At Last, a “New” Presidential Candidate Progressives Can Support (Or So We Wish)

Posted on December 7, 2011 by Arlen Grossman

A fellow claiming to be President Barack Obama spoke about the economy today in Osawatomie, Kansas.  Although this person looked like President Obama, he did not sound like the centrist President we’ve seen in office the last three years. The person giving the speech spoke like a staunch progressive; the words he used were more like ones we’ve heard from  Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) or Representative Dennis Kuchinich (D-OH) than from any recent president of the United States.

If it indeed was the real President Obama, important questions need to be asked: Does he really believe what he said?  Who or what got to him? Why hasn’t he spoken like this before?  Is this a new political strategy to recapture his lost base? Will he act on these convictions?  Or is this another one of many elegant speeches  followed by inaction? Did the White House hire Paul Krugman or Robert Reich as a speechwriter?

Here are some of the amazing highlights of the President’s uncharacteristically progressive Kansas speech:

My grandparents served during World War II.  He was a soldier in Patton’s Army; she was a worker on a bomber assembly line.  And together, they shared the optimism of a nation that triumphed over the Great Depression and over fascism.  They believed in an America where hard work paid off, and responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried — no matter who you were, no matter where you came from, no matter how you started out.

And these values gave rise to the largest middle class and the strongest economy that the world has ever known.  It was here in America that the most productive workers, the most innovative companies turned out the best products on Earth.  And you know what?  Every American shared in that pride and in that success — from those in the executive suites to those in middle management to those on the factory floor. So you could have some confidence that if you gave it your all, you’d take enough home to raise your family and send your kids to school and have your health care covered, put a little away for retirement…

For most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded.  Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people.  Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success.  Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and their investments — wealthier than ever before.  But everybody else struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren’t — and too many families found themselves racking up more and more debt just to keep up.  

Now, for many years, credit cards and home equity loans papered over this harsh reality.  But in 2008, the house of cards collapsed.  We all know the story by now:  Mortgages sold to people who couldn’t afford them, or even sometimes understand them.  Banks and investors allowed to keep packaging the risk and selling it off.  Huge bets — and huge bonuses — made with other people’s money on the line.  Regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this, but looked the other way or didn’t have the authority to look at all.

It was wrong.  It combined the breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility all across the system.  And it plunged our economy and the world into a crisis from which we’re still fighting to recover.  It claimed the jobs and the homes and the basic security of millions of people — innocent, hardworking Americans who had met their responsibilities but were still left holding the bag…

But, Osawatomie, this is not just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time.  This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.  Because what’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement.

Now, in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia.  After all that’s happened, after the worst economic crisis, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess.  In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years.  And their philosophy is simple:  We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.  

I am here to say they are wrong.  I’m here in Kansas to reaffirm my deep conviction that we’re greater together than we are on our own.  I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules. These aren’t Democratic values or Republican values.  These aren’t 1 percent values or 99 percent values.  They’re American values.  And we have to reclaim them.

You see, this isn’t the first time America has faced this choice.  At the turn of the last century, when a nation of farmers was transitioning to become the world’s industrial giant, we had to decide:  Would we settle for a country where most of the new railroads and factories were being controlled by a few giant monopolies that kept prices high and wages low?  Would we allow our citizens and even our children to work ungodly hours in conditions that were unsafe and unsanitary?  Would we restrict education to the privileged few?  Because there were people who thought massive inequality and exploitation of people was just the price you pay for progress.

Theodore Roosevelt disagreed.  He was the Republican son of a wealthy family.  He praised what the titans of industry had done to create jobs and grow the economy.  He believed then what we know is true today, that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history.  It’s led to a prosperity and a standard of living unmatched by the rest of the world.

But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can.  (Applause.)  He understood the free market only works when there are rules of the road that ensure competition is fair and open and honest.  And so he busted up monopolies, forcing those companies to compete for consumers with better services and better prices.  And today, they still must.  He fought to make sure businesses couldn’t profit by exploiting children or selling food or medicine that wasn’t safe.  And today, they still can’t.    

