Cheney backs Obama on drones
Source: USA Today
Dick Cheney isn't critical of all of President Obama's national security policies -- he backs drone strikes.
"I think it's a good program and I don't disagree with the basic policy that the Obama administration is pursuing," Cheney said in an interview that aired Tuesday on CBS This Morning.
Cheney also endorsed the drone strike against Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen living in Yemen, saying "he was clearly part of al-Qaeda."
To be sure, the former vice president continued to criticize other aspects of the Obama administration, including what he called a "second rate" national security team.
Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2013/02/12/obama-cheney-drones-anwar-al-awlaki/1912323/
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ReRe
(12,189 posts)...is clearly psycho-schizo. 
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)
AnneD
(15,774 posts)Obama needs to rethink this. It is nothing but a slippery slope power grab. Illegal and unconstitutional to boot.
When Cheney thinks you're right on anything, it's time to do some real soul searching.
Live and Learn
(12,769 posts)MotherPetrie
(3,145 posts)Bad news: Obama finally gets his due from Cheney!
They_Live
(3,373 posts)all of a sudden. He makes me nervous. Every time he shows up, something "TERRORble" happens soon after.
samsingh
(18,426 posts)
Redfairen
(1,276 posts)The number of people on the left who speak out against this practice is trivial. Pointing fingers at Cheney is laughable. He's retired. Whenever a drone kills someone the Democratic base does not say shit. Silence is consent. The left supports Obama's use of drones.
montanto
(2,966 posts)
davidthegnome
(2,983 posts)The left has been anything but silent regarding this issue. There are debates taking place on college campuses, within family homes, here on the internet, on the radio, on television. That being said, silence is NOT consent, either. It may instead be indicative of consideration, of thought, of planning.
Your assertion is both inaccurate and unfair. I don't support Obama's use of drones. If asked, I imagine that millions on the left do not.
The democratic base says plenty when the drones kill innocents. It's a matter of whether or not you're paying attention. Most of us lack the ability to rant about it on television.
Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)It is not laughable to point fingers at Cheney. It should, one hopes, make the silent and complicit Democrats a bit uncomfortable about the company they're keeping.
Puzzledtraveller
(5,937 posts)What is that called, where people filter what they don't want to accept of face up to? Dissonance?
cosmicone
(11,014 posts)Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)cosmicone
(11,014 posts)most of whom happen to be Pakistanis.
Puzzledtraveller
(5,937 posts)What was it referred to before, overseas contingency? My problem with drones is it's less discriminating and makes it much easier for there to be collateral deaths of non combatant, non terrorist targets or what have you. I think the government likes it, not just Obama admin because it's covert, sanitary and looks good on tv because we don't have flag draped coffins of Americans coming home, but what the media wont show is all the innocents killed by these drone strikes.
Amonester
(11,541 posts)They hide in places where a lot of innocents live.
That's where they usually plot to go out and kill innocents if they don't get what they want.
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)Their Leadership are usually educated for years and cowards, they won't strap the bomb to themselves. When we take out a Leader that group may never recover.
And it does the community good, one less Leader forcing someone to strap on a bomb.
Amonester
(11,541 posts)their 'faith' calls for merging religion and state to impose their dogmas on everyone who is not male, and hetero, and religious, no matter how crazy those dogmas can be, and how much pain they can inflict to whoever stand in their ways.
They must be disarmed.
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)Could we stop whoever arms them somehow? I mean the gun runner companies, or the countries who sell them arms in the first place.
We in America can't even make walmart stop selling their cheap guns to anyone with cash in hand.
Amonester
(11,541 posts)And I suspect 'drones' are used to that effect, and to minimize the deterrers casualties.
Ash_F
(5,861 posts)it's history or the current political situation. Neither do the people in the media crowing about the righteousness of these purely political killings. But the information is out there for those who seek it, from mainstream sources even, should they decide to cease wallowing in ignorance.
Hope this helps. 
cosmicone
(11,014 posts)You have got to be kidding me!
I lived in the subcontinent for 22 years and have visited Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Nepal several times.
I know what ails Pakistan and it is religious ego. Pakistan was nefariously created by the brits as a part of a "two state" strategy -- one Hindu and one Muslim. While India chose not to be a "Hindu" state and chose to be secular instead, Pakistan chose to be an Islamic Republic.
