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Thursday, April 28, 2011

Waiting for Change: Time for Obama's Long Form Presidency

FYI: Legitimacy of leadership demands more than being a legitimate natural born citizen. When does the President become a fully legitimate, Democratic, even progressive leader, per his election?




April 28, 2011 at 10:22:51

Time for Obama's Long Form Presidency

By Robert S. Becker (about the author)



Waiting for Change by Eric Allie

Now that the president has delivered proof positive he's legit, at least to all three undecided sloths, when does he begin to prove he's a legitimate, history-making president ready to "win the future"? When does Mr. Obama wake from slumber, get on the boat of history, cross the Jordan, and begin working to deliver the Long Form of his Promised Land? That starts not in Hawaii, nor over the rainbow, but by leveraging the greatest bully pulpit in the world and displaying a presidential learning curve.

Hell, the sterling bully pulpit is about the only residual piece of American exceptionalism extant.

Does the drama begin now, say, Obama freeing himself from the corporate octopus, his own risk-aversion, and transcend the "silliness" plaguing his constituency, natural born and otherwise. For once I'm with the unequivocal president, "We do not have time for this kind of silliness." Okay, how about tomorrow shedding your loyal embrace of Republican entrenchment that smothers federal spending, taxation, and budgetary projections -- compacting government to the size of a bathtub?

Change means change

How about abandoning the imperial mindset inherited from a most hated, militaristic administration, bogging us down and threatening bankruptcy? Or don't trust job-production comes after this self-induced bust by capitalism finally turns boomward -- if it does, any time soon for middle Americans? When do we confront the "silliness" of the Bush-Cheney juggernaut that misused terrorism to discard our Constitution, due process and civil rights? Here's an easy one -- apologize for the inexcusable, pre-emptive "silliness" of declaring jailed soldier, Bradley Manning, guilty for "he broke the law." Obama's expanded his commander-in-chiefdom across military tribunal, judge, and jury.

Reversing Obama's own "silliness," a.k.a. regression to the mean-spirited, would thrill countless former supporters -- frantic there'll be four more years of the slow Obama boat to the status quo. When does this president find a genuine voice of his -- and learn the political craft of getting his way on something significant, not cowed by Republican "bipartisan" shafting?

Hold your horses, this skeptic also endorses a second declaration: "We are not going to be able to solve," Obama said, "our problems if we get distracted by side shows and carnival barkers." Well, chatting up fractional, compromised, half-solutions to complex problems, then catering to reactionaries strikes me as a painful side show. Does not this White House, oddly handing out the Long Form after obnoxious, fraudulent hucksterism from the Donald, serve distraction by carnival barkers? Why not hold the line, letting Trump the non-candidate choke on his own non-issue?

True Legitimacy Stills Silliness

Widespread Obama silliness ends not by confirming what every rational being knew (the birthplace), but showing you understand you desperately need the liberal and progressive wings to win re-election. Why not regret openly attacking your base, nothing less for me than bad politics, bad electioneering and, frankly, bad manners? Bad faith enemies won't care if you talk nice to your '08 supporters.

In a perverse, dim-witted way, Birtherism obsessed about one critical political and spiritual issue for Obama, or any leader -- legitimacy of power. When does the electioneering stop, the candidate shucks his old skin, and he grows fully into the daunting job he won, battling for his agenda? Though winning grants initial legitimacy, the ultimate legacy comes after only real achievements under duress, even losing in a noble cause. All presidents face unexpected dramas, but what new information about any major issue is now at hand that wasn't known on Inauguration Day?

Summary: stalled wars, inconclusive or worse, with a new one growing; credit, except to the rich, blocked; foreclosures, worse; job growth, miserable; restoration of civil rights, non-existent; union-busting, a growth industry; energy plan, non-existent; deep Gulf oil drilling, approved; price checks on health care, theoretical at best. Good news, in short, rarer than hen's teeth.

And the Reward: Re-election?

Yes, yes, the president can be articulate (though most honest off the record), and great on ceremony (though his speeches have sagged, more vacuous than ever). I celebrate Elizabeth Warren and a few other progressive appointments -- yet any survey of our big issues shows the change guy I voted for hasn't yet shown up for the job. Rahm Emanuel did, with predictable results. Ditto, Joe Biden, a forgettable, gaffe-ridden V.P. And the twin bankster enablers, Summers and Geithner, performed as expected (protecting paper assets, not job growth), along with Gates at Defense (militarism rationalized). Hasn't this safe team demonstrated only what it takes to kept the mainliner afloat even, bite my lip, stay the course. I know very few smart observers without substantial qualifications about Obama's performance, and none truly enthusiastic. Many are morose.

Perhaps I cling to an historical model that no longer applies, perhaps this time is "different"-- the reactionaries are exceptionally craven and strong, corruption from money and influence-peddling overwhelming, and international complications beyond the ken of human wisdom. Sure, global environmental thresholds loom like never before -- and our complacent, safety- and comfort-driven species, seemingly allergic to planning and projections (and science), blunders on.

Yet history also informs us the worst case from public pessimists of any age were specious, that humanity muddles through, and human ingenuity pushes forward. Few, certainly not I, expect miracles, nor Promised Land from this directionless president. But all the more reason this is a good time to demand our ship of state begins to address, if not admit catastrophes. Those ignored rarely go away. It's not like there aren't many to choose from -- and great presidents have looked upon challenges as opportunities to show one's mettle, not throw one's hands up in frustration and gridlock.

Educated at Rutgers College (BA) and UC Berkeley (Ph.D, English) Becker left university teaching (Northwestern, U. Chicago) for business, founding and heading SOTA Industries, high end audio company from '80 to '92. From '92-02 he did marketing (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Obama Denies Vermont Healthcare

There's a problem, of course. And the problem is not purely that Republicans are evil. The problem is also that the President of the United States is just as evil as the Republicans.



April 27, 2011 at 23:53:26

Obama Denies Vermont Healthcare

By David Swanson (about the author)

Here's the news as I received it in an Email from Thom Hartmann's radio show on Wednesday:

"Vermont is one step-closer to becoming the first state to set up a truly universal, single-payer health care system. The Vermont Senate passed the new healthcare bill yesterday - following in the footsteps of the state House that passed the bill last month. Now - it just needs to be signed into law by Governor Peter Shumlin who's already expressed his support for the measure. There IS one last step though - Vermont would need to secure a waiver to opt out of Obamacare in order to build its own healthcare system.

"A handful of lawmakers have introduced legislation to allow states - in particular Vermont - to drop out of Obamacare if they prove they can cover just as many people with insurance as the law would have without adding to the deficit. But surprise, surprise, Republicans don't like the idea. That's right - after bashing Obamacare for 2 years - they don't want to let states drop out of it. What happened to their whole "state's rights" platform - does that only apply to stuff like abortion and gay marriage - and not to giving people free healthcare? The truth is - Republicans are trembling at thought of Vermont having a single-payer healthcare system to serve as a model for other states. Canada's single-payer healthcare system started in just one province - Saskatchewan - and then spread across the country because people in other provinces demanded it.

"Republicans fear that the same thing is likely to happen in the United States and they'll do anything they can to stop it in Vermont. They don't care about sick people - they care about profits for their buddies - the millionaire private health insurance executives."

Of course it's not a surprise that passing a bill through Congress allowing states to create real healthcare solutions is an uphill climb. Congress does what the insurance companies like, and the insurance companies like continuing to exist. But way back yonder in July 2009, the House Committee on Education and Labor, voted 27 to 19 with 13 Republican Yes votes to pass Congressman Dennis Kucinich's amendment to the healthcare reform bill. This amendment would not have altered the federal legislation except to allow states to create single-payer healthcare systems if they chose to. That's the one and only thing this amendment did.

First among the 19 members who voted No was Committee Chairman and Democrat George Miller. Congressional staffers who knew told me that President Obama had personally told Miller to block the amendment.

When the legislation that came out of Miller's committee was merged with the versions from two other House committees, the Kucinich amendment, which did not conflict with anything in any version of the bill, disappeared. Again, the word on the Hill was that Obama had told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to strip that amendment out. In fact, Pelosi said the President had asked her to do that.

The Democratic Party loyalist groups were, of course, focused on the doomed "public option" and -- even more so -- on supporting the bill no matter what was in it. Mentioning an amendment that permitted states to pursue serious solutions didn't harmonize well with the message that the concoction of corporate giveaways churning through Congress was itself a serious solution. Two things is too many to mention in an Email. And so none of the public-optioners, or very few, fought to keep the Kucinich Amendment in.

The single-payer healthcare groups were living in a fantasy world in which they thought they were going to persuade Congress to pass national single-payer healthcare. Talking about a state or two leading the way just wasn't part of this pretty story. So these groups let the Kucinich Amendment be stripped out without a fight.