And in 1910, Teddy Roosevelt came here to Osawatomie and he laid out his vision for what he called a New Nationalism.  “Our country,” he said, “…means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy…of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”

Now, for this, Roosevelt was called a radical.  He was called a socialist — — even a communist.  But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for in his last campaign:  an eight-hour work day and a minimum wage for women — insurance for the unemployed and for the elderly, and those with disabilities; political reform and a progressive income tax…  

Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune.  “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us.  If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger.  Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers.  But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else.  And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty.

Now, it’s a simple theory.  And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government.  That’s in America’s DNA.  And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem:  It doesn’t work.  It has never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression.  It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ‘50s and ‘60s.  And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.  

Remember that in those same years, thanks to some of the same folks who are now running Congress, we had weak regulation, we had little oversight, and what did it get us?  Insurance companies that jacked up people’s premiums with impunity and denied care to patients who were sick, mortgage lenders that tricked families into buying homes they couldn’t afford, a financial sector where irresponsibility and lack of basic oversight nearly destroyed our entire economy.

We simply cannot return to this brand of “you’re on your own” economics if we’re serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country.  We know that it doesn’t result in a strong economy.  It results in an economy that invests too little in its people and in its future.  We know it doesn’t result in a prosperity that trickles down.  It results in a prosperity that’s enjoyed by fewer and fewer of our citizens.   

Look at the statistics.  In the last few decades, the average income of the top 1 percent has gone up by more than 250 percent to $1.2 million per year.  I’m not talking about millionaires, people who have a million dollars.  I’m saying people who make a million dollars every single year.  For the top one hundredth of 1 percent, the average income is now $27 million per year.  The typical CEO who used to earn about 30 times more than his or her worker now earns 110 times more.  And yet, over the last decade the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about 6 percent.

Inequality also distorts our democracy. It gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, and it runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder. It leaves everyone else rightly suspicious that the system in Washington is rigged against them, that our elected representatives aren’t looking out for the interests of most Americans.  

But there’s an even more fundamental issue at stake.  This kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise that’s at the very heart of America:  that this is a place where you can make it if you try.  We tell people — we tell our kids — that in this country, even if you’re born with nothing, work hard and you can get into the middle class.  We tell them that your children will have a chance to do even better than you do.  That’s why immigrants from around the world historically have flocked to our shores…

So what does that mean for restoring middle-class security in today’s economy?  Well, it starts by making sure that everyone in America gets a fair shot at success.  The truth is we’ll never be able to compete with other countries when it comes to who’s best at letting their businesses pay the lowest wages, who’s best at busting unions, who’s best at letting companies pollute as much as they want.  That’s a race to the bottom that we can’t win, and we shouldn’t want to win that race.  Those countries don’t have a strong middle class.  They don’t have our standard of living.  

The race we want to win, the race we can win is a race to the top — the race for good jobs that pay well and offer middle-class security.  Businesses will create those jobs in countries with the highest-skilled, highest-educated workers, the most advanced transportation and communication, the strongest commitment to research and technology…

In the long term, we have to rethink our tax system more fundamentally.  We have to ask ourselves:  Do we want to make the investments we need in things like education and research and high-tech manufacturing — all those things that helped make us an economic superpower?  Or do we want to keep in place the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in our country?  Because we can’t afford to do both.  That is not politics.  That’s just math.   

Now, so far, most of my Republican friends in Washington have refused under any circumstance to ask the wealthiest Americans to go to the same tax rate they were paying when Bill Clinton was president…

This isn’t about class warfare.  This is about the nation’s welfare.  It’s about making choices that benefit not just the people who’ve done fantastically well over the last few decades, but that benefits the middle class, and those fighting to get into the middle class, and the economy as a whole…

We shouldn’t be weakening oversight and accountability.  We should be strengthening oversight and accountability.  I’ll give you another example.  Too often, we’ve seen Wall Street firms violating major anti-fraud laws because the penalties are too weak and there’s no price for being a repeat offender.  No more.  I’ll be calling for legislation that makes those penalties count so that firms don’t see punishment for breaking the law as just the price of doing business.

Read the full transcript here:

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PUBLISHED IN OPEDNEWS.COM   12/8/2011
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What is Radical?

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Arlen Grossman
350.org

The Most Important News Story of the Day/Millennium

by Bill McKibben

The most important piece of news yesterday, this week, this month, and this year was a new set of statistics released yesterday by the Global Carbon Project. It showed that carbon emissions from our planet had increased 5.9 percent between 2009 and 2010. In fact, it was arguably among the most important pieces of data in the last, oh, three centuries, since according to the New York Times it represented “almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution.”

