The World Today - VENEZUELA

Analysis of Obama's decision to label Venezuela a security threat to the USA

The Role of the IMF in the world

The Shock Doctrine - A documentary on the book by Naomi Klein

Inequality gets even more entrenched when a person of colour reaches the top

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent

Black anger is being directed against Barack Obama. Not before time. Millions of African-Americans came out to mark the historical moment of his election in 2008. They praised the Lord, and wept with disbelief and joy. The whole of Africa burst into song. His inauguration was among the most watched global events ever.

In his victory speeches, Obama invoked Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, and Martin Luther King. Real freedom  would come, he said – so too justice and unity. Today his black supporters can claim, with some justification, that he failed to deliver. Badly. Deplorably.

African-Americans are still more likely to go to prison than to university, to be victimised by police, courts and various state institutions, to be poor and ignored by Washington, to have neo-natal mortality rates twice as high as white babies, to have lower life expectancy, and so on and on.

They are out on the streets again, with brothers and sisters of other races, all across the US – in Washington, New York, Baltimore, Denver, Arizona, everywhere, now shedding tears of rage. ’Tis come to this? How and why? Because five unarmed black males have been killed this year by white police officers.

In July, Eric Garner – father of six, suspected of selling black market cigarettes – was pushed to the ground by a NYPD policeman, and held so tight that he died. A video of the incident records him saying; “I can’t breathe”. In August, Michael Brown perished after he was shot a dozen times by a Darren Wilson  in Ferguson, Missouri. Apparently the teenager had refused orders to walk on the pavement and that led to an altercation. Grand juries decided not to indict the policemen involved.

In November, in Cleveland, Ohio, Tamir Rice was killed by 26-year-old Timothy Loehmann, an officer deemed unfit for duty in 2012. Rice, a schoolboy who loved basketball, had a toy gun in his hands. His family are suing the police. The same month Akai Gurley, 28, was brought down in a darkened stairwell, by police who claim it was an “accidental discharge”. A grand jury will examine this incident.

And finally,  last Tuesday, Rumain Brisbon, who had four children,  was killed by officers in Phoenix, Arizona. Police said they thought the bottle of pills he was holding was a gun. Stevie Wonder wonders how this is possible. I wonder that he wonders.  Living on the hills of fame and fortune, it must be hard to know what is being done to your people way down below.

Seems it is even harder for the President. In February 2012, when Trayvon Martin, 17, was shot dead by a neighbourhood watch co-ordinator in Florida, Obama did at least identify with the pain of the parents and community: “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon”. (The police officer was, needless to say, acquitted. ) Today Obama makes, makes tepid, middle-management noises about the responsibilities of law enforcers. No fire or fury in his belly any more. Like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, he is now a caretaker of white power.

Obama’s self-belief must be crashing as the accusations build up. Black congressman Charlie Rangel  is  forthright: “Having a black president has not solved the problem at all. ...the colour of one’s skin determines how lives are going to be and whether they live at all.” New York University academic Frank Roberts goes further: “We had hoped he would be Moses; he turned out to be the pharaoh. We have a lame duck president who does not have a moral conscience.” Or as an angry young black man put it: “Obama is a bummer”.

Perhaps it was foolish to expect too much from him.  He has pushed through health care reforms, but that’s it folks. Remember all that loose talk about post-racial America? It actually stopped the fight, disabled the struggle so lethally that today R&B star Alicia Keys is able to say, “We absolutely feel disregarded as human beings.”

It seems inequality gets even more firmly entrenched when a woman or person of colour gets to the very top. Margaret Thatcher didn’t do it for feminism and Theresa May won’t either. We have more MPs and peers of colour than ever before and racism is rising again. Once they get to where they want to, even those who used anti-racism to push in, go strangely quiet, seek approval rather than confrontations.

Obama’s presidency represents the perils of entryism. The rough Texan Lyndon Johnson, who pushed through civil rights legislation, did more for African-Americans than Barack Obama. Johnson didn’t give a damn for the establishment, wasn’t intimidated by white opinion. Here, Ken Livingstone pushed equality policies with courage of a kind we do not see in most black and Asian people in power. My heart cracks as I write this. The truth hurts, but can no longer be dodged or excused.

Bethlehem as you’ve never seen it before

Mary, heavily pregnant, and Joseph arrive in Bethlehem. Christ is born in a stable. The angel Gabriel had foretold this birth of the son of God, come down to save humans from temptations and themselves. The first believers followed the brightest of stars to pay homage. Bethlehem is where it all began.

It’s Christmas again. Millions of Nativity scenes are being re-enacted in infant and primary schools all over the world. Parents film these scenes, and rejoice. But do any of them know what is happening to the actual Bethlehem?

I didn’t until I saw a new film, Open Bethlehem, by a Palestinian woman, Leila Sansour. A Christian, she was born and raised there, and then, like many others, went off to the West. Her father’s death drew her back and she found her home town cowed and shattered by aggressive Israeli anti-terrorism measures.

