From Volume 37, Issue 33 of EIR Online, Published Aug. 27, 2010

United States News Digest

White House, Dems Shift Line on Obamacare, Away from Cost-Cutting

Aug. 21 EIRNS)—Some of the Obama Administration's top allies in pushing for his Nazi health-care bill, are now admitting that even key Democratic constituents have not been won over, and that their arguments have failed. Their solution? To lie!

Politico reports on a conference call held yesterday by Families USA and the Herndon Alliance, which includes AARP, AFL-CIO, SEIU, La Raza, and MoveOn.com, to shift their message on health-care reform away from saying it will save money, to saying, "We'll work to improve it."

A power-point presentation admits the failure of White House predictions that the health-care plan would become more popular as people learned more about it. It concedes that groups typically supportive of Democratic causes—people under 40, non-college-educated women, and Hispanic voters—have not been won over. "Straightforward policy defenses fail to [move] voters' opinions about the law," says one image. "Voters are concerned about rising health-care costs and believe costs will continue to rise.... Women in particular are concerned that the health-care law will mean less provider availability.... Many don't believe health-care reform will help the economy."

Obviously feeling the heat from opponents of the law, including, notably, from the LaRouche movement, the presentation points out that "It is critical to assure seniors that Medicare will not be cut." The presentation's final page of "Don'ts" directs people: "Don't ... say the law will reduce costs and [the] deficit"—and, implicitly, don't mention the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB)—aka "death panel"—or that Obama has promised to cut a half-trillion dollars out of Medicare over the next decade!

LaRouche: Fix No Longer in for Obama

Aug. 22 (EIRNS)—A source close to the Obama White House reports that the President and his top aides are hysterical over the prospect of a retrial of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich case. Blagojevich's corruption trial ended on Aug. 17 in a hung jury for 23 out of the 24 charges against him. The most serious charges included the accusation that he and his co-defendants had tried to sell or trade President Barack Obama's old Senate seat.

According to the source, if U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald decides to go ahead with a retrial, chances are good that Blagojevich will subpoena President Obama and advisor Rahm Emanuel to testify—a situation for Obama and company which could become a nightmare for the White House, the source emphasized.

Interviewed on Fox News today, Blagojevich said that if the prosecution retries his case—a court hearing will take place on Aug. 26 to discuss the schedule for a retrial—he intends to call Emanuel and Obama. Blagojevich accused Fitzgerald of selective prosecution, and said that he was in direct negotiations with Emanuel the day before he was arrested.

Lyndon LaRouche today observed that President Obama has "good reason to be worried. Obama is now targeted. The fix is no longer in to save him."

Billionaire Mayor Bloomberg at War with New York's Homeless

Aug. 19 (EIRNS)—New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire who bought his election repeatedly, is intent on driving out the city's poor. To give a hint of how this works, look at the Work Advantage program, which ostensibly helps homeless families get back into housing; but in fact, like the welfare reform programs on which it is based, it actually blames the homeless for the conditions they are in.

On Jan. 31, the New York Daily News reported that the Work Advantage program had placed families who were facing foreclosure of their homes in illegally converted apartments and units riddled with code violations. Some landlords were even shaking down Advantage tenants for extra, under-the-table payments. The next day, the Daily News reported on a single mother, with her two children, who had been placed in an apartment infested with rats, whose landlord demanded $130 a month on top of the monthly $1,020 rent subsidy he was getting from the city. He then allegedly sexually abused one of the woman's daughters.

The Coalition for the Homeless, the advocacy organization for the homeless in New York City, places the blame for this situation on Bloomberg and his appointee to run the city's Department of Homeless Services, Seth Diamond, who said, upon being appointed that position, that he plans "to import more of the work-based philosophy that dominates the city's welfare agency, to the homeless services system." The coalition calls this approach "deeply unrealistic" as the homeless problem in New York City is not a "jobs" problem, but one of the lack of affordable housing. The average homeless family assisted by DHS earns $9 an hour and works 32 hours a week, which translates into a pretax annual income of about $15,000. Yet the typical Work Advantage family is placed in an apartment with a monthly rent of $1,100, and the family is expected to pay the rent on its own after one or two years. On Aug. 10, the coalition, in its blog, reported that it had acquired documents from DHS showing that 1,137 families that had been in the Advantage program re-applied for shelter, and that only 3,746 families had started receiving the subsidy two or more years ago, meaning that the failure rate could be as high as 1 in 3.

Tea Party Is Not the Mass Strike; It's Dick's Armey

Aug. 17 (EIRNS)—Lyndon LaRouche said last week that the Tea Party movement is not the mass strike (see last week's EIR Editorial, http://tiny.cc/s0bwj). And, the Tea Party is about to go the way of the dinosaur, unless it breaks from the corrupt, money-grubbing operation known as "Dick's Armey," a.k.a. Freedomworks.

The Wall Street Journal provided a half-page of op-ed space to former Republican Congressional leader Dick Armey (Texas) and Freedomworks head Matt Kibbe to hype the release of their new book, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto. Its publisher, HarperCollins, like the Journal, is owned by Sir Rupert Murdoch, who just donated $1 million from News Corporation to the Republican Governors Association for their election fights. So much for the "independent" Tea Party.

Armey and Kibbe say it arose as "beautiful chaos—or, as the Nobel Prize-winning [fascist] economist FA Hayek put it, 'spontaneous order.'"

Their underlying message: Turn the Tea Party into a battering ram for austerity, in which all their candidates goose-step to a program called "Contract from America."

The Tea Party's real agenda has become the destruction of the United States by keeping British puppet Barack Obama in the White House. One Tea Party blogger wrote in a Cape Cod, Mass., blog, "We don't want to impeach Obama—we want to keep him there to help us win elections!"

Obama, the One-Term President

Aug. 17 (EIRNS)—The dam is about to burst on President Obama and his tenure in office. An article in The New Republic, "The Unnecessary Fall of Barack Obama," is "just the beginning," reported a senior Democratic Party source. By today, the "Fall" article had over 2,000 comments on the Huffington Post blog, many of them blasting Obama and pointing out that his approval rating, at 42%, is still dropping.

On Aug. 17, Politico published an article called, "Obama, the One-Term President," by chief political columnist Roger Simon. He writes: "Q: Will Barack Obama be a one-term president? A: Yes, he might last that long. Honest to goodness, the man just does not get it. He might be forced to pull a Palin and resign before his first term is over."

An ABC News blog comment says, "This is the most miserably failed presidency in US history.... It is time to impeach him." Roger Stone, a former heavy hitter politically, has an article titled, "Is Obama the New Jimmy Carter?" with a picture of Carter morphing into Obama. Stone calls Obama the "most incompetent" President since Carter.

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