Obama and his neo democrats: (Same ass, different pAloon ...)

Obama and his neo democrats: (Same ass, different pAloon ...)


http://www.opednews.com/articles/Conned-Again-by-Paul-Craig-Roberts-081109-377.html

If the change President-elect Obama has promised includes a halt to
America's wars of aggression and an end to the rip-off of taxpayers by
powerful financial interests, what explains Obama's choice of foreign
and economic policy advisors? Indeed, Obama's selection of Rahm Israel
Emanuel as White House chief of staff is a signal that change ended with
Obama's election. The only thing different about the new administration
will be the faces.



Rahm Israel Emanuel is a supporter of Bush's invasion of Iraq. Emanuel
rose to prominence in the Democratic Party as a result of his
fundraising connections to AIPAC. A strong supporter of the American
Israeli Public Affairs Committee, he comes from a terrorist family. His
father was a member of Irgun, a Jewish terrorist organization that used
violence to drive the British and Palestinians out of Palestine in order
to create the Jewish state. During the 1991 Gulf War, Rahm Israel
Emanuel volunteered to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. He was a
member of the Freddie Mac board of directors and received $231,655 in
directors fees in 2001. According to Wikipedia, "during the time
Emanuel spent on the board, Freddie Mac was plagued with scandals
involving campaign contributions and accounting irregularities."



In "Hail to the Chief of Staff," Alexander Cockburn describes Emanuel as
"a super-Likudnik hawk," who as chairman of the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee in 2006 "made great efforts to knock out antiwar
Democratic candidates."



My despondent friends in the Israeli peace movement ask, "What is this
man doing in Obama's administration?"



Obama's election was necessary as the only means Americans had to hold
the Republicans accountable for their crimes against the Constitution
and human rights, for their violations of US and international laws, for
their lies and deceptions, and for their financial chicanery. As an
editorial in Pravda put it, "Only Satan would have been worse than the
Bush regime. Therefore it could be argued that the new administration in
the USA could never be worse than the one which divorced the hearts and
minds of Americans from their brothers in the international community,
which appalled the rest of the world with shock and awe tactics that
included concentration camps, torture, mass murder and utter disrespect
for international law."



But Obama's advisers are drawn from the same gang of Washington thugs
and Wall Street banksters as Bush's. Richard Holbrooke, son of Russian
and German Jews, was an assistant secretary of state and ambassador in
the Clinton administration. He implemented the policy to enlarge NATO
and to place the military alliance on Russia's border in contravention
of Reagan's promise to Gorbachev. Holbrooke is also associated with the
Clinton administration's illegal bombing of Serbia, a war crime that
killed civilians and Chinese diplomats. If not a neocon himself,
Holbrooke is closely allied with them.



According to Wikipedia, Madeline Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelova
in Prague to Jewish parents who had converted to Catholicism in order to
escape persecution. She is the Clinton era secretary of state who told
Leslie Stahl (60 Minutes) that the US policy of Iraq sanctions, which
resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, had
goals important enough to justify the children's deaths. Albright's
infamous words: "we think the price is worth it." Wikipedia reports that
this immoralist served on the board of directors of the New York Stock
Exchange at the time of Dick Grasso's $187.5 million compensation
scandal.



Dennis Ross has long associations with the Israeli-Palestinian "peace
negotiations." A member of his Clinton era team, Aaron David Miller,
wrote that during 1999-2000 the US negotiating team led by Ross acted as
Israel's lawyer: "we had to run everything by Israel first." This
"stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for
serious peacemaking. If we couldn't put proposals on the table without
checking with the Israelis first, and refused to push back when they
said no, how effective could our mediation be?" According to Wikipedia,
Ross is "chairman of a new Jerusalem-based think tank, the Jewish People
Policy Planning Institute, funded and founded by the Jewish Agency."



Clearly, this is not a group of advisors that is going to halt America's
wars against Israel's enemies or force the Israeli government to accept
the necessary conditions for a real peace in the Middle East.



