• Either Learn from FDR or be Destroyed •
• See FDR’s Got The Answer •

New York Times — by Frank Rich — 7 March 2010 — He cannot wait much longer... This time Obama doesn’t have a year to arrive at his finest hour. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the clock runs out on November 2nd.

WEDNESDAY’S HEALTH CARE RALLY WAS ONE OF PRESIDENT OBAMA’S FINEST HOURS. It was so fine it couldn’t be blighted even by his preposterous backdrop, a cohort of white-jacketed medical workers large enough to staff a hospital in one of the daytime soaps that refused to be pre-empted by the White House show.

• UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE FOR ALL ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Obama’s urgent script didn’t need such cheesy theatrics. At last he took ownership of what he called “my proposal,” stating concisely three concrete ways the bill would improve America’s broken health care system. At last he pushed for a majority-rule, up-or-down vote in Congress. At last he conceded that bipartisan agreement between two parties with “honest and substantial differences” on fundamental principles wasn’t happening. At last he mobilized his rhetoric against a villain everyone could hiss — insurance companies. In a brief address, he mentioned these malefactors of great greed 13 times.

• Wanna fix the economy? • Then BE A LEADER! ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

There was only one problem. This finest hour arrived hastily and tardily. At 1:45 p.m. Eastern time, who was watching? Of those who did watch or caught up later, how many bought the president’s vow to finish the job “in the next few weeks”? We’ve heard this too many times before. Last May Obama said he would have a bill by late July. In July he said he wanted it “done by the fall.” The White House’s new date for final House action — specified as March 18th by Robert Gibbs, the press secretary — is already in jeopardy.

“They are waiting for us to act,” Obama said on Wednesday of the American people. “They are waiting for us to lead.” Actually, they have given up waiting. Some 80 percent of the country believes that “nothing can be accomplished” in Washington, according to an Ipsos/McClatchy poll conducted a week ago. The percentage is just as high among Democrats, many of whom admire the president but have a sinking sense of disillusionment about his ability to exercise power.

Now that we have finally arrived at the do-or-die moment for Obama’s signature issue, we face the alarming prospect that his presidency could be toast if he doesn’t make good on a year’s worth of false starts. And it won’t even be the opposition’s fault. If too many Democrats in the House defect, health care will be dead. The G.O.P. would be able to argue this fall, not without reason, that the party holding the White House and both houses of Congress cannot govern.

• FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

For the sake of argument, let’s say that Obama does eke out his victory. Republicans claim that if he does so by “ramming through” the bill with the Congressional reconciliation process, they will have another winning issue for November. On this, they are wrong. Their problem is not just their own hypocritical record on reconciliation, which they embraced gladly to ram through the budget-busting Bush tax cuts. They’d also have to contend with this country’s congenitally short attention span. Once the health care fight is over and out of sight, it will be out of mind to most Americans. We’ve already forgotten about Afghanistan — until the next bloodbath.

The 2010 election will instead be fought about the economy, as most elections are, especially in a recession whose fallout remains severe. But that battle may be even tougher for this president and his party — and not just because of the unemployment numbers. The leadership shortfall we’ve witnessed during Obama’s yearlong health care march — typified by the missed deadlines, the foggy identification of his priorities, the sometimes abrupt shifts in political tone and strategy — won’t go away once the bill does. This weakness will remain unless and until the president himself corrects it.

Those who are unsympathetic or outright hostile to Obama frame his failures as an attempt to impose “socialism” on a conservative nation. The truth is that the Fox News right would believe this about any Democratic president no matter who he was and what his policies were. Obama, who has expanded the war in Afghanistan and proved reluctant to reverse extra-constitutional Bush-Cheney jurisprudence, is a radical mainly to those who believe a conservative Republican senator like Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas is a closet commie.

The more serious debate about Obama is being conducted by neutral or sympathetic observers. There are many hypotheses. In Newsweek, Jon Meacham has written about an “inspiration gap.” He sees the professorial president as “sometimes seeming to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.” In The New Yorker, Ken Auletta raised the perils of Obama’s overexposure in our fractionalized media. (As if to prove the point, the president was scheduled to appear on Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” to celebrate its 1,000th episode this weekend.) In the Beltway, the hottest conversations center on the competence of Obama’s team. Washington Post columnists are now dueling over whether Rahm Emanuel is an underutilized genius whose political savvy the president has foolishly ignored — or a bull in the capital china shop who should be replaced before he brings Obama down.

