[Peace-discuss] Obama Inc.
Chuck Minne
mincam2 at yahoo.com
Wed Nov 22 14:18:03 CST 2006
Obama's office has issued a press release refuting the piece in
Harper's:
Senator Obama's Office Responds to Misleading Harper's Magazine Story
Monday, October 23, 2006
The latest issue of Harper's Magazine contains a piece titled "BARACK
OBAMA INC. The birth of a Washington machine." The story is
unfortunately filled with a selective presentation of the facts,
innuendo and a cynical assumption of bad faith in our leaders.
<http://obama.senate.gov/press/061023-
senator_obamas_office_responds_to_misleading_harpers_magazine_story/
index.html>
Ken Silverstein's limited response to the press release:
A Bit More on Barack
Senator's office criticizes Harper's story
<http://www.harpers.org/sb-a-little-bit-more-on-obama-1161881683.html>
"C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:
[More on our Potemkin village of a junior senator. The excellent Ken
Silverstein published "Barack Obama Inc.: The birth of a Washington
Machine" in Harpers Magazine. Selections follow. --CGE]
...it is also startling to see how quickly Obama's senatorship has been
woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts
official Washington. He quickly established a political machine funded
and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and
hangers-on. For the staff post of policy director he hired Karen
Kornbluh, a senior aide to Robert Rubin when the latter, as head of the
Treasury Department under Bill Clinton, was a chief advocate for NAFTA
and other free-trade policies that decimated the nation's manufacturing
sector (and the organized labor wing of the Democratic Party). Obama's
top contributors are corporate law and lobbying firms (Kirkland & Ellis
and Skadden, Arps, where four attorneys are fund-raisers for Obama as
well as donors), Wall Street financial houses (Goldman Sachs and
JPMorgan Chase), and big Chicago interests (Henry Crown and Company, an
investment firm that has stakes in industries ranging from
telecommunications to defense)...
...In several primaries, Obama's PAC has given to candidates that have
been carefully culled and selected by the Democratic establishment on
the basis of their marketability as palatable "moderates" -- even when
they are facing more progressive and equally viable challengers. Most
conspicuously, Obama backed Joe Lieberman over Ned Lamont, his
Democratic primary opponent in Connecticut, endorsing him publicly in
March and contributing $4,200 to his campaign. The Hopefund also gave
$10,000 to Tammy Duckworth, a helicopter pilot in the National Guard who
lost both legs in Iraq and who is running for the seat of retiring
G.O.P. Congressman Henry Hyde in Chicago's western suburbs. Despite her
support from the party establishment, an enormous fund-raising
advantage, and sympathy she had due to her war record, Duckworth won the
primary by just 1,100 votes over a vocal war opponent named Christine
Cegelis. [The Democrats worked hard to defeat Cegelis in the primary
because of her antiwar position; they barely managed it; and then
Duckworth, without the antiwar vote, lost to a Republican. --CGE]
...Since taking office, Obama has become far more measured in his
position. After Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha called for
withdrawal from Iraq last fall, Obama rejected such a move in a speech
before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, saying the United
States needed "to manage our exit in a responsible way--with the hope of
leaving a stable foundation for the future." His stance won him praise
from Washington Post columnist David Broder, the veritable weather vane
of political conventional wisdom. Murtha's was "not a carefully reasoned
analysis of the strategic consequences of leaving Iraq," Broder wrote,
whereas Obama was helping his party define "a sensible common ground"
and had "pointed the administration and the country toward a realistic
and modestly hopeful course on Iraq."
...Although this is not the place to review the full history of ethanol,
it's beyond dispute that it survives only because members of Congress
from farm states, whether liberal or conservative, have for decades
managed to win billions of dollars in federal subsidies to underwrite
its production. It is not, of course, family farmers who primarily
benefit from the program but rather the agribusiness giants such as
Illinois-based Aventine Renewable Energy and Archer Daniels Midland
(http://www.knowmore.org/index.php/Archer_Daniels_Midland_Company) (for
which ethanol accounts for just 5 percent of its sales but an estimated
23 percent of its profits.) Ethanol production, as Tad Patzek of UC
Berkeley's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineeringg wrote in a
report this year, is based on "the massive transfer of money from the
collective pocket of the U.S. taxpayers to the transnational
agricultural cartel."
Since arriving on Capitol Hill, Obama has been as assiduous as any
member of Congress in promoting ethanol. He has introduced a number of
measures that benefit the industry--such as the "Obama Amendment" that
offered oil companies a 50 percent tax credit for building stations that
offer E85 fuel-and voted for the corporate-welfare-laden 2005 energy
bill, which offered billions in subsidies to ethanol producers as well
as lavish incentives for developing cars that run on alternative fuels.
Meanwhile, Obama, Durbin, and three other farm-state senators opposed a
proposal this year by the Bush administration to lower stiff tariffs on
cheaper sugarcane-based ethanol from Brazil and other countries. To
lower such tariffs, the senators suggested, would leave the nation
dangerously dependent on foreign ethanol. "Our focus must be on building
energy security through domestically produced renewable fuels," wrote
the senators in a letter to Bush. That Obama would lend his name to such
an argument -- with its dubious implication that Brazilians ethanol is a
national-security liability comparable to Saudi crude -- indicates that
he is at least as interested in protecting domestic producers of ethanol
as he is in weaning America from imported petroleum.
[For the rest of the article, see
.]
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