White House Neoliberals (Clintonistas) Work With GOP Neoliberals and Democratic Congressional Leadership to Fund More War and Defund Education and Teachers… and Police and Firefighters and Other State Employees

mash-up from HuffPo…

The White House veto threat, combined with a GOP filibuster, was enough to defeat the funding bill in the Senate. On July 22nd, the Senate sent the stripped-down war funding bill back to the House, leading to Tuesday’s showdown. Nine years into the war, the Senate approved funding on a voice vote….

[UPDATE: So much for that. Only 102 Democrats joined a dozen Republicans and the war money passed, 308-114.]

… “Once again, war is being paid for with a credit card while investments in our children’s future are tossed aside. These investments — $10 billion for teacher jobs, $1 billion for summer youth employment, $5 billion for Pell grants, $701 million for border security — were cut from the war funding bill coming to the House floor despite being fully paid for and not adding to the budget deficit,”

“They have been jettisoned in favor of further borrowed war spending. Today’s bill doesn’t include anything to maintain first responder, police or firefighter positions despite the dramatic need for those jobs in every community in America. We believe this is fiscal insanity and a moral tragedy.”

… The program that was cut was a pet project of Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey told the Fiscal Times that the administration had recommended cutting food stamps instead.

… Duncan’s victory is a Pyrrhic one, as his strident objections led to all of the education funds being taken out, which will lead to tens of thousands of teacher layoffs. Duncan was objecting to the loss of $800 million in unspent funds that had been dedicated to his “Race to the Top” reform. Instead, he lost the entire $15 billion. Obey said today he will oppose the stripped-down bill…

Guardian Writer Mentions CIA Death Squad Murder

(Writer from The Guardian talks about CIA (death squad) killing a deaf-mute Afghan civilian…)

DAVID LEIGH: Yes, Shum Khan. This is one of the rather harrowing little stories that appears in these 92,000 entries. He lived in a very remote village 7,000 feet up in the mountains near the border with Pakistan. A CIA paramilitary squad charged into the village. They were on some secret mission, I suppose. And he was frightened, and he started to run away. They shouted at him to stop. He didn’t stop, because he couldn’t hear them. But they didn’t know that, so they shot him. And then, afterwards, the village elders explained the mistake to them, so they fetched out some supplies—I don’t know exactly what they were, probably rice and beans, that kind of thing—and handed them over as compensation, what they call “solatia.” And then the CIA paramilitary team carried on its way to whatever military mission it was doing. And that’s a little story of an interaction between an ordinary disabled person and, you know, a killer squad (DEATH SQUAD), probably. Democracy NOW!

[go watch the interview and read the transcript, here]

also read…

 CIA Death Squads are Alive and Well In Todays Drone Industry by Scott Creighton

Top 18 Secret Mercenary Armies of the CIA

Is the U.S. Organizing Salvador-Style Death Squads in Iraq?

FROM WOUNDED KNEE TO IRAQ: A CENTURY OF U.S. MILITARY INTERVENTIONS

Charles Bowden on “The War Next Door”

Karzai Confirms: NATO Killed 52 Civilians in Friday Attack

Rockets Hit House Full of Hiding Civilians

by Jason Ditz, AntiWar

Following up on reports emerging over the weekend, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office is confirming that a NATO attack in Sangin District of the Helmand Province struck a houseload of civilians hiding from a nearby battle, and that at least 52 civilians were killed.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has resulted in increased Unemployment in the U.S.

(… and yet the Clinton’s little puppet, Barack Obama, is trying to sell 3 more NAFTAs to us “as if” we can still be convinced that “free trade’ is good for anyone outside Wall Street or their personal servants in Washington…)

by Mark Vorpahl, Global Research

…

We will make our case as hard and as well as we can. And, though the fight will be difficult, I deeply believe we will win. And I’d like to tell you why. First of all, because NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t support this agreement. Bill Clinton, 1993

… NAFTA’s free trade was a boon for Wall Street, but a bust for Main Street. President Obama is resurrecting President Clinton’s failed promise of NAFTA’s jobs creation in hopes of selling the public on the Korea, Colombia, and Panama FTAs. With nearly half of U.S. workers having lost a job or experienced a cut in wages since the recession started in 2007/2008, combined with a jobless “recovery,” the need for jobs is first and foremost on U.S. workers’ minds. However, this time around, after the experience of NAFTA, the promise of jobs creation comes off like a cheap gimmick used too many times, as if to sell a shoddy “lemon” used car as good coin. All three of the trade agreements Obama is pushing are modeled after NAFTA. There is absolutely no reason to expect different results when it comes to jobs creation.

[read the rest, here]

Leaked documents expose imperialist war in Afghanistan

(Task Force 373 – think “Caravan of Death”  (Chile), “Escuadrón de la Muerte ” (El Salvadore), “Battalion 316″  (Honduras), “Contras” (Nicaragua), and SAVAK in Iran.. the list goes on and on… )

by Alex Lantier, WSWS

On Sunday, the WikiLeaks web site posted 91,731 American military documents on the US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan, covering the period from January 2004 to December 2009. The release was timed to coincide with articles on these revelations in the New York Times, the British Guardian and the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, all of which had received the documents several weeks ago.

The documents make clear that the occupation of Afghanistan is a filthy imperialist war. Popular resistance and protest demonstrations are drowned in blood, US death squads operate at will under a media blackout, and Washington and NATO collaborate with a narrow elite of corrupt warlords and Afghan officers.

The documents were released as the Afghan government confirmed that NATO rocket fire last week killed more than 50 civilians, largely women and children, in the Sangin district of Helmand Province. The attack was one of the worst since the May 2009 Gerani air strike, in neighboring Farah province, which killed 140 civilians, including 93 children and 28 women.