Tags: Obama's New National Security Structure, NSC-50, PM Hatoyama Resigns, Overthrow, Propaganda, Obama Attacks?,
Normally when a President or Prime Minister goes against the economic powers in a country, he or she is punished severely. This was true for Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and looks increasingly like the same fate is in store for Obama. There has been a sea change in the corporate press/media coverage emphasis as it has been from Presidents Carter, Clinton, and now