of Iraq Now!

No to Insurance Company Healthcare, For Socialized Medicine!

Save the Planet, Curb Carbon Emissions Now!

Vote Socialist, Build the Labor Movement, Build the Anti-War Movement, Build the Socialist Movement.

[Note, small changes were made to the response that was censored at NYC Indymedia to make it more readable within the format of this article. Those wishing to see the original version will be given it upon request. Likewise, anyone wishing further sources will be provided them upon request]

This is an article of Liberation News, a low volume newsletter, Subscribe free!
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

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The Case for Socialized Medicine in the United States, and the Struggle to Achieve It

2008-01-03T01:40:21Z

The Case for Socialized Medicine in the United States,
and the Struggle to Achieve It

By Steven Argue

As someone without healthcare, I support the idea of socialized medicine for the United States. Socialized medicine will bring healthcare to everyone. Besides legitimate self-interest, my personal position comes from being an advocate for social justice with a vision of an egalitarian society. As such, I not only see universal access to healthcare as a basic human right, I also see that socialized healthcare will mitigate some of the racial and class inequalities in our society. In addition, socialized medicine is cheaper than the costs of current system of for-profit capitalist healthcare. It also looses the profit motive of insurance companies to deny needed procedures. From this knowledge, and these personal convictions, I am strongly in favor of socialized healthcare in the United States like that established in Europe as well as established in Cuba with the 1959 revolution. Short of a fully socialized healthcare system I see that the single payer system (i.e. socialized health insurance run by the government), like in Canada, would be a significant step forward for the United States.

In the United States there’s a lot of confusion on terminology. With a system of socialized medicine hospitals are directly owned by the government and doctors are government employees. It’s a universal system where everyone is covered and all health care is paid for by the government. Under a single payer health care plan, health care is universal and paid for by the government, but it is a system still largely based on private hospitals and private physicians.

Two main arguments are encountered when discussing socialized medicine. One argument is that it will cost too much. The second argument is that socialized medicine doesn’t work to provide adequate healthcare. Neither argument stands up to scrutiny.
Socialized medicine and single payer medicine actually cost less than the United State’s current for profit capitalist health care system. Both statistics and common sense back this up.

According to statistics from 2003, the United States spends $5,711 per capita per year for health care while Canada spends about half of that, $2,998 per capita per year (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2007). In fact, the costs per capita are much cheaper in every other developed country with some form of socialized healthcare. In other examples Sweden spends $2,745, Germany $2,983, and the United Kingdom $2,317 (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2007). In addition, Cuba , with their well known socialized healthcare system, spent only $251 per capita on healthcare in 2006 (United Nations World Health Organization, 2006).

The reason socialized insurance is much cheaper and more efficient than private health insurance is because single payer eliminates the health insurance racket with all of its waste in capitalist profits, paperwork, and overpaid CEOs. In addition, such insurance practices as routinely denying needed medical procedures to keep profits up are eliminated, thus reducing capitalism as being the cause of death.

Socialized healthcare does work. It is working very well in Cuba. Cuban life expectancy in 2006 was 77.6 years, while the life expectancy of the United States for that same year was slightly less, 77.5 years (United Nations Development Program, 2006). It is interesting that poor Cuba with a history of poverty before their 1959 socialist revolution, and a devastating U.S. imposed economic blockade since, is able to provide good healthcare for everyone through socialized medicine. Cuba, unlike the United States, does not let people die in the emergency rooms without treatment, turn sick people away from receiving healthcare because they lack insurance, or allow insurance companies to decide, based on profit motive, whether the insured actually receive the care they paid for and need. The Cubans have done this by taking the profit out of illness and injury and providing healthcare as a basic human right.

Canada, like Cuba, has a higher life expectancy than the United States. In 2004 the life expectancy of Canada hit 80.2 years (Statistics Canada, 2004). With Canada’s socialized health insurance system, like Cuba’s socialized medical system, every single person is covered. In the United States 45.8 million Americans do not have health insurance (U.S. Department of Health and human Services, 2005).

On another key indicator of health, infant mortality, the United States is also nearly the worst in the developed world, only worse than the recently turned capitalist country of Latvia (Green, 2006). The infant mortality rate in the United States in 2002 was 7.0 deaths before the age of one per every 1,000 live births (Center for Disease Control, 2005). In comparison, other advanced countries with forms of socialized medicine and socialized health insurance have lower infant mortality. This includes rates per thousand births in Japan of 3.2, Germany with 4.4, Italy with 4.5, France with 4.6, and the United Kingdom with 5.6 (Treasury Board of Canada, 2003).

Cuba, with their system of socialized medicine has an infant mortality rate of 6.2 per thousand live births, a rate much lower the United States rate of 7.0 per every thousand live births (BBC News, 2002). This is also lower than every other Latin American country (BBC News, 2002).

The only other country in the Americas with an infant mortality lower than Cuba is Canada with their system of socialized health insurance. The Canadian infant mortality rate in the year 2000 was 5.3 (Treasury Board of Canada, 2003).

In addition, a United Nations report on the status of Native Americans in Canada has credited Canada’s relatively recently established socialized health insurance system with drastically reducing an extremely high infant mortality among Native Americans (United Nations, 1993). In 1979, that death rate for Canadian Native Americans was 27.6 per thousand live births, but by 1999 it had dropped to 8.0 deaths per thousand live births (Treasury Board of Canada, 2003). These improvements coincide with Canada’s passage of the Canada Health Act in 1984 that brought their socialized insurance system to the entire country at that time (Health Canada, 2002).

For Blacks in the United States between 1995 and 2002, the infant mortality rate was 13.9, more than double the rate of 5.9 for whites in the same time period (Center for Disease Control, 2005). Canadian statistics are a strong indication that a socialized insurance system in the United States could both decrease the infant mortality rate of the general population and dramatically decrease the infant mortality of oppressed and impoverished minorities such as Blacks, as it did for Canadian Native Americans.

The statistics show that socialized medicine is cheaper, saves lives, and helps alleviate class and racial inequalities in healthcare.

Prospects for Socialized and Single Payer Medicine

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has declared, "It's time to provide quality affordable health care for every American, and I intend to be the president who accomplishes that goal finally for our country" (CNN.com). This is the same promise that Bill Clinton made when he ran for office in 1992.

After being elected, in Bill Clinton’s first State of the Union address, he said, “And on any given day, over 37 million Americans -- most of them working people and their little children -- have no health insurance at all.” Yet, despite Bill Clinton’s campaign promise of universal health care, his defeated proposal to congress would not have provided health care to every American, nor did it address the other fundamental problems of private health insurance. After his health care proposal was defeated, Clinton dropped the issue. In fact, the Bill Clinton administration was opposed to a bill for single payer health care introduced by Wellstone, Conyers, and Mcdermott that actually would have provided universal health care. By the time Bill Clinton left office, an additional three million more Americans were uninsured.

Today Republican candidate Mitt Romney has declared of Hillary Clinton’s promised health care plan, “It’s a European-style socialized medicine plan, that’s where it leads–and that’s the wrong direction for America” (Shulte).

Yet, unfortunately, Clinton’s plan has nothing in common with socialized medicine, neither of the European variety, nor the Canadian single payer. Her plan is to keep the broken and expensive capitalist system of health care, a system that keeps the insurance industry in charge of life and death questions of whether or not we receive health care when we need it.

In addition, the Clinton plan would make the purchase of health insurance by America’s uninsured mandatory for those who do not get insurance from their employer and who do not qualify for government assistance. Yet, the problem for America’s nearly 50 million uninsured is not that we don’t want to have insurance, the problem is that we can’t afford it. Clinton’s plan of making us criminals for not purchasing health insurance will not resolve this fundamental problem.

By making the purchase of health insurance mandatory Clinton makes the false claim that hers is a plan for universal health insurance as compared to the plan of Obama. Neither would provide universal health care. John Edwards has taken the absurdity of forced insurance purchases one step further, detailing a plan that would include the necessity of showing proof of health insurance at the time of paying taxes, with penalties for those who do not provide that proof.

In a similar fashion as Mitt Romney, Republican contender Rudolph Giuliani has extended false accusations of socialized medicine to other Democratic hopefuls stating, “Whether it’s HillaryCare or ObamaCare or EdwardsCare, the idea that it’s not socialized medicine is a trick. It’s a massive growth of government control of medicine” (Rovner).

