Instead of adopting adopting a single-payer plan, which would both cover everyone and be the most cost-effective solution, they’re going to pass an outrageous insurance-and-drug-industry-friendly bill. Then, they’ll brag about how they passed “landmark legislation.”

At least until the bills come due and the government goes bankrupt.

Despite the armed racist mobs turning their brains off and running their mouths at town halls (Trotsky called them “human dust” in his day), Congress will pass and President Obama will sign into law something mislabelled health care reform. The devil, as always, is in the details.

First and foremost, a robust public option is pretty much off the table, and with it, anything meaningful, substantive, or worthy of the name “reform.” A public option would be a government-run single-payer health insurance program similar to Medicare. You know, that big scary socialist-fascist-communist-anti-American-beginning-of-the-Gulag government program that has sent tens of thousands of patriots to their graves thanks to Soviet death panels? Yeah, that Medicare.

Despite their trash talk, Republicans in Congress refused to kill Medicare in a recent vote. Not a single Republican would vote against this diabolical Marxist scheme. We ought to deport these single-payer-loving commies back to Cuba where they belong, but only after some “enhanced interrogation” at Gitmo, of course. We can start with Michelle Bachmann. At least then she’ll have something real to fear for a change.

President Obama said “those who profit from the status quo” are behind the efforts to sabotage the legislation. The funny thing is, he gave them a seat at the health care reform table in an effort to buy their acquiescence. Instead of going to war with the institutions that have a vested interest in sabotaging his agenda, the president allowed them to shape the legislation. This is Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force all over again, except its out in the open. When people voted for change, they weren’t voting for lobbyists to use the front door of the White House instead of the back door.

At a “historic” summit, Obama announced that hospitals, drug and insurance industries, and doctors’ associations agreed to $2 trillion savings over the next 10 years. But as the New York Times noted, “None of the proposals are enforceable, and none of the savings are guaranteed. … At this point, cost control is little more than a shared aspiration.”

Obama surrendered any hope of meaningful health care reform in exchange for – nothing. Absolutely nothing. The drug companies, for example, agreed to voluntarily cut costs by $80 billion over the next 10 years. In exchange, the legislation won’t legalize the re-importation of cheaper drugs from abroad, and there won’t be government negotiation of drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries. (For anyone who’s counting, that’s another campaign promise Obama reneged on and another Bush policy he’s adopted.)

Never mind the fact that these agreements don’t have the force of law behind them. Never mind that they are so vague as to be totally meaningless. Never mind the lack of an enforcement mechanism in case these industries don’t live up to their obligations. While we’re at it, never mind health care reform.

The reason the Right is screaming against a single-payer or public option is very simple: it works. Cheap, universal, quality health care coverage is what the drug companies, insurance crooks, doctors’ organizations, and the rest of the health care industrial complex are so deathly afraid of. They stand to lose hundreds of billions of dollars and could be driven out of business if the profit motive is removed from the health care equation.

We get the least bang for the buck because our system is set up to get the private sector the most buck for the bang. In McAllen, Texas, where medical costs are among the highest in the nation, an investigative journalist found that doctors did all kinds of medically unnecessary procedures to increase their income. One doctor claimed that ordering superfluous tests was a necessary evil to avoid lawsuits, to which a general surgeon replied, “We all know these arguments are bullshit. There is overutilization here, pure and simple. … [T]he way to practice medicine has changed completely. Before, it was about how to do a good job. Now it is about ‘How much will you benefit?’”

The fee-for-service system, where doctors get paid every time they run a test, see a patient, do a procedure, etc., is one of the reasons health care is so costly. The Mayo Clinic, which Obama touts as a model for the nation, keeps costs low and has excellent outcomes because their doctors are essentially proles. They work under one year contracts for a salary instead of deriving their incomes from individual services performed.

None of the legislation in Congress would touch the fee-for-service system.

David Roderick, the chairmen of U.S. Steel, once commented: “US Steel is not in the business of making steel. It is in the business of making money.” Ditto for doctors’ associations, insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmaceutical giants. They’re not in the business of helping sick people, they’re in the business of making money. The health care system can either prioritize making money, or it can prioritize delivering the best possible health care for the population. It can’t do both.

Private sector profits are at the heart of why the U.S. health care system is number one in the world when it comes to costs but is 72nd in terms of the health of its population.

Plans that fail to address this issue are doomed. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that none of the plans under consideration by Congress would halt or reverse health care inflation. (By contrast, the CBO says single-payer would save $1 trillion(!) over the course of a decade, yet no fiscal conservatives are screaming for single-payer at the town halls.)

Obama’s version of the public option is not even worthy of the name. He says, “it shouldn’t be something that’s simply a taxpayer-subsidized system that [isn't] accountable, but rather [has] to be self-sustaining through premiums and that [has] to compete with private insurers.” For those who don’t spend their lives inside the Beltway, here’s the translation: I don’t want to drive the insurance industry out of business with an effective public option that would provide cheap quality health care for everyone. So, I want the government plan to emulate what the private sector does, even though those practices are what’s creating the rapid inflation and terrible outcomes for patients in the first place.

Setting up a public option this way guarantees it’ll be a miserable failure. Not only would it lead to political blowback that could dislodge the Democrats from power (not that I care), it would discredit the very idea of a public option (which I do care about). On top of that, it’d make the health care system even more dysfunctional, chaotic, and costly than it already is. It’d do for the Democratic Party what the Bush’s Iraq war did for the Republicans.

Sadly, it looks like we won’t even get the half-assed version of the public option described above, mainly because the insurance industry spent $11 million since 2007 getting Democrats elected to Congress. The Democrats are prepared to bear the political consequences of a deeply flawed version of the public option without even delivering it. In all likelihood, cooperatives will take the place of a public option, thanks to Senate Finance Committee, which the White House directed industry lobbyists to work with.

That’s right: President Obama directed industry lobbyists to focus their efforts on the Senate Finance Committee. Your president has betrayed you.

After the legislation passes, health care decisions will continue to be made exclusively by penny-pinching insurance company bureaucrats. Medical bills will continue to be the number one reason people declare bankruptcy. Denying people coverage because of preexisting conditions will be outlawed, which is well and good. But lawyers and accountants for the insurance companies have probably figured out a way around the ban: charge people with preexisting conditions ten, a hundred, or a thousand times more than the average policyholder. Those who are too poor or sick to buy private insurance will be forced into the co-op system, which will be quickly overloaded and become insolvent. The government will then be forced to either subsidize co-ops with taxpayer dollars, kick people off the rolls, charge them higher rates, or some combination of all three.

The bottom line is that whatever passes promises to be a costly, ineffective failure.

The health care industrial complex is in a win-win situation. If reform fails to pass because right-wing Democrats join the miserable Republican rump, they win. If reform without a real public option, they win. An aide to the Senate Finance Committee admitted, “The bottom line is that health reform would lead to increased revenues and profits.” The law that passes will make buying health insurance coverage mandatory for all Americans. That will boost the industry’s profits as almost 50 million Americas are forced into the insurance marketplace, aided by small tax credits.

Obama said, “I would rather do the right thing and have one term than be mediocre and have two.” At this rate, he won’t be forced to choose. American history has plenty of one-term mediocrities who broke campaign promises at the behest of Corporate America.

For the American working class movement and the organized left, the Democratic Party has been a key stumbling block since the Populist Movement shook the country back in the 1890s. The Democratic Party has managed, contained, controlled, co-opted, rolled back and eventually destroyed every social movement that has arisen since then.