Huge walls are being built, homes and old businesses confiscated, human rights trampled. An old man died broken-hearted after his beloved shop was bulldozed. Church leaders watch helplessly. Sansour’s poignant film is both a recovery of her own memories and a cry against the lock-up of Jesus’s birthplace.

Good people rightly condemn the persecution of Christians by hardline Muslims and Hindus. But as Israel strangles the life out of Christianity’s holiest site, nobody dares speak out. This woman has. Go to her website, join her campaign. It could be the noblest thing you do this Christmas.

‘Cleansing the stock’ and other ways governments talk about human beings

Those in power don’t speak of ‘people’ or ‘killing’ – it helps them do their job. And we are picking up their dehumanising euphemisms

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 21 October 2014 15.25 BST

An Israeli strike on a UN school in the northern Gaza Strip in which two children were killed and a dozen other people were injured. 'Mowing the lawn'? Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images

To blot people out of existence first you must blot them from your mind. Then you can persuade yourself that what you are doing is moral and necessary. Today this isn’t difficult. Those who act without compassion can draw upon a system of thought and language whose purpose is to shield them – and blind us – to the consequences.

The contention by Lord Freud, a minister in the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions, that disabled people are “not worth the full wage” isn’t the worst thing he’s alleged to have said. I say “alleged” because what my ears tell me is contested by Hansard, the official parliamentary record. During a debate in the House of Lords, he appeared to describe the changing number of disabled people likely to receive the employment and support allowance as a “bulge of, effectively, stock”. After a furious response by the people he was talking about, this was transcribed by Hansard as“stopped”, rendering the sentence meaningless. I’ve listened to the word several times on the parliamentary video. Like others, I struggle to hear it as anything but “stock”.

If we’re right, he is not the only person at his department who uses this term. Its website describes disabled people entering the government’s work programme for between three and six months as “3/6Mth stock”. Perhaps this makes sense when you remember that they are a source of profit for the companies running the programme. The department’s delivery plan recommends using “credit reference agency data to cleanse the stock of fraud and error”. To cleanse the stock: remember that.

Human beings – by which I mean those anthropoid creatures who do not necessarily receive social security – often live in families. But benefit claimants live in “benefit units”, defined by the government as “an adult plus their spouse (if applicable) plus any dependent children living in the household”. On the bright side, if you die while on a government work programme, you’ll be officially declared a “completer”. Which must be a relief.

A dehumanising system requires a dehumanising language. So familiar and pervasive has this language become that it has soaked almost unnoticed into our lives. Those who do have jobs are also described by the function they deliver to capital. These days they are widely known as “human resources”.

The living world is discussed in similar terms. Nature is “natural capital”. Ecological processes are ecosystem services, because their only purpose is to serve us. Hills, forests and rivers are described in government reports as “green infrastructure”. Wildlife and habitats are “asset classes” in an “ecosystems market”. Fish populations are invariably described as “stocks”, as if they exist only as movable assets from which wealth can be extracted – like disabled recipients of social security. The linguistic downgrading of human life and the natural world fuses in a word a Norwegian health trust used to characterise the patients on its waiting list: biomass.

Those who kill for a living employ similar terms. Israeli military commanders described the massacre of 2,100 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians (including 500 children), in Gaza this summer as “mowing the lawn”. It’s not original. Seeking to justify Barack Obama’s drone war in Pakistan (which has so far killed 2,300 people, only 4% of whom have since been named as members of al-Qaida), Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser Bruce Riedel explained that “you’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.” The director of the CIA, John Brennan, claimed that with “surgical precision” his drones “eliminate the cancerous tumour called an al-Qaida terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it”. Those who operate the drones describe their victims as bug splats.

During its attack on the Iraqi city of Falluja in November 2004, the US army used white phosphorus to kill or maim people taking shelter in houses or trenches. White phosphorus is fat-soluble. Even small crumbs of it bore through living tissue on contact. It destroys mucous membranes, blinding people and ripping up their lungs. Its use as a weapon is banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention, as the US army knows: one of its battle books observes that “it is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets” (personnel targets, by the way, are human beings). But never mind all that. The army has developed a technique it calls Shake ‘n Bake: flush people out with phosphorus, then kill them with high explosives. Shake ‘n Bake is a product made by Kraft Foods for coating meat with breadcrumbs before cooking it.

Terms such as these are designed to replace mental images of death and mutilation with images of something else. Others, such as “collateral damage” (dead or wounded civilians), “kinetic activity” (shooting and bombing), “compounds” (homes) and “extraordinary rendition” (kidnapping and torture by states), are intended to prevent the formation of any mental pictures at all. If you can’t see what is being discussed, you will struggle to grasp the implications. The clearest example is “neutralising”, which neutralises the act of killing it describes.