The truth, however, is that the only presidential candidates of the Democrat and Republican Party that are for single payer health care are Democrats Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, and none are for full socialized medicine. The other major candidates, who oppose single payer, enjoy massive contributions from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

In addition to being excluded from money, the Kucinich and Gravel campaigns have also been excluded from debates. Most recently, for the 2008 election, CNN and the Des Moines Register made the decision to exclude both Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel from a key debate in Iowa. Yet Biden and Dodd, who are behind Kucinich in the national polls, but who reject single payer health care, were allowed into the debate. This kind of undemocratic shenanigan is to be expected of CNN, a corporate media source that was forced to publicly apologize for a number of lies they told about Michael Moore’s pro-socialized medicine film “Sicko”.

While Kucinich has alienated the corporate power structure with his stand for single payer health care, he has also alienated much of his natural base by voting for Bush’s “War on Terror”, voting for the U.S. travel ban against Cuba, and by voting against Mumia Abu-Jamal.

In 2001 Kucinich voted in favor of the US travel ban against Cuba. The travel ban does not allow U.S. citizens to spend any money in Cuba, basically making travel to Cuba illegal. It is under the travel ban that Michael Moore has been harassed by the U.S. government for bringing sick 9/11 rescue workers, who were unable to receive medical treatment in the United States, for medical treatment in Cuba. The United States has had hostile relations with Cuba ever since the 1959 Cuban revolution overthrew the U.S. backed Batista dictatorship, nationalized the United Fruit Company owned by the Rockefeller family, ended Jim Crow style racist segregation, and began providing free socialized health care and education.

In contrast to Kucinich’s support for U.S. measures against Cuba, Mumia Abu-Jamal recognizes the gains Cuba has made in areas such as health care. Of the U.S. and Cuban health care systems, Mumia Abu-Jamal stated May 2nd, 2003:

“What about the human right to health care? In the US, you can obtain excellent health care if you can afford it. Cuba, meanwhile, boasts the largest number of doctors per capita on earth. They provide medical care to people all around the world. Indeed, there are more Cuban doctors working in other countries than the UN’s World Heath Organization. Millions of men, women and children in this country have no medical insurance and no real prospect for decent medical care.” (Abu-Jamal 5/2/03)

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a political prisoner in the United States whose trial, according to Amnesty International, was not fair and “did not comply with international justice standards” (Amnesty International). Yet, in 2006 Kucinich voted to condemn the French City of St. Denis for naming a street after Mumia. The resolution boldly proclaimed Mumia’s guilt, despite international recognition of the injustice dished out to Mumia, and despite the fact that the courts are still reviewing the case. Despite the injustice represented by this resolution and despite 31 members of Congress voting against it, Kucinich voted for it.

Showing a similar lack of support for the needs of the people, Kucinich voted for Bush’s so-called “War on Terror”. This was a vote that effectively gave Bush the power to invade any country at any time. That vote could have been used for anything, and was used by Bush to invade Afghanistan. Likewise, despite pretending to be a peace candidate, Kucinich’s calls for a strong and efficient military do not address the fact that the United States is the most aggressive and dangerous nation in the world.

The tremendous lack of judgment on these three votes alone, along with Kucinich’s promotion of the pro-war, anti-single payer health care, and corporate controlled Democrat Party, have alienated the left from Kucinich’s campaign.

Presidential candidate Mike Gravel doesn’t have a recent voting record, but was actively opposed to the Vietnam War in Congress, voting to cut off funding for the war, and helping to release the Pentagon Papers that exposed many wrong doings by the U.S. government in Vietnam. On the issue of health care, Gravel states on his website that he proposes “a universal healthcare system that provides equal medical services to all citizens, paid for by a retail sales tax (a portion of the Progressive Fair tax)” (Gravel website). Yet, sales taxes are not fair taxes. They are regressive taxes that charge the poor a much higher percentage of their income than they charge the rich. While it is true that the rich are not paying their fair share under the current tax system, Gravel’s proposal is even worse.

Sadly for those who think solutions could come from the Democrat Party, Kucinich and Gravel are the best the Democrat Party could produce.

While the mainstream of the American political establishment rejects any form of socialized medicine, all political parties to the left of the Democrats and Republicans support some form of socialized medicine. This is true from the Green Party and Reconstruction Party to the various socialist parties who run candidates, including the Peace and Freedom Party, Socialist Action, Socialist Party, Workers World Party, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Freedom Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, and Socialist Equality Party.

Breaking from the pro-war anti-health care Democrat Party is former Georgia Democratic Congressperson Cynthia McKinney. In a video news release declaring her candidacy for president she says, “The Democrat is no different from their Republican counterparts, eat out of the hands of corrupt lobbyists and feed at the same corporate tough” (McKinney). McKinney is running for president on the Reconstruction Party ticket as well as in the Green Party primaries.

On health care McKinney states, "I've supported every universal single payer health care plan. She goes on to state, “People who rail against `socialized medicine' in Canada and the UK have to explain why life expectancy is longer in Canada and the UK, why infant mortality is lower in Canada and the UK" (Deeth). McKinney further denounces the war in Iraq stating that the money being squandered could be better used on social programs such as rebuilding New Orleans, child nutrition, and health care, stating in part, “one billion dollars a day can provide medical care for the 47 million Americans who don’t have health insurance” (McKinney).

Another Green Party candidate, Kent Mesplay, declares on his website:

“Medical attention is a human right not yet recognized by the United States government. Nearly every other industrialized country on the planet has National Health Care. We are tied with South Africa for last place. In the same manner that we have a socialized military that at best provides for some aspects of our physical security, single payer health insurance is necessary to ensure that all people within our borders receive at least a basic level of medical and dental care.” (Mesplay).

While this may be a good position on single payer health care, it ignores the fact that the U.S. military does not provide physical security to the people of the United States, but is instead used to kill and terrorize the people of the world for the security of the profits of American corporations.

Also supporting single payer health care, Green Party candidate Kat Swift states:

“Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and other prominent Democrats are the greatest obstacle to universal health coverage. Except for a few mavericks like Rep. John Conyers [D-Mich.], who has regularly introduced single-payer bills, Democrats have joined Republicans in favoring HMO and insurance corporations over guaranteed publicly-financed quality health care for every American. It's a safe bet that the 2008 Democratic nominee will -- like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry before them -- follow the same pattern.”

Likewise, Green Party candidate Jared Ball, a Black free-lance journalist and college professor who calls for freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, and all political prisoners states, “Medicine for profit cannot be sustained as a model of managing health care for any progressive society” (Ball).

To the left of the Green Party is Elaine Brown, a former Black Panther Party member and activist for social programs for the poor and for prison reform. On health care she declares herself for, “Full and free health care for everyone, as exists in most civilized countries.”

Elaine Brown was a candidate for nomination as Green Party candidate for president until, on December 28, 2007, she broke with the Green Party, pointing out it was a capitalist Party and accusing the Green Party of racism. In her public statement Brown declared, "In effect, the present Green Party leadership promotes a kinder, gentler capitalism, a moderated racism, an environmentally-sustainable globalism, which I cannot support." On racism in the party she declared she intended to use her campaign “to bring large numbers of blacks and browns into the Party, particularly from the hood and the barrio” but that the Green Party “hierarchy seemed utterly fearful of the prospect of a massive influx of blacks and browns into the Green Party". Brown has given no indication that she now intends to continue her run as a candidate to the left of the Greens.

To the left of the Green Party are socialist candidates that call for full socialized medicine, like in Europe and Cuba, but who also see that single payer health care would be a step forward. These include likely Socialist Equality Party candidate Bill Van Auken, who calls for full socialized medicine, and says of the Canadian Single Payer system as an imperfect form of “socialized medicine”.

Likewise Peace and Freedom Party candidate and Socialist Party USA nominee for vice president, Stewart Alexander states,

“I favor a fully socialized medical care system, with as a first step a single-payer system similar to Medicare, but covering people of all ages. I favor eliminating the "co-pays" that are such a burden, and keep people from seeking needed care. We should take the profit out of the health-care system, and fully fund it. (The money now spent on health care in the USA is about twice as much per person as is spent in Western Europe, with less effective delivery of care. No additional money would actually be needed, but taxes on the wealthy few should be used initially to help fund improvements.) Eventually, I favor a fully-socialized system, funded from the surplus of the socialized economy, with an emphasis on prevention and public health.” (Alexander)

Also advocating full socialized medicine is Socialist Party USA nominee and Peace and Freedom Party candidate Brian Moore. In the California Voters Guide he states that he would, “establish guaranteed minimum income, housing and socialized healthcare for all”.

