Obama's Legacy of Failure + Remember Pussy Riot!

The Obama administration continues to absorb abuse for not sending an official to Sunday's Charlie Hebdo massacre demonstration photo op with more "star power" than U.S. ambassador to France Jane Hartley.

I suppose the thinking goes, at least if we are taking our cues from Tea Party senator Ted Cruz, that if Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov attended certainly Uncle Sam's John Kerry should have been there locking arms with Israel's Bibi Netanyahu and Mali's President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita. Attorney General Eric Holder was in Paris to attend a counterterrorism meeting but the administration blundered by not having him put in an appearance for the cameras at the rally.

Come to think of it, which I did this morning, what is the Obama administration but a frequently misfiring Fortune 500 corporation? What are Obama's legacy achievements?

While you are contemplating that, take a look at the part of Lambert Strether's Water Cooler post from yesterday where he quotes Thomas Frank's assessment of Beltway Democrats:

Thomas Frank fires a last salvo before taking time off to write a book [Salon]. It’s a nice takedown of Obot talking points. The peroration:

What I am suggesting, in other words, is that the financial crisis worked out the way it did in large part because Obama and his team wanted it to work out that way. 

That is the simplest and most direct explanation.

The notion that Democrats might have agency is shocking, I know, since it means they bear some responsibility for our unhappy situation. However, once you acknowledge that it might be true, it occurs to you that this simple and direct explanation might also be the key to all kinds of Democratic betrayals and failures over the years, from the embrace of NAFTA to the abandonment of the Employee Free Choice Act. Maybe these episodes weren’t failures at all. Maybe it’s time we confronted the possibility that these disasters unfolded the way they did because Democratic leaders wanted them to work out that way.

Back to the question of Obama's legacy achievements. At this point, in the fourth quarter of his administration, the GOP in firm control of both the House and the Senate, initiatives being floated (free community college tuition, immigration reform -- to name a few) to keep the Democratic Party from capsizing, the two things Obama will be remembered for will be 1) the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a.k.a., Obamacare and 2) the complete withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

In terms of the first, Obamacare, it is becoming increasingly clear that it is a corporate-friendly ruse designed to shunt as many people as possible into a failed system. Workers who had blue-chip coverage through their employers, those plans are being degraded to match the new normal on offer through the Obamacare exchanges, and that new normal is some form of co-insurance, high deductibles and higher out-of-pocket caps.

Tara Siegel Barnard's story from last week, "Health Premiums Rise More Slowly, but Workers Shoulder More of Cost," says it all:

To contain costs, many large corporate employers are offering high-deductible plans, also known as consumer-directed plans. At about one-third of large companies, it is the only option available, according to the National Business Group on Health. The plans require employees to pay for a greater share of their medical costs upfront, before the plan starts making payments. The goal is to make employees comparison-shop for medical services, something not always easy to do, particularly in emergency situations.

“It’s quite shocking when you see the range of costs for the same services in a market,” said Brian Marcotte, president and chief executive of the National Business Group on Health. “But employers are also trying to get employees to play a greater role in managing their care.”

In 2013, 81 percent of workers were enrolled in a health plan with a deductible, according to Commonwealth Fund, compared with 52 percent in 2003. The average per-person deductible has more than doubled over that period, rising 146 percent on average. In 2013, the average per-person deductible exceeded $1,000 in most states, and exceeded $1,500, on average, in seven states.

For an excellent report on workers coming to the realization that the post-Obamacare new normal is co-insurance and higher deductibles read Robert Pear's "Harvard Ideas on Health Care Hit Home, Hard," which also appeared last week.

Of course, the ACA's expansion of Medicaid -- for those 27 states and the District of Columbia that opted in -- must not to be dismissed. But Paul Ryan is till on the scene and the dust hasn't settled yet.

As for Obama legacy achievement numero dos, the Iraq withdrawal, we know now where that stands. U.S. troops are streaming steadily back into the country to re-occupy their old bases. Consult Tim Arango's "U.S. Forces, Returning to Iraq, Encounter the Things Their Comrades Carried":

CAMP TAJI, Iraq — The calendar on the wall reads November 2011. 