Now, any defeat of Pakistan in any field has become a defeat of Islam in the minds of many Pakistanis. Since Pakistan cannot match India in conventional forces and cannot stop Indian economy's stratospheric growth, Pakistan can only compete via terrorism and has become a terrorist state with its institutions (if one can call them that) all involved in terrorism against India and export of this terrorism to Bosnia, Dagestan, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Mali, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Kashmir, Thailand and Mindanao in the Philippines -- all to compete with India's eventual rise to superpowerdom.
The only solution to this menace is to balkanize Pakistan along ethnic divisions and that will stop these after effects of the lack of British foresight when they forcibly imposed a two state doctrine on a country.
Ash_F
(5,861 posts)The drone program's goal is to cement the central government's hold on the country through instilling fear of dissent . If the US wanted to actually help, they would broker peaceful political reform which includes representation of the disaffected regions and ethnic groups.
But I guess it is just easier and more profitable to perpetuate the status quo. Wouldn't want political upheaval messing up a good thing. 
cosmicone
(11,014 posts)The central government in Pakistan IS the creator, founder, funder, armer and trainer of the terrorist groups.
The terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan are active agents of the Pakistani establishment.
Who are you going to negotiate with and create political reform? hahahahahaha
The only solutions involve a) making Pakistan downsize its military (which would never happen out of religious ego) or b) balkanization of Pakistan so there would be no interest and resources to menace the world.
Ash_F
(5,861 posts)The drone strikes are done in coordination with the Pakistani government. Who do you think is directing the US military to it's targets? James Bond?
PS - The victims are wholly and completely anti-government.
cosmicone
(11,014 posts)Pakistani government is AGAINST the drones to the point of purposely inflating the "innocent victim" counts and protesting loudly.
The US government doesn't take Pakistan into confidence anymore because Pakistan is complicit with terrorists. (e.g. Osama bin Laden raid)
The intelligence is gained from a variety of sources but mainly eavesdropping on telephone traffic and a few informants.
Ash_F
(5,861 posts)Step one: turn off the tv
Step two: Read entire news articles, not just headlines
Here, I'll start you off. This article is from 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/world/asia/12drone.html?_r=0
Read it; finish it.
A couple months later
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/pakistan-permits-cia-base-for-strikes/story-e6frg6t6-1111118893683
That was the beginning of what we now know as the drone wars. Like I said, you really don't know anything about Pakistan. Stop being a pretender. People come to this board for serious discussion. Don't spread disinformation.
cosmicone
(11,014 posts)Pakistan asks US to vacate the airbase used for drones in 15 days ...
http://www.dawn.com/2011/11/26/pakistan-asks-us-to-vacate-shamsi-airbase-within-15-days.html
Pakistan protests after a US drone strike
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b4a8cc3c-96c0-11e1-847c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2KyWa8Agl
More Pakistan's official protests against drones ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pakistanis-protest-latest-us-drone-strike-104/2012/01/11/gIQAAWAgrP_video.html
All these are from 2011 and 2012.
Enjoy!
Ash_F
(5,861 posts)At this point I am no longer responding to you, but to readers who could possibly take your lies at face value. It is clear that you are not being innocently ignorant.
Enjoy being in league with Dick Cheney.
EastKYLiberal
(429 posts)Support of the empire. I like being part of an empire.
I also think we can maintain that empire with some drastic cuts.
When the world runs low on resources, I hope we take it all with whatever advanced tech we have. It'll be easier to keep the superpowers' citizens alive when the fat is trimmed.
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)
shanti
(21,799 posts)slippery slope and all that.
Pterodactyl
(1,687 posts)
SylviaD
(721 posts)Doctor_J
(36,392 posts)they are, simply, as disgusting as any Repuke.
davidthegnome
(2,983 posts)If DICK CHENEY is on your side, you're almost definitely on the wrong side! Consider why a man like Cheney would support this policy. Do you think he's an honest, decent American who simply desires peace and justice? Think about it. This asshole makes most assholes look like angels.
Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)Obama
Cheney
John Bolton
Michelle Malkin
New Gingrich
Half of Democratic Underground (or some fraction, anyway)
Mutatis Mutandis
(90 posts)It is certainly not what he hoped or intended, but one of President Obama’s biggest legacies in foreign affairs may prove to be the proliferation of drones as tools of war, assassination and terror.
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-killer-drones-20130207,0,7056065.story
Obama is not the first to use drones to strike enemy targets, but the 300 attacks that have occurred on his watch are six times the number carried out under President George W. Bush. A new set of guidelines that give the president broad discretion in approving execution by drones, coupled with the current congressional hearings on the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director, have brought the drone debate front and center.