Not mentioning socialized medicine, but supporting single payer, Party for Socialism and Liberation nominee and Peace and Freedom Party candidate Gloria La Riva states, “The three main focuses of my campaign will be to oppose the racist attacks on immigrants; to propose a massive jobs program and increased social spending as an alternative to anti-crime hysteria and new prisons; and to give strong support for Single Payer Healthcare” (La Riva).

While generally being a good activist party, a strong concern among many on the left towards the Party for Socialism and Liberation is their uncritical support for undemocratic communist models, a problem that will cause many to instead vote for non-Stalinist candidates such as Stewart Alexander or Brian Moore in the Peace and Freedom Party primaries, or for other anti-Stalinist socialist parties that may run candidates such as the Socialist Equality Party, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Action, or the Freedom Socialist Party.

In contrast to some of the anti-democratic positions of Gloria La Riva’s party, presidential candidate Stewart Alexander states,

“Socialism is the common ownership of the means of production, but I like to be more specific. There are, have been, and can be many forms of socialism, but I believe that the best, strongest and most beneficial form of socialism, the kind of socialism I personally work for, is common ownership of the economy coupled with its democratic control by working people.” (Alexander)

Obviously, there are clear alternatives to the capitalist Democrat and Republican Parties that are working hard to promote a workers agenda that includes either fully socialized medicine or single payer healthcare. Yet, almost all of the unions of the United States remain committed to endorsing and financing Democrats and only Democrats in elections. A good number of unions, such as the SEIU, even endorse Democrats that are opposed to single payer health care and help fund the same campaigns that are being funded by the big insurance companies. These endorsements of the anti-worker politicians of the Democrat Party are a blatant violation of the interests of the membership. Such endorsements hurt attempts at building alternative parties that represent workers interests, and hurt the ability of workers to protest and strike against such politicians that are not representing our interests. Some other unions, such as the California Nurses Association, take the stand of only endorsing candidates who support single payer health care. This is a step forward, but many on the left see that a full break by labor from the corporate controlled Democrat Party will be necessary.

Ultimately, what is needed is the building of a spirit of resistance among workers, the unemployed, and students, where we no longer passively agree to politicians and union leaders who pretend to be lesser evils, but are rarely even that. We must challenge and change the organizations we are part of, and when that fails, break away and build new ones. Most importantly, we must fully resurrect the use of political strikes and demonstrations to force the bosses and government to give us what we need, as is often done in countries with socialized medicine such as France. It is this kind of resistance that won socialized healthcare in Europe after the Second World War, and it will be this that will bring socialized medicine to the United States.

This is an article of Liberation News, subscribe free:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

References:

Abu-Jamal, Mumia. "Mumia 5/2/03 Taped Commentary on Cuba." Radio4all and Prisonradio.org. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://www.iacenter.org/polprisoners/maj_cuba03.htm. Internet.

Alexander, Stewart. “Presidential Candidate Questionnaire” Socialist National Committee, Socialist Party. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://vote-socialist.org/p08/questionnaires/alexander.html. Internet.

Ball, Jared. “Healthcare.” Jared Ball for President Website. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://www.jaredball.com/?cat=12. Internet.

“Clinton Unveils Mandatory Health Insurance Program” CNN.com. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/09/17/health.care/index.html. Internet.

“Concluding observations of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Canada”. 6 March, 1993. United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Accessed 26 September, 2007. Available from: http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:Jt9OTyVZWTYJ:www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/(Symbol)/280a3783f5a26d09c12563e80058b47e%3FOpendocument+infant+mortality+ canada +%22united+nations%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=16&gl=us. Internet.

“Cuba Records Lowest Infant Mortality Rate”. BBC News. 3 January, 2002. Accessed 26 September, 2007. Available from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1739773.stm. Internet.

Deeth, John. "Cynthia McKinney Brings Green Campaign to Iowa City." Iowa Independent. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://www.iowaindependent.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=3D80FCACF0E1EC162CC087F14BCF9BC5?diaryId=1610. Internet.

Green, Jeff. “U.S. has second worst newborn death rate in modern world, report says”. 10 May, 2006. CNN.Com. Accessed 26 September, 2007. Available from: http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/parenting/05/08/mothers.index/index.html. Internet.

Health Canada, Government of Canada. 25 November, 2002. Accessed 26 September, 2007. Available from: http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ahc-asc/media/nr-cp/2002/2002_care-soinsbk4_e.html. Internet.

“How Mike Stands on the Issues.” Mike Gravel ’08 Website. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://www.gravel2008.us/issues. Internet.

“Human Development Report”. 2006. United Nations World Health Organization. Accessed 23 September, 2007. Available from: http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/indicators/52.html. Internet.

La Riva, Gloria. “Gloria La Riva for Governor”. California Online Voting Guide. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://calvoter.org/archive/94general/cand/governor/lari/larispeech3.html. Internet.

Mesplay, Kent. “Healthcare”. Kent Mesplay for President. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://www.mesplay.org/healthcare.html. Internet.

McKinney, Cynthia. “Cynthia McKinney Announces Campaign for Presidency” McKinney for President 2008 Website. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://www.runcynthiarun.org/node/25. Internet.

“Overview of the Uninsured in The United States, An Analysis of the 2005 Current Population Survey”. 22 September 2005. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Accessed 23 September, 2007. Available from: http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/reports/05/uninsured-cps/index.htm. Internet.

“Presidents Report, Canada’s Performance 2003”. 2003. Treasury Board of Canada. Accessed 26 September, 2007. Available from: http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/report/govrev/03/cp-rc-PR_e.asp?printable=True. Internet.

“Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Infant Mortality --- United States, 1995-2002”. 10 June 2005. MMWR Weekly. Center for Disease Control. Accessed 26 September, 2007. Available from: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5422a1.htm. Internet.

Rovner, Julie. “Socialized Medicine Belittled on Campaign Trail.” 6 December, 2007. NPR Morning Edition. Available from Physicians for a National Health Program: http://www.pnhp.org/news/2007/december/socialized_medicine_.php. Internet.

Shulte, Elizabeth. "Hillary Clinton’s First Health Care Non-Reform." 27 September, 2007. Dissident Voice. Available from: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/09/hillary-clintons-first-health-care-non-reform/. Internet.

“Snapshots: Healthcare Costs”. Kaiser Family Foundation. January 2007. Accessed 23 September, 2007. Available from: http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/chcm010307oth.cfm. Internet.

“Statistics Canada”. 20 December, 2006. The Daily. Accessed 23 September, 2007. Available from: http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/061220/d061220b.htm. Internet.

“USA: Mumia Abu-Jamal -- Overturning of death sentence falls short of full justice” 19 December, 2001. Amnesty International. Available from: http://www.amnesty.org/en/alfresco_asset/9e6893af-a3f9-11dc-9d08-f145a8145d2b/amr511832001en.html. Internet.

***************
This is an article of Liberation News, subscribe free:
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posted in George W. Bush: Assclown or Fucktard? - 0 replies

Did RAND Corporation Pen the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act?

2007-11-24T14:17:13Z

Did RAND Corporation Pen the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act?
Published on Friday, November 23, 2007.

AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget

By Kurt Nimmo

According to Jessica Lee of Indypendent and Kamau Karl Franklin of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act was penned with plenty of help from the RAND Corporation.

“Rep. Jane Harman, Democrat from California, has had a lengthy relationship with the Rand Corporation,” Lee tells Democracy Now, although she was unable to determine if RAND wrote the bill. On the 12th anniversary of the OKC bombing, Rep. Harman, as chair of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, introduced the bill in the House of Representatives.
“The ‘Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007' seeks to address the roots causes of radicalization, and would establish a grant program to provide funds to States to foster badly needed vertical information sharing from the Intelligence Community to the local level and from local sources to state and federal agencies,” explains Harman’s website. “It also creates a Center of Excellence for the Prevention of Radicalization and Home Grown Terrorism to examine the social, criminal, political, psychological and economic roots of domestic terrorism and to propose solutions, and promotes international collaboration on strategies to combat radicalization."