On the ground is a half-filled can of Copenhagen smokeless tobacco. Scattered here and there are bottles of Gatorade, cans of Rip It energy drinks, poker chips, Monopoly money and razor blades. 

Stenciled on a wall is a punchy soldier’s slogan: “I will always place the mission first. I will never accept defeat.” Taped on another is a note of encouragement from a Boy Scout troop back home: “You are our hero and your commitment to freedom is honorable.” 

There is even a jar of salsa still in the fridge.

So scratch that achievement off the Obama legacy list. The Noble Peace Prize POTUS, if anything, reinvigorated the U.S. commitment to empire by obscuring the history of the Bush occupation. Tim Arango's  "U.S. Troops, Back in Iraq, Train a Force to Fight ISIS" is illuminating in this regard:

“They are already looking at us to provide food, water, everything to sustain them,” said a Marine major stationed at Al Asad Air Base, who asked that his name not be used because he is worried that identifying him could put his family back at home at risk of a so-called lone wolf attack by a sympathizer of the Islamic State. “That worries me.”

The major also said it was unclear what would happen if the air base, which is surrounded by the Islamic State, should come under attack. Should the Marines help defend the Iraqis, or flee?

The small Marine compound in the vast base is under constant attack by rockets and mortars, although there have been no casualties. Then there is the fear of attacks from the Iraqis themselves, the ones they are supposed to train.

“I always have those concerns,” said the major. “We are trained to watch each other’s backs.”

The six-week curriculum for the Iraqi soldiers was developed in recent months by the Americans and Iraqis, with a final sign-off by the office of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. In addition to basic infantry skills, the Americans are teaching the Iraqis map reading, intelligence collection, the laws of warfare and how to treat the civilian population so that it supports the government rather than the militants. Every Friday, there is a class on ethics.

Al Asad Air Base is in Anbar Province, which is ground zero of Islamic State, down the road from Haditha, site of the 2005 Marine massacre of women and children, an event that probably had as much to do with the efflorescence of ISIS precursor Al Qaeda in Iraq as anything. For Tim Arango, an excellent, reliable reporter, to fail to mention the irony of Marines teaching ethics to a Iraqi soldiers down the road from Haditha is a true sign of the dramatic failure of Obama. Nothing has changed.

But something did change under Obama. We now have a New Cold War on our hands. Before saying goodbye this morning Neil MacFarquhar's latest iteration of his "Moscow Journal" must be mentioned. Constantly seeking to stokes the flames of Russophobia, the Gray Lady wants to remind us in MacFarquhar's "Conspiracy Theories Mix With Official Condolences" that Russia is not a place that celebrates free speech like France or the U.S. (where we put whistle-blowers in prison and summon journalists to court) because, remember, what happened to Pussy Riot:

Scores of Russians laid flowers and other expressions of sympathy at the French Embassy in Moscow, and more liberal voices in the Russian Orthodox Church responded that they were appalled by Mr. Tsorionov — often without naming him directly. 

Some invoked the case of the punk band, the best-known free speech case in recent Russian history, when two young female musicians were sent to labor camps for two years after singing an anti-Putin song in the Russian Orthodox cathedral of the Moscow establishment in 2012. 

Sergei Chapnin, a high-profile Orthodox commentator, wrote last week that he was “amazed most of all by the high level of sympathy for the killers, the readiness to justify them, based on a fear of ‘incitement of religious discord.'” 

Then he linked it to the punk band’s case. “In the depths of our Russian soul, there still smolders dissatisfaction with the Pussy Riot verdict not being harsh enough,” he wrote. “For some, yesterday’s tragedy in Paris is something to fantasize about.”

See, Russians are on the side of Kouachi brothers; Pussy Riot and the United States, the angels. Someone needs to send a memo to Dean Banquet that the New Cold War propaganda needs a do-over.

The U.S. "Double Game" Formula for Never-Ending Terror: Allied with Wahhabism to Fight Wahhabism

One of the most trenchant, articulate and regular critics of the prestige press (e.g. The New York Times, The Washington Post) is Robert Parry. He runs Consortiumnews.com. He features other writers, but his posts are the best.