What it means, in climate terms, is that we’ve all but lost the battle to reduce the damage from global warming. The planet has already warmed about a degree Celsius; it’s clearly going to go well past two degrees. It means, in political terms, that the fossil fuel industry has delayed effective action for the 12 years since the Kyoto treaty was signed. It means, in diplomatic terms, that the endless talks underway in Durban should be more important than ever–they should be the focus of a planetary population desperate to figure out how it’s going to survive the century (Continued)

Click here to read the entire article from Common Dreams

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New Problem For GOP

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Arlen Grossman

Republicans Worried Women Won’t Vote For Assholes

By Erin Gloria Ryan/ Jezebel.com/ Dec. 2, 2011

With the once overcrowded field full of potential Republican Presidential candidates growing more sparse and morally tarnished by the day, some strategists are worried that women might hesitate to vote for whichever of the remaining jagoffs the GOP nominates. And because women vote in larger numbers than men and they tend to prefer voting for non-dickheads, this could be a problem.

Reuters reports that the field of presumed GOP nominees has been narrowed down to three remaining frontrunners— Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Herman Cain. Many in the party are unhappy with this turn events, and few are less happy than strategists concerned with the female vote. Since that pesky 19th amendment passed, and this “voting” craze drove all the dames wild, parties have realized that they can’t ignore the lady electorate. Barack Obama won the Presidency in 2008 with 56% of the female vote and only 49% of the male vote, because in the last election 10 million more women voted than men. Republican strategists should be worried that women won’t want to vote for Gingrich, Romney, or Cain, because each of the frontrunners has their own unique way of pissing off the ladies.

America’s Smuggest Lobbyist Newt Gingrich has been divorced twice, and has used his multiple marriages to use every possible opportunity to act inhumanely to his spouses. He ran for Congress on a family values platform in 1978 while cheating on his cancer-stricken wife (who had once been his high school geometry teacher). According to his ex-wife, Gingrich visited her in the hospital and demanded she discuss the terms of their divorce. He married the woman with whom he was cheating on his first wife, and in the mid-1990’s when he was busy attempting to get Bill Clinton burned at the political stake for marital infidelity, he began having an affair of his own with a woman he later married. After divorcing his second wife, of course. When asked why he couldn’t keep Little Newt in his pants, Gingrich said he did it because he loves his country so very much. Let’s hope America never comes down with a case of uterine cancer.

Mittens Romney fares better than Gingrich with the ladies, but there was that one time that he tried to personally block a woman from having a life saving abortion. And there’s also the truly dickish and dismissive way he speaks to female debate moderators. And also all the flip flopping.

And we all know the Adventures of Herman Cain, who has been accused by multiple women of sexual harassment and who early this week was alleged to have carried on a 13 year extramarital affair with an Atlanta woman. Cain says the allegations are false and that all those women need to stop worrying their pretty little heads about man things like politics and whether or not it’s okay for a guy to push your head toward his crotch. Even if all of the allegations are false, there’s the issue of the way Cain speaks to and about women. In a recent debate, he referred to the first female Speaker of the House as “Princess Nancy,” presumably because it’s impossible for a woman to be elevated to a status above sexist nicknames in Herman Cain’s eyes.

To make matters worse, the party’s been hijacked by a conservative fringe that’s too conservative even for Mississippi. Every candidate in the race with the exception of poor, reasonable, forgotten Jon Huntsman said they supported a definition of personhood that began at conception, a notion rejected by 57% of voters in the most conservative state in the union.

So, unless Republicans want to win the Presidency by convincing every single man in America to vote for them and ignore women entirely, they’ll have to do a little bit of damage control no matter who ends up winning the nomination. My prediction? They’ll hastily pick a female Vice Presidential nominee in the same manner a frustrated 12 year old boy who hates shopping picks out a sweater: by marching up to the store display and grabbing something that looks like it won’t make his mom mad. It’s how John McCain picked Sarah Palin!