Selfa begins the book by looking at the Obama’s ascension to the throne of the American Empire in the wake of 9/11, eight years of Bush, and the collapse of the Republican Party after three decades of political dominance. In the second chapter, he analyzes the class nature of the Democratic Party, and points out that the Democrats are unlike most other parties in the world in that individual candidates, rather than the party platform, dictate their policies. He argues convincingly that the Democratic Party is a capitalist party and cites as evidence where their politicians get money from, which think-tanks they take advice from, who they staff their campaigns with, their record on legislation, and their record on foreign policy. He devotes an entire chapter to explaining how and why the Democrats are just as imperialist as their counterparts across the aisle, and points out that all the major wars of the 20th century were launched by Democratic politicians who claimed to want peace while they prepared for war. The fact that the party that jumped into two world wars, used nuclear weapons, designed the Cold War, and started “small” wars in Korea and Vietnam is seen as being less pro-war than the Republicans is a feat that would impress Karl Rove.

Unlike the Republican party, the Democrats incorporate representatives of the oppressed and exploited (women, blacks, gays, unions) within the party as a subordinate component, to give them a meaningless “seat at the table.” Doing so helps the Democrats maintain the fiction that they are the “party of the people,” or that they’re “friends of labor,” as opposed to the bad big business-backed Republicans. The third chapter is dedicated to looking at the rise of the “New Democrats,” i.e. Bill Clinton and the unapologetically pro-business GOP-lite Democratic Leadership Council that has controlled the party since the 1990s.

In the remaining chapters of the book, Selfa turns his attention from the nature of the party and its current trajectory to focusing on the Democratic Party’s (abusive) relationship with social movements, unions, and the organized left. He starts with the Populist movement that united black and white sharecroppers in the rural West and South(!) against the growing power of the robber barons but which made the fatal mistake of entering into an alliance with the Democrats. Next, he shows how the tremendous working-class rebellion in the 1930s that won Social Security and made the American Dream possible was blocked from creating a European-style Labor Party, the parties that created the universal health care systems that Michael Moore envied in Sicko. Lastly, he looks at the rise and fall of the civil rights, anti-war, women’s rights, and gay liberation movements of the 60s and 70s.

In each case, the Democrats resisted these movements but eventually granted meaningful reforms because these movements became too powerful to crush. These movements ignored pleas by Democratic politicians to moderate their demands, to shut up and wait, and to stop organizing (Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the darling of liberals to this day, told civil rights organizers: “If you stop all this sitting-ins — and concentrate on voter registration, I’ll get you a tax-exemption.”) At the same time, the Democrats worked hard to incorporate and co-opt movement leaders into the machinery of government, to transform organizers into party/government bureaucrats sitting behind desks by offering them jobs.

Sadly, in many cases, the strategy worked. Jesse Jackson, for example, agreed to endorse conservative Democratic loser Michael Dukakis and give him the Rainbow Coalition’s delegates in exchange for putting several Jackson staffers (including Jackson’s son) on the Democratic National Committee. While big business-friendly candidates kept its hands firmly on the wheel of the Democratic Party, progressives and their issues took their seats at the back of the bus. The book is rife with examples of movement leaders that decide a seat at the Democratic table is more important than changing the menu, the portions, or who gets what in this country.

The last few chapters of the book are devoted to whether or not the left can take over or use the party as a vehicle for social change. He uses Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s and today’s Progressive Democrats of America as examples of how activists who set out to change and takeover the Democratic party end up changing, getting co-opted and neutered by the very forces they sought to challenge.

The book closes by examining the missed opportunities to create broad-based third parties free of corporate domination, opportunities which the Democratic party sabotaged, more often than not with help from forces within social movements. The most ugly example is the American Communist Party during the 1930s and 40s. No matter how many strikes the Democrats broke, or how many working-class radicals were victimized by McCarthyism, the CP toed a pro-FDR line even though there was a groundswell of support for a Labor Party independent caused by repeated Democratic betrayals of the working class. To read more about that, check out Sharon Smith’s excellent book on U.S. labor history Subterranean Fire.

Two themes run throughout the book and form Selfa’s conclusion: 1) the Democratic Party is part of the problem, not part of the solution if you want real, meaningful change in this country and 2) change comes from grassroots movements independent of (and in opposition to) the Republican and Democratic parties. The lesser-evil strategy has been and will always be a complete disaster, allowing both parties the freedom to become more and more “evil” as time goes on so long as they don’t become equally “evil.”

The only shortcoming of this book is that Selfa neglects to mention the fact that the Democratic Party is itself a misnomer. Forty percent of the votes that a nominee needs to win at the Democratic Convention are controlled by “super-delegates,” current and former elected officials, who can vote however they want, regardless of how people in their districts or state vote. This system was instituted after George McGovern lost in 1972 to Nixon for the explicit purpose of blocking candidates that were deemed by party bosses as “too left-wing.” This voting bloc exists to put a check on democracy within the party. Furthermore, there’s the fact that the road to the nomination begins in rural conservative states (Iowa, New Hampshire) and continues through a gauntlet of the other 49 states, each of which have different and complicated formulas for awarding delegates, a system whose lunacy was on full display in the Clinton-Obama death march to the nomination that lasted twice as long as the general election. The system is rigged to ensure that only conservative candidates with millions of dollars to burn can win the nomination.

This book is essential reading for any activist who wants to understand how to win change in this country and anyone who thinks we need an alternative to the two party state we live in now.

Sadly, Paul won a large amount of support from young people, progressives, and anti-war activists who were fed up with the two parties that are both pro-war, pro-corporate, and anti-civil liberties.

The fact that someone who opposes the minimum wage, has made racist remarks past and present, hates unions, opposes immigrant rights, and doesn’t believe in evolution could gain the support of many progressives says a lot about how politically weak and organizationally almost non-existent the American left is these days.

I don’t know Kokesh personally, but I see his endorsement as another example of someone who was pulled to Paul’s campaign for lack of anything else. Paul, for the record, voted against expanding education benefits for returning GIs and against providing housing assistance to very low-income veterans. As a result, Paul has earned himself a dismal 41% rating from the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. When your candidate’s rating on vets issues matches Bush’s IQ, you have a problem.

Not only has he voted against veterans, he’s also an opportunist. In his announcement that he would not endorse McCain, he said that “the strongest message can be sent by rejecting the two party system. This can be accomplished by voting for one of the non-establishment, principled candidates.” Funny that he calls on voters to reject the two party system, because is part of it — he’s a Republican.

Then there’s the fact that his congressional district gets its fair share of federal dough. There’s a word for this. It’s called hypocrisy.

Some have argued that Batman is an allegory for neoconservatives, the folks who wanted to invade and occupy Iraq come hell or highwater under the pretense of fighting terrorism by spreading democracy in the Middle East. You could even go so far as to see Batman as Bush, a crusader willing to break the law because the institutions charged with enforcing them are too corrupt to do so themselves.

However, I think The Dark Knight’s politics are much more complicated than that. The Joker’s goal is to break Gotham’s heroes in order to rob the city of all hope. He is the criminal world’s answer to Batman, the anti-Batman if you will, dedicated to ensuring that vice, crime, sin and fear rule Gotham’s streets again. Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s butler, labels him a “terrorist” and says, “some men aren’t looking for anything logical. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

In a conversation over dinner, District Attorney Harvey Dent tells Bruce Wayne “either you die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.” That sums up both the Joker’s goal and the theme of the movie.