Ralph Nader predicted as much. In his "Open Letter to Barack Obama
(November 3, 2008), Nader pointed out to Obama that his "transformation
from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights . . . to a dittoman
for the hard-line AIPAC lobby" puts Obama at odds with "a majority of
Jewish-Americans" and "64% of Israelis." Nader quotes the Israeli
writer and peace advocate Uri Avnery's description of Obama's appearance
before AIPAC as an appearance that "broke all records for obsequiousness
and fawning." Nader damns Obama for his "utter lack of political
courage [for] surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit
former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National
Convention." Carter, who achieved the only meaningful peace agreement
between Israel and the Arabs, has been demonized by the powerful AIPAC
lobby for criticizing Israel's policy of apartheid toward the
Palestinians whose territory Israel forcibly occupies.



Obama's economic team is just as bad. Its star is Robert Rubin, the
bankster who was secretary of the treasury in the Clinton
administration. Rubin has responsibility for the repeal of the
Glass-Steagall Act and, thereby, responsibility for the current
financial crisis. In his letter to Obama, Nader points out that Obama
received unprecedented campaign contributions from corporate and Wall
Street interests. "Never before has a Democratic nominee for President
achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart."



Obama's victory speech was magnificent. The TV cameras scanning faces
in the audience showed the hope and belief that propelled Obama into the
presidency. But Obama cannot bring change to Washington. There is no
one in the Washington crowd that he can appoint who is capable of
bringing change. If Obama were to reach outside the usual crowd, anyone
suspected of being a bringer of change could not get confirmed by the
Senate. Powerful interest groups--AIPAC, the military-security complex,
Wall Street--use their political influence to block unacceptable
appointments.



As Alexander Cockburn put it in his column, "Obama, the first-rate
Republican," "never has the dead hand of the past had a 'reform'
candidate so firmly by the windpipe." Obama confirmed Cockburn's
verdict in his first press conference as president-elect. Disregarding
the unanimous US National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that
Iran stopped working on nuclear weapons five years ago, and ignoring the
continued certification by the International Atomic Energy Agency that
none of the nuclear material for Iran's civilian nuclear reactor has
been diverted to weapons use, Obama sallied forth with the Israel
Lobby's propaganda and accused Iran of "development of a nuclear weapon"
and vowing "to prevent that from happening."
http://news.antiwar.com/2008/11/07/obama-hits-out-at-iran-closemouthed-on-tactics/



The change that is coming to America has nothing to do with Obama.
Change is coming from the financial crisis brought on by Wall Street
greed and irresponsibility, from the eroding role of the US dollar as
reserve currency, from countless mortgage foreclosures, from the
offshoring of millions of America's best jobs, from a deepening
recession, from pillars of American manufacturing--Ford and GM--begging
the government for taxpayers' money to stay alive, and from budget and
trade deficits that are too large to be closed by normal means.



Traditionally, the government relies on monetary and fiscal policy to
lift the economy out of recession. But easy money is not working.
Interest rates are already low and monetary growth is already high, yet
unemployment is rising. The budget deficit is already huge--a world
record--and the red ink is not stimulating the economy. Can even lower
interest rates and even higher budget deficits help an economy that has
moved offshore, leaving behind jobless consumers overburdened with debt?



How much more can the government borrow? America's foreign creditors
are asking this question. An official organ of the Chinese ruling party
recently called for Asian and European countries to "banish the US
dollar from their direct trade relations, relying only on their own
currencies."



"Why," asks another Chinese publication, "should China help the US to
issue debt without end in the belief that the national credit of the US
can expand without limit?"



The world has tired of American hegemony and had its fill of American
arrogance. America's reputation is in tatters: the financial debacle,
endless red ink, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, rendition, torture, illegal wars
based on lies and deception, disrespect for the sovereignty of other
countries, war crimes, disregard for international law and the Geneva
Conventions, the assault on habeas corpus and the separation of powers,
a domestic police state, constant interference in the internal affairs
of other countries, boundless hypocrisy.



The change that is coming is the end of American empire. The hegemon
has run out of money and influence. Obama as "America's First Black
President" will lift hopes and, thus, allow the act to be carried on a
little longer. But the New American Century is already over.


Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and
former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has held numerous
academic appointments. He has been reporting shocking cases of
prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The
Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a
documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, was
published by Random House in March, 2008.