Jezebel Article

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Civil Libertarian Dianne Feinstein vs. Politician Dianne Feinstein

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Arlen Grossman

The U.S. Senate on Friday passed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. Within that bill, still to be voted on by the House before being sent off to the President, is a chilling provision allowing for the military detention of American citizens suspected of involvement in terrorism. U.S. citizens suspected of being terrorists could be detained indefinitely by the military without a trial.

SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN–COURAGEOUS CIVIL LIBERTARIAN

In the Senate debate, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) argued “We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge, prosecution, and conviction.” Senator Feinstein chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee.

She compared the provisions to the incarceration of Japanese citizens during World War II, for which the U.S. government formally apologized in 1988.

“This constant push that everything has to be militarized – I don’t think that creates a good country,” declared Feinstein. “Because we have values. And due process of law is one of those values. And so I object, I object to holding American citizens without trial. I do not believe that makes us more safe.”

So concerned was Sen. Feinstein she offered up an amendment to confine military detention to those apprehended “abroad,” i.e., off U.S. soil. However, the amendment failed by a 45-55 vote in the Senate.

SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN–COWARDLY POLITICIAN

The Senate vote for the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, including the clearly unconstitutional provision for indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens considered to be suspected terrorists, passed by a 93-7 vote on December 1.

Among the “Yes” votes: Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA).

PUBLISHED IN OPEDNEWS.COM   12/6/2011
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Special Education

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Arlen Grossman

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The Pampering of Corporate Crooks

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Arlen Grossman

“Hands up Corporate Crooks!”

(Not Really, Unless it’s in a Movie.)

By Gary Brumback/ OpEdNews.com/ Dec. 3, 2011

Much of corporate wrongdoing such as endless wars, bribery of politicians, tax dodging and the like has been made legal by our three servile branches of government. What’s left is illegal corporate wrongdoing, or corporate crime, and it is basically immune to being held accountable.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to explain corporate wrongdoing either the legal or the illegal kind. It always happens when certain personal factors and certain situational factors, or badvantages (temptations and pressures), come together.

First, needless to say, there must be corporate people predisposed to cut ethical and legal corners. Second, there must be badvantages within the corporation. They always exist. Ignoble expectations and upside down rewards are classic examples. Third, there must be badvantages outside the corporation. A hands-off government is a huge badvantage with its lap dogs instead of watch dogs; escape hatches (e.g., legal loopholes); pampering instead of prosecuting and punishing; and deregulation. Without these four laissez-faire policies and practices, corporate crime would shrivel.

Because this article was prompted by Rob Kall’s November 28 piece, “Big corporations may not pay taxes, but they pay billions in fines for corruption,” I am going to single out here for a brief discussion the fourth hands-off policy and practice, the pampering of corporate crooks.


Stop Pampering, Start Prosecuting and Punishing Corporate Crooks

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld California’s tough “3 strikes and you’re out” law, letting stand two consecutive 25-year terms to life imprisonment with little chance for parole of a man convicted of stealing nine videotapes worth $150 after two earlier offenses. Now that’s more like bloody overkill and certainly not a case of pampering or coddling the criminal!

Consider, in stark contrast, pampered corporate criminals. If they only stole videotapes I wouldn’t be writing this article. But by any stretch of the imagination corporate crime is not petty theft. Yet the paucity of its prosecution and the puniness of its punishment are beyond any stretch of the imagination except that of the corpocracy, the Devil’s marriage between powerful corporate interests and all three branches of our government.

 

Numerous proposals for meaningful prosecution and punishment of corporate crime and criminals have been made in the literature and on the websites of a few NGOs although not as far as I can tell for preventing each and every one of the following ways the Department of Justice coddles corporate criminals: non-prosecution; “deferred” prosecution; mitigation; double-disclaimers; plea bargaining; non-criminal alternatives; and wrist slapping. And in every one of these ways we can be sure there are stables of corporate lawyers working to ensure their crooked employers go scot-free or nearly so.

1. End Non Prosecutions

The sine qua non of pampering is simply not to prosecute. Despite two arguments that try to justify this practice, non prosecution is a blatant as well as an unlawful cop out by our non-law enforcing captive government. One argument is that only persons can commit crimes. The argument is ludicrous when made by defenders of corporate personhood, but that is really beside the point. Much more to the point is that the persons responsible for the crime occupy official positions legitimized by the corporation; the crime is usually intended to benefit the corporation; the harm done is magnified by the overall presence and power of the corporation; and the organizational history and culture conducive to the crime will likely remain even if the individual culprits are removed.