Franklin mentions Brian Michael Jenkins, an “expert” on “terrorism, counterinsurgency, and homeland security,” according to RAND. Jenkins is “someone who helped the United States in counterinsurgency measures in Vietnam,” states Franklin. “In addition to that, he wrote a book, and in his own book” Jenkins declared that “in their international campaign, the jihadists will seek common ground with leftists, anti-American and anti-globalist forces, who will in turn see radical Islam comrades against a mutual foe.”

In short, according to Kamau Karl Franklin, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act is more about domestic political activism than Islamic terrorism, although it appears Jenkins—and neocons such as the former Marxist David Horowitz—are attempting establish a link between the two, an absurdity at best, as the best way to discredit both the antiwar and patriot movements.

According to a Center for Constitutional Rights factsheet, RAND is a key player in the “domestic terrorism” prevention effort detailed in this draconian bill. A RAND study “Trends in Terrorism,” Chapter 4 on “homegrown terrorism,” advocates “special attention to environmentalist, Anti-globalization activist and anarchists as potentially new terrorist in the making.”

Not surprisingly, RAND is intimately connected to the global elite and the military-industrial-intelligence complex: “The interlocks between the trustees at Rand, and the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations were so numerous that the Reece Committee listed them in its report (two each for Carnegie and Rockefeller, and three for Ford). Ford gave one million dollars to Rand in 1952 alone, at a time when the chairman of Rand was simultaneously the president of Ford Foundation,” notes SourceWatch (Rene Wormser, Foundations: Their Power and Influence, p65-66). “Two-thirds of Rand’s research involves national security issues. This is divided into Project Air Force, the Arroyo Center (serving the needs of the Army), and the National Defense Research Institute (providing research and analysis for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, and the defense agencies).”

As Lee Rogers notes, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, in its effort to flush out “terrorists,” including those opposed to the sort of globalism supported by Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations, will perform an end-run around the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The bill “states in the first subsection that in general the efforts to defeat thought crime shall not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights and civil liberties of the United States citizens and lawful permanent residents. How does this protect constitutional rights if they use vague language such as in general that prefaces the statement? This means that the Department of Homeland Security does not have to abide by the Constitution in their attempts to prevent so called homegrown terrorism.”

This bill is completely insane. It literally allows the government to define any and all crimes including thought crime as violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism. Obviously, this legislation is unconstitutional on a number of levels and it is clear that all 404 representatives who voted in favor of this bill are traitors and should be removed from office immediately. The treason spans both political parties and it shows us all that there is no difference between them. The bill will go on to the Senate and will likely be passed and signed into the law by George W. Bush. Considering that draconian legislation like the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act have already been passed, there seems little question that this one will get passed as well. This is more proof that our country has been completely sold out by a group of traitors at all levels of government.

“With overwhelming bipartisan support, Rep. Jane Harman’s ‘Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act’ passed the House 404-6 late last month and now rests in Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Homeland Security Committee. Swift Senate passage appears certain,” write Ralph E. Shaffer and R. William Robinson for the Baltimore Sun. “Not since the ‘Patriot Act’ of 2001 has any bill so threatened our constitutionally guaranteed rights.”

Harman’s “proposed commission is a menace through its power to hold hearings, take testimony and administer oaths, an authority granted to even individual members of the commission—little Joe McCarthys—who will tour the country to hold their own private hearings. An aura of authority will automatically accompany this congressionally authorized mandate to expose native terrorism.”

Ms. Harman’s proposal includes an absurd attack on the Internet, criticizing it for providing Americans with “access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda,” and legalizes an insidious infiltration of targeted organizations. The misnamed “Center of Excellence,” which would function after the commission is disbanded in 18 months, gives the semblance of intellectual research to what is otherwise the suppression of dissent.

While its purpose is to prevent terrorism, the bill doesn’t criminalize any specific conduct or contain penalties. But the commission’s findings will be cited by those who see a terrorist under every bed and who will demand enactment of criminal penalties that further restrict free speech and other civil liberties. Action contrary to the commission’s findings will be interpreted as a sign of treason at worst or a lack of patriotism at the least.

While Ms. Harman denies that her proposal creates “thought police,” it defines “homegrown terrorism” as “planned” or “threatened” use of force to coerce the government or the people in the promotion of “political or social objectives.” That means that no force need actually have occurred as long as the government charges that the individual or group thought about doing it.

As Shaffer and Robinson note, examples of “resulting crackdowns on such protests include the conviction and execution of anarchists tied to Chicago’s 1886 Haymarket Riot.” Additionally, we might add that the FBI’s COINTELPRO—targeting civil rights, antiwar, and national liberation movements—may serve as a template for “insidious infiltration of targeted organizations.” Although the official history would have us believe COINTELRPO was shut down in the 1970s, events since that time reveal the government is still in the business of illegally going after Americans who exercise their constitutional right to petition the government. For more on these recent events, see Brian Glick’s COINTELPRO Revisited: Spying and Disruption.

Thus it makes perfect sense that the corporate media—compromised by the CIA under Operation Mockingbird beginning in the 1950s—would employ the likes of Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly to characterize the antiwar, truth and patriot movements—and even supporters of Ron Paul—as potentially violent advocates of “domestic terrorism.” No doubt, in the weeks and months ahead, we should expect more such propaganda as Harman’s “proposed commissions,” little more than federally mandated inquisitions, get up to speed.
Finally, as noted above, it is only a matter of time before the so-called Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 becomes law. The bill has been referred to the Senate where it awaits scrutiny from the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and is almost certain to pass.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2007/231107RAND.htm

posted in George W. Bush: Assclown or Fucktard? - 0 replies

You should push for indictments and not for impeachment

2007-11-18T12:22:17Z

You should push for indictments and not for impeachment.

posted in George W. Bush: Assclown or Fucktard? - 0 replies

~LOOSER!

2007-10-11T00:36:28Z

http://green.yahoo.com/pledge/

posted in George W. Bush: Assclown or Fucktard? - 0 replies

RETARD!

2007-10-10T17:01:56Z

oh, but that's not fair to the mentally challenged!

posted in George W. Bush: Assclown or Fucktard? - 0 replies

no...BASTARD!

2007-09-06T22:45:54Z

JUST A freak!~& here's one reason why: http://tribes.tribe.net/stemcellsgivelife

posted in George W. Bush: Assclown or Fucktard? - 0 replies

More on the possible Nuking of Portland

2007-08-17T22:13:46Z

More on the possible Nuking of Portland

If you have not heard there is a growing concern the fascist elements within the US corporate and government structures may use a mock scenario to actually nuke Portland Oregon and then use Presidential Directive 51 to declare Bush dictator and to declare war on Iran.

Some articles giving background:
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/08/363204.shtml
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/08/363284.shtml
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/08/363408.shtml

Updated articles:

Swan Island Networks role in Portland drills
author: Mr_DNA
press release is from 1 year ago, but seems to shed some light on their role in the upcoming operations.
http://www.rainsnet.org/press/pr/pr0818066778.asp

Portland Seeks Designation as First 'Synthetic City'

Technology in the war on terror now key to homeland security

Portland, OR - August 18, 2006 -

On Friday, August 18, a group of federal, state and local officials, academics, and private sector leaders will convene on the campus of Portland State University to talk about a potential transfer of power. Under discussion is the notion that technology used to fight the war on terror abroad could soon be applied to homeland security needs... and that Portland, Oregon could be an early test-bed for such transfers.

According to the Regional Alliances for Infrastructure and Network Security (RAINS), a central player in the development of homeland defense technology solutions, the primary military technology under consideration for transfer is "synthetic city" software—a digital information platform that fuses data from a variety of real-world sources, such as 9-1-1 centers, atmospheric sensors, smart buildings, health networks, and intelligent transportation systems—then organizes and displays it all in a 3-D geographical modeling and simulation environment.

"Our military friends are going to be demonstrating some very cutting edge technology—sort of the ultimate Sim City," explained RAINS' chairman Charles Jennings, "They'll be displaying virtual version of the real Portland, with real-time data inside." Jennings is the CEO of Portland-based Swan Island Networks.

