Optimism grows ahead of Obama"s next Hill meeting

President Barack Obama will cap a two-day period of intense outreach to Congress, meeting with the Senate Republican Conference late Friday morning on day 11 of the government shutdown and less than a week before a potential default.

The gathering with more than 40 GOP senators is the culmination of talks between the White House and each major Capitol Hill faction on how to reopen government and evade a debt crisis. On Thursday afternoon Obama met with House Republican leaders and committee chairmen who want to raise the debt ceiling for six weeks and then open the government. During that meeting, the president asked the House GOP “what’s it going to take to” open up the government.

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Obama’s meeting with House Republicans ended without agreement on a deal. But for the first time, senior aides, lawmakers — and even staunch conservatives — feel an agreement is possible.

House Republicans and the White House worked through the evening to craft an accord to lift the debt ceiling and jump-start fiscal talks. The House Republicans sent a proposal to Obama at 10 last night and as of Friday morning they were waiting for a response.

At issue is putting in place a framework for six weeks of budget talks. If Obama and House Republicans could find common ground on what those talks would look like and what they would achieve, it would increase the likelihood of an expedient lifting of the debt ceiling and re-opening government.

Right now, House Republicans want to fund the government through Dec. 15, and lift the debt ceiling through Nov. 22. That would open two tracks for negotiations. Appropriations negotiators would develop 2014 funding levels. And then broader fiscal talks – spearheaded by Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp and GOP leadership – would proceed alongside the debt ceiling timeline.

In the meantime, Obama will meet Friday morning with GOP senators who have been sketching out their own rough framework for lifting the debt ceiling and reopening the government. The president has long been trying to woo Republican senators, holding open-ended budget talks throughout the year, though those discussions were broken off in August over a lack of progress.

The open-ended talks by a group of Senate Republicans and several influential Democrats are based off the work of Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and have been encouraged by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). But several of the ideas would affect portions of Obamacare, like repealing the medical device tax, verifying income for Obamacare subsides and changing the Independent Payment Advisory Board. Though those ideas do not attack the heart of the health care law like past efforts of House Republicans, they still may turn off the president and Senate Democrats who have emphasized Obamacare will not be part of debt ceiling and government funding talks.

Obama will also come face to face on Friday with conservative senators like Ted Cruz of Texas, who led the charge for the Republicans to try to defund Obamacare as part of a spending bill.

Senate Democrats are still heading toward a Saturday vote on a clean raise to the debt ceiling into 2015, which needs the support of six Republicans to advance and is widely expected to fail.

POLITICO – Congress

Optimism grows ahead of Obama"s next Hill meeting

In an Age of ‘Realists’ and Vigilantes, There is Cause for Optimism

The most important anniversary of the year was the 40^th anniversary of 11 September 1973 – the crushing of the democratic government of Chile by General Augusto Pinochet and Henry Kissinger, then US secretary of state. The National Security Archive in Washington has posted new documents that reveal much about Kissinger’s role in an atrocity that cost thousands of lives. 

In declassified tapes, Kissinger is heard planning with President Richard Nixon the overthrow of President Salvador Allende. They sound like Mafiosi thugs.  Kissinger warns that the “model effect” of Allende’s reformist democracy “can be insidious”. He tells CIA director Richard Helms: “We will not let Chile go down the drain”, to which Helms replies: “I am with you.” With the slaughter under way, Kissinger dismisses a warning by his senior officials of the scale of the repression. Secretly, he tells Pinochet, “You did a great service to the West.”

I have known many of Pinochet’s and Kissinger’s victims. Sara De Witt, a student at the time, showed me the place where she was beaten, assaulted and electrocuted. On a wintry day in the suburbs of Santiago, we walked through a former torture centre known as Villa Grimaldi, where hundreds like her suffered terribly and were murdered or “disappeared”.

Understanding Kissinger’s criminality is vital when trying to fathom what the US calls its “foreign policy”. Kissinger remains an influential voice in Washington, admired and consulted by Barack Obama. When Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain commit crimes with US collusion and weapons, their impunity and Obama’s hypocrisy are pure Kissinger. Syria must not have chemical weapons, but Israel can have them and use them. Iran must not have a nuclear programme, but Israel can have more nuclear weapons than Britain. This is known as “realism” or realpolitik by Anglo-American academics and think-tanks that claim expertise in “counter-terrorism” and “national security”, which are Orwellian terms meaning the opposite.

In recent weeks, the New Statesman has published articles by John Bew, an academic at Kings College war studies department, which the cold warrior Laurence Freedman made famous.  Bew laments the parliamentary vote that stopped David Cameron joining Obama in lawlessly attacking Syria and the hostility of most British people to bombing other nations. A note at the end of his articles says he will “take up the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations” in Washington. If this is not a black joke, it a profanity on those like Sara de Witt and Kissinger’s countless other victims, not least those who died in the holocaust of his and Nixon’s secret, illegal bombing of Cambodia.

This doctrine of “realism” was invented in the US following the second world war and sponsored by the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, the OSS (forerunner of the CIA) and the Council on Foreign relations. In the great universities, students were taught to regard people in terms of their usefulness or expendability: in other words, their threat to “us”. This narcissism served to justify the cold war, its moralising myths and cataclysmic risks, and when that was over, the “war on terror”. Such a “transatlantic consensus” often found its clearest echo in Britain, with the British elite’s enduring nostalgia for empire. Tony Blair used it to commit and justify his war crimes until his lies got the better of him. The violent death of more than a thousand people in Iraq every month is his legacy; yet his views are still courted, and his chief collaborator, Alastair Campbell, is a jolly after-dinner speaker and the subject of obsequious interviews. All the blood, it seems, has been washed away.

Syria is the current project. Outflanked by Russia and public opinion, Obama has now embraced the “path of diplomacy”. Has he? As Russian and US negotiators arrived in Geneva on 12 September, the US increased its support for the Al-Qaeda affiliated militias with weapons sent clandestinely through Turkey, Eastern Europe and the Gulf. The Godfather has no intention of deserting his proxies in Syria. Al Qaeda was all but created by the CIA’s Operation Cyclone that armed the mujahedin in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Since then, jihadists have been used to divide and Arab societies and in eliminating the threat of pan-Arab nationalism to western “interests” and Israel’s lawless colonial expansion. This is Kissinger-style “realism”.

In 2006, I interviewed Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, who ran the CIA in Latin America in the 1980s. Here was a true “realist”. Like Kissinger and Nixon on the tapes, he spoke his mind.  He referred to Salvador Allende as “whatshisname in Chile” and said “he had to go because it was in our national interests”. When I asked what gave him the right to overthrow governments, he said, “Like it or lump it, we’ll do what we like. So just get used to it, world.”

The world is no longer getting used to it. In a continent ravaged by those whom Nixon called “our bastards”, Latin American governments have defied the likes of Clarridge and implemented much of Allende’s dream of social democracy – which was Kissinger’s fear. Today, most of Latin America is independent of US foreign policy and free of its vigilantism. Poverty has been cut almost by half; children live beyond the age of five; the elderly learn to read and write. These remarkable advances are invariably reported in bad faith in the west and ignored by the “realists”. That must never lessen their value as a source of optimism and inspiration for all of us.

John Pilger’s new film, Utopia, will have its premiere at the National Film Theatre in London on 3 October and open in cinemas in November. For more information visit www.johnpilger.com

Global Research

In an Age of ‘Realists’ and Vigilantes, There is Cause for Optimism