But the buck stops with the president, not his chief of staff. And if there’s one note that runs through many of the theories as to why Obama has disappointed in Year One, it cuts to the heart of what had been his major strength: his ability to communicate a compelling narrative. In the campaign, that narrative, of change and hope, was powerful — both about his own youth, biography and talent, and about a country that had gone wildly off track during the failed presidency of his predecessor. In governing, Obama has yet to find a theme that is remotely as arresting to the majority of Americans who still like him and are desperate for him to succeed.

• A PRESIDENT CONCERNED FIRST FOR THE POOREST AMONG US INSPIRES CONFIDENCE ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

— Click the pics to read the rest! —

That includes nearly $15 billion paid to companies that defied American sanctions law by making large investments that helped Iran develop its vast oil and gas reserves.

For years, the United States has been pressing other nations to join its efforts to squeeze the Iranian economy, in hopes of reining in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Now, with the nuclear standoff hardening and Iran rebuffing American diplomatic outreach, the Obama administration is trying to win a tough new round of United Nations sanctions.

But a New York Times analysis of federal records, company reports and other documents shows that both the Obama and Bush administrations have sent mixed messages to the corporate world when it comes to doing business in Iran, rewarding companies whose commercial interests conflict with American security goals.

Many of those companies are enmeshed in the most vital elements of Iran’s economy. More than two-thirds of the government money went to companies doing business in Iran’s energy industry — a huge source of revenue for the Iranian government and a stronghold of the increasingly powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a primary focus of the Obama administration’s proposed sanctions because it oversees Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.

Other companies are involved in auto manufacturing and distribution, another important sector of the Iranian economy with links to the Revolutionary Guards. One supplied container ship motors to IRISL, a government owned shipping line that was subsequently blacklisted by the United States for concealing military cargo.

Beyond $102 billion in United States government contract payments since 2000 — to do everything from building military housing to providing platinum to the United States Mint — the companies and their subsidiaries have reaped a variety of benefits. They include nearly $4.5 billion in loans and loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that underwrites the export of American goods and services, and more than $500 million in grants for work that includes cancer research and the turning of agricultural byproducts into fuel.

In addition, oil and gas companies that have done business in Iran have over the years won lucrative drilling leases for close to 14 million acres of offshore and onshore federal land.

In recent months, a number of companies have decided to pull out of Iran, because of a combination of pressure by the United States and other Western governments, “terrorism free” divestment campaigns by shareholders and the difficulty of doing business with Iran’s government. And several oil and gas companies are holding off on new investment, waiting to see what shape new sanctions may assume.

The Obama administration points to that record, saying that it has successfully pressed allied governments and even reached out directly to corporate officials to dissuade investment in Iran, particularly in the energy industry. In addition, an American effort over many years to persuade banks to leave the country has isolated Iran from much of the international financial system, making it more difficult to do deals there.

“We are very aggressive, using a range of tools,” said Denis McDonough, chief of staff to the National Security Council.

The government can, and does, bar American companies from most types of trade with Iran, under a broad embargo that has been in place since the 1990s. But as The Times’s analysis illustrates, multiple administrations have struggled diplomatically, politically and practically to exert American authority over companies outside the embargo’s reach — foreign companies and the foreign subsidiaries of American ones.

“The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans. Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap.”

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area encompassing more than three-quarter million square miles of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean — three times larger than the nearby Siberian wetlands formerly considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane.

Shakhova’s research shows the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already emitting 7 teragrams (1 teragram = 1.1 million tons) of methane yearly, about as much as the all the oceans of the world.

“Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already,” says Shakhova. “If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger.”

From 2003 through 2008 the researchers took annual research cruises on the shelf, sampling seawater at various depths, and sampling the air above the ocean. Their findings:

• More than 80 percent of the deep water and greater than half of surface water had methane levels more than eight times that of normal seawater.

• In some areas, the saturation levels reached at least 250 times that of background levels in the summer and 1,400 times higher in the winter.

The reason we’re not setting up Camp on the 13th is that the people who are running the St. Patty’s Day parade won’t allow us to keep Camp up during the parade. So on Sunday during the parade, we will be passing out info and making an anti-war presence —

We will gather in Lafayette Park (across from the White House) at 10am the morning of the parade.

We will show our righteous outrage at U.S. militarism by showing our elected officials that “Peace means Business,” by clogging up government business. We want an end to Empire so we can build a new economy that is not drained by the costs of Empire and war. This Empire does not create jobs abroad and has the effect of destroying jobs here. This Empire builds the profits of transnational businesses while Americans go further into debt and fights wars for oil and resources. It’s time to stop using militarism as the PRIMARY tool of foreign policy. It’s time to start adhering to the U.S. Constitution and International Law.