I doubt many people could kill and wound if their language accurately represented what they were doing. It is notable that those who are most enthusiastic about waging war are the least able to describe what they are talking about without resorting to metaphor and euphemism. Few people have nightmares about squashing insects or mowing the lawn.

The media, instead of challenging public figures to say kill when they mean kill, and people when they mean people, repeats these evasions. Uncontested, their sanitised, trivialised, belittling terms seep into our own mouths, until we also talk about “operatives” or “human capital” or “illegal aliens” without stopping to consider how those words resonate and what they permit us not to see. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are dehumanising metaphors in this article that I have failed to spot.

If we wish to reclaim public life from the small number of people who have captured it, we must also reclaim the language in which it is expressed. To know what we are talking about: this, in more than one sense, is the task of those who want a better world.

Like al-Qaeda, the Islamic State spawned by those countries now in the lead to combat it.

Brahma Chellaney in The Hindu

Like al-Qaeda, the Islamic State has been inadvertently spawned by the policies of those now in the lead to combat it. But will anything substantive be learned from this experience?

U.S. President Barack Obama has labelled the jihadist juggernaut that calls itself the Islamic State a “cancer,” while his Defence Secretary, Chuck Hagel, has called it more dangerous than al-Qaeda ever was, claiming that its threat is “beyond anything we’ve seen.” No monster has ever been born on its own. So the question is: which forces helped create this new Frankenstein?

The Islamic State is a brutal, medieval organisation whose members take pride in carrying out beheadings and flaunting the severed heads of their victims as trophies. This cannot obscure an underlying reality: the Islamic State represents a Sunni Islamist insurrection against non-Sunni rulers in disintegrating Syria and Iraq.

Indeed, the ongoing fragmentation of states along primordial lines in the arc between Israel and India is spawning de facto new entities or blocks, including Shiastan, Wahhabistan, Kurdistan, ISstan and Talibanstan. Other than Iran, Egypt and Turkey, most of the important nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan (an internally torn state that could shrink to Punjabistan or, simply, ISIstan) are modern western concoctions, with no roots in history or pre-existing identity.

The West and agendas

It is beyond dispute that the Islamic State militia — formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — emerged from the Syrian civil war, which began indigenously as a localised revolt against state brutality under Syrian President Bashar al-Assad before being fuelled with externally supplied funds and weapons. From Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-training centres in Turkey and Jordan, the rebels set up a Free Syrian Army (FSA), launching attacks on government forces, as a U.S.-backed information war demonised Mr. Assad and encouraged military officers and soldiers to switch sides.

 “By seeking to topple a secular autocracy in Syria while simultaneously working to shield jihad-bankrolling monarchies from the Arab Spring, Barack Obama ended up strengthening Islamist forces.” 

But the members of the U.S.-led coalition were never on the same page because some allies had dual agendas. While the three spearheads of the anti-Assad crusade — the U.S., Britain and France — focussed on aiding the FSA, the radical Islamist sheikhdoms such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates as well as the Islamist-leaning government in Turkey channelled their weapons and funds to more overtly Islamist groups. This splintered the Syrian opposition, marginalising the FSA and paving the way for the Islamic State’s rise.

The anti-Assad coalition indeed started off on the wrong foot by trying to speciously distinguish between “moderate” and “radical” jihadists. The line separating the two is just too blurred. Indeed, the term “moderatejihadists” is an oxymoron: Those waging jihad by the gun can never be moderate.

Invoking jihad

The U.S. and its allies made a more fundamental mistake by infusing the spirit of jihad in their campaign against Mr. Assad so as to help trigger a popular uprising in Syria. The decision to instil the spirit of jihad through television and radio broadcasts beamed to Syrians was deliberate — to provoke Syria’s majority Sunni population to rise against their secular government.

This ignored the lesson from Afghanistan (where the CIA in the 1980s ran, via Pakistan, the largest covert operation in its history) — that inciting jihad and arming “holy warriors” creates a deadly cocktail, with far-reaching and long-lasting impacts on international security. The Reagan administration openly used Islam as an ideological tool to spur armed resistance to Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

In 1985, at a White House ceremony in honour of several Afghan mujahideen — the jihadists out of which al-Qaeda evolved — President Ronald Reagan declared, “These gentlemen are the moral equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers.” Earlier in 1982, Reagan dedicated the space shuttle ‘Columbia’ to the Afghan resistance. He declared, “Just as the Columbia, we think, represents man’s finest aspirations in the field of science and technology, so too does the struggle of the Afghan people represent man’s highest aspirations for freedom. I am dedicating, on behalf of the American people, the March 22 launch of the Columbia to the people of Afghanistan.”

The Afghan war veterans came to haunt the security of many countries. Less known is the fact that the Islamic State’s self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — like Libyan militia leader Abdelhakim Belhadj (whom the CIA abducted and subjected to “extraordinary rendition”) and Chechen terrorist leader Airat Vakhitov — become radicalised while under U.S. detention. As torture chambers, U.S. detention centres have served as pressure cookers for extremism.