The second argument is that indicting corporations would put them out of business and in doing so would hurt innocent shareholders, employees, creditors, and other stakeholders. But few corporations have ever been put out of business by being indicted. Nevertheless, advocates of this argument point to what happened to the consulting firm hired by Enron, Arthur Anderson. It was indicted, folded with some 28, 000 employees left unemployed, and then was subsequently acquitted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The ruling, however, turned on technicalities that didn’t really exonerate its culpability.

Government will sometimes go to extreme lengths not to prosecute corporate crime. A good example is what I call “phantom substitutes” in cases of Medicare fraud committed by corporations. Instead of having to give a “death sentence” mandated by its own harsh (on paper only) rule of excluding corporations that defrauded Medicare from doing further business with it, the prosecution has a phantom or defunct unit plead guilty (I guess the phantom can write and talk) and gives it the death sentence. The “parent” criminal, meanwhile, continues to milk the cash cow.

The Department of Justice currently has given itself entirely too much discretion in choosing whether to prosecute. Non-prosecution might be limited to cases where the harm done is relatively miniscule and no-repeat pledges are required and tied to heavy penalties if not honored. There should be no other exceptions.

2. End Deferred Prosecutions

If it doesn’t think it can get away with not prosecuting criminal corporations, government resorts to “deferred” prosecutions, but they eventually evaporate into non prosecutions. Ever since the Arthur Anderson case the trend has been for criminal corporations to be offered “deferred” prosecution agreements and the public gets hoodwinked yet again. The agreements aren’t publicized, so the corporation avoids damage to their reputation. Sometimes the court appoints a monitor with authority to impose internal reforms, but the monitor usually turns out to be cozy with the corporation. In any case, most often all charges in deferred agreements are dropped after the agreement “expires.” Some legal experts refer to these agreements as a “get-out-of-jail card,” but I prefer to call it a “stay-out-of-jail card.”

Deferred prosecution agreements should be totally banned. In their place, criminal corporations should be fully and rigorously prosecuted with no double disclaimers or plea bargaining allowed, and, where appropriate, put on tough probation that includes a bona fide outside monitor or trustee, ouster and severe punishment of the offending executives, a court-ordered restructuring plan, and publication in the major media of the corporation’s crime and punishment. Executives involved in any really serious corporate crimes should be prosecuted as criminals under the principle of “do crime, do time.”

3. Severely Limit Mitigation  (continued)

Read entire article at OpEdNews.

Gary Brumback, PhD is a retired psychologist and Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. He is an author of several books, including The Devil’s Marriage: Break Up the Corpocracy or Leave Democracy in the Lurch.

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Coal in Your Stocking

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Arlen Grossman
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Young Turks Return–Monday on Current TV

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Arlen Grossman

Starting 7pm Monday, December 5.

Comcast: Channel 107

Direct TV: Channel 358

Dish: Channel 215

AT&T U-verse: Channel 189

Time Warner: 103 NY, 142 LA

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Can You Feel Another War Coming?

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Arlen Grossman

Prepping Americans For an Iran War

As the American/Israeli war drums beat more loudly over Iran, the U.S. public is being told that this time the warnings about nuclear weapons are right, that no one should listen to Iranian denials, that ratcheting up tensions toward war is the only way. But William Blum recalls the similar false certainty about Iraq.

By William Blum/ Consortiumnews.com/ Dec. 3, 2011

There’s no letup, is there? The preparation of the American mind, the world mind, for the next gala performance of D&D — Death and Destruction. The Bunker Buster bombs are now 30,000 pounds each one, six times as heavy as the previous delightful model..

But the Masters of War still want to be loved; they need for you to believe them when they say they have no choice, that Iran is the latest threat to life as we know it, no time to waste.

The preparation of minds was just as fervent before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And when it turned out that Iraq did not have any kind of arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) … well, our power elite found other justifications for the invasion, and didn’t look back. Some berated Iraq: “Why didn’t they tell us that? Did they want us to bomb them?”