• Does democracy exist anywhere any more? From our country to the the countries of Georgia, to Mexico, Iran and Afghanistan, the will of the people is ignored and elections are stolen. We work for a Voters’ Bill of Rights which protects democracy with a national standard of hand-counted paper balloting only. All electric voting machines can be manipulated and rigged. We must not permit their use.

• Two jet plans did not bring down 3 buildings in New York City on 11 September 2001. Thousands of engineers and architects have testified to that. All right, then what really happened and why? Those specifics have never come to light. It’s our right to complete, real investigations, and the prosecutions all who were responsible for 9-ll. We’re pleased to work with Voices of Safety International in this great work for truth and justice.

• Recruitment Education: Dealing with military indoctrination and the poverty draft in our public schools.

1. Our recruitment education campaign is moving along. We sent letters to a number of churches so we can affiliate with people in communities who will join us in approaching public high school principals and superintendents.

2. We continue to follow up and make contacts where we can. We decided to make phone call contact with schools to alert them we’re sending our formal letter regarding recruitment education, and telling them we’ll follow up with phone calls a week after they get our letter.

3. We’re going to approve a script for our people to use when contacting schools and hope to approve it at this meeting.

4. We’re going to assign jobs for all so we can move into high gear.

5. This is a big one. We’re planning to have a major RECRUITMENT EDUCATION forum at LUUF the afternoon of Saturday, May 8th. We will publicize this wide as we can in an effort to draw people from our communities who aren’t aware of the Armed Forces work to snag recruits in an unethical and essentially dishonest way. We have booked one of the leading authorities on recruitment education, Oskar Castro, from the American Friends Service Committee Youth & Militarism Project.

We will also feature veterans from the Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan wars. We are inviting Armed Forces recruiters and other “pro-military” people to participate.

We support President Obama as much as we are able. But the plain fact is, Mr. Obama has back-tracked on many of his campaign pledges around the effort to restore justice, protect our constitution, and prosecute all who violated our laws. This is not limited to Republicans.

And speaking of promises made, then thrown away, be sure to check out what’s now a famous 15 second video of candidate Obama making a promise concerning Afghanistan that ends with him saying, “And you can take that to the bank.”

There are many Democrats who were complicit with the Bush gang in their efforts to destroy our freedoms and to convert our government into a theocratic corporate dictatorship.

The problem isn't any lack of “robust competition.” How could it be? First, of all, there really never was much “competition” in the e-vote/e-vote-counting business — and there really wasn’t any when, essentially, Diebold and ES&S divided up the territory, since those two juggernauts were Siamese twins. They were originally one company, founded by the Christianist brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich (who still wield corporate power today).

Moreover — and more important — elections are a vital civic exercise, not an economic matter that requires a market-based solution. We rule ourselves — or ought to — as voters, not consumers. The problem with ES&S, therefore, is surely not that that colossus hogs “the market,” although it is indeed grotesque, and dangerous, to have one private company run our national elections.

The problem, rather, is that America’s elections have been privatized, whether it’s one company or four, or six, that runs the show — and, indeed, “a show” is all it is, because that company, and all its peers, deploy a wholly non-transparent, easily manipulated electronic system, which makes it quite impossible for anyone to tell if the results of our elections are legitimate or not. Those companies, moreover, are not honest brokers but intensely partisan concerns, owned and managed by right-wing Republicans.

What we need, then, isn’t “robust competition” in the field of electronic voting and vote-counting. What we need is to BAN SUCH VOTING NATIONWIDE, IN FAVOR OF A NATIONAL RETURN TO PAPER BALLOTS, WHICH MUST BE HAND-COUNTED. We also need to BAN PRIVATE COMPANIES FROM ALL PARTICIPATION IN OUR VOTING PROCESS.

[See THE VOTERS’ BILL OF RIGHTS]

I hope I've made myself clear. The time, in short, has come to repeal the disastrous — and frighteningly misnamed — Help America Vote ACT (HAVA), and start anew.

Tell the Times in 150 words or less: New York Times Letters to Editor

The combination could mean that nearly 70 percent of the nation’s precincts would use machines made by a single company. If the deal is allowed to go through, it would make it harder for jurisdictions to bargain effectively on price and quality. The Justice Department should reject it as a violation of antitrust rules that is clearly not in the public’s interest.

The 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida, with its hanging chads and uncounted votes, highlighted the deep flaws in voting machine technology — and in the industry. That was in no small part because of a lack of robust competition. If the Diebold acquisition goes forward, competition would all but disappear.