Mr. Obama’s Syria strategy took a page out of Reagan’s Afghan playbook. Not surprisingly, his strategy backfired. It took just two years for Syria to descend into a Somalia-style failed state under the weight of the international jihad against Mr. Assad. This helped the Islamic State not only to rise but also to use its control over northeastern Syria to stage a surprise blitzkrieg deep into Iraq this summer.

Had the U.S. and its allies refrained from arming jihadists to topple Mr. Assad, would the Islamic State have emerged as a lethal, marauding force? And would large swaths of upstream territory along the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers in Syria and Iraq have fallen into this monster’s control? The exigencies of the topple-Assad campaign also prompted the Obama administration to turn a blind eye to the flow of Gulf and Turkish aid to the Islamic State.

In fact, the Obama team, until recently, viewed the Islamic State as a “good” terrorist organisation in Syria but a “bad” one in Iraq, especially when it threatened to overrun the Kurdish regional capital, Erbil. In January, Mr. Obama famously dismissed the Islamic State as a local “JV team” trying to imitate al-Qaeda but without the capacity to be a threat to America. It was only after the public outrage in the U.S. over the video-recorded execution of American journalist James Foley and the flight of Iraqi Christians and Yazidis that the White House re-evaluated the threat posed by the Islamic State.

Full circle

Many had cautioned against the topple-Assad campaign, fearing that extremist forces would gain control in the vacuum. Those still wedded to overthrowing Mr. Assad’s rule, however, contend that Mr. Obama’s failure to provide greater aid, including surface-to-air missiles, to the Syrian rebels created a vacuum that produced the Islamic State. In truth, more CIA arms to the increasingly ineffectual FSA would have meant a stronger and more deadly Islamic State.

As part of his strategic calculus to oust Mr. Assad, Mr. Obama failed to capitalise on the Arab Spring, which was then in full bloom. By seeking to topple a secular autocracy in Syria while simultaneously working to shield jihad-bankrolling monarchies from the Arab Spring, he ended up strengthening Islamist forces — a development reinforced by the U.S.-led overthrow of another secular Arab dictator, Muammar Qadhafi, which has turned Libya into another failed state and created a lawless jihadist citadel at Europe’s southern doorstep.

In fact, no sooner had Qadhafi been killed than Libya’s new rulers established a theocracy, with no opposition from the western powers that brought about the regime change. Indeed, the cloak of Islam helps to protect the credibility of leaders who might otherwise be seen as foreign puppets. For the same reason, the U.S. has condoned the Arab monarchs for their long-standing alliance with Islamists. It has failed to stop these cloistered royals from continuing to fund Muslim extremist groups and madrasas in other countries. The American interest in maintaining pliant regimes in oil-rich countries has trumped all other considerations.

Today, Mr. Obama’s Syria policy is coming full circle. Having portrayed Mr. Assad as a bloodthirsty monster, Washington must now accept Mr. Assad as the lesser of the two evils and work with him to defeat the larger threat of the Islamic State.

The fact that the Islamic State’s heartland remains in northern Syria means that it cannot be stopped unless the U.S. extends air strikes into Syria. As the U.S. mulls that option — for which it would need at least tacit permission from Syria, which still maintains good air defences — it is fearful of being pulled into the middle of the horrendous civil war there. It is thus discreetly urging Mr. Assad to prioritise defeating the Islamic State.

Make no mistake: like al-Qaeda, the Islamic State is a monster inadvertently spawned by the policies of those now in the lead to combat it. The question is whether anything substantive will be learned from this experience, unlike the forgotten lessons of America’s anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan.

At a time when jihadist groups are gaining ground from Mali to Malaysia, Mr. Obama’s current effort to strike a Faustian bargain with the Afghan Taliban, for example, gives little hope that any lesson will be learned. U.S.-led policies toward the Islamic world have prevented a clash between civilisations by fostering a clash within a civilisation, but at serious cost to regional and international security.

The Tea Party have successfully undermined everything Obama has attempted

Mark Steel in The Independent

Now the American government is open again, I wonder what tactic the Tea Party will try next to get their way. One favourite must be chilli powder down Barack Obama’s underpants. One of their senators will explain in a live interview from Washington, “We have no choice but to do this until the President shows he is willing to negotiate”, while in the background we can hear, “Yeaaagh they’re on fire”, and Michelle saying: “Don’t put your fingers in your eyes love or they’ll start stinging as well.”

Or they’ll set a leopard loose in the House of Representatives, as a legitimate means of expressing the will of the common man from Utah. Whatever they do, to them it seems utterly reasonable, so they make statements such as, “It’s the President who is causing this conflict, by insisting on implementing the policies he was elected on. So what choice did we have but to urinate over the Democrat senators in alphabetical order? It’s only what Abraham Lincoln would have done?”