Civil libertarians and activists on the left see the use of missile-firing drones to take out suspected terrorists as a threat to the rule of law. They are particularly concerned that American citizens, such as Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar Awlaki, have been killed in drone strikes without a finding of guilt and sentencing in a U.S. court. At the opening of his confirmation hearing on Thursday, Brennan -- who, as Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, has managed the deadly drone missions for four years -- was met by protesters shouting, “Assassination is against the Constitution! You are betraying democracy!”
Opponents of the drone attacks are making a principled point. A government free to kill citizens at will is truly the worst kind of Big Government nightmare. But few of the usual anti-government folks on the right are concerned about the drone hits. They consider the remote control killing of Al Qaeda operatives as completely justified, the equivalent of doing battle in a declared war, and any American who has joined the other side is merely getting what he deserves.
About 80% of Americans agree with that view and plenty of them are liberals and Democrats. Many see drone attacks as an improvement over commando raids and bombing runs. Drones do not put American soldiers directly at risk and they are far more precise than big bombs dropped from the sky, thus minimizing the collateral deaths of innocent bystanders. Those are pretty good debating points -- probably winning points.
snip
reorg
(3,317 posts)To grasp how Obama’s policies benefit General Dynamics (GD) in particular, we need to understand how GD’s business model has changed as the U.S. military and intelligence budgets have doubled in the past decade. Pentagon contractors like General Dynamics have evolved from simply manufacturing weapons to playing an integrated role in military operations, targeted killings and the new surveillance state. As Dana Priest and William Arkin write in their new book, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State: “Of the 1,900 or so companies working on top secret contracts in mid-2010, roughly 90 percent of the work was done by 6 percent (110) of them. To understand how these firms have come to dominate the post-9/11 era, there’s no place better to look than the Herndon (Virginia) office of General Dynamics.”
Inside General Dynamics’ offices, a software trainer showed off one of its new products. They watched a picture of a white truck on a TV monitor as a U.S. surveillance plane followed it along a road in Afghanistan. With the click of a mouse, the technician could get:
- link to a photo of the truck driver’s home and a list of recent visitors
- an infrared view of the truck to see what might be inside it
- close-up and analysis of something that the driver threw out of the window
- higher resolution image of the truck from a U-2 spy plane 70,000 feet above it
- log of the truck’s previous journeys
- real-time map of U.S. forces in the area
- chat window with comments from other Americans watching the same video
The technician explained that all this material would be stored and searchable if other Americans became interested in the same truck again later.
(...)
The bottom line for major shareholders like the Crown family is that General Dynamics’ revenue has tripled from $10.4 billion in 2000 to $32.5 billion in 2010 and the value of their stock has quadrupled. GD’s Information Systems and Technology Division (IS&T) now provides 34 percent of its revenue. As the 2010 annual report explained, “(IS&T) remains the company’s revenue leader and was the fastest growing segment in 2010.... Volume was particularly strong in IS&T’s battlefield communications and information technology modernization programs.”
http://www.zcommunications.org/investing-in-weapons-war-and-obama-by-nicolas-j-s-davies
Mutatis Mutandis
(90 posts)excellent find
The Second Stone
(2,900 posts)to our freedoms.
Pterodactyl
(1,687 posts)
pansypoo53219
(23,034 posts)halliburton can profiteer more.
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)I think most reasonable people don't want to go back to the old days.
Where we have to send in troops, go door to door terrorising families untill we find our mark. Thousands of troops, support crews and the very well paid Cheney war profiteers soaking up the billions.
Where there are street bombs all over the place, picking off our military. Making thousands lose limbs, horrid burns or sufferer from head injury the rest of their lives.
I bet the countries that give the USA permission to root out the terrorists like the drones better too.
Mutatis Mutandis
(90 posts)Really? I suggest you go to Pakistan(just for starters) and conduct a poll.
Pakistanis hate the drone war: The proof is in the data
http://dawn.com/2013/01/30/pakistanis-hate-the-drone-war-the-proof-is-in-the-data/
Writing for the Atlantic, three American academics posed a challenge in their article http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/01/you-say-pakistanis-all-hate-the-drone-war-prove-it/267447/ titled: “You Say Pakistanis All Hate the Drone War? Prove It.” I thought I did prove it http://dawn.com/2013/01/02/pilots-dinner-trumps-regard-for-civilian-lives/ a few weeks ago. But I welcome the opportunity to elaborate even further.
