On Monday the Democrat controlled House voted 226-202 to approve a rushed $106 billion dollar war spending bill, guaranteeing more carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan (and lately Pakistan) until September 30, 2009, which marks the end of the budget year. The Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of the bill’s first draft last month, with the final vote on a compromised version to occur in the Senate sometime in the next couple of weeks.

The majority of opposition in the House came from Republicans who opposed an add-on to the bill that would open up a $5 billion International Monetary Fund line of credit for developing countries. This opposition in the House led Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday to quip, “It’ll be interesting to see what happens here. Are my Republican colleagues [in the Senate] going to join with us to fund the troops? I hope so.”

No longer can the blame for the turmoil in Iraq and Afghanistan rest at the feet of George W. Bush alone. This is now Obama’s War on Terror, fully funded and operated by the Democratic Party.

The bill that passed the House on Monday, once approved by the Senate, will not be part of the regular defense budget as it’s off the books entirely. Following the attacks on September 11, 2001, Congress has passed similar emergency spending bills to finance US military ventures in the Middle East. The combined “supplementals” are fast approaching $1 trillion, with 30% going to fund the war in Afghanistan.

In addition to the latest increase in war funds, Obama is also asking for an additional $130 billion to be added on to the defense budget for the new fiscal year starting on October 1. The president is upholding his campaign promise to escalate the war in Afghanistan, which also means increasing the use of remote controlled drone planes in neighboring Pakistan that are to blame for hundreds of civilian deaths since Obama took office last January.

Despite Obama’s historic (albeit rhetoric filled) speech in Cairo, the new Commander in Chief is still not about to radically change, let alone reform, the US’s long-standing role in the Middle East. A master of his craft, Obama is simply candy coating the delivery of US imperialism in the region. Given the lack of opposition to Obama’s policies back home, it is becoming clear that he may well be more dangerous than his predecessor when it comes to the US’s motivations internationally.

Had Bush pushed for more military funds at this stage, the antiwar movement (if you can call it that) would have been organizing opposition weeks in advance, calling out the neocons for wasting our scarce tax dollars during a recession on a never-ending, directionless war. But since Obama’s a Democrat, a beloved one at that, mums the word.

Certainly a few progressive Democrats are dismayed by what the Obama administration is up to, but how many of these Democrats that are upset now will be willing to break rank and oppose their party when it matters most, like during the midterm elections coming up next year? Obama had the majority of antiwar support shored up while he ran for the presidency, with absolutely no demands put on his candidacy. And not surprisingly, antiwar progressives have little to show for their fawning support.

All this begs a few questions: If not now, when exactly will Obama’s policies be scrutinized with the same veracity that Bush’s were? When will the media end its love affair with Obama and hold his feet to the fire like they did Bush once the wheels fell off the war in Iraq? When will progressives see their issues as paramount and oppose Obama and the Democratic Party until they embrace their concerns?

If these questions are not answered soon, we are in for many more years of war and bloodshed, funded by US taxpayers and approved by a Democrat controlled White House and Congress.

The price of oil per barrel fluctuated dramatically in the past year, and the U.S.’s dependency on foreign crude has become less stable as tensions in the Middle East have escalated. Over his long campaign, Obama laid out his strategy on how to deal with the crisis, which has been exacerbated by the war in Iraq and the potential confrontation with Iran, not to mention the oil speculator’s dubious role in the money game. But sadly Obama has been echoing old solutions to our new 21st century environmental troubles. Mainly, where is our energy going to come from if oil supplies dwindle or prices skyrocket again? And how will this all affect the dire reality of climate change?

President Obama supports an array of neoliberal strategies to deal with the country’s volatile energy situation. He is not opposed to the prospect of nuclear power, endorses capping-and-trading the coal industry’s pollution output, and supports liquefied coal.

Well, that’s a maybe on the latter.

“Senator Obama supports … investing in technology that could make coal a clean-burning source of energy,” Obama stated in an email sent out by his campaign in June 2007. “However, unless and until this technology is perfected, Senator Obama will not support the development of any coal-to-liquid fuels unless they emit at least 20 percent less life-cycle carbon than conventional fuels.”

You did not just read a lofty proclamation from the new White House change agent, but a well-crafted rationale meant to appease the environmental movement. Meanwhile, back in his Senate days, Obama’s record relays a much different position on the issue.

It was only six months before the aforementioned email that Republican Senator Jim Bunning and Obama introduced the Coal-to-Liquid Fuel Promotion Act of 2007. The bill, introduced in January 2007, was referred to the Senate committee on finance and would have amended the Energy Policy Act of 2005 as well as the Energy Policy and Conservation Act to evaluate the feasibility of including coal-to-oil fuels in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and provide incentives for research and plant construction.

Shortly after the introduction of the bill, Tommy Vietor, Obama’s spokesman, defended the senator’s proposal, “Illinois basin coal has more untapped energy potential than the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined. Senator Obama believes it is crucial that we invest in technologies to use these resources to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”

It was at the onset of the Nazi era that coal-to-liquid technology came to the forefront of modern energy science. In the latter part of the 1920s, German researchers Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch developed the initial processes to liquify the dark rock into fuel. The procedure was utilized throughout World War II by both Germany and Japan. In fact, coal-to-liquid technology largely fueled Hitler’s bloody campaigns throughout Europe, as Germany had few petroleum reserves but held vast amounts of coal deposits throughout the country. Not too unlike the United States’ fossil fuel conundrum of today.

By 1930, Fischer and Tropsch had applied for several U.S. patents, yet it wasn’t until earlier last summer that the first U.S. coal-to-liquid plant was set for construction in West Virginia. But while liquid coal may help replace petroleum based fossil fuels, it is certainly not an answer to global warming.

“The total emissions rate for oil and gas fuels is about 27 pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon, counting both production and use,” states the Natural Resource Defense Council. “[T]he estimated total emissions from coal-derived fuel is more like 50 pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon — nearly twice as much.”

Has Obama had a change of heart, or has he just flip-flopped around like a suffocating trout for political leverage? The answer to that question may reside along the nuanced path we are getting all too used to seeing President Obama traverse these days. As his presidential campaign website read in late October 2008:

“Obama will significantly increase the resources devoted to the commercialization and deployment of low-carbon coal technologies. Obama will consider whatever policy tools are necessary, including standards that ban new traditional coal facilities, to ensure that we move quickly to commercialize and deploy low carbon coal technology.”

The apartheid government of South Africa was the first to use liquid coal for motor vehicles, and it seems, despite the “low carbon coal” rhetoric, that Obama may be poised to carry on the dirty legacy of liquid coal.

The move from foreign oil to locally mined coal, “low carbon” or otherwise (no coal energy has zero carbon emissions), would only change the dynamics of the U.S.’s massive energy consumption, not its habits, which is at the heart of our current energy woes.

Plus the coal has to come from somewhere. As a result of our consumptive lifestyles, the mountaintops of the Appalachia region, from Tennessee up to the heart of West Virginia, are being ravaged by the coal industry — an industry that cares little about the welfare of people or the land that it is adversely affecting with its industrial mining operations.

The concept of “clean coal” is nothing more than unabashed greenwashing.

The debris from the mining pits, often 500 feet deep, produce toxic waste that is then dumped in nearby valleys, polluting rivers and poisoning local communities downstream. No state or federal agencies are tracking the cumulative effect of the aptly named “mountaintop removal,” where entire peaks are being blown apart, only to expose tiny seams of the precious black rock.

There has been little to no oversight of the wholesale destruction of these mountains and Obama has not addressed the ruin in any of their bullet point policy papers on “clean coal.” Any new coal burning technology, whether it be liquidification or otherwise, would surely rely on the continuation of such brutal methods of extraction, and carbon output would still be significant. And it is not just the burning of coal that is damaging to the environment.

On December 22, 2008, a coal slurry impoundment at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston coal fired power plant in Harriman, Tennessee spilled more than 500 million gallons of toxic coal ash into the Tennessee River.

The epic spill was over 40 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez in Alaska. Approximately 525 million gallons of black coal ash flowed into tributaries of the Tennessee River – the water supply for Chattanooga and millions of people living downstream in Alabama and Kentucky. The true adverse effects of the spill are still not known.

The fight in West Virginia to stop mountaintop removal has been heating up in the past few weeks as 13 radical environmentalists, led my veteran activist, Mike Roselle, protested by chaining themselves to bulldozers at the Massey Energy Corp. site in Raleigh County on February 3. The group was arrested and cited for trespassing on private property.

“Trespassing is certainly a serious offense, but destroying a mountain is more serious,” Roselle said of the arrests. “I am going to be here until this issue is resolved. This is a serious environmental crisis that we face [today].”

During his confirmation hearings, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, was asked about how the Obama administration would handle US coal production.

“The fact of the matter is it powers much of America and there are lots of jobs it creates,” said Salazar, who is no foe of the mining industry. “The challenge is how we create clean coal. I believe that we will move forward with the funding of some of those demonstration projects so we can find ways to burn coal that don’t contribute to climate change.”
And so the rhetoric spins.

President Obama may receive high marks from the League of Conservation Voters and be touted by the Sierra Club for being marginally better than his predecessor on the environment, but when it comes to his position on the U.S.’s coal extracting future, the president’s position is not only wrong, it is absolutely disastrous.

It is clear that Obama has amassed a foreign policy team that is pro-war, an economic team that is pro-business (see the latest CounterPunch print issue for Cockburn and St. Clair’s ravaging assessment) and an environmental team that will combat climate change with “clean coal” and nuclear energy.

No progressive would defend the Bush doings. He lacks any redeeming qualities. Yet, how bad has Bush really been over the past eight years? Has he done a worse job than Bill Clinton did? Let’s give it a quick whirl.

Let’s start with the environment. Bush has ignored science, weakened regulation and made a joke out of the EPA. In a nutshell, he’s been awful. Even so, the Bush forest plan was actually re-written with the help of two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Dianne Feinstein of California. As veteran forest activist Michael Donnelly wrote in 2003, “Perhaps the greatest irony is that the forests have fared far better under Bush than they did under his Democrat predecessor. Under Clinton’s [Salvage Rider] plan, some 1.1 billion board feet of Ancient Forest stumps were authorized annually. Much to industry’s chagrin, under Bush, around 200 million per year has been cut. Already, that means that 2.7 billion board feet LESS has been cut under Bush than would have been under a Gore administration with the Big Greens usual silence regarding Democrat stump-creation.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Clinton’s plan was actually worse for our national forests.

The economy, many believe, was in better shape under Clinton than Bush because of Clintontime policies. On Bush’s watch the economy has tumbled, sending shock waves throughout the markets. Of course, many of these job losses were leftovers from the neo-liberal Clinton years. Under the Democratic president, as economist Robert Pollin has pointed out in his book Contours of Descent, “The distribution of wealth in the U.S. became more skewed than it had at any time in the previous forty years. No question, an increasing number of U.S. jobs began to be outsourced at an unprecedented rate as well.”