The issue that’s angered them this time is Obama’s healthcare plan, designed to address the problem of millions of Americans having no access to healthcare. The Tea Party has a carefully considered objection to this policy, which is on the home page of its website. It’s worth repeating in full to do justice to the prose. It goes “Destroy Obamacare. This abomination from hell must be eradicated.”

As with all the best political writing, it’s the delicate details that make it so engaging. To start with, this displays an impressive knowledge of The Bible, as few people are aware of the section that goes, “And God saw that Satan had spread his wickedness among the people. And he did say unto Abraham ‘Eradicateth this abomination for they will burn in hellfire who are carried upon a stretcher with no charge’”.

John Culberson, a Tea Party spokesman from Texas, was slightly less subtle, declaring his support for the strategy of shutting down the country by saying, “Like on 9/11, let’s roll”, a reference to the passengers who said “Let’s roll” before confronting terrorists on their plane. This could be worrying if he visits an NHS surgery in Britain. He’ll stab all the doctors, and explain: “I could see one of them diagnosing gastro-enteritis without charging a fee and knew I had to act straight away.”

To be fair, the Tea Party takes up other issues as well as healthcare, employing the same subtle arguments. Their supporter Stephen Schwarzmann, a hedge-fund billionaire, contributed to the tax debate by saying: “Tax rises on equity firms is a signal for war, like when Hitler invaded Poland.” It could be argued it’s even worse, because at least when Hitler invaded Poland the casualties couldn’t run crying to the Third Reich for free medical care.

Maybe the reason they come up with minor exaggerations is they struggle without them. Tea Party senator Louis Gohmert was interviewed about whether the deal they've agreed to was a success. In his exact words, this is how he answered: “The fact is all those children gathered round by Nancy Pelosi and they weren’t of legal consent age and we’ve stolen $12bn dollars from those children and the least we can do and all we’re asking if we had leaders who do the right thing they look listen it’s illegal.”

I wonder how many people saw that and thought, “At last, someone who’s saying exactly what I’m thinking”. It appears they’re reasoning is the Republican Party lost the election because in crucial swing states such as Ohio, voters thought “the trouble with Mitt Romney and his supporters is they’re not do-lally enough”. In which case none of this matters, as it only ensures they’ll lose by even more next time.

But maybe there is logic to their strategy. Because since Obama became President, the Tea Party Republicans have been able to undermine everything he’s attempted. Even the budget following this agreement is seven per cent less than the amount Obama originally proposed. The healthcare plan will still leave around one fifth of the population with no care, and many of the promises, such as closing Guantanamo Bay or on gun control, have been abandoned altogether. Partly this has been a result of backing down to the constant niggling of the Tea Party.

Obama even had to spend much of his first year in office proving he was the President as they insisted he wasn’t born in America. So they can do that again. For example if Hillary Clinton wins they’ll say they’ve got evidence she’s Russian and fought at the Alamo on the side of the Mexicans, and her real name’s Hillary Mohammed Trotsky Lucifer Compulsory Free Liver Transplants For Everyone Even If You’re Completely Healthy Jihad Abortion Clinton.

They’ll say she was born under the sea, and they’ve got evidence she eats live squirrels, and it’s their constitutional duty to flood the Senate with mercury until she agrees to abolish tax for oil companies. Because for many of the rich and powerful, why bother going through all the hassle of winning an election to get your way, when it’s much easier and more fun to let the other side win, then refuse to accept the result and bring everything to a halt until they do as you want anyway.

Obamacare begins – and the right is terrified that it will work

Rupert Cornwell in The Independent

In a week in which all the talk was of shutdown, the most notable development here in Washington was something that opened up. I refer to the launch of the online federal and state health exchanges that are a key feature of Obamacare, allowing those without health insurance to shop around for the best plan.

Readers who have managed to keep up with the latest antics of what passes as the United States Congress will be aware that the reason Republican hardliners shut down the government was to force the President to delay – or to put it less politely, dismantle – his signature legislative achievement. Yet in a splendid two-finger gesture by fate, on the very day that veterans' services, national parks and a host of other government functions were closing, the health exchanges, symbol of everything those Republicans detest about Obamacare, were opening for business.

True, the moment was pretty shambolic. Overwhelmed by visitors, the websites virtually seized up on day one, though things seemed to improve slightly as the week wore on. But it was a start, and let it never be forgotten what Obamacare is attempting: to bring the US in line with every other advanced industrial country and provide healthcare for all its citizens, irrespective of their means.

Others had tried it before. Harry Truman called for universal health insurance in the late 1940s, only to be described by Republican adversaries as a crypto-communist. Two decades later, Lyndon Johnson did push through Medicare and Medicaid for elderly and poor Americans. Not, however, before a certain aspiring conservative politician named Ronald Reagan predicted that Medicare would see Americans "spending their sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was like when men were free".