Joker succeeds in corrupting Dent by getting corrupt cops to kill Dent’s girlfriend, Rachel (whom Bruce Wayne also loves). Thanks to Batman, Dent survives an explosion set up by the Joker but the left side of his face is horribly disfigured, and he takes on the name Two-Face. Two-Face goes on a rampage against all those he deems responsible for Rachel’s premature death – the corrupt cops, the mob boss, and eventually, Batman and Lt. Gordon. Instead of dying a hero, Dent becomes corrupt by violating his own principles and taking the law into his own hands in his desperation to stop the Joker. Even before his transformation into Two-Face, Dent threatened to shoot one of Joker’s goons unless he gave him information on the Joker’s whereabouts.

Joker’s attempt to corrupt Batman proves far more difficult. He tells the people of Gotham that he will continue murdering people until Batman takes his mask off and reveals his true identity. After he kills the police commissioner, a judge, Dent’s parents, and comes close to killing Dent and the mayor in broad daylight at the commissioner’s funeral, Bruce Wayne decides he can’t take it anymore and will reveal his identity. Doing so would destroy Batman’s mystique as a hero and make it impossible be a billionaire playboy by day, crime-fighter by night.

Dent beats Wayne to the punch and claims that he’s Batman, setting a trap for the Joker, who willingly walks into it. After Batman saves Dent and Joker is arrested, Rachel and Dent are whisked away by corrupt cops to warehouses on the opposite sides of town, bound and gagged, and explosives are set up next to them.

To save Rachel and Dent, Batman attempts to get their locations by brutalizing the Joker in an interrogation room after he blocks the door to prevent the cops from getting in to stop him. Later on, Batman taps the cell phones of every single person in Gotham (millions of people) and turns them into sonar devices so he can find the Joker’s location. This is where it seems like Batman is aping the Bush administration in the “war on terror.”

However, this is also where the analogy falls apart. Batman manages to stay true to his one rule, don’t kill anyone, and the cell phone spying system is immediately destroyed after the Joker is apprehended after Lucius Fox, Batman’s gadget-maker, threatened to resign. This stands in stark contrast to the open-ended nature of the so-called “war on terror” and the destruction of the very freedoms that Bush claimed to be protecting after 9/11. In The Dark Knight, there is no parallel to the administration’s exploitation of 9/11 to achieve its long held goals to invade Iraq and expand executive power at home.

Furthermore, the Joker is not simply a maniacal mass murderer hellbent on creating chaos for his own sake. He’s also something of an intellectual and a social critic. For example, he tells Harvey Dent:

Nobody panics when they expect people to get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will get blown up, nobody panics. But when I say one little old mayor will die, everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It’s fair.

Throughout the movie, the Joker is constantly exposing society’s hypocrisy and forcing his victims to make horrendous choices to expose their “true nature.” He threatens to destroy a hospital if an individual isn’t killed within the hour, and sure enough, a mob forms outside the building to kill the man. Even a police officer assigned to escort the individual tries to shoot him because the officer is worried about his own wife who is in a hospital.

When Joker gives Batman the location of Harvey and Rachel, he lies about who was where, tricking Batman into thinking he was saving Rachel when in fact he was saving Dent. When people evacuate the city on ferries, Joker rigs them both with explosives, and tells each ferry that they have the detonators for the other ferry and that by midnight, if one group has not blown the other up, he will blow up both groups. (This is a modified version of prisoner’s dilemma.) He dresses hostages up as clowns and tapes machine guns to their hands in the hopes that police snipers will shoot them instead of his goons who are dressed as hostages, making the snipers guilty of judging books by their covers.

One of the most emotionally powerful and politically significant moments in the movie is the resolution of the scene with the people stranded on the ferries rigged with explosives. Heated arguments on each ferry amongst the passengers (one ferry is loaded with civilians, the other is loaded with convicts) climax with a vote on the passengers’ boat. The majority vote to blow up the prisoners but the most vocal proponent of blowing up the other ferry backs down at the last minute. On the prisoners’ ferry, a big, muscular black convict tells the captain of his boat to give him the remote detonator so that he can do what should’ve been done 10 minutes ago. Just when you think the prisoner is going to hit the button and save his boat, he throws the detonator out the window, goes back to his seat, and sits quietly.

When neither boat blows the other up, Joker is furious that he was wrong in his assessment of society’s “true nature” that people are at a basic level willing to cut each other’s throats if that’s what it takes to survive. The people on the ferries proved that they are just as capable of solidarity as they are capable of being greedy, even in life-and-death situations where the rational choice is to blow someone else up to save yourself.

Joker tells Batman, “you complete me,” and he isn’t lying. While Joker is funny, spontaneous, bloodthirsty, and not bound by any rules, Batman is humorless, predictable, and torn by acting outside the law in order to enforce it while at the same time adhering to a strict moral code. What they have in common is that they both don costumes, and they are both very driven, methodical loners, excellent at reading people’s strengths and weaknesses.

Given all this, it’s safe to say that the Joker is no bin Laden, Batman is no George W. Bush, and The Dark Knight is not the “War on Terror.”

The irony is that at the end of the movie, Joker does win, although not in the way he imagined. While Batman sticks to his moral code and refuses to kill the Joker, Batman tells Gordon to blame him for the murders Dent committed so that Gotham City can have an untarnished White Knight, a legitimate hero who played by the rules and put the bad guys in jail. Dent died a hero to Gotham while Batman lives to become the villain despite not breaking his moral code. He is the Dark Knight.

That’s the proverb that comes to mind when looking at Barack Obama’s recent and not-as-recent flip-flops on everything from publicly financed elections to the recent FISA bill legalizing warrantless wiretapping and email snooping by the government. The bill also gives companies like Verizon, which cooperated with the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping after 9/11, immunity from lawsuits.

In Obama’s announcement that he would opt out of the system of public financing, he claimed that the system “is broken” because of loopholes that Senator John McCain has exploited to raise money from lobbyists and special interest groups. With public financing, Obama would have received $84 million in taxpayer money, gained from the $3 check-off on federal tax returns, which he could spend starting at the close of the Democratic Party’s convention until Election Day.

To deflect criticism of Obama’s flip-flop on the issue, apologists for Obama and the candidate himself have made much of the fact that 45 percent of his money comes from small donors (defined as those who donate $200 or less). He claims that these small donors “will have as much access and influence over the course and direction of our campaign that has traditionally been reserved for the wealthy and the powerful.”

In reality, big contributors have far more influence in and access to the campaign than the voter who shells out $200 because he or she really believes in Obama’s message of change. These small donors did not get advance copies of Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech addressing the Reverend Wright controversy. They do not participate in weekly and quarterly conference calls with the head honchos of the campaign and with Obama himself.

To sit on the “national finance committee” that gets advance copies of speeches and access to the campaign’s decision-makers, donors must bundle contributions of $200,000 or more from friends, associates, co-workers, and employees. The top 79 bundlers for Obama’s campaign, five of whom are billionaires, are responsible for 27,000 checks from individuals for the legal maximum of $2,300. Of those bundlers, 18 work at top law firms and 21 are Wall Street executives and power brokers from Fortune 500 companies. Others include hedge fund executives, Silicon Valley capitalists, Chicago-based developers, and black millionaires.

Of course, that’s not counting the money Obama has raised by exploiting the very same loophole in campaign finance laws that he blasted McCain for. He got $28,500 donations recently by dining with rich couples in Hollywood for a grand total of $5 million in one event. (That money goes to the party, circumventing the $2,300 legal limit on individual donations to candidates, which is a joke since Obama now controls the Democratic Party).

Forget “change we can believe in.” I’ve got a better slogan for the Obama campaign: “hypocrisy made flesh.”

Here’s the picture when individual donors are broken down by industry: Lawyers have donated about $18 million to Obama, the telecom industry has given about $10 million (thereby purchasing his flip-flop on FISA legislation), employees of securities and investment firms have given about $8 million, university administrators and employees have given roughly $7 million, real estate professionals have contributed $5 million, medical professionals have donated $7 million, bankers have given $1.6 million, and hedge fund and private equity managers have given about $1.6 million.

Broken down by individual companies, we find that Goldman Sachs employees gave more to Obama than any other group, followed by the University of California, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, National Amusements, Lehman Brothers, Harvard, and Google. These institutions would have to be stupid to give millions to a candidate that would deliver real, substantive change at their expense for the benefit of America’s working-class majority. If they’re that stupid, they can write some checks for a guy I know in Venezuela named Hugo Chávez.

Now that the primaries are over, we can see what Obama really stands for: more of the same. More of the same policies that have produced a gigantic disparities in income, growing pockets of poverty, more people without health insurance, the highest per-capita prison population in the world, crumbling infrastructure, a failing education system, inner city decay, and an increasingly aggressive foreign policy.

If you think Obama’s light-speed blitz to the right is bad now, wait until the election is over. Then he won’t have to pretend to give a damn what the voters think and he can repay his top donors for the investment they made in him. Already the Wall Street Journal is salivating over the prospect of Obama presiding over Bush’s third term.

Remember folks, he’s Barack Obama, and Wall Street approved his message.

“Yes we can!”

“Change the world.”

For hundreds of millions of people, the slogans of the Obama campaign are not the focus-group tested products of marketing gurus and professional campaign strategists. They’re not empty words printed on cheap plastic yard signs, on banners, or on the podium from which Obama speaks.

To them, these slogans and Obama’s candidacy are what the 2008 elections are all about. Somewhere around 85 percent of the country thinks things are going in the wrong direction. It’s gotten so bad that even Black Republicans are thinking of voting for Obama.

The question is: will Obama deliver?

Of course, electing a black man to the throne of the American empire would make history, given that America is the land of the free and the home of the slave. But the millions, especially in the black community, who look to Obama for change don’t simply want a black man in the White House. They want real, substantial change. Health care coverage for all. Reform of the criminal justice system and out-of-control police brutality both of which have devastated black and Hispanic communities. Debt relief for homeowners. Halting the three-decade decline in working-class living standards and the skyrocketing price of food and energy. Fixing the dysfunctional two-party system. Steps to finally overcome centuries of racism. An end to the war in Iraq.

That’s a tall order for one man to live up to. Unfortunately, I don’t think Obama has any intention of delivering on these lofty goals.

For example, take his position on Iraq. According to conventional wisdom he is the candidate who will get U.S. troops out of there, as opposed to old man McCain who is more than happy to keep them there for 100 years. But Samantha Power, one of Obama’s foreign policy advisers (who resigned after she called Hillary Clinton a “monster”), made it clear that Obama has no intention of being bound by anything he says on the campaign trail.

Obama’s criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a similar case of mendacity. Behind the scenes one of his advisers told Canadian officials “not to be worried about what Obama says about NAFTA.” Translation: don’t worry, Obama is just telling voters what they want to hear. Given the free-market ideologues he has surrounded himself with, lying about NAFTA shouldn’t be a surprise.

However, I don’t think Obama is a bad person, that his lying is some kind of personal flaw, or that it’s a compulsion that he has no control over (as it seems to be for President Bush).

Rather, it’s because Obama has made a series of political choices, the cumulative effect of which is real change we can believe in because we can see it before our very eyes. He might have set out to change the system, to change the way politics is done in this country, but it is the political system that has changed him.

The first and foremost example of this has been the way he threw his pastor of two decades under his campaign bus. The thought police . . . err, I mean the corporate media . . . focused with laser-like intensity on Reverend Wright’s suggestion that AIDS was the product of a government conspiracy to rid the country of blacks (as if AIDS only infected them). They exploited this remark to vilify Wright and distract people from the content of what he said about U.S. foreign policy. When he spoke up in his own defense, Obama severed all ties to him, proving without a doubt that Obama is indeed a conventional politician. As Wright himself put it, “politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.”

The corporate media forced Obama to choose between his pastor and a shot at the presidency, between principles and power. After some hesitation, Obama chose the latter.

Obama faced the same choice on the issue of Israel and Palestine. He could either continue saying “nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people,” or he could stop worrying about them and learn to love Israel for ensuring American dominance of the Middle East. (One Major General said Israel is worth “5 CIAs” and that it would cost $125 billion a year to maintain an American force in the region the size of Israel’s, making the $5 billion a year the U.S. gives to Israel every year an amazing bargain).

The day after clinching the Democratic Party nomination, Obama told the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee that Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel, i.e. that the Palestinians had no claim whatsoever over the Holy City. That put him to the right of Bush and the Israeli government, both of whom pay lip service to Palestinian aspirations and say that the city’s final status is subject to “future negotiations.” He said he would do “everything” in his power to defend Israel. Over time Obama chose the Israeli Goliath over the Palestinian David.

Apparently he didn’t see the irony of the first black President-to-be calling for Jerusalem to be a Jews only city and pledging to preserve Israeli apartheid by any means necessary. Malcolm X had a term for politicians like Obama. Hint: it wasn’t field negro.

People may not want to hear it, but “change we can believe in” is a lie almost as big as Iraq’s WMD or Saddam Hussein’s connection to Al-Qaeda.

If Obama represents some kind of watershed or fundamental break with the past, why is his panel of foreign policy advisers dominated by officials from the Clinton administration? If Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright, the woman who said killing half a million Iraqi kids through sanctions was “worth it,” is giving Obama foreign policy advice, how many Iraqi and American lives will be “worth it” because he refuses to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq? If he represents such a dramatic break with Bush’s policies, why is he open to keeping Bush’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the Pentagon? Is it because Gates is secretly a big fan of Cindy Sheehan, or is it because Obama and Gates want to mend, not end, the occupation of Iraq and American domination of the oil-rich Middle East?

Even Obama’s call for ethanol to replace gasoline as a fuel source is disingenuous. He opposes importing Brazilian ethanol derived from sugar which is cheaper, cleaner, and produces more energy than the domestically produced ethanol derived from corn. Why? Could it be because Archer Daniels Midland and other American agribusiness corporations that produce corn ethanol have close financial and personal ties to his campaign and his advisers?

Like McCain, Hillary Clinton, and every politician on both side of the aisle, his positions on every issue are heavily conditioned by what big business is willing to tolerate. That doesn’t mean he won’t talk a good game on the campaign trail and ride the intense desire for change that’s gripped the country all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

However, it does mean that progressives (or The Left, if you prefer) need to wake up and take advantage of the rising expectations generated by Obama’s campaign. Both the hunger for real change and the elite’s determination to block it has never been greater.

The Washington Post has a story with a big headline that says: “All Iraqi Groups Blame U.S. Invasion for Discord, Study Shows.” The second paragraph starts with the following sentence: “That is good news, according to a military analysis of the results.”

Say what? It’s good news that Iraqis of all sects agree on one thing: that the U.S. military’s invasion and occupation is the number one cause of sectarian warfare in Iraq? It’s good news that despite the sectarian hatred that has ripped Iraq apart, they all agree that America is to blame?

These idiots are so desperate for good news they’re spinning anti-occupation sentiment among Kurds, Shias, and Sunnis as proof that the surge is working.

The article mentions that other polls conducted by the State Department and private companies have all been consistent on one issue: a majority of Iraqis think a U.S. withdrawal would make their lives better. Duh. Not having the 130,000+ soldiers from the world’s most lethal military and tens of thousands of armed, lawless contractors roaming your country killing at will would be an improvement.

Over a million Iraqis have died as a result of the occupation and the U.S. opted for a divide-and-rule strategy when a unite Shia-Sunni resistance became a threat in spring of 2004. Fracturing the resistance along sectarian lines helped maintain an otherwise unsustainable occupation but had the unintended consequence of igniting a full-scale civil war that has torn Iraqi society apart. Fear and sectarian militias now rule the streets.

Many Americans who oppose the war also oppose immediate withdrawal based on this reality. Their argument, echoed by mainstream politicians who want to stay in Iraq to protect its oil not its people, is that there will be genocide, chaos, and unthinkable bloodshed if the U.S. leaves. If anything, the opposite is true: there will be genocide, chaos, and unthinkable bloodshed if the U.S. stays against the will of the overwhelming majority of Iraqis, especially given that the main sponsors of the sectarian death squads, the Shia parties Dawa and SIIC, are in the government, control the armed forces, and have American protection. The fact that every year of occupation was worse than the last should be enough proof that what Iraq needs is not more of the same.

Withdrawing the largest, deadliest militia — the U.S. military and its Blackwater counterparts — would reduce the amount of Iraqi bloodshed exponentially. The polls of Iraqis show that 1) they want a total U.S. withdrawal ASAP and 2) they realize that the occupation is the main reason Iraq has become divided against itself. Removing the occupation from the equation will produce a much more democratic and representative government than what exists now in the Green Zone. Without American protection and sponsorship, the Dawa and SIIC parties, will not be able to stay in power. Indeed they’ve been blocking elections in southern Iraq because they fear they will lose, and lose badly, to the Sadrists.

Obviously, Iraq will not become some kind of mythical paradise or utopia once U.S. forces get out. (Another duh.) The country has already been pushed back almost to an almost feudal era, without a national government, where warlords and their militias rule by fear and terror, where women are forced to wear veils in public, with little or no basic services like clean water, an education system, or health care, thanks to a decade of murderous sanctions imposed by Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton and a war launched by Bush Jr. That the U.S. government and companies like Halliburton who profited from Iraq’s destruction owe Iraq tens of billions in reparations is the understatement of the century.

Make no mistake: there will be a civil war to determine who will come out on top of the post-U.S. political order, but it won’t be nearly as bloody as having a civil war and an occupation at the same time, which has been the situation for the past five years.

Neither the Mahdi Army, the Badr Brigade, the various Sunni resistance groups, Al-Qaeda, nor the Kurdish Pershmerga have anything remotely approaching the firepower or destructive capability of the U.S. military. They have AK-47s, mortars, rockets, and roadside bombs, all of which limit how many Iraqis they can kill, even assuming they want to conduct a full-scale genocide.

Furthermore, a post-occupation civil war wouldn’t necessarily be a straight Sunni vs Shia vs Kurd battle. The sectarian parties that control the Shia south (SIIC, Dawa) and the Kurdish north (KDP, KUP) both have an interest in creating strong regional governments and a weak central government, which reflects their geographic and political sway. They want to monoplize control of the oil revenues, and the country’s oil deposits are conveniently located in southern and northern Iraq.

The Sadrist movement, on the other hand, has strongly opposed any move in that direction because a weak central government would mean less oil money invested into the movement’s Sadr City stronghold in Baghdad. This opposition puts the Sadrists in the same camp as the Sunni resistance, who contorl the central and western areas of the country, which would also receive little to no oil money if the central government is weak.

The problem is that these Sunni resistance groups see Al-Qaeda being closer to them than the Sadrist movement because of the sectarian murders committed by many members of the Mahdi Army. Sadr has declared a ceasefire against the U.S. to buy himself the peace he needs to purge his militia of the disloyal sectarians who, by murdering their Sunni brethren, have made it all but impossible to unite with the Sunni resistance against the occupation. At the same time, Sadr is also cramming to become an Ayatollah, to counter the influence of SIIC which has the backing of the top Shia religious authority in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

So I guess I agree with the U.S. military analysts. It is good that Iraqis blame the occupation for the sectarian strife. Hopefully that will be enough of a basis for them to unite and pry the eagle’s claws off their country.

Dumbsfeld went before Congress to testify about the apparent fratricide of Army Ranger Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. At the time, the Bush administration seized Tillman’s death as an opportunity to sell the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They pointed to him and said that he had given up a million dollar career as a star in the NFL to serve his country. The Pentagon said he was killed by enemy fire and he was awarded the Silver Star posthumously.

Five weeks later the truth leaked out. Tillman was killed by red-blooded patriotic Americans, not crazy Jihadi evil-doers wearing turbans. He died from three bullet wounds to the head from an M-16 at a range of only 10 yards, making it look suspiciously like murder. A sergeant in his unit burned Tillman’s journal and personal belongings on the orders of a higher-up.

That the Army did this shouldn’t be a surprise. Tillman was no closet critic of the war. He told his comrades-in-arms while serving in Iraq that the war was “so f—– illegal,” crushing the hopes of couch potato hawks such as Ann Coulter who sought to pimp his death for the war machine. His commanders have consistently said he was well-liked within the unit, but that doesn’t square with the fact that he yelled at a fellow Ranger moments before his death: “Would you shut your (expletive) mouth? God’s not going to help you; you need to do something for yourself, you sniveling …” We can only imagine what he wrote in his journal about incompetent commanders, restless natives, and unwinnable, unjustifiable, illegal wars. Rest assured, whatever was in there wouldn’t fit in a strength-through-illiteracy “Army Strong” recruiting commercial.

Anyway, back to Dumbsfeld.

I doubt he had any idea of what really happened that day in Afghanistan to Tillman. He was busy lying his ass off about Iraq’s WMD in 2004, claiming that they just hadn’t been found yet because the U.S. wasn’t looking in the right places. (In 2006, he denied ever saying that he knew where Iraq’s WMD were.) He was also busy lying his ass off about prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib in April 2004, saying that he had no idea what was going on when in fact, he knew damn well what happened. He personally authorized specific torture techniques in an order to Gen. Karpinski who was in charge of the prison that had a handwritten note next to his signature that read: “make sure this is accomplished.”

But in the case of the Tillman, this might be the one time anyone should believe that Don Rumsfeld wasn’t really involved in the cover-up. But when he says “I would not engage in a cover-up,” try not to laugh too hard.

NY Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer says there is “such urgency to bring an end to the war” that they are “stepping up the pressure.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t think any Republicans will be upset about a Senate slumber party except those who have to skip their D.C. Madam visit that night.

Reid is whining because Republicans are threatening to use a filibuster, which can only be overridden with 60 votes, to block an amendment to a military spending bill that would embarass Bush. I’ve lost count of the ridiculous number of toothless nonbinding hand-wringing votes that have occurred since the Democrats took office last year. No wonder Congress’ approval rating is lower than Bush’s. People want them to shut up and start doing something about Iraq instead of just droning on and on about Bush. That’s why the comparisons between the U.S. and the Roman Empire are totally false — back then, when the Emperor angered the Senate, Senators stabbed him to death.