Wage gains for average workers during the Clinton boom remained historically weak, especially in relationship to the ascent of productivity, Pollin argues. “This ‘heightened sense of job insecurity,’” he continues, “lies at the very foundation of the Clinton administration’s economic legacy.”

Things were not any better abroad. Under Clinton, the World Trade Organization (WTO) enhanced its strength, piquing the anger of thousands of protesters who took to the streets of Seattle in 1999 to demonstrate against the WTO’s power.

Clinton also bolstered the influence of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the developing world, and passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with few qualms from the liberal establishment. It’s no coincidence that neo-liberalism is now dictating the free-market economy despite the claims of some who argue that ideology is on its way out the door.

“Had [the original promises] come true, NAFTA would have been an enormous boom, and we would all be cracking champagne,” says Lori Wallach, director of the consumer rights group Public Citizen. “But instead we have got the 10-year record, and it’s pretty damn grim. NAFTA’s 10-year record,” Wallach adds, “demonstrates that under the NAFTA model, most people in the three countries were losers, while only a few of the largest corporations who helped write NAFTA were the major winners.”

For those still caught up in a love affair with Clintontime Democrats, beware: It was under Bush — not Clinton — that the U.S. briefly challenged the WTO’s legitimacy over steel imports. Bush eventually lifted the tariffs, but he held out much longer than expected. While it is conceivable that Obama would have done the same, the president-elect is no doubt an ardent free-trader, particularly when compared to Bush, who, unlike the New Democrats, was somewhat hesitant to embrace such dogma.
This reality stands in stark contrast to the boisterous cheers we hear whenever Democrats defend Clinton’s economy.

And what about welfare reform — or as the Democrats called it, “The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act”? Could you have imagined Bush getting away with signing a piece of legislation into law as horrid as the bill passed under Clinton? In fact under Bush, Democrats halted the reauthorization of welfare reform on several different occasions. Where was this defense under Clinton? Don’t think so many would have watched silently had it been Bush who signed it into law in 1996. “It is the end of welfare as we know it,” Clinton declared.

How right he was.

“[M]ajor research studies now report that welfare reform harms families. Young children are going hungry, rushing to emergency rooms, being hospitalized and being abandoned at higher rates,” welfare expert Sanford F. Schram wrote in 2002. “A personal responsibility act that simply pushed single mothers into low-wage jobs without making any provision for the care of their children was a contradiction in terms – it was irresponsible. It was immoral. It still is, and now the evidence proves it.”

Iraq? That was the last straw for most, who simply did not want to believe that a Gore administration could have attacked Iraq under false pretenses. Never mind the fact that the Democrats authorized bombings throughout Clinton’s tenure and passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 (supported by Al Gore and Joe Lieberman), giving the U.S. the right to whack the country for the slightest provocation-or no reason at all. And forget about those UN sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It is also worth mentioning that the Democrats overwhelmingly supported Bush’s invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, with Obama planning to ship off more troops to the Taliban controlled land.

How about the Patriot Act? This of course, was a bipartisan nightmare based on the assumption that curtailing our civil liberties would make us safe from terror. Given that Clinton had a version of his own following the Oklahoma City bombing called the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, there is little reason to believe the Democrats would not have moved forward with a more egregious version following 9-11, with their mass support for John Ashcroft’s version, as our conspicuous souvenir.

For those that looked with an open mind, it was difficult to discern any tangible difference between Bush and the Democrats, who supported his most damanging policies.

Affordable health care? Both parties deride real universal health-care as outlandish radicalism, even though Richard Nixon was the last to propose it. Surely there must be some distinction, you say? Certainly not the war, empire, tax breaks for the working class, or trade. In fact, if the Clinton years are anything, they are a testament to how the left reacts to Democratic administrations. They get by with whatever and however.

Obama supporters take heed.

Invading Syria or Iran? Might happen given Obama’s rhetoric, as he has entertained the possibility of “surgical strikes” on Iran.

The antiwar movement is on life-support; even the radical reincarnation of the Vietnam era’s Winter Soldier hearings weren’t enough to awaken the corporate press from its slumber. Obama will be inheriting an economy that is caught in a downward spiral. Hundreds of thousands have perished as a result of the US wars in the Middle East. Thousands of species on Earth face extinction as our polar ice caps melt and the climate warms beyond repair.

These are dire times indeed.

Desperation is no way to invigorate the soul, whether it’s your own or that of a movement. In fact while the last eight years of George W. Bush may have seemed like an eternity of sorrow and misery, there may be a silver-lining to all that’s transpired.

No other president in modern history has done more to expose the dark side of US imperialism than Bush. The international community is not behind the Iraq war and doesn’t trust our half-baked intelligence toward Iran, making it even more difficult for us to get away with bombing the country in the future. US power, while not fully-deflated, is fast leaking hot air.

Old alliances are becoming obsolete. NATO has weakened and the US go-it-alone strategy has damaged the trend of US isolation in foreign hostilities. The US is unequivocally deemed a global menace. We have become, against Washington’s better wishes, a more humble nation.
It’s a sure sign US dominance is on the skids.

So too is our economic prowess, as witnessed by the subprime mortgage collapse and decline of the dollar. The US banking system is in flux due in large part to the dismantling of Glass-Steagall under the reign Bill Clinton’s economic henchman, Robert Rubin, who is now reemerging as an Obama advisor. Sure Bush’s Fed has overstepped its boundaries and attempted to “bailout” the credit sector, but hasn’t this whole debacle also exposed the fallacies of neoliberal ethos?

These events sure seem to me to be something the left ought to be encouraged by. It wasn’t even ten years ago that we took to the streets of Seattle to rally in opposition to the WTO and Clinton’s free-trade pathology. Now even his wife is attempting to distance herself from the failures of NAFTA. Not that she’s sincere, but at least the language is beginning to change.

Many are also yapping away about the fate of the environment. Even McCain believes humans are impacting the global climate. While much of this is unadulterated green-washing, the tide is shifting. People are beginning to care about the planet they will are leaving future generations. Awareness is growing despite the campaign against it.

The reaches of Empire are being destroyed quicker than you may realize, so let’s continue our fights and not let Barack Obama and the Democrats repair this one fine aspect of the Bush legacy.

It was the single deadliest attack on Gaza in over 20 years and Obama’s initial reaction on what could be his first real test as president was “no comment”. Meanwhile, Israel has readied itself for a land invasion, amassing tanks along the border and calling up 6,500 reserve troops.

On Sunday’s Face the Nation, Obama’s Senior Adviser David Axelrod explained to guest host Chip Reid how an Obama administration would handle the situation, even if it turns for the worst.

“Well, certainly, the president-elect recognizes the special relationship between United States and Israel. It’s an important bond, an important relationship. He’s going to honor it … And obviously, this situation has become even more complicated in the last couple of days and weeks. As Hamas began its shelling, Israel responded. But it’s something that he’s committed to.”

Reiterating the rationale that Israel’s bombing of Gaza was an act of retaliation and not of aggression, Axelrod, on behalf of the Obama administration, continued to spread the same misinformation as President Bush: that Hamas was the first to break the ceasefire agreement, which ended over a week ago, and Israel was simply responding judiciously.

Aside from the fact that Israel’s response was anything but judicious, the idea that it was Hamas who broke the six-month truce is a complete fabrication.

On the night of the U.S. election, Israel fired missiles on Gaza that were aimed at closing down a tunnel operation they believed Hamas was building in order to kidnap Israeli soldiers. The carnage left in the wake of Israel’s bombing of Gaza over the past six weeks has killed dozens of Palestinians.

“The escalation towards war could, and should, have been avoided. It was the State of Israel which broke the truce, in the ‘ticking tunnel’ raid … two months ago,” the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom wrote in a press release. “Since then, the army went on stoking the fires of escalation with calculated raids and killings, whenever the shooting of missiles on Israel decreased.”

Over the last seven years only 17 Israeli citizens have been killed by Palestinian rocket fire, which makes it extremely difficult for Israeli politicians, which are in the midst of an election, to argue that their response has been proportionate or defensible in any way.

The asymmetry of the conflict leaves an opening for harsh criticism from soon-to-be president Barack Obama. He has every right to oppose Israel’s belligerence. The international community and public opinion are on his side. Certainly he knows Israel’s disproportionate response has inflicted pain on Palestinians beyond what the blockade has done by keeping vital medical and other supplies from reaching Gaza, where hundreds have died as a result of inadequate medical treatment.

While bombs fall on a suffocating Palestinian population and Israeli forces prepare for a ground invasion, Obama is monitoring the situation from afar after a talk with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration officials. This isn’t leadership; it’s a continuation of a policy that has left Palestinians with little recourse, let alone hope for lasting peace.

“The president-elect was in Sderot last July, in southern Israel, a town that’s taken the brunt of the Hamas attacks,” David Axelrod told Chip Reid on Face the Nation. “And he said then that, when bombs are raining down on your citizens, there is an urge to respond and act and try and put an end to that. So, you know, that’s what he said then, and I think that’s what he believes.”

If Axelrod is correct, and Barack Obama does indeed support the bloodshed inflicted upon innocent Palestinians by the Israeli military, there should be no celebrating during Inauguration Day 2009, only mass protest of a Middle East foreign policy that must change in order to begin a legitimate peace process in the region.

Joshua Frank: Afshin, can you tell us a little about Press TV? How long has the station been on the air?

Afshin Rattansi: Certainly more than a year. It’s an initiative by the Iranian government to counter some of the more crazy assumptions that other international channels make about the Middle East. Of course, given the crippling siege of Gaza at the moment, international media can’t even get into the place so that makes Press TV uniquely able to cover something that the rest of the world’s media seems to have forgotten. The “narrative”, as the fashionable post po-mo word goes, seems to be that the U.S. made a mistake by invading Iraq rather than the whole operation being an international war crime.

If Press TV can redress the balance a bit, it would be good. Also, wars in Africa are covered on other stations as if they are purely about “black people fighting each other” just as famines are somehow natural phenomena. Little is told about the corporate background to conflicts in a continent in which the positive stories seem to be about animals and “entrepreneurs” somehow battling, atomistically, against the tide.

Frank: You aren’t a native of Iran, so how did you get involved with Press TV?

Rattansi: There may be some Iranian in me! Afshin is an Iranian name and I think there is a possibility my roots are from the a magician’s castle in Alamut but that’s a long story and goes back a thousand years or so,

But seriously, I had been at Bloomberg News, hired to revamp things, after my time at CNN International and Al Jazeera Arabic and, most enlightening of all, the Today programme at the BBC. The mainstream coverage in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was very poor even if Today and its source, the late David Kelly, tried its best to allow listeners another view of what the British government was spouting about WMD in Iraq. It was odd as twenty years ago I was accused of being against an ally, Saddam Hussein. I had helped make a documentary for Channel 4 in the UK about how Western companies, in particular architectural firms akin to Albert Speer acolytes, were aiding
Saddam.

The British government didn’t like it at all and yet, once I was working at Today, my colleagues and I were being accused of being apologists for Saddam because we could tell that the government was lying about WMD. Blair’s people unleashed an onslaught that led to the resignations of all the most senior staff at the BBC. I left for the Jazeera Arabic programme, Top Secret, which identified the 911 attackers when Osama bin Laden himself contacted the programme to name the perpetrators. They would be caught even as we ran the trailers.

Well, after that story the Qatari Al Jazeera Arabic was chastened as we prepared for the launch of the English-language channel. As for my attempt at trying to get Bloomberg to avoid bluster and actually cover what was well known – the impending financial catastrophe – it ended in failure. In between, at CNN, coverage of the financial world was laughable. I remember talking to financial editor, Todd Benjamin who was nonchalantly cheerleading multinationals without a care in the world for the house of cards.

It was in this context, that I was getting worried that the same mistakes were going to be made all over again, vis a vis Iran. For me, the deaths of more than a million people in Iraq let alone the disastrous interventions in Afghanistan were axiomatic. Reading Seymour Hersh had me worried and I still don’t know if he was being used. But Iran was the story. Thankfully, that’s died down a little. But going to Tehran seemed a responsible thing to do.

Frank: Do you think the mood has changed because of the forthcoming change in administrations here in the United States? What’s the perception among Iranians about Barack Obama?

Rattansi: I think the mood hasn’t changed at all. Certainly, Hillary Clinton’s appointment as Secretary of State and the possibility of Dennis Ross and Richard Holbrooke hardly inspires much confidence. Nevertheless, there was a certain amount of heat generated by the electoral victory of Barrack Obama.

Frank: How can people in the US tune in to Press TV, and why do you think it’s important that they should?

Rattansi: Press TV is available in the U.S. through special servers via the internet at presstv.com. I think the audience will certainly get a very different perspective to that on other channels of world events and they may be surprised to see that many of the people interviewed on the channel – from Noam Chomsky to Gore Vidal to Amy Goodman – are all American.

Press TV is available in Europe on Sky Channel 515.

Barack Obama has chosen Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State; a choice that confirms US foreign policy is not about to change significantly under the forthcoming Democratic administration. The US will continue to pander to Israel and the War on Terror will still be the rallying cry for our foreign interventions.

In a letter to her constituents in November 2005, Clinton expressed her belief that the war in Iraq shouldn’t be “open-ended,” but was clear that she would never “pull out of Iraq immediately.” She wrote that she wouldn’t accept any timetable for withdrawal and won’t even embrace a “redeployment” of US troops along the lines of Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.).

“I take responsibility for my vote, and I, along with a majority of Americans, expect the president and his administration to take responsibility for the false assurances, faulty evidence and mismanagement of the war,” Clinton wrote in her lengthy letter that amounted to nothing short of denial for her own culpability in the mess.

Clinton soon after reiterated her position to a group of Democrats in Kentucky. “The time has come for the administration to stop serving up platitudes and present a plan for finishing this war with success and honor,” she said. “I reject a rigid timetable that the terrorists can exploit, and I reject an open timetable that has no ending attached to it.”

Translation: Clinton is all for an extended American stay in Iraq. She “takes responsibility” for her vote on the war, but won’t admit that it was wrong. And of course, Clinton is still for “winning” this war.

In the same note, Clinton hoped contingents of US soldiers would remain in the region with “quick-strike capabilities…This will help us stabilize that new Iraqi government,” she attested. “It will send a message to Iran that they do not have a free hand in Iraq despite their considerable influence and personal and religious connections there.”

Apparently messages carry more weight when they are delivered at gunpoint. “Watch out Tehran,” Hillary seems to be declaring, “I’ll strike quick.”

As one of the top Democratic recipients of pro-Israel funds for the 2006 election cycle, pocketing over $83,000, Clinton now has Iran in her crosshairs.

***

The Bush administration’s position on Iran is “disturbing” and “dangerous,” reads a position paper written in late 2005 by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Two years ago the Bush administration accepted a Russian proposal to allow Iran to continue to develop nuclear energy under Russian supervision. Needless to say, AIPAC wasn’t the least bit happy about the compromise.

In a letter to congressional allies, mostly Democrats, the pro-Israel organization admitted it was “concerned that the decision not to go to the Security Council, combined with the US decision to support the ‘Russian proposal,’ indicates a disturbing shift in the Administration’s policy on Iran and poses a danger to the US and our allies.”

Israel, however, continues to develop a substantial nuclear arsenal. In 2000, the British Broadcasting Corporation reported that Israel has likely produced enough plutonium to make up to 200 nuclear weapons. So it is safe to say that Israel’s bomb-building technologies are light years ahead of Iran’s budding nuclear program. Yet Israel still won’t admit they have capacity to produce such deadly weapons.

Meanwhile, as AIPAC and Israel pressure the US government to force the Iran issue to the UN Security Council, Israel itself stands in violation of numerous UN resolutions dealing with the occupied territories of Palestine, including UN Resolution 1402, which in part calls on Israel to withdraw its military from all Palestinian cities at once.

AIPAC’s hypocrisy is nauseating. The Goliath lobbying organization wants Iran to cease to procure nukes while the crimes of Israel continue to be ignored. So who is propping up AIPAC’s hypocritical position?

During a Hanukkah dinner speech delivered in December 2005, hosted by Yeshiva University, Clinton prattled:

I held a series of meetings with Israeli officials [last summer], including the prime minister and the foreign minister and the head of the [Israel Defense Forces], to discuss such challenges we confront. In each of these meetings, we talked at length about the dire threat posed by the potential of a nuclear-armed Iran, not only to Israel, but also to Europe and Russia. Just this week, the new president of Iran made further outrageous comments that attacked Israel’s right to exist that are simply beyond the pale of international discourse and acceptability. During my meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, I was reminded vividly of the threats that Israel faces every hour of every day. … It became even more clear how important it is for the United States to stand with Israel…

As Clinton embraces Israel’s violence, as well as AIPAC’s fraudulent posture on Iran, she simultaneously ignores the hostilities inflicted upon Palestine, as numerous Palestinians have been killed during the continued shelling of the Gaza Strip over the past year.

Clinton’s silence toward Israel’s brutality implies that Clinton as Secretary of State will continue to support AIPAC’s mission to occupy the whole of the occupied territories, as well as a war on Iran.

AIPAC is correct – even President Bush appears to be a little sheepish when up against the warmongering of Hillary Clinton.

***

Hillary, along with her husband Bill, paid a visit to Israel in the fall of 2005. The former president was a featured speaker at a mass rally that marked the 10th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. It was Hillary’s second visit to Israel since she was elected to office in 2000.

The senator did manage to take time out of her voyage to meet with the then semi-conscious Ariel Sharon to discuss “security matters.” Hillary also made her way to the great apartheid wall, which separates Palestine from Israel. As of now, the barrier is nearing completion, and when all is said and done, the monstrosity will stretch to well over 400 miles in length.

Palestinians rightly criticize the obtrusive wall on the grounds that it cuts them off from occupied land in the West Bank. Thousands have also been cut off from their jobs, schools and essential farmland.

Hillary and her Israeli allies don’t get it. When you put powerless Palestinians behind a jail-like wall where life in any real economic sense is unattainable, you wreak pain and anguish, which in turn leads to more anger and resentment toward Israel’s brutal policies. Indeed, the wall will not prove to be a deterrent to resistance, but an incitement to defiance.

“This is not against the Palestinian people,” Clinton said as she gazed over the massive wall. “This is against the terrorists. The Palestinian people have to help to prevent terrorism. They have to change the attitudes about terrorism.”

The senator’s comments seem as if they were taken word-for-word from an American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) position paper.

They may well have been.

In May 2005, Clinton spoke at an AIPAC conference where she praised the bonds between Israel and the United States. “[O]ur future here in this country is intertwined with the future of Israel and the Middle East,” she said. “Now there is a lot that we could talk about, and obviously much has been discussed. But in the short period that I have been given the honor of addressing you, I want to start by focusing on our deep and lasting bonds between the United States and Israel.”

Clinton went on to address the importance of disarming Iran and Syria, as well as keeping troops in Iraq for as long as “it” takes. It was textbook warmongering, and surprise, surprise — Hillary got a standing ovation for her repertoire.

Chief of Staff

Obama’s key White House position will go to Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois. While Emanuel knows his way around the corridors of Washington, qualifying him in the traditional sense, this alone doesn’t mean he’s the guy you want drawing up Obama’s policy papers day after day.

For starters, Emanuel is a shameless neoliberal with close ties to the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), even co-authoring a strategy book with DLC president Bruce Reed. Without Emanuel, Bill Clinton would not have been able to thrust NAFTA down the throats of environmentalists and labor in the mid-1990s. Over the course of his career, Emanuel’s made it a point to cozy up to big business, making him one of the most effective corporate fundraisers in the Democratic Party. He’s also a staunch advocate of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

Emanuel’s shinning moment came in 2006 as he helped funnel money and poured ground support into the offices of dozens of conservative Democrats, expanding his party’s control of the House of Representatives. Emanuel, who supports the War on Terror, and expanding our presence in Afghanistan, worked hard to ensure that a Democratic House majority would not alter the course of US military objectives in the Middle East.

In short, Rahm Emanuel is not only a poor choice for Obama’s Chief of Staff; he’s one of the least progressive picks he could have made. While he may have decent views on abortion, tax policy, and social security, Emanuel’s broader vision is more of the same: war and corporate dominance.

Treasury Secretary

For arguably the most important position Obama will be appointing, the President-Elect may pick well-regarded economist Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Volker is one of Obama’s closest economic advisors and is thought to be the top-choice for the position of Treasury Secretary.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Volker, in an attempt to cut inflation, dramatically raised interest rates, which helped the elite maintain value in their assets but strangled the working class as credit dried up.

In his book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey writes that Volker personified one of the key facets of the neoliberal era.

“[Volker] engineered a draconian shift in U.S. monetary policy. The long-standing commitment in the U.S. liberal democratic state to the principles of the New Deal, which meant broadly Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies with full employment as a key objective, was abandoned in favour of a policy designed to quell inflation no matter what the consequences might be for employment. The real rate of interest, which had often been negative during the double-digit inflationary surge of the 1970s, was rendered positive by fiat of the Federal Reserve. The nominal rate of interest was raised overnight … Thus began ‘a long deep recession that would empty factories and break unions in the U.S. and drive detour countries to the brink of insolvency, beginning a long-era of structural insolvency’. The Volker shock, as it has since come to be known, has to be interpreted as a necessary but not sufficient condition of neoliberalism.”

In supporting Henry Paulson’s bailout package, Volker would not re-regulate the banks nor provide more power to shareholders, he’s simply carry on another element of neoliberalism: tightening federal budgets which inevitably will put great budgetary pressure on federal agencies.

Another potential pick for the post is Robert Rubin, who served under Clinton in the same position and is currently Director and Senior Counselor of Citigroup. Rubin played a key role in abetting another neoliberal objective: deregulation. Where Volker was hung up on economic austerity, Rubin pushed for more deregulatory policies that ended up shifting jobs, and entire industries, overseas.

Rubin even pushed for Clinton’s dismantling of Glass-Steagall, testifying that deregulating the banking industry would be good for capital gains, as well as Main Street. “[The] banking industry is fundamentally different from what it was two decades ago, let alone in 1933,” Rubin testified before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services in May of 1995.

“[Glass-Steagall could] conceivably impede safety and soundness by limiting revenue diversification,” Rubin argued.

While the industry saw much deregulation over the years preceding these events, the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act of 1999, which eliminated Glass-Steagall, extended and ratified changes that had been enacted with previous legislation. Ultimately, the repeal of the New Deal era protection allowed commercial lenders like Rubin’s Citigroup to underwrite and trade instruments like mortgage backed securities along with collateralized debt and established structured investment vehicles (SIVs), which purchased these securities. In short, as the lines were blurred among investment banks, commercial banks and insurance companies, when one industry fell, others could too.

Robert Rubin is in part responsible for supporting the policies that pushed us to the brink of a great recession. When the subprime mortgage crisis hit, instability and collapse spread across numerous industries.

Another name that is in the hunt for the top spot is Lawrence Summers, who served during the last 18 months of the Clinton administration. Summers is greatly responsible for expanding Rubinomics and is credited by many for the collapse in the derivatives sector, which later imploded the housing market.

Defense Secretary

While Obama’s choice for this important role is speculative, quite a few fingers are pointing to Richard Holbrooke.

After Gerald Ford’s loss and Jimmy Carter’s ascendance into the White House in 1976, Indonesia, which invaded East Timor and slaughtered 200,000 indigenous Timorese years earlier, requested additional arms to continue its brutal occupation, even though there was a supposed ban on arms trades to Suharto’s government. It was Carter’s appointee to the Department of State’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Richard Holbrooke, who authorized additional arms shipments to Indonesia during this supposed blockade. Many scholars have noted that this was the period when the Indonesian suppression of the Timorese reached genocidal levels.

During his testimony before Congress in February 1978, Benedict Anderson of Cornell University cited a report that proved there never was a United States arms ban, and that during the period of the alleged ban; the US initiated new offers of military weaponry to the Indonesians at Holbrooke’s request.

Over the years Holbrooke, who is philosophically aligned with Paul Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives, has worked vigorously to keep his bloody campaign silent. Holbrooke described the motivations behind his support of Indonesia’s genocidal actions:

“The situation in East Timor is one of the number of very important concerns of the United States in Indonesia. Indonesia, with a population of 150 million people, is the fifth largest nation in the world, is a moderate member of the Non-Aligned Movement, is an important oil producer — which plays a moderate role within OPEC — and occupies a strategic position astride the sea lanes between the Pacific and Indian Oceans … We highly value our cooperative relationship with Indonesia.”

Other foreign policy advisors may also include the likes of Madeline Albright, the great supporter of Iraq sanctions, which killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Madeline Albright, when asked by Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes about the deaths caused by U.N. sanctions, infamously condoned the deaths. “I think this is a very hard choice,” she said. “But the price–we think the price is worth it.”

Samantha Power, cheerleader for humanitarian intervention, also has Obama’s ear and may even entice him to put U.S. forces in Darfur.

“With very few exceptions, the Save Darfur campaign has drawn a single lesson from Rwanda: the problem was the US failure to intervene to stop the genocide. Rwanda is the guilt that America must expiate, and to do so it must be ready to intervene, for good and against evil, even globally. That lesson is inscribed at the heart of Samantha of Power’s book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. But it is the wrong lesson,” writes author Mahmood Mamdani in the London Review of Books.

As Mamdani continues: “What the humanitarian intervention lobby fails to see is that the US did intervene in Rwanda, through a proxy … Instead of using its resources and influence to bring about a political solution to the civil war, and then strengthen it, the US signalled to one of the parties that it could pursue victory with impunity. This unilateralism was part of what led to the disaster, and that is the real lesson of Rwanda … Applied to Darfur and Sudan, it is sobering. It means recognising that Darfur is not yet another Rwanda. Nurturing hopes of an external military intervention among those in the insurgency who aspire to victory and reinforcing the fears of those in the counter-insurgency who see it as a prelude to defeat are precisely the ways to ensure that it becomes a Rwanda.”

Other names in the running include John Kerry, who as many know, ran an antiwar campaign for president in 2004. A full supporter of the War on Terror, with a hard-line on Iran, Kerry would certainly not alter the U.S. relationship in the Middle East.

Regarding the Department of Defense, it looks as if Robert Gates will still control the top spot, with no alterations made to the DoD or its inflated budget.

The Next Step

While the election of Barack Obama is a blow to George W. Bush-Republicanism and a gain for racial equality in this country, it is in many ways only a symbolic victory. The future of the U.S.’s foreign and economic agenda will continue to be saturated with ideologies and individuals that are directly responsible for our current predicament, both in the Middle East and domestically.

Celebrating the end of the ugly Bush era is one thing. Celebrating the continuation of their policies with a different administration in the White House is quite another. With these prospective appointments, Obama seems to be moving backwards to Clintontime. This may be sufficient change for some, but it far from a progressive push toward social, economic, and environmental justice.

For significant change to happen, the kind that is needed in order to mend the wounds of the Bush years, we have to put down our Obama signs and force Congress and the new administration to end the wars in the Middle East, and push for regulating the financial industry while providing true universal health-care and economic safety-nets for all Americans.

Given the make up of his potential advisors, we’re in for a long uphill battle. So let’s drop our illusions and start organizing, beginning with a discussion of what “organizing” even means in today’s political climate.

At least that’s the message reverberating across the progressive landscape these days. One can almost hear a collective sigh of relief. Darth Cheney will be gone. Karl Rove will be forced to recoil, and President Bush can retire in ignorant bliss to his ranch in Crawford.

Ahhhh…

It is certainly comforting to believe the stars have aligned and progressive values are about to flood the Beltway. Barack Obama has campaigned on “Hope” and “Change” and we all but believe the guy is actually going to deliver on his varied promises.

But believing is what’s caused so many to fall victim to Obama fever. You know the signs: they send you emails from MoveOn.org (claiming you’re to blame for Obama’s fictional loss) and hope-filled rants from Norman Solomon. They talk about Obama as if he’s the next messiah, their wardrobe consists of more than two Obama shirts that they’ll wear every day leading up to the election. They have a “Change” sign in their window and one in their front yard. It’s as if they’ve become more or less Obama-zombies, just in time for Halloween.

No question the Obama strategists have accomplished what they set out to do. Just look at all they’ve achieved thus far: antiwar activists have exchanged their slogans for pro-Obama refrains despite the fact that their candidate inflates the alleged threat of Iran, wants to put more troops in Afghanistan and won’t pull out of Iraq anytime soon.

Environmentalists have come out for Obama in large numbers, even though he thinks coal can be clean and nuclear energy can be safe. No big deal that he wants to drill baby drill off our coastal shores. At least the guy believes in global warming.

Or take the civil rights champions who have few qualms about his rabid support for FISA and the PATRIOT Act or social justice activists who aren’t overly concerned that Obama condones the execution of convicts who have never murdered. Economic progressives, who would be the first to say the economic I.V. pumped into the Wall Street bloodline was hastily passed and rips off tax-payers, are the first to defend Obama’s economic platform. No matter he supported the bailout without reservation. No matter his team of economic hit men includes a whole slew of Clintonite neoliberals like Robert Rubin. Obama is still their guy.

All of this wouldn’t bother me much if it weren’t for the overt hypocrisy so many progressives, and a few radicals, are exhibiting with their blind support for Obama. It’s one thing to embrace pragmatic voting and lesser-evilism on the grounds that we don’t really live in a true democracy. It’s quite another to be excited about the prospect of electing a man who doesn’t stand for the issues you do, and is in fact campaigning against them.

What will happen if Obama wins the electorate? Progressive Group Number One seems to believe he’ll magically move left once inaugurated and is only running to the right in order to win the election. That position is a non sequitur and not worthy of real discussion as it’s based on wishful thinking.

Progressive Group Number Two knows Obama is pretty damn conservative but is planning on voting “strategically,” arguing that change comes in baby steps, yet they assure us they’ll apply pressure once Obama’s elected to get the little toddler strolling. A friend, who happens to be a professor at a large university, recently told me that he plans on coercing Obama by pressuring elected members of congress. He’ll be “making a stink” and “scene,” he assured me.

What a relief.

“The forces arrayed against far-reaching progressive change are massive and unrelenting. If an Obama victory is declared next week, those forces will be regrouping in front of our eyes — with right-wing elements looking for backup from corporate and pro-war Democrats,” Norman Solomon recently wrote in an article advising progressives to vote against their interests. “How much leverage these forces exercise on an Obama presidency would heavily depend on the extent to which progressives are willing and able to put up a fight.”

Does Solomon even understand what it means to “put up a fight”? And what’s with the notion that progressives will “apply pressure” once Obama wins? They have no cash and he’s already going to receive most of their votes. What are they going to do to pressure him, poke him in his ribs? Cause a stink by farting through the halls of Congress? Obama may actually listen to us if he thought progressives were considering to vote for a guy like Ralph Nader, which is the point Nader seems to be making by campaigning in swing states this week. Nader knows how to put up a real fight, one not mired in hypotheticals and fear-mongering, so he’s pressuring Obama where it matters most.

Of course, such a direct confrontation to Obama’s backward policies ruffles the slacks of many devout liberals. But that is the point. Progressives are not flush with cash and as we all should know, flashing the almighty buck is usually the best way to grab a politician’s attention. But the only thing we have at our immediate disposal now is votes. These crooks need us to get elected. Obama already has the majority of left-wing support shored up despite his resistance to embrace our concerns. Imagine if he had to earn our votes instead of receiving our support without having to do a thing for it?

So let’s prepare for what’s ahead. Obama may win next Tuesday, but what will happen to the movements that have been sidelined in order to help get the Democrats elected? What will become of the environmental movement after January 20? Will it step up to oppose Obama’s quest for nuclear power and clean coal? Will the antiwar movement work to force Obama to take a softer approach toward Iran? Will they stop the troop increase in Afghanistan?

These are but a few of the questions I’d like progressive supporters of Obama to answer. I’ve yet to hear exactly how they will pressure an Obama administration. In fact, I don’t think they will. George W. Bush will be gone and that will be enough for most. Progressives faced a similar confrontation in 1992 when Bill Clinton took office, but without much of a fight we saw neoliberalism take hold in the form of NAFTA and we endured the Telecommunications Act, Welfare Reform, a forest plan written by the logging industry, the dismantling of Glass-Steagall, the Iraq Liberation Act, and much much more.

What makes the Democrats believe that they even deserve our support now? President Bush has indeed been bad, but his most egregious policies were upheld and supported by the majority of Democrats. They gave Bush the green light to whack Saddam while they controlled the Senate. They supported the PATRIOT Act (Obama voted for its reconfirmation), the War on Terror, Bush’s increased Pentagon budget, a no-strings Wall Street bailout and two awful Supreme Court confirmations. You may also remember that two years ago we ushered Democrats back into office with the belief that they might actually fight Bush on Iraq. Instead we’ve had nothing but complicity, with Democrats time and again supporting increased war funds.