Then came the Senate bill, also written at Obama's careful direction, which added in language forbidding state healthcare solutions through 2017. Obama told Kucinich that the Senate bill included the waivers he'd successfully put into the House bill and seen unceremoniously removed. But this was not true.

Nonetheless, Kucinich got on an airplane with Obama opposing the healthcare bill and wanting his amendment put back in it if it passed. Kucinich got off the airplane supporting the healthcare bill without his amendment restored or any other concession that has ever been mentioned in public.

And now comes Vermont trying to provide a civilized system of health coverage for one state. The other 49 states lose nothing by this. They could conceivably give their citizens vouchers for half what they now spend on healthcare and allow everyone to go buy into the Vermont plan. Tourism to Vermont would get a huge boost. But states that pretended nothing had happened could ignore Vermont and proceed on the same stairway to hell they are on now.

There's a problem, of course. And the problem is not purely that Republicans are evil. The problem is also that the President of the United States already cut off this escape route.

http://davidswanson.org

David Swanson is the author of "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Obama's "Compromise" With Republicans Is "Rotten Deal" For America




April 26, 2011 at 10:14:43

Obama "Compromise" With Republicans Is "Rotten Deal" For Most Americans

By Sherwood Ross (about the author)

President Obama's compromise with Congressional Republicans to reduce the deficit is "a rotten deal" that "hits the poor and the middle class the hardest," The Nation magazine said in a May 2 nd editorial.

The president may have called for "shared sacrifice"to reduce the budget by $4 trillion over the next 12 years but for every $1 raised by closing tax loopholes for the wealthy, he proposes $2 in spending cuts, the liberal magazine says.

And "Two-thirds of those cuts would come from education, health and other social programs while one-third would come from the military budget," the magazine editorialized.

" The president's vision of 'shared sacrifice,' in other words, hits the poor and the middle class hardest. Meanwhile, wealthy Americans and the military are asked to sacrifice less, even though it was unfunded tax cuts and wars that got us a deficit in the first place," the editorial continued.

To avoid a government shutdown, the president agreed to a 2011 budget compromise that cut spending by $38 billion, "the majority of which will come from the departments of education, labor and health," The Nation pointed out.

The magazine concluded Mr. Obama's "balanced approach" "conceded too much too early to the deficit hawks and austerity pushers." Where he "needed to reset the debate," instead "he split the difference."

In a similar vein, former Labor Secy. Robert Reich wrote on his blog the president "is losing the war of ideas because he won't tell the American public the truth: That we need more government spending now---not less---in order to get out of the gravitational pull of the Great Recession."

That's because "the increasingly lopsided distribution of income and wealth has robbed the vast working middle class of the purchasing power they need to keep the economy going at full capacity," Reich explained.

Early in the last century, enlightened industrialists raised workers' salaries so they could buy the goods they were manufacturing. Today, corporations show zero loyalty to their workers. They do not cut productive workers in for a share of the profits. Working Americans, Reich says, are earning on average "only about $280 more a year than 30 years ago, adjusted for inflation. That's less than a 1 percent gain over more than a third of a century."

Worse, corporations whose employees made them great in the first place quit the country to find cheaper labor overseas. And many of the new jobs being created in recent months are bottom-of-the-barrel, minimum wage work.

" Real hourly wages continue to fall," Reich says, because "with unemployment so high, most people have no bargaining power and will take whatever they can get."

At the same time ever more families are sliding into poverty, signing up for food stamps, and lining up at church soup kitchens, "Wall Street profits soared to $426.5 billion last quarter," Reich says.

Since Corporate America is largely responsible for the Great Recession by starving its workers of the purchasing power they need to put punch back into the economy, you might think companies would plow some of their lush profits back into the work force. You might think the oil companies would share some of their fabulous profits with motorists. But no such luck.

Worse, the corporate types and their Republican allies in Congress want to stop federal and state governments from paying their workers fairly and creating needed public service jobs. Instead, they want to lay off loyal employees. They want to bust the unions. They move whole factories overseas. They abandon cities and counties, robbing them of their industrial base. They relocate offshore to evade taxes. They even outsource help-line jobs to low-paid workers in India. And if they can, they will privatize Social Security and gut Medicare.

This is capitalism without a heart, without a conscience.

Yet if the private sector will not live up to its responsibilities, who would deny government the role of employer of last resort and the trainer of last resort?


Right now, not tomorrow, the U.S. needs to provide a job for every person who wants to work. Right now, the U.S. has got to mobilize and upgrade a vast network of vocational training facilities---in trade schools, union halls, community colleges and, yes, corporations---to train millions of workers in skilled trades. Right now, the U.S. needs to create millions of jobs in day care centers, hospitals, the building trades and for work on all phases of infrastructure---from replacing sewer and water pipes, to creating solar, sea, and wind power plants, to refurbishing run-down housing and beautifying deteriorating communities.

Tragically, Mr. Obama is virtually blind to the needs of the American people. He is smitten with the imperial vision. Americans have been electing presidents who, upon taking office, act like kings and kill like tyrants, and he is no exception. Americans want jobs at home, not wars abroad. They want money for local schools, not for foreign bases. They want peace and prosperity. At the least, Democrats need a new standard-bearer in 2012. Americans need a Green Revolution. President Obama talks a great game. But his promises before an election are broken after he's elected. And his foreign policy of wars and assassinations is cruel and contemptible. It's time for a change!


Sherwood Ross worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and contributed a regular "Workplace" column for Reuters. He has contributed to national magazines and hosted a talk show on WOL, Washington, D.C. In the Sixties he was active as public (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

4 Reasons Obama Should Not "Triangulate"

AlterNet.org

4 Reasons Obama Should Not "Triangulate"


It is, by now, an article of faith for most folks in the punditocracy that a Democratic President must triangulate to earn re-election. First brought to the public conversation in President Clinton's ultimately successful 1996 re-election bid, the concept is to position oneself as the bridge between two intractable parties/ideologies. Many a column inch has been devoted to alternately insisting that Barack Obama follow the same trail, or praising him when it appears that he is doing precisely that.


His Smugness: The Barackster

Consider this point of praise back in December for the tax cut deal:

Sixteen years ago, Mr. Clinton was in the same situation Mr. Obama finds himself in today: the Democratic majority in Congress swept out of power, and the need to rethink how policy is formed. For Clinton, the answer was “triangulation,” the practice of meeting Republicans part-way, often to the chagrin of Democrats.

Obama already appears to be getting the hang of it. This week’s crackup between Obama and his liberal base over a tax-cut deal he reached with the Republicans seemed poised to threaten Obama’s support among the progressive grassroots, whose energy and donations he will need to win reelection. But just as easily, it opens him up to a second look from independents and moderates who abandoned the Democrats in the midterms and whose support he needs if he wants a second term.

With rare exceptions, it is extraordinarily difficult to find an election analyst make the case that for President Obama to get re-elected, he needs to tack left, at least some of the time.

You are about to read a rare exception. Perhaps not stunning, coming from a site that calls the progressive blogosphere home. Nevertheless, there is a legitimate, data-driven case that triangulation and tacking to the "center" (or, heaven forbid, the "center-right") will not yield President Obama the electoral dividends he seeks.

To make the case, I will use several sets of data. To save us from incessant linkage down the line, let's lay out the sources up front. They are:

  • 2010 Exit Polls, both nationally and from a total of 15 states.
  • 2009 Exit polling from New Jersey and Virginia
  • 2008 Exit Polls, both nationally and from a total of 20 states.
  • 2006 Exit Polls, national House poll only.
  • A trio of late-cycle Independent polls from 2010: a SUSA poll from Georgia, a PPP poll from Minnesota, and a PPP poll from North Carolina. These three polls were chosen for two simple reasons: these were states that did not have exit polling on Election Day, and the poll toplines closely reflected the final result.

Based on the above data sources, there is a reasonable case to be made that a base strategy may well prove to be as sound an electoral strategy as triangulation. This argument is based upon four primary points of emphasis.

1. WHO votes is every bit as important as HOW they vote

As disastrous as the 2010 election cycle was for Democrats, we tend to forget that the Democrats not only carried 90% of the vote among liberals last year, they also carried 55% of the vote among moderates. The disaster for Democrats came among conservatives.

It wasn't necessarily their vote total, though the mere 13% of conservatives who voted for Democrats was substantially less than the 20% that voted for Dems in 2006, or voted for President Obama in 2008. It was the proportion of the electorate represented by conservatives.

Consider than in 2008, when President Obama scored his historic victory, the ideological makeup of the electorate was as follows: 22% liberal, 44% moderate, and 34% conservative. By 2010, the electorate looked dramatically different: 20% liberal, 38% moderate, and 42% conservative.

