U.S. in Middle East: Kill until all disagreeing are killed; abandon Palestine ─ Kucinich, Carter

Acute and constant U.S. Foreign relations disasters

Re-reporting, editing by 

Carolyn Bennett

Referencing this week’s Washington Post article on the White House’s calculated global killing program, Kucinich writes, the United States’ “‘targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the process that sustains it.’ …  The current policy creates new U.S. enemies and our government wants to make this program permanent.”

This is a “short-sighted policy,” Kucinich says, that “has been likened to mowing the grass. As soon as you stop cutting the grass down, it comes right back.”

U.S. drone
Human costs
Somalia

But, Kucinich warns, “Nations are not made of grass. They are made of people” ─ as many as 3,378 people including 885 civilians killed by more than 350 U.S. drone strikes.

Innocent civilians, thousands of people dead [not to mention the maimed and demoralized, the displaced, the terrified and insecure, the destabilized]; and we “continue to kill ‘top leaders’”: repeatedly, we have “killed ‘Al Qaeda’s number 2’… and significant questions persist as to whether the United States is conducting [assassination drone] strikes in accordance with the law. The evidence suggests not.

“We are not solving our problems or making the world safer,” Kucinich says. We are staining our own global image, undermining our ethical place to lead and descending into moral depravity.

U.S. drone
Pakistani backlash

 

“Will we keep killing until everyone who disagrees with us is dead?”

U.S. drone launch

W

hile the elected government in Washington was killing people in the Middle East, the Elders were fact finding in the Middle East, talking peace and a two-state solution in Palestine.

The Elders is an independent group of ten global leaders who no longer hold public office (they are independent of any national government or other vested interest), leaders who have earned international trust, demonstrated integrity, and built a reputation for inclusive, progressive leadership.

Palestinian woman
Child
Rubble

The Elders work together for peace and human rights. They were brought together in 2007 by Nelson Mandela, who is not an active member of the group but remains an Honorary Elder. The Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi was also an Honorary Elder, until her election to the Burmese parliament in April 2012. Current active Elders are Martti Ahtisaari, Kofi Annan, Ela Bhatt, Lakhdar Brahimi, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Fernando H Cardoso, Jimmy Carter, Graça Machel, Mary Robinson.

Three of the Elders, former Norway Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Ireland President Mary Robinson, and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, made a two-day visit to Israel and the West Bank this week.

Elders’ findings in Occupied Territories

Elders left to right
Gro Harlem BrundtlandJimmy Carter
Mary Robinson.

The former President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, said:

“The aspirations of Palestinians are being crushed, not only by the complete failure of negotiations with Israel but by a lack of unified political leadership.

“They deserve much better,” she said. “Reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas remains an essential ingredient in Palestinian self-determination [and] the leaders have to be more attuned to the demands of the people, especially given the broader changes sweeping the region.” 

 

The former Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, said:

“It has been very sad to hear of the considerable problems that long-standing Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem face in their everyday lives –

having to reapply every year for the right to stay,

businesspeople waiting years for licenses,

[loss of] their homes to settlers or demolition.

“The effect of this system,” she said, [creates] great suffering, and erode[s] the diverse character of this city, which is so important for people of all faiths and traditions from all around the world.”

As a physician, Gro Harlem Brundtland said she “was particularly affected by our visit to Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, a Palestinian model of excellence for the entire region which faces enormous difficulties in treating those people nearest to it from the West Bank – never mind Palestinians from Gaza – due to Israeli travel restrictions.” This is a tragic illustration, she said, of “the direct human impact of the present deadlock.” 

Middle East
Occupied Territories

The former President of the United States, and the leader of this Elders’ delegation, Jimmy Carter, said:

“We are heading towards a one-state outcome, which will fail to ensure 

• the security and democratic rights of the people of Israel and

• renege on the promise of self-determination for Palestinians.

The two-state solution is vanishing. We urgently need a fresh approach by all parties if a Palestinian state is to be achieved.