Numerous studies have shown that electronic voting machines are particularly vulnerable to software glitches, intentional vote theft or sabotage. Having such a large percentage of the nation’s votes counted on machines made and serviced by a single company increases the vulnerability of the system.

A group of election administrators, fair-voting advocates and computer experts wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. recently to warn of the dangers if the deal closes. They warned that Election Systems and Software already has a bad record on open competition, including contract clauses that prevent jurisdictions that buy their machines from hiring other vendors to service them.

If the deal nevertheless goes forward, the department should insist on strong protections to minimize the potential for damage. The combined company should be prohibited from using contracts that interfere with competition and required to use hardware and software that are interoperable with products from other companies.

The Justice Department also should require the company to continue efforts Diebold was reportedly taking to make its systems more transparent by, among other things, making some or all of its software code public.

The Justice Department has considerable antitrust authority. It needs to use it to ensure that an industry the public rightly mistrusts does not get any worse.

“In order to bring down this kind of mass in such a short period of time, the material must have been artificially, exploded outwards,” says Richard Gage, a San Francisco architect and founder of the nonprofit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Mr. Gage, who is a member of the American Institute of Architects, managed to persuade more than 1,000 of his peers to sign a new petition requesting a formal inquiry.

“The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction. We are therefore calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials,” Mr. Gage adds.

The technical issues surrounding the collapse of the towers has prompted years of debate, rebuttal and ridicule.

He is particularly disturbed by Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper, which was not hit by any aircraft, yet came down in “pure free-fall acceleration.” He also says that more than 100 first-responders reported explosions and flashes as the towers were falling and cited evidence of “multi-ton steel sections ejected laterally 600 ft. at 60 mph” and the “mid-air pulverization of 90,000 tons of concrete and metal decking.”

There is also evidence of “advanced explosive nano-thermitic composite material found in the World Trade Center dust,” Mr. Gage says. The group’s petition at ae911truth.org, is already on its way to members of Congress.

“Government officials will be notified that ‘Misprision of Treason,’ U.S. Code 18 (Sec. 2382) — [See Misprision] — is a serious federal offense, which requires those with evidence of treason to act,” Mr. Gage says. “The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Shaikh Mohammed trial.”

“I was a big supporter of waterboarding,” boasted Cheney.

Waterboarding is torture and a war crime. The UN Convention on Torture, the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross, and constitutional governments around the globe agree on this point of law. More to the point, Attorney General Eric Holder has stated publicly that waterboarding is torture. Cheney's confession legally obligates Holder to prosecute him.

Cheney apologists will no doubt turn a blind eye to this. But this is the law, plain and simple. The case has been laid out in detail by Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, and Scott Horton.

By publicly confessing his role in illegal U.S torture programs, Cheney has created an extraordinary opportunity to hold the Bush administration accountable for its crimes. One that must not — and indeed legally cannot — be ignored.

There was more to admire in Obama’s performance as well. He did not retreat into the bite-size initiatives — V-chips, school uniforms — embraced by an emasculated Bill Clinton after his midterm pummeling of 1994. The president’s big original goals — health care, economic recovery, financial reform — remained nominally intact, as did his sense of humor. In a rhetorical touch William Safire would have relished, Obama had the wit to rush the ritualistic “our union is strong” so it would not prompt the usual jingoistic ovation.

Good thing, too, since our union is not strong. It is paralyzed. Many Americans were more eagerly anticipating Steve Jobs’s address in San Francisco on Wednesday morning than the president’s that night because they have far more confidence in Apple than Washington to produce concrete change. One year into Obama’s term we still don’t know whether he has what it takes to get American governance functioning again. But we do know that no speech can do the job. The president must act. Only body blows to the legislative branch can move the country forward.

The historian Alan Brinkley has observed that we will soon enter the fourth decade in which Congress — and therefore government as a whole — has failed to deal with any major national problem, from infrastructure to education. The gridlock isn’t only a function of polarized politics and special interests. There’s also been a gaping leadership deficit.

In Obama’s speech, he kept circling back to a Senate where both parties are dysfunctional. The obstructionist Republicans, he observed, will say no to every single bill “just because they can.” But no less culpable are the Democrats, who maintain “the largest majority in decades” even after losing Teddy Kennedy’s seat — and yet would rather “run for the hills” than accomplish anything.