Senate Republicans aren’t afraid to use a filibuster to stop an embarassing vote for Bush but the Democrats won’t do it to stop the killing in Iraq. It takes 60 votes, a super-majority, to end a filibuster undertaken by one Senator and the Republicans have only 49 seats. None of the Senators running for President — Obama, Clinton, Biden, or Dodd — filibustered the war-spending bill in the spring and none of them are filibustering the jaw-dropping $648 billion Defense Authorization Bill which will fund the U.S. military through 2008 for everything including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reid has said “the war is lost” yet continues to fund this lost war to the tune of billions of dollars a year. (Mr. Reid, I have some Enron stock you may be interested in buying.)

The impending vote on this monstrous bill is giving Senate Democrats the opportunity to do photo-ops, get sound-bytes on the air, and have a slumber party over an amendment that will inevitably be voted down or blocked by intransigent Republicans. The irony is that the amendment would not end the war, close the permanent bases the Pentagon is building in Iraq, or get any troops out of harm’s way.

I’ve read the text of the doomed amendment. It would require some unstated number of troops to be withdrawn, starting within four months of the bill’s passage and ending by April 30, 2008. So Bush could withdraw a division of tens of thousands of troops or a single squad of ten soldiers on April 29, 2008 and satisfy the amendment’s requirements. After the deadline, U.S. forces in Iraq could only be used for the following purposes: protecting U.S. bases and personnel, training, equipping, and providing logistical support for the Iraqi military/police, and fighting Al-Qaeda and other freedom-hating terrorists.

Sound familiar? It should. These limits are identical to the pre-surge Rumsfeld-Casey strategy of “as Iraqis stand up, we will stand down,” which was a smashing success. These limits are also identitical to the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, the grumpy old white men and foreign policy nerds who offered Dubya some political cover to change his war policy after the GOP thumpin’ at the polls last November.

Reverting back to the old strategy will require the same number of troops as it did before (duh!) — about 100,000 or so. Like Slick Willie on affirmative action, the Democrats’ position on the Iraq occupation can be summed up as: “mend it, don’t end it.”

No wonder our troops are so fed up that they’re saying stuff like this: “we have people up there in Congress with the brain of a two-year-old who don’t know what they are doing – they don’t experience it. I challenge the president or anyone who has us for 15 months to ride alongside me. I [would] do another 15 months if he comes out here and rides along with me every day for 15 months. I’ll do 15 more months. They don’t even have to pay me extra.”

Of course, if I were a two-year-old, I would be deeply offended at the suggestion that my intelligence was equivalent to Harry Reid’s, but I would understand the anger. The anger about being lied to about Hussein’s WMD and connections with Al-Qaeda, that “we will be greeted as liberators,” about Iraq’s never-ending progress, about “turning points” that come and go with no change in the situation, and about the historically unprecedented multiple yearlong deployments of continuous combat that have been extended to 15 months that troops have to endure.

That anger has fueled the explosive growth of Iraq Veterans Against the War from a handful of members in 2004 to over 500 today. IVAW’s growth is a hopeful sign admist the divided, partially co-opted, and largely dormant American anti-war movement. A strong anti-war movement can do what Senate slumber parties, meaningless nonbinding resolutions, and Democratic Party politicians won’t: end the war by forcing the U.S. to close those permanent bases and bring all the troops home now.

On Wednesday, the Senate voted 97-0 for an amendment written by Joe Bomb Iran Lieberman, whose position on Iran is identical to Dick Cheney’s.

The amendment repeats the flimsy charges made by the Cheney administration earlier this year that the Iranian government is arming Iraq’s Shia militias with explosively-formed projectile explosives that have killed almost 200 American troops and that Shia Iran is giving a safe haven to Sunni extremist Al-Qaeda (even though AQ is blowing up Iraqi Shias left and right). These are the same charges that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Statt, Peter Pace, distanced himself from, claiming that the evidence did not support the contention that Iran’s government either supplied or was complicit in the supply of these weapons to militias in Iraq. (Pace’s will not be renominated for the position, by the way.)

The amendment states that “the murder of members of the United States Armed Forces by a foreign government or its agents is an intolerable act against the United States,” and demands the government of Iran “take immediate action” to end all forms of support it is providing to Iraqi militias. It also mandates a regular report on Iran’s anti-US activity in Iraq .

Senior Democrat Carl Levin successfully inserted a small change to Lieberman’s text stating that, “Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize or otherwise speak to the use of Armed Forces against Iran.” If you’re thinking, “phew! That’ll stop a war on Iran!” think again. The Iraq Liberation Act passed by Congress in 1998 and signed by Bill Clinton had the same text. And we all know the story of how that text stopped the invasion of Iraq .

Charging Iran with killing US troops has nothing to do with the facts. It’s about beating the war drums and trying to convince Americans that in order to “protect our troops” the US must bomb Iran.

The unanimity of the vote is alarming. Hillary and Obama voted for it. Only three sat out on the vote, including Senator Vitt who can’t be bothered to Iran-bash in the middle of his Religious Right-family-values-meets-hookers-and-diapers political meltdown.

During the Vietnam war, it was obvious that the Vietnamese were killing American soldiers with bullets and bombs with “from Russia with love” or “made in China” written all over them. These weapons were delivered by the boatload by Chinese and Russian ships sent their by their respective governments. Yet no one in Congress declared that this was “murder” by “foreign governments and their agents” and even Nixon, rabid anti-Communist that he was, never threatened Russia or China if they failed to “take immediate action” to halt these shipments.

Then again, those governments had armies and nukes powerful enough to do real damage if the US was stupid enough to attack them. These days, the US picks fights with tin pot dictators of impoverished Third World nations (Noriega, Hussein, Milosevic, the Taliban, Kim Jong-Il, Ahmadinejad) while screaming they are “the next Hitler.”

If the war on Iraq was a cakewalk, an attack on Iran would be. It’s got a bigger population, a bigger economy, a fairly strong military, and they’ve probably studied how Hezbollah fought the Israelis to a stalemate last year. The US Navy is so cramped for room to manuever its 130 or so ships in the Persian Gulf that they regularly radio the Iranian navy to notify them about impending ship movements, imagine how it will be once that third aircraft carrier arrives and if Iran fires thousands of missiles at these ships to overwhelm their hi-tech defenses. Plus, Iraq’s Shia won’t take kindly to the mass slaughter of their brethren next door by the same nation that refuses to leave Iraq and funds Israel’s slow motion genocide of the Palestinians.

Make no mistake. The US is on a collision course with Iran. Both Democrats and Republicans are hell-bent on rolling back Iran’s growing power and influence on the region, even if it means a war that will cost thousands or tens of thousands of lives. The vote on Wednesday is just more proof of that.

The editorial says that “keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse,” which has been the argument of the anti-war movement since the beginning of the occupation in 2003. The editorial goes further, saying that opposing withdrawal because it will lead to a civil war is silly because Iraq is already knee-deep in a civil war that the U.S. can’t stop.

Now of course, the Times hasn’t joined the anti-war movement or lined up with the likes of Cindy Sheehan. It suggests that Bush keep permanent bases in the not-so-anti-US Kurdish north and that U.S. forces pull back to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia so that they can still bomb the hell out of “Al-Qaeda” in Iraq. Essentially, the Times is calling for a phased re-deployment of troops which won’t end the war in Iraq.