Yesterday I got around to reading Parry's "NYT Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine" from last week, which comments on the same Andrew Higgins and Andrew Kramer story ("Ukraine Leader Was Defeated Even Before He Was Ousted") that I wrote about last Monday. I was struck by the intense cognitive dissonance the editors of the mainstream news organs create in their audience. Contradictions abound and must be swallowed daily. As Parry explains in terms of the Ukraine:

Throughout the crisis, the mainstream U.S. press hammered home the theme of white-hatted protesters versus a black-hatted president [Yanukovych]. The police were portrayed as brutal killers who fired on unarmed supporters of “democracy.” The good-guy/bad-guy narrative was all the American people heard from the major media.

The New York Times went so far as to delete the slain policemen from the narrative and simply report that the police had killed all those who died in the Maidan. A typical Times report on March 5, 2014, summed up the storyline: “More than 80 protesters were shot to death by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February.”

The mainstream U.S. media also sought to discredit anyone who observed the obvious fact that an unconstitutional coup had just occurred. A new theme emerged that portrayed Yanukovych as simply deciding to abandon his government because of the moral pressure from the noble and peaceful Maidan protests.

Any reference to a “coup” was dismissed as “Russian propaganda.” There was a parallel determination in the U.S. media to discredit or ignore evidence that neo-Nazi militias had played an important role in ousting Yanukovych and in the subsequent suppression of anti-coup resistance in eastern and southern Ukraine. That opposition among ethnic-Russian Ukrainians simply became “Russian aggression.”

This refusal to notice what was actually a remarkable story – the willful unleashing of Nazi storm troopers on a European population for the first time since World War II – reached absurd levels as the New York Times and the Washington Post buried references to the neo-Nazis at the end of stories, almost as afterthoughts.

The Washington Post went to the extreme of rationalizing Swastikas and other Nazi symbols by quoting one militia commander as calling them “romantic” gestures by impressionable young men. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s ‘Romantic’ Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers.”]

Yet, despite the best efforts of the Times, the Post and other mainstream outlets to conceal this ugly reality from the American people, alternative news sources – presenting a more realistic account of what was happening in Ukraine – began to chip away at the preferred narrative.

Instead of buying the big media’s storyline, many Americans were coming to realize that the reality was much more complicated and that they were again being sold a bill of propaganda goods.

The glaring contradictions the Gray Lady expects her readers to cognitively digest were on full display this past Saturday. The paper was dominated by the terror attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, and its aftermath, by the Kouachi brothers, Cherif and Said, who apparently received training from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. But that is not where I want to start. I want to start where I ended on Saturday, by reading the unsigned editorial on U.S. aid to Pakistan, "Is Pakistan Worth America’s Investment?"

It doesn’t take much to stir controversy over America’s relationship with Pakistan. The latest dust-up involves $532 million in economic assistance that the United States expects to provide later this year. Last week, Pakistani officials jumped the gun by suggesting the money is closer to being disbursed than it is; the news annoyed India, which doesn’t think the aid is merited.

That is a familiar complaint. Since 9/11, the United States has provided Pakistan with billions of dollars, mostly in military aid, to help fight extremists. There are many reasons to have doubts about the investment. Still, it is in America’s interest to maintain assistance — at a declining level — at least for the time being. But much depends on what the money will be used for. One condition for new aid should be that Pakistan do more for itself — by cutting back on spending for nuclear weapons and requiring its elites to pay taxes.

Doubts about the aid center on Pakistan’s army, which has long played a double game, accepting America’s money while enabling some militant groups, including members of the Afghan Taliban who have been battling American and Afghan troops in Afghanistan. The relationship hit bottom in 2011 when Osama bin Laden was found hiding in Pakistan and was killed by a Navy SEAL team. But it has since improved. Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to visit Islamabad soon.