The "Synthetic Portland" conference brings together participants from around the country, representing all levels of government, large federal contractors and system integrators; information technology vendor companies; universities; hospitals; and various types of non-governmental service organizations.

Also participating will be representatives from the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration; United States Joint Forces Command (JFCOM); the Information Assurance Directorate of the National Security Agency; and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

"We are excited to have such an innovative technology conference in Portland—especially since its ultimate purpose is to increase public safety," said Matt Lampe, the City of Portland's Chief Technology Officer. This new technology, like the Internet, was developed by the military and now, the military is actively exploring its use and potential in civil environments to improve emergency response, transportation systems and sustainability practices.

The central purpose of new synthetic city technology is to generate predictive models that can be used by the real city to prepare for and manage emergencies, increase public safety, and generally improve urban quality of life.

According to Jennings, "Although it could have been held anywhere, having this conference in Portland makes perfect sense. To connect previously stove-piped information systems in new ways, you need a city with a culture of both innovation and collaboration—two of Portland's best qualities."

"This is a unique opportunity to look at new, advanced technology and how that technology could help in the event of disasters or security problems. Portland State University does leading edge research in computer security, and we're interested in how that research can be used for application in areas that will be discussed at this symposium. That makes our campus the perfect venue for this event," said Mike Burton, Vice Provost of Portland State University and RAINS board member.

Sponsors of the event, in addition to RAINS and PSU, include Oregon Economic & Community Development Department; Portland Development Commission; Siemens; Online Business Systems; the Zeno Group; and Swan Island Networks.

About RAINS
RAINS (Regional Alliances for Infrastructure and Network Security) is a public/private partnership formed in 2001. RAINS has forged alliances with technology companies, multiple research universities, critical infrastructure providers, local, state and federal agencies, and first responders. Its Connect & Protect information sharing service was launched in 2003, and has successfully delivered hundreds of thousands of alerts. Connect & Protect was described as a "radical breakthrough" by WIRED Magazine (December 2005). Connect & Protect was also a finalist for the inaugural Mitretek Innovations Award in Homeland Security, a partnership of Mitretek Systems and the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

For RAINS information:
Tel: 503-796-5804
info@rainsnet.org
contribute to this article

update 16.Aug.2007 15:07
Mr_DNA link

According to Sherry Lamoreaux, Marketing Communications Manager of Swan Island Networks:

1. Swan Island wanted to be a part of the Noble Resolve exercise but is not now participating and has no information regarding it.

2. RAINS is no longer an active organization. In her words, it has been "dormant" since around June of this year.

3. Swan Island Networks CEO and RAINS founder, Charles Jennings, will be on vacation beginning at the end of this week or next week.

found at http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/08/363597.shtml

__

Regarding Noble Resolve
author: fellow worker
8/10/07 naval vessel spotted at Port of Portland docks-maybe part of Noble Resolve nuke exercise?
While I was at lunch break on 8/10, I was sitting outside the Gunderson lunch room on the south bank of the Willamette, across from a Port of Portland facility. I saw an unidentifiable navel vessel, smallish, uniform battleship grey, apart from the blue and yellow bands encircling the stack. I was only able to make out numbers on the bow, either 23 or 28. No other markings, flags or symbols were visible, and I only wish I had my binoculars with me. Based on the projected blast pattern from "The Day After" Report as seen on www.lonestaricon.com, I am thinking this may be part of the exercise to come.
contribute to this article

specifics 16.Aug.2007 10:32
Mr_DNA link

Do you know which Terminal this is docked in or closest to?

unusual license plate 16.Aug.2007 11:17
hum link

seen this plate this morning heading into downtown

probably not "Noble related" but it caught my eye

it was hard to read all the print on the plate

picture at http://media.portland.indymedia.org/images/2007/08/363573.jpg

posted at http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/08/363568.shtml

posted in George W. Bush: Assclown or Fucktard? - 3 replies

Mumia Abu-Jamal on "Scooter" Libby

2007-07-16T18:09:27Z

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Of Cronies and Kings

[col. writ. 7/5/07] (c) '07 by Mumia Abu-Jamal

The recent presidential commutation of Vice-Presidential aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, has demonstrated how deeply politics and cronyism invades the realm of law.

In commuting Libby's 30-month prison sentence, the president has made it clear that, while he made his political career on being 'tough on crime' (especially when it comes to the death penalty), in the cases of his homies, the regular rules don't matter.

This is a politician who, when governor of the Republic of Texas, only granted one commutation to a man on Death Row (to Henry Lee Lucas), while denying every other request, even one advocated by the Pope, for Christian convert Karla Faye Tucker.

As a rule, this is not the guy who even grudgingly gives up either pardons or commutations until, that is, it came to his homie, 'Scooter.'

The power to pardon actually has it roots in the "royal prerogative of the kings and queens of England.

Yet, this act owes more to simple cronyism than to the English precedents.

"Scooter" held the keys to the kingdom. Faced with prison, his lips might have loosened as to the real roots of the Valerie Plame affair. He had it potentially within his power to threaten not just the Vice President, but the White House entire.

Thus, this commutation (pending a full pardon) is as much an act of self-defense, as it is of grace.

The power, under U.S. law and precedents, is virtually total.

The president can pardon or commute any sentence of any person serving (or having already served) a federal criminal sentence or sanction.

Yet, when have we heard of a commutation without someone actually filing for it?

This is an act of power, or politics, and cronyism.

For Bush, this was a freebie.

He never has to face another vote in his life.

With a 27% approval rating in the polls, he as much as told the American people to kiss his ass.

He could care less what you think.

'Scooter' was his homie.

Nor does this 'tough on crime' politician give a fig about what happens to hundreds and thousands of other Americans, every day.

For the statute governing perjury to a federal grand jury, and the range of sentences available under the law, doesn't change a bit.

The White House hasn't, and won't, send a recommendation to the U.S. Sentencing Commission to change the range of sanctions.

'Scooter' got a break because of who he knew in the White House.

The rest of us are on our own.

Cronyism. Homieism.

There is one law for the privileged and the powerful: another law for the rest of us.

'Equal Justice under the law?'

Yeah, right.

--(c) '07 maj

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a political prisoner in the United States, with what could be the final decision on his legal appeals possibly coming down this summer. That decision could give Mumia his freedom, life in prison, or execution. It is time to turn up the heat against this injustice. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

For more on the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal read:

Top Ten “Fry Mumia” Myths Debunked
(Myth #1) “Five eyewitnesses saw Mumia shoot officer Faulkner.”
http://people.tribe.net/steveargue2/blog/d6e00c07-4d42-4eb0-8220-c00a1894a8e9

posted in George W. Bush: Assclown or Fucktard? - 0 replies

Pro-War Democrats Battle for the Presidency

2007-07-16T04:36:57Z

Pro-War Democrats Battle for the Presidency

By Steven Argue

Every four years the American people are subjected to the farce of bourgeois democracy, a “democracy” where only the candidates chosen by the very wealthy have any chance of being elected. That season of nicely dressed pathological liars and false hopes is now upon us.

Since the corporate media of the United States has long ago abandoned any semblance of reporting on anything of substance about candidates such as voting records and actual political views, it is up to the journalists of the left press and Indy-media to do so.

A front-runner in the race is pro-war Democrat Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton has voted for every war the United States has carried out since she came into office in 2000. Those pro-war votes include the Iraq war. She also voted to take away our civil liberties by supporting the “Patriot Act” and its renewal. Hillary Clinton, like many Democrats, pounds the war drum for the racist Zionist state of Israel even louder than the Republicans. In addition she voted for the anti-immigrant wall.

In her recent successful run for Senate Hillary Clinton amassed more than 22 million dollars, making her the biggest campaign finance recipient running for Senate in the country. Her money came from such corporate interests as drug and hospital conglomerates, Wall Street finance interests, real estate developers, and rightwing corporate media mogul, Rupert Murdoch.

Barack Obama

Another front-runner and “rising star” of the Democrat Party is Barack Obama. Like Hillary Clinton, Obama has voted for the Patriot Act by voting to renew it in 2006. He also voted for the racist anti-immigrant wall as well as the “guest worker” program that denies immigrants rights, but allows them to come to this country to be exploited and under-paid. Obama also voted for the so-called “Class Action Fairness Act” that makes it harder for the people to sue corporations.

