Saturday, October 09, 2010

The Fool Card reversed

He has declared an end to the war in Iraq by redefining the mission of the 50,000 troops who remain there. Yet the war continues, our soldiers fight and die, and Iraq still lacks a functioning government.
We’ve seen much the same thing with ObamaCare. As with the Iraq War, Obama has merely redefined the mission. Far from being the universal health-care system that the country needs, Obama’s health program is best understood as a bailout of the private health industry that seeks to guarantee some 30 million additional customers for insurance companies and continued obscene profits for large drug manufacturers. The paradox here is that in a system aiming at universal coverage, the actuarial role of insurance companies, which is to determine the precise odds of paying unprofitable claims on a given class of customers, has become obsolete.

That's Roger D. Hodge speaking in an interview at Harper's and if you think that Harper's has suddenly rediscovered the Iraq War, think again. Hodge makes those comments on his own -- the question from the Barry fluffer at Harper's was about health care. Hodge, latest book is The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism, is the one who remembered the Iraq War not the dopey professor who used to bill himself as a "Constituational law expert" until news of that billing got back to his university which did not think he was fit to teach Constitutional law and wasn't too happy that he was billing himself as an expert. The only time Fat And Tubby remembers the Iraq War is when he gets booked as a guest on Antiwar Radio.

It's a tough life for Fat And Tubby. Many MSM outlets backed away from him in light of the 'credential' issue yet, once upon a time, he was supposedly going to become a leading light in legal circles. Whoring for Barack has consequences. Even Fat And Tubby grasps that now. And he now busies himself wondering if he can manage a double gainer off the diving board and reposition himself as an Obama critic? Myself, I see him doing a belly flop. Which doesn't mean he shouldn't attempt the move, we could all use a good laugh.

Fat And Tubby is The Fool in the Tarot Cards, The Fool reversed -- which would explain rash decisions and does take us to the latest nonsense from Nouri al-Maliki. AFP reports that Nouri made a little speech today in Baghdad insisting that, "We must . . . turn a new page with all those who have gone too far and made mistakes. [. . .] We forgive and turn the page because the country cannot be built on the basis of hatred and rancour." AFP rightly interprets the remarks to be aimed as Sunni exiles, Nouri's political opponents.

The ones he always lashes out at, remember? A bomb goes off in Baghdad and Nouri's insisting it is former Ba'athists in Syria. And then he's demanding that Syria force out all the Sunnis in the country. ('Forgetting' that when he was an exile, he sought and was provided refuge in Syria.) As Rickie Lee Jones once asked, "What could make a boy behave this way?"

Let's see, St. Bernadette visited him in a dream? No. There's been no Nouri transformation. This is the man who actively used star-crossed lovers Ali al Lami and Ahmed Chalabi and their so-called Justice and Accountability Commission to purge Sunnis before the March 7th elections, during the March 7th elections and after the March 7th elections. But the world's supposed to believe Nouri's had a sudden change of heart?

Nouri was unable to force Syria to expell the exiles. Now he seems to be banking on the belief that he's smarter than the exiles and can trick them into returning which would allow him to seek the retribution his blood lust demands.

As Nouri's opponents have been repeatedly targeted with assassination in the months since the elections, as Nouri has expelled Sahwa (largely Sunni fighters, also known as "Sons Of Iraq" and "Awakenings") from Iraq's security forces despite pledges to incorporate them into the security forces and the government, he now wants to show up claiming that Sunni exiles are welcomed in Iraq and he really expects to be believed?

That's how dumb Nouri is and, let's face it, the US government has a long record of installing the weak minded and stupid as puppets throughout the world.


The following community sites updated last night and this morning:


David Bacon's latest book is Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press) which won the CLR James Award. Bacon can be heard on KPFA's The Morning Show (over the airwaves in the Bay Area, streaming online) each Wednesday morning (begins airing at 7:00 am PST). And we'll close with this from Bacon's "Union Busting, Iraqi Style" which you can read at The Nation or at Agence Global -- links go to the article at each outlet:


The political deadlock in Baghdad, which has prevented the formation of an Iraqi government more than six months after the parliamentary elections of last March, has not prevented the lame-duck administration of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki from opening its southern oilfields to the world's giant corporations. Nor has it stopped the US Embassy and Commerce Department from reinvigorating the Bush-era program of selling the country's public assets to corporate buyers. And because Iraqi unions have organized public opposition to privatization since the start of the occupation, the Maliki administration is enforcing with a vengeance Saddam Hussein's prohibition on public-sector unions.

The United States may have withdrawn its combat brigades, but it is not leaving Iraq. And while Washington may have scaled back earlier dreams of "nation building," it has not given up on a key aspect of the economic agenda behind that project: sacrificing the rights of Iraqi workers and unions to encourage corporate investment.

Unions have been locked in conflict with the Iraqi government since the occupation began, but in the last year, that conflict has grown much more intense. In March, after oil workers protested low pay and their union's illegal status, worksite leaders were transferred hundreds of miles from home. The oil ministry banned travel outside Iraq for Hassan Juma'a and Falih Abood, respectively president and general secretary of the Federation of Oil Employees of Iraq. Both were hauled into court and threatened with arrest.

"It is our duty as Iraqi workers to protect the oil installations, since they are the property of the Iraqi people," Juma'a explained in early 2005, when the U.S. was still directly governing Iraq. "We are sure that the US and the international companies came here to put their hands on the country's oil reserves." Juma'a's union chased Halliburton's subsidiary KBR from southern Iraq in the first year of the occupation.




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thomas friedman is a great man






oh boy it never ends



















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