To put it another way, in two years the liberal/conservative gap went from Cons +12 to Cons +22. And therein lies the landslide.

The gap was even wider in some key battleground states that went away from the Democrats. Pennsylvania went from a 4-point conservative edge to a 16-point edge. Ohio travelled on a similar vector, where an already sizeable 15-point edge ballooned to 26-points last year.

To put it even more simply: make the following assumptions. Assume that Barack Obama gets the same amount of support for each ideological group that he did in 2008. Which is a reach--there is no reason to expect him to get 20% among conservatives again (he also nabbed 60% of moderates and 89% of liberals). But, for the sake of argument, assume it anyway. If the ideological makeup of the electorate does not change from 2010, Barack Obama claims just 49% of the vote. He also heads under 50% of the vote in several states he carried: Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia.

One counterargument to this is that the larger presidential electorate automatically presumes a less conservative electorate, because midterm electorates are comprised of more regular (read: conservative) voters. And while that is often true, it is not a guarantee. The Lib/Con spread was actually incrementally wider in the 2004 Presidential election year than it wound up being for the 2006 midterm.

The bottom line is that President Obama needs a Election Day 2012 composition that is at least 60%-65% comprised of moderates (many of whom are left-leaning, but don't want to self-identify as liberal) and liberals. Absent that, even a solid performance with those two groups is unlikely to be a guarantee of victory. He cannot run away from the left and simultaneously expect them to turn out in droves on his behalf next November. The Democrats, and his second term, cannot survive another "enthusiasm gap."

2. Yes, the President does have a little bit of a "base problem"

Another article of faith among the political chattering classes is the notion that the idea that President Obama has alienated the left in any meaningful way is a fiction bounced around among "liberal elites." They often cite polling data, pointing out that Obama's approval rating among Democrats and liberals remains "high." And, indeed, his numbers with those two groups are far from free fall.

But they aren't that great, either.

Consider a recent national poll (PDF) conducted by Public Policy Polling. Independent of their work for Daily Kos, this poll explored the presidential contest, and found President Obama staked to leads over the entire GOP field.

That, indeed, was the good news. But buried within the numbers are two items that should be cautionary notes for Team Obama. The first was an issue of ideological makeup--while there were more liberals than usual (probably because PPP takes the smart step of allowing people to identify as "somewhat" liberal or conservative, allowing some self-professed moderates to out themselves), it also maintained a 41% conservative contingent.

The second issue was that despite a laudable 61/33 spread among moderates, the President's job approval was underwater. The culprit? Godawful numbers among conservatives (more on this later), and the fact that Obama's approval numbers among liberals (both "somewhat" and "very") lingered in the low 80s. That isn't spectacular, when one considers that President Obama locked down 89% of liberals in 2008, and the Democrats snared 90% of them last year, as well.

Some pollsters have it even worse: this week's Marist/McClatchy poll had the liberal job approval numbers at 68/24. Some polls don't have it nearly as bad: this week's installment of the Daily Kos/SEIU State of the Nation poll had it at 88% approval.

Nevertheless, that is a group that should be pretty close to unanimous. And they are not. If the President cannot up those numbers by a few points, there is serious peril there for him. Because, as you'll see, it might prove difficult for him to get the numbers to move elsewhere.

3. It is nearly impossible for the President to replicate his 2008 performance among conservatives.

There are few reasonable scenarios by which we can assume that the President will, as he did in 2008, attract 20% of the conservative vote next November. The past two years have clearly seen a sharp polarization among conservative voters, who have basically written off both this President and his party.

Consider the PPP national poll from mid-April alluded to above. In that poll, President Obama was in the teens with "somewhat" conservative voters, and in single digits among the "very" conservative ones. This tracks well with this week's Daily Kos/SEIU State of the Nation Poll, where his approval spread with conservatives sits at a mere 12/81 spread.

Furthermore, beyond mere approval numbers, last year's vote tallies also suggest that it is unlikely that the President will see 2008 levels of support among conservatives again. In the twenty statewide races from 2009-2010 which I tracked, the Democratic nominee did no better than 18% of the vote. In the majority of those twenty races, the Democratic nominee failed to crack into the teens, including three races that Democrats actually won. Nationally, Democrats running for the House received just 13% of the conservative vote.

There is some precedent to suggest that Obama's 20% of the vote may have been a bit inflated, owing to conservative mistrust of John McCain. His 20% was substantially higher than the 15% won by John Kerry in 2004, and was also higher than the 17% won by Al Gore in 2000.

4. The President already has a solid standing with moderate voters.

In the blockquoted piece at the start of this essay, the author lauded President Obama for the tax cut deal with Republicans, in essence arguing that any loss of support among liberals would be offset by the re-evaluation of the man among moderates.

Two pieces of data seem to disprove that.

The November edition of PPP's national polling, conducted before the tax cut deal, showed that the President was already doing quite well (61/34) among moderates. He was also doing extremely well (90/8) among liberals. Earlier, I noted where the President's approval now stood in that monthly survey (low 80s) among liberals.

Meanwhile, in that same April survey, where was the President with moderate voters? 61%. A solid performance, to be sure, but also exactly the same percentage support he enjoyed among moderates last November.

Therefore, only two conclusions can be drawn. Either (a) the tax cuts paid no dividends with moderate voters, or (b) any positive re-evaluation of the President post-tax cuts by centrist moderates was nullified by a dip among left-of-center "moderates". Therefore, the overall number remained constant.

You see, a cursory look at polling data reveals one truism: a large number of moderate voters...simply aren't. A load of them are actually left-of-center voters who are uncomfortable, after decades of the term being gradually hammered into an epithet, with self-identifying as "liberal."

The proof is in the data. Even in the ugliness of the 2009-2010 electoral cycle, Democratic candidates carried a majority of the moderate vote in nineteen of the 20 statewide races I tracked. The sole exception was Jon Corzine, who nabbed just 45% of the moderate vote in the 2009 New Jersey gubernatorial election (remember when people thought Chris Christie was a moderate? Fun times.).

President Obama snared 60% of the moderate vote, according to the 2008 exit polls. Looking at the recent polling data, he still draws favorable job approval numbers from anywhere between 54-61% of moderate voters. I wouldn't necessarily argue that he has "maxed out" his support among this corps of voters, but I also think it is silly to argue that there is a vast, untapped reservoir of undecided/hostile moderate voters that Obama could bring home by being more conciliatory to conservative positions.

Indeed, given the fact that moderates tend towards the left-of-center in their voting preferences in recent years, it is not crazy to suggest that Obama might gain more yardage with this group by tacking to the left, as opposed to finding common cause with the right or "center" (which, for far too many in the political analysis community, are interchangeable terms).

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Virtually every poll over the past few months has shared a common theme: the President is on shaky footing with the electorate, but continues to hold leads over the potential GOP field. This rather strange dichotomy is owed to two characteristics of that Republican contingent: they are still very undefined to the electorate, but what the electorate knows of them, they do not like.

Given that a bit of fratricide on the GOP side appears inevitable as the field of declared challengers begins to grow, President Obama will have a great deal of flexibility. Triangulating might allow him to frame himself as the "adult in the room", but it also runs a very real risk of leaving loads of potentially decisive voters on the sidelines. However, the prospect of a real spectacle on the other side may also allow Obama the ability to tend to his base on some big-ticket items and still look reasonable by comparison, given the tea-flavored festival that seems bound to begin (and already has, if the ideologically flexible Tim Pawlenty is any indication).

Certainly, other factors beyond ideological positioning are of paramount importance. If voters still feel the country is off on the wrong track, and that the economy is stagnant, no amount of framing and posturing is likely to resurrect the President's electoral prospects. On the other hand, if genuine signs of healing and improvement lift the electorate's spirits, the President becomes a betting favorite no matter how the GOP primary plays out.

The bottom line here is that there is reasonable evidence that the risks of alienating or neglecting the base could well outweigh any potential rewards for doing so. This is not 1996, and the data makes it a bit tough to see where any erosion in liberal enthusiasm or support is going to be offset by surging Presidential support from the center or right.

Which is something that the Obama 2012 team might do well to consider as they position their man for the inevitable future battles that they will face with the GOP inside the beltway.

By Steve Singiser | Sourced from 1470

Posted at April 24, 2011, 8:46 am

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Obama's Global Puppet Show: Global Shame

Opinion Maker


Global Puppet Show: Global Shame

Can the Aggressors be Peacemakers in Iraq and Afghanistan?

By Mahboob A. Khawaja, Ph.D.

