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President Obama has issued a signing statement refusing to comply with several provisions of the $106 billion war funding bill he signed into law last week. Obama says he will ignore a congressional mandate to pressure the World Bank to strengthen labor and environmental standards. Obama has also rejected a provision calling for the Treasury Department to report on the World Bank and IMF’s activities. The war funding bill included billions of dollars for the IMF. The signing statement is Obama’s sixth since taking office.

Latin American leaders stand united behind Zelaya, army arrests Telesur broadcasters and smother media , several army battalions pledge allegiance to the people against the plotters and the media doesn’t seem to care much.

ADRIAN BLEIFUSS PRADOS

[UPDATED BELOW]

For a while now, I’ve been  excited by the possibility that the rich and powerful  would make good on their threats and “go Galt,” vanishing without a trace and leaving their palaces and playgrounds behind for the rest of us.  It will almost be as fun as the Rapture, when supporters of the religious right get snatched into Heaven, leaving the world to “secular progressives,” feminists and sexual deviants.

Mark Sanford, conservative movement hero and nicely tanned governor of South Carolina, has been flirting with Galtitude since last week when he up and disappeared without giving the “moochers” and “looters”  in his family and staff any clue as to where he was going.

His beleaguered (and definately underpaid) press secretary claimed the governor was hiking the Appalachian Trail when, as it turns out, Sanford was actually in Argentina.  It’s all been pretty hilarious.

The secrecy surrounding the Mark “Tango” Sanford’s travels to South America can only mean one thing:  the captains of industry have selected Argentina as the location of their “Galt’s Gulch,” a top-secret  libertarian summer camp where good-looking, well-dressed capitalists will relax and enjoy Argentine reds and grass-fed beef while the world, deprived of their visionary leadership, goes to shit.

At first I bought the hiking story (yup, I’m a sucker) and assumed the tycoons were building their paradise in the woods of Appalachia where, after all, heroic libertarian mountain-folk and moonshiners have been going Galt since the 18th century.

But now it’s clear that Galt’s Gulch will be located in the Southern Cone, perhaps a lush valley hidden between the snowy peaks of the Argentine Andes, near the border with Chile.  Of course,  if it doesn’t work out there’s always seasteading.

________________

[UPDATE: To my great disappointment, Mark Sanford was apparently NOT establishing a secret  hideout for tycoons in an Andean Sangri-La.  Instead, he was wrapping up a romantic affair with a certain "dear, dear friend" from Argentina.  I guess seasteading it is.]

BHASKAR SUNKARA

Dearest agents of the bourgeois press,

Whatever Works came out last week, Woody Allen and Larry David together at last, the wet dream of every narcotic New Yorker!  Not unlike neo-classical economics it sounds better in theory than in practice. Nonetheless, I knew I would end up watching the whole film for the same reason I sat through Righteous Kill. Yet for some reason I decided to find out what your snarky film critics thought about it.  Being the internet-savvy young man that I am I did a quick Google News search for “Whatever Works” (intuitive huh?).  Here are the unedited titles of the first few results:

Woody Allen’s Latest: Works Like a Charm TIME

‘Whatever Works’ doesn’t for Woody Allen Los Angeles Times

Woody Allen’s ‘Whatever Works’ doesn’t USA Today

Woody Allen’s ‘Whatever Works’ not working that well New York Daily News

Review: Allen’s `Whatever Works’ not quite working Associated Press

Being a movie star ‘Works’ for Larry David Miki Turner

Woody Allen still knows what ‘Works’ The Examiner

In Allen’s ‘Whatever Works,’ Not Much Does Kenneth Turan

‘Whatever Works’ for Larry David: Not Much, Thanks Blackbook Magazine

Woody Allen hopes Whatever Works The Examiner

In a world where Antonio Meucci, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell all invented the telephone independently of each other, these writers really should’ve realized that dozens of other hacks were going to get just as cute with the title “Whatever Works”.

Please eradicate the “Dane Cooks” of the written-word involved with the publication of the aforementioned articles or at the very least prepare to ship them to reeducation camp to get review-title writing lessons from A.O. Scott.  That is of course after DSA and the New Party team up with Obama to open those FEMA death camps for people who won’t turn in their guns or submit to marathon viewing sessions of Queer Eye (speaking of that, don’t forget about Friday night!).

PS: Thanks for doing your best to cover up the whole “Muslim-radical-Marxist” thing– Barack Hussein sends his comradely regards. 

In solidarity,

Bhaskar Big Bhask da Boss

ADRIAN BLEIFUSS PRADOS

For the most part, the liberal champions of the Iraq war have survived last eight years with their reputations intact.  Some, George Packer, Paul Berman and others,  have been celebrated for the noble motivations behind their  support for the 2003 invasion (democracy, Kurdish rights, etc.).  It’s like we’re supposed to think the  liberal hawks were  good kids that fell in with a bad crowd, the Bushies — their only mistake was in loving democracy and hating Saddam too much, and who could hold that against anyone?

I think this gives the liberal hawks a free pass, and fails diagnose the fatal error in their thinking.  Some of the excited American reactions to the very inspiring events in Iran have made me worry that the attitudes behind “muscular” democracy promotion and humanitarian-militarism remain uncorrected.

Most critics of the Bush administration’s project in the Middle East would argue that war and occupation have been ineffective means for realizing the noble end of democracy, human rights, etc.  In other words, the problem was merely the technical one of selecting the wrong tool (warfare and occupation) for  advancing the cause of political liberalism and representative government.

Obviously, destroying a country and letting its society descend  into a hell of religious and ethnic violence is not a very nice thing to do.  But I think the problem is not a question of  means and ends, but of actors and agency — not how but who.

“With great power comes great responsibility,”  the lesson of the Spider-Man comic books, pretty much sums up the moral rationale of American imperialism.