I hope I’m not alone in saying that we deserve more than lofty rhetoric about “action” and “hope.” We deserve a program for real progressive change — the kind Democrats and Barack Obama will not bring as long as we give them our unconditional support.

Of course this isn’t the lofty hope their candidate has been talking about. After eight long years of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, it’s been a logical reaction, one that the Obama camp has done their best to exploit. But as Obama shows his constituents that he is far from progressive, the less likely he is to walk away with an electoral victory come November, and the more doubtful it is that he will make any real progress if elected.

It’s a pretty straight forward equation: centrist Democrats don’t have a great track record of winning national elections. Voters want simple, common sense approaches to handling the problems our country faces today, not posturing and political maneuvering for the sake of manipulation. For what it’s worth, John McCain shoots it straight. He supports more war and doesn’t know much about economics. Voters know exactly what they are getting if they punch the card for the old Arizona senator.

That’s not the case with Obama who says he wants an end to the war but has voted for its continuation and will leave troops and private mercenaries in the country to deal with the so-called insurgents — even threatening to shift US forces to Afghanistan and Iran, where he’s promised to bully our enemies into submission.

Obama says he supports our civil liberties but voted to reaffirm the PATRIOT Act and FISA. He says he will expand the Pentagon budget, and on Israel he promises to do whatever it takes to protect the country from “terrorists,” paying little to no attention to the plight of Palestinians and their suffering in Gaza.

The good senator also wants to put Americans to work with a neo-Keynesian economic plan, producing millions of “green jobs” across the country. Our addiction to foreign crude surely needs to be dealt with, but Obama’s call for diversified energy sources includes some not so great alternatives, such as nuclear power, clean coal, and more domestic oil production.

Obama also claims to speak for the underprivileged but has refused to support a cap on credit card interest rates and has spoken little about the ruthless prison industry, the war on drugs or the death penalty — all of which unfairly affect the poor.

I would call all of these postures a huge betrayal. But they aren’t. Obama has never been a true progressive. He’s another centrist Democrat that has done his best to appease all sides of the political spectrum; giving the corporate wing the hard evidence they need to trust he’ll protect their interests, and the left-wing, rhetoric and political bravado to ensure they won’t flee from the stifling confines of the Democratic Party.

Nevertheless, many Obama supporters know well of his pitfalls, and no matter how disastrous they may seem, they’ll still vote for him. As respected columnist Norman Solomon recently claimed,

“To some, who evidently see voting as an act of moral witness rather than pragmatic choice (even in a general election), forces such as corporate power or militarism are binary — like a toggle switch — either totally on or totally off. This outlook says: either we reject entirely or we’re complicit … Such analysis tends to see Obama as just a little bit slower on the march to the same disasters that John McCain would lead us to. That analysis takes a long view — but fails to see the profound importance of the crossroads right in front of us, where either Obama or McCain will be propelled into the White House.”

Solomon, who served as an Obama delegate at the convention in Denver and sits on the board of Progressive Democrats of America, has an agenda: to usher Barack Obama into the White House because he sees John McCain as leading our country closer to the sacrificial ledge. “Save the Country (read Empire) Vote Democrat” has become a common refrain among a certain segment of the left, one that echoes through progressive and even radical circles every four years like clockwork. Go ahead and acknowledge their faults, they sing from on high, just don’t you dare ditch the Democrats come Election Day, for the rapture will ensue.

Like others of his stature, Solomon has in the past dished out scare tactics in an attempt to threaten progressives into voting against their own interests, an approach not too unlike the Republican’s who consistently undermine the concerns and needs of their base.

One typical threat that is often levied with fury is the prospect of future Supreme Court nominations. No question the most recent selections to the Court depict a rabid rightwing shift, just don’t forget that it was the Democrats who overwhelmingly confirmed both John Roberts and Samuel Alito despite the collective power to halt their confirmations. And remember, the two best judges serving today, John Paul Stevens and David Souter, were nominated by Gerald Ford and G.W.H. Bush, Republicans both.

Barack Obama will not address progressive issues because he knows quite well he’ll have this segment of the voting block shored up no matter how far right he may turn. If one follows the Solomon line of logic, we will all just have to wait until Obama’s inauguration to pester him to the left. If you do it now, they assert, it will only embolden John McCain.

Such a political philosophy (bigotry) is void of historic truths. One need look no further than Cintontime to grasp the amount of abuse the Democrats are allowed to commit because they are not Republicans. It’s the political version of the battered wife syndrome. Once Democrats are elected and things don’t change, progressives are still silent. And Clinton’s legacy is a long, ugly list of betrayal indeed: NAFTA, Welfare Reform, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty and Iraq Liberation Acts, the Salvage Rider, and the shattering of Glass-Steagall, which is greatly responsible for the current market meltdown.

So don’t fear standing up and voting for what you believe in, no matter how fringe or foolish you are made out to be by others who claim to know better than you. Our democracy is in peril. War rages on. Jobs are scarce and the environment is being destroyed at an exponential rate. Voting on the likelihood of perceived social gains in the short-term is not only erroneous; it is without a true understanding of what it is going to take to bring about real change in this country.

Frustrated by the complicity of the Democratic Party in waging the war, Sheehan decided this year to run as an independent candidate against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her San Francisco district.

Joshua Frank is co-author with Jeffrey St. Clair of the recent collection Red State Rebels. He recently caught up with Sheehan to discuss her bid.

***

Joshua Frank: Cindy, you recently obtained ballot access in your campaign against Rep. Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco. It was a hard fought battle from what I heard. Can you talk about the whole process a little bit, and what you’re campaign had to overcome in order to get on the ballot in November’s election?

Cindy Sheehan: Well, Josh, as you know, last May I renounced my membership in the Democratic Party in response to yet another multi-billion dollar Iraq/Afghanistan war funding bill that Pelosi’s Congress handed to George W. Bush.

In July of 2007, I decided to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco’s 8th District if she did not reverse her treasonous position of the Constitutional remedy of impeachment being “off the table.” As I didn’t belong to any political party at that point, I weighed my options and decided to re-register as “Decline to State.” Although I resonate with many parts of third party platforms, I thought to retain my independent integrity I would make my bid unaffiliated with any party.

We found out early this year that the requirements for obtaining ballot status as a non-partisan in California are the 4th most rigorous in the nation. If one belongs to a party it is far easier to obtain ballot status. I was required to get signatures from 3% of the people in the 8th District who voted in November 2006. That came to an unbelievable number of 10,198.

When we first contacted the DOE (Department of Elections) to pull the first petitions. In lieu of filing fee — which I had to obtain 3000 signatures and pay a fee for 400 signatures, the staff there told us that we could register people and write the form number next to that person’s signature on the petition after they signed. Well into the process, we had registered hundreds of new voters and we were told that the DOE would not accept signatures of new voters unless the office had the time to “process” those forms. The first time we turned in our “Nomination” papers, the DOE invalidated 44%, saying that over half of those people weren’t “registered.”

Ten days in advance of the August 8 deadline for the signatures, we needed to turn in 7,694 (out of the original 10,198) more signatures and we turned in 10,856. Our campaign volunteers and staff rejoiced because we were sure that we had made it with those signatures. However, we got “Supplemental” to the nomination papers and continued to collect signatures “just in case.” Well, it was a good thing that we did, because the DOE invalidated almost 5,000 of those signatures and we were lacking just under 1,700.

We discovered this information the four days before the papers were due from a phone call from the DOE. We were shocked, but we mobilized dozens of people to collect signatures.

In the end, we figure that we collected right around 20,000 signatures, and on afternoon of August 8 we received a phone call from the DOE that turned out to be good news: We had qualified!

I became only the sixth non-partisan candidate in California history to qualify for ballot status, and the first Congressional Candidate since 1996! The signature process was very labor intensive, and time consuming, but we were able to obtain about 20,000 votes and dozens of energized volunteers that will be with us until November 4th, when we celebrate victory.

I am sure there will many more obstacle thrown in the path of our campaign, but we are experts at overcoming obstacles and fearless in the face of adversity.

Frank: Some may laugh when you say, “celebrate victory”. Do you really think you can beat Nancy Pelosi? Also, do you believe it is more effective to challenge the Democrat’s position outside of the party, instead of inside, like the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) are trying to do?

Sheehan: Well, I always say that there’s not enough laughter in the world today … but seriously, we have a society where “winning” is the only acceptable outcome of any event: from sports, to American Idol to politics. I believe that every day our campaign office is open and functioning and attracting more volunteers and positive energy is a victory. I go to sleep every night convinced of this fact and wake up every morning ready to get back to the important work of confronting what Nancy Pelosi represents to many people: corporate militarism and a fascist police state.

Besides the daily victories, and the major victory of just getting on the ballot as a non-partisan candidate, I do think that this election is winnable. There is excitement from all over the world, really, for this race. We have a comfortable amount of money right now that we are planning to use to wage a fierce-issues based campaign. I can’t really believe that the people of the 8th District would vote for Pelosi when they find out that she knew about torture and sanctioned the inhumane practice as well as her other failures for the people (but victories for the war machine).

I tried working the whole inside/outside strategy of the PDA, and was, in fact, on its national board until they refused to endorse me in my race against Pelosi. I believe that the only way we are going to save our representative republic and restore some kind of peace and economic equality is to challenge the two party duopoly that only suppresses these attributes.

Frank: Progressive Democrats of America did not endorse your candidacy? Did they give you a reason as to why? What has your support been like among Democrats in general this year?

Sheehan: PDA only endorses Democratic candidates, so to the organization, it’s not how progressive a candidate is, but what letter comes after their name.

They won’t endorse Pelosi, I don’t think, at least that’s what I have been told, but I think the organization should enthusiastically endorse me because of my platform and the work I have done with them.

I have had some very private endorsements from Democrats, but nothing public. I also have a few top people in the California Democratic National Committee who are helping me behind the scenes because they have been warned away from my campaign.

I know I have to appeal to progressive Democrats to win, but I think my message does this directly. However, “Decline to State” makes up the second highest amounts of registration here in San Francisco, so we just need an aggressive campaign to get the progressive message out there.

Frank: Why did you decide to target Pelosi out of all the bad Democrats out there?

Sheehan: I decided to target Pelosi because she is the number one Democrat in Congress and she was the number one obstacle to ending the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

My reasoning was and is that if she refused to hold Bush accountable, then someone needed to hold her accountable. I am not the kind of person to wait for someone else to do something that needs to be done. So here I am.

Frank: How has she responded to your campaign or the issues you are raising? Can you talk about those issues a bit?

Sheehan: When we qualified for the ballot she said something like she “welcomes” the challenge and has the highest “respect” for me. I don’t respect her because I believe she has taken the amazing power that was bestowed on her and has further diminished the causes of peace, justice, environmental sustainability and economic equality. But since she has sold out to the war machine, she knows who her masters are.

We saw one interesting step slightly to the left for her when she allowed Congressman John Conyers to have the non-impeachment hearings last month. Otherwise, she has effectively destroyed the 4th Amendment by granting the telecommunication companies and the Bushites immunity from warrantless spying, and she has proudly funded the war until the middle of next year. She was also fully briefed on torture in 2002 and sanctioned the practice. There are many other ways she has abused “We the People.”