Jimmy Carter said, “The Elders share the view that the two-state solution is the only realistic path to peace and security for Israel and the Palestinians but changes on the ground ─ including the construction of settlements beyond the Green Line and the growing isolation of East Jerusalem from the West Bank ─ make a Palestinian state unviable.”

In the reporting press on the Elders’ Middle East trip, Mr. Carter reportedly chastised U.S. leadership “for the lack of progress toward a two-state resolution:

The United States ‘has withdrawn commitment to be the major negotiator.’

Sources and notes

“The Kill Matrix ─ State-sponsored murder has killed so many people that it is becoming routine, bureaucratized and pathological” Washington, October 24, 2012, http://kucinich.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=311425

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today released a statement (text and video) opposing the codification and the streamlining of the United States’ ‘Kill Matrix’ which determines when and where the United States uses drones to conduct targeted killings.

“State-sponsored murder has killed so many people that it is becoming routine, bureaucratized and pathological,” Kucinich added.

American for nonviolence

Dennis John Kucinich (b. October 8, 1946) has been a member of the United States House of Representatives representing Ohio’s 10th congressional district since 1997 (2012, current Congress, ends his tenure). He was a candidate for the U.S. presidency in 2004 and 2008; and before entering Congress, Kucinich was Cleveland, Ohio’s 53rd mayor (1977-1979).

In the U.S. Congress, Dennis Kucinich sits on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. In a Congressional career in which he has stood for bringing articles of impeachment against former U.S. President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard (Dick) Cheney; and against the 2003 invasion of Iraq and consistently for nonviolence, for diplomacy, for peace, Kucinich will end his congressional career in January 2013, following a redistricting by Ohio’s Republican-controlled state legislature that abolished the congressional district in which he serves.

Todays Insight News: “Toward U.S. global Tiananmen?”  Tuesday, June 5, 2012 

The Elders, http://theelders.org/about

“We are heading towards a one-state outcome” (press release) October 22, 2012, http://theelders.org/article/we-are-heading-towards-one-state-outcome

‘The two-state solution is vanishing’ – Jimmy Carter, Gro Harlem Brundtland and Mary Robinson urge a fresh approach to achieving lasting peace in the Middle East

The Elders concluded a two-day visit to Israel and the West Bank by saying that the two-state solution is in deep peril and may soon be out of reach. They urged a fresh, concerted approach to explore all alternatives to the current stalemate in negotiations, stressing that a two-state solution is the only realistic path to lasting peace in the Middle East.

During this visit, the Elders met the Israeli President Shimon Peres, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, international officials and a range of Israeli and Palestinian groups. Their discussions on this issue will continue in the coming days in Cairo, Egypt.

“Carter joins two other members of The Elders on visit to Israel and the West Bank and sees worsening situation for Palestinians” (Common Dreams staff), October 23, 2012, http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/23-4

“Jimmy Carter downplays U.S. influence on Israel and Palestine” (Press TV), October 23, 2012,

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/10/23/268308/carter-downplays-us-influence-on-israel/

Elders’ Part II Egypt

“The Elders begin two-day visit to Egypt” October 23, 2102:  In the second part of their trip to the Middle East, The Elders were in Egypt for two days meeting with President Morsi, senior officials, religious leaders and members of civil society. The Elders praised the Egyptians for their success in using non-violent protest to bring about sweeping political changes and expressed their support for the country’s democratic transition.

Gro Harlem Brundtland, Jimmy Carter and Mary Robinson offered encouragement and support for an inclusive democratic transition. http://theelders.org/article/elders-begin-two-day-visit-egypt

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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Foreign policy failure can be fixed not by Dem-Repubs ─ Anderson, Stein

Airstrike hits
Afghanistan

.… By

Obeying international law, building friendly relations, ending to aggression

Editing, re-reporting by 

Carolyn Bennett

Drone

U.S. government’s reckless foreign relations ─ Dem-Repubs agree on Drones-PLUS

The executive government in Washington has yet to give in-depth explanations as to why targeted killings are an option. RT is reporting today that United States-led drone strikes ─ the remote-controlled, killing machines, which are launched from tens of thousands of feet above the Earth and which target “suspected insurgents” (and indiscriminately kill untold hundreds if not thousands of civilians) ─ see no end in sight given the status quo in U.S. federal government.

Drone attack
Somalia

Their performance on Tuesday made clear that U.S. Dem/Repub presidential candidates not only agree on assassination drones; but they cavalierly brag about this method of mass murder, a policy and practice that any sane person understands to be a violation of domestic law, moral principle, and international law.

The United States in recent years has ramped-up ‘counterterrorism’ tactics by expanding launching pads for drones around the world. Stealth airships today, RT reports, “can be dispatched in moments across the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula or Northern Africa.” Domestically, these remote-controlled hostile machines “are expected to be cleared [this year] by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.”  

But for killers in chief this is not enough.

U.S. Remote killing

DRONE JUSTIFIER

“According to a chilling report published Tuesday evening in the Washington Post,” RT reported that U.S. officials are going even further in the practice of “hands-off” murder by technological advancement. The “most advanced tactics” for decimating “alleged enemies without ever bringing them to trial are not being eliminated but updated.”

The current “secret Oval Office-penned roster of persons slated for extrajudicial execution” will soon be in the past, replaced by “a ‘disposition matrix,’ more modernized terminology and technology [that allows] ─

counterterrorism experts in Washington to plot not just who and how to kill; but where to find them and what to do in order to ‘bring them to justice.’

October 3 airstrike

Wrong on so many levels: in law, in morality, in human rights

The report says, “The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations.…  

The database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the ‘disposition’ of suspects beyond the reach of U.S. drones

Step-by-step procedures or algorithms are developed by computers as are answers justifying full-fledged manhunts and executions of any alleged enemies of the state.

Drone protest
Pakistan

ASSASSINATION TODAY

Today in Pakistan, according to Press TV reports, “Local officials said an unmanned aircraft fired two missiles at a compound in the Tapi area near Miranshah, the major town of North Waziristan.” At least three people died. Two weeks ago (October 11), “sixteen Pakistani people were killed in a similar attack in South Waziristan tribal region” and “on October 10, a U.S. assassination drone strike killed five people in North Waziristan’s Hurmuz area.”

Yesterday, U.S. officials admitted killing civilians in Eastern Afghanistan.

This is the United States status quo but not the end of the story. There are options.

Though the corporate choreographers of the Dem/Repubs’ dance this week denied participation of presidential candidates Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party (U.S.), they did have something to say about drones and war and foreign policy. These are some Stein’s and Anderson’s responses on critical issues of foreign relations.

B

oth Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson agreed that the status quo in U.S. foreign policy is damaging to the United States and the world.

Outrageously inhuman policy

“Can you imagine,” Rocky Anderson asked, “if there were Muslim countries coming into the United States and occupying us, invading us, telling us how, where to run our government; and then running unmanned drones over Canada, Mexico, the United States ─ determining who is going to live and who is going to die, and in the process killing hundreds if not thousands of (we don’t know how many) innocent men, women and children?”

Anderson exclaimed at the “outrage” and went on to point out that “our national security is at risk long-term, because of the hostility and hatred we are generating throughout [the Middle East].

“We have got to turn this around,” Anderson said, “and we, the American people, can do it.”

Yemenis protest
foreign meddling

FOREIGN POLICY FAILURE

“We are seeing a very ill-conceived, irresponsible and immoral war policy come back to haunt us,” Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said. “United States foreign policies have been based, unfortunately, on brute military force and wars for oil.”

Regarding the United States’ interference in another conflict, in Syria, Stein reflected on the past decade of U.S. aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, amounting to great losses all over the world, and observed a seemingly chronic condition in U.S. officialdom, “collective amnesia.”

