Dave Lindorff

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Dave Lindorff

Another night-time raid on a housing compound in Afghanistan. Another bunch of innocent Afghans killed. Another round of lies by the US-led forces of the so-called International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Only this time, among the dead are two pregnant mothers and a teenage girl.

And once again the US media remain mute, accepting the official story, which was of ISAF forces responding to an attack which in reality appears never to have happened.

Before I started to write this piece, which once again was broken by the intrepid Jerome Starkey, a reporter in Afghanistan who works for the Times of London, I thought maybe I should read the Sunday edition of the New York Times, to see whether America’s “paper of record” had reported on this latest atrocity. But the night before we had suffered a heavy storm that knocked down three large trees in my front yard, and there was currently a thunderstorm underway, with rain pouring down, so I decided, what the hell, I’ll just write it. There’s no way the Times would cover this story.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Dave Lindorff

When Charlie Company’s Lt. William Calley ordered and encouraged his men to rape, maim and slaughter over 400 men, women and children in My Lai in Vietnam back in 1968, there were at least four heroes who tried to stop him or bring him and higher officers to justice. One was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who evacuated some of the wounded victims, and who set his chopper down between a group of Vietnamese and Calley’s men, ordering his door gunner to open fire on the US soldiers if they shot any more people. One was Ron Ridenhour, a soldier who learned of the massacre, and began a private investigation, ultimately reporting the crime to the Pentagon and Congress. One was Michael Bernhardt, a soldier in Charlie Company who witnessed the whole thing, and reported it all to Ridenhour. And one was journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story in the US media.

Today’s war in Afghanistan also has its My Lai massacres. It has them almost weekly, as US warplanes bomb wedding parties, or homes “suspected” of housing terrorists that turn out to house nothing but civilians. But these My Lais are all conveniently labeled accidents. They get filed away and forgotten as the inevitable “collateral damage” of war. There was, however, a massacre recently that was not a mistake--a massacre which, while it only involved fewer than a dozen innocent people, bears the same stench as My Lai. It was the execution-style slaying of eight handcuffed students, aged 11-18, and a 12-year-old neighboring shepherd boy who had been visiting the others, in Kunar Province, on Dec. 26.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff Foreign Policy War in Afghanistan

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

By Dave Lindorff

      President Barack Obama is a relative newbie to Washington.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff Obama Wall Street Bonuses

For months, the various government departments dealing with things economic--Treasury, Commerce, Labor and of course the Council of Economic Advisers and the Federal Reserve, have been issuing soothing words that the nation’s economy is headed back up from the Great Recession that allegedly began in December 2007.

But now comes word from the Department of Labor that, whoops, we minsunderestimated, as former President George W. Bush would say, the number of jobs lost.  The Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting that because of a “modeling error,” it misstated the number of jobs lost between March 2008 and March 2009 by 17%. In hard numbers, that is to say, the BLS was reporting that a record 4.8 million jobs were lost during those 12 months of economic collapse, when in fact the job loss total was actually 5.6 million.

They missed 824,000 lost jobs! Just to give you an idea of how many people that is, we’re talking about 10% of the population of the city of New York, and more people than the entire population of San Francisco.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

By Dave Lindorff 
 
       You had to love the headline the Philadelphia Inquirer put on the jump page of columnist Trudy Rubin’s Sunday commentary about word that the Obama administration is hoping to talk with at least some mid-level Taliban leaders about giving up the fight and “coming over” to the “government” side.       

   &n

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff Taliban Talks

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

By Dave Lindorff

        Flash! The Supreme Court’s latest 5-4 decision overturning the over 60-year-old ban on corporations giving money to political campaigns is not the end of democracy as we know it, or the onset of fascism in America, as some of hyperventilating progressives have been claiming.

          Sure it’s an outrage to say, as the court majority did, that corporations have the same rights as people.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff Supreme Court Corporate Personhood

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

By Dave Lindorff

       The Democratic Party’s embarrassing electoral disaster in Massachusetts, losing a seat held for 46 years by the late Sen.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff A Year of Shafting the Working Class

The media punditry, corn-fed on conventional wisdom, are all atwitter about the looming Democratic debacle in Massachusetts, saying that win or lose, the poor showing by the Democratic candidate for the late Sen. Edward Kennedy's seat, state Attorney General Martha Coakley, means Democrats in Congress should abandon plans to push through a House-Senate compromise health bill, and instead just go with the Senate's version of health "reform" legislation, thus circumventing a certain Republican filibuster attempt.

The Senate bill, remember, is the dreadful health bill version that outlaws abortion coverage for anyone getting subsidized insurance, and that taxes the hell out of health insurance benefits that are the mainstay of many middle-income and working-class families, not to mention mandating that people with low incomes spend significant assets they don't have to buy lousy insurance they may not want or need. As bad as the House bill is, the Senate bill is even worse.

It is a crummy bill, cobbled together from bits and pieces of self-serving elements submitted by health industry lobbyists, who have spent the last year swarming over the Senate like ants and maggots over a fetid, unrecognizable lump of roadkill.

The call for the House to adopt the Senate plan, so as to avoid a filibuster, is advice that would doom the Democrats in 2010. While that might be a good thing, given the sorry excuse for an alternative to the Republicans that the Democrats have become, I would argue that the time is right for the small rump of Democrats who are still progressives to take a stand.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

There are only two U.S. media outlets that have reported on Cuba's response to the deadly 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti. One was Fox News, which claimed, wrongly, that the Cubans were absent from the list of neighboring Caribbean countries providing aid. The other was the Christian Science Monitor (a respected news organization that recently shut down its print edition), which reported correctly that Cuba had dispatched 30 doctors to the stricken nation.

The Christian Science Monitor, in a second article, quoted Laurence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense and now based at the Center for American Progress, as saying that the U.S., which is leading the relief efforts in Haiti, should "consider tapping the expertise of neighboring Cuba," which he noted, "has some of the best doctors in the world -- we should see about flying them in."

As for the rest of the U.S. media, they have simply ignored Cuba.

In fact, left unmentioned is the reality that Cuba already had over 400 doctors posted to Haiti to help with the day-to-day health needs of this poorest nation in the Americas, and those doctors were the first to respond to the disaster, setting up a hospital right next to the main hospital in Port-au-Prince that collapsed in the earthquake.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

If you want to see the unvarnished, true nature of our latest president, you need look no farther than two issues: whether to tax health plans that are deemed "too generous" and whether or how to tax the banks that brought about the financial crisis.

In the case of the health insurance tax, President Obama, after opposing the idea as a candidate when it was proposed by Republican candidate John McCain, is endorsing the Senate bill's approach, which would levy a 40% tax on all insurance plans that cost more than $8,500 for an individual or $23,000 for a family. According to the union movement, such a tax would hit one in four union members, who over years of struggle have negotiated decent medical benefits, often foregoing pay increases in order to provide members with health coverage. It would also hit employers with older workforces, smaller employers, who have to pay more for insurance, and also employers in parts of the country where the overall pay scales and cost of living are higher, such as the Northeast and the West Coast.

Obama says he thinks taxing such plans (which are hardly "Cadillac" in today's health marketplace), would help restrain health inflation. More important, he and the Senate backers of the measure, like that it is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to bring in $149 billion in revenue over 10 years. (Note that we're talking about just $14.9 billion per year -- a rather minor sum compared to the total U.S. healthcare bill of $2.5 trillion a year, or the taxpayer share of that bill -- $1.2 trillion.)

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff