A Predictable Outcome: "The Biden Betrayal"

Warning: Extreme (but informed) dissillusionment expressed below...

This article confirms my utter cynicism at the false hope in the optimism over the alleged Obama agenda for "change"... Obama was a millionaire member of the ruling-elite policy formation club (the CFR), as is his warmongering establishment running-mate. The failure to investigate the organizations these politicians are members of has gotten us into the unbelievable mess we're in. Bill Clinton's history professor explained exactly how this system works and how they pick these phony populist frauds to co-opt legitimate movements and fool the public into passivity. The control is institutional, not personal. "Meet the new boss... same as the old boss."

The pastor at Renovatus warned about having false hope in either Republicans or Democrats and mentioned he is going to start a series on "The Politics of Jesus"... that should be very interesting.

Jerry


The Biden Betrayal
by Stephen Zunes

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's selection of Joseph Biden as his running mate constitutes a stunning betrayal of the antiwar constituency who made possible his hard-fought victory in the Democratic primaries and caucuses.

The veteran Delaware senator has been one the leading congressional supporters of U.S. militarization of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, of strict economic sanctions against Cuba, and of Israeli occupation policies.

Most significantly, however, Biden, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the lead-up to the Iraq War during the latter half of 2002, was perhaps the single most important congressional backer of the Bush administration' s decision to invade that oil-rich country. ...


Rather than being a hapless victim of the Bush administration' s lies and manipulation, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of Iraq and making false statements regarding Saddam Hussein's supposed possession of "weapons of mass destruction" years before President George W. Bush even came to office.

As far back as 1998, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Even though UN inspectors and the UN-led disarmament process led to the elimination of Iraq's WMD threat, Biden – in an effort to discredit the world body and make an excuse for war – insisted that UN inspectors could never be trusted to do the job. During Senate hearings on Iraq in September of that year, Biden told Ritter, "As long as Saddam's at the helm, there is no reasonable prospect you or any other inspector is ever going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root and branch, the entirety of Saddam's program relative to weapons of mass destruction. "

Calling for military action on the scale of the Gulf War seven years earlier, he continued, "The only way we're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we're going to end up having to start it alone," telling the Marine veteran "it's going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking Saddam down."

When Ritter tried to make the case that President Bill Clinton's proposed large-scale bombing of Iraq could jeopardize the UN inspections process, Biden condescendingly replied that decisions on the use of military force were "beyond your pay grade." As Ritter predicted, when Clinton ordered UN inspectors out of Iraq in December of that year and followed up with a four-day bombing campaign known as Operation Desert Fox, Saddam was provided with an excuse to refuse to allow the inspectors to return. Biden then conveniently used Saddam's failure to allow them to return as an excuse for going to war four years later.

In the face of widespread skepticism over administration claims regarding Iraq's military capabilities, Biden declared that President Bush was justified in being concerned about Iraq's alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Even though Iraq had eliminated its chemical weapons arsenal by the mid-1990s, Biden insisted categorically in the weeks leading up to the Iraq war resolution that Saddam Hussein still had chemical weapons. Even though there is no evidence that Iraq had ever developed deployable biological weapons and its biological weapons program had been eliminated some years earlier, Biden insisted that Saddam had biological weapons, including anthrax, and that "he may have a strain" of smallpox. And, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported as far back as 1998 that there was no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had any ongoing nuclear program, Biden insisted Saddam was "seeking nuclear weapons."

Said Biden, "One thing is clear: These weapons must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power." He did not believe proof of the existence of any actual weapons to dislodge was necessary, however, insisting that "If we wait for the danger from Saddam to become clear, it could be too late." He further defended President Bush by falsely claiming that "He did not snub the UN or our allies. He did not dismiss a new inspection regime. He did not ignore the Congress. At each pivotal moment, he has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation. "

In an Orwellian twist of language designed to justify the war resolution, which gave President Bush the unprecedented authority to invade a country on the far side of the world at the time and circumstances of his own choosing, Biden claimed that "I do not believe this is a rush to war. I believe it is a march to peace and security. I believe that failure to overwhelmingly support this resolution is likely to enhance the prospects that war will occur." ...

must see DNC video (he had me until he proposed the corporate party faction #2 [DNC] as the solution):

http://ca.youtube.com...