After militants massacred 148 students and teachers at an army-run school in Peshawar last month, Pakistan’s government promised that it would no longer distinguish between “bad” militant groups, which are seeking to bring down the Pakistani state, and “good” militant groups that have been supported and exploited by the army to attack India and wield influence in Afghanistan. But there is little evidence that the army has gone after the “good” groups in a serious way.

This double game is a big reason that the administration has been unable to fulfill Congress’s mandate to certify that Pakistan has met certain requirements, including preventing its territory from being used for terror attacks, as a condition of assistance. Instead, officials have had to rely on a national security waiver to keep aid flowing.

Pakistan's "double game" is merely a smaller copy of the U.S. global "double game." To wit, jump from the editorial page to the middle of the paper where Ben Hubbard's "Saudis Begin Public Caning to Punish a Blogger":

The authorities in Saudi Arabia on Friday began the public flogging of a blogger who was sentenced to 1,000 blows, 10 years in prison and a large fine for starting a website that featured content critical of the country’s religious establishment, the rights group Amnesty International reported.

The floggings are to be administered with a cane over a period of months.

The blogger, Raif Badawi, was arrested after starting a website called “Free Saudi Liberals,” and he was later convicted of charges that included cybercrime and parental disobedience.

The case has drawn attention to the strict limits on freedom of expression inSaudi Arabia, a close Arab ally of the United States, and prompted unusually direct criticism from the American government.

Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, told reporters on Thursday that the United States was concerned that Mr. Badawi would face “the inhumane punishment of a thousand lashes in addition to serving a 10-year sentence in prison for exercising his rights to freedom of expression and religion.”

The United States government called on Saudi Arabia to cancel the flogging and “review Badawi’s case and sentence,” Ms. Psaki said.

Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, has used its courts in the past to punish dissidents or those who question the country’s strict interpretation of Islam. Often, these actions face no public rebuke from the United States, which considers Saudi Arabia an important ally in the fight against terrorism and other areas.

Besides being the world’s largest oil exporter, the kingdom is one of five Arab countries that have joined an American-led air campaign against the jihadists of the Islamic State.

Mr. Badawi was arrested in 2012 and prosecuted in a criminal court for offenses that included cybercrime and disobeying his father, who has denounced his son in the news media.

Prosecutors tried and failed to charge him with apostasy and then pressed for a resentencing because they considered his first sentence of seven years in prison and 600 blows too lenient.

Last year, Mr. Badawi received his final sentence of 10 years in prison, a fine of more than a quarter-million dollars and 1,000 blows with the cane.

An unidentified witness cited by Amnesty said that Mr. Badawi was taken from a bus and flogged 50 times in a public square outside of a mosque in the port city of Jidda after Friday Prayer. About 15 minutes later, he was put back on the bus and taken away. Amnesty said it would not identify the witness because of security concerns.

Adam Coogle, a Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch, said Mr. Badawi was clearly being punished for starting a liberal website and insulting the religious authorities. He said that floggers in Saudi Arabia are supposed to distribute the blows from the top of the back to the back of the legs without breaking the skin. It is not a bloody affair, but it is public and painful.

Imagine if we caned bloggers in the United States for disobeying one's father or starting a website. Every public square in every major city would be filled to overflowing. Better yet, we would have to go Pinochet "dirty wars" style and use our lavishly tax-payer subsidized sports stadiums to facilitate the floggings.

Rather than more pro forma mendacious meek mewling from The Stepford Wives-like Jen Psaki why not economic sanctions from the ballyhooed Treasury Department official, David S. Cohen, who was just promoted to the number two slot at the CIA? That story -- "Reaching Outside C.I.A., Obama Picks Treasury Official to Become Agency’s No. 2" by Mark Mazzetti -- which appeared a few pages after the "Saudis Cane Blogger" article illuminates the nature of the U.S. "double game":

WASHINGTON — President Obama has chosen the Treasury Department official who has directed the effort to cut off funding of the Islamic State and impose economic sanctions on Syria, Russia and Iran to become the C.I.A.’s deputy director, the agency announced on Friday. 

The official, David S. Cohen, who as under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence has spent more than three years in charge of the Obama administration’s attempts to punish foreign governments and cripple terrorist groups, will help lead an agency that remains at the center of armed drone campaigns and covert efforts to arm and train Syrian rebels. 