Anderson said, regarding the United States in Syria, “We are again trying to assert our will and dictate the result.”

 

War policy impairs domestic affairs

Stein continued. With a “bloated military-industrial-security budget,” trillions spent, and hundreds of thousands (U.S. and foreign) dead, Stein said, we need to ─

Cut the military budget to right size

Bring our war dollars home.

Build true security here at home

U.S. bullies Middle East

Justice Party presidential candidate Rocky Anderson said, “The policy failure has been in the way the United States has treated so many nations in the Middle East. We’re like the bully that never got counseling and we keep wondering why they don’t like us.”

Anderson pointed to “Our belligerence, our efforts to control, to dominate and to make certain that we will always have that control over the resources of Middle East nations” ─ this is the character that constitutes a foreign policy of failure, he said.

Our invasion and occupation of Iraq was completely illegal. Two United Nations secretaries-general declared it illegal.

It was a war of aggression, all done on a pack of lies.

Now, we aggravate the situation by keeping bases in scores of nations, including those of tyrants such as Saudi Arabia, bolstering these tyrants;  and  engaging in direct, unmanned drone strikes in at least four sovereign nations, killing hundreds if not thousands of innocent men, women and children.

We have a history of bullying in foreign relations and we need to “start building friendly relationships,” Rocky Anderson said. “This is a holistic problem, an imperialist foreign policy that we must turn around; and if we join together, the American people can see to it.”

Anti-American protests
Middle East

Violence has consequences

“It is very clear, Jill Stein said, “that there is blowback across the Middle East. Not only unrest directed at the Libyan embassy; but also at embassies across the Middle East (including other nations of North and East Africa).

“In Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers are being killed by police forces supposedly being trained by U.S. soldiers. Seventy-five percent of Pakistanis identify the United States, not as their supporter or their ally; but as their enemy.”

 Fixing foreign policy failure

To repair the failed U.S. foreign policy, Jill Stein added, “We need to stop the flow of the arms: the U.S. militaristic export of arms, the support of a profiteering war industry.” End this American complicity in “[throwing] gasoline on the fires of virtually every ethnic, religious and national conflict around the Middle East.”

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said under her administration ─

 

We will have a foreign policy based on international law and human rights and we will use diplomacy.

Instead of fighting wars for oil, we will be leading America in the fight to end global warming and climate change.

 

“The American people can see to it,” Anderson said, “if we join together.”

Sources and notes

“Kill-list 2.0: Obama’s ‘disposition matrix’ maps out extrajudicial murders for years to come,”

October 24, 2012, http://rt.com/usa/news/disposition-matrix-kill-obama-146/

“U.S. assassination drone kills three in Pakistan’s North Waziristan,” October 24, 2012, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/10/24/268490/us-terror-drone-kills-3-in-pakistan/

“Two U.S.-led troops killed in Afghanistan,” October 24, 2012, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/10/24/268579/two-usled-troops-killed-in-afghanistan/

“U.S. admits to killing civilians in eastern Afghanistan,” October 23, 2012, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/10/23/268357/us-admits-to-killing-afghan-civilians/

“Exclusive: As Obama and Romney Agree on Afghan War, Israel and Syria, Third Parties Give Alternative” (Transcript) October 23, 2012

Amy Goodman: “In the last of our exclusive ‘Expanding the Debate’ series, we bring you highlights of our coverage of last night’s final presidential debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, with the added voices of third-party candidates…

“In an evening focused on foreign policy, both Obama and Romney shared wide agreement on issues including support for the Israeli government, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and opposition to U.S. military involvement in Syria. But they clashed over a few key points, including military spending, negotiating with Iran, and responding to the Libyan embassy attack. Before a live audience in San Rafael, California, we aired the Obama-Romney debate and paused the tape to insert into the discussion [Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party], responding in real time to the same questions put to the Democratic and Republican Party candidates,” http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/23/exclusive_as_obama_and_romney_agree#transcript

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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Cold War with vengeance: U.S. Dem-Repubs pledge allegiance to cont'd violence across Asia, Africa

“Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice,” I’ve had this quote on my desk for years. No matter how you slice it or angle it, what you heard last night is not demonstrative of choice. 

