Author's posts
Feb 08 2010
Fire Under Their Seats – Pt 4: Progressives & The Democratic Party
This is the fourth and last segment of Paul Jay’s interview of journalism professor Jeff Cohen of FAIR and the Park Center for Independent Media.
In Part 3 Cohen talked about the struggle for power and direction within the Democratic Party from the days of the Viet Nam War to the present, and wound up with “Frankly… I would love to see a primary challenge to Obama when he’s up for re-election… Because unless you build a base through elections and then you hold the officials accountable, then you’ll never get anywhere.”
Here in the conclusion of the interview Cohen expands on those ideas and fills in some of the outlines to draw a rough set of guidelines or roadmap of how to get from where things stand now with the Democrats as out and out corporatists to a world of the kind of progressive populism they have been well known for at various points in history, and how it is going to take a no more Mr. Nice Guy approach from progressives and a lot of very hardnosed and fearless aggressiveness, of the kind that I think Muhammad Ali meant when he noted so many years ago “He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.”
Real News Network – February 6, 2010
Cohen: Far right Republicans are dangerous, but also need to primary against corporate Democrats
Part 1 of this interview is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here.
Feb 07 2010
Wall Street CEOs Organizing To Buy U.S. Elections
The January 21 Supreme Court decision [.pdf] in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case lifted bans on corporate spending for campaign finance, drawing heavy criticism from across the country for the ruling’s potential to undermine the American democratic process.
Now with that ruling in their back pockets, “[a]t least half a dozen leaders of the Republican Party have joined forces to create a new political group with the goal of organizing grass-roots support and raising funds ahead of the 2010 midterm elections, according to people familiar with the effort”, says the Wall Street journal in an article January 30.
The Supreme Court ruling could potentially allow the group, called the American Action Network, to take unlimited contributions from corporations for use in political campaigns.
Feb 06 2010
Fire In The Belly – Pt 3: Progressives & The Democratic Party
Journalism professor Jeff Cohen of FAIR and the Park Center for Independent Media on the struggle within the Democratic Party, starting from the Viet Nam War:
There’s no doubt that there’s an awakening. What concerns me is that the liberal base, the Democratic Party base, has never been more educated, in my view, and that’s because of the independent media. The democratic base is against an imperial foreign policy. The democratic base is for real medicare for all, or at least the strongest public option that would really hurt private insurance. There’s an understanding of history, and again it’s largely because the independent media is giving us the news in real time, every day when we click on the computer and we watch Real News, we watch Democracy Now.
What hasn’t translated is while we have this boom in independent media on the Internet, we don’t have a boom of independent politics.
What I believe are needed are new groups, that will be on the Internet, mobilizing the millions to make the kinds of demands of the Democrats that the right wing base, which has clearly transformed the country, the right wing base in the Republican Party not only took over a major party, they haven’t let up on that party until their agenda is put in place, whereas on our side we don’t have that.
What needs to happen, this is what a few groups are doing, Progressive Democrats of America is one, the idea is we need to take over that major political party.
When people talk about change, and then they deliver only for insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and Wall Street, you vote them out. You primary them. You know this is what the right wing has done for decades. It’s what they’re doing now.
What we get from MoveOn historically and other groups is apologies for democratic office holders who have faked left with their rhetoric and then governed for big business. And what we need is to primary these people.
Frankly… I would love to see a primary challenge to Obama when he’s up for re-election.
Because unless you build a base through elections and then you hold the officials accountable, then you’ll never get anywhere.
Real News Network – February 6, 2010
This is Part 3. Part 1 of this interview is here. Part 2 is here.
Part 4 is still to come…
Feb 06 2010
Obama Waits Open Thread
Obama To Wait For Next Bruce Springsteen Album For Word On Economy
WASHINGTON-Faced with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the White House announced Tuesday that a cautious President Obama is awaiting the release of the next Bruce Springsteen album before moving forward with additional economic stimulus initiatives.
“If Mr. Springsteen puts out an E-Street Band project with one rave-up and several tracks containing an overarching theme of redemption, the president will certainly take that as a strong indicator of economic recovery,” said press secretary Robert Gibbs, adding that an album cover featuring an American flag would be “extremely promising.” “However, if he records a stark, haunting, Nebraska-esque exploration of blue-collar life, then it is time to lower interest rates and take immediate steps toward drastically reevaluating our current strategy.”
The president has reportedly eschewed the supplementary Mellencamp Little Pink Housing Index used during the Reagan administration, as economists now widely believe it conveys a derivative, shallow view of the American fiscal landscape.
Dancing In The Dark
Feb 05 2010
We’re Not In Kansas Anymore
Over at Mindfully.org you can find hundreds of big and small literary and informational treasures for those interested in peering through the veils of darkness that the media does it’s best to pull over our eyes with all of their well practiced smoke and mirrors.
One such is in the Political/Social category. An article titled Beyond Voting about the limits of electoral politics, that is particularly relevant this year.
Here’s an excerpt, but the entire thing is worth a close read, and some intense discussion or at least much thought, IMHO…
Roughly speaking we can distinguish five degrees of “government”:
(1) Unrestricted freedom
(2) Direct democracy
(3) Delegate democracy
(4) Representative democracy
(5) Overt minority dictatorship
The present society oscillates between (4) and (5), i.e. between overt minority rule and covert minority rule camouflaged by a facade of token democracy. A liberated society would eliminate (4) and (5) and would progressively reduce the need for (2) and (3). . . .
…
In representative democracy people abdicate their power to elected officials.
The candidates’ stated policies are limited to a few vague generalities, and once they are elected there is little control over their actual decisions on hundreds of issues – apart from the feeble threat of changing one’s vote, a few years later, to some equally uncontrollable rival politician.
Feb 04 2010
Deeper Politics: For Profit Government, Intelligence, Foreign Policy, and War
Last week we heard Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and University of California at Berkeley Professor, and author of Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), talk with Paul Jay of The Real News in the first and second parts of a multipart series about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war in Afghanistan.
Scott also talked about an “iceberg” analogy of US politics in which which “the visible part, the public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of the totality of what’s going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution at all”
Here in part 3 of the series Scott again talks with Jay, this time about something much more sinister that permeates American political reality penetrating and corrupting much deeper than the normal military-industrial complex we’ve read about in the past – about the fact that the way to succeed in Washington has become to support the next use of the war machine to attack its next chosen target – about privatized intelligence services creating for profit wars, representing a private business that has become a form of permanent government – and concludes that the only way he can see out of the mire is that “We have to pull back from the two-party system and start a new kind of politics. We have to essentially build a new kind of civil society in America. And this is not easy, and I’m not confident that it will happen. The most likely thing to happen is that America will just go into decline from overextension the way that Britain went into decline from overextension before it“.
To give you an example of how powerful they are, when it was clear that the intelligence about Iraq [had] been skewed and we went in because of weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there. And they commissioned (Science Applications International Corporation) SAIC to investigate what went wrong. And SAIC came up with a report that didn’t mention that some of the key people who had been saying that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction had been saying that it would be necessary to deal with him militarily were people who were in fact working for SAIC. So when you give a private corporation the job of seeing whether we should go to war against a country, and then you give that same private corporation the job of finding out why false information was given, you can see that there has been a very, very deep corruption of the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence in Washington and SAIC.
JAY: Who are some of the individuals you referring to?
SCOTT: If you don’t mind, I’m going to read from an article by Donald Barlett that you already quoted from. This was David Kay, who was on the committee, and this is what he said in 1998 to the Senate Armed Services Committee, that Saddam Hussein, quote, “remains in power with weapons of mass destruction,” and that, quote, “military action is needed.” Wayne Downing, a retired general and proselytized for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis, quote, “are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us.” Both of these men, David Kay and Wayne Downing, worked for SAIC. And so a decent analysis of what went wrong would have pointed to the fact that we were relying on people who had, really, a profit motive. I’m not saying that they did all of this thinking only of profit; I’m saying that they were totally part of this dominance mindset that I’m talking about, and they know that the way to succeed in Washington is to support the next target, the policy for the next use of the war machine.
JAY: Now, Robert Gates, Obama’s secretary of defense, used to be part of SAIC as well. Is that true?
SCOTT: Was on the board of directors of SAIC, yes. And, you know, for that matter, Mike McConnell was with Booz Allen Hamilton.
JAY: So, given the Obama administration, again, promises of a new mindset, has the role of SAIC and these kinds of companies changed in any way?
SCOTT: No. See, this is why I talk about deep politics.
Real News Network – February 04, 2010
Full Transcript here
New mindset for US foreign policy? Pt.3
Scott: The military-industrial-counterterrorism complex is beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmare
Feb 04 2010
Deeper Politics: For Profit Government, Intelligence, Foreign Policy, and War
Last week we heard Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and University of California at Berkeley Professor, and author of Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), talk with Paul Jay of The Real News in the first and second parts of a multipart series about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war in Afghanistan.
Scott also talked about an “iceberg” analogy of US politics in which which “the visible part, the public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of the totality of what’s going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution at all”
Here in part 3 of the series Scott again talks with Jay, this time about something much more sinister that permeates American political reality penetrating and corrupting much deeper than the normal military-industrial complex we’ve read about in the past – about the fact that the way to succeed in Washington has become to support the next use of the war machine to attack its next chosen target – about privatized intelligence services creating for profit wars, representing a private business that has become a form of permanent government – and concludes that the only way he can see out of the mire is that “We have to pull back from the two-party system and start a new kind of politics. We have to essentially build a new kind of civil society in America. And this is not easy, and I’m not confident that it will happen. The most likely thing to happen is that America will just go into decline from overextension the way that Britain went into decline from overextension before it“.
To give you an example of how powerful they are, when it was clear that the intelligence about Iraq [had] been skewed and we went in because of weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there. And they commissioned (Science Applications International Corporation) SAIC to investigate what went wrong. And SAIC came up with a report that didn’t mention that some of the key people who had been saying that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction had been saying that it would be necessary to deal with him militarily were people who were in fact working for SAIC. So when you give a private corporation the job of seeing whether we should go to war against a country, and then you give that same private corporation the job of finding out why false information was given, you can see that there has been a very, very deep corruption of the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence in Washington and SAIC.
JAY: Who are some of the individuals you referring to?
SCOTT: If you don’t mind, I’m going to read from an article by Donald Barlett that you already quoted from. This was David Kay, who was on the committee, and this is what he said in 1998 to the Senate Armed Services Committee, that Saddam Hussein, quote, “remains in power with weapons of mass destruction,” and that, quote, “military action is needed.” Wayne Downing, a retired general and proselytized for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis, quote, “are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us.” Both of these men, David Kay and Wayne Downing, worked for SAIC. And so a decent analysis of what went wrong would have pointed to the fact that we were relying on people who had, really, a profit motive. I’m not saying that they did all of this thinking only of profit; I’m saying that they were totally part of this dominance mindset that I’m talking about, and they know that the way to succeed in Washington is to support the next target, the policy for the next use of the war machine.
JAY: Now, Robert Gates, Obama’s secretary of defense, used to be part of SAIC as well. Is that true?
SCOTT: Was on the board of directors of SAIC, yes. And, you know, for that matter, Mike McConnell was with Booz Allen Hamilton.
JAY: So, given the Obama administration, again, promises of a new mindset, has the role of SAIC and these kinds of companies changed in any way?
SCOTT: No. See, this is why I talk about deep politics.
Real News Network – February 04, 2010
Full Transcript here
New mindset for US foreign policy? Pt.3
Scott: The military-industrial-counterterrorism complex is beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmare
Feb 04 2010
Deeper Politics: For Profit Government, Intelligence, Foreign Policy, and War
Last week we heard Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and University of California at Berkeley Professor, and author of Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), talk with Paul Jay of The Real News in the first and second parts of a multipart series about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war in Afghanistan.
Scott also talked about an “iceberg” analogy of US politics in which which “the visible part, the public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of the totality of what’s going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution at all”
Here in part 3 of the series Scott again talks with Jay, this time about something much more sinister that permeates American political reality penetrating and corrupting much deeper than the normal military-industrial complex we’ve read about in the past – about the fact that the way to succeed in Washington has become to support the next use of the war machine to attack its next chosen target – about privatized intelligence services creating for profit wars, representing a private business that has become a form of permanent government – and concludes that the only way he can see out of the mire is that “We have to pull back from the two-party system and start a new kind of politics. We have to essentially build a new kind of civil society in America. And this is not easy, and I’m not confident that it will happen. The most likely thing to happen is that America will just go into decline from overextension the way that Britain went into decline from overextension before it“.
To give you an example of how powerful they are, when it was clear that the intelligence about Iraq [had] been skewed and we went in because of weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there. And they commissioned (Science Applications International Corporation) SAIC to investigate what went wrong. And SAIC came up with a report that didn’t mention that some of the key people who had been saying that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction had been saying that it would be necessary to deal with him militarily were people who were in fact working for SAIC. So when you give a private corporation the job of seeing whether we should go to war against a country, and then you give that same private corporation the job of finding out why false information was given, you can see that there has been a very, very deep corruption of the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence in Washington and SAIC.
JAY: Who are some of the individuals you referring to?
SCOTT: If you don’t mind, I’m going to read from an article by Donald Barlett that you already quoted from. This was David Kay, who was on the committee, and this is what he said in 1998 to the Senate Armed Services Committee, that Saddam Hussein, quote, “remains in power with weapons of mass destruction,” and that, quote, “military action is needed.” Wayne Downing, a retired general and proselytized for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis, quote, “are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us.” Both of these men, David Kay and Wayne Downing, worked for SAIC. And so a decent analysis of what went wrong would have pointed to the fact that we were relying on people who had, really, a profit motive. I’m not saying that they did all of this thinking only of profit; I’m saying that they were totally part of this dominance mindset that I’m talking about, and they know that the way to succeed in Washington is to support the next target, the policy for the next use of the war machine.
JAY: Now, Robert Gates, Obama’s secretary of defense, used to be part of SAIC as well. Is that true?
SCOTT: Was on the board of directors of SAIC, yes. And, you know, for that matter, Mike McConnell was with Booz Allen Hamilton.
JAY: So, given the Obama administration, again, promises of a new mindset, has the role of SAIC and these kinds of companies changed in any way?
SCOTT: No. See, this is why I talk about deep politics.
Real News Network – February 04, 2010
Full Transcript here
New mindset for US foreign policy? Pt.3
Scott: The military-industrial-counterterrorism complex is beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmare
Feb 04 2010
Deeper Politics: For Profit Government, Intelligence, Foreign Policy, and War
Last week we heard Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and University of California at Berkeley Professor, and author of Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), talk with Paul Jay of The Real News in the first and second parts of a multipart series about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war in Afghanistan.
Scott also talked about an “iceberg” analogy of US politics in which which “the visible part, the public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of the totality of what’s going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution at all”
Here in part 3 of the series Scott again talks with Jay, this time about something much more sinister that permeates American political reality penetrating and corrupting much deeper than the normal military-industrial complex we’ve read about in the past – about the fact that the way to succeed in Washington has become to support the next use of the war machine to attack its next chosen target – about privatized intelligence services creating for profit wars, representing a private business that has become a form of permanent government – and concludes that the only way he can see out of the mire is that “We have to pull back from the two-party system and start a new kind of politics. We have to essentially build a new kind of civil society in America. And this is not easy, and I’m not confident that it will happen. The most likely thing to happen is that America will just go into decline from overextension the way that Britain went into decline from overextension before it“.
To give you an example of how powerful they are, when it was clear that the intelligence about Iraq [had] been skewed and we went in because of weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there. And they commissioned (Science Applications International Corporation) SAIC to investigate what went wrong. And SAIC came up with a report that didn’t mention that some of the key people who had been saying that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction had been saying that it would be necessary to deal with him militarily were people who were in fact working for SAIC. So when you give a private corporation the job of seeing whether we should go to war against a country, and then you give that same private corporation the job of finding out why false information was given, you can see that there has been a very, very deep corruption of the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence in Washington and SAIC.
JAY: Who are some of the individuals you referring to?
SCOTT: If you don’t mind, I’m going to read from an article by Donald Barlett that you already quoted from. This was David Kay, who was on the committee, and this is what he said in 1998 to the Senate Armed Services Committee, that Saddam Hussein, quote, “remains in power with weapons of mass destruction,” and that, quote, “military action is needed.” Wayne Downing, a retired general and proselytized for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis, quote, “are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us.” Both of these men, David Kay and Wayne Downing, worked for SAIC. And so a decent analysis of what went wrong would have pointed to the fact that we were relying on people who had, really, a profit motive. I’m not saying that they did all of this thinking only of profit; I’m saying that they were totally part of this dominance mindset that I’m talking about, and they know that the way to succeed in Washington is to support the next target, the policy for the next use of the war machine.
JAY: Now, Robert Gates, Obama’s secretary of defense, used to be part of SAIC as well. Is that true?
SCOTT: Was on the board of directors of SAIC, yes. And, you know, for that matter, Mike McConnell was with Booz Allen Hamilton.
JAY: So, given the Obama administration, again, promises of a new mindset, has the role of SAIC and these kinds of companies changed in any way?
SCOTT: No. See, this is why I talk about deep politics.
Real News Network – February 04, 2010
Full Transcript here
New mindset for US foreign policy? Pt.3
Scott: The military-industrial-counterterrorism complex is beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmare
Feb 03 2010
Pt 2: Progressives and the Democratic Party
Here is the second part of Paul Jay’s talk with journalism professor Jeff Cohen of FAIR and the Park Center for Independent Media.
Cohen here goes into much more depth about the history and the evolution of the corporate influences that took took both Democrats and Republicans to the far right in a long attempt beginning in the late 1960’s and 70’s at taking over the Republican Party, at marginalizing the left, the antiwar movement, and progressives, and then a corporate movement beginning in the 80’s to coopt the Democratic Party, and how we got into the current political situation.
Real News Network – February 3, 2010
Part 1 of this interview is here.
Part 3 is still to come…
Feb 03 2010
Progressives and the Democratic Party
Jeff Cohen is a media critic and lecturer, founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, a national center for the study of media outlets that create and distribute content outside traditional corporate systems and news organizations, where he is an associate professor of journalism.
Cohen also founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986.
Here Cohen talks with Paul Jay of The Real News about the larger significance and social context of the Massachusetts election, about the message of “change” that has been a staple of Democratic candidates for decades, and about the the term “swing voter” and what it means in the context of today’s politics, and concludes that the key attribute of swing voters is that they are not ideological at all, and that if Obama and the Democrats don’t deliver real change they will simply vote against them.
In other words it seems that people like your average (if there is such a thing) DD’er are representative of a very large segment of the population, and hold the future of political parties in their hands, from what Cohen is saying here.
He also tackles the question of why it is that Democrats seem to be never able to deliver on their messages of change, and comes out with some very interesting observations.
Cohen’s own site is JeffCohen.org
Real News Network – February 2, 2010
I get the strange feeling for some reason that Cohen might have been reading DD and places like it.
Part 2 of this interview is here.
Feb 01 2010
The Deep State, Part 2, PD Scott
SCOTT: Well, it certainly informs the vision of people around him. It was the neocon vision for the world. Brzezinski was certainly not a neocon, but on this point he sounds very much like them. You know, when [Paul] Wolfowitz and [Lewis “Scooter”] Libby were working for Cheney, when Cheney was secretary of defense back in 1992, they came up with this defense planning guidance draft which was later disowned, but it was the same thing, that we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. And then there was a JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] strategic document, Joint Vision 2020, which for all I know is still in force, calling for “full spectrum dominance.” And this is a quote from the document: full spectrum dominance means the ability of US forces operating alone or with our allies to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations. I mean, this talk is just insane, but it is the language of geopolitics, and I think it’s the language that people learn in military schools. And that’s why it’s wrong to think it was just neocons. I’ve written something very recently and I’d like to quote it: all thought is socially conditioned, and at the center of large, highly developed societies, all bureaucratic thought is bureaucratically conditioned. But at the heart of dominant societies, this bureaucratic thinking slowly acquires the features of a dominance mindset, and those conditioned by this mindset come to participate in what I call the war machine. We saw it in Britain. And ironically, you know, when Britain started talking about global dominance, it was Sir Halford Mackinder, and the year was 1919, when Britain was already, after World War I, destined to no longer play the role that it played before. It’s a way, I think, of trying to keep the morale up. And I think that Brzezinski, when he wrote that book in 1997, he was worried that America would not be interested in playing the dominance role. And he, of course, is by background a Pole, for whom the great enemy in the world was Russia. And so he was trying to cheer America on to do things which it’s not capable of doing. His metaphor is The Grand Chessboard, which is, of course, a zero-sum model for world politics. The good sense of geopolitics is the way it’s been talked about by, say, Kissinger, when he says it’s seeking a mode of equilibrium in the world. And that, I think, is [inaudible] I think a better model than a chessboard for the world would be a canoe, an overloaded canoe with some very heavy players and it, and the art of geopolitics is to learn not to capsize the canoe.
JAY: And when you look at President Obama’s own statements during the election campaign when asked about foreign policy, he always rooted himself very clearly in what he said was the tradition of American pragmatic foreign policy, starting with Truman. He even included George Bush senior, Reagan. He never differentiated himself fundamentally, other than with George Bush junior. But the idea, even his opposition to the war in Iraq, had to do with that it was a stupid war that would weaken America’s ability to project power. So if you look at, in terms of Latin America, Afghanistan, his relationship with Russia, in terms of this either change of mindset or traditional, dominant theory of dominance, where do you put him after one year?
SCOTT: Well, as long as he’s trying to look forward to a second term, he’s going to fit into Washington. And I watched Brzezinski’s interview with you-a very good interview, I thought-and I can see how Brzezinski repeatedly said that he’s now no longer inside the system; he’s an outside adviser and remote from the way power decisions are made. I think that’s true. That allows him to be much wiser than he was when he wrote his book or when he had his famous interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998. He is a wise man now, and almost by definition that means he doesn’t have as much influence. The wise are not the people who prevail in Washington. So that Obama, now that he’s at the heart of things, he’s got to live with his joint chiefs, he’s got to live with his Democratic Party. I mean, a lot of us like to think that democracy is the answer, but if we mean by democracy the two-party system that we have, the two-party system is very definitely part of the problem, because he is going to get attacked. If he does anything to pull back from Afghanistan, if he does anything that looks like he’s knuckling under to those outside forces there, he will be jumped on by members of both parties, who are, of course, all elected with the same money from the same big donors. We used to emphasize how the big donors came from the military-industrial complex, but we have to add to that now, having seen what’s happened in the last couple of years, they’ve come also from Wall Street and the big banks. They’re all part of the same -.
Real News Network – February 1, 2010
Full Transcript here
New mindset for US foreign policy? Part 2
Peter Dale Scott: If you unleash the dogs of war it’s not easy to pull them back.
Part 1 of this interview is here.