The thinking goes that since American power is great,  the United States is, by its actions and inactions, greatly responsible for world affairs and bears a special burden of being the principal historical actor of our times and the key architect of humanity’s future.  Let’s call it the Yankee’s burden.

The Spider-Man maxim has become such an established principle in our foreign policy debates that it seems like a no-brainer, but it is entirely wrong.  It is wrong because it diminishes the responsibilities and historical agency of other peoples and nations.  It also allows for the the United States to dangerously and ahistorically insert itself  into all kinds of past events and developments in which the United States was not really a protagonist.

For example, even educated Americans generally understand the dissolution of the Soviet Union,  largely the result of processes internal to the Soviet and Eastern Bloc systems,  to have been a heroic American victory.  Forget the political dynamics and tensions of Glasnost and Perestroika  (Perez Hilton?),  Ronald Reagan somehow wrestled Gorbachev to the ground in Afghanistan, Lane Kirkland parachuted into the Gdansk shipyards and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.   Hurray!

The United States has few if any responsibilities or obligations to Iran besides, perhaps, compensation for oppression endured under the Shah’s reign and the misery suffered by Iran’s people during the Iran-Iraq war.   If we (Americans) want to support the  mobilizations in Iranian cities we have only the right to follow the lead of Iranian reformers and help them as per their specific requests, instructions and appeals to the international community.  That’s it.  They are in charge and we can’t pinch hit for them.

MIKE ELY

There is a self-deceptive politics (among some leftists) that seeks to prettify all kinds of reactionary forces that (for one reason or another) are in opposition to U.S. imperialism — including Islamic reactionaries, Kim Jung Il, “hardline” revisionists of the Li Peng and Eric Honecker type and so on.

And in the process they have a real, almost startling, hostility toward sections of the people who rise up in important if still-inarticulate ways.

My sense is that such politics arise from a despair over actually developing our own revolutionary forces — and a resigned assumption that we have no other alternative but to fall behind any forces (ugly, oppressive, reactionary or not) who (one way or another) who seem to be on America’s shit list.

This is not a uni-polar world with only one defining contradiction. Yes, we understand (and must understand) that the U.S. acts as a central pillar of world capitalism… but it is hardly the only pillar or the only reactionary force.

As someone who remembers this Iranian regime murdering our comrades and drenching the people in blood, it is hard not have a far more nuanced sense of such events. I remember so vividly attended parties of celebration with  our Iranian communist comrades,  from the Iranian Student Association (ISA) at colleges  in  the U.S.,  as they went back to Iran (in 1979) to dive into the revolution — so full of hopes and energy.

And I know now, with real sadness that has never gone away, that many of them ended up in the prisons and torture cells of Khomenei, or wasted on the frontlines of the war with Iraq.

I suspect there is a whole generation of radical activists in the U.S. who don’t know how Iran’s Islamic Republic murdered and tortured communists and leftists in large numbers after the 1979 revolution — to consolidate a very conservative-reactionary god-state. And these victims including many who had based their politics (naively) on forming a “united front against imperialism” with those bloody mullahs-in-power.

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ADRIAN BLEIFUSS PRADOS

The Washington Post:

The House today passed a $106 billion bill funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through September, as House Democrats backed President Obama despite misgivings among the ranks about his strategy in Afghanistan …

“We are in the process of wrapping up the wars. The president needed our support,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), who had earlier said he opposed the war funding but voted for it in the end. “But the substance still sucks.”

CHRIS MAISANO

The fight over healthcare reform enters a crucial phase this week. The Congressional committee charged with drafting legislation on reform is scheduled to start voting on Wednesday. President Obama made a major speech outlining his intentions to the American Medical Association, which has come out in opposition to important aspects of his proposed reforms, especially the so-called “public option.” And the Congressional Budget Office, the agency charged with reviewing the budgetary implications of proposed legislation, released a study on the likely outcomes of the leading Democratic plan. It wasn’t pretty. 

As a report in the New York Times made clear, the administration’s “reform” proposals fail to do what any sort of legitimate reform should have as its two central goals: cost containment and universal coverage. The CBO estimates that establishing the Obama plan would cost a staggering $1 trillion over ten years, and would only cover a net total of 16 million people who currently lack insurance, leaving 36 million people uninsured by 2017. 

Some Democrats have proposed introducing taxes on soft drinks and a value-added tax in order to raise the funds necessary to pay for the plan. But why spend an additional $1 trillion when we already spend far more on healthcare than every other industrialized country, with inferior health outcomes? Why resort to labyrinthine legislative schemes that don’t even accomplish the president’s stated goals for healthcare reform? The answers to these questions are obvious, of course. The private health insurance industry and the doctors’ lobby want to sabotage any effort at serious reform, and they have lined the pockets of politicians in both parties (including President Obama) to ensure that single-payer, or at least a legitimate public option that can possibly lead the way to single-payer, remains off the agenda. And Obama’s healthcare proposals once again point up the deeply conservative nature of his conciliatory approach to politics. The private insurers can’t be “brought to the table.” They must disappear, and the only way to do that is through the mobilization of public opinion (which clearly supports single-payer) and through conflict, something that Obama seems congenitally allergic to. 

It’s becoming increasingly clear that any sort of healthcare “reform” that comes out of Congress this year is going to be so mutilated by the corporate-dominated legislative process that we’ll wind up with a healthcare system that’s even worse than the one that we have now. Advocates of real universal healthcare need to draw a line in the sand, oppose Obamacare, and continue to organize for single-payer. 

For more information on single-payer health insurance, see Physicians for a National Health Program.

It’s A Mighty Wind meets the Westboro Baptist Church Ensemble:

Hat Tip: Sadly, No!