What does strong Senate leadership look like? That would be L.B.J. in the pre-Kennedy era. Operating with the narrowest of majorities and under an opposition president, he was able to transform a sleepy, seniority-hobbled, regionally polarized debating society into an often-progressive legislative factory. As Robert Caro tells the story in his book “Master of the Senate,” this Senate leader had determination, “a gift for grand strategy,” and a sixth sense for grabbing opportunities for action before they vanished for good. He could recognize “the key that might suddenly unlock votes that had seemed locked forever away” and turn it quickly. The horse trading with recalcitrant senators was often crude and cynical, but the job got done. L.B.J. knew how to reward — and how to punish.

We keep hearing that they just don’t make legislative giants like that anymore. In truth, the long drought has led us to forget what they look like and to define senatorial leadership down. L.B.J.’s current successor, Harry Reid, could be found yawning on camera Wednesday night. He might as well have just taken the whole nap. Here was this leader’s pronouncement last week on the future of the president and his party’s No. 1 priority: “We’re not on health care now. We’ve talked a lot about it in the past.” Yes, a lot of talk — a year’s worth, in fact — with nothing to show for it. [Editor’s Note: See also Here, Here, and Here.]

• Come to our RECRUITMENT EDUCATION & PROSECUTE THEM NOW MEETING 7:30 FEBRUARY 8th •

Be sure to print our beautiful new opt out brochure to help families from military predators. Print front and back on a page, fold it in half and you’re good to go! Contact us at info@impeachthem.com for help in building counter-recruitment in your town. Click BROCHURE!

USMilitary.com — 24 October 2009 — “This is much to the amazement and pleasure of the US military, especially the Army and the Marine Corps.”

— THIS HAS BEEN QUITE THE ACCOMPLISHMENT FOR THE MILITARY, which has seen a decline in enrollments in the last few years, since the beginning of the current Iraqi war. The Army alone recruited close to 5,000 people in the month of October, which was over two percent of their originated goal. For the Marine Corps, there were close to 3,000 recruitments that were eager to sign up to join the military. This amount for the Marine Corps was well a little over one percent of their target as well.

The figures for meeting the military quota have been highly pleasurable for all companies that are involved, as they eagerly await the new troops from the registered enrollment. The numbers do not lie — there is now a higher interest for the joining the military’s forces from the civilian end. This is much to the amazement and pleasure of the US military, especially the Army and the Marine Corps, who both saw substantial numbers increase in their recruitments. Many of the civilians that are signing up are high school graduates that have preferred to enroll in the military to proudly serve our country. There is a great number of these recruitments that have claimed that they will continue their education while in the military, which is often paid for.
Copyright © 24 October 2009 USMilitary.com

See also Pentagon Invades Our Schools

Mother Jones — September/October 2009 — by David Goodman — How the No Child Left Behind Act allowed military recruiters to collect info on millions of unsuspecting teens.

JOHN TRAVERS WAS STRIDING PURPOSEFULLY into the Westfield mall in Wheaton, Maryland, for some back-to-school shopping before starting his junior year at Bowling Green State University. When I asked him whether he’d ever talked to a military recruiter, Travers, a 19-year-old African American with a buzz cut, a crisp white T-shirt, and a diamond stud in his left ear, smiled wryly. “To get to lunch in my high school, you had to pass recruiters,” he said. “It was overwhelming.” Then he added, “I thought the recruiters had too much information about me. They called me, but I never gave them my phone number.”

Nor did he give the recruiters his email address, Social Security number, or details about his ethnicity, shopping habits, or college plans. Yet they probably knew all that, too. In the past few years, the military has mounted a virtual invasion into the lives of young Americans. Using data mining, stealth websites, career tests, and sophisticated marketing software, the Pentagon is harvesting and analyzing information on everything from high school students’ GPAs and SAT scores to which video games they play. Before an Army recruiter even picks up the phone to call a prospect like Travers, the soldier may know more about the kid’s habits than do his own parents.

The military has long struggled to find more effective ways to reach potential enlistees; for every new GI it signed up last year, the Army spent $24,500 on recruitment. (In contrast, four-year colleges spend an average of $2,000 per incoming student.) Recruiters hit pay dirt in 2002, when then-Rep. (now Sen.) David Vitter (R-La.) slipped a provision into the No Child Left Behind Act that requires high schools to give recruiters the names and contact details of all juniors and seniors. Schools that fail to comply risk losing their NCLB funding. This little-known regulation effectively transformed President George W. Bush’s signature education bill into the most aggressive military recruitment tool since the draft. Students may sign an opt-out form — but not all school districts let them know about it.

Yet NCLB is just the tip of the data iceberg. In 2005, privacy advocates discovered that the Pentagon had spent the past two years quietly amassing records from Selective Service, state DMVs, and data brokers to create a database of tens of millions of young adults and teens, some as young as 15. The massive data-mining project is overseen by the Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies program, whose website has described the database, which now holds 34 million names, as “arguably the largest repository of 16-25-year-old youth data in the country.” The JAMRS database is in turn run by Equifax, the credit reporting giant.

Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says the Pentagon’s initial failure to disclose the collection of the information likely violated the Privacy Act. In 2007, the Pentagon settled a lawsuit (filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union) by agreeing to stop collecting the names and Social Security numbers of anyone younger than 17 and promising not to share its database records with other government agencies. Students may opt out of having their JAMRS database information sent to recruiters, but only 8,700 have invoked this obscure safeguard.

The Pentagon also spends about $600,000 a year on commercial data brokers, notably the Student Marketing Group and the American Student List, which boasts that it has records for 8 million high school students. Both companies have been accused of using deceptive practices to gather information: In 2002, New York’s attorney general sued SMG for telling high schools it was surveying students for scholarship and financial aid opportunities yet selling the info to telemarketers; the Federal Trade Commission charged ASL with similar tactics. Both companies eventually settled.

The Pentagon is also gathering data from unsuspecting Web surfers. This year, the Army spent $1.2 million on the website March2Success.com, which provides free standardized test-taking tips devised by prep firms such as Peterson's, Kaplan, and Princeton Review. The only indications that the Army runs the site, which registers an average of 17,000 new users each month, are a tiny tagline and a small logo that links to the main recruitment website, GoArmy.com. Yet visitors’ contact information can be sent to recruiters unless they opt out, and students also have the option of having a recruiter monitor their practice test scores. Terry Backstrom, who runs March2Success.com for the US Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, insists that it is about “good will,” not recruiting. “We are providing a great service to schools that normally would cost them.”

Recruiters are also data mining the classroom. More than 12,000 high schools administer the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, a three-hour multiple-choice test originally created in 1968 to match conscripts with military assignments. Rebranded in the mid-1990s as the “ASVAB Career Exploration Program,” the test has a cheerful home page that makes no reference to its military applications, instead declaring that it “is designed to help students learn more about themselves and the world of work”" A student who takes the test is asked to divulge his or her Social Security number, GPA, ethnicity, and career interests — all of which is then logged into the JAMRS database. In 2008, more than 641,000 high school students took the ASVAB; 90 percent had their scores sent to recruiters. Tony Castillo of the Army’s Houston Recruiting Battalion says that ASVAB is “much more than a test to join the military. It is really a gift to public education.”


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Concerns about the ASVAB’s links to recruiting have led to a nearly 20 percent decline in the number of test takers between 2003 and 2008. But the test is mandatory at approximately 1,000 high schools. Last February, three North Carolina students were sent to detention for refusing to take it. One, a junior named Dakota Ling, told the local paper, “I just really don’t want the military to have all the info it can on me.” Last year, the California Legislature barred schools from sending ASVAB results to military recruiters, though Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill. The Los Angeles and Washington, DC, school districts have tried to protect students’ information by releasing their scores only on request.

To put all its data to use, the military has enlisted the help of Nielsen Claritas, a research and marketing firm whose clients include BMW, AOL, and Starbucks. Last year, it rolled out a “custom segmentation” program that allows a recruiter armed with the address, age, race, and gender of a potential “lead” to call up a wealth of information about young people in the immediate area, including recreation and consumption patterns. The program even suggests pitches that might work while cold-calling teenagers. “It’s just a foot in the door for a recruiter to start a relevant conversation with a young person,” says Donna Dorminey of the US Army Center for Accessions Research.

Still, no amount of data slicing can fix the challenge of recruiting during wartime. Last year, a JAMRS survey identified recruiters’ single biggest obstacle: Only 5 percent of parents would recommend military service to their kids, a situation blamed on “a constant barrage of negative media coverage on the War in Iraq.” Not surprisingly, more and more kids are opting out of having their information shared with recruiters under No Child Left Behind; in New York City, the number of students opting out has doubled in the past five years, to 45,000 in 2008. At some schools, 90 percent of students have opted out. In 2007, JAMRS awarded a $50 million contract to Mullen Advertising to continue its marketing campaign to target “influencers” such as parents, coaches, and guidance counselors. The result: print ads that declare, “Your son wants to join the military. The question isn’t whether he’s prepared enough, but whether you are.”

Not far from the mall in Maryland, I asked 21-year-old Marcelo Salazar, who'd been a cadet in his high school’s Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, why he decided not to enlist after graduating from John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 2005. Now a community college student, he replied that his mother was firmly against it.