The American academics are convinced that a large number of Pakistanis are ignorant of drone strikes, and that another sufficiently large number of Pakistanis support the American drone strikes on Pakistani territory. The academics have relied on a data set by Pew Global Attitudes Project to reach these conclusions. I have demonstrated in an earlier submission that their conclusions are not supported by data. I further illustrate here that the data set is deficient in answering questions of such wide implications.
Let me begin by answering the question, “how many Pakistanis support drone strikes?” Using the same data set as the one used by the American academics I found no more than the 20 respondents out of the 2,000 (i.e., 1 per cent) surveyed by the Pew Global Attitudes Project who truly supported the drone war. Let me explain: if we consider only those respondents who were aware of the drone strikes and who considered drones to be a good thing and went ahead with supporting the drone strikes, they add up to only 20, which is a much smaller number than the one estimated by the American academics.
I would also like to mention that Pew’s questionnaire is deficient in several ways. For instance, some key questions about drones are convoluted while other questions force respondents to either support or oppose the drone attacks. The questionnaire does not allow respondents to declare indifference, i.e., neither support nor oppose drone strikes, which may be the reason why so many chose the option ‘Don’t Know’ or refused to answer the question. I am of the view that the ‘Don’t know’ option in the data set is capturing ignorance of, indifference to, and the refusal to answer questions about drone attacks. Thus, the data set imposes restrictions on one’s ability to infer from it.
snip
------------------------------------------
Drones propel hate in Pakistan for the U.S.
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/drones-propel-hate-in-pakistan-for-the-u-s.premium-1.484185
------------------------------------------------------------------
Drones and Our National Religion
http://warisacrime.org/content/drones-and-our-national-religion
The national religion of the United States of America is nationalism. Its god is the flag. Its prayer is the pledge of allegiance. The flag's powers include those of life and death, powers formerly possessed by traditional religions. Its myths are built around the sacrifice of lives to protect against the evils outside the nation. Its heroes are soldiers who make such sacrifices based on unquestioning faith. A "Dream Act" that would give citizenship to those immigrants who kill or die for the flag embodies the deepest dreams of flag worship. Its high priest is the Commander in Chief. Its slaughter of infidels is not protection of a nation otherwise engaged, but an act that in itself completely constitutes the nation as it is understood by its devotees. If the nation stopped killing it would cease to be.
What happens to myths like these when we discover that flying killer robots make better soldiers than soldiers do? Or when we learn that the president is using those flying robots to kill U.S. citizens? Which beliefs do we jettison to reduce the dissonance in our troubled brains? Some 85% of U.S.ians, and shrinking rapidly, are theists. Flag worship may be on the decline as well, but its numbers are still high. A majority supports a ban on flag burning. A majority supports the power of the president to kill non-U.S.ians with drones, while a significantly smaller percentage supports the president's power to kill U.S. citizens with drones abroad. That is to say, if the high priest declares someone an enemy of god, many people believe he should have the power to kill that enemy . . . unless that enemy is a U.S. citizen. In secular terms, which make this reality seem all the crazier, many of us support acts of murder based on the citizenship of the victim.
Of course, the Commander in Chief kills U.S. citizens all the time by sending them into wars. Drones don't change that. Drone pilots have committed suicide. Drone pilots have been targeted and killed by retaliatory suicide bombings. Drones have killed U.S. citizens through accidental "friendly" fire. The hostility that drones are generating abroad has motivated terrorist attacks and attempted attacks abroad and within the national borders of the United States.
But feeding corpses to our holy flag looks different when we're feeding them directly to the president's flying robots without a foreign intermediary. And yet to approximately a quarter of the U.S. public it doesn't look different after all. The president, in their own view, should have the power to kill them, or at least the power to kill anyone (including U.S. citizens) so contaminated as to be standing outside the United States of America -- a frightening and primitive realm that many U.S.ians have never visited and feel no need to ever visit.
snip
-------------------
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)But those countries want us there and in that part of the world we have allies.
I want America to use the best technology and not risk troops if at all possible.
Mutatis Mutandis
(90 posts)Obama has done nothing but expand the empiric war theatres, with the exception of the so-called withdrawl from Iraq, a withdrawl that his administration fought every step of the way.
