Dave Lindorff

If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you've chosen to sit amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don't turn to them for help when you can't figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you the same thing, but they'll all be wrong.

That's the situation President Obama finds himself in today in the White House. Having surrounded himself with the very Wall Street con men who set up the crooked game that led to the current financial crisis and economic collapse, and finding that the lousy advice they have been giving him since last January has left the country still mired in deepening economic decline, with the banks still not lending and unemployment still mounting, and with growing signs that instead of bottoming out and starting to recover, the economy is threatening to fall a second time, to new lows and higher unemployment, Obama has turned to the same rotten advisors for answers.

A few days ago, in an interview with Fox TV while he was in China off all places (a country that has made a stupendous stimulus investment to create domestic jobs!) Obama warned, for the first time, that America faces the possibility of a "double-dip" recession. That's fine as far as it goes. I agree. But what did he say the risk was? Not that the government has been failing to put significant numbers of people back to work, but that the government keeps piling up deficits.

This has to be the lamest economic thinking since Herbert Hoover started tightening the screws on government spending at the onset of the Great Depression in 1930.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

President Obama, in his visit to China, held a "town meeting" with Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the value of freedom of information, saying that he is a "supporter of non-censorship" and that open access to information was a "source of strength."

And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of U.S. troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo. Talk about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian style control over information.

Let's just take the issue of depleted uranium weapons, over 1000 tons of which have been expended in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, most of it in populated areas where millions remain exposed to the radioactive dust of the burned material. There is almost no reporting on this topic in the U.S. media. The Pentagon has for years lied about and hidden the effects of this deadly substance, used in shells, bombs, and bullets because of its unique ability to penetrate hard steel armor and concrete bunker walls. It has refused to disclose where the weapons were fired, and has denied U.S. troops the tests that would show if they have been contaminated. It has even resorted to having paid Pentagon hacks surreptitiously libel, slander, and otherwise undermine those military sources and journalists who have tried to expose this scourge (this reporter has been the target of such disinformation attacks).

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

The ongoing absolutism in Congress in trying to prevent women -- or at least poor women -- from obtaining abortions is one of the more shameful spectacles in America.

The sanctimonious Blue Dog Democrats and the Republicans, who almost unanimously opposed any right to abortion, present two basic arguments. One is that abortion is murder, and therefore must be illegal, or, in more nuanced form, they say that they or their constituents oppose abortion and therefore it is wrong to have their tax money paying for the procedure.

Of course, for most of those who argue that abortion is murder, there is a towering hypocrisy in the fact that with rare exceptions, those who argue this view also support capital punishment, which is also murder. Furthermore, given the über-conservative political stance of most such people, they also tend to unquestioningly support America's wars on Third World peoples -- wars that inevitably lead to the mass slaughter of innocent men, women, and children -- support the use of lethal American weapons from nuclear bombs to anti-personnel fragmentation shells and bombs to depleted uranium shells and mines, which kill adults and children, soldiers, and civilians indiscriminately, and support cuts in social services that leave American kids hungry, malnourished and without needed medical care, which leads to many untimely deaths. But even for those people -- some liberal Catholics, for example -- who may be consistent in their opposition to state-sponsored murder and killing, there is an unwillingness to address the central problem with opposing abortion: namely that women will get abortions whether they are legal or not, the only difference being that one way, they are likely to die or be seriously injured in the process, while the other way, the process can be done safely.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

I never thought I'd find myself thanking the women-loathing, Christian fundamentalist-pandering Democrats in Congress for anything, but here it is: Thank you, Congressman Bart Stupak (D-MI), for your outrageous amendment to the House version of the health insurance reform legislation in Congress, which bars any insurance company in the proposed health insurance exchange from offering a health insurance plan that includes abortion coverage.

This amendment, which would actually bar women or families from buying even with their own money and no government subsidy health insurance that includes funding for a medically recommended abortion, was supported by 64 Democrats along with all but one Republican in Congress.

Because it passed and was attached to the House health reform bill, it gives hope to the notion that the disastrous so-called health reform legislation in Congress will die.

And so it should.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

With word being leaked out over the weekend that our Nobel Peace Prize president is close to announcing plans to escalate the U.S. troop level in the Afghanistan War by 50%, we are about to have perhaps the ultimate of ironies -- a president announcing a big step-up in American war-making on November 11, the day known around much of the Western world as Armistice Day.

While modern Americans might not know it, with all the boom and bombast and mindless flag-waving featured in the military parades popular in today's warrior culture, November 11 was originally established by Congress back in 1919, a year after the day the guns of World War I finally went silent over the blood-drenched fields of Europe in what was once, in a naïve spasm of optimism, referred to as the War to End All Wars. In declaring the national holiday Armistice Day, Congress said it was to be "a day dedicated to the cause of world peace."

It's hard to see how President Obama, who has yet to actually receive his Nobel Prize as a peacemaker from Norway's King Harald, is contributing to peace with the addition of another 34,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines to the 68,000 already fighting, killing, and dying on Afghan soil. Maybe he thinks holding this escalation to 34,000 instead of accommodating Afghanistan Theater Commander Gen. Stanley McCrystal's request for 80,000 more troops is an act of pacificistic moderation.