Then, as if on cue, his cell phone chirped: It was a recruiter who called him constantly. He ignored it. “War is cool,” he said, flipping on his aviator sunglasses. “But if you're dying, it's not.”
Copyright © September/October 2009 Mother Jones

NEW UPDATE

• Military Training Program for Teens Expands in USA •

Agence France Press — Posted 23 January 2010 — by Mira Oberman — The hallways are lined with prints depicting historic recruiting posters and great moments in military history, like the Battle of the Bulge. Teachers in uniform lead classes in military history, civics, health, and physical fitness.

Dozens of teens dressed in uniforms provided by the US Marines stand at attention in the gym of a Chicago public high school as a drill sergeant goes through a list of the day’s do’s and don’ts.

Bring your books to class. Come for extra help if you need it. And wear your uniform with pride.

“Young men, you think you can get a haircut and say I'm done for two or three weeks. WRONG,” Sgt. Major Thomas Smith Jr. intones.

“Young ladies. There's been no problem with your uniforms but there is a problem with your ties. Again, I will go through it again. Wear your ties when you come to my class.”

One in 10 public high school students in Chicago wears a military uniform to school and takes classes — including how to shoot a gun properly — from retired veterans.

That number is expected to rise as junior military reserve programs expand across the country now that a congressional cap of 3,500 units has been lifted from the nearly century-old scheme.

Proponents of the junior reserve programs say they provide stability and a sense of purpose for troubled youth and help to instill values such as leadership and responsibility.

But opponents say the programs divert critical resources from crumbling public schools and lead to a militarization of US society.

“To call these young people child soldiers might be technically inaccurate, but it does reveal the truth of it,” said Oscar Castro, a spokesman for the National Youth and Militarism Program, an advocacy group.

Military recruiters already have the right to give presentations in public schools and to access databases with the contact information of all public school students whose parents do not remove their children from the list.

But they don’t have nearly the same impact as daily interaction with teachers and students in uniform, Castro said.

While military officials say the junior reserve programs are not used as recruiting tools, about 30 to 50 percent of cadets eventually enlist, according to congressional testimony by the chiefs of staff of the various armed services in February 2000.

This is particularly troubling given that the programs are concentrated in low-income and minority neighborhoods, said Sheena Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the Chicago branch of the American Friends Service Committee which lobbies against the programs.

— Click the pics to read the rest! —

In 1944 Douglas led the Saskatchewan CCF to a massive victory, winning 47 of 53 seats and achieving the first democratic socialist government elected in North America.

Tommy Douglas introduced universal hospitalization in Saskatchewan in 1949 and a Medicare plan for Saskatchewan in 1959.

The video is from a CBC Television production, “Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story.” In the dark times today, this brings much needed cheer over what we can achieve in the face of the insatiable greed that infects our country. CFC stands for Co-operative Commonwealth Federation; the organization became the New Democratic Party. Have a look and feel a warm smile for our future.

IMPEACH BEACH

Bush Lies, Thousands Die: On March 19th, 2003, BUSH INVADED IRAQ. As of 14 November 2009, according to the reliable Iraq Coalition Casualties web site: 4,680 U.S. military people DEAD, includes 91 from New Jersey — We mourn the death of army sergeant Michael P. Scusa, 22, of Villas, N.J., died October 3rd, Kamdesh, Afghanistan.

See Highest troop levels EVER.
Includes 208 who died from self-inflicted wounds as of August 2008. As of 14 November, the official military tally of “non-hostile suicides” in the field — NOT accounting for suicides after returning home from the war — is 12 suicides in Iraq, and 2 suicides in Afganistan..

National Priorities “Cost of War” — 14 November 2009 — To date, $932 billion dollars have been allocated to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The national, state, and local numbers we provide are based on the total approved amounts through the end of Fiscal Year 2009.

In addition to this approved amount, the FY2010 budget shows a $130 billion request for more war spending. This would bring total war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan to more than $1 trillion. When all FY2010 war-related amounts are approved, we will adjust our counter so that it reaches the new total at the end of FY2010.

• COST OF WAR • NationalPriorities.org•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Now we confirm more tragic news:
18 Vets kill themselves every day. There are now over one million Iraqis dead due to our war. As of now, the U.S. War On Iraq Costs over $915,000,000,000, give or take a billion. OUR WAR COST IS OVER ONE-HALF TRILLION DOLLARS, on the way to a total cost of OVER THREE TRILLION DOLLARS! See National Priorities.