Wars are planned and orchestrated by the few, the privileged ruling elite; the humanity becomes the targeted victims of the few for global hegemonic governance. Throughout the ages, the conscientious mankind searched for ways to undo the war and strive for peace, the real aim for the establishments of international institutions. But now the global institutional capacity to deal with peace and conflict management appears in ruin with the continued onslaught of the American led War on Terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like the failed League of Nations, the UNO is an umbrella institution for debate and time consuming dialogue – a new nuisance model of the 21st century institutional failure. Most UN funding is covered by I.O.U. paper notes by the leading powers. They decide and control what the UN can and should do, not the UN itself. It is a dummy and silent spectator organization witnessing all the global catastrophic disasters in progress. A global puppet show to deceive the humanity with visual illusions of intentions, discussions, complemented by lies and deceptions assuming new titles for the international politics. Bush and Blair have been replaced by Obama and Cameron to overtake the wars of aggressions in Iraq and Afghanistan. With changed faces, strategies and aims remain the same to continue the war against Islam. In the recent past, the allied nations coerced by the US to participate in the wars, have held global conferences to talk about the reconstruction and future peacemaking. The question is why was Afghanistan invaded and destroyed in the first place? The fully intact graveyards created by the former USSR invasion are still in existence and there was no chance or even an illusion that the destitute people of Afghanistan could have posed any threat to the transitory and diminishing “superpower” status of the US.

Realizing the eminent defeats by the handful forces of Talaban, the allies get together to make their presence known for propaganda purposes to the beleaguered people of Afghanistan, Pakistan and global audience. Talaban fighting the intruders are not the foreigners but people of the Afghan land. The US, British and others paid agents are foreigner mercenaries fighting in a foreign land, culturally unknown and unconquerable by their armed forces. Virtuous peacemaking vis-à-vis aggression and wickedness cannot be combined as credible attribute in one mindset and one character. Now, the issue is, how conveniently, the aggressors want to redefine their strategic role and ambitions in Afghanistan as peacemakers as if they have achieved the goals of their aggression. Imagine, Adolph Hitler while occupying France and continuing bombing of London, wanted to organize a peace conference. Would it have been a logical discourse for the French and British people to talk peacemaking with the aggressor? Bush and Hitler had lot in common as both claimed to have the divine support for their mission. Both tried to destroy the living humanity but fell in disgrace and met defeats.

A week earlier, Talaban while talking to the BBC reporter in Kabul, made it clear that they believe in peacemaking but all the foreign forces must leave Afghanistan. The same logic that French and British politicians would have implied to Hitler. Could the facts of human life be changed, be it Iraq, Afghanistan or the occurrences of the 2nd World War?

The “war on terror” was a bogus war planned by the US neoconservatives to occupy Iraq and other oil rich Muslim countries for their strategic goals. Both the US and its allies failed miserably to conquer the people of these lands. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan need change for peace and normalcy. The change can only happen if the US led occupying forces leave immediately and compensate the victim nations for their cruelty and the war damages. The same formula used at the end of the WW2. The same legal principle is needed that the aggressors be brought to legal and political accountability in an international war tribunal such as Nuremberg tribunal after the end of the WW2. E. H Carr, the famous historian, had emphasized that history has learning role for the future. Those who defy the logic of learning were lost without a trace.

Would the aggressors tell the humanity, when would they end the aggression? And when would their armed forces finally leave Iraq and Afghanistan? So that the victims could think openly and plan for change and peaceful transfer to making of their own future. This is the issue that the US led allied gathering of the 70 or so nations avoided to discuss. The assemblies were not for peacemaking but for prolonging the failing war efforts to ensure that the gas pipeline is completed from Central Asia. The leaders wanted to discuss the developmental aid, a typical western materialistic scenario to help the impoverished nations. The aid gimmick is an attractive illusion to entrap the poor nations and exploit their resources for the good of the colonial masters. The US and Britain survive on borrowed money from the future generations as their own financial institutions have collapsed and so are the political powerhouses and working agencies. But the aid’s long term purpose is to create more beggars and poverty and dependent nations asking for external aid and to survive on borrowed future and resources. The discussion developmental aid and withdrawal of the foreign forces from Afghanistan sends a clear signal of defeat and prospective surrender to the Talaban fighting for the freedom of their homeland.

Future must be anew, not the repetition of the past. Future making does not lie with the aggressors nor with the failed international institutions, it is with the will and resolve of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan to oust the aggressors and recover their homes and habitats for rebuilding of their lives and human dignity. The US led forces went to Iraq and Afghanistan in pursuit of freedom, liberty and justice for the people. Instead they planned and developed the institutions of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Belgrham prison in Afghanistan and many unknown secret terror cells across Europe. Facts speak for themselves. All you need to do is to see the outcomes, the triumphs of the American version of liberty, human rights and justice role models, the inhuman treatment and horrifying photos of the prisoners are easily available from the internet, and the photos speak their own language depicting the American-British civilized achievements in the Arab-Islamic world. Mr. Karzai, the self-made president of Afghanistan, claimed that he and the participating members of the Arab-Islamic world represent the Islamic version of the civility and not terrorism. Mr. Karzai or others in attendance, the Arab-Muslim staged actors do not represent the interest and priorities of the Muslim Ummah. The people of the Islamic world see them all as a pan on the global political chessboard being financed, supported and kept in office to steal the future of the people of Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He is viewed as part of the problem, not part of any workable solution. If the US and its comrades in arms the UNO, NATO and others were honest and responsible institutions, they should have outlined the priorities for immediate withdrawals of the forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. More importantly, if there are concerned Arab-Muslim leaders, they should set the agenda for the resolution of the Arab-Israeli problem, the making of an independent State of Palestine and the removal of the illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem. Apparently, there is no conference scheduled to deal with the real issues facing the global humanity. The states, the main puppet actors in the global political arena can be found existing on legal papers, not in the real world actions, and certainly not in a responsive manner to the concerned international community.

The abstract phenomenon of the State – the sitting members of the UNO, lack any human conscience to be accountable to the global humanity already in great distress and sufferings. The UNO, the US and other intransigent state actors feel no shame for their atrocities against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, the US forces have massacred more than three million innocent civilians and millions displaced or forced to become refugees in foreign lands. Afghan landscape tells its own story with million uprooted from ancestral homes and forced to go to foreign countries in search of protection and human survival. The aggressors do not wish to see the problem, that they are the real problem, not otherwise. Sooner they leave Iraq and Afghanistan, the better. The ancient and civilized people of Iraq and Afghanistan know it well what is peacemaking and who are the aggressors. The aggressors appear desperate to quit and the Kabul conference seems to explain that urgent necessity but intellectually confused, morally corrupt and militarily exhausted, and not sure how best to get out of the terrible mess they have created for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and the whole of the humanity in turmoil.

A century earlier C.E, M. Joad (Guide to Modern Wickedness), captioned the human tragedy in these words:

“….Human nature is at least in part wicked and in part foolish, how can human beings be prevented from suffering from the results of their wickedness and folly? ….Men simply do not see that war is foolish and useless and wicked. They think on occasion that it is necessary and wise and honourable, for war is not the work of bad men knowing themselves to be wrong, but of good men passionately convinced that they are right.”


Obama: All In The Company: Is Barack Obama a real-life “Manchurian Candidate?”

Opinion Maker



Obama: All In The Company -Part I, II and III


Special Report: The Story of Obama: All in The Company Part I

By Wayne Madsen


WMR has discovered CIA files that document the agency’s connections to institutions and individuals figuring prominently in the lives of Barack Obama and his mother, father, grandmother, and stepfather.

President Obama’s own work in 1983 for Business International Corporation, a CIA front that conducted seminars with the world’s most powerful leaders and used journalists as agents abroad, dovetails with CIA espionage activities conducted by his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham in 1960s post-coup Indonesia on behalf of a number of CIA front operations, including the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Ford Foundation. Dunham met and married Lolo Soetoro, Obama’s stepfather, at the East-West Center in 1965. Soetoro was recalled to Indonesia in 1965 to serve as a senior army officer and assist General Suharto and the CIA in the bloody overthrow of President Sukarno.

Barack Obama, Sr., who met Dunham in 1959 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii, had been part of what was described as an airlift of 280 East African students to the United States to attend various colleges — merely “aided” by a grant from the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation, according to a September 12, 1960, Reuters report from London. The airlift was a CIA operation to train and indoctrinate future agents of influence in Africa, which was becoming a battleground between the United States and the Soviet Union and China for influence among newly-independent and soon-to-be independent countries on the continent.

The airlift was condemned by the deputy leader of the opposition Kenyan African Democratic Union (KADU) as favoring

Obama's African family

certain tribes — the majority Kikuyus and minority Luos — over other tribes to favor the Kenyan African National Union (KANU), whose leader was Tom Mboya, the Kenyan nationalist and labor leader who selected Obama, Sr. for a scholarship at the University of Hawaii. Obama, Sr., who was already married with an infant son and pregnant wife in Kenya, married Dunham on Maui on February 2, 1961 and was also the university’s first African student. Dunham was three month’s pregnant with Barack Obama, Jr. at the time of her marriage to Obama, Sr.

KADU deputy leader Masinda Muliro, according to Reuters, said KADU would send a delegation to the United States to investigate Kenyan students who received “gifts” from the Americans and “ensure that further gifts to Kenyan students are administered by people genuinely interested in Kenya’s development.’”

Mboya received a $100,000 grant for the airlift from the Kennedy Foundation after he turned down the same offer from the U.S. State Department, obviously concerned that direct U.S. assistance would look suspicious to pro-Communist Kenyan politicians who suspected Mboya of having CIA ties. The Airlift Africa project was underwritten by the Kennedy Foundation and the African-American Students Foundation. Obama, Sr. was not on the first airlift but a subsequent one. The airlift, organized by Mboya in 1959, included students from Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland

Reuters also reported that Muliro charged that Africans were “disturbed and embittered” by the airlift of the selected students. Muliro “stated that “preferences were shown to two major tribes [Kikuyu and Luo] and many U.S.-bound students had failed preliminary and common entrance examinations, while some of those left behind held first-class certificates.”

Obama, Sr. was a friend of Mboya and a fellow Luo. After Mboya was assassinated in 1969, Obama, Sr. testified at the trial of his alleged assassin. Obama, Sr. claimed he was the target of a hit-and-run assassination attempt after his testimony.

Obama, Sr., who left Hawaii for Harvard in 1962, divorced Dunham in 1964. Obama, Sr. married a fellow Harvard student, Ruth Niedesand, a Jewish-American woman, who moved with him to Kenya and had two sons. They were later divorced. Obama, Sr. worked for the Kenyan Finance and Transport ministries as well as an oil firm. Obama, Sr. died in a 1982 car crash and his funeral was attended by leading Kenyan politicians, including future Foreign Minister Robert Ouko, who was murdered in 1990.

CIA files indicate that Mboya was an important agent-of-influence for the CIA, not only in Kenya but in all of Africa. A formerly Secret CIA “Current Intelligence Weekly Summary,” dated November 19, 1959, states that Mboya served as a check on extremists at the second All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) in Tunis. The report states that “serious friction developed between Ghana’s Prime Minister Kwame NNkrumah and Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya who cooperated effectively [emphasis added] last December to check extremists at the AAPC’s first meeting in Accra.” The term “cooperated effectively” appears to indicate that Mboya was cooperating with the CIA, which filed the report from field operatives in Accra and Tunis. While “cooperating” with the CIA in Accra and Tunis, Mboya selected the father of the president of the United States to receive a scholarship and be airlifted to the University of Hawaii where he met and married President Obama’s mother.

An earlier CIA Current Intelligence Weekly Summary, Secret, and dated April 3, 1958, states that Mboya “still appears to be the most promising of the African leaders.” Another CIA weekly summary, Secret and dated December 18, 1958, calls Mboya the Kenyan nationalist an “able and dynamic young chairman” of the People’s Convention party who was viewed as an opponent of “extremists” like Nkrumah, supported by “Sino-Soviet representatives.”

In a formerly Secret CIA report on the All-Africa Peoples Conference in 1961, dated November 1, 1961, Mboya’s conservatism, along with that of Taleb Slim of Tunisia, are contrasted to the leftist policies of Nkrumah and others. Pro-communists who were elected to the AAPC’s steering committee at the March 1961 Cairo conference, attended by Mboya, are identified in the report as Abdoulaye Diallo, AAPC Secretary General, of Senegal; Ahmed Bourmendjel of Algeria; Mario de Andrade of Angola; Ntau Mokhele of Basutoland; Kingue Abel of Cameroun; Antoine Kiwewa of Congo (Leopoldville); Kojo Botsio of Ghana; Ismail Toure of Guinea; T. O. Dosomu Johnson of Liberia; Modibo Diallo of Mali; Mahjoub Ben Seddik of Morocco; Djibo Bakari of Niger; Tunji Otegbeya of Nigeria; Kanyama Chiume of Nyasaland; Ali Abdullahi of Somalia; Tennyson Makiwane of South Africa, and Mohamed Fouad Galal of the United Arab Republic.

The only attendees in Cairo who were given a clean bill of health by the CIA were Mboya, who appears to have been a snitch for the agency, and Joshua Nkomo of Southern Rhodesia, B. Munanka of Tanganyika, Abdel Magid Shaker of Tunisia, and John Kakonge of Uganda.

Nkrumah would eventually be overthrown in a 1966 CIA-backed coup while he was on a state visit to China and North Vietnam. The CIA overthrow of Nkrumah followed by one year the agency’s overthrow of Sukarno, another coup that was connected to President Obama’s family on his mother’s side. There are suspicions that Mboya was assassinated in 1969 by Chinese agents working with anti-Mboya factions in the government of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta in order to eliminate a pro-U.S. leading political leader in Africa. Upon Mboya’s death, every embassy in Nairobi flew its flag at half-mast except for one, the embassy of the People’s Republic of China.

Mboya’s influence in the Kenyatta government would continue long after his death and while Obama, Sr. was still alive. In 1975, after the assassination of KANU politician Josiah Kariuki, a socialist who helped start KANU, along with Mboya and Obama, Sr., Kenyatta dismissed three rebellious cabinet ministers who “all had personal ties to either Kariuki or Tom Mboya.” This information is contained in CIA Staff Notes on the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, formerly Top Secret Umbra, Handle via COMINT Channels, dated June 24, 1975. The intelligence in the report, based on its classification, indicate the information was derived from National Security Agency intercepts in Kenya. No one was ever charged in the assassination of Kariuki.

The intecepts of Mboya’s and Kariuki’s associates are an indication that the NSA and CIA also maintain intercepts on Barack Obama, Sr., who, as a non-U.S. person, would have been lawfully subject at the time to intercepts carried out by NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

In Part I of this WMR special report, we revealed the connections between Barack Obama, Sr. and the CIA-affiliated Airlift Africa project to provide college degrees to and gain influence over a group of 280 eastern and southern African students from soon-to-be independent African nations to counter similar programs established by the Soviet Union and China. Barack Obama Sr. was the first African student to attend the University of Hawaii. Obama Sr. and Obama’s mother Stanley Ann Dunham met in a Russian language class in 1959 and they married in 1961.

The African airlift program was administered by Kenyan nationalist leader Tom Mboya, a fellow Luo tribe mentor and friend of the senior Obama. According to CIA documents described in Part I, Mboya also served the CIA in ensuring that pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese African nationalists were stymied in their attempt to dominate pan-African nationalist political, student, and labor movements.

One of Mboya’s chief opponents was Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, who was ousted in a CIA-inspired coup in 1966, one year before to Obama Sr’s son, Barack Obama, Jr. and his mother joined Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian who Obama’s mother met at the University of Hawaii in 1965, when President Obama was four years old.

In 1967, Obama and his mother joined her husband in Jakarta. In 1965, Lolo Soetoro had been called back from Hawaii by General Suharto to serve as an officer in the Indonesian military to help launch a bloody CIA-backed genocide of Indonesian Communists and Indonesian Chinese throughout the expansive country. Suharto consolidated his power in 1966, the same year that Barack Obama, Sr.’s friend, Mboya, had helped to rally pro-U.S. pan-African support for the CIA’s overthrow of Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966.

East-West Center, University of Hawaii, and CIA coup against Sukarno

CIA Links

Ann Dunham met Soetoro at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. The center had long been affiliated with CIA activities in the Asia-Pacific region. In 1965, the year that Dunham met and married Soetoro, the center saw a new chancellor take over. He was Howard P. Jones who served a record seven years, from 1958 to 1965, as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia. Jones was present in Jakarta as Suharto and his CIA-backed military officers planned the 1965 overthrow of Sukarno, who was seen, along with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), as allies of China.

When Jones was chancellor of the East-West Center, he wrote an article for the Washington Post, dated October 10, 1965, in which he defended Suharto’s overthrow of Sukarno. Jones was “invited” by the Post to comment on the Suharto coup, described as a “counter-coup” against the Communists. Jones charged that Suharto was merely responding to an earlier attempted Communist-led coup against Sukarno launched by Lt. Col. Untung, “a relatively unknown battalion commander in the palace guard.”

Jones’s article, which mirrored CIA situation reports from the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, continued by stating that the alleged leftist coup on September 30 ”came within an inch of succeeding through the assassination of six of the top military command. It might well have succeeded had not Defense Minister Nasution and a number of other senior generals also maked for assassination acted fast in a dramatic counter-coup.” Of course, what Jones did not inform the Post’s readers was that the Suharto “counter-coup” had been assisted with the strong help of the CIA.

Sukarno never blamed the Communists for the assassination of the army generals nor did the Indonesian Cabinet, where the second= and third-ranking leaders of the PKI were present. The possibility that the assassination of the generals was a CIA/Suharto “false flag” operation to affix blame on the PKI cannot be ruled out. Two days after Suharto’s coup, a CIA “rent-a-mob” burned down the PKI headquarters in Jakarta. As they marched past the U.S. Embassy, which was also the site of the CIA station, they yelled out, “Long live America!”

Untung later said that when he became aware that Suharto and the CIA were planning a coup on October 5, 1965 – Indonesian Armed Forces Day – forces loyal to him and Sukarno moved first. Jones described this as “typical Communist propaganda.” Suharto moved against Sukarno on October 1. Jones iterated that “there was not an iota of truth . . . in the accusation that the CIA was working against Sukarno.” History has proven otherwise. Jones accused the Communists of taking advantage of Sukarno’s failing health to beat out the other candidates to succeed him. The goal, according to Jones, was to have PKI boss D.N. Aidit succeed Sukarno. Sukarno did not die until 1970, while under house arrest.

A CIA paper, formerly classified Secret and undated, states “Sukarno would like to return to the status quo ante-coup. He has refused to condemn the PKI or the 30th September Movement [of Lt. Col. Untung]; instead, he calls for unity of Indonesia and asks that no vengeance be taken by one group against the other. But, he has not succeeded in forcing the Army to abandon its anti-PKI activities and, on the other hand, he has bowed to their demand by appointing its single candidate General Suharto as head of the Army.” Suharto and Barry Obama Soetoro’s step-father Lolo Soetoro would ignore Sukarno’s call for no vengeance, as hundreds of thousands of Indonesians would soon discover.

The mass murder by Suharto of Indonesian Chinese is seen in the CIA paper’s description of the Baperki Party: “the leftist Baperki Party, with its major strength in rural areas, is largely Chinese-Indonesian in membership.” A CIA Intelligence Memorandum, dated October 6, 1966 and formerly classified Secret, shows the extent of the CIA’s monitoring of the anti-Sukarno coup from various CIA agents assigned as liaisons to Suharto’s army units surrounding the Presidential Palace in Bogor and at various diplomatic posts around the country, including the U.S. Consulate in Medan, which was keeping track of leftists in that Sumatran city and, which, in an October 2, 1965, Intelligence Memo, reported to the CIA that the “Soviet consul-general in Medan has a plane standing by that could be used for evacuation of Soviet citizens from Sumatra.” The October 6 memo also warns against allowing Untung from developing a following in Central Java.

A CIA formerly Secret “Weekly Summary Special Report” on Indonesia, dated August 11, 1967, and titled “The New Order in Indonesia,” reports that in 1966, Indonesia re-aligned its economy in order to receive International Monetary Fund (IMF) assistance. The CIA reports its is happy with the new triumvirate ruling Indonesia in 1967: Suharto, Foreign Minister Adam Malik, and the Sultan of Jogjakarta, who served as minister for economics and finance. The report also rejoices in the outlawing of the PKI, but states it “retains a significant following in East and Central Java,” where Ann Dunham Soetoro would largely concentrate her later efforts on behalf of USAID, the World Bank, and the Ford Foundation, all front activities for the CIA to “win the hearts and minds” of the Javanese farmers and artisans.

A CIA Intelligence Memorandum, formerly Secret and dated July 23, 1966, clearly sees the Muslim Nahdatul Ulama party {NU), the largest party in Indonesia and Muslim, as a natural ally of the United States and the Suharto regime. The report states that helped Suharto put down the Communists in the post-coup time frame, especially where the NU was strongest: East Java, where Obama’s mother would concentrate her activities, and North Sumatra and parts of Borneo. An April 29, 1966, formerly Secret CIA Intelligence Memorandum on the PKI states: “Moslem extremists in many instances outdid the army in hunting down and murdering members of the party [PKI] and its front groups.”

Dunham and Barry Soetoro in Jakarta and USAID front activities

Dunham dropped out of the University of Hawaii in 1960 while pregnant with Barack Obama. Barack Obama Sr. left Hawaii in 1962 to study at Harvard. Dunham and Obama divorced in 1964. In the fall of 1961, Dunham enrolled at the University of Washington while caring for her infant son. Dunham was re-enrolled at the University of Hawaii from 1963 to 1966. Lolo Soetoro, who Dunham married in March 1965, departed Hawaii for Indonesia on July 20, 1965, some three months prior to the CIA’s coup against Sukarno. Soetoro, who served Suharto as an Army colonel, was clearly called back from the CIA-connected East-West Center to assist in the coup against Sukarno, one that would eventually cost the lives of some one million Indonesian citizens. It is a history that President Obama would like the press to ignore, which it certainly did during the 2008 primary and general election.

In 1967, after arriving in Indonesia with Obama, Jr., Dunham began teaching English at the American embassy in Jakarta, which also housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia and had significant satellite stations in Surabaya in eastern Java and Medan on Sumatra. Jones left as East-West Center chancellor in 1968.

In fact, Obama’s mother was teaching English for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which was a major cover for CIA activities in Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia, especially in Laos, South Vietnam, and Thailand. The USAID program was known as Lembaga Pendidikan Pembinaan Manajemen. Obama’s mother, painted as a free spirit and a “sixties child” by President Obama and people who claimed they knew her in Hawaii and Indonesia, had a curriculum vitae in Indonesia that contradicts the perception that Ann Dunham Soetoro was a “hippy.”

Dunham Soetoro’s Russian language training at the University of Hawaii may have been useful to the CIA in Indonesia. An August 2, 1966, formerly Secret memorandum from the National Security Council’s Executive Secretary Bromley Smith states that, in addition to Japan, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, the Suharto coup was welcomed by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies because its created a non-aligned Indonesia that “represents an Asian counterweight to Communist China.” Records indicate that a number of CIA agents posted in Jakarta before and after the 1965 coup were, like Dunham Soetoro, conversant in Russian.

Dunham Soetoro worked for the elitist Ford Foundation, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Bank Rakyat (the majority government-owned People’s Bank of Indonesia), and the CIA-linked USAID while she lived in Indonesia and later, Pakistan.

USAID was involved in a number of CIA covert operations in Southeast Asia. The February 9, 1971, Washington Star reported that USAID officials in Laos were aware that rice supplied to the Laotian Army by USAID was being re-sold to North Vietnamese army divisions in the country. The report stated that the U.S. tolerated the USAID rice sales to the North Vietnamese since the Laotian Army units that sold the rice found themselves protected from Communist Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese attack. USAID and the CIA also used the supply of rice to force Laotian Meo tribesmen to support the United States in the war against the Communists. USAID funds programmed for civilians injured in the war in Laos and public health care were actually diverted for military purposes.

In 1971, the USAID-funded Center for Vietnamese Studies at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale was accused of being a CIA front. USAID-funded projects through the Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activities (MUCIA) — comprising the Universities of Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana and Michigan State — were accused of being CIA front projects, including those for “agricultural education” in Indonesia, as well as other “projects” in Afghanistan, Mali, Nepal, Nigeria, Thailand, and South Vietnam. The charge was made in 1971, the same year that Ann Dunham was working for USAID in the country.

In a July 10, 1971, New York Times report, USAID and the CIA were accused of “losing” $1.7 billion appropriated for the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program in South Vietnam. CORDS was part of the CIA’s Operation Phoenix program, which involved CIA assassination and torture of South Vietnamese village elders and Buddhist clerics. USAID money was also directed to the CIA’s proprietary airline in Southeast Asia, Air America. In Thailand, USAID funds for the Accelerated Rural Development Program in Thailand were actually masking a CIA anti-Communist counter-insurgency operation. USAID funds programmed for public works projects in East Pakistan in 1971 were used for East Pakistan’s military fortifications on its border with India, in the months before the outbreak of war with India, in contravention of U.S. law that prohibited USAID money for military purposes.

In 1972, USAID administrator Dr. John Hannah admitted to Metromedia News that USAID was being used as a cover for CIA covert operations in Laos. Hannah only admitted to Laos as a USAID cover for the CIA. However, it was also reported that USAID was being used by the CIA in Indonesia, Philippines, South Vietnam, Thailand, and South Korea. USAID projects in Southeast Asia had to be approved by the Southeast Asian Development Advisory Group (SEADAG), an Asia Society group that was, in fact, answerable to the CIA.

The U.S. Food for Peace program, jointly administered by USAID and the Department of Agriculture, was found in 1972 to be used for military purposes in Cambodia, South Korea, Turkey, South Vietnam, Spain, Taiwan, and Greece. In 1972, USAID funneled aid money only to the southern part of North Yemen, in order to aid North Yemeni forces against the government of South Yemen, then ruled by a socialist government opposed to U.S. hegemony in the region.

One of the entities affiliated with the USAID work in Indonesia was the Asia Foundation, a 1950s creation formed with the help of the CIA to oppose the expansion of communism in Asia. The East-West Center guest house in Hawaii was funded by the Asia Foundation. The guest house is also where Barack Obama Sr. first stayed after his airlift from Kenya to Hawaii, arranged by the one of the CIA’s major agents of influence in Africa, Mboya.

Dunham would also travel to Ghana, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, and Thailand working on micro-financing projects. In 1965, Barack Obama Sr. returned to Kenya from Harvard, with another American wife. The senior Obama linked up with his old friend and the CIA’s “golden boy” Mboya and other fellow Luo politicians. The CIA station chief in Nairobi from 1964 to 1967 was Philip Cherry. In 1975, Cherry was the CIA station chief in Dacca, Bangladesh. Cherry was linked by the then-U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, Eugene Booster, to the 1975 assassination of Bangladesh’s first president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and members of his family.

The hit on “Sheikh Mujib” and his family was reportedly ordered by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Bangladesh was also on the micro- and macro-financing travel itinerary of CIA-linked Ann Dunham.

CIA banking and Hawaii

Meanwhile, Dunham Soetoro’s mother, Madelyn Dunham, who raised young Obama when he returned to Hawaii in 1971 while his mother stayed in Indonesia, was the first female vice president at the Bank of Hawaii in Honolulu. Various CIA front entities used the bank. Madelyn Dunham handled escrow accounts used to make CIA payments to U.S.-supported Asian dictators like Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos, South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu, and President Suharto in Indonesia. In effect, the bank was engaged in money laundering for the CIA to covertly prop up its favored leaders in the Asia-Pacific region.

One of the CIA’s major money laundering fronts in Honolulu was the firm of Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong (BBRDW). After the CIA allowed the firm to collapse in 1983 amid charges that BBRDW was merely a Ponzi scheme, Senator Daniel Inouye of the US Senate Intelligence Committee said the CIA’s role in the firm “wasn’t significant.” It would later be revealed that Inouye, who was one of the late Alaska Senator Ted Stevens’s best friends in the Senate, was lying. In fact, BBRDW was involved heavily in funding covert CIA programs throughout Asia, including economic espionage against Japan, providing arms for Afghan mujaheddin guerrillas in their war against the Soviets and covertly supplying weapons to Taiwan. One of BBRDW’s principals was John C. “Jack” Kindschi, who, before he retired in 1981, was the CIA station chief in Honolulu. BBRDW’s chairman Ron Rewald had a counterfeit college degree certificate provided for the wall of his office by the CIA’s forgery experts and his name was inserted in university records as an alumnus.

A false history for BBRDW was concocted by the CIA claiming the firm had operated in Hawaii since it was a territory. President Obama is currently plagued by allegations that he has fake college and university transcripts, a phony social security number issued in Connecticut, and other padded resume items. Did Hawaii’s fake BBRDW documents portend today’s questions about Obama’s past?

BBRDW conducted its business in the heart of Honolulu’s business district, where the Bank of Hawaii was located and where Obama grandmother Madelyn Dunham ran the escrow accounts. The bank would handle much of BBRDW’s covert financial transactions.

Manchurian Candidate?

Obama/Soetoro and the “years of living dangerously” in Jakarta

It is clear that Dunham Soetoro and her Indonesian husband, President Obama’s step-father, were closely involved in the CIA’s operations to steer Indonesia away from the Sino-Soviet orbit during the “years of living dangerously” after the overthrow of Sukarno. WMR has discovered that some of the CIA’s top case officers were assigned to various official and non-official cover assignments in Indonesia during this time frame, including under the cover of USAID, the Peace Corps, and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA).

One of the closest CIA contacts for Suharto was former CIA Jakarta embassy officer Kent B. Crane. Crane was so close to Suharto after “retiring” from the CIA, he was reportedly one of the only “private” businessmen given an Indonesian diplomatic passport by Suharto’s government. Crane’s company, the Crane Group, was involved in supplying small arms to the military forces of the United States, Indonesia, and other nations. A foreign policy adviser to Vice President Spiro Agnew, Crane was later nominated as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia by President Ronald Reagan but the nomination was dead-on-arrival because of Crane’s dubious links to Suharto. The ambassadorship would instead go to John Holdridge, a close colleague of Kissinger. Holdridge was succeeded in Jakarta by Paul Wolfowitz.

Suharto’s cronies, who included Mochtar and James Riady of the Lippo Group, would later stand accused of funneling over $1 million of illegal foreign contributions to Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.

President Obama has twice postponed official state visits to Indonesia, perhaps fearful of the attention such a trip would bring to the CIA connections of his mother and Indonesian step-father.

In the 1970s and 80s, Dunham was active in micro-loan projects for the Ford Foundation, the CIA-linked East-West Center, and USAID in Indonesia. One of the individuals assigned to the U.S. embassy and helped barricade the compound during a violent anti-U.S. student demonstration during the 1965 Suharto coup against Sukarno was Dr. Gordon Donald, Jr. Assigned to the embassy’s Economic Section, Donald was responsible for USAID micro-financing for Indonesian farmers, the same project that Dunham Soetoro would work on for USAID in the 1970s, after her USAID job of teaching English in Indonesia. In a 1968 book, “Who’s Who in the CIA,” published in West Berlin, Donald is identified as a CIA officer who was also assigned to Lahore, Pakistan, where Dunham would eventually live for five years in the Hilton International Hotel while working on microfinancing for the Asian Development Bank.

Another “Who’s Who in the CIA” Jakarta alumnus is Robert F. Grealy, who later became the director for international relations for the Asia-Pacific for J P Morgan Chase and a director for the American-Indonesian Chamber of Commerce. J P Morgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon is being mentioned as a potential replacement for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, whose father, Peter Geithner, was the Ford Foundation’s Asia grant-selector who funneled the money to Ann Dunham’s Indonesian projects.

CIA Black Projects and Hawaii

While in Pakistan, Dunham’s son Barack visited her in 1980 and 1981. Obama visited Karachi, Lahore, and Hyderabad, India during his south Asia visits. It was during the time period that the CIA was beefing up its anti-Soviet operations in Afghanistan from Pakistan.

A January 31, 1958, heavily-redacted formerly Secret NOFORN [no foreign dissemination] memorandum for CIA Director Allen Dulles from the Deputy Assistant Director of the CIA for Research and Reports [name redacted] reports on a fact-finding mission to the Far East, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East from November 17 through December 21, 1957.

The CIA Office of Research and Reports (ORR) chief reports a meeting with the staff of retired Army General Jesmond Balmer, a senior CIA official in Hawaii, about requests by the Commander-in-Chief Pacific (CINCPAC) for “a number of detailed, time-consuming research studies.” The ORR chief then reports about a CIA “survey of students at the University of Hawaii who have both Chinese language and research ability.” The ORR chief also reports that at a South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) Counter Subversion Seminar at Baguio, Philippines held from November 26-29, 1957, the Economic Subcommittee discussed an “economic development fund” to combat “Sino-Soviet Bloc subversive activities in the area and a consideration of possible counter-measures which might be employed.”

The Thailand and Philippines delegations were pushing hard for U.S. funding for an economic development fund, which may have provided the impetus for later USAID projects in the region, including those with which Peter Geithner and Obama’s mother were intimately involved.

Although CIA geo-political covert operations at the University of Hawaii are well-documented, the agency’s darker side of research and MK-UKTRA type operations has not generally been associated with the University of Hawaii.

A series of formerly Confidential CIA memoranda, dated May 15, 1972, points to the involvement of both the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the CIA, and the University of Hawaii in the CIA’s behavioral science program. The memos are signed by then-Deputy Director of the CIA Bronson Tweedy, the chief of the Intelligence Community’s Program Review Group (PRG) [name redacted], and CIA Director Richard Helms. The subject of the memos is “ARPA Supported Research Relating to Intelligence Product,” The memo from the PRG chief discusses a conference held on May 11, 1972, attended by Lt. Col. Austin Kibler, ARPA’s Director of Behavioral Research. Kibler was the chief for ARPA research into behavior modification and remote viewing. Others mentioned in the PRG chief’s memo include CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence Edward Proctor, the CIA Deputy Director for Science and Technology Carl Duckett, and Director of the Office of National Estimates John Huizenga.

In 1973, after CIA Director James Schlesinger ordered a review of all CIA programs, the CIA developed a set of documents on various CIA programs collectively called the “Family Jewels.” Most of these documents were released in 2007 but it was also revealed that Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s director of MKULTRA, the agency’s behavior modification, brainwashing, and drug testing component, had been ordered by Helms, before he resigned as CIA director, to be destroyed. Duckett, in one memo from Ben Evans of the CIA to CIA Director William Colby, dated May 8, 1973, conveys that he “thinks the Director would be ill-advised to say he is acquainted with this program,” meaning Gottlieb’s drug testing program under MKULKTRA.

Senior Gerald Ford administration officials, including Chief of Staff Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ensured that after the production of the “Family Jewels” documents, no CIA revelations were made about CIA psychological behavior-altering programs, including MKULTRA and Project ARTICHOKE.

The May 15, 1972, set of memos appears to be related to the CIA’s initial research, code named SCANATE, in 1972 into psychic warfare, including the use of psychics for purposes of remote viewing espionage and mind control. The memo discussed Kibler from ARPA and “his contractor,” which was later discovered to be Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California.

In a memo from CIA Director Helms to, among others, Duckett, Huizenga, Proctor, and the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which later inherited reote viewing from the CIA under the code name GRILL FLAME, Helms insists that ARPA had been supporting research into behavioral science and its potential for intelligence production ”for a number of years” at “M.I.T., Yale, the University of Michigan, U.C.L.A., and University of Hawaii and other institutions as well as in corporate research facilities.”

The role of the University of Hawaii in CIA psych-war operations continues to this day. The chief of research for DIA’s Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC) Behavioral Sciences Program, Dr. Susan Brandon, who was reportedly involved in a covert program run by the American Psychological Association (APA), Rand Corporation, and the CIA to employ “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including sleep and sensory deprivation, intense pain, and extreme isolation on prisoners held at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and other “black prisons,” received her PhD in Psychology from the University of Hawaii. Brandon also served as assistant director of Social, Behavioral, and Educational Sciences for the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the George W. Bush White House.

The CIA’s close connections to the University of Hawaii continued to the late 1970s, when the former President of the University of Hawaii from 1969 to 1974, Harlan Cleveland, was a special invited speaker at CIA headquarters on May 10, 1977. Cleveland served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs from 1961 to 1965 and Lyndon Johnson’s ambassador to NATO from 1965 to 1969 before taking up his position at the University of Hawaii.

A CIA Director of Training memo dated May 21, 1971, reports on the active recruitment of a U.S. Marine officer who was entering graduate school at the University of Hawaii.

The Family of Obama and the CIA

There are volumes of written material on the CIA backgrounds of George H. W. Bush and CIA-related activities by his father and children, including former President George W. Bush. Barack Obama, on the other hand, cleverly masked his own CIA connections as well as those of his mother, father, step-father, and grandmother (there is very little known about Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham, who was supposedly in the furniture business in Hawaii after serving in Europe during World War II). Presidents and vice presidents do not require security background checks, unlike other members of the federal government, to hold office. That job is left up to the press. In 2008, the press failed miserably in its duty to vet the man who would win the White House. With the ties of Obama’s parents to the University of Hawaii and its links to MKULTRA and ARTICHOKE, a nagging question remains: Is Barack Obama a real-life “Manchurian Candidate?”

Add one more Obama family member to the CIA payroll.

By Wayne Madsen

WMR previously reported on the CIA links of President Obama’s mother, father, step-father, grandmother to the CIA. Not much is known about Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham, who Obama mistakenly referred to as “his father” in two speeches, one recently to the Disabled American Veterans.

What is officially known about Stanley Armour Dunham is that he served with the 9th Air Force in Britain and France prior to and after the D-Day invasion. After the war, Dunham and his wife, Madelyn and his daughter Stanley Ann — Obama’s mother — moved to Berkeley, California; El Dorado, Kansas; Seattle; and Honolulu. Armour Dunham is said to have worked for a series of furniture stores.

Obama maintains that his mother and father first met in a Russian-language class at the University of Hawaii in 1959. However, a photograph has emerged of Stanley Armour welcoming Barack Obama, Sr., complete with traditional Hawaiian welcoming leis, from Kenya. Obama, Sr. was the only Kenyan student airlifted to Hawaii as part of the CIA-inspired Airlift Africa project that saw Obama and 279 other students from British eastern and southern African colonies brought to the United States for college degrees prior to their homelands gaining independence from Britain. The students were selected by Kenyan nationalist leader Tom Mboya who would later conduct surveillance for the CIA at pan-African nationalist meetings. Mboya was particularly focused on two African leaders who were seen as too close to the Sino-Soviet bloc, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Sekout Toure of Guinea.

Stanley Armour Dunham with Barack Obama, Sr. at welcoming ceremony to Hawaii. The presence of two US Navy personnel indicates the plane may have landed at Hickam Air Force Base, an indication of the U.S. government's and CIA's role in the Airlift Africa project.

The photograph of Armour Dunham with Barack Obama, Sr., indicates that the “furniture salesman” in Hawaii was, in fact, working with a CIA-funded project to rapidly educate aspiring politicians to serve in post-independence African governments to counter Soviet- and Chinese-backed political leaders in the region.

There is a strong reason to believe that Armour Dunham worked in the 1950s for the CIA in the Middle East. An FBI file on Armour Dunham existed but the bureau claimed it destroyed the file on May 1, 1997. Considering the sour relations between the FBI and CIA during the Cold War, it is likely that Armour Dunham was being monitored by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in the same manner as a number of other CIA officials and agents were being surveilled. Similarly, the pre-1968 passport records of Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, were destroyed by the State Department.

There is a photographic clue that the Dunhams may have been assigned by the CIA to Beirut, Lebanon in the early 1950s. A photograph of Obama’s mother and grandparents has emerged that shows Stanley Ann Dunham wearing what may be a school uniform with the insignia of “NdJ,” which stands for the College Notre-Dame de Jamhour, a private Jesuit Catholic French language school in Beirut, Lebanon. Graduates of the school include three former presidents of Lebanon, Amine Gemayel, Bashir Gemayel, and Charles Helou, all of whom maintained close relations with Washington.

go to a private school in Lebanon in the early 1950s while her father [middle] worked for the CIA in Beirut?”]There is also the curious nature of President Obama’s Social Security Number, issued in Connecticut, a state where there is no other evidence of his ever being a resident. Adding to the mystery is a New York City address for a “male” named Stanley Ann Dunham, 235 E. 40th St Apt 8F, New York NY 10016-1747. The address is a few blocks away from the address of the Ford Foundation. Ann Dunham did work briefly in New York for the Ford Foundation.

On August 9, 2010, WMR reported, “In a December 19, 1971, article in the Boston Globe by Dan Pinck, [a historian and former OSS officer] titled ‘Is everyone in the CIA?’ it is alleged that identifying US Agency for International Development (USAID) officers as CIA agents was a ‘reasonably accurate accounting of certain leading operatives and associates of the CIA.’ President Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro worked for USAID in rural Java in Indonesia. Pinck’s article was a review of a 1968 book, ‘Who’s Who in the CIA’ published in Berlin.”

WMR has obtained a rare copy of “Who’s Who in the CIA,” from England. The book, published in West Berlin in 1968, lists some 3,000 CIA agents and agents-of-influence around the world.

The book also contains a reference to one CIA operative whose area of primary place of operation was Mercer Island, Washington. He was retired Air Force General Don Zabriskie Zimmermann, who was the Chief Engineer for the Boeing Company in Seattle. Before retiring from the Air Force, Zimmermann was the Air Force Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Development in Foreign Countries. Ann Stanley Dunham reportedly graduated from Mercer Island High School in 1960 and met Obama later that year in a Russian language class after her parents moved to Hawaii. Stanley Ann’s mother, Madelyn Dunham, worked at a Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas during World War II.

The book lists the number of CIA agents in countries during the 1950s and 60s where Obama’s father, mother, step-father Lolo Soetori, and allegedly, his grandmother and grandfather worked:

Indonesia

Jakarta 64

Surabaya 12

Medan 8

Hollandia 1

Kenya

Nairobi 19

Mombassa 2

Lebanon

Beirut 61 (including one agent also assigned to Jakarta, Lahore, and Karachi and another assigned to Lahore)

Hawaii

Honolulu 6 (one agent also assigned to Canton Island and another was fluent in French, Stanley Ann Dunham spoke French, Urdu, Bahasa Indonesian, and she studied Javanese at the University of Hawaii, in addition to Russian).

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. He has written for several renowned papers and blogs.

Madsen is a regular contributor on Russia Today. He has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. Madsen has taken on Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity on their television shows. He has been invited to testifty as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel of the French government.

As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He subsequently worked for the National Security Agency, the Naval Data Automation Command, Department of State, RCA Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation.

Madsen is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), Association for Intelligence Officers (AFIO), and the National Press Club. He is a regular contributor to Opinion Maker