Endless USA UAVs kill while claiming end of war; USA policies
kill worker chances while claiming pro-labor values
Excerpts, editing, end comment by
Carolyn Bennett
Flashback
briefly to a significant presidency: One of America’s founders, James Madison Jr. (b. 1751 in Port
Conway, Virginia, d. 1836 in Montpelier, Virginia) was the fourth president of
the United States (1809–1817). He influenced the planning and ratification of
the U.S. Constitution and collaborated with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in
the publication of the Federalist papers. As a member of the new House of
Representatives, James Madison sponsored the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution,
commonly called the Bill of Rights.
He was secretary of state under US President Thomas Jefferson when the
Louisiana Territory was purchased from France. The War of 1812 was fought
during Madison’s presidency [Britannica note].
U
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S Domestic affairs—Ralph Nader on the US president’s
latest State of the Union rhetoric
Destruction, rights abuse, corruption
The President “stressed civil liberties and never mentioned
what he’s going to do about the renewal of the notorious USA PATRIOT Act
provisions.
“He said there should be more oil and gas production and then
he warned about climate change.
“He said there should be a strengthening of unions
and voices of workers and then he took it away with the Trans-Pacific
trade agreement
[Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)], which exports jobs, and he wants to ram through Congress a voiceless
fast track that prohibits amendments and labor from having a role in that
deliberation.”
The President “didn’t even mention the hundreds of billions
of dollars of commercial fraud on Medicare and Medicaid and patients in the
private sector—hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars of corporate crime.”
The President “could have done a convergence with the
Republicans on auditing the Pentagon, which … is a huge issue supported by the
rank and file on both sides of the isle.” The grounds for this is that when the
president was a US Senator, “he teamed up with Republican Senator Coburn to put
the full text of hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate contracts online
so that competitors, taxpayers, media and academia could analyze and prune the
huge waste, fraud and corruption.”
Oklahoma physician and politician Thomas
Allen (Tom) Coburn arrived in the US Senate at the same as Barack Obama and
reportedly the two became friends, despite ideological differences. Before his
election to the Senate, Coburn was a member of the US House of Representatives.
Again, in his final years in office, the president missed an obvious
opportunity for making common cause.
Torture, illegal detention
Nader continues. The President “said, again, ‘Close down
Gitmo’” [the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba], a “song … we have heard before.
Also the president again in this speech failed entirely to address the heart of the Middle East struggle, “the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.”
The President failed to mention where money would come from
for programs he mentioned and failed to mention a critical source of lost or
uncollected funds: the Internal Revenue Service budget being squeezed by the
Republicans to the extent that the agency cannot “begin collecting what the IRS
says is $300 billion of evaded (not avoided but evaded) taxes every year.”
In sum, Nader says, the President’s speech lacked essential specifics.
It was insufficiently coherent and failed to articulate convergence with the
other major political party. The President, he said, “missed a lot of
opportunities.”
 M |
endacious rhetoric: Foreign
relations “values” soaked with the blood of millions— Institute for Policy Studies Fellow Phyllis Bennis also today on Democracy Now
The United States under the current president is “in at
least five or six separate wars that may not involve large numbers of ground
troops.
“[However] There are troops on the ground” and more
not fewer are being deployed; but “there are primarily air wars.”
Values licensing to kill
Phyllis Bennis said, “Closing Guantánamo [the US prison at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba] is easier if you just kill all the people that your
predecessor arrested. So there’s something very disturbing about this framework
in [the President’s] speech where he spoke so much of values.
“This is about the values of our country [but] what values
are we talking about here? What does the rest of the world—what do people in
Iraq, people in Syria, people in Gaza—what are they seeing of our values as
they watched the speech last night?”
Unconscionable killing by remote
“It was extraordinary… -- this notion of constraining drone
strikes, which means that we only have a ‘kill meeting’ at the White House once
a week; not every day. Only on Tuesdays does the White House staff meet,
literally, to decide who should be on the so-called ‘kill list’.
Repeating an astonishing yet true statement, Bennis continued,
“When I said earlier that this is a scenario where closing Guantánamo becomes
easier if you have fewer people—it is not because they are not going after
people.…
They
are simply assassinating people—at far higher numbers. There has been a serious
escalation in the drone war.
“…To say that instead of going to war, we are pulling back,
we are doing something else… belies the reality of what the drone war looks
like on the ground.”
I
|
n my view, there should be no tribal
politics of any kind, no taking of one or another side—whatever the
color, cast or ideology of the side—when faced with such barefaced betrayal and utter mendacity
on the part of public officials against the public good.
Sources and notes
“Ralph Nader on What was Missing in President Obama’s State
of the Union Address,” Democracy Now, January 21, 2015, http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/21/ralph_nader_on_what_was_missing
“Phyllis Bennis: As Obama Hails ‘Turning Page’ on Wars, U.S.
Drone Strikes Continue Across Globe,” Democracy Now January 21, 2015, http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/21/phyllis_bennis_as_obama_hails_turning
Ralph Nader
Veteran consumer advocate, author, critic, and former candidate
for the US presidency, Ralph Nader, his latest book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the
Corporate State.
Phyllis
Bennis
U.S. journalist, activist, and political commentator Phyllis
Bennis is Director of New Internationalism at the Institute for Policy Studies. The New Internationalism project “works to
challenge U.S. domination of the UN and to help democratize and empower the
global organization,” according to its website. It works primarily on Middle
East and United Nations issues with key areas of interest including U.S. wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Instrumentally,
the NI project focuses on “education and activism to change the failed and
failing U.S. policies and retool those policies to meet the goals of peace with
justice” [http://www.ips-dc.org/projects/new-internationalism/]
Madison,
James. (2013). Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica Deluxe
Edition. Chicago: Encyclopedia
Britannica.
Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP)
Proposed as a regional regulatory and investment treaty, the
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) implementation “has been one of the primary
goals of the trade agenda of the Obama administration.… The proposed agreement
began in 2005 as the Trans-Pacific Strategic Partnership Agreement (TPSEP or
P4) and participating countries set 2012 as the goal for wrapping up
negotiations.” However, “contentious issues such as agriculture, intellectual
property, and services and investments have caused negotiations to continue past
that deadline. … Global health professionals, internet freedom activists,
environmentalists, organized labor, advocacy groups, and elected officials have
criticized and protested the negotiations, in large part because of the
proceedings’ secrecy, the agreement's expansive scope, and controversial
clauses in drafts leaked to the public.” As of 2014, twelve countries
throughout the Asia-Pacific region have participated in negotiations on the
TPP: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand,
Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership
________________________________________________A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora
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