Frank: Now that you are on the ballot, has Pelosi agreed to any formal debates?

Sheehan: That’s an easy one: No. But we will press her and press her to come to San Francisco and debate her opponents, which include a Republican and a Libertarian, and answer for her deplorable record.

One thing I forgot to mention in your last question is her unforgivable backslide to the oil companies in offshore drilling. I haven’t seen poll numbers that address this issue here in the 8th, but I sense that this is as big of a betrayal to most voters here as it is to me.

Frank: Ultimately, what you expect to achieve by running againt. Pelosi this year? And what can members of the antiwar movement do to learn more about your campaign?

Sheehan: I expect to achieve victory against the war machine.

I realize that win or lose, we still have a long way to go in achieving a better world, but taking out Pelosi will be a significant step in the right direction.

I believe that we have marched as far as we can go; signed as many petitions as we can; knocked on too many Congressional office doors; and sang too many verses of “We shall overcome.” This campaign is the most significant action an anti-war person can be involved in until November 4th.

To learn more about our campaign, people should visit our site at www.CindyForCongress.org.

Following on the heels of Howard Dean’s groundbreaking presidential campaign in 2004, where Dean’s campaign guru, Joe Trippi, brilliantly employed the power of the internet to market and raise money, Barack Obama has smashed their apparatus and resurrected an entirely new fundraising beast.

On the surface, Obama’s approach to raising funds for his candidacy seems to be breaking from the norm, relying not on money from lobbyists or those issue-oriented Political Action Committees (PACs), but instead on individual donations that account for 99% of the over $339 million he’s raked up thus far.

Unlike Dean’s campaign of yore, however, Obama is not banking solely on small online donations in order to fuel his long drive to the White House. As the New York Times reported on April 6, Obama has raised more cash from folks giving $1,000 or more than he has from small donors.

But Obama’s largess goes far deeper than that.

A tally of Obama’s list of his campaign’s 552 large bundlers (those who have collected between $50,000 and $200,000 from different individuals on Obama’s behalf) reveals that they have dumped a combined total of $31.65 million in to Obama’s war chest as of mid-June 2008.

The bundlers are currently listed on Obama’s official website under the guise of “full-disclosure”. But as senior researcher at Public Citizen, Alex Cohen, says, one big name is no longer there, that of Robert Blackwell Jr.

On April 27, 2008 the Los Angeles Times published a story that portrayed the relationship between Blackwell and Obama in a not-so-shining light. The Times noted that after Obama lost his run for Congress in 2000, the state senator was strapped for cash, only to be bailed on by Blackwell who put Obama on a retainer of $8,000-a-month for his services as a legal adviser to Blackwell’s budding technology firm, Electronic Knowledge Interchange.

The money Blackwell gave Obama would end up totaling $112,000, a nice supplement to the state senator’s $58,000 a year salary. Explains the Times, “A few months after receiving his final payment from EKI, Obama sent a request on state Senate letterhead urging Illinois officials to provide a $50,000 tourism promotion grant to another Blackwell company, Killerspin.”

Illinois tax-payers ended up giving Killerspin, a table-tennis tournament company, $20,000 as per Obama’s request. However, between 2002 and 2004 the company was granted $320,000 in Illinois state grants. And while Obama’s retainer and subsequent political maneuverings were not illegal, they certainly lead one to wonder what other dealings are still lingering in Obama’s past that we don’t know about.

“Any implication that Sen. Obama would risk an ethical breach in order to secure a small grant for a pingpong tournament is nuts,” said Obama’s chief political advisor, David Axelrod.

As of April 2008, Blackwell was committed to raising over $100,000 for Obama’s campaign through bundling efforts. His name, as mentioned, has since disappeared from that list, and according to Public Citizen, Obama’s camp has not yet provided them with a “straight answer” as to why. Obama’s team has replied by saying that Blackwell hasn’t met the right criteria to be included in the list.

And while Obama may not be taking money directly from PACs or lobbyists, Public Citizen’s WhiteHouseForSale.org notes that the presumptive Democratic nominee has 14 registered lobbyists on board who are serving as bundlers to his campaign, bringing in millions of dollars, with more surely to come as Obama continues to reach out to Hillary Clinton’s lonely money hounds.

While Barack Obama may be attempting to break the mold and reshape election fundraising techniques, many of his new methods are simply warped versions of the old. Obama may be perpetuating an image of change and transparency, but in reality what his campaign seems to be giving us are smoke and mirrors.

By 1930 Fischer and Tropsch had applied for several U.S. patents, but it wasn’t until earlier this summer that the first U.S. coal-to-liquid plant had been slated to be constructed in West Virginia. But while liquid coal may help replace petroleum based fossil fuels, it is certainly not an answer to climate change.

“The total emissions rate for oil and gas fuels is about 27 pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon, counting both production and use,” states the Natural Resource Defense Council. “[T]he estimated total emissions from coal-derived fuel is more like 50 pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon — nearly twice as much.”

The price of oil per barrel has risen dramatically in the past year, and the U.S.’s dependency on foreign crude has become less stable as tensions in the Middle East have escalated with the ongoing war in Iraq and the potential confrontation with Iran. The major presidential candidates have laid out their plan of attack to dealing with the crisis, echoing many old solutions to our 21st century environmental troubles.

Sen. John McCain, for example, wants to drill off the coast of California, build dozens of nuclear plants from Oregon to Florida, and slightly increase fuel efficiency of automobiles. Similarly, Sen. Barack Obama supports an array of neoliberal strategies to deal with the country’s volatile energy situation. He is not opposed to the prospect of nuclear power, endorses capping-and-trading the coal industry’s pollution output, and supports liquefied coal.

Well, that’s a maybe on the latter.

“Senator Obama supports … investing in technology that could make coal a clean-burning source of energy,” Obama stated an email sent out by his campaign in June 2007. “However, unless and until this technology is perfected, Senator Obama will not support the development of any coal-to-liquid fuels unless they emit at least 20 percent less life-cycle carbon than conventional fuels.”

You did not just read a lofty proclamation from a change agent, but a well-crafted rationale meant to appease green voters. Meanwhile, back in the Senate, Obama’s record relays a much different position on the subject.

It was only six months before the aforementioned email that Republican Senator Jim Bunning and Obama introduced the Coal-to-Liquid Fuel Promotion Act of 2007. The bill, introduced in January 2007, was referred to the Senate committee on finance and, if passed, would ultimately amend the Energy Policy Act of 2005 as well as the Energy Policy and Conservation Act to evaluate the feasibility of including coal-to-oil fuels in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and provide incentives for research and plant construction.

Shortly after the introduction of the bill, Tommy Vietor, Obama’s spokesman, defended the senator’s proposal, “Illinois basin coal has more untapped energy potential than the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined. Senator Obama believes it is crucial that we invest in technologies to use these resources to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”

Has Obama had a change of heart, or has he just flip-flopped around like a suffocating fish for political leverage? The answer to that question may reside along the nuanced path we are getting all too used to seeing candidate Obama traverse these days. As his campaign website reads:

“Obama will significantly increase the resources devoted to the commercialization and deployment of low-carbon coal technologies. Obama will consider whatever policy tools are necessary, including standards that ban new traditional coal facilities, to ensure that we move quickly to commercialize and deploy low carbon coal technology.”

The apartheid government of South Africa was the first to use liquid coal for motor vehicles, and it seems, despite the “low carbon coal” rhetoric, that Obama may be poised to carry on the dirty legacy of liquid coal. Sen. McCain, for what’s its worth, has also announced support for “clean coal” technology.

The move from foreign oil to locally mined coal, “low carbon” or otherwise (no coal energy has zero carbon emissions), would only change the dynamics of the U.S.’s massive energy consumption, not its habits, which is at the heart of our current energy woes.

As a result of our consumptive lifestyles, the mountaintops of Appalachia, from Tennessee up to the heart of West Virginia, are being ravaged by the coal industry — an industry that cares little about the welfare of people or the land that it is adversely affecting with its mining operations.

The waste from the holes, often 500 feet deep, produce toxic debris that is then dumped in nearby valleys, polluting rivers and poisoning local communities downstream. There has been little to no oversight of the wholesale destruction of these mountains and Obama and McCain have not addressed the ruin in any of their bullet point policy papers on “clean coal.” No state or federal agencies are tracking the cumulative effect of the aptly named “mountaintop removal,” where entire peaks are being blown apart, only to expose tiny seams of the black rock.

Any “clean coal” technology, whether it be liquidification or otherwise, would surely rely on the continuation of such brutal methods of extraction, and carbon output would still be significant. Like his Republican opponent, Obama has stayed silent on the issue of mountaintop removal. McCain’s ignorance may be for a reason, however, as the presumptive Republican nominee has received over $49,000 from the coal industry this election cycle compared to Obama’s meager $12,000, which makes Obama’s green coal embrace all the more bewildering.

Sen. Obama may receive high marks from the League of Conservation Voters and be touted by the Sierra Club for being marginally better than John McCain on the environment, but when it comes to his position on the U.S.’s coal extracting future, the senator’s position is not only wrong, it is absolutely disastrous.

Several weeks ago Congress passed the engorged HR 2419, the “Food and Energy Act of 2008,” better known to the rest of us lay folk as the annual Farm Bill. Along with the laundry list of lavish handouts to the agricultural industry, there were also two fat pork loins cooked up for timber companies, tucked deep in the 682-page sham of legislation.

Thanks to Montana Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat, timber giant Weyerhaeuser was granted $182 million in tax breaks along with Plum Creek Timber, one of the largest private land owners in the state, which received a whopping $500 million. On May 23, Sen. Baucus announced his deal with Plum Creek CEO Rick Holley standing by his side.

It was payback. Employees of Plum Creek have donated almost $20,000 to Baucus this past year, and the company spent $200,000 in lobbying fees during the period in which the Farm Bill was being debated in Congress.

The forest removal industry has for decades been rewarded for its bad behavior. They have been given unfettered access to log on our public lands, with subsidies aiding them along the way. Even when push came to shove they have always made out like bandits, sharing little of their uber-wealth with the public who helped finance their success — not to mention ever giving back to the habitat they profited from by destroying.

If I sound bitter, it’s because I am.

Plum Creek, after cutting virtually all the good trees on its Montana land, is about to be compensated for its loss by so-called conservationists. Last week the Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land announced a backroom deal, brokered by Sen. Baucus himself, that would transfer up to 300,000 acres of the company’s despoiled property over to the groups for the amount of $510 million. It is to become the largest, most expensive conservation deal in U.S. history.

Nonetheless, all that money isn’t going to be paid by the green groups alone. In fact, the Federal government will cover half of the tab, thanks to Sen. Baucus of course, with Montanans paying another $100 million. The rest will be raised by the conservationists who claim they are actually saving the land from residential development.