AFGHANISTAN

920 Americans were killed in Afghanistan since Bush took office January 2001, including 13 New Jersey people.

• Suicides Increase Among Troops •
Bloomberg News — 13 November 2009 — There have been 133 suspected suicides among active-duty Army troops this year, putting the service within reach of a new annual high.
The suicides, between January and October and including the National Guard and Reserves, compared with 115 in the same period in 2008. That year the service recorded 140 by year’s end, an annual record, the Army said. The rate of suicide within the Army last year was 20.2 per 100,000 personnel, exceeding for the first time the age-adjusted rate in the civilian population, which was 19.2, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
See The Alarming Increase In Suicides and September Suicide Data — U.S. Labor Against War

— Now the tragic truth comes out: — New York Times — 9 November 2008 — by Associated Press — Army Will Investigate Recruiters’ Suicides — SAN ANTONIO — SEVENTEEN ARMY RECRUITERS NATIONWIDE HAVE COMMITTED SUICIDE SINCE 2001... There are 38 recruiting battalions nationwide, with 8,400 soldiers. The Army’s suicide rate has been climbing as the war in Iraq has increased deployments. Read New York Times — Suicide Rate for Soldiers Rose in ’07 — 30 May 2008 — by Associated Press —The 208 confirmed suicides among active-duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops who had been activated amounted to a rate of 18.8 per 100,000 troops — the highest since the Army began keeping records in 1980. — WASHINGTON DC — At least 208 soldiers killed themselves in 2007-08 [and the rate of suicide among soldiers is rising], up from 102 the previous year, the Army said Thursday. Nearly one-third of them died at the battlefront, 32 in Iraq and 4 in Afghanistan. But 26 percent had never been sent to either conflict.

Read WASHINGTON — 28 May 2008 — New York Times — Nearly 40,000 military personnel have been given diagnoses of post-tramatic stress disorder since 2003.

Read 126 War Vets Commit Suicide Every Week.
Read Suicide rate among soldiers in '06 was a record — Baltimore Sun.

And Veterans for Common Sense — CBS News — 13 November 2007 — by Laura Strickler, Sarah Fitzpatrick, Armen Keteyian and Katie Couric — Between 1995 and 2007, there were almost 2,200 suicides. That’s 188 last year alone. But these numbers included only “active duty” soldiers. One age group stood out. Veterans aged 20 through 24, those who have served during the war on terror. They had the highest suicide rate among all veterans, estimated between two and four times higher than civilians the same age. The suicide rate for non-veterans is 8.3 per 100,000, while the rate for veterans was found to be between 22.9 and 31.9 per 100,000. — Veterans for Common Sense was featured on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. On November 13, Armen Keteyian, the top CBS investigative reporter, reveals an enormous epidemic of suicides among our returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.

CBS News has three excellent videos: The CBS Evening News Broadcast, An Interview with Common Sense Vet Paul Sullivan, and Interviews with Veterans' Families. The Veteran Suicide Epidemic NEW YORK — CBS News — THEY ARE THE CASUALTIES OF WAR YOU DON'T OFTEN HEAR ABOUT — SOLDIERS WHO DIE OF SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS. Little is known about the true scope of suicides among those who have served in the military. A five-month CBS News investigation discovered data that shows a startling rate of suicide, what some call a hidden epidemic, Chief Investigative Reporter Armen Keteyian reports exclusively. “I just felt like this silent scream inside of me,” said Jessica Harrell, the sister of a soldier who took his own life. — Click the beach to see the people and read the rest!

89% — 642,437 people — voted TO IMPEACH out of 721,839 votes cast as of noon New Jersey time, 20 January 2009. Only 9% — just 64,966 people — said Bush should not be impeached, with the rest unsure. 95% of the American people do not trust Bush to end the Iraq war successfully. And a recent Gallup Poll shows Opposition to Iraq War is at a New High — 63% of Americans Say the United States Made a Mistake in Sending Troops to Iraq.

See our story at http://www.ProsecuteThemNow.com/?q=node/1696 — Wexler Wants Hearings Movement Climbing Fast
and our story at http://www.ProsecuteThemNow.com/?q=node/1994 — The Impeach Bush organization

— See also the Official Petition to Impeach CLICK http://impeachment.kucinich.us/petition —

As of now, the U.S. War On Iraq Costs over $584,000,000,000, give or take a billion here and there. OUR WAR COST IS NOW OVER ONE-HALF TRILLION DOLLARS, on the way to a total cost of OVER THREE TRILLION DOLLARS! See also National Priorities

— Vote NOW — click on THE NATIONAL CHENEY IMPEACHMENT POLL! See a video and answer DENNIS KUCINICH STATEMENT
Now cast your vote: — DENNIS KUCINICH — E-Mail your thanks to him at Contact Dennis