One might think that Obama, as a black man in racist America, might have something to offer on issues dealing with the suffering caused by the racist police state, mass incarceration of the poor, lack of healthcare, and dramatic drop in the standard of living of the multi-racial working class and poor. Instead Barack Obama plays into racist stereotypes, blaming the victims of racist America rather than the corporate criminals, stating:

"Such wisdom might help us move beyond ideological bickering and serve as the basis of a renewed effort to tackle the problem of inner-city poverty. We could begin by acknowledging that perhaps the single biggest thing we could do to reduce such poverty is to encourage teenage girls to finish high school and avoid having children out of wedlock. . ." Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, pps. 255-256

The inner cities of America have, by and large, been abandoned by the same capitalists that got rich off of the jobs they have now exported, just as the victims of hurricane Katrina were left to die by this same racist system. Yet the best thing to do according to Barack Obama is for black girls to stop having children out of wedlock.

In his book Uncle Obama not only lets this racist system off the hook, but he praises one of the worst anti-working class reforms of the Clinton administration stating, "we should also acknowledge that conservatives-and Bill Clinton-were right about welfare as it was previously structured." Bill Clinton’s welfare reform has caused homelessness, hunger, and less access to other basic necessities for the poor in America, but Barack Obama says Bill Clinton and the conservatives were right.

Both Obama and Clinton have voted for war appropriations. The fact that they both decided at the last minute to vote against war appropriations in the most recent vote on supplemental war appropriations is a symptom of the fact that the war has not gone as planned. The war has not gained the desired oil loot for U.S. corporations and has caused a number of growing problems for U.S. imperialism including internal dissent in the United States. And while Clinton and Obama have finally voted against war appropriations this time, their pro-war Democrat Party garnered plenty of other votes to keep the imperialist war going.

In his book, Barack Obama makes clear his support for the billions being squandered on lining the pockets of the military contractors stating, “given the depletion of our [military] forces after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we will probably need a somewhat higher [Pentagon] budget in the immediate future just to restore readiness and replace equipment.” (Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, p 307).

Joe Biden

Another Democrat candidate is Joe Biden. Unlike many Democrat presidential candidates that have tried to distance themselves from the war that they voted for to begin with, in the most recent vote on war appropriations Joe Biden voted with the majority of the Democrats and Republicans in the Senate putting billions of dollars towards the continued U.S. imperialist slaughter of the Iraqi people.

John Edwards

Another presidential candidate with a pro-war record is John Edwards. Edwards voted for the war against Iraq and campaigned as a vice presidential candidate on the pro-war John Kerry ticket. At that time both candidates defended their votes for the war. John Edwards has since apologized for his vote for unprovoked military aggression and mass murder (without using that wording and without recognizing that his vote for war was a criminal act).

Yet when Edwards was running for the position of vice president in 2004 this what he had to say on his pro-war vote:

“We need to stick to this [defending their Iraq war votes]. We should stand by our votes, say we would vote that way again. If you admit a mistake, it shows weakness in time of war. That's what the Republicans want us to do.” (John Edwards's changing tune on the Iraq vote, Scot Lehigh, The Globe, April 17, 2007)

Bill Richardson

Another candidate trying to paint himself as an antiwar candidate of the people is presidential candidate and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson. Richardson doesn’t call for immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq, but instead calls for a slow withdrawal. In the early 1990s he did vote against the U.S. war to reinstate the anti-woman pro-U.S. corporate oil monarchy in Kuwait, but later said he regretted that vote. In addition Richardson is a strong supporter the pro-corporate anti-worker NAFTA, GATT, and WTO. On the death penalty Richardson, like many Democrats, says it is a good thing.

Well over one hundred inmates in the United States have had their convictions overturned as a result of new DNA evidence being brought to light, with some of these being death penalty cases. Still prosecutors have fought against the use of DNA evidence to overturn old convictions, even when the lives of innocent people are on the line. In racist America, death penalty juries are always more likely to convict because all who oppose the death penalty are excluded from these juries, making them juries that are more biased towards supporting the prosecution. Blacks often face all or mostly white death penalty juries. These are juries likely to contain a number of people who think that all Black people are criminals, making these jurors incapable of weighing the evidence and understanding the concept of reasonable doubt even in those rare circumstances when the evidence is fairly presented.

Why would anybody support the death penalty being carried out by a system that has been proven to make so many mistakes? The answer lies in the fact that the death penalty is an instrument of terror used by the American ruling class against the working class, poor, and people of color. On the one hand when such innocent people are executed it has no importance to the likes of Joe Biden because to them the lives of the poor and people of color are cheap. But for the ruling class, the added bonus of the death penalty is when it is used in political cases to silence dissent such as with the executions of Nicola Sacco, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, the Haymarket martyrs, and the threatened execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal. As governor, the fact that Joe Biden has no problem with the death penalty means that he already has blood on his hands.

Dennis Kucinich

Likewise Dennis Kucinich is portraying himself as the standard bearer of peace, love, and liberalism, but has voted in favor of the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal. The resolution Kucinich voted for falsely claims, “Mumia Abu-Jamal stood over Officer Faulkner and shot him in the face, mortally wounding him…” Yet this is not what the eyewitnesses said. For instance eyewitness William Singletary says, "Mumia Abu-Jamal didn't shoot Daniel Faulkner. The passenger in the right-hand side of the Volkswagen [that Faulkner had stopped] got out of the car and shot him. When Mumia came on the scene, we [Singletary and another man] were on the police radio trying to radio for help." ("Witness: Abu-Jamal didn't do it" Philadelphia Daily News Dec. 8, 2006)

In the last presidential election Dennis Kucinich portrayed himself up as an anti-war candidate of the Democrat Party. Yet on his web site the Kucinich campaign stated that Kucinich, “Supports a strong and efficient military. He believes that the current practice of procuring ever more costly weapons has the effect of weakening military readiness. As the cost of new weapons systems rise, the cost of merely replacing aging weapons with new ones becomes prohibitively expensive. As a result, U.S. military forces shrink, while they become at the same time more expensive to maintain and more prone to failure.”

So Kucinich advocates more frugal and efficient spending on imperialist terror and murder.

This is the same position taken by two U.S. generals waging the war in Iraq. During the U.S. invasion of Iraq General Stanley McCrystal complained, "It was enough for the enemy to show a little resistance and some creative thinking as our technological superiority begun to quickly lose all its meaning. Our expenses are not justified by the obtained results. The enemy is using an order of magnitude cheaper weapons to reach the same goals for which we spend billions on technological whims of the defense industry!"

Similarly General Richard Mayers commented on precision-guided munitions, "The rate of their use is incompatible with the obtained results. We are literally dropping gold into the mud!"

The contradiction here was purely limited to the difference between the pure profiteering of the military industrial complex and the desire for actual cost effective results for imperialist victory on the battlefield.

Dennis Kucinich spoke to a gathering of the Southern California Americans for Democratic Action claiming, "We [he and the congress] did not authorize an eye for an eye. Nor did we ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan. We did not authorize the Administration to wage war anytime, anywhere, anyhow it pleases. We did not authorize war without end. We did not authorize a permanent war economy. Yet we are upon the threshold of a permanent war economy."

Yet that is exactly what Kucinich and the rest of the congress, with the exception of California Democrat Barbara Lee, agreed to with their votes authorizing Bush’s endless war on the world. The entire Democrat Party in both the Senate and Congress, with only one exception, voted for Bush's war.

Since a different vote was later taken authorizing the US war in Iraq, the most practical application of this vote by Kucinich was to authorize the US war in Afghanistan.

In stark contrast to Kucinich’s vote for war Mumia Abu-Jamal wrote on March 2002:

“When U.S. President George W. Bush spoke about an "endless war," some took it as mere political speech, or rhetoric designed to gain the top spot on the evening network news. I did not. "W" is an agent of his class, the wealthy oil merchants of the land, and his intentions are to press for an ever-wider war in all corners of the earth, to make the world safe for capital exploitation and unbridled commerce. This will eventually become a war that reaches into a slew of countries in the Middle East, on behalf of the rich and powerful elites who rule. Make no mistake: this is a war that has nothing to do with democracy. The U.S. enters the region, armed to the gills, not to defend democracies, but to defend theocracies; to defend kings, princes and sultanates; to defend U.S. access to vast oil resources in the region.” Mumia Abu-Jamal

The U.S. war in Afghanistan has in fact killed tens of thousands of civilians and brought the Afghan nation back to the chaos of fragmented warlord rule last seen after the various U.S. trained and financed Mujahideen forces defeated the Soviet backed PDPA government.