Choice is not given; you must make it. Re-reporting and comment by Carolyn Bennett 

I

f you stand long enough with these entrenched men, you will turn this country back to yesteryear, lose any ground achieved as a civilized people in a civilized world where every human being is protected under the rule of law and in adherence to declarations of human rights. 

If we continue sending the same ilk to Washington ─ if we refuse to imagine above this fray, outside this box, beyond this ideology ─ then America (this America) will do no more than regress and regress and regress into an abyss of worsening mendacity and barbarity. 

Hoodwinked

An RT story observes, and rightly so, that the Democratic-Republican Party “monopoly is failing the American people.” The hoodwinking perpetrated by these parties is indeed “a joke” played on the American electorate. Aided and abetted by mass media, these heavies block choice as an Israeli blockade on peoples of the Gaza Strip; and only ordinary Americans can break the hold.

It is true, as this article puts it, that the political process in the United States is a “corporate-owned sweepstakes with less credibility than a beauty pageant.” And to raise the standard, the American people must engage, uproot this rotten entrenchment, and demand a substantively changed ethos, desperately needed new voices and new ideas. Clean house in Washington.

 

Foreign policy is domestic policy.

 

F

ormer Senator Mike Gravel responded to last night’s televised event of a couple of cosmetic characters’ wink-and-nod performance on foreign policy. This is some of what Gravel told Press TV about the Obama-Romney (Dem-Repub.) callous, cowardly, pernicious and careless model of U.S. foreign relations and how it inevitably intertwines with U.S. domestic conditions.

Former Senator
Mike Gravel

Cold War with a vengeance

“I think their foreign policies are very close,” Gravel said.

Barack Obama: admits the United States has been “indirectly” supplying insurgents in Syria.

Mitt Romney: says we should give them more “supplies.”

Gravel says, “This is waging war through an agency, which is how we started the war in Libya. Now we are doing this [in] Syria and look at all the deaths that have occurred.

“There is as much blood on our hands as there is on [President Bashar al-] Assad’s government.” Sustained by his allies Iran and Russia, Gravel said, President Assad “is trying to maintain himself in power. And we (the United States of America) are trying to bring about a new person in power.”

 

Based on what the Republican and Democratic candidates said last night, Mike Gravel concluded that there is “no change in policy … toward Iran and toward Israel’s control of American foreign policy.” 

We are, he said, “almost back at the Cold War where the United States is waging proxy wars [and] other people are dying.”

Aided and abetted by mass media

The head of the international affairs committee of the Russian Federation legislature (the State Duma), Alexei Pushkov, also commented recently on the carelessly violent pattern in U.S. foreign relations and the press’s collusion with it.  

Iraq to Libya to Syria ─ When the United States “was attempting to justify the war in Iraq, ‘the entire U.S. media claimed the country had nuclear weapons,’ a claim that turned out to be blatantly false [and] today a similar situation is unraveling with regard to Syria:

‘The Americans are taking an absolutely one-sided position and

[t]heir media act as if they were the ideological arm of U.S. foreign policy.’

Reporting on Libya, the U.S. media alleged President Muammar al Qaddafi “was guilty of murdering 6,000 Libyan citizens, ‘but the bodies were never found and the theme was forgotten,’” Pushkov said.

The singular “‘voice of U.S. media is startling’” and demonstrative of a blind allegiance to “‘the policy of national authorities.’”