Empire America is 2-party consensus, and has been since the Philippines invasion of 1899. The USA had little to no problems with the entire Middle East (the last regionally generated major conflict the US was involved there was the Barbary Wars in the early 1800's), and Islam in general until the formation of Israel, along the 1953 coup d' etat against Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran under Eisenhower.
Clinton's Iraq bombing, along with the US-led sanctions led to the deaths of over 1 million Iraqis, including over 500,000 children.
Madeleine Albright says 500,000 dead Iraqi Children was "worth it" wins Medal of Freedom
The 3rd-world 'allies' the US has in almost all hot-zone regions are either bought-and-paid-for brutal corrupt dictatorships, or post-invasion puppet regimes.
The bankers, through their web of sovereign debt, central bank monetary creation/control have co-opted most of the West, with the US/UK/NATO war machine leading their way. The wars they engage in are not to 'spread freedom'. They are to control the global resource pool, reinforce the petro-dollar matrix, and quash all attempts to erect a competitive structure outside of their systemic financial over-lordship.
The ONLY people who profit from war are the bankers (and some of the multinationals they control). They profit in the build up, the conflict, and the rebuilding, all the while further yoking the citizens of the world in neo-feudal perpetual debt slavery.
I want America to use the best technology too, I just so happen to want that technology to uplift humanity, not track, trace, database, crush dissent, and ultimately kill millions as the tangible wealth and power of the globe are forever concentrated into fewer and fewer hands at the capstone of the pyramid.
Simply to say that less troops of the empire are at risk due to the use of robotic killing does nothing to stop the spread of empiric wars.
In fact, it encourages them. It further removes the smell of blood, brains and guts, removes from sight even more the countless civilian bodies blown apart, and makes war seem a sterile action.
War thus becomes a sanitised act for the empire's denizens, thus falsely assuaging their collective consciences, and ultimately reducing them to a antiseptically clean state of complicity in the barbarity and passive tools of state-sanctioned murder.
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)Mutatis Mutandis
(90 posts)banks, dismantle the IMF, World Bank, and especially the BIS, dismantle the surveillance state, stop propping up insanely evil dictatorships like the Saudis, Qataris, etc, outlaw most derivatives, slap a 1% Wall street transaction tax on fiscal speculation (with the first $5 million per annum exempted), institute single payer health care, with the profit motive forever ripped-out, launch a series of tranches of one trillion dollar 0% 'century bonds' bonds to rebuild the entire USA base infrastructure (it needs 10 to 20 trillion dollars to rebuild it over the next 20 to 30 years), stop creating, funding, enabling, then warring against false flag Emmanuel Goldstein bogeymen like al-Qa-ida, radically reshape education in the country in order to bring back the 89% of all US industrial manufacturing that has been lost in the last 45 to 50 years, prosecute BOTH the financial and the political enablers of the gran looting and the wars of death, launch a 'Manhattan project' to make thorium reactors (a KEY), solar, geo-thermal, wind, etc a reality that finally ends the carbon fuel matrix's death grip on the world, move from the utterly failed 'absolute advantage' model of production to the 'comparative advantge' model (like we use here in Sweden, and also Germany, Finland, Denmark, Norway, etc).
here is a more eloquent document that lays out a lot of what I said:
http://chan4chan.com/archive/180190/Chan4Chan
1. Measures to reduce speculation and minimize the burden of fictitious capital: End all bailouts of banks and financial institutions. Claw back the TARP and other public money given or lent to financiers. Abolish the notion of too big to fail; JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Wells Fargo and other Wall Street zombie banks are insolvent and must be seized by the FDIC for chapter 7 liquidation, with derivatives eliminated by triage. Re-institute the Glass-Steagall firewall to separate banks, brokerages, and insurance. Ban credit default swaps and adjustable rate mortgages. To generate revenue and discourage speculation, levy a 1% Tobin tax (securities transfer tax or trading tax) on all financial transactions including derivatives (futures, options, indices, and over the counter derivatives), stocks, bonds, foreign exchange, and commodities, especially program trading, high-frequency trading, and flash trading. Set up a 15% reserve requirement for all OTC derivatives. Use Tobin tax revenue and a revived corporate income tax to provide immediate tax relief to individuals, families, the self-employed, and small business by increasing personal exemptions and standard deductions. Stop all foreclosures on primary residences, businesses, and farms for five years or the duration of the depression, whichever lasts longer. Set a 10% maximum rate of interest on credit cards and payday loans. Re-regulate commodities markets with 100% margin requirements, position limits, and anti-speculation protections for hedgers and end users to prevent oil and gasoline price spikes. Enforce labor laws and anti-trust laws against monopolies and cartels. Restore individual chapter 11.