Then came Bill Clinton. Alas, he created the impression that a coterie of White House officials, led by his wife, Hillary, was trying to foist its pet ideas upon a suspicious country and he, too, failed. But in 2010, after a monumental fight, Obama's plan was finally approved by Congress.

Yet still Republicans continue their Canute-like refusal to accept the rules of democracy. No matter that the measure was signed by the President and ratified by the Supreme Court, or that Republicans resoundingly lost the 2012 presidential election in which Obamacare was a prime issue. The law, their leaders say, is a "monstrosity," a "trainwreck" that must be fought by every means, even if that means closing down the government.

Now, no one would argue that the reform is perfect. Even without the distortions and abuse peddled by the right- and left-wing media alike, it is extremely hard to understand. Nor will it cover absolutely everyone. If you started from scratch, you would almost certainly go for some form of single-payer system, a universal, government-funded scheme of the sort that Truman advocated.

Determined not to make the Clintons' mistake, Obama consulted with every interested party: Democrats and Republicans, hospitals, private insurers, doctors and the pharmaceutical companies. He bent over backwards to retain the existing structure of employer-based coverage, even dropping proposals for a "public option" favoured by the left as a way of keeping the private insurers honest. In doing so, he bowed, in effect, to the conservatives' argument that an alternative state-run insurance scheme would pave the way for a single-payer system.

But, as Obama has painfully discovered, offer Republicans an olive branch and they'll use it to whip you. Since 2010, the Republican-controlled House has passed no fewer than 42 resolutions seeking to overturn Obamacare (albeit knowing that the Senate would reject every one.) Now it has shut down the government, even though 70 per cent of the US public disapproves of the tactic, and even right-wing commentators argue that the way to get rid of Obamacare is via the ballot box, not blackmail. Elect a Republican president and a Republican Congress, they say, then repeal the thing.

At state level, where Republicans dominate, the sabotage of Obamacare is endless. Many states have failed to set up health exchanges. Citizens are being urged to flout the law and pay a fine rather than obey the individual mandate that requires them to buy insurance. Most inexcusable of all, a swathe of red states is refusing to expand Medicaid, which helps the poor. That will be critical for the success of Obamacare – even though the federal government is picking up 100 per cent of the cost for the first three years, and 90 per cent thereafter.

Why this scorched-earth opposition? After all, the mandate was originally a Republican idea, put forward by the impeccably conservative Heritage Foundation some two decades ago. Obamacare, moreover, is based on the healthcare reform enacted in Massachusetts in 2006 under the state's then governor, Mitt Romney – the Republicans' White House candidate in 2012. And at a simple human level, why oppose a law providing cover for 28 million people who don't have it?

One reason is Republicans' visceral dislike of Obama, on political, personal or racist grounds – or a blend of all three. Ideologically, they are terrified not that healthcare reform will fail, with the dire consequences they predict, but that it will succeed.

Success would strike at the very core of Republican belief, that government is bad for you and should be reduced to the bare minimum to sustain a functioning state. Despite public wariness of the law as a whole, several of its main provisions are extremely popular (as the once reviled Medicare now is.) If Obamacare works, Americans would feel better about government in general; the terrible monster erected by Republican demonology would be seen to be benign, after all. What price the party's electoral prospects then?

Obama's rogue state tramples over every law it demands others uphold

For 67 years the US has pursued its own interests at the expense of global justice – no wonder people are sceptical now

BETA

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 9 September 2013 20.30 BST

US troops fire a white phosphorous mortar towards a Taliban position on 3 April 2009 in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Photograph: John Moore/Getty

You could almost pity these people. For 67 years successive US governments have resisted calls to reform the UN security council. They've defended a system which grants five nations a veto over world affairs, reducing all others to impotent spectators. They have abused the powers and trust with which they have been vested. They have collaborated with the other four permanent members (the UK, Russia, China and France) in a colonial carve-up, through which these nations can pursue their own corrupt interests at the expense of peace and global justice.

Eighty-three times the US has exercised its veto. On 42 of these occasions it has done so to prevent Israel's treatment of the Palestinians being censured. On the last occasion, 130 nations supported the resolution but Barack Obama spiked it. Though veto powers have been used less often since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the US has exercised them 14 times in the interim (in 13 cases to shield Israel), while Russia has used them nine times. Increasingly the permanent members have used the threat of a veto to prevent a resolution being discussed. They have bullied the rest of the world into silence.

Through this tyrannical dispensation – created at a time when other nations were either broken or voiceless – the great warmongers of the past 60 years remain responsible for global peace. The biggest weapons traders are tasked with global disarmament. Those who trample international law control the administration of justice.

But now, as the veto powers of two permanent members (Russia and China) obstruct its attempt to pour petrol on another Middle Eastern fire, the US suddenly decides that the system is illegitimate. Obama says: "If we end up using the UN security council not as a means of enforcing international norms and international law, but rather as a barrier … then I think people rightly are going to be pretty skeptical about the system." Well, yes.