"Obama was a millionaire member of the ruling-elite policy formation club (the CFR), as is his warmongering establishment running-mate."

Actually, some quick investigation reveals no evidence that Biden or Obama were or are part of the CFR. (Doesn't necessarily mean they are not. I'll have to dig a little deeper.)

However, if you are scared of the CFR then you SHOULD be afraid of G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney AND John McCain, all members or former members of the CFR.

The problem is that we are afloat in a sea of belief, much of which is not accurate. So we just do the best we can, which is not all that good. Perhaps things are getting better though. They are insofar as we are getting beyond the postmodern position that there is no absolute truth so therefore everyone "has a right to their beliefs," and the more opinions there are the better. We need to gain back our valuing of accuracy of belief, and the determination to explore our differences of opinion utilizing the rules of logic and the rules of evidence. Our fate as a species depends on this.

There is a very challenging movie at:

http://video.google.c...

You have to see the full length movie (2 hours, I believe). When you go to the above site, it seems you have to get through a couple of trailers before you can get to the full length movie. You are looking for:

Zeitgeist: The Movie - Full, Final version. (See edit below)

You have to get through the first few minutes before the action starts.

Prepare for some emotion. And some questioning.

Edit: This goes directly to the full length movie, I believe:
http://www.youtube.co...

Bill Van Fleet
HomoRationalis.com

"Obama was a millionaire member of the ruling-elite policy formation club (the CFR), as is his warmongering establishment running-mate."

Actually, some quick investigation reveals no evidence that Biden or Obama were or are part of the CFR. (Doesn't necessarily mean they are not. I'll have to dig a little deeper.)

However, if you are scared of the CFR then you SHOULD be afraid of G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney AND John McCain, all members or former members of the CFR.

Yes, I'm disgusted by both parties (2 factions of the same party) and the unrivaled influence of the CFR over both parties and therefore US policy in general. The CFR has been called the State Department in Absentia by those who have investigated its singular role in dictating American policy for big business. The leading proponent of the CFR was a member of the same corporate oligarchy that created the eugenics movement and then helped bring Hitler to power to implement it (and then hired his henchlings by the thousands after the war). That scares me... I think they are still implementing this plan today.

The CFR's elitist policies have been disastrous for the third world. That scares me, too. As does the CFR's goal of eliminating national borders (in favor of their long-awaited "New World Order"), which has been declared by its members and publications for decades.

You're right Biden/Obama's membership in the CFR is not obvious. It looks like the CFR has removed its membership list since the last time I researched this. According to one webpage, the 1988 report of the CFR lists Biden as a member. His behavior is consistent with being a member. He gives speeches at CFR meetings and writes policy recommendations with high-level CFR members. Curiously he recently co-authored a controversial "divide and conquer" plan on US Iraq policy with the president of the CFR:

"In November 2006, Biden and Leslie Gelb, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, released a comprehensive strategy to end sectarian violence in Iraq. Rather than continuing the present approach or withdrawing, the plan calls for ''a third way'': federalizing Iraq and giving Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis ''breathing room'' in their own regions."

Is Obama a member? I'll have to find the source I had found a while back. In the meantime...he too certainly acts like a member. He has written essays in the CFR's leading publication. He advocates CFR policies. His chief advisor is also a member (and a founding member of the Trilateral Commission): http://en.wikipedia.o...

And here's Obama downplaying the role of the CFR--one of the most powerful and dedstructive corporate think tanks in the world--as a "club" while avoiding the question about his membership (why didn't he just say no?) and then lying about there being no official membership in the CFR:

http://www.youtube.co...

So he's outright lying about the nature of the CFR and its members. Why would he do that?

Here's a wikipedia summary of CFR membership:

Membership
There are two types of membership: life, and term membership, which lasts for 5 years and is available to those between 30 and 36. Only U.S. citizens (native born or naturalised) and permanent residents who have applied for U.S. citizenship are eligible. A candidate for life membership must be nominated in writing by one Council member and seconded by a minimum of three others.[29]

Corporate membership (250 in total) is divided into "Basic", "Premium" ($25,000+) and "President's Circle" ($50,000+). All corporate executive members have opportunities to hear distinguished speakers, such as overseas presidents and prime ministers, chairmen and CEOs of multinational corporations, and U.S. officials and Congressmen. President and premium members are also entitled to other benefits, including attendance at small, private dinners or receptions with senior American officials and world leaders.[30]

Here's the CFR web page's description of the various memberships:

The Council on Foreign Relations is a national membership organization. There are two groups of members, life and term members. Term members must be between the ages of 30 and 36 at the time of their application, and term memberships are limited to five years. Here is a summary of the membership process:
A candidate for life membership must be nominated in writing by one Council member and seconded by a minimum of three other individuals (maximum of four seconding letters). The seconding letters do not need to be from Council members, but letters from members are strongly encouraged.
A term membership candidate must be nominated by one Council member and seconded by a minimum of two other individuals (maximum of three seconding letters). Candidates applying for the November 1, 2008 deadline must be between the ages of 30 and 36 on January 1, 2009.
All candidates must submit to the membership office a curriculum vitae or chronological resume and a nominee information form with the candidate’s date of birth.
Membership is restricted to U.S. citizens (native-born or naturalized) and permanent residents who have applied to become citizens. If foreign born, a candidate must submit a statement that he or she has been naturalized or is a permanent resident who has made formal application for citizenship.

Gee, what a surprise (but not to me):

Conned Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, Jerry, what do you recommend as actions we can take to "speak truth to power" and hold Obama accountable? I'm not agreeing with 100% of the information you're spreading here, but I agree with the overall concern that now that Obama is president we need to hold his feet to the fire and press him to address the things that concern us the most. So what are some practical actions we can take? What do you recommend?

So, Jerry, what do you recommend as actions we can take to "speak truth to power" and hold Obama accountable? I'm not agreeing with 100% of the information you're spreading here, but I agree with the overall concern that now that Obama is president we need to hold his feet to the fire and press him to address the things that concern us the most. So what are some practical actions we can take? What do you recommend?

-that's a good question, steve. one i've been trying to figure out for years. given the rapid militarization of american society, the imperial presidency consummated by the neo-con israeli goon squad (bush is a figure head), the phony left-right paradigm to control any real reform, the military now home to patrol american streets (there is a slow motion coup in process), there is very little anyone can do to hold the federal government accountable for anything. now we have a popular president-elect socialist (from faction 1) who will likely use the police powers set up by socialist faction 2, to finalize the police state (i'm jaded enough to think obomba will implement margaret sanger's final solution on a massive scale...)

as a pacifist, the only thing i can think to do is to try to understand the nature of power and how it is being exercised so that we can more effectively recognize abuse and develop ways to stop it. you have to become an information warrior--read, study and tell people what you've found. unfortunately, the worse it gets, the less people want to hear the truth... with the implementation of MKULTRA tactics, the less people are even capable of recognizing the truth. it's just too easy to dismiss everything as a conspiracy theory...


The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who Is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are.


H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

I find the Sanger-Obama connection a bit over the top...and further displays the desperation of social conservatives (black ones no less) to create political insight ex nihilo. I've learned something about getting into ideological squabbles. They are circular. If I tell you the boogey man isn't that bad you will tell me I'm being used by the boogey man. So, I find this line of thinking and reflection interesting. But am more interested in the kind of alternative politics that would come out of this speaking truth to power. Someone mentioned the 'politics of Jesus'. Yes...Jesus did talk alot about Herod and Pilate...but he did alot more than just talked. He 'demonstrated' his politics in the embodiedment of shalom in word and deed. I don't have the trust in Obama that I have in the Messiah. Obama is an American politician that represents a epochal moment in American history. Of course that depends on what side of history you come from of course.

I just spent the last week talking with older black folks about Obama's win. It was very surreal for them. I wonder Jerry. Have you talked to any real black folks, besides quoting virtual conservative ones?