The day after the September 11 attack this author wrote:

“Today the clerical fascists of the Taliban rule Afghanistan. The CIA put them in power with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid. This massive U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was in opposition to the revolutionary PDPA government that came to power in 1978 on issues of promoting women’s rights and land reform. Literacy campaigns began teaching the poor and women how to read and write.

“Foreign religious fanatics and wealthy defenders of the old feudal system came together in a terrorist organization called the Mujahideen (from which the Taliban were later formed). With billions of dollars in assistance from the U.S. [starting under the Jimmy Carter presidency] these fanatical cutthroats waged a holy war that included killing woman for teaching little girls how to read and write and throwing acid into the faces of women who had become liberated from the veil. The Taliban came to power as a result of this U.S. intervention.

“Will a U.S. war now against the Taliban and former CIA aid recipient Osama Bin Laden set things straight? No. It will be the people of Afghanistan who suffer death and destruction from war as the U.S. attempts to install a puppet government friendly to U.S. corporate (oil) interests” Steven Argue, Liberation News, September 12, 2002

Kucinich, the “peace candidate”, as much as he may now want to deny it, voted for the war in Afghanistan and played his part in making it happen.

On the war in Iraq Kucinich now states, "There is only one way in which the United States will withdraw from Iraq, prior to the end of President Bush's term: Congress must vote to cut off funds." (Rep. Kucinich, The Huffington Report) This position not only ignores the role of the people of the United States, Britain, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere rising up and resisting the war and imperialist occupations, but it is also is being put forward by a politician that voted for the war in Afghanistan, wants a leaner meaner imperialist military, voted for the racist legal lynching of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and who has worked hard to bring the anti-war movement back into the pro-war Democrat Party.

Some may argue that Kucinich is not perfect, but he’d make a better president than Bush. Yet it is unlikely that Kucinich has any intention of winning the presidency. His role is one of bringing the anti-war movement and others who are breaking from the establishment and the twin parties of war and racism back into the fold of the pro-war Democrat Party. Kucinich makes this point clear when he states, "The Democratic Party created third parties by running to the middle. What I'm trying to do is to go back to the big tent so that everyone who felt alienated could come back through my candidacy" (Counter Punch, April 2003).

Yet that tent Kucinich speaks of is one that, despite its name, is not democratic. It is a tent dominated by big capital and the politicians subservient to it. It is under this tent that the ruling class would like to swallow up the legitimate opposition of the people towards war and turn us into the water boys for the “responsible” politicians of the Democrat Party.

It is such "responsible" politicians, including Kucinich, that voted in their vast majority to back the racist legal lynching of Mumia Abu-Jamal. It is outrageous that that the Democrat party would vote in its House majority to condemn a French city for daring to make an issue of this racist legal lynching, while at the same time doing nothing about the liar and killer, Bush. But then again that should be no surprise either since the Democrat Party voted in its majority for the war in Iraq.

Hillary Clinton

In a press conference on August 21, 2006 George Bush Jr. finally admitted what Liberation News has been pointing out since before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. That Iraq had nothing to do with September 11th. Yet Bush had used a supposed connection as a pretext for the U.S.’s unprovoked aggression against Iraq. In addition, Bush Jr. also admitted that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

Most of the Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, Hillary Clinton included, supported going to war with Iraq. Today Hillary Clinton has no remorse for that murderous decision stating, "Obviously, I've thought about that a lot in the months since. No, I don't regret giving the president authority because at the time it was in the context of weapons of mass destruction, grave threats to the United States, and clearly, Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international community for more than a decade." Hillary Clinton: No regret on Iraq Vote, CNN.Com

In trying to let themselves off the hook many Democrats claim that Bush “did not fairly represent intelligence”. Feeble cries by these politicians today that their votes for war weren’t their fault because they were lied to by Bush not only make them look stupid, they are an insult to the intelligence of the American people. Clinton, however, is worse in not even distancing herself from this “justified invasion” and “weapons of mass destruction” lies.

While the Democrats helped promote the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq had no right to defend itself, Liberation News pointed out that it is the United States that has the weapons of mass destruction. Instead we supported the right of Iraq to acquire the weapons necessary to defend themselves from U.S. aggression. There can be little doubt that if Iraq had acquired those weapons they might not be in the mess they are now.

Yet for Bush Jr. and Hillary Clinton Iraqi weapons were never the real motive for mass murder in Iraq. The capitalist ruling class, and their Democrat and Republican representatives, thought that they could use their superior military power to quickly move into Iraq and establish by force a stable neo-colonial puppet regime, and then make massive profits from the privatization of the Iraqi economy, especially oil. It is the failures of this imperialist plan, in the face of Iraqi resistance and growing unpopularity at home, that has forced some Democrats to try to rethink, or at least distance themselves from, the Bush policies they have supported.

Just as Liberation News opposes the U.S. occupation and corporate looting of Iraq, we also denounced the starvation blockade that was carried out through the UN by the Bill Clinton administration. That blockade, partially due to the capitalist nature of the Iraqi economy under Saddam Hussein, cost the lives of about a million people, many of them children. While a socialist economy like that of Cuba could have made sure that everyone in Iraq had food, blame for this mass murder should also be put on the Bill Clinton administration. Likewise, it was this Clinton starvation blockade that also weakened Iraq for the Bush invasion.

Today, while the U.S. occupation of Iraq has murdered well over 655,000 people and the U.S. starvation blockade of Iraq murdered a million or more, the U.S. government and its puppets in Iraq had the nerve to put Saddam Hussein on trial, and execute him, for propaganda purposes. Yet the worst crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime were also carried out when he was directly backed by the United States. In the 1980’s the U.S. was giving massive military assistance to Iraq to help Saddam Hussein commit genocide against Kurds and carry out a bloody war with Iran at a time when Saddam Hussein was being used as an asset of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Likewise the CIA helped Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party come to power, supplying them with the names of 5,000 socialists and labor leaders that the Ba’athists subsequently rounded up and executed.

Yet to those who claimed that an invasion of Iraq would be a chance for the U.S. to finally set things straight and set up a democracy in Iraq, Liberation News responded before the U.S. invasion saying:

“In the 1970s Iraq nationalized its oil fields. This helped the Iraqi people by taking a chunk of the profits made off of oil out of the hands of the international oil monopolies and instead keeping them in Iraq. This money helped pay for free healthcare and education. As such this was a socialist measure carried out by Saddam Hussein’s capitalist government. It was also a measure that stood up to the interests of the rich and powerful nations. For both reasons socialists supported the nationalization of Iraqi oil while those measures infuriated the imperialists...

“While defending Iraq against imperialist attack and supporting their right to defend themselves socialists also recognize that Saddam Hussein is a capitalist leader and that the Iraqi people have their own scores to settle with him. Yet any government set up by a US occupation army will not be democratic and will only lead to the privatization of the resources that American oil monopolies intend to steal...”

“U.S. imperialism will never solve the question of women’s liberation in the Middle East. Unlike all of the US supported governments and forces in the Arab World, Iraqi women have many rights found nowhere else in the Arab World except in the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Over 50% of Iraqi doctors are women. Iraqi women are allowed to walk unescorted in the streets. They are allowed to drive. Iraqi women can even freely criticize men. In addition Iraqi women have the right to work and control their own funds. This is in stark contrast to the treatment of women under the repressive U.S. backed governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where women have no rights what-so-ever.