It’s very important to remember that as Nixon withdrew troops from Vietnam, he attacked Laos and Cambodia and dramatically upped the bombing of Vietnam to show the world that America was not a “pitiful, helpless giant” as it abandoned its ally, South Vietnam, to defeat at the hands godless Communist hordes.

Since the Times editorial was published, important Republicans in Congress have begun to jump ship (guess they got tired of trying to sit on the deckchairs as the Titanic slides sideways into the ocean), causing the White House to shit themselves. Poor SecDef Robert Gates had to cancel his tour of rebellion-ridden Latin America and Condy crony Stephen Hadley had to cut short his vacation to meet with bossman Rove and devise (drum roll please) brand-spanking new talking points! We now know that the President wants to bring the troops home too, he doesn’t want all of them to die horrible deaths in Iraq. I’m glad we cleared that up.

It’s unlikely that Bush is going to change course and embrace withdrawal to placate a few GOP traitors who turned out to be terrorist-loving Al-Qaedacrats, but the fact of the matter is that the surge is not sustainable from a military/logistical point of view after spring/summer of 2008. Congress has already shown they don’t really want to cut off funding for the war and thus are powerless to change the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.

What scares me is that a withdrawal/redeployment in Iraq in 2008, like Nixon’s withdrawal in Vietnam, might be coupled with an intensification of the air war in Iraq and an attack on Iran. Bush has until January 20, 2009 to do yet another “Mission Accomplished” speech and frankly, he’s got nothing left to lose.

The hysteria comes despite the fact that the only people they managed to injure were themselves. The hysteria comes despite the fact that these guys only had a couple cans of gas and a box of nails in the back of the Cherokee, which, even if it had exploded, would have just set the car on fire and not even come close to damaging the terminal much less killing even a dozen people.

A day before the “attack,” the British police defused a bomb consisting of a propane tank and 33 gallons of gas, which they claim could have caused “significant loss of life.” The gas tank of a Cadillac Escalade has a capacity of 26 gallons and the propane tank in the car couldn’t have been much bigger than the one people use at their family barbeques, so you get an idea of what kind of monstrous Weapon of Mass Destruction this thing was. The only significant loss of life would have been the millions of innocent bacteria that would have perished in the heat of the explosion.

Already the pundits and politicos are saying these “terrorists” are “linked” to Al-Qaeda. Apparently AQ does it all — from mass murder at symbols of economic and political power (WTC and the Pentagon) to amateur burn-only-yourself crash-and-burns. One thing that comes to mind is the terrorist “graduate ceremony” footage that ABC aired a couple weeks ago, which showed English speakers vowing to attack Britain, the possibility of which US counter-terrorism officials dismissed as “a bit of a stretch.” Sometimes it’s hard to tell which group of terrorist idiots is worse, the ones armed with AK-47s and cheap video cameras or the ones running “our” government.

Of course I’m glad no one was hurt (except the idiot driving the car), but Britain is lucky these guys were not the fanatical masterminds that the media is making them out to be. Both Britain and the US have been very lucky thus far that the people angry enough to take up bomb-making in response to the deaths of 650,000 Iraqis and thousands of Afghans haven’t come to the homeland to wreak havoc. Apparently, most of them just want to kick the occupiers out rather than launch (counter-productive) strikes on innocent civilians on this side of the ocean.

What a surprise!

I say lucky because a handful of angry people building bombs and launching attacks can’t be stopped by warrantless wiretapping, e-mail snooping, racist profiling, torturing detainees, putting video cameras on every street corner, or forcibly occupying other countries. The only reason the recent plot against Fort Dix was foiled was because the would-be terrorists brought a jihad propaganda tape into Circuit City (so much for “Jihad vs. McWorld”) to get it transferred to DVD and the clerk thought that was a little strange. The only reason the 1993 WTC bombers were caught was because one of them was stupid enough to go back to the car rental company and demand his $400 deposit back for the truck he had blown up.

The corporate media says we should be scared. I agree, but not because I’m dumb enough to think that more and more people are willing to die because they “hate our freedom.” I’m scared because the only thing separating us from another 9/11 is the stupidity of the terrorists who increase in number with every day US forces stay in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The first sign of trouble was when the Bush administration and the military began touting early signs of success back in April. They said sectarian violence was down in Iraq thanks to Bush’s decision to throw 30,000 more troops into the meat-grinder, and they pointed to the 50 percent decline in the number of bodies dumped on the streets of Baghdad as proof. Of course, what they left out was that over the same time period the number of car bombings grew. “Oops.”

Now there’s even more proof that the surge has failed. In May, recorded civilian deaths reached 2,000, the highest since the beginning of the surge. (And who knows how many unrecorded deaths there are — the Ministry of the Interior which helps compile the stats is controlled by the Shia Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council [SIIC] which is responsible for the bulk of the sectarian killings in Baghdad). The Green Zone’s parliament was bombed in April, rockets and mortars attacks on the Zone have become common, and U.S. soldiers have been ordered not to walk alone in the Zone because they might be kidnapped. Now, a new internal assessment by the U.S. military of the surge shows that they have been able to “maintain physical influence over” only 146 of the 457 neighborhoods in the capital — a whopping 32 percent — despite the fact that almost all the surge troops are in place.

Bush’s “bold new strategy” to win the war never had a chance to succeed because it was based on a combination of delusion, wishful thinking, and desperation. The theory (insofar as there was one) was that if the U.S. could curb the sectarian violence in Baghdad, all the hardcore sectarian politicians the U.S. installed into power would put aside their sectarianism, sing kumbaya, give each other flowers, make nice, and create a stable puppet government that would recognize Israel and allow the U.S. pull its combat troops out while keeping a garrison of tens of thousands there permanently. Such a large military presence in the heart of the Middle East would allow the U.S. to blackmail competitors like Russia and China by threatening to cut off their oil supply and at the same time threaten Iran and Syria militarily.

According to the Army’s counter-insurgency doctrine written by General David Petraeus, the man in charge of executing the surge, the U.S. needs a minimum of 120,000 combat troops in Baghdad to wrest control of its neighborhoods away from the Sunni resistance and the Mehdi Army, the anti-occupation Shi’ite militia led by Muqtada al-Sadr. Prior to the surge there were 52,000 combat troops in all of Iraq. So even if the U.S. sent all the troops it has in Iraq to Baghdad as well as the 30,000 surge troops on top of that it would still be unable to control the city!

The bottom line is that the U.S. cannot win in Iraq. The British Ministry of Defence did a poll in 2005 that showed 65 percent of Iraqis (that’s 18.2 million people) think attacks on U.S. and British forces are justified.

The basic problem for the U.S. is that there are no social forces in Iraq that want Iraq to be an American satellite. Al-Sadr and the Sunni resistance, which combined probably have more popular support than all of the collaborators in the Green Zone government put together, want the U.S. out ASAP. Among the forces in the Green Zone government, the Kurdish parties want autonomy and their share of oil revenue; the Sunni parties want an end to the occupation, a share of the oil money, and some control over the state apparatus; the SIIC has only collaborates with the U.S. to stay in power. None of them are particularly interested in a permanent U.S. occupation. Furthermore, the Iraqi police and army units that the U.S. created, armed, and trained are merely Shia militias with uniforms and legal authority whose members are routinely caught planting the deadly roadside bombs that have killed so many of our hapless soldiers.