John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, said in a statement that Mr. Cohen brings a “wealth of experience on many of the issues that we focus on as an agency” — such as money laundering, financial support for terrorism and narcotics trafficking. 

In the past, the C.I.A.’s No. 2 job, which does not require Senate confirmation, has often been filled by agency veterans or senior military officers. Mr. Cohen, a lawyer who has no previous C.I.A. experience, will replace Avril D. Haines, who left the C.I.A. to become Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser. 

The selection could be an indication that the White House is wary of elevating a C.I.A. insider who might have played a role in the detention and interrogation program that used torture on Qaeda detainees in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. 

Over the past year, Mr. Cohen has been consumed with trying to cut off the spigot of money flowing into the Islamic State’s coffers — primarily from black-market oil sales. The militant group controls oil-rich territory in Iraq and Syria, and has been able to use smuggling routes to sell oil in Turkey. This month, the group announced that it would have a 2015 budget of more than $2 billion that it would use to pay its fighters and govern the territory it has taken. 

American officials believe that figure wildly overstates the Islamic State’s resources, but they concede that drying up the group’s finances will take time. 

“This is not going to be a case of, we flip a light switch and all of a sudden all of their financial resources have disappeared,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview last year.

Economic sanctions on Russia and Iran are trumpeted by the Obama administration as being enormously effective, but somehow when it comes to Islamic State, not so much. Why the disconnect?

Note that three out of the four key targets of Cohen's efforts -- Russia, Iran and Syria (one could also add Hezbollah) -- are official enemies of the United States and its monarchical allies in the Gulf; the fourth, Islamic State, we are told not to expect much. The reason, as briefly reported last August in the mainstream press when people were asking how Islamic State got so big and powerful so quickly, is that funding for Islamic State tracks back to the U.S.-allied monarchies in the Gulf.

And just as flogging bloggers receives only a canned criticism from a State Department spokeswoman, the effect of economic sanctions on Islamic State is downplayed because the U.S. will never officially go after the corrupt absolutist monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council. This is the U.S. "double game," identical to the one that the Gray Lady criticizes Pakistan for in her unsigned editorial: taking money to fight jihadis at the same time funding and working with jihadis.

Our allies in the fight against Islamic fundamentalism should be Russia, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah (see Anne Barnard's "Extremists Harming Islam, Leader of Hezbollah Says" for Hassan Nasrallah's cogent reaction to the Paris attacks and her snarky "Hezbollah is the enemy" reply) rather than the very nations that are exporting the extreme militant version of Islam, Wahhabism, that leads to jihad. As Andre Vltchek wrote this weekend in "Who Should be Blamed for Muslim Terrorism? The West is Manufacturing Muslim Monsters":

Almost all radical movements in today’s Islam, anywhere in the world, are tied to Wahhabism, an ultra-conservative, reactionary sect of Islam, which is in control of the political life of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other staunch allies of the West in the Gulf.

To quote Dr. Abdullah Mohammad Sindi:

“It is very clear from the historical record that without British help neither Wahhabism nor the House of Saud would be in existence today. Wahhabism is a British-inspired fundamentalist movement in Islam. Through its defense of the House of Saud, the US also supports Wahhabism directly and indirectly regardless of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Wahhabism is violent, right wing, ultra-conservative, rigid, extremist, reactionary, sexist, and intolerant…”

The West gave full support to the Wahhabis in the 1980s. They were employed, financed and armed, after the Soviet Union was dragged into Afghanistan and into a bitter war that lasted from 1979 to 1989. As a result of this war, the Soviet Union collapsed, exhausted both economically and psychologically.

The Mujahedeen, who were fighting the Soviets as well as the left-leaning government in Kabul, were encouraged and financed by the West and its allies. They came from all corners of the Muslim world, to fight a ‘Holy War’ against Communist infidels.

According to the US Department of State archives:

“Contingents of so-called Afghan Arabs and foreign fighters who wished to wage jihad against the atheist communists. Notable among them was a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden, whose Arab group eventually evolved into al-Qaeda.”

