from Greens for Greens

CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

On the Rocks

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

I write these words at the end of a week in which:

A new Democratic president, Barack Obama, via his Attorney General, has explicitly endorsed Bush’s policy on renditions and Bush’s refusal to recognize the jurisdiction of US courts in any legal proceedings in this regard; also a week in which Obama’s solicitor general has explicitly endorsed  Bush’s policy on enemy combatants.

I write not long after the New York Times reported that state welfare rolls are actually shrinking in months when unemployment has risen to real totals of 17 and 18 per cent – 1.7 million in Dec and Jan, hence when more and more people are in desperate straits. This is a consequence of a former Democratic president’s “reform” of welfare in the mid-90s.

Back then, Clinton reached out in the spirit of bipartisanship to Republicans to effect this piece of legislative savagery. In the same spirit of bipartisanship Obama invited a New Hampshire right-winger, Judd Gregg, to be his Commerce Secretary, while simultaneously pledging that Judd’s vacated seat would be filled by… a Republican!  Ultimately, Judd contemptuously kicked away the proffered hand of friendship.

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