From Volume 8, Issue 26 of EIR Online, Published June 30, 2009

United States News Digest

Holbrooke: Afghan Drug Strategy Is a Failure

June 28 (EIRNS)—When getting American troops killed pursuing a stupid British drug policy, a useful first step is to admit the folly of it; and the State Department's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, did that yesterday. The British NATO troops in Afghanistan have been, notoriously, repeatedly caught by the CIA, State Department, and U.S. military forces, working to bring Taliban and drug-running local warlords into control of regional governments there.

Now Holbrooke has publicly admitted the failure of the British-instigated policy which was denounced again yesterday in a webcast by Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche said, in response to a question from a Senate office, instead of shooting the farmers, who "are working under a gun at their neck.... Shut down the drug traffickers!" including British agent George Soros.

Holbrooke, speaking at a G8 conference in Trieste, Italy, said the U.S. was shifting away from eradicating poppy fields, and toward interdicting drug supplies—"seizing both drugs coming out of the country, and growing/processing supplies coming in.... The Western policies against the opium crop, the poppy crop, have been a failure," he said. "They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work and they alienated people and drove people into the arms of the Taliban. The poppy farmer is not our enemy." Holbrooke said the United States had wasted "hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars" on the failed British strategy.

Obama Muscles Cap-and-Trade Genocide Bill Through the House

June 26 (EIRNS)—Down-to-the-wire thuggery and bribery were required by President "Nero" Obama himself, to win passage tonight, by a bare minimum of 219 to 212, of Prince Philip's "Bomb the U.S. Economy!" bill, otherwise known as HR 2454, the Cap-and-Trade Energy bill.

The President spent June 25 calling up Congressmen; undecided Congressmen meeting with Chief of Staff Rahm 'Hedge Fund' Emmanuel, received "a tap on the shoulder" and were ushered in to meet with the President personally; Obama arranged a last-minute Rose Garden speech, denouncing "misinformation that's out there," as to why the vote was so close. Emmanuel's front-woman Nancy Pelosi worked over top House Democrats for more than two hours, until after midnight on Thursday.

At stake in the vote was not so much the policy, as was Obama's political control. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) counselled in advance, that if the House defeated the bill, the fascist policy to take down what remains of the U.S. industrial economy could be imposed by Environmental Protection Agency regulation, Congress be damned.

Forty-four Democrats and 168 Republicans voted against the bill; 211 Democrats and eight Republicans voted for it; two each from both parties abstained.

AARP Praises Obama's Nazi Health Care

June 22 (EIRNS)—Kicking off a White House propaganda campaign to try to ram through Obama's Nazi health policy today, President Obama held a press conference with Barry Rand, the CEO of the American Association of Retired People (AARP), and Senators Max Baucus (Mont.) and Chris Dodd (Conn.), who are leading the push in the Senate. The event was called to announce a so-called "breakthrough," which is a phony deal with the major pharmaceutical companies, which promised to cut $80 billion over a period of ten years in the costs of medication for the poorest senior citizens. This pittance is meaningless in terms of the real burden on seniors, and will only come through if Obama succeeds in passing his plan to cut $1 trillion in Medicare.

Contrary to its own propaganda, AARP is not a pro-health group, doing nice things for seniors. The largest voluntary organization in the world, AARP is in a public-private partnership with UnitedHealth Group, one of largest of the HMO corporations, with 70 million enrollees. UnitedHealth Group in turn, is directly tied into Britain's fascist NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) program through Simon Stevens, who was Tony Blair's national health advisor from 1997-2004, and implemented the health-care rationing NICE program in 1999.

Stevens then ran United Health U.K. (a newly created-division of UnitedHealth Group) from 2004 to 2006, which made fat profits by privatizing parts of the British National Health Service. Then in January 2007, he moved to UnitedHealth Group's headquarters in Minnesota to become a vice president, and head up its UnitedHealth Groups' seniors business, Ovations/AARP Medicare division. In January 2009, he launched the UnitedHealth Group's new thinktank on health "reform." As the director of the Center for Health Reform and Modernization, Stevens is a major pusher of Obama's death plan.

Soros Coalition Rules Out Single-Payer Health Plan

June 22 (EIRNS)—Health Care for America Now (HCAN), endorsed by President Obama as the coalition pushing his health-care (euthanasia) reform, is a project of billionaire British-agent George Soros, his Tides Foundation, and the Saul Alinsky counterinsurgency networks used by Soros to ramp up the Obama Presidential candidacy. HCAN explicitly opposes the single-payer health-care plan favored by most Americans.

The group was established in July 2008 as an adjunct to the Soros operations supporting the Obama candidacy. At the outset, HCAN national campaign director Richard Kirsch wrote (July 16, 2008, Huffingtonpost) under the headline, "Why Not Single-Payer?" "I want to take a moment and address those of you who have been asking why Health Care for America Now is not focusing on creating a single-payer health insurance system." Kirsch explains that he used to believe in that sort of thing, but came to realize it would scare people.

Richard Kirsch was for 22 years an executive of the Saul Alinsky-modeled group led by Heather Booth, Citizen Action.

The inner core that created HCAN is the tight clique of Soros front organizations, ACORN, Americans United for Change, Campaign for America's Future, Center for American Progress, Center for Community Change, MoveOn, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and USAction (formerly Citizen Action).

Although Andy Stern's SEIU openly runs anti-union wrecking operations, and outrageous sell-out deals with nursing homes and budget-cutting politicians, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, the AFL-CIO, and some of their union affiliates have signed onto the HCAN initiative.

Wade Rathke was chairman of the Tides Center, founder of ACORN, and a high executive of the SEIU. Rathke had to step down as ACORN dictator and Tides Foundation board member during the Obama campaign, when it was discovered that Rathke's brother had embezzled about $1 million from the money passed through to ACORN.

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