Even the ever-in-denial-because-we’re-making-progress-and-victory-is-around-the-corner-if-only-the-Democrats-stopped-coddling-terrorists Bush administration is beginning to realize that there’s no winning strategy for a lost war, with the exception of Dick Cheney who is still babbling about victory. Bush, whose approval rating now matches his I.Q., has said that after the surge he would implement the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), whose report was published shortly after the Republicans got their long-overdue thumpin’ at the polls last year. Although Bush probably did not bother to read it (the words “Study Group” probably killed what little interest he had), its recommendations were: talk nice to Syria and Iran, step up the training of Iraqi military and police units (apparently the Iraqis blowing up our soldiers need should be doing a much better job), withdraw combat troops, and let the remaining troops hunker down in the four permanent mega-bases under construction.

If Bush does all of the above, it would be the smartest thing he has done in a long, long time. The surge is going to end at some point in 2008 because it is not working and because it is militarily unsustainable.

Bringing the troops home from Iraq is what Americans overwhelmingly voted for in the last mid-term election. Implementing the ISG’s recommendations would allow Bush to take credit for something that he was initially hostile to. More importantly, doing so would deprive the Democrats of the ability to criticize his Iraq policy because he would be implementing theirs. (Leading Democrats Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama have endorsed the ISG’s recommendations to pull combat troops out of Iraq while maintaining a permanent garrison there. Not one of them spoke out against the administration’s comparison of U.S. presence in Iraq to South Korea, where tens of thousands of U.S. troops have been stationed for over fifty years.)

Bringing some troops home in 2008 would help the G.O.P. a lot with the Iraq problem that cost them so dearly at the polls in 2006. Bush could claim that he was obeying the will of the voters while the Dems would not be able to slam him for stubbornly staying the course. If this redeployment occurs, it would mean the American ruling class has given up on the original aims of the war: complete and total domination over Iraq, the creation of a thoroughly pro-U.S. regime, and a permanent military presence. Instead, they would opt for the ISG’s Plan B: a permanent military presence tacitly tolerated by a semi-independent Iraqi government.

While this would be a step forward for the Iraqis and the U.S. antiwar movement, it would by no means be the end of the war or the end of the fight to get our troops out of Iraq.

Now the Democrats face a stark choice: to fund, or not to fund the war? That is the question.

And we already have the answer. House Democratic Majority leader Steny Hoyer has said in response to the veto “We are going to fund the troops, we are not going to leave our troops in harm’s way without the resources that they need.” In all likelihood, Democrats in Congress will pass a bill funding the bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan that requires Bush to certify that the Iraqi government is meeting “benchmarks” to warrant the continuation of the war as well as political support for and financial aid to the Iraqi government. How anyone can spin this as a “course correction” in Iraq is beyond me — Bus has been touting “progress” in Iraq ever since his “Mission Accomplished” speech on May 1, 2003. How the U.S. is losing despite uninterrupted progress in Iraq also remains to be explained.

Anti-war sentiment propelled the Democrats into power last November. Since then they have done zero, zip, zilch, nada to end the war. To cover their asses, Democrats have come up with pathetic excuses as to why they haven’t lifted a finger to stop Bush. Basically their argument is: “we can’t cut off funding for the war because that would mean depriving the troops of equipment, food, water, and weapons they need to defend themselves. President Bush, the Commander-in-Chief, can veto our bills and there aren’t enough Republicans to help us override that veto.” The not-so-subtle-subtext is: vote for us in ‘08. Only when a Democrat is in the White House will we have the power to end the war.

That’s a lie. They have the power to stop the slaughter right now. It only takes one Senator to filibuster and kill the war funding bill in the Senate. All it would take is one well-timed, long, boring, verbose speech by a Senator to save the lives of literally thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Senators John Kerry and Joe Biden love to give those kinds of speeches to mostly-empty Senate seats and C-SPAN cameras, so why don’t they do it when it counts? Hillary Clinton promises she’ll end the war in Iraq if she’s elected, but why wait until January of 2009? What about liberal wet-dream Barack Obama? He wants voters to believe that he’s different, that he’s an outsider to the dirty and corrupt business of Washington politics, why not prove it? Senator Reid says “this war is lost” — so why doesn’t he move to end it?

This reminds me of the scene in Fahrenheit 9/11 when members of the Congressional Black Caucus begged a Senator, any Senator, to sign onto their objections regarding the massive disenfranchisement of black voters in Flordia where Bush Jr’s bro was governor. Doing so would have prevented Bush and his gang of incompetent neo-con nut-jobs from taking office in the first place. Not one Democratic Senator gave a damn about black voters enough to sign on, even though it would have put a Democrat into office for the next four years. After they were unable to get the support of a John Kerry, a John Edwards, or a single one of their colleagues, Al Gore (who as Vice President also served as the President of the Senate) out-shouted, overruled, and shut down Caucus speakers.

Since taking Congress, the Democrats have passed a non-binding resolution against Bush’s surge. Then they voted unanimously for the men Bush picked to implement the surge they voted to oppose, Gen. Petraeus who is the top general in Iraq and Admiral Fallon who heads all U.S. forces in the Middle East. This was “I voted against it before I voted for it” squared.

After that, they passed a war funding bill they knew Bush would veto that had dates for the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq. (60,000 out of 140,000 troops in Iraq are combat troops, meaning 80,000 troops would still be in Iraq even if Bush signed the bill into law.)

All of this noise about non-binding resolutions and withdrawal schemes attached to war spending bills is just posturing for the 2008 race for the White House. They want to look like they are doing everything they can to get out of the hole while handing Bush all the shovels he needs to dig deeper. They have a big incentive to keep the disaster in Iraq going until November of next year so that they can repeat their victory of last year. As one Democratic strategist explained to a journalist from the New York Review of Books: “We don’t want to own this war. It’s Bush’s war, and we want him to keep owning it.”

It gets worse. After a few minutes of research on Google, I found that the Democratic chair of the House Appropriations Committe, David Obey of Wisconsin, included funding for the construction of permanent bases in Iraq in the war funding bill that Bush just vetoed. This is the same guy that called an anti-war military mom a “liberal idiot” for wanting to cut off funding for the war in Iraq on YouTube. His idiotic response to the demand of “liberal idiots” to cut off funding for the war was “we don’t have the votes to get it through.” Obey didn’t have the votes to pass the bill that funded the wars and the construction of bases that Bush just vetoed either, but it didn’t stop him from trying.

Of course, Obey’s bill doesn’t refer to the four enormous military installations that are being built in Iraq as “permanent bases.” Over the course of the last few years, they’ve morphed from permanent bases, to enduring bases, to contingency operating bases. Contingency has a very temporary sound to it — the contingency being that if Iraq unexpectedly runs out of oil, they’ll close those bases and the tens of thousands of troops stationed in them can come home.

Both sides of the aisle in Washington are angling to stay in Iraq permanently in one form or another. The difference is that the Republicans are open about it, while the Democrats are trying hard to fool us into thinking they want out of Iraq ASAP.

Fortunately, people are taking action to hold the Democrats to their (false) promises. Student activists in the Campus Antiwar Network held a sit-in at Wisconsin Democratic Senator Herb Kohl’s office demanding an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, full funding for veterans health care, reparations to the Iraqi people, banning the use of depleted uranium munitions, and money for jobs and education and not occupation. Militant activism by grassroots activists like this is the only hope for ending this war.