In actuality, before the U.S. invasion high Iraqi officials had stated clearly on repeated occasions that they had no such weapons. In August 2002, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told American newscaster Dan Rather on CBS: “We do not possess any nuclear or biological or chemical weapons.” [CBS Evening News, Aug. 20, 2002]

In December, Aziz stated to Ted Koppel on ABC: “The fact is that we don’t have weapons of mass destruction. We don’t have chemical, biological, or nuclear weaponry.” [ABC Nightline, Dec. 4, 2002]

Hussein himself told Rather in February 2003: “These missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations [as to range] in Iraq. They are no longer there.” [60 Minutes II, Feb. 26, 2003]

Moreover, Gen. Hussein Kamel, former head of Iraq’s secret weapons program, and a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical and biological weapons soon after the Persian Gulf War of 1991. [Washington Post, March 1, 2003]

There are yet other examples of Iraqi officials telling the world that the WMD were non-existent.

And if there were still any uncertainty remaining, last year Hans Blix, former chief United Nations weapons inspector, who led a doomed hunt for WMD in Iraq, told a British inquiry into the 2003 invasion that those who were “100 percent certain there were weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq turned out to have “less than zero percent knowledge” of where the purported hidden caches might be.

Blix testified that he had warned British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a February 2003 meeting — as well as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in separate talks — that Hussein might have no weapons of mass destruction. [Associated Press, July 28, 2010]

Those of who you don’t already have serious doubts about the American mainstream media’s knowledge and understanding of U.S. foreign policy, should consider this: Despite the two revelations on Dan Rather’s CBS programs, and the other revelations noted above, in January 2008 we find CBS reporter Scott Pelley interviewing FBI agent George Piro, who had interviewed Saddam Hussein before he was executed:

CBS correspondent Scott Pelley with President George W. Bush in 2002

PELLEY: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?

PIRO: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.

PELLEY: He had ordered them destroyed?

PIRO: Yes.

PELLEY: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade? [60 Minutes, Jan. 27, 2008. See also: Consortiumnews.com’s “CBS Falsifies Iraq History,” Jan. 28, 2008; Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [FAIR] Action Alert, Feb. 1, 2008]

[Scott Pelley is now the anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News and a correspondent on 60 Minutes. He previously was a correspondent on 60 Minutes II and a White House correspondent.]

The United States and Israel are preparing to attack Iran because of its alleged development of nuclear weapons, which Iran has denied on many occasions. Of the Iraqis who warned the United States that it was mistaken about the WMD — Saddam Hussein was executed, Tariq Aziz is awaiting execution. Which Iranian officials is U.S./Israel going to hang after their country is laid to waste?

Would it have mattered if the Bush administration had fully believed Iraq when it said it had no WMD? Probably not. There is ample evidence that Bush knew this to be the case, or at a minimum should have seriously suspected it; the same applies to Tony Blair. Saddam Hussein did not sufficiently appreciate just how psychopathic his two adversaries were.

Bush was determined to vanquish Iraq, for the sake of Israel, for control of oil, and for expanding the empire with new bases, though in the end most of this didn’t work out as the empire expected; for some odd reason, it seems that the Iraqi people resented being bombed, invaded, occupied, demolished, and tortured.

But if Iran is in fact building nuclear weapons, we have to ask: Is there some international law that says that the U.S., the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not? If the United States had known that the Japanese had deliverable atomic bombs, would Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been destroyed?

Israeli military historian, Martin van Creveld, has written: “The world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all. Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy.”7

It cannot be repeated too often: The secret to understanding U.S. foreign policy is that there is no secret. Principally, one must come to the realization that the United States strives to dominate the world. Once one understands that, much of the apparent confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity surrounding Washington’s policies fades away.

Examine a map: Iran sits directly between two of the United States’ great obsessions — Iraq and Afghanistan … directly between two of the world’s greatest oil regions — the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea areas … it’s part of the encirclement of the two leading potential threats to American world domination — Russia and China … Tehran will never be a client state or obedient poodle to Washington.

How could any good, self-respecting Washington imperialist resist such a target? Bombs Away!

William Blum is the author of: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2; Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower; West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir; Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire. Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org. [This story first appeared at Anti-Empire Report.] 

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BPR Quote of the Day: Lincoln’s Leftist Rhetoric

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Arlen Grossman

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

Abraham Lincoln

First State of the Union Address, Dec. 3, 1861


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