U.S. war left in
Iraq

Hit and run U.S. hostilities: 

Iraq to Libya

Anti- U.S.
Libya

International dispatches in recent days from Libya have been reporting post-U.S.-invasion atrocities against “innocent civilians” ─ this latest conflict reportedly provoked by the death of Omran Shaaban, a “rebel from Misrata credited with capturing” President Qaddafi. Shaaban reportedly died on September 25 after “two months’ detention in Bani Walid.” Reports from the  town have indicated that innocent civilians are caught in the crossfire of increasing “fighting between pro-government forces and Qaddafi loyalists.”

So today the Russian Federation offered at the United Nations a statement expressing concern about the significant escalation of violence in and around Bani Walid and calling on Libyan authorities “to take urgent steps to resolve the conflict by peaceful means and to preserve the rights of all Libyan citizens.”

United Nations
 Bushwhacked by
USA

The United States then blocked the draft statement, which the Russian envoy found strange indeed. Vitaly Churkin said:

Blocking a draft statement that called to solve the country’s political problems without violence is very strange.

This is a case when it is difficult to explain the U.S. delegation’s actions in rational terms.

W

hat can change U.S. foreign relations of war, its violence against sovereign peoples? Gravel continued.

I know of no change “that could come about in the United States to change our whole attitude of imperialism,” he said, other than bankruptcy ─ where, of course, “the country it is slowly going.”

During the Republican-Democratic Party candidates’ foreign policy performance, Gravel said, “There was some truth in what Obama said:

[w]e cannot be strong in the world if we’re not strong at home economically; and we are not strong economically.

“We waste our economic capability on foreign wars and foreign policies” that do nothing other than kill a lot of people; and we stand above them [and tell them] we can dictate the kind of government they will have.”

Egypt-Libya-Syria

“We are trying to dictate that in Syria, in Libya, and in other countries,” Gravel said.

“We dictated that in Egypt: through our military and through the billions of dollars the United States gives annually to Egypt’s military, we forced [President Hosni] Mubarak out.” It is a pattern employed by the United States government “around the world” including “indirectly” in Syria.

Rights due to Human beings as 

Human beings

Speaking recently on the sidelines of a parliamentary hearing on human rights in America, Alexei Pushkov pointedly observed that the United States itself must “honor human rights before trying to lecture other countries on these principles.”

Universal Declaration of
Human Rights
1947

I

’d say that targeted assassinations, wars of aggression, provocation and destabilization of countries and factions, displacement of peoples, torture and detention without charge, trial or counsel, violations of the peace ─ all of these known to have been committed and are still being ordered and committed by U.S. government officials and agents ─ all of these fall within the category of lawlessness and abuse of human rights. 

Those who order and or commit these acts must be brought to account before an impartial court of justice and those who promise to commit or suggest that they intend or might commit such acts must be barred from or voted out of public office ─ especially the entrenched, no matter who they are or what their pedigree or lineage.

Sources and notes

“Romney vs. Obama: Where’s the Choice?”  October 4, 2012, http://rt.com/politics/columns/bridge-too/us-presidential-debates-romney-obama/

“Cold war climate pursued by U.S. in Syria at cost of their own economy,” October 23, 2012, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/10/23/268353/obama-romney-debate-promoted-waging-war/

“U.S. media: Ideological arm of American foreign policy – Russia,” October 22, 2012, http://rt.com/politics/us-russia-media-human-rights-violations-956/

“U.S. blocks Russia’s draft statement in UN on peaceful resolution of Bani Walid violence.” October 23, 2012, http://rt.com/news/us-russia-libya-statement-068/

Mike Gravel

A former U.S. presidential candidate (2008) and a former U.S. Senator (1969-1981), Maurice Robert (Mike) Gravel (b. May 13, 1930) is prominently known for his release of the Pentagon Papers, the secret official study that revealed the lies and manipulations of successive U.S. administrations that misled the country into the Vietnam War. After the New York Times published portions of the leaked study, the Nixon administration moved to block any further publication of information and to punish any newspaper publisher who revealed the contents. Speaking on the floor of the Senate, Gravel (a junior senator at the time) argued that his constituents had a right to know the truth behind the war and proceeded to read into the senate record 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page document. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Senator Gravel did not have the right and responsibility to share official documents with his constituents. Gravel then published The Senator Gravel Edition, The Pentagon Papers, Beacon Press (1971). What followed was the court case Gravel v. U.S. and the handing down of a landmark Supreme Court decision (No. 71-1017-1026) pertaining to the Speech and Debate Clause (Article 1, Section 6) of the United States Constitution.

