The Misguided Left Attempt to Mobilize Support for President Obama

President Obama is under constant attack from the far right for the Affordable Care Act and many other actions of his administration. Some leftists are now calling on us to support him against that attack. That call is irresponsible and makes no sense. During the great depression, much of the left gave support to FDR who was genuinely wringing concessions from the rich and powerful in order to save capitalism. That made sense. Unfortunately, that is not the case with Obama. Obama is a right of center Democrat who seems to see his job as to wring concessions from the poor and downtrodden in favor of the rich and powerful. A strong majority of Americans in poll after poll support single payer healthcare. Obama responded with the Affordable Care Act which was crafted by insurance companies, came out of a conservative Republican think tank, and implemented first in Massachusetts by Mit Romney. The ACA is a piece of crap. It makes a few improvements, such as pre-existing conditions and coverage for adult children, but it doesn't address the hundreds of billions in profit and waste, including unnecessary administrative costs, siphoned out of our healthcare dollars by the insurance companies. Obama deserves no credit for passing the ACA, even if its rollout had been smooth as silk. In fact, the misguided left has made it easy for Obama to capitulate to the right because it has given him support instead of confrontation. The Occupy movement showed that confrontation could shift the discourse and put pressure on the government. Instead of learning that lesson, some in the left continue their huge mistake of supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012. If we are to have any influence on the direction of the USA, we have to be bold in fighting for our ideas. We cannot do that and at the same time support a president who shows no sign of having a single progressive bone in his body. Our response to the ACA should be to raise the demand to expand Medicare to all. Our response to the ongoing financial crisis should be to demand the takeover (not bailout) of failing banks and other financial institutions and the prosecution of criminal financiers. Our response to calls for austerity, such as cuts to Social Security and Medicare, should be to call for increased taxes on the rich and the corporations. These are all very popular ideas among the American public. One of the jobs of the left is to articulate and to fight for those ideas. It is not our job to be co-opted by the moribund Obama administration.

The Brainwashing of Israel and the Spillover into the United States

Israeli universities separate Jewish history from the rest of history, and it is not subject to the normal kind of scholarly review which is customary at universities. This is because the Jewish history they teach is based on false myths which are easily refuted. That would be bad enough, but this same falsified history is also taught to Israeli schoolchildren. Israeli education authorities have even tried to impose this falsified history on their Palestinian citizens, though this has so far been resisted. As a result, the Israeli public, and especially its youth, have beliefs which are ahistorical, racist, and very dangerous. In ancient history, for example, Israeli Jewish history teaches that the Romans exiled the Jews. In fact, there is zero historical evidence that such an exile ever occurred, and it would have been totally out of character for the practices of Roman rule. By and large, the small number of Jews who left ancient Palestine did so as merchants. The vast majority of Jewish communities in the world were descended from converts, for which there is ample evidence, such as the mass conversions in ancient Yemen, in the 9th century Khazar empire, and by Berbers in north Africa, some of whom went to Spain. However, the most dangerous falsification is that which treats Palestinians as foreigners in Israel because this underlies the strong and growing Israeli movement to continue the theft of Palestinian land and for expulsion of more Palestinians from Palestine, whether in the West Bank or inside Israel. Even Palestinian nomads in the Negev, who are not only Israeli citizens but who, along with the Druze, serve in the army are being displaced by the tens of thousands even as I write. Only a tiny group of Jewish Israelis opposes these acts and exposes the blatant lies at the root of Israeli education. Another way to put it is that Israelis are educated to believe in delusions, and the result is a psychotic society, which is willing to take extreme measures to carry out its government's insane policies.

Let's shift gears now and note that Israeli psychotics like Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have broad access to the media in the United States. That spreads the brainwashing to the American public, who generally believe many easily refuted myths about Israel. One of the most blatant effects is that the fact that Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons combined with a very aggressive military policy against its neighbors is almost totally ignored in the US media. It never comes up, for example, in the current coverage of the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. Note that existing US law prohibits any aid to a country with nuclear weapons and does not sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which is clearly the case with Israel. That coverage is filled with easily refuted claims. For example, Iran offered an even better deal in 2003 when it completely halted its nuclear weapons program. That deal was rejected. Nobody has claimed, let alone produced any evidence, that Iran currently has a nuclear weapons program. Therefore, the heavy sanctions imposed on Iran have really had no purpose or effect except to feed the false narrative which comes from Israeli and Western governments and the media. This insanity would be dangerous enough if it only affected public opinion, but much more dangerously it is used as the rationale for insane government policies. It is well past time for responsible citizens to educate themselves and their fellows and reject the nonsense which passes for analysis and history spewing from all this brainwashing.