United States News Digest

Auto 'Recovery' Chief: Green Work Makes Free!

May 22 (EIRNS)—The Obama Administration is attempting to use the collapse of the U.S. auto sector to implement a fascist retooling of the U.S. economy and reprogramming of the U.S. workforce using behavioral modification brainwashing methods. Dr. Ed Montgomery, Obama's Director of Recovery for Auto Communities and Workers, visited Toledo, Ohio yesterday. During a tour of the Jeep plant that is currently shut down, like all of Chrysler's plants, Montgomery discussed Obama's plans for laid off autoworkers. Earlier in the day, in Dayton, he announced that the Federal government is making $50 million in Federal funds available for "green energy" job training in communities hurt by auto layoffs.

"It's part of our effort to bring relief to workers from the auto community, to help them train for new energy efficient and green jobs for the future," Montgomery said. Next week, Montgomery will travel to Detroit to kick off workshops on how to access nearly $80 million in stimulus funds to develop new, green jobs.

Montgomery was a leading official in the Labor Department under President Clinton; most recently he served as dean of the University of Maryland College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. Larry Summers, the leader of the pack of behavioral economists pushing nazi health-care policies in the Obama Administration, and Montgomery's graduate school classmate, who persuaded him to take his present job.

Cheney Brags of His Support for Torture

May 21 (EIRNS)—Former Vice President Dick Cheney gave a speech today, clearly intended as a rebuttal to President Obama's speech earlier in the day, in which the President spoke on protecting national security in the context of American Constitutional values. Cheney's speech at the American Enterprise Institute was a snarling exposition of the "success" of the Bush Administration's warrantless electronic surveillance and "enhanced interrogation program." It was perhaps his fifth such episode over the past couple of months.

"I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program," Cheney boasted. The speech, full of declarations of support for the valiant interrogators who, Cheney says, extracted valuable information about further planned al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S., was premised on a world of permanent warfare—warfare that was in fact assured by the Bush Administration's brutality, war, and other sanctions against most of the Arab and Muslim world.

Cheney found it necessary to reassert the long-discredited claim that the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was the isolated activity of a "few bad apples" in the prison, rather than a systemic policy aimed at "softening up" detainees for interrogation: "In public discussion of these matters," Cheney declared, "there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulation, and simple decency. For the harm they did to Iraqi prisoners and to America's cause, they deserved and received Army justice."

The recently declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report is explicit, that what happened at Abu Ghraib was a direct result of decisions made at the top levels of the Bush Administration, particularly by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney; the report, approved by Democrats and Republicans alike, specifically refuted the "few bad apples" fable.

Californians Reject Arnie's Ballot Initiatives

May 20 (EIRNS)—California voters decisively rejected Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's efforts to gain more power to dismantle state government, defeating five of the six initiatives he placed on the ballot, in a special election yesterday. The sixth, which passed, is insignificant, as it establishes that there can be no pay increases for legislators when the budget is not passed by the deadline (this merely reflects anger at the state's elected officials).

While anti-tax idiots are proclaiming victory, the mobilization to defeat these initiatives included activity by the LaRouche Youth Movement and LaRouche PAC, union members, many Democrats, and a lot of fed-up Californians. The measures would do nothing but give Arnie more power to make cuts, while enabling him to borrow money against future revenues from the state lottery, and from issuing new bonds to cover mandatory budget items. While it might have provided some immediate relief from an expected $21 billion budget shortfall, it would gain that relief through postponing payments, adding the costs of interest on the new borrowing to future deficits. The fact remains that the state is bankrupt, and nothing short of Lyndon LaRouche's FDR-style transformation of the U.S. physical economy, based on Hamiltonian principles, can help California, or any other state, avoid disintegration.

Schwarzenegger responded to the vote by saying that there is no choice but to "go all out" in cutting government spending. On the chopping block will be health care and social services, education, infrastructure, and law enforcement.

In his campaign to pass the initiatives, Schwarzenegger warned that if they did not pass, he might be forced to release 40,000 prisoners and to make draconian cuts. Instead of recognizing that the voters are tired of his manipulative games, bullying, threats, and his approach to governance, which have made the state government dysfunctional, and legislative deliberation nonexistent, he now says the vote has given him a mandate to further dismantle the social safety net.

Academy of Sciences Wants Army To Create Zombie Killers

May 18 (EIRNS)—A National Academy of Sciences committee last week recommended "that the Army expand its research into how a soldier's brain, blood, and nerves work so it can develop futuristic applications that can increase performance and survivability."

National security columnist Walter Pincus writes in today's Washington Post, "There are simpler present day augmented reality opportunities, the committee said. The report describes having a virtual overlay associated with the trigger of a soldier's weapon, which provides a sensory feedback when it locks on a target identified as a foe. The soldier can be trained so that he pulls the trigger without thinking, 'decreasing the time between acquiring and engaging the target,' the study says." ("Augmented reality" displays the actual world mixed with the "virtual world.")

Former Supporters See Obama Turning into Bush

May 17 (EIRNS)—The Washington, D.C. newspaper Politico's lead story today is, "Some on Left Souring on Obama," citing anger from liberal and left-wing Democrats over Obama's breaking of campaign promises on treatment of detainees; failure to close Guantanamo as promised; not releasing information on torture, especially photos; not doing anything to help the immigration issue; not moving on gay rights; and not pulling troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Politico mention that support is being most quickly lost among working families, those formerly employed in the lower 80% income bracket.

One disillusioned liberal, Michael Meyers of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, says that many Obama supporters built him up "to be more of a liberal icon than his public speeches and writings ever justified.... They invested in Obama everything they wanted the next President to be.... 'He's black, liberal, anti-Iraq War, urban, young. He was all of that and smart and he went to a radical church. They just knew.'... They exaggerated him. They saw him as a messiah.... He's not the person that people thought he was."

Other attacks are coming from the ACLU and Human Rights Watch for the decision to use military tribunals, not the Federal courts, to try Guantanamo prisoners.