American Empire Produces 11 Global Winners — Hint: They Aren’t the Good Guys

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written by Tom Englehardt/ Tomdispatch.com

You couldn’t turn on the TV news or pick up a paper during the election season without stumbling across the latest political poll and the pros explaining how to parse it, or some set of commentators, pundits, and reporters placing their bets on the election results.  The media, of course, loves a political horse race and, as those 2010 midterms approached, you could easily feel like you weren’t catching the news but visiting an Off-Track Betting parlor.

Fortified by rounds of new polls and all those talking heads calibrating and recalibrating prospective winners and losers, seats “leaning Democratic” and “leaning Republican,” the election season essentially became an endless handicapping session.  This is how American politics is now framed — as a months or years-long serial election for which November 2nd is a kind of hangover.  Then, only weeks after the results are in, the next set of polls will be out and election 2012, the Big Show, will be on the agenda with all the regular handicappers starting to gather at all the usual places.

Doesn’t it strike you as odd, though, that this mania for handicapping remains so parochially electoral?  After all, it could be applied to so many things, including the state of the world at large as seen from Washington.  So consider this my one-man tip sheet on what you could think of as the global midterms, focused on prospective winners and losers, as well as those “on the cusp,” including crucial countries and key personalities.

Prospective Winners

Osama bin Laden: Who woulda thunk it?  More than nine years after 9/11, Osama bin Laden and his number two compadre, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are believed to be alive, well, and living comfortably in the Pakistani borderlands with not a cave in sight, according to the best guesstimate of a “NATO official who has day-to-day responsibility for the war in Afghanistan.”  With the globe’s “sole superpower” eternally on his trail — admittedly, the Bush administration took a few years off from the “hunt” to crash and burn in Iraq — he’s a prospective global winner just for staying alive.  But before we close the books on him, he gets extra points for a singular accomplishment: with modest funds and a few thousand ragtag masked recruits, swinging on monkey bars and clambering over obstacles in “camps” in Afghanistan, he managed to lure the United States into two financially disastrous, inconclusive wars, one in its eighth year, the other in its tenth.  To give credit where it’s due, he had help from the Bush administration with its dominatrix-like global fantasies.  Still, it’s not often that someone can make his dreams your nightmares on such a scale.

Facing the Threat from the Far Right, Noam Chomsky Says He ‘Has Never Seen Anything Like This’

This article first appeared on TruthDig. ♦ written by Chris Hedges

"The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way."

Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state, excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for being fops and courtiers and describes the drivel of the commercial media as a form of “brainwashing.” And as our nation’s most prescient critic of unregulated capitalism, globalization and the poison of empire, he enters his 81st year warning us that we have little time left to save our anemic democracy.

“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”

“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”

Obama: Palin ‘not much of an expert on nuclear issues’

“In a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.” – Albert Camus

by Davis Fleetwood
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Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian leader, signed an arms treaty that will slash their respective nuclear arsenals to their lowest levels since the 1960s. If both countries respective legislative branches ratify the treaty, the two former adversaries in the cold war will now only have nukes to blow up the world 798 times over.

Commiserating with Russia. What would Ronald Regan say? Clearly this socialist bastard has finally gone to far in sacrificing defense.

The Obama administration set the stage for his overseas trip by announcing a new nuclear policy with the intent of limiting the threat of a catastrophic international conflict. Included in the new strategy is a vow not to develop new nuclear weapons and clarifying the circumstances under which the United States would use nuclear weapons.

Secretary of defense Robert Gates said:

“If a non-nuclear weapons state is in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and its obligations, the U.S. pledges not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against it. If, however, such a state were to use chemical or biological weapons against the U.S. or its allies, it would face the prospect of a devastating conventional, or non-nuclear, military response.”

And the Washington Post reported shed some light on what a future devastating response would look like, reporting that a new weapon being developed by the Pentagon, the so called prompt global strike weapons, are missiles armed with conventional warheads that could strike anywhere in the world in less than an hour.

A new super weapon that can strike anywhere in the world in an hour? That would surely be welcome news to the former runner up to Ms. Wassilla 1984 and current headlining act for the Tea Party Tour.

Mrs. Palin said:

“You know that is kind of like, uh, getting out there on the playground, a bunch of kids ready to fight and one of the kids saying go ahead punch me in the face and I’m not gonna retaliate… go ahead and do what you want to with me.”

Obama, when reminded of this quote during an interview with Alex P. Keaton, was clearly miffed, and fired back with “Last time I check, Sarah Palin is no expert on nuclear issues.”

But in this partisan media-wrestling match, it is not so much what you say, but how you say it. Obama’s thoughtful, measured, rhetorical style, sharpened while president of the Harvard Law Review appeals to about 4.3% of Americans, while Palin’s down homey, if factually inaccurate, delivery honed as a communication major at North Idaho community College appeal to a much larger base of real Americans.

As always, both sides of this tête-à-tête miss the point. Simply put since World War 2, the metaphor of children fighting on a playground, and the U.S., as just another child is way off base. The U.S. is more like a bully, a fully-grown adult bully busting the skull of sixth graders who dare not turn over their lunch money.

The Tea Party would have you believe that Obama is the most radical President ever. I’ve got a radical nuclear proposal for you. Russia and the United States should distribute nuclear warheads to every country in the world.

Equally. Just level the playing field. Let all the kids on the playground have the potential to enact a Hiroshima or a Nagasaki on the other kids ass. Do this, and one of two things will happen:
1. The human race, embolden because all of the have not’s are suddenly in the “haves” column will make an evolutionary leap, born out of Darwinian necessity, and realize a heretofore unforeseen path to sustained peace and prosperity for all.

Or

2. The human race will exterminate itself quicker than you say Revelations, Chapter 16, verses 13 and 14.

I’m a gambling man; I think it is worth the risk.

ω

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A freelance writer, Davis Fleetwood has worked as a writer/ media consultant for Dennis Kucinich’s 2008 presidential campaign and served as a contributing editorial commentator for The Uptake. His videos have been seen by over 14 million viewers. He has been called (among many other things) “one of the most prominent voices in YouTube politics.” (-You Tube News & Politics chief, Steve Grove) He was a “Best of YouTube, 2007” nomination. His book I Stay In So You Can Go Out, is due out in May from No Cure For That Press, and his first full length feature documentary, MANIFEST DESTINY’S CHILD, is due out on DVD this June.

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