List of nations we have fucked since the 1950s
Here’s a list of nations we’ve bombed:
-Korea and China 1950-53 (Korean War)
-Guatemala 1954
-Indonesia 1958
-Cuba 1959-1961
-Guatemala 1960
-Congo 1964
-Laos 1964-73
-Vietnam 1961-73
-Cambodia 1969-70
-Guatemala 1967-69
-Grenada 1983
-Lebanon 1983, 1984 (both Lebanese and Syrian targets)
-Libya 1986
-El Salvador 1980s
-Nicaragua 1980s
-Iran 1987
-Panama 1989
-Iraq 1991-present
-Kuwait 1991
-Somalia 1993
-Bosnia 1994, 1995
-Sudan 1998
-Afghanistan 1998
-Yugoslavia 1999
-Yemen 2002
-Afghanistan 2001-present
-Pakistan 2007-present
And here’s a list of nations where our government has taken a “hands off” approach:
-1947: Greece (military aid to Greece to support right-wing forces)
-1948: Italy (CIA corrupts democratic elections)
-1953: Iran (CIA overthrows the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in a military coup)
-1954: Guatemala (CIA overthrows the democratically elected Jacob Arbenz in a military coup)
-1954-1958: North Vietnam (CIA’s continuing failure results in escalating American intervention and finally the Vietnam War)
-1956: Hungary (Radio Free Europe incites Hungary to revolt by broadcasting Khruschev’s Secret Speech, The conflict kills 7,000 Soviets and 30,000 Hungarians)
-1957-1973: Laos (CIA carries out approximately one coup per year trying to nullify Laos’ democratic elections)
-1959: Haiti (U.S. military helps “Papa Doc” Duvalier become dictator of Haiti)
-1961: Cuba (CIA sends 1,500 Cuban exiles to invade Castro’s Cuba)
-1961: Dominican Republic (CIA assassinates Rafael Trujillo, a murderous dictator Washington has supported since 1930)
-1961: Ecuador (CIA-backed military forces the democratically elected President Jose Velasco to resign)
-1961: Congo (CIA assassinates the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba)
-1963: Dominican Republic (CIA overthrows the democratically elected Juan Bosch in a military coup)
-1963: Ecuador (CIA-backed military coup overthrows President Arosemana)
-1964: Brazil (CIA-backed military coup overthrows the democratically elected government of Joao Goulart)
-1965: Indonesia (IA overthrows the democratically elected Sukarno with a military coup)
-1965: Dominican Republic (A popular rebellion breaks out, promising to reinstall Juan Bosch as the country’s elected leader. The revolution is crushed when U.S. Marines land to uphold the military regime by force)
-1965: Greece (With the CIA’s backing, the king removes George Papandreous as prime minister)
-1965: Congo (CIA-backed military coup installs Mobutu Sese Seko as dictator)
-1967: Greece (CIA-backed military coup overthrows the government two days before the elections)
-1968: Bolivia (CIA-organized military operation captures legendary guerilla Che Guevara)
-1969: Uruguay (right-wing forces previously used torture only as a last resort, CIA convinces them to use it as a routine)
-1970: Cambodia (CIA overthrows Prince Sihanouk, who is highly popular among Cambodians for keeping them out of the Vietnam War)
-1971: Bolivia (CIA-backed military coup overthrows the leftist President Juan Torres)
-1971: Haiti (“Papa Doc” Duvalier dies, leaving his 19-year old son “Baby Doc” Duvalier the dictator of Haiti. His son continues his bloody reign with full knowledge of the CIA)
-1973: Chile (CIA overthrows and assassinates Salvador Allende)
-1975: Australia (CIA helps topple the democratically elected, left-leaning government of Prime Minister Edward Whitlam)
-1975: Angola (CIA backs the brutal leader of UNITAS, Jonas Savimbi)
-1979: Iran (CIA fails to predict the fall of the Shah of Iran, a longtime CIA puppet, and the rise of Muslim fundamentalists who are furious at the CIA’s backing of SAVAK)
-1979: El Salvador (military officers, repulsed by the massacres, overthrows the right-wing government. However, the U.S. compels the inexperienced officers to include many of the old guard in key positions in their new government leading to new massacres)
-1979: Nicaragua (CIA-backed guerilla war against the Sandinista government throughout the 1980s)
-1981: Iran (CIA’s Freedom Fighter’s Manual disbursed to the Contras includes instruction on economic sabotage, propaganda, extortion, bribery, blackmail, interrogation, torture, murder and political assassination)
-1983: Honduras (CIA gives Honduran military officers the Human Resource Exploitation Training)
-1986: Haiti (CIA tries to strengthen the military by creating the National Intelligence Service (SIN), which suppresses popular revolt through torture and assassination)
-1989: Panama (U.S. invades Panama to overthrow a dictator of its own making, General Manuel Noriega)
Special Comment: Not Health, Not Care, Not Reform | Video Cafe
Finally, as promised, a Special Comment on the latest version of H-R 35-90, the Senate Health Care Reform bill. To again quote Churchill after Munich, as I did six nights ago on this program: “I will begin by saying the most unpopular and most unwelcome thing: that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat, without a war.” Last night on this program Howard Dean said that with the appeasement of Mr. Lieberman of Connecticut by the abandonment of the Medicare Buy-in, he could no longer support H-R 35-90. Dr. Dean’s argument is informed, cogent, heart breaking, and unanswerable. Seeking the least common denominator, Senator Reid has found it, especially the “least” part. This is not health, this is not care, this is certainly not reform. I bless the Sherrod Browns and Ron Wydens and Jay Rockefellers and Sheldon Whitehouses and Anthony Weiners and all the others who have fought for real reform and I bleed for the pain inflicted upon them and their hopes. They have done their jobs and served their nation. But through circumstances beyond their control, they are now seeking to reanimate a corpse killed by the Republicans, and by a political game played in the Senate and in the White House by men and women who have now proved themselves poorly equipped for the fight. The “men” of the current moment, have lost to the “mice” of history. They must now not make the defeat worse by passing a hollow shell of a bill just for the sake of a big-stage signing ceremony. This bill, slowly bled to death by the political equivalent of the leeches that were once thought state-of-the-art-medicine, is now little more than a series of microscopically minor tweaks of a system which is the real-life, here-and-now version, of the malarkey of the Town Hallers. The American Insurance Cartel is the Death Panel, and this Senate bill does nothing to destroy it. Nor even to satiate it. It merely decrees that our underprivileged, our sick, our elderly, our middle class, can be fed into it, as human sacrifices to the great maw of corporate voraciousness, at a profit per victim of 10 cents on the dollar instead of the current 20. Even before the support columns of reform were knocked down, one by one, with the kind of passive defense that would embarrass a touch-football player – single-payer, the public option, the Medicare Buy-In – before they vanished, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the part of this bill that would require you to buy insurance unless you could prove you could not afford it, would cost a family of four with a household income of 54-thousand dollars a year, 17 percent of that income. Nine thousand dollars a year. Just for the insurance! That was with a public option. That was with some kind of check on the insurance companies. That was before — as Howard Dean pointed out — the revelation that the cartel will still be able to charge older people more than others; will — at the least — now be able to charge much more, maybe 50 percent more, for people with pre-existing conditions — pre-existing conditions; you know, like being alive. You have just agreed to purchase a product. If you do not, you will be breaking the law and subject to a fine. You have no control over how much you will pay for the product. The government will have virtually no control over how much the company will charge for the product. The product is designed like the Monty Python sketch about the insurance company’s “Never-Pay” policy … “which, you know, if you never claim — is very worthwhile. But you had to claim, and, well, there it is.” And who do we have to blame for this? There are enough villains to go around, men and women who, in a just world, would be the next to get sick and have to sell their homes or their memories or their futures — just to keep themselves alive, just to keep their children alive, against the implacable enemy of American society, the insurance cartel. Mr. Grassley of Iowa has lied, and fomented panic and fear. Mr. DeMint of South Carolina has forgotten he represents people, and not just a political party. Mr. Baucus of Montana has operated as a virtual agent for the industry he is charged with regulating. Mr. Nelson of Nebraska has not only derailed reform, he has tried to exploit it to overturn a Supreme Court decision that, in this context, is frankly none of his goddamned business. They say they have done what they have done for the most important, the most fiscally prudent, the most gloriously phrased, the most inescapable of reasons. But mostly they have done it for the money. Lots and lots of money from the insurance companies and the pharmacological companies and the other health care companies who have slowly taken this country over. Which brings us to Mr. Lieberman of Connecticut, the one man at the center of this farcical perversion of what a government is supposed to be. Out of pique, out of revenge, out of betrayal of his earlier wiser saner self, he has sold untold hundreds of thousands of us into pain and fear and privation and slavery — for money. He has been bought and sold by the insurance lobby. He has become a Senatorial prostitute. And sadly, the President has not provided the leadership his office demands. He has badly misjudged the country’s mood at all ends of the spectrum. There is no middle to coalesce here, Sir. There are only the uninformed, the bought-off, and the vast suffering majority for whom the urgency of now is a call from a collection agency or a threat of rescission of policy or a warning of expiration of services. Sir, your hands-off approach, while nobly intended and perhaps yet some day applicable to the reality of an improved version of our nation, enabled the national humiliation that was the Town Halls and the insufferable Neanderthalian stupidity of Congressman Wilson and the street-walking of Mr. Lieberman. Instead of continuing this snipe-hunt for the endangered and possibly extinct creature “bipartisanship,” you need to push the Republicans around or cut them out or both. You need to threaten Democrats like Baucus and the others with the ends of their careers in the party. Instead, those Democrats have threatened you, and the Republicans have pushed you and cut you out. Mr. President, the line between “compromise” and “compromised” is an incredibly fine one. Any reform bill enrages the right, and provides it with the war cry around which it will rally its mindless legions in the midterms and in ‘12. But this Republican knee-jerk inflexibility provides an incredible opportunity to you, Sir, and an incredible license. On April 6th 2003 I was approached by two drunken young men at a baseball game. One of them started to ask for an autograph. The other stopped him by shouting “Screw him, he’s a liberal.” This program had been on the air for three weeks. It had to that point consisted entirely of brief introductions to correspondents in Iraq or to military analysts. There had been no criticism, no political analysis, no commentary. I had not covered news full-time for more than four years. I could not fathom on what factual basis, I was being called a “liberal,” let alone being sworn at for being such. Only later did it dawn on me that it didn’t matter why, and it didn’t matter that they were doing it – it only mattered that if I was going to be mindlessly criticized for anything, the reaction would be identical whether I did nothing that engendered it, or stood for something that engendered it. Mr. President, they are calling you a socialist, a communist, a Marxist. You could be further to the right than Reagan – and this health care bill (as Howard Dean put it here last night, this bailout for the insurance industry) sure invites the comparison. And they will still call you names. Sir, if they are going to call you a socialist no matter what you do, you have been given full unfettered freedom to do what you know is just. The bill may be the ultimate political manifesto, or it may be the most delicate of compromises. The firestorm will be the same. So why not give the haters, as the cliché goes, something to cry about. But concomitant with that is the reaction from Democrats and Independents. You have riven them, Sir. Any bill will engender criticism but this bill costs you the left — and anybody who now has to pony up 17 percent of his family’s income to buy this equivalent of Medical Mobster Protection Money. Some speaking for you, Sir, have called the public option a fetish. They may be right. But to stay with this uncomfortable language, this bill is less fetish, more bondage. Nothing short of your re-election and the re-election of dozens of Democrats in the house and senate, hinges in large part on this bill. Make it palatable or make it go away or make yourself ready — not merely for a horrifying campaign in 2012 — but for the distinct possibility also of a primary challenge. Befitting the season, Sir, these are not the shadows of the things that will be, but the shadows of the things that may be. But at this point, Mr. President, only you can make certain of that. There is only one redemption possible. The mandate in this bill under which we are required to buy insurance must be stripped out. The bill now is little more than a legally mandated delivery of the middle class (and those whose dreams of joining it slip ever further away) into a kind of Chicago stockyards of insurance. Make enough money to take care of yourself and your family and you must buy insurance – on the insurers terms – or face a fine. This provision must go. It is, above all else, immoral and a betrayal of the people who elected you, Sir. You must now announce that you will veto any bill lacking an option or buy-in, but containing a mandate. And Senator Reid, put the public option back in, or the Medicare Buy-In, or both. Or single-payer. Let Lieberman and Ben Nelson and Baucus and the Republicans vote their lack-of-conscience and preclude 60 “ayes.” Let them commit political suicide instead of you. Let Mr. Lieberman kill the bill — then turn to his Republican friends only to find out they hate him more than the Democrats do. Let him stagger off the public stage, to go work … for the insurance industry. As if he is not doing that now. Then, Mr. Reid, take every worthwhile provision of health care reform you legally can, and pass it via reconciliation, when ever and how ever you can — and by the way, a Medicare Buy-In can be legally passed via reconciliation. The Senate bill with the mandate must be defeated, if not in the Senate, then in the House. Health care reform that benefits the industry at the cost of the people is intolerable and there are no moral constructs in which it can be supported. And if still the bill and this heinous mandate become law there is yet further reaction required. I call on all those whose conscience urges them to fight, to use the only weapon that will be left to us if this bill becomes law. We must not buy federally mandated insurance if this cheesy counterfeit of reform is all we can buy. No single payer? No sale. No public option? No sale. No Medicare buy-in? No sale. I am one of the self-insured, albeit by choice. And I hereby pledge that I will not buy this perversion of health care reform. Pass this at your peril, Senators, and sign it at yours, Mr. President. I will not buy this insurance. Brand me a lawbreaker if you choose. Fine me if you will. Jail me if you must. But if the Medicare Buy-In goes, but the Mandate stays, the people who fought so hard and so sincerely to bring sanity to this system must kill this mutated version of their dream, because those elected by us to act for us have forgotten what must be the golden rule of health care reform. It is the same one to which physicians are bound, by oath: First… do no harm.
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Katrina Vanden Heuvel, the lone liberal voice during the panel discussion on This Week pointed out the obvious about our war on terror and what we’re doing in Afghanistan.
War Powers – Bill Moyers
This is not what democracy looks like.
When Americans vote, by overwhelming majorities, to place control of the executive and legislative branches in the hands of a party that has promised fundamental change, they are supposed to get that change. They are not supposed to watch as a handful of self-interested and special-interested senators prevent progress by exploiting the arcane rules of the less representative of our two legislative chambers–rules requiring that not a majority but a supermajority be attained in order even to discuss necessary reforms, and that a similar supermajority be in place to thwart a filibuster.
Yet this is where America, a nation often inclined to tell other nations how to practice democracy, finds itself as the debate about healthcare reform reaches its critical stage. We have a president who is prepared to sign legislation to expand access to healthcare while establishing at least some controls against profiteering by insurers. We have a House of Representatives in which a majority has voted for imperfect but real reform. We have a Senate in which a majority is ready to vote for what could be even better reform. Unfortunately, that majority is sidelined as a few wavering senators game the system.
Unless Harry Reid and his colleagues implement majority rule–by abolishing rules that allow two-fifths of the chamber’s members (as few as forty-one senators) to prevent passage of that legislation–the character and quality of any “reform” will be dictated by a tiny minority from some of the nation’s least populous states.