Mike Gravel has been characterized as “a passionate advocate of direct democracy and the National Initiative.” During the 2007-2008 presidential campaign, Gravel ran on these ideas.

The former lawmaker served in the Alaska House of Representatives (1963-66), and as Speaker (1965-66). He then represented Alaska in the U.S. Senate (1969-81) where he served on the Finance, Interior, and Environmental and Public Works committees, chairing the Energy, Water Resources, Buildings and Grounds, and Environmental Pollution subcommittees. In 1971, Gravel waged a successful solo filibuster for five months that forced the Nixon administration to cut a deal, effectively ending the draft in the United States. He was founder and president of The Democracy Foundation, Philadelphia II, and Direct Democracy, nonprofit corporations dedicated to the establishment of direct democracy in the United States, through the enactment of the National Initiative for Democracy by American voters.  Senator Gravel is author of Jobs and More Jobs, and Citizen Power. He lectures and writes about governance, foreign affairs, economics, Social Security, tax reform, energy, environmental issues and democracy.

Senator Gravel served in the U.S. Army (1951-54) and as special adjutant in the Communication Intelligence Services and as a Special Agent in the Counterintelligence Corps. His academic credentials are in economics (B.S., Columbia University) and in law and public affairs (four honorary degrees). Mike Gravel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, of French Canadian immigrants. http://www.mikegravel.us/bio

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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In undemocratic, highly manipulated contest between right-wing reps of financial oligarchy, pseudo-left protects their DP privileges ─ Joseph Kishore

Jerry White, Phyllis Scherrer
SEP U.S.
2012 Presidential
Vice presidential candidates

Nation Magazine’s lesser-of-two-evils choice furthering suppression of mass socialist movement of working class

Excerpting, editing by 

Carolyn Bennett

In September of this year, writer and Socialist Equality Party National Secretary Joseph Kishore introduced to his party a resolution emphasizing the international class struggle. The resolution states in part ─

The intensification of global economic crisis is leading inexorably to the resurgence of class struggle within the United States and throughout the world.…

It is not enough to predict the inevitability of revolutionary struggles and then await their unfolding…

The Socialist Equality Party must do everything it can to develop, prior to the outbreak of mass struggles, a significant political presence within the working class ─ above all, among its most advanced elements.

The resolution notes that the ruling class, in seeking to maintain its political and ideological domination, relies on the services of innumerable ‘left’ organizations. Referring to the sections of the resolution dealing with the role of these organizations, Kishore said ─

 

The past year and a half have provided the working class with many crucial lessons on the importance of leadership, and, related to this, the role of the middle class pseudo-left.

 

Today the World Socialist Web Site published Joseph Kishore’s latest article: “The Nation magazine and the campaign to reelect Obama.” This is some of what Kishore had to say.

 Socialist Equality Party
National Secretary
Joseph Kishore 

Four years ago the Nation Magazine and Democrats argued that the election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency would bring “a sea change in American politics”; and though this illusion has been shattered and “genuine popular support” for the Obama government policies “has largely dissipated,” the magazine’s latest issue gives space to numerous articles by “Nation writers and ‘left’ activists …” arguing for reelection of the Obama government.

Unconscionable leadership, Nation supports U.S. Middle East/Persian war expansion

The Nation is hustling votes for a president who asserts the presidential “‘right’ to [kill] anyone, including U.S. citizens, without any judicial process, … a man who holds weekly meetings at which he personally signs off on drone assassinations ─ knowing that those killed will include innocent men, women and children.”