It should be clear that Plum Creek doesn’t deserve the hundreds of millions of dollars it’s going to receive from taxpayers. Instead the company ought to be the one cutting checks for all the environmental damage they’ve caused to grizzly and fish habitat throughout the state over the years.

Here’s a little information about Montana’s non-forest policy that Plum Creek Timber and others have exploited: The state is essentially a resource treasure chest that has no acting forest practices in place to regulate private lands. In short, it’s a deregulated, boondoggle, free-for-all. And Plum Creek, in this case, liquidated its assets (trees) and is now selling off their land under the guise of conservation, paid in large part by the public.

However, what’s being conserved is still up for debate.

“I recently flew over some of the Plum Creek land that the public will eventually get west of Seeley Lake, Montana, and it was mile after mile of clearcuts,” says Michael Garrity, Executive Director of Helena, Montana based Alliance for the Wild Rockies. “That is probably one reason Plum Creek agreed to sell it and not develop the land into vacation subdivisions. Who wants a vacation home in a middle of a clearcut?”

So let’s get this straight, Plum Creek, once dubbed the Darth Vader of the timber industry by a Republican congressman from Washington state, builds logging roads through prime grizzly habitat, pollutes rivers, and clearcuts forests just so they can sell it off at a huge profit, and somehow we’re supposed to be exited about a deal that will stop some development, but not all of it?

Yes, that’s right, Plum Creek can still log on some of this land, but they can only do so if certified “sustainable” by a third-party verifier.

“Many of these third party certificates are worthless if the public is not allowed to over see them,” says Garrity. “And it is not clear if the public will.”

This fact alone should raise the hackles of taxpayers who are footing the majority of Plum Creek’s bill. They may have little input about what actually happens on the land they helped pay for. The agreement will also allow the Forest Service, an agency wrought with a history of corruption and mismanagement, to oversee half of the land down the road.

It is just one more tale of environmental compromise that many greens have for far too long been forced to accept in Montana and the Pacific Northwest when dealing with resource extraction outfits like Plum Creek and conservationists such as the Nature Conservancy. These guys run the only game in town, which is fixed at the highest levels by senators like Max Baucus who operate behind the curtains of power with impunity.

So how good is this deal when all is said and done?

“Nothing is good about 150 years of corporate subsidies, but the unintended consequences are less evil than the subdivisions alternative,” says veteran forest activist Steve Kelly of Bozeman, Montana. “Oh, there will still be subdivisions, just a lot fewer. Good, or excellent, is never an option in a rigged world limited to choosing between the lesser of two evils.”

Virtually every progressive cause, from labor to the environment, had been co-opted by a mindset that would have ensured more of the same. There was no pressure put on Kerry to change, and he didn’t. As a result, the antiwar movement collapsed, with no demonstrations and a strict allegiance to the Democrat’s pro-war campaign. Fortunately, the movement to end the war was resurrected by Cindy Sheehan as she erected her tent outside the Bush compound in Texas months later.

Today we find our political climate in a similar state of shock. Call it the “Nobody but Obama” epidemic. Senator Barack Obama has now sealed up the Democratic nomination, and the usual suspects, from MoveOn.org to Progressive Democrats for America, are falling in line. Sadly, what seems to be reigning in this year’s election is even worse than the storm that flooded our issues in 2004.

After eight dreadfully long years of Bush, it is to be expected that a lot of voters would support any Democrat if it meant kicking the wretched Republicans out of the White House. Obama’s message of “change” has certainly resonated well. But underlying his rhetoric is a brilliant public relations campaign, orchestrated by DC insiders, that is void of any real substance.

In 2006, the Democrats were ushered in to Congress with the expectation that they would end the war in Iraq. Democratic campaigns across the nation exploited the popular anti-Bush sentiment, promising that real “change” was on the horizon.

It’s a familiar refrain indeed.

Two years later, we have nothing to show for it. The Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress, yet have rubber stamped virtually every Iraq war spending bill that has come down the pipeline — ensuring the bloodbath will continue for years to come. All major Democrats have echoed the Bush line on Iran, promising a military confrontation if the country does not cease its nuclear experimentation. By and large, Bush’s backward Middle East foreign policy has not been met any real opposition from the Hill.

Like the majority of his colleagues, Obama has done very little to change the face of American politics. He has voted for war spending, appeased the pro-Israel lobby, and helped build the erroneous case against Iran, saying nothing about Israel’s plentiful arsenal of nuclear warheads. In short, Barack Obama is not an ally to those of us who oppose the ambiguous War on Terror.

“I want you to know that today I’ll be speaking from my heart, and as a true friend of Israel,” Obama announced a day after he locked up his party’s nomination to a crowd of pro-Israel zealots. “[W]hen I visit with AIPAC, I am among friends, Good friends. Friends who share my strong commitment to make sure that the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, tomorrow, and forever.”

Yet here we are again, like 2004, with “progressives” and other lefties ogling a hope-filled candidacy. But it’s not just Obama’s war support that should raise our hackles.

Obama supports the death penalty, opposes single-payer health care, supports nuclear energy, opposes a carbon pollution tax, supports the Cuba embargo, and will not end the vast array of federal subsidies to corporations, including those to the oil and gas cartel.

And as the United States economy slides into a deep recession, Barack Obama is promising more of the same, despite his criticism of John McCain’s economic plan. But behind the curtains of Obama’s strategy team is the same set of economic troglodyte intellectuals that led us in to our current financial disaster.

Obama’s advisory team includes Harvard economist Jeffrey Liebman, a former Clinton adviser, who believes we ought to privatize social security. Then we have the renowned David Cutler, another Harvardite, who believes our economy can be boosted through an increase in privatized health care costs. Writing for New England Journal of Medicine in 2006, Cutler explained, “The rising cost … of health care has been the source of a lot of saber rattling in the media and the public square, without anyone seriously analyzing the benefits gained.”

And that’s just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Perhaps all of these issues are aiding the independent candidacy of Ralph Nader, who is consistently polling above 5% nationwide. This, despite a virtual media blackout and very little support among progressives.

Nader still faces many hurdles, from ballot access to fundraising, yet his support is higher at this point than it was at a similar stage during his 2000 Green Party bid. I still believe that if Nader wanted to put real pressure on Obama and the Democrats this year he would focus his finite resources and energy on the states that matter most: Ohio and Florida.

All in all, progressives and others working to bring about real change in this country, ought to escape from under the dark “Nobody but Obama” cloud that hovers above. For his campaign, when it comes to the most pressing issues of the day, does not represent “change” and “hope” anymore than Senator McCain’s.

At least that’s the sentiment rolling out of the state this past week as a long shot candidate for U.S. Senate, Bob Kelleher, won the Republican nomination and will take on seasoned Democrat Max Baucus in next fall’s election. The odd thing about the whole ordeal is that Kelleher is pretty much a bona fide socialist. More so, than say, Senator Bernie Sanders at least. Not that that’s saying a whole lot, but Kelleher’s policies do tilt dramatically left of his Democratic opponent.

Kelleher brings the same spunky flare that he has brought to his politics for the past four decades, where he’s lost 15 of his 16 bids for public office. He’s run repeatedly as a Democrat and as a Green, so his allegiance to the Republican Party is nebulous at best. But that didn’t stop the 85-year-old Kelleher from winning by a margin of 10,000 votes on November 3, despite no cash and very little campaign organization.

The victory has left many veteran Montana election veterans scratching their heads in bewilderment. How did this guy win by running within the Republican Party? Ron Paul’s supporters came out in droves, but many don’t follow Kelleher’s socialist leanings. The most likely answer is two-fold. First, Kelleher’s name is well known, as his name has appeared on the ballot so many times. Second, it was a six-way race, splitting the votes among the rest of the right-wing and centrist pack, leaving Kelleher on the left, all alone.

Even so, it was still a substantial feat, and it just goes to show you can’t tell which way the political winds are blowing the Big Sky state.

Kelleher wants a “non-violent” revolution to essentially dismantle the government in Washington, doing away with the presidency, Senate and House, and replacing it with a parliamentary body, where citizens don’t vote for individuals, but for parties. He wants massive Keynesian-style work programs to eliminate poverty; he favors real socialized medicine, an end to neoliberal trade policies, and a revamping of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, to name a few of his positions.

Kelleher’s opponent, Max Baucus, has already refused to debate Kelleher, and has said assertively that he is “not running against anyone”. Nonetheless, Baucus certainly deserves the challenge. He’s supported the invasion of Iraq, trade policies that have hurt working Montanans, and an agenda that is shaped by corporate influence, which has helped him amass over $10 million for a campaign he has said he basically is not going to run.

Democrats like Baucus don’t embrace competition, they ignore it. In doing so, however, Baucus may hurt himself, as he will be ignoring the wishes of tens of thousands of Montana voters that have giving Kelleher the green light to challenge him.

Sadly, the Republican Party is also shunning Kelleher’s campaign, with state party officials saying they will not back their candidate for U.S. Senate, as he’s a long shot. They’ll focus on “winnable” elections instead. That’s certainly not going to stop Kelleher, however, who’s obviously not deterred by the impossible.

And Kelleher doesn’t give a damn about his current own party rejecting him.

“The party has actually no legal significance,” he said. “The party platforms are unenforceable. It’s a lie to voters to give them an impression that any party stands for anything.”

But Kelleher sure as hell stands for something, and he will likely get crushed in November as a result.

Nevertheless remember, this is Montana, and when it comes to politics and elections, anything can happen.

Hillary Clinton seems poised to damage Barack Obama so badly in the Democratic primary that he will end up flopping around like a suffocating trout in the general election when he faces John McCain. From the progressive left, the Green Party, totally strapped for cash and lacking an effective platform, seems intent on running former Democrat Cynthia McKinney for president, known in mainstream America only for her ugly spat with Capital Hill police. And of course there is Ralph Nader who is running another quixotic campaign on sound issues and moral fortitude, but with absolutely no grassroots base to form a rebellion against the powers that be — a campaign that will inevitably become mired in expensive ballot-access battles that will drag far beyond the election itself.

It’s a dismal time for electoral politics indeed. Candidates that oppose the Iraq war, Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the oil cartel, the banking industry, the PATRIOT Act and the death penalty are shoved to the political margins, starved for cash, lacking an organized movement and are ignored by the press.

Back in 2000, during Nader’s most spirited presidential run, anti-globalization sentiment, fueled by the WTO protests, was coming to a head. Nader spoke forcefully about the concerns of the activists that took to the streets of Seattle one year prior, addressing the corporate takeover of our natural resources, the exploitation of labor in developing countries and the fallacies of neoliberalism at home. For many, Nader’s candidacy was less about Nader the persona and more about what his campaign represented. Sadly, the reality today is much different than it was eight years ago.

Unless Hillary Clinton somehow pulls out the Democratic nomination, Nader’s struggling campaign will likely draw only a fraction of the support it did in 2004, despite what a few cherry-picked polls are saying about his chances. Barack Obama has all but sealed up the progressive vote, riding on his airy rhetoric of “change” and “hope”. This no doubt will deflate Nader’s campaign even further.