Never have Obama or his predecessors attempted a serious reform of this system. Never have they sought to replace a corrupt global oligarchy with a democratic body. Never do they lament this injustice – until they object to the outcome. The same goes for every aspect of global governance.

Obama warned last week that Syria's use of poisoned gas "threatens to unravel the international norm against chemical weapons embraced by 189 nations". Unravelling the international norm is the US president's job.

In 1997 the US agreed to decommission the 31,000 tonnes of sarin, VX, mustard gas and other agents it possessed within 10 years. In 2007 it requested the maximum extension of the deadline permitted by the Chemical Weapons Convention – five years. Again it failed to keep its promise, and in 2012 it claimed they would be gone by 2021. Russia yesterday urged Syria to place its chemical weapons under international control. Perhaps it should press the US to do the same.

In 1998 the Clinton administration pushed a law through Congress which forbade international weapons inspectors from taking samples of chemicals in the US and allowed the president to refuse unannounced inspections. In 2002 the Bush government forced the sacking of José Maurício Bustani, the director general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. He had committed two unforgiveable crimes: seeking a rigorous inspection of US facilities; and pressing Saddam Hussein to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, to help prevent the war George Bush was itching to wage.

The US used millions of gallons of chemical weapons in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It also used them during its destruction of Falluja in 2004, then lied about it. The Reagan government helped Saddam Hussein to wage war with Iran in the 1980s while aware that he was using nerve and mustard gas. (The Bush administration then cited this deployment as an excuse to attack Iraq, 15 years later).

Smallpox has been eliminated from the human population, but two nations – the US and Russia – insist on keeping the pathogen in cold storage. They claim their purpose is to develop defences against possible biological weapons attack, but most experts in the field consider this to be nonsense. While raising concerns about each other's possession of the disease, they have worked together to bludgeon the other members of the World Health Organisation, which have pressed them to destroy their stocks.

In 2001 the New York Times reported that, without either Congressional oversight or a declaration to the Biological Weapons Convention, "the Pentagon has built a germ factory that could make enough lethal microbes to wipe out entire cities". The Pentagon claimed the purpose was defensive but, developed in contravention of international law, it didn't look good. The Bush government also sought to destroy the Biological Weapons Convention as an effective instrument by scuttling negotiations over the verification protocol required to make it work.

Looming over all this is the great unmentionable: the cover the US provides for Israel's weapons of mass destruction. It's not just that Israel – which refuses to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention – has used white phosphorus as a weapon in Gaza (when deployed against people, phosphorus meets the convention's definition of "any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm").

It's also that, as the Washington Post points out: "Syria's chemical weapons stockpile results from a never-acknowledged gentleman's agreement in the Middle East that as long as Israel had nuclear weapons, Syria's pursuit of chemical weapons would not attract much public acknowledgement or criticism." Israel has developed its nuclear arsenal in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty, and the US supports it in defiance of its own law, which forbids the disbursement of aid to a country with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction.

As for the norms of international law, let's remind ourselves where the US stands. It remains outside the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, after declaring its citizens immune from prosecution. The crime of aggression it committed in Iraq – defined by the Nuremberg tribunal as "the supreme international crime" – goes not just unpunished but also unmentioned by anyone in government. The same applies to most of the subsidiary war crimes US troops committed during the invasion and occupation. Guantánamo Bay raises a finger to any notions of justice between nations.

None of this is to exonerate Bashar al-Assad's government – or its opponents – of a long series of hideous crimes, including the use of chemical weapons. Nor is it to suggest that there is an easy answer to the horrors in Syria.

But Obama's failure to be honest about his nation's record of destroying international norms and undermining international law, his myth-making about the role of the US in world affairs, and his one-sided interventions in the Middle East, all render the crisis in Syria even harder to resolve. Until there is some candour about past crimes and current injustices, until there is an effort to address the inequalities over which the US presides, everything it attempts – even if it doesn't involve guns and bombs – will stoke the cynicism and anger the president says he wants to quench.

During his first inauguration speech Barack Obama promised to "set aside childish things". We all knew what he meant. He hasn't done it.

Obama is all about 'universal rights' - except for Muslims

It's time the president acknowledges that systematized discrimination against Muslims is real and thriving

• 
• • Uzma Kolsy
  • theguardian.com, Saturday 31 August 2013 12.30 BST

Jay Leno talks with President Barack Obama during a commercial break on 6 August 2013. Photograph: Paul Drinkwater/NBC/Getty Images

I was watching President Obama employ his devilish charisma, in routine fashion, on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in early August. The banter dissipated as the interview took a more serious turn to embassy closures, Edward Snowden and, finally, Russia. Obama condemned President Vladimir Putin for Russia's recent "homosexual propaganda" bill saying:

"When it comes to universal rights, when it comes to people's basic freedoms, whether you are discriminating on the basis of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, you are violating the basic morality that should transcend every country."

I was left rattled by the president's statement. Obama, who made history last year whenhe expressed his support for same-sex marriage, was comfortably unabashed in impugning Russian leadership on the reprehensible policy, as he should have been. But as a Muslim American, neither the irony nor the hypocrisy of his statement, championing "universal rights", was lost on me.

As we've witnessed time and time again domestically, most recently with the Associated Press revelation that the NYPD designated Muslim houses of worship and community centers as terrorist organizations, the United States is no stranger to legalizing discrimination. In the elusive pursuit of true equality, President Obama has made considerable and long overdue progress in securing the rights of the LGBT community. But he in no way can tout the badge of "basic morality" until he acknowledges that many Americans are being confronted with institutionalized discrimination in every tier of the government hierarchy. Racism, Islamophobia and prejudice run amok in our society, but when discriminatory practice is etched into law, it harkens back to a sinister time in our nation's history.

Regrettably, branding mosques as terrorist enterprises doesn't exactly move the needle given the NYPD's history of targeted surveillance and monitoring of the region's Muslim community. Invidious policy and religious profiling are not confined to the NYPD either. This is just the latest in a mounting string of offenses by government agencies against Muslim Americans. The FBI maintains an intimidatingly lengthy catalog of 15,000 spies, three times as many as there were 25 years ago. In a post 9/11 climate many of them operate as informants in mosques throughout the nation. The mosque that I grew up attending in Irvine, California, was infiltrated by one such informant, who worked so hard to plant seeds of violence and terrorism in the minds of its congregants that members of the mosque immediately reported him.

"Geo-mapping", the FBI's purported tactical crime fighting tool, was exposed as a covert mapping program to track and monitor Muslim communities engaging in constitutionally protected activity, without any suspicion of crime. Leaked FBI training materials have also cemented what we already know – the agency religiously profiles Muslims,instructing its agents that "mainstream" Muslims are terrorist sympathizers and the Muslim practice of giving charity is a cover for funding "combat".

It doesn't end there. Seven states have passed anti-Shariah legislation, redundant and extraneous laws that explicitly prohibit the use of foreign law in American courts, as already established by our nation's constitution. The bills passed in these states, most recently North Carolina, alienate the Muslim community and unfairly paint them as adherents of an archaic, anti-Western system, playing up longstanding stereotypes and stoking fears. Open-ended guidelines for Homeland Security initiatives, like the Suspicious Activity Reporting program, give credence to the subjective biases of citizens and law enforcement alike, allowing for religious profiling when dubbing something as "suspicious". And that is apart from the FBI Watch List and the TSA's No-Fly List.

TSA memos have indicated that their passenger screening process includes "things passengers might do which also might be things a terrorist would do, eg, pray to Allah right before the flight that you might have 90 virgins in heaven". Needless to say, many of these counter-terrorism measures disproportionately target Muslims. We see this disparity even in federal prison, where Muslims make up only 6% of the general federal prison population, but comprise two thirds of the inmates in Communication Management Units (CMU), prison units furtively created to isolate certain prisoners.

And all the while, the president has remained unnervingly silent.

I shouldn't have to point to statistics that most informants actually acted as agent provocateurs in terrorism probes. I also shouldn't have to cite that there is a dearth of evidence to prove that these national security measures, like the SAR program, are effective in combatting terrorism. I shouldn't have to clarify that there is no specter of Shariah law looming on the horizon and that Muslims are not looking to prop up a crescent and star flag in state capitols. And I've come undone at the thought of having to explain, again, that the overwhelming majority of Muslims being spied on, monitored, tracked and, in the case of 16 year old US citizen Abdulrahman Awlaki, killed – by federal, state and local agencies- are innocent of any wrongdoing.

My father's Islamic name should not place him on a watch list. When I pray in the airport, I should expect law enforcement to protect my right to do so, not jot notes in a security memo. And I should be able to attend my mosque without fear of reprisal, from anti-Muslim bigots and FBI spies alike. Being Muslim does not make me a criminal. I shouldn't have to say it, but secret measures that profile Muslims and veiled discriminatory policies assume as much.

This is not a "new low for the NYPD"; it's a dangerous manifestation of a foregone conclusion: in the name of national security, the civil rights afforded to Muslim Americans are being deliberately curtailed. It's time that the president acknowledges that systematized discrimination against Muslims is real and thriving, and expands the reach of his advocacy for universal human rights to include Muslim Americans.

Dark moments of institutionalized racism, alienation and ostracism besmirch this nation's history. It is all too coincidental that we recently marked the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's legendary "I have a dream" speech – the impetus that led the FBI to surreptitiously launch one of the biggest surveillance operations in history – spying on Dr King himself. The idea that the government was looking for dirt on Dr King to discredit and destroy him seems ludicrous and offensive today. Here's hoping the president sees the historical irony.