Obama jobs summit: “No money for jobs”

Original article, by Barry Grey, via World Socialist Web Site:

Thursday’s White House summit on jobs was an open display of the callousness and indifference of President Barack Obama and the American corporate elite to the plight of the working class.

Not that it's any surprise. Obama's shown he's in the bosses pocket pretty much from the beginning. Actually, calling himself a Democrat is a sham.

In the course of a two-hour “brainstorming” session with 130 corporate CEOs, government officials, trade union executives and economists, Obama flatly rejected any major new allocation of federal funds to create jobs and ruled out a second stimulus package. Two days after he announced an escalation of the deeply unpopular war in Afghanistan, which he said would cost $30 billion a year, Obama insisted at Thursday’s gathering that the government’s resources were too “limited” to finance job creation programs.

This is part of the joke Obama and the bosses are playing on us. There's never enough money for we the people. There's always enough money for the bosses, bankster frauds, etc. You know it. I know it. Perhaps someday the right-winger workers will figure it out.

Instead, he appealed to the multi-millionaire CEOs in attendance to propose measures that would induce them to begin hiring workers. “What’s holding back business investment and how we can increase confidence and spur hiring?” he asked. “And if there are things that we’re doing in Washington that are inhibiting you, then we want to know about it.”

Obama is a neoliberal capitalist. Trust me, that's worse than calling him a socialist. He's quite willing to see the bosses make money. Maybe he's actually stupid. I mean really dumb. Either that or he's 1) corrupt as hell or 2) has some really huge skeletons in his closet. It's a shame, really. The Dems got who they wanted, and the national party seems really, really happy. The sad part of it is there's no real national alternative to Obama and his cronies from either party.

I'll let you read the rest of the article. Seethe a little bit. Then pull out one of the oldies: "Ho, ho, ho, Obama's got to go!"

Public Menace-Private Profit: America's Biowarfare Alliance

Original article via Antifacist Calling:

In September, The New York Times reported that a
University of Chicago researcher, Malcolm Casadaban, died after exposure to "a
weakened and ordinarily harmless strain of the bacteria that cause plague."

If I remember correctly, we went to war with Iraq over, in part, WMDs. Biological weapons were considered WMDs. Hmmmmm....

According to the Times, "Dr. Casadaban, an associate professor at the university, was studying the bacteria to create a better vaccine for plague ... in part because of concerns about its possible use in bioterrorism." The Times averred that "infectious disease experts said researchers rarely die from being infected with an ordinarily harmless strain of the bacteria or viruses they are studying."

If a bacteria, etc., is harmless, people shouldn't die from it. Casadaban probably wasn't working with a 'harmless' strain, since he got infected and died. Oh well....

Which of course, raise inevitable and troubling questions: just how "safe" was the strain of plague studied by Casadaban, and was this research part of a new round of illicit, highly compartmented experiments meant to bulk-up America's first-strike arsenals?

I'll let you read the rest of the article. It's both fascinating and terrifying in it's implications. Not that we should be surprised if the US is working on bio-terror weapons for it's arsenal. We've done that for years, along with chemical and our famed nuclear arsenals. It's a case of "Do as we say, and as far as what you think, we don't give a shit." It's another reason to question whether our government, corporate and military establishments should be trusted even a little bit.

John Pilger - Obama and Empire

From Socialism 2009 in San Francisco:



Well worth the listen in respect toward Obama's escalation of the Afghan War.