Kishore continues, “Notably absent from any of these articles in the Nation is any serious analysis of U.S. military policy, outside of a reference to the administration’s supposed ‘ending’ of the war [in fact, hostile U.S. presence still exists on the ground] in Iraq.

This is because the Nation [magazine] and the social forces that it represents fully support the administration’s expansion of war, including the assault on Libya and the current stoking up of a civil war in Syria.

“None of the writers refers to plans underway for launching military action against Iran in the aftermath of the elections, regardless of who is elected.

“Such a war could quickly escalate into a confrontation with China and Russia, which the Nation Magazine would find a way to support.” 

Nation pandering to upper crust

The Nation Magazine, Kishore says, speaks for “a layer of the upper-middle class,” which is concerned not about “Romney’s viciously anti-working class agenda” but about “their own positions and privileges linked to the fortunes of the Democratic Party”; and who have done quite well under Obama —

Sections of the trade union bureaucracy,

Tenured professors at elite universities,

Well-paid journalists in the orbit of the political establishment and employed by Democratic Party think tanks,

Better-off sections of minority populations

[The Obama government] has offered them ‘space,’ soliciting their services in policing the working class and maintaining the political order.

The Nation Magazine and its constituency, Kishore says, “are far more concerned about the danger of an independent movement of the working class” than they are about “the anti-working class and militarist policies of the Obama administration” or the “wage cutting, unemployment and attacks on education and health care.”

What concerns the Nation Magazine’s constituency, Kishore says, is upper-middle class layers’ sensitive to ─

[t]he potential for a movement from below, outside of the Democratic Party, which would threaten their own social and political position.

“Their social grievances and their opposition to the Republicans,” he says, “reflect [their] dissatisfaction with the distribution of wealth within the top 10 percent ─ not [concerns about] the lowering of living standards of the bottom 60 percent.

“They exclude any genuinely popular and democratic alternative, a socialist alternative to the two-party system [This rings true for me as I observe the pseudo-left Democracy Now program’s exclusion of and discrimination against certain political parties such as the Socialist Equality Party and others from their “expanded” editions paralleling the exclusive Commission on Presidential Debates-controlled U.S. 2012 presidential debates].

Beyond “evils” to real choice

“The elections—an undemocratic and highly manipulated contest between two right-wing representatives of the American financial oligarchy—do present workers and young people with a real choice,” Kishore says. “It is not, as the Nation Magazine would have it, [a choice] between the ‘lesser of two evils.’

“

I

t is instead the choice of taking up the struggle to build a mass socialist movement of the working class ─ in opposition to a capitalist system incapable of meeting the basic needs of the people and the political establishment [including the Nation Magazine and its constituency] that defends that system.”

Sources and notes

Joseph Kishore is National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party and writer (regular contributor) for the World Socialist Web Site, wsws.org, Michigan, USA http://www.socialequality.com

September 2012: The incoming National Committee of the Socialist Equality Party reelected Joseph Kishore as national secretary, Lawrence Porter as assistant national secretary, and Barry Grey as World Socialist Web Site national editor.

“The Nation magazine and the campaign to reelect Obama” (by Joseph Kishore), World Socialist Web Site wsws.org, October 22, 2012, Copyright © 1998-2012 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/oct2012/nati-o22.shtml

SOCIALIST EQUALITY PARTY

Chairman: David North, Joe Kishore

Founded: 1966 (as Workers League)

Headquarters Socialist Equality Party: PO Box 48377, Oak Park, MI 48237

Ideology: Trotskyism, socialism

Political position: Fiscal: Socialist economics

Social: Anti-war, pro-choice, against identity politics

International affiliation: International Committee of the Fourth International Website

http://www.socialequality.com

STRUGGLES

Auto workers

Teachers

Students and Young People

The Fight against Utility Shutoffs

ISSUES

The Social Rights of the Working Class

Expropriate the Banks and Corporations

For Social Equality

Oppose Militarism and War

Defend Democratic Rights

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