Muslim radical groups created and injected into various Muslim countries by the West included al-Qaeda, but also, more recently, ISIS (also known as ISIL). ISIS is an extremist army that was born in the ‘refugee camps’ on the Syrian/Turkish and Syrian/Jordanian borders, and which was financed by NATO and the West to fight the Syrian (secular) government of Bashar al-Assad.

Such radical implants have been serving several purposes. The West uses them as proxies in the wars it is fighting against its enemies – the countries that are still standing in the way to the Empire’s complete domination of the world. Then, somewhere down the road, after these extremist armies ‘get totally out of control’ (and they always will), they could serve as scarecrows and as justification for the ‘The War On Terror’, or, like after ISIS took Mosul, as an excuse for the re-engagement of Western troops in Iraq.

Stories about the radical Muslim groups have constantly been paraded on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, or shown on television monitors, reminding readers ‘how dangerous the world really is’, ‘how important Western engagement in it is’, and consequently, how important surveillance is, how indispensable security measures are, as well as tremendous ‘defense’ budgets and wars against countless rogue states.

The Kouachi brothers had a connection to Yemen and the Qaeda branch there, AQAP. Read Kareem Fahim's latest from Yemen, "Violence Grows in Yemen as Al Qaeda Tries to Fight Its Way Back," to get caught up on the U.S. "double game" there. The U.S. faced with the rise of the pro-Iranian Shiite Houthi movement, which is consolidating power in Sana, is working with its Gulf allies and their AQAP proxies to claw back territory from the Houthis.

This is what the U.S. "double game" does; it foments instability, terror and war. And more is on the way because there is no indication that the people at the top see any reason to change.

European Fracture

This year promises to be even more jarring than the last. The pace of change and the spread of unrest will accelerate. Hopefully, this will translate into a toppling of the neoliberal consensus that has ruinously governed the globe for the last thirty years.

Europe is in trouble. Birthplace of the West, it is fitting that change will start there. The Charlie Hebdo massacre will certainly benefit Marie Le Pen's National Front, already polling ahead in France.

"‘Dangerous Moment’ for Europe, as Fear and Resentment Grow," by Steven Erlanger and Katrin Bennhold, provides a useful snapshot of the spread of nativism in Europe. From Britain to Germany, mainstream political formations are unwilling to accommodate anti-immigrant demands, and this has led to the rise of far-right parties.

Couple this with the rise of the radical left -- hopefully Syriza will triumph in Greek parliamentary elections at the end of the month -- and Europe will shortly have to perform an ideological about-face or risk the disintegration of the eurozone.

All of this is taking place against a backdrop of deflation. Brent crude dropped below $50 a barrel yesterday (before closing at $51) and American producers are beginning to cancel orders for oil rigs. (See Clifford Krauss' excellent "U.S. Oil Producers Cut Rigs as Price Declines.")

Mike Whitney has consistently argued from the outset of the current oil-price drop that $50-a-barrel oil will rip through the U.S. economy, increasing unemployment and undermining banks loaded with energy-sector derivatives. He revisited this topic yesterday in "Oil Price Blowback: Is Putin Creating a New World Order?"

Whitney frames plummeting oil prices in terms of the New Cold War. Shortly after the Minsk ceasefire agreement was signed at the beginning of September, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited Saudi King Abdullah in Jeddah. An agreement was struck to increase Saudi production and cut the price of its crude. The targets were U.S.-Saudi enemies Russia and Iran. On Tuesday, Whitney notes, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it was fast-tracking the sale abroad of lightly processed U.S. crude. Deflation looks to be here to stay for a while.

Deflation is not as catastrophic an issue in the U.S. as it is in Europe. The Federal Reserve can maintain its policy of quantitative easing. The European Central Bank is not in the same position since Germany is opposed.

The U.S. is able to do what it does because it carries European elites in its hip pocket. Just look at what happened in Ukraine last year. The U.S.-EU relationship is about to be roiled because Europe is going to fracture. Putin invested wisely in loaning money to the National Front.