Nader often speaks of the role third parties have played in past social movements. But what “party” does Mr. Nader speak for now? What movement is pounding the pavement day in and day out in support of his candidacy? What stadium will be sold out to hear him speak later this summer? What election is he going to spoil?

This is where Barack Obama steps on to the scene. The fact that Obama has been able to mount a battle against the Clinton controlled Democratic Party, throwing Bill and Hillary into a few tizzies along the way, deserves respect. No Democrat has dared challenge the duo’s control these past two decades, and those who did have been silenced and marginalized. But that’s right about where my respect for Obama stops. While the senator from Illinois claims to oppose the war in Iraq, he has nonetheless voted numerous times to continue funding its continuation. He supports the death penalty, nuclear power and “clean” coal, believes Israel has a right to occupy Palestine and promises to bully Iran with the threat of warfare. All-in-all Obama is a candidate caught in the same old empty cul-de-sac, and progressives ought to jump off his wobbly bandwagon at the next stop.

The Green Party, or what’s left of it, isn’t a much better alternative. Just last December the GPUS was forced to borrow over $6,000 from its members in order to send out a direct mailing. The party is dead broke. Or maybe just dead. If the GPUS were a corporation they’d have filed for bankruptcy years ago. It’s also hard to tell what party their leading candidate Cynthia McKinney is exactly working to build — is it the Greens or the Reconstruction Party, a party rising from the ruin of New Orleans?

As a former Democrat, how loyal will McKinney be to the Green Party? Is she, as a few Green loyalists have expressed to me privately, just using the Greens for her own gain in order to help build the new Reconstruction Party? Regardless, it probably doesn’t matter all that much as to where her allegiance resides, for neither party is likely to amount to anything significant in the end.

All this may lead one to a state of electoral despair. Who is then to challenge John McCain’s 100 year war and the corporate takeover of the planet? Barack Obama isn’t going to put on the breaks on American empire; in fact, if elected, it’s likely he’ll face less opposition than Bush has during his two terms.

But don’t fret. Opposition to grave social injustices is most effective when it takes place outside the presidential election racket.

Activists on the ground fighting to stop the conveyer belt execution industry of Texas, organic farmers battling Monsanto in North Dakota, Native Americans challenging the federal government over ancient land rights, unionists fighting for a fair wage, environmentalists working to hold polluters accountable for their actions — all of these activities will rage on under the radar despite who is in power in Washington. And these are the campaigns that we ought to be supporting.

So don’t worry too much if the left seems dead in the water this year. It may well be, but grassroots activism is alive and well across the land in some of the most remote, forgotten places you could imagine. Jeffrey St. Clair and I chronicle a few of the more vibrant local movements in our forthcoming Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland. People in our own backyard are fighting over the essentials of life: water, food, human liberty. And while up against tremendous, insurmountable odds, many are steadily gaining momentum.

This election season surely won’t sidetrack their valiant efforts. Nor should it your own.

It will be his third deployment to Iraq in four years but his first to be served on shore. Thousands of Navy and Air Force personnel are now serving non-traditional roles in Iraq — posts they never signed up for. Steven, who asked I not use his last name in print, said he’s to receive six weeks of weapons training at a California Army base before being flown over to Iraq for a year-long deployment.

“We’ve all heard of the stop-loss policy, there’s even a new movie about it, but few know about what else is happening in our armed forces right now,” Steven explained. “The back door draft is real, for sure, but here we are being shipped off to Iraq to basically serve in the infantry. It’s ridiculous.”

The Department of Defense reports that sailors and Air Force members are carrying out many different missions in Iraq, from traditional duties in the air and sea to construction jobs, medical operations, civil affairs, custom inspection, security and detention operations. Most are promised non-combative roles in Iraq, but many have found themselves to be in harms way once they arrive.

In 2007 the Navy sent roughly 2,200 “individual augmentees”, as the service calls them, to handle combat-related duties with Marine and Army units stationed in Iraq. As of early April, 2008, 92 Navy and 46 Air Force personnel had been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, with those numbers sure to rise as the U.S. troop surge continues into its second year.

On March 31, 400 Navy reservists who had received training at military bases in Virginia were shipped back to Iraq. “The good news and bad news about this is that we are out doing things that our people weren’t originally trained for,” said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley in a speech last year.

Such a trend has increased over the past several years. In 2006, for example, there were 4000 Air Force members in Iraq, but that number has jumped significantly. Now the Pentagon reports that over 6,000 are to serve in the country by year’s end.

“Technically, these combat-related assignments do not violate service members’ contracts,” said Lawrence Korb, who handled manpower as assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration. “But many … are not volunteering for these jobs — they’re being told to do them.”

Military recruitment numbers across the board are dwindling, and as result all branches of the service are being overextended to maintain current troop levels in Iraq. Aside from combat-related roles, however, sailors and Air Force members have been deployed in order to protect U.S. economic interests in the region — from oil pipelines to Halliburton’s numerous reconstruction projects.

And that’s what seems to have sailors like Steven irked at the troop surge and his new function in Iraq.

“It’s a draft, plain and simple. I don’t care what they call it,” Steven told me as our plane landed at LAX. “I didn’t sign up for the Navy to be in the Army. But I’m going because I don’t feel I have a choice. I have children to feed and a mortgage to pay.”

Not to say all this is not occurring. The antiwar movement is on life-support; even the radical reincarnation of the Vietnam era’s Winter Soldier hearings weren’t enough to awaken the corporate press from its slumber. The economy is caught in a downward spiral. Hundreds of thousands have perished as a result of the US wars in the Middle East. Thousands of species on Earth face extinction as our polar ice caps melt and the climate warms beyond repair.

These are dire times indeed.

Even so I tend to cling to Ed Abbey’s admonition to be a part-time warrior, saving enough hours in the day to enjoy the offerings of this little blue planet while we still can. As my friend Jeffrey St. Clair puts it, “Be as radical as reality. Fight fiercely for what you feel passionate about, no matter how long the odds seem. But don’t fret so much about the meta-crises, such as global warming or ozone depletion. It’ll only weigh you down and drive you toward nihilistic despair.”

Desperation is no way to invigorate the soul, whether it’s your own or that of a movement. In fact while the last seven-and-a-half-years of George W. Bush may have seemed like an eternity of sorrow and misery, there may be a silver-lining to all that’s transpired.

No other president in modern history has done more to expose the dark side of US imperialism than Bush. The international community is not behind the Iraq war and doesn’t trust our half-baked intelligence toward Iran, making it even more difficult for us to get away with bombing the country in the future. US power, while not fully-deflated, is fast leaking hot air.

War is pretty unpopular across the US too. John McCain is the only candidate willing to call for an outright extension of the occupation of Iraq. And while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton may covertly plan to lengthen our presence there, they dare not utter such nonsense out loud. Both are doing their best to position themselves as the antiwar candidate, hiding their military tactics away in the fine print of their policy briefs.

Old alliances are becoming obsolete. NATO has weakened and the US go-it-alone strategy has damaged the trend of US isolation in foreign hostilities. The US is unequivocally deemed a global menace. We have become, against Washington’s better wishes, a more humble nation. It’s a sure sign US dominance is on the skids.

So too is our economic prowess, as witnessed by the subprime mortgage collapse and decline of the dollar. The US banking system is in flux due in large part to the dismantling of Glass-Steagall under the reign of Bill Clinton’s economic henchman, Robert Rubin. Sure Bush’s Fed has overstepped its boundaries and attempted to “bailout” the credit sector, but hasn’t this whole debacle also exposed the fallacies of neoliberal ethos?

These events sure seem to me to be something the left ought to be encouraged by. It wasn’t even ten years ago that we took to the streets of Seattle to rally in opposition to the WTO and Clinton’s free-trade pathology. Now even his wife is attempting to distance herself from the failures of NAFTA. Not that she’s sincere, but at least the language is starting to change.

Many are also yapping away about the fate of the environment. Even McCain believes humans are impacting the global climate. While much of this is unadulterated green-washing, the tide is shifting. People are beginning to care about the planet they will be leaving their children and grand kids. Awareness is growing despite the campaign against it. The hike in gas prices, while hurting some financially in the interim, may in the long-run force us to rethink public transportation and our over-consumption of fossil fuels.

The reaches of US Empire are being destroyed quicker than you may realize, yet the left is still stuck neck-deep in a dark, humorless, perpetual cynicism. But why not look at the bright side of the mess we’re in instead? Your outlook depends solely on your vantage point. The bottom line is that we can either be dejected by the negative or inspired by the positive. Ultimately, it’s up to you.

None of this should come as much of a surprise if you’ve been watching Obama backpedal over the last few months. Somehow the Democratic frontrunner seems to believe Hillary’s defeat will only come about if he steers clear of a legitimate peace platform, merely paying lip-service to the conflicts in the Middle East instead.

While John McCain pronounces the US will be in Iraq for ten more bloody decades, Hillary and Obama aren’t raising any qualms in their policy papers. In fact, as author Jeremy Scahill has pointed out, Obama’s plan for Iraq not only includes continued funding for the gargantuan US Embassy in Baghdad, the senator also wants to leave at least 40,000 troops to roam about the country and allow mercenary forces like Blackwater to operate above the law indefinitely. Hillary Clinton, of course, seconds Obama’s thirst for more occupation and both senators aren’t the least bit hesitant to leave “all options on the table” in regard to Iran.

Warmongers all of them.

Sadly, many have unwittingly gulped the Kool-Aid this year, swallowing the notion that Barack Obama somehow represents a mild, pragmatic antiwar position. Even Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo, who usually provides keen insight into our militarized political sleaze, believes Obama may be the real deal.

“Clearly, Obama is the candidate the neoconservatives fear and loathe: the loathing is on account of his antiwar views, at least when it comes to Iraq, and the fear stems from the fact that campaigning against him will be difficult,” Raimondo recently wrote. “Hillary they can handle: she’ll mobilize the troops and weld together the fractured Republican coalition in opposition.”

The Republican establishment certainly deems Obama a serious threat. Not for the reasons Raimondo notes, however. The neocons fear Obama because of his grassroots support, not his “antiwar views”. Simply put: Obama is not antiwar but his following seems to be. At least when it comes to the turmoil in Iraq. But a true antiwar movement should not get behind a candidate that promises to pander to Israel and continue an aggressive policy toward Iran — which includes threatening to murder the poor bastards if they don’t comply with our hypocritical demands.

On the contrary, those who oppose war ought to oppose candidates that support Empire in any of its ugly forms.

The differences between the big three campaigns at this point are only marked by rhetorical persuasions and not on the ground strategy. Iran will be threatened, Israel will be funded, and the war in Iraq will rage on despite it all.

Movements are most effective when they remain independent, refusing to wrangle their pleas in the circus of electoral politics. The tearful testimonies given by our bold veterans during last weekend’s hearings are an indication that dissent is growing, not only among the public, but also among the military. And that’s a good thing. Americans are becoming fed up with perpetual war and the political machinery that enables it.

Without a doubt Barack Obama would love to capitalize on this mounting disgust. But co-opting our efforts won’t end the war, it will simply finish off the movement that is seeking to end it.