“The U.S. ruling class hates governments like Iraq, Libya, and Venezuela who use the profits of their oil resources partly to benefit the people with social programs. Likewise they love governments like that of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that strip the people of all their rights and keep the oil profits in the hands of the international oil monopolies and their corrupt local servants. Today in the United States we face unemployment, homelessness, and a lack of health care. The billions of dollars the U.S. will squander on killing Iraqis to steal their resources should be spent to benefit the working class and poor of the United States instead.” -From Liberation News: What Is Socialism, and Why We Oppose The Invasion of Iraq

What was predicted is reality. Those predictions were not from a crystal ball. They were accurate because they were based on the past behavior of U.S. imperialism. Today in Iraq the U.S. has set up a puppet Islamic government with functioning death squads and torture chambers. Socialists have been excluded from participating in elections and unarmed demonstrators have been shot down and murdered in the streets by U.S. troops and troops of the puppet Iraqi government. The puppet Islamic government also opposes women’s rights and women’s rights have deteriorated dramatically since the U.S. invasion. The rebuilding of basic infrastructure, such as electricity, has lagged way behind what was rebuilt by Saddam Hussein after the massive U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 1992.

With the exception of the privatization of Iraqi oil, all of the predictions have shown themselves to be true and the only reason that Iraqi oil isn’t completely under the direct control of U.S. oil monopolies now is because of the union resistance of 23,000 organized oil workers as well as the general resistance by the Iraqi people to the idea of Iraq’s resources being looted by U.S. corporations.

For the working class in the United States there is ever growing frustration with a war that is costing many lives and billions in dollars while needed programs for healthcare, jobs, the environment, and disaster relief do not get the funding they need. Just as the new imperialist masters of Iraq have shown a criminal lack of interest in the rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure, so too they left the people of New Orleans.

Yet for the ruling class their failure in Iraq is not in the murderous, undemocratic, and anti-woman puppet regime they have set up and the money that has been squandered in doing it, but in the failure of that regime to deliver the stability needed to acquire the oil loot. They complain that oil production in Iraq is below prewar levels and the occupation by U.S. and British troops serve as targets for the insurgency.

The words of Hillary Clinton, an icon of Democratic Party liberalism, makes abundantly clear that what she opposes is not the oil war itself, but the fact that Bush is not winning it:

“Let us not confuse the leadership’s failures with either the remaining mission in Iraq or the war on terrorism or with our support for our troops. What we have here is a failure of leadership to accomplish that mission. What was hailed as our shortest war has now become one of our longest. What was hailed as a model of democracy teeters on the brink of complete anarchy. What was the leadership that quickly claimed credit for success has been lethargic in the face of misjudgments and setbacks.” Hillary Clinton

As a result of imperialism’s failure in Iraq some Democrats that voted for the war like John Kerry have called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of this year. Yet the Kerry-Feingold plan actually calls for keeping troops in Iraq that are "critical to completing the mission of standing up Iraqi security forces." The Kerry-Feingold plan also calls for "an over-the-horizon" troop presence in the region that could come to the aid of a failing puppet government in Iraq as well as intervene elsewhere in the so-called war on terror. (Lawmakers begin Bitter Debate on U.S. Troop Withdrawal Plan for Iraq, FOXNews, online report, June 2, 2006)

Hillary Clinton even opposed the Kerry-Feingold plan and voted against it arguing against any withdrawal timeline.

Unlike Hillary Clinton and the leading Democrats, Liberation News sees nothing good that can come from the continuation of the U.S. war against Iraq. The U.S. occupation of Iraq is doing nothing for anybody except the capitalists that are profiting from the war and the tax dollars of the American people. We call for no support to the Democrats and we demand: Iraq to the Iraqis! U.S. Out Now!

Liberation News calls for ending the war through building the mass movement in the streets; striking against arms producers; hot cargoing war materials on the docks, trains, and trucks; and building towards a general strike against the war. Likewise we support the right of military personal to refuse orders and resist this war. We support students, such as those at UC Santa Cruz that have repeatedly driven military recruiters off campus. And we call for building the socialist movement to end imperialism through socialist revolution.

The Role of Peace Action (Formerly Sane / Freeze)

Hillary Clinton’s record is clearly pro-imperialist war. Yet the group “Peace Action” gives Hillary Clinton the passing grade of voting for peace 89% of the time. Other Democrats are given similar scores by these political hacks.

“Peace Action” is deceiving the anti-war vote. Why? Because Peace Action is a pillar of the status quo that sees no alternative to delivering votes to what they see as the “lesser evil” Democrat Party, even when the Democrats are equally pro-war. This strategy has made “Peace Action” an obstacle to peace and a pillar of the status quo of war.

Every few years the ruling class of the United States parades its selected representatives in front of the American people to give us the chance to vote for their so-called “lesser” and “greater evil” representatives in the Democrat and Republican Parties. The corporate media and liberal pro-war groups like “Peace Action” ignore the real anti-war candidates and back pro-war Democrats by misrepresenting their records to the people.

Liberation News urges all of the super-exploited workers that go door to door raising money for the Peace Action bureaucracy to quit your meaningless jobs and look for better work while looking for ways to hook up with the real anti-war/anti-imperialist movement that is marching in the streets. Likewise we urge all of the liberal and leftist minded people that give money to Peace Action to stop doing so and instead participate in the mass anti-war movement in the streets with your bodies, minds, and your money if you can afford it.

No to the twin parties of war and oppression! Yes to the independent organization and mobilization of working people!

Obama, Clinton, and Richardson, Supporters of Racist Israel

Hillary Clinton, like many Democrats, has pounded the war drum for the racist Zionist state of Israel even louder than the Republicans. The U.S. gives Israel billions of dollars in military aid every year and Senator Clinton’s vote backs that money for death. Israel is a racist settler state established in 1949 that has denied the original inhabitants, the Palestinians, many basic rights, often including the basic right to live. Besides denying Palestinians the same rights to travel, jobs, housing, and education as allowed Jews, the racist and religious Zionist State has used massacres and other forms of terror, wars, and torture to drive out the original Palestinian inhabitants.

Likewise Israel is always at war with its Arab neighbors. Israel’s recent attack against Lebanon where their aerial bombardment of the civilian population murdered 1,150 people and destroyed vital infrastructure is only the latest such terrorism by Israel. Yet Hillary Clinton recently told a pro-Israel rally “We will stand with Israel because Israel is standing up for American values as well as Israeli ones.”

She’s got it wrong, the mass murder and racism of Israel are in league with the values of American ruling class, as has been seen in Iraq, but these are not the values of the American people.

Claims of Israel being the victim, bombing and invading Lebanon on the pretext of two Israeli soldiers taken prisoner do not hold water in light of the fact that Israel is holding 2,000 Lebanese prisoners in their torture chamber dungeons from their previous invasion of Lebanon. In addition numerous reports say those two Israeli soldiers were captured in Lebanon, not in Israel. Those reports are from such sources as AP, Hindustan Times, and AFP.

On Israel “anti-war” Richardson shares Hillary Clinton’s views stating, “I am firmly committed to one of the United States' closest and most important allies - the State of Israel. Throughout my career, I've steadfastly supported Israel, obtaining a consistently pro-Israel voting record in Congress and defending Israeli interests as Ambassador to the United Nations.”

Barack Obama also backs racist Israel stating, “The United States and Israel share important interests - promoting a peaceful Middle East, combating terrorism, and encouraging reform in the Arab and Muslim world.” Likewise as a senator he has backed the massive military aid the United States gives Israel every year and says he will continue this policy as president stating he will, “insist on fully funding military assistance to Israel”.

For Socialist Democracy!

Let me be clear on this point, Obama and Clinton, and the rest of the pack will not betray us. They cannot betray us because they were never with us. Under the current politics most Americans would never have heard their names if they were on our side.

A truly democratic society would eliminate corporate control of the elections by nationalizing the corporate media and allowing all candidates equal access to the airwaves, cable, and print. Likewise a truly democratic society would carry out a sweeping “campaign finance reform” through the nationalization of the means of production (using that wealth for human and environmental needs rather than decadence and deception).

Up against the likes of Hillary Clinton, with her millions of dollars in corporate bribes, a sympathetic corporate media, growing police state, and increasing electoral fraud, it will take a socialist revolution to bring democracy to the United States.

How we can all resist:

Tell the truth!

Build the mass movement in the streets!

Strike against arms producers!

Become ungovernable!

Hot cargo war materials on the docks, trains, and trucks!

Build towards a general strike against the war!

Support the right of military personal to refuse orders and resist this war!

Drive military recruiters off campus!

No tolerance or excuses for the pro-war, racist, and capitalist Democrat Party!

Build the socialist movement to end imperialism, racism, environmental destruction, and capitalism!

End U.S. imperialism through socialist revolution!

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