Obama now set to become another war president

[Myra Bronstein]

He's signed his political epitaph. Very disappointing.

Syd Walker's piece on Obama's disastrous decision is pretty good.

http://sydwalker.info/blog/2009/03/28/ob...pigs-test/

He's being pushed into war with Pakistan--by you know who.

I don't even understand why Obama gets the benefit of the doubt. So many writers, like the one in this article, talk like he is merely listening to bad advisors when in fact Obama is part of the machine. He knows exactly what he is doing and who he is doing it for.

As Molly Ivins might say--he's dancing with the guys what brung 'im.

mmm......no I disagree, Myra.

Obama inherited more problems than any incoming POTUS in recent memory. He isn't Superman.

Problem is, the system has overwhelmed him. He's tightly bound when it comes to foreign policy. If he wanted to change course, he would face a barrage of opposition from the media, the MIC, the Israel Lobby and most of the Congress. The failed system is the major problem here, not the man who has inherited the poisoned chalice, imo.

I can't see why so many writers give the Zionist Lobby a free pass. By pushing America into expensive, unwinnable wars against invented foes, Israel behaves more like America's worst enemy than a so-called ally. Clearly, Pakistan is next on America's, or should I say Israel's, list.

When will America exorcise this genocidal parasite called Israel and finally determine its own future?

Can anyone here see that Russia, China, Europe and the rest of the world are over it and desperately need both the parasite and its host to show some sanity and stop committing the world to these endless wars against enemies of their own fucking creation?

Far better to focus rage on that rather than on Obama. There'll be weak leaders aplenty until the system changes. A far stronger POTUS once said those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. The psychosis of Zionism is making peaceful revolution impossible in America and elsewhere. Kennedy's words will come back to haunt us all.

Mmm......no I disagree with your disagreement, Mark. If Obama is so well-meaning how come his cabinet is filled with the very Wall Street insiders who are behind the discredited policies that created the mess?

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/25/n...nd_michael

"... AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to begin right now with Naomi Klein. Your response to these appointments and what they signify? If you could begin with Larry Summers, the former Clinton Treasury Secretary.

NAOMI KLEIN: Hi, Amy. It’s good to be with you. Well, I have to say it’s a profound disappointment. And it really does represent a very safe choice, but let’s remember that Barack Obama won this election saying that taking the status quo, that staying with the same policies that have been governing the country for the recent past, was actually a very dangerous course. And I think, in many ways, we are paying the price of the—frankly, the intellectual dishonesty of the progressive liberal left during the Bush years, because Obama said again and again during the campaign that the crisis on Wall Street represented the culmination of an ideology of deregulation and laissez-faire, trickle-down economics that had guided the country for the past eight years.

And the truth is, as we all know, Amy, that it wasn’t just eight years during which those policies guided US economic policy. They certainly guided them under Reagan, and they certainly guided them under Clinton. And that’s where Larry Summers comes in, because Larry Summers was the last Treasury Secretary under Clinton. And he, along with Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, were really the key architects of the policies of deregulation that created the crisis that we are living now. And those key policies, as you know, are the killing of Glass-Steagall that allowed a series of very large bank mergers that created these institutions that are too big and too intermingled to fail, we’re told again and again; the deliberate decision to keep the derivatives out of the reach of financial regulators—that was also a Summers decision; and also allowing the banks to carry these extraordinary levels of debt, thirty-three-to-one in the case of Bear Stearns.

Now, you know, in my book, I—in The Shock Doctrine, I start a chapter with a quote from Larry Summers. The context in which he said this, it was 1992, and it was when he was making World Bank economic policy as it related to Russia in the midst of a financial crisis. What he said, and this is why I quoted him, because it really shows the extent to which he is truly an ideologue, truly a follower of the very ideology—not just a follower, but a propagator of the very ideology that Obama ran his campaign against. And here’s the quote. This is Larry Summers in 1992: “Spread the truth. The laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.” And then he laid out those laws a little bit later. He referred to the three “ations,” and those were privatization, stabilization and liberalization. So he has been preaching the doctrine. He is by no means sort of an innocent bystander. He is a dyed-in-the-wool privatizer, free trader.

And he, along with Tim Geithner, his deputy, played key roles during very important economic crises in other countries, in Russia, during the Asian financial crisis, during the Mexican peso crisis. And when these countries were suffering a profound economic crisis created by deregulation, they preached more deregulation, more privatization and—this is key—they preached economic austerity to disastrous results. So I think this is really troubling. And, you know, one thing that Obama said is that Larry Summers set the terms of the debate for this financial crisis, and that, once again, is very worrying, because if Barack Obama thinks that these are the only terms, the parameters of the debate, then they’re very, very narrow.
...
AMY GOODMAN: But let me ask you something, Bob. William Greider had an interesting piece in The Nation. He said, “On Monday, Geithner was busy executing the government’s massive rescue of Citicorp--the very banking behemoth that Geithner and Summers helped to create back in the Clinton years, along with Federal Reserve [chairman] Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, Clinton’s economics guru. Now Rubin is himself a Citicorp executive and his bank is now being saved by his old protégé (Geithner) with the taxpayers’ money. […]

“Geithner has been a central player in the deal-making, from Bear Stearns to AIG to Citi. The strategy has not only failed, it has arguably made things worse as savvy market players saw through the contradictions and rushed out to dump more bank stocks.”
And ultimately, Mark Ames, also in The Nation, writes ,“Summers was one of the key architects of our financial crisis--hiring him to fix the economy makes as much sense as appointing Paul Wolfowitz to oversee the Iraq withdrawal.”

Your response, Bob Kuttner?

ROBERT KUTTNER: I basically agree.
...
NAOMI KLEIN: ...
But the key issue—and this is where we need to, I think, concentrate our energies, because it isn’t just—you know, we all want to be optimistic, but I think part of what got us into this situation where we’re seeing these very disappointing appointments has been the fact that we have not been honest about the legacy of the Clinton years. So much misinformation was spread during the election campaign, because it was a nice message to present the ’90s as these wonder years in contrast to the Bush years. And that is exactly what created a situation where you could have a Summers being presented as the wise man instead of going down with Alan Greenspan. You know, when Alan Greenspan’s reputation was raked over the coals, it should have been Rubin and Summers alongside him. And I think we have nobody to blame, really, but ourselves for that failure. So, essentially, that was an electoral strategy, and it was an electoral strategy that relied on intellectual dishonesty.

And now, I think, to continue to make excuses for Obama is a real mistake, because he’s not running for election anymore. He’s already won, so there’s no reason to be pandering in this way."