I doubt it. (Incidentally, some Pentagon and White House flaks are referring to this escalation as another "surge," but you can't call a 50% increase in troop commitments a "surge." It is what it is -- a massive expansion of the current war effort.)

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

As the strike by transit workers in Philadelphia enters its fifth day, it is clear why unions have such a tough time in the United States, where fewer than one in eight workers is covered by a union contract.

Although the average pay of transit workers is just $50,000 a year (that represents take-home pay of less than $35,000 take-home after taxes or about $3,000 a month to live on for a typical family of four), the suburbanites who feel put out because they have to brave huge traffic jams to get to and from work in the city are grousing that the transit workers are greedy for holding out for a slightly less than 4% per year pay increase over the three years of their contract.

I just got into a debate at the local YMCA gym with an older guy who probably makes over $100,000 a year and whose children are already grown, who was incensed that the "greedy bus and subway drivers" were asking for a raise at this time "with the economy in such a mess."

But I also noticed, as I drove my son into school this week in the traffic crush, that these same suburbanites are, for the most part, continuing to drive to work one to a car. What a lack of creativity!

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

Ordinary, average, struggling Americans might be scratching their heads over the news today, as the Labor Department reports that unemployment is up by four-tenths of a percent for the month to a record 10.2%, fully three-tenths of a percent higher than economists had been forecasting, and stocks do what? Rise by a quarter of a percent!

What's going on here?

Well, the tube analysts are quick to say, unemployment figures are a "lagging" indicator. That is, employment generally lags the overall economy, with layoffs coming after a recession kicks in, and hiring waits until a recovery is well underway.

But that isn't true with a deep recession such as this one, because at some point -- and we're well past that point -- high and prolonged unemployment leads to reduced demand for goods and services, and to a psychology of fear and consumer withdrawal. Once people feel that they aren't going to find a new job soon, and once those who still have jobs feel their employment is not secure, they no longer buy things except what they absolutely need. And in an economy where fully 72% of economic activity is consumer spending, that is no longer a "lagging indicator." High, prolonged unemployment becomes a causal factor in the economic downturn.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

It would be easy to read too much into the few statewide races that were decided last night, but I think it's fair to say that the results in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates won -- in New Jersey's case knocking off a well-funded Democratic incumbent -- that the results were a blow to the Barack Obama/Rahm Emanuel strategy of playing to the right, of avoiding confrontation in Congress and of ignoring the progressive voters whose enthusiasm and effort back in the 2008 campaign put Obama in office.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

Country Joe McDonald said it best in his iconic "Fixin' to Die" Rag: "Oh, it's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for? Don't ask me. I don't give a damn." In fact, we were fighting for nothing in Vietnam. It was a war that started out because the U.S. didn't want the Commies to win a battle in the so-called Cold War, and even though it was on the farthest side of the world, in a poor nation of peasants, even though they had been struggling to throw off colonialism for years and we had simply become the new colonists, no president dared to admit the obvious -- we had no business being there, and all the killing and dying had no point.

Afghanistan is the same thing all over again. We "got in" surreptitiously for the same reason. Russia had helped organize a coup to take over what passed for a "central government" and had found itself mired in a brutal war of occupation, and the U.S. had begun, back in the '70s, organizing and providing arms to the forces fighting the Russians, not because Afghanistan -- a country even more remote and meaningless in terms of U.S. interests or security than Vietnam -- had any importance but because it was a way to "stick it to" the Russians in the waning days of the Cold War.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

If you listen to the happy-talk folks at Treasury and the Fed, and on the tube, you'd think things had finally turned a corner. The economy grew at a 3.5% annualized rate in the third quarter that ended September 30. "The Economy is Back in Gear" shouted the headline on an article by CNN senior writer Chris Isadore. "The recession ended unofficially in September," said a reporter on NPR.

There was some mention of the fact that earlier in the week there were reports that consumer confidence had fallen, foretelling a sluggish Christmas retail season, and that new home sales slipped an unanticipatedly high 3.6% in September, when analysts had been expecting a rise in sales. Meanwhile, new unemployment claims filed during the third week of October jumped to 531,000, well above the predicted 520,000, indicating that the official unemployment rate is likely to top 10% in the next Department of Labor report due out in early November. As well, fully one-third of the nation's homeowners were now said to be "underwater," meaning that their outstanding mortgage balances are greater than the current value of their homes. Not surprisingly, foreclosures are continuing to surge.

How to explain this seeming oxymoronic situation? Well, that positive economic growth figure, which comes on the heels of a 6.4% decline in GDP in the first quarter and a .7% decline in the second quarter, is, according to government analysts, actually largely the result of two government stimulus programs -- the "cash for clunkers" program that induced people to rush out and buy a new car (usually a much smaller, cheaper and, for the carmakers, less profitable one than they had been buying in prior years), and the $8,000 new home tax credit, which led a lot of people to rush out and buy a first home.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff