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Eli Stephens | 1 Nov 01:00
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Re: Last minute stab by rightist Dobson against Obama


Louis quotes Obama:

"And one of the biggest savings we can make is to change our policy in Iraq.

"We are currently spending $10 billion a month in Iraq, when they have
a $79 billion dollar surplus. It seems to me that if we're going to
be strong at home as well as strong abroad, that we've got to look at
bringing that war to a close."

First of all, even if you think the basic point is valid (that the Iraqis "owe 
us" financially, rather than the other way around), the Iraqis at least claim 
that $79 billion figure that the Democrats like to throw around is b.s.:

http://lefti.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.html#8568008463956450212

Second of all, look closely at "we've got to look at bringing that war to a close."

Even if you believe THAT, it's a far cry from "we're going to end the war", 
something Obama USED to say.

And I'm sure Louis and everyone here knows that with Obama's current 
expectations, even the war in Iraq, at best, is going to continue to cost a 
substantial fraction of that $10 billion a month.

But finally, of course, most of the "savings" achieved there he proposes to 
spend in Afghanistan. In point of fact, he proposes to INCREASE the military 
budget. So the idea that he's going to either do away with deficit spending 
altogether, or continue deficit spending but spend the money on roads and 
bridges etc. instead of war is DIRECTLY CONTRADICTED by his own platform.
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Greg McDonald | 1 Nov 01:21
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Help stop imminent massacre of peace community in Colombia


Colombia Support Network has received information from the Peace  
Community of San Jose de Apartado that paramilitary forces are  
threatening its community members. Yesterday, paramilitaries in the  
region stopped three people and told them to take a message to their  
“town full of guerrillas.”  They told them that the people of La  
Esperanza (a settlement which is part of the Peace Community) must  
leave if they want to avoid being massacred, and that they have a  
list of six specific people living in the community that they intend  
to murder.  On the 28 and 29 of October, the army was present in  
homes and in the school of La Esperanza, preventing children from  
attending classes and putting the civilian population in great  
danger. Additionally, the army has been conducting an illegal census  
of the civilian population of the area. Other threats that have  
occurred are described in detail on the CSN website.

These events clearly demonstrate a plan to generate terror and to  
exterminate the people of the Peace Community of San Jose de  
Apartado.  We, therefore, urge you to contact the following  
individuals and to demand a stop to the planned massacre and that the  
army respect the rights of the civilian population.  In your  
messages, please ask why paramilitaries are so active in a region  
already controlled by the police and military.

-Your Senators and Representatives: see CSN In Action (http:// 
www.colombiasupport.net/actioncenter.html)

-The Political Attache of the US Embassy: Scott Fagan: FaganSR <at> state.gov

-In Colombia: General Hector Eduardo Pena, Commander 17th Brigade:
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Mark Lause | 1 Nov 01:22
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Re: Last minute stab by rightist Dobson against Obama

We've been experiencing the damned Democratic Party since the 1820s.
Let me know when when you've decided that we've experienced it
enough....

ML

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Walter Lippmann | 1 Nov 03:06
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Re: Last minute stab by rightist Dobson against Obama

MARK LAUSE wrote:
We've been experiencing the damned Democratic Party since the 1820s.
Let me know when when you've decided that we've experienced it
enough....
-------------------------------------------------------------------
ELI STEPHENS wrote:
There is NOTHING about Obama which wouldn't fit comfortably in the
no-longer existing "Rockefeller wing" of the Republican party.
==================================================================

Mark is wrong. The Democratic Party of today isn't the slavocracy's
party, it's the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy. My comment was about
how it is experienced by the MASSES of the American people, not by
the handful who call themselves Marxists, whose political influence
in the United States is relatively miniscule.

Eli is wrong. There are Rockefeller Republicans as well, starting
with the Rockefeller who runs Chase Manhattan Bank, and various
other moderate Republicans who have largely, but not entirely bee
pushed out. Even some of the Log Cabin Republicans would fit into
such a category. Not everyone in the Republican Party is a Bushoid.

It would be better if the Rockefeller wing of the Republican party
were able to be more influential and in charge. The problem is that
the whole spectrum of politics has moved to the right. Obama's not
all that different from the older Republican wing of the Republican
Party, that's pretty much the essence of the situation. 

Neither Nader nor McKinney have any chance of being elected, and so
it would be better if Obama were elected so that the masses of the
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Dbachmozart | 1 Nov 03:06
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1956 Kafr Qassem massacre lives on for Palestinians


Jonathan Cook, "Execution of 47 in Kafr Qassem  Commemorated: Message of 
Massacre Lives On for Palestinians"
Kafr Qassem had to wait until December last year to receive what some  
interpreted as an official apology. President Shimon Peres, who in 1956 headed  the 
Defense Ministry, told the villagers that "in the past a very serious event  
occurred that we greatly regret." In another possible sign of shifting  
attitudes, the Israeli media re-examined the massacre this month by interviewing  two 
former officers in the Border Police who were given the task of imposing the  
last-minute curfew on villages neighboring Kafr Qassem. The curfew was 
imposed  in the immediate build-up to Israel's surprise attack on the Sinai as part 
of  the Suez war. According to Israeli historian Tom Segev, it later emerged 
that  the decision to seal off the villages was one element of a contingency 
plan to  expel the inhabitants to Jordan under cover of the war. Mr. Arabi 
pointed out  that the entrances to Kafr Qassem were shut on three sides, leaving 
open only an  exit to the West Bank.

full -

_http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/cook301008.html_ 
(http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/cook301008.html) 

 
“The  great appear great to us only because we are on our knees. Let us  rise.
”

James Connolly
**************Plan your next getaway with AOL Travel.  Check out Today's Hot 
5 Travel Deals! 
(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1212416248x1200771803/aol?redir=http://travel.aol.com/discount-travel?ncid=emlcntustrav00000001)
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Louis Proyect | 1 Nov 03:30
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Re: Last minute stab by rightist Dobson against Obama

Walter wrote:
>so it would be better if Obama were elected so that the masses of 
>the people of the United States, and others who pay attention to 
>what the US president does, would go through and complete their 
>rather long experience.

Any connections between this and what Lenin said in "Ultraleftism, an 
infantile disorder" is purely coincidental. Lenin said that 
Communists should back Labor or Social Democratic candidates in 
instances where they have not yet become ruling parties. There is 
nothing that the Democrats can possibly do once they are in power 
again that they have not already done in terms of betraying the 
working people who voted for them. They have been anti-trade union, 
anti-poor, pro-war, etc. for many, many decades. In fact, workers 
understand this:

"Talk to Derek Wood, 28, as his Dalmatian tugs at a leash, and he 
says he is voting for Mr. McCain. He likes the tax cuts.

"People here have voted for Democrats since the 1930s, Mr. Wood said, 
and what is left? Ghosts hang from oaks and pumpkins sit on porches, 
but there are no children to demand trick or treat. If you are 28, 
you rent a U-Haul truck and leave."

--NY Times, Oct. 27, 2008

The reason workers continue to vote for the Democrats is the same 
reason that workers vote for capitalist parties everywhere in the 
world. Unless there is a rising tide of revolutionary action, workers 
tend to vote for bourgeois parties or reformist workers parties. That
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Walter Lippmann | 1 Nov 03:30
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Re: Last minute stab by rightist Dobson against Obama

SARTESIAN wrote, incorrectly:
It would be "better overall if Obama won"?  Better how, better for whom?
Better indeed, so... then how is Obama's victory better today than say 
Kerry's would have been 4 years ago; than Gore's 8 years ago?
--------------------------------------------------------------
I thought the civil rights struggle had taught us something-- that the 
struggle is not about replacing bad individuals in good institutions; it's 
about replacing the institutions themselves regardless of the individuals, 
which is exactly how and why the civil rights struggle transformed itself 
from one of formal equality, legislative equality, to one of social 
emancipation, which means, of course, class struggle.
Guess it didn't teach everyone that.
=====================================================================
WALTER responds:
What matters isn't what individual think as individuals, but what the
masses of people think in in their political consciousness. So it does
make an individual difference which individual holds the position since
individual are different from one another. Not a qualitative difference,
but a difference. Someone might push the button for thermonuclear war,
while someone else is less likely to do that, so it make a difference.

A tree makes a noise in the forest, even if no one is there to hear it.
Conscious, self-declared Marxists may well make a critical difference 
at specific moments in time, such as October (or November) 1917, but on
most occasions they don't. This moment, November 2008, is one in which
self-declared Marxists are making virtually no impact whatsoever in the
politics of the United States.

Who is Sartesian advocating voting for, if anyone? I assume he holds the
revolutionary position of abstention. Which is it, Sartesian?
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Fred Feldman | 1 Nov 03:32

Re: Last minute stab by rightist Dobson against Obama

MARK LAUSE wrote:
We've been experiencing the damned Democratic Party since the 1820s.
Let me know when when you've decided that we've experienced it
enough....

Fred comments: 
We will have experienced the Democratic Party, like cops and capitalism and
other things, "enough" when the oppressed and exploited are strong and
knowledgeable enough to be done with it. Until then, we won't be done
experiencing it.

It's sort of like The Long Goodbye.
Fred Feldman

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Walter Lippmann | 1 Nov 03:37
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Re: Last minute stab by rightist Dobson against Obama

LOUIS PROYECT wrote:
We live in a period when perhaps 1 in 100,000 workers thing that the
system must be changed. Our goal today is to assemble the
revolutionaries into a nation-wide and even world-wide movement to
prepare for the future. In other words, the same challenge that
confronted Lenin in 1902 and with the same opportunist and reformist
adversaries making the same rotten arguments that they always have.
====================================================================
This has nothing to do with the fact that the overwhelming majority
of the people of the United States today continue to believe that
politics is practiced through the two-party system and that to their
way of looking at who is likely to be elected on Tuesday, it makes
a difference. The masses, not the participants in a Marxist e-mail
discussion circle. That's whose decisive in politics at this time.

The value of candidacies like those of McKinney, Nader, LaRiva, 
Calero and the SP is that they raise general socialist propaganda
ideas and try to draw individuals into deeper thought and perhaps
some organized activity. Nothing wrong with any of that, but that
ought not be be confuses with changing social institutions.

Walter Lippmann
Los Angeles, California

=========================================
     WALTER LIPPMANN
     Los Angeles, California
     Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
     "Cuba - Un Paraíso bajo el bloqueo"
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Walter Lippmann | 1 Nov 03:41
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Virtual JFK: The 44th President’s Foreign Policy Challenge

Virtual JFK: The 44th President’s Foreign Policy Challenge
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081029_virtual_jfk_the_44th_presidents_foreign_policy_challenge/
Posted on Oct 29, 2008

By James G. Blight and janet M. Lang [short excerpt]

"Many regard this kind of calmness and resistance to making snap
judgments based on advice from bellicose advisers as one of Obama’s
strongest traits. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote
recently that he fears if John McCain had been president during the
Cuban missile crisis we would recall that event not as a crisis but
as “World War III”—assuming that anyone remained to recall it.

"Kristof endorses Obama. Why? Because Kristof believes that McCain’s
instincts lead him to snap decisions, pre-emptive decisions, meant to
“beat the other guy to the punch.” Kristof’s reference to the Cuban
missile crisis suggests that he believes a McCain-like president in
October 1962 would have agreed with the preponderance of JFK’s
advisers then who initially recommended an air attack on Cuba and an
invasion. 

Such an invasion, if militarily successful, would have
resulted in the U.S. occupation and governance of the island under
difficult circumstances, against a force of tough Cuban and Russian
fighters numbering in the hundreds of thousands. In other words, as
Cuban veterans from that era have said on many occasions, the U.S.
would have had its “Vietnam” in Cuba—a guerrilla war the U.S. was
unlikely to win and from which it would eventually have withdrawn in
defeat.
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