2. Measures to nationalize the Federal Reserve, cut federal borrowing, and provide 0% federal credit for production: Seize the Federal Reserve and bring it under the US Treasury as the National Bank of the United States, no longer the preserve of unelected and unaccountable cliques of incompetent and predatory bankers. The size of the money supply, interest rates, and approved types of lending must be determined by public laws passed and debated openly, passed by the congress and signed by the president. Stop US government borrowing from zombie banks and foreigners -- let the US government function as its own bank. Reverse current policy by instituting 0% federal LENDING with preferential treatment for tangible physical production and manufacturing of goods and commodities, to include industry, agriculture, construction, mining, energy production, transportation, infrastructure building, public works, and scientific research, but not financial services and speculation. Issue successive tranches of $1 trillion as needed to create 30 million union-wage productive jobs and attain full employment for the first time since 1945, reversing the secular decline in the US standard of living. Provide 0% credit to reconvert idle auto and other plants and re-hire unemployed workers to build modern rail, mass transit, farm tractors, and aerospace equipment, including for export. Extend 0% federal credit for production to small businesses like auto and electronics repair shops, dry cleaners, restaurants, tailors, family farms, taxis, and trucking. Maintain commercial credit for retail stores. Create an unlimited rediscount guarantee by the National Bank for public works projects to provide cash to local banks for bills of exchange pertaining to infrastructure and public works. Repatriate the foreign dollar overhang by encouraging China, Japan, and other dollar holders to place orders for US-made capital goods and modern hospitals. Revive the US Export-Import Bank. Set up a 10% tariff to protect domestic re-industrialization. Nationalize and operate GM, Chrysler, CIT, and other needed but insolvent firms as a permanent public sector. Maintain Amtrak and USPS.
3. Measures to re-industrialize, build infrastructure, develop science drivers, create jobs, and restore a high-wage economy: state and local governments and special government agencies modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority will be prime contractors for an ambitious program of infrastructure and public works subcontracted to the private sector. To deal with collapsing US infrastructure, modernize the US elgeneration, pebble bed, high temperature reactors of 1,000 to 2,000 megawatts each. Rebuild the rail system with 50,000 miles of ultra-modern maglev Amtrak rail reaching into every state. Rebuild the entire interstate highway system to 21st century standards. Rebuild drinking water and waste water systems nationwide. Promote canal building and irrigation. For health care, build 1,000 500-bed modern hospitals to meet the minimum Hill-Burton standards of 1946. Train 250,000 doctors over the next decade. The Davis-Bacon Act will mandate union pay scales for all projects. For the farm sector, provide a debt freeze for the duration of the crisis, 0% federal credit for working capital and capital improvements, a ban on foreclosures, and federal price supports at 110% of parity across the board, with farm surpluses being used for a new Food for Peace program to stop world famine and genocide. Working with other interested nations, invest $100 billion each in: biomedical research to cure dread diseases; high energy physics (including lasers) to develop fusion power and beyond; and a multi-decade NASA program of moon-Mars manned exploration, permanent colonization, and industrial production. These science drivers will provide the technological spin-offs to modernize the entire US economy in the same way that the NASA moon shot gave us microchips and computers in the 1960s. These steps will expand and upgrade the national stock of capital goods and enhance the real productivity of US labor. Return the federal budget and foreign trade to surplus in 5 years or less.
4. Measures to defend and expand the social safety net: Restore all cuts; full funding at improved levels for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, jobless benefits, WIC, Head Start, and related programs. Offer Medicare for All to anyone under 65 who wants it at $100 per person per month, with reduced rates for families, students, and the unemployed. Pay for this with Tobin tax revenues and TARP clawback, and by ending the Iraq and Afghan wars. Seek to raise life expectancy by five years for starters. No rationing or death panels; savings can come only by finding cures. Quickly reach a $15 per hour living wage. Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act and affirm the right to organize. Pass card check to promote collective bargaining.
5. Measures to re-launch world trade and promote world recovery: Create a new world monetary system including the euro, the yen, the dollar, and the ruble, plus emerging Arab and Latin American regional currencies, with fixed exchange rates and narrow bands of fluctuation enforced by participating governments. Institute clearing and gold settlement among member states. Replace the IMF with a Multilateral Development Bank to finance world trade and infrastructure. The goal of the system must be to re-launch world trade through exports of high-technology capital goods, especially to sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia, and the poorer parts of Latin America. Promote a world Marshall Plan of great projects of world infrastructure, including: a Middle East reconstruction and development program; plans for the Ganges-Bramaputra, Indus, Mekong, Amazon, and Nile-Congo river basins; bridge-tunnel combinations to span the Bering Strait, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Straits of Malacca, the Sicilian narrows, and connect Japan to the Asian mainland; second Panama canal and Kra canals; Eurasian silk road, Cape to Cairo/Dakar to Djibouti, Australian coastal, and Inter-American rail projects, and more. American businesses will receive many of these orders, which means American jobs.
This program will create 30 million jobs in less than five years. It will end the depression, rebuild the US economy, improve wages and standards of living, re-start productive investment, and attain full employment with increased levels of capital investment per job. Most orders placed under this program will go to US private sector bidders. Because of the vastly increased volume of goods put on the market, inflation will not result.
ForgoTheConsequence
(5,186 posts)Thumbs up!
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)some of it, re trade Obama has helped increase Americas trade almost triple the exports from the past 5 years.
I don't know about the world bank and currencies, what can the President do about that? world banks pretty powerful and they seem to do whatever they want.
I think American businesses do 'sell' much services to other countries like our oil companies, mining all of them have for 100 years or more.
Obama has been trying to have infrastructure improvements using Federal money to contractors. Problem is the contractors want the Federal money but they want to import cheap visa workers rather than hire Americans for the jobs. The contracts are there but they must hire American workers.
The states are the ones who raise the minimum wage, they will not because the base pay of foreign visa workers is based off the states minimum wage.
President Obama has asked Congress to raise the Federal minimum wage from 7.25 an hour to 12? an hour. You know Congress so I doubt our federal employees starting pay will increase any time soon.
A good list though. Be better to break it down into the 50 or so issues and try to deal with each separate 
Mutatis Mutandis
(90 posts)
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)Gentle-man
(39 posts)Please explain. If you meant a majority of the people in those countries, please share the link to the poll you base your assertion on.
If by country you mean its leader, please be aware that a country is not a person.
ForgoTheConsequence
(5,186 posts)But how do you poll the 900 innocent civilians who are dead? Would you be ok with your son or daughter being collateral damage?
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)They are not a democracy as far as their citizens go, they do not ask permission of their citizens if they can ask for help killing off terrorists in their countries.
America has had interests in much of the middle east for 100 years? especially in oil and now services in security, many other services and they buy our exports.
Would you want to see the usa become an isolated island with no world trade and export income for Americans? Thank God for the internet, the exposure of the oppression of citizens, cutting off hands, stonings, woman and child issues all the horrid barbarian crap- helps improve the world for all humans, a lot more than it hurts.
Gentle-man
(39 posts)Secondly, besides citing no polls whatsoever, you make up an illiteracy number with no source at all. You simply made up the 90%-can't-read-or-write statistic. Can you show us how many are those "many countries" where 90% are illiterate?
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)post topic. ?
Plenty of countries are full of people who can't read or write, can't you use search? Afghanistan for one with low literacy rates especially for woman.
Anytime Cheney pops out of the republican coffin and is hits the media for the republicans, something bad is going to happen. Cheney never works for free or out of the 'goodness' of his black heart.
Gentle-man
(39 posts)In your last post, you made sure you substituted "Afghanistan" for "many countries," and omitted the 90% figure.
That was a smart move, because when you said "many countries" had illiteracy rate of 90%, the reality was that zero countries have that many people who are illiterate.
Afghanistan has an illiteracy rate of 78%, which is very high, but,
a) It is not 90%, which begs the question of whether you are the one who cannot search
b) One country is not "many countries."
c) In Pakistan, the number of people who can't read and write is 45%, or half your made-up 90% figure.
d) In Saudi Arabia, the number of people who can't write is 13.4%, far below your 90% figure.
e) In Yemen, 36% of illiterates (not 90%).
f) In Turkey, 14% of illiterates (not 90%).
g) In Qatar, 4%.
h) In Philippines, 7%.
You also continued to dodge the question of how you know that most people in countries led by drone-permitting leaders support the use of drones.
In your next post, please try to find at least one country where 90% of people are illiterate. Also please explain how being illiterate would render this people slaves to their supreme leader. You pretend that not being able to read and write equals supporting drones. That is simply a weird argument.
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)The Leadership in those countries support the help. Your black hearted leader may love to have the boots on the ground because it means billions in taxpayer dollars into his pockets. Tell him the white horse said, "tough shit you lost." you'll always lose.
Your numbers are way off, let's have a link from you that includes the entire population including females.
Response to Sunlei (Reply #69)
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Sunlei
(22,651 posts)get back to your desk job Hibby, it is a sin to steal work hours in your world.
Response to Sunlei (Reply #71)
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John2
(2,730 posts)as a weapon against Terrorists. That does not mean I support it because of Dick Cheney's reasons. I see no difference from any War when innocent people are in the line of fire. As someone with military experience, I agree with the statement made by General Tecumseh Sherman over one hundred years ago. There is no such thing as a clean or sterile War. Innocent people will get killed. There is a difference when you target innocent people. The President is not deliberately targeting innocent people.
As far as the country of Pakistan, I do not trust them nor their Government. And the reason I do not trust them is because they harbor Terrorists among their population. Bin Laden found safe haven there for twelve years. It didn't take me too long to figure that out. Apparently President Obama didn't trust them either and had the guts to take action. The simple fact, that our military has to go after these guys with Drones, reveals how much the Governments of these countries are going after them and bringing them to justice. So these innocent people have no idea what the accused terrorists among them do and there has been numerous known Terrorists killed among them by Drones. So why aren't they angry with the Terrorists instead of the United States?
The President of the United States first duty is to defend this country. And we do have the military might to destroy any country if we really unleashed every weapon within our power. So think about it that way. We are not dropping nukes on any country like we did in World War II. So the President is using good judgement. He is also saving American military lives, which I'm sure the Terrorists in those countries would love to get Americans in their country. The best thing the people of these countries can do is get rid of the Terriorists bringing destruction and lost of lives within their borders because there is no way they can invade the U.S. If some country used drones on us in retaliation, that would essentially be suicide. Just see Japan. The U.S. has too many nuclear weapons. They don't have to use any ground troops if they released all the weapons in their arsenal.
Doctor_J
(36,392 posts)and they wonder why some of us are disgusted with them and the president.
Third Doctor
(1,574 posts)I think Obama needs to review that policy. I would not want the agreement of a known criminal.
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)He and Bush are both immune from prosecution in America. They are not welcome and subject to arrest in many countries around the world. I would love it if Mr. Cheney and his buddie Bush stayed out of America and were not allowed to speak to our Gov. Let Dubai keep them both.
aggiesal
(10,801 posts)an endorsement from loserville!
obama2terms
(563 posts)If Cheney says it's good that means it's bad. I don't know enough about the program to just completely want to do away with it, but there should be limits. I'm glad democrats are complaining about it, even if the president is in our party if he does something wrong we need to say it!
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)why it's the American way gotta luv it
Response to Gentle-man (Original post)
devilgrrl This message was self-deleted by its author.
rachel1
(538 posts)supporting the slaughtering of suspected terrorists without trial.
Ash_F
(5,861 posts)The drone program just got the Cheney endorsement. 
MyNameGoesHere
(7,638 posts)Puzzledtraveller
(5,937 posts)
FiveGoodMen
(20,018 posts)OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)...Republican meeting of minds.
- Dick also agreed with his former boss' policy where if the President does it, it ain't illegal. Another meeting of the minds???
[center]''For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.'' ~Simon Wiesenthal[/center]
liberalmuse
(18,881 posts)I remember during Gulf War I when he would have his press conferences and gleefully describe blowing up shit while showing the visuals. Sick, sick man.
DCBob
(24,689 posts)as long it was aimed at "bad guys".
Amonester
(11,541 posts)bloating his bank accounts (and more so his offshore ones...).
panzerfaust
(2,818 posts)
Somewhere - oh yes, here it is:
The Fifth Amendment.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Odd that a former professor of constitutional law has trouble understanding that the executive does not have the power to order the execution of anyone simply because, as our former Decider, used to phrase it "They are the bad guys."
The distinction between the executive authority of our country and that of a dictatorship, continues to fade.
undeterred
(34,658 posts)
alarimer
(17,146 posts)If Cheney likes it, it must be reprehensible.
Where are the apologists now?
NoGOPZone
(2,971 posts)
yurbud
(39,405 posts)Doctor_J
(36,392 posts)the Cheney Fan Club