change
neo-con obama
Submitted by antarchi on January 22, 2011 - 22:16the crux of Bush/Cheney radicalism -- the mindset and policies that caused much of the controversy - continues and has even been strengthened. Gen. Hayden put it best, as quoted by The Washington Times:
"You've got state secrets, targeted killings, indefinite detention, renditions, the opposition to extending the right of habeas corpus to prisoners at Bagram [in Afghanistan]," Mr. Hayden said, listing the continuities. "And although it is slightly different, Obama has been as aggressive as President Bush in defending prerogatives about who he has to inform in Congress for executive covert action."
Obama enshrining bush policies
Submitted by antarchi on August 16, 2010 - 00:18...if you take a step back and you look more broadly at what the administration is doing on national security, in particular, what you see far too often is the administration endorsing policies that most of us recognize were extreme under the last administration. And, in fact, in some cases, you see this administration going even further than the last administration did...
some of the places we point to in the report include the endorsement of indefinite detention for some of the people who are now held at Guantánamo, the failure to hold accountable the people who endorsed torture. The last administration built a framework for torture, but this administration... is building a framework for impunity. Allowing those senior officials who endorsed torture to get away with it leaves torture on the table as a permissible policy option, if not for this president, then for the next president...
the decision to endorse torture was a decision that was made at the highest levels of the Bush administration... So the problem we have now is that there is... the Obama administration has initiated a criminal investigation, but the criminal investigation is very narrow. It examines only a handful of incidents in which contractors or CIA interrogators went beyond the authority that was invested in them. And nobody, as far as we know, is looking into the responsibility and the criminal liability of the people who endorsed torture and authorized it. And that seems indefensible to us...
'tell me how you do these things'
Submitted by antarchi on June 12, 2010 - 11:35The Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials. Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia...
Obama, one senior military official said, has allowed "things that the previous administration did not."
"We have a lot more access [to the White House]," a second military official said. "They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly."
The White House, he said, is "asking for ideas and plans . . . calling us in and saying, 'Tell me what you can do. Tell me how you do these things.'
disgusted by Obama
Submitted by antarchi on June 12, 2010 - 11:08It's President Obama's policies on civil liberties and national security issues I'm disgusted by....
It’s 18 months and, if not now, when? ... Guantanamo is still not closed. Military commissions are still a mess. The administration still uses state secrets to shield themselves from litigation. There's no prosecution for criminal acts of the Bush administration. Surveillance powers put in place under the Patriot Act have been renewed. If there has been change in the civil liberties context, I frankly don't see it...
The unwillingness of the administration to stick by its guns and prosecute the Sept. 11 defendants in criminal court does not bode well for the broader civil liberties agenda," he said. "The fact they've not announced anything raises the specter of doubt that, in itself, is debilitating to the Justice Department and raises serious questions about the administration's commitment to the rule of law. Their silence speaks volumes.
no cuts allowed
Submitted by antarchi on May 22, 2010 - 21:05I came up with a cunning plan. Instead of working for a lower wage - which was rejected by the fluffy, corporocratic 'charity' which pays my wages - I would put in a voluntary day. The same wage, but spread over more days. Win-win, you might think: win for the charity, which gets more free labour than it receives already from its numerous unpaid interns - and win for me, because I get what I asked for, only by a different means.
In fact, ever since the charity informed me that it wouldn't contemplate 'paying people differently' - and even though that is exactly what they do already - I have been behaving (a bit) like an intern. And they know it. The cunning plan has been in force for the past 10 months: paid work for 3 days, another 1, or 2 or 3 days as unofficial intern - and fiddling the work plan to make it look as though the work that takes 4, 5 or 6 days can be done in 3. They know it's a lie.
But they won't formalise the lie. They are happy for the lie to lie there, unacknowledged: they get the 4 or 5 days that they wanted me to work, and bank the cash. They are even happy, generally, to take on volunteers, and add them to the balance sheet as 'contributions in kind' (some, not all). But they won't add this contribution; and more importantly, they won't allow the grant that has been allocated to pay for 4 days' of my work to be redistributed: to be used to pay for 3 days' work, with the rest fed back into the project (with the funder's agreement).
The same amount of time would be spent on the project, but the money would go further. It can't be done, apparently.
- antarchi's blog
- Login to post comments
- Read more
obama lies as cravenly as bush
Submitted by antarchi on March 1, 2010 - 23:52Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush ... As a senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA Reform Act that retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens without warrant; instead he supported passage of the loathsome legislation. He told us he would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the detention facility at Guantánamo, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new jobs. None of this has happened.
He is shoving a health care bill down our throats that would give hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the private health insurance industry in the form of subsidies, and force millions of uninsured Americans to buy insurers' defective products ... Obama did nothing to halt the collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference, after promising meaningful environmental reform, and has left us at the mercy of corporations such as ExxonMobil. He empowers Israel's brutal apartheid state. He has expanded the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where hundreds of civilians, including entire families, have been slaughtered by sophisticated weapons systems such as the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of victims' lungs. And he is delivering war and death to Yemen, Somalia and perhaps Iran.
From Chris Hedges' Ralph Nader was right about Barack Obama
Is this enough to take our idol off the wall? No, no! He would have done so if he could (and didn't, so he obviously couldn't).
What does it take to take an idol off the wall? It takes another idol to replace him. Until that happens, and unless an idol loses his good looks, his ease, smooth charm and eloquence, he can smooth-charm his way through just as many lies as there are pores to let them out of his athletic body. He isn't there to lead us out of trouble: he's there for us to make-believe the trouble isn't there while he's in charge. And the smoother and more porous his athletic body is, the more we pin it on our walls to gaze at; the more we blame the things he said he'd do, and didn't do, on everyone, except for him.
Until the wall falls down. And even then, the wall fell down despite him, not because of him.
It's easier, more comforting, to cope with walls come tumbling down than it is to have our superheroes falling of their own accord. It's easier to have a superhero who we vote for every 4 or 5 years, and who will do the job of Change for us, mend everything, put things to rights. It's hard and most unsettling to think that superheroes don't exist and we have no-one else to put up on the wall. Or at least - no-one who has the powers of superheroes: the power to do for us what we need to do for ourselves.
I am not blaming Obama for not being super-human. I am blaming humans for believing in those who make-believe that they are superhuman - and cannot see, as Hedges says, that
Social change does not come through voting. It is delivered through activism
- antarchi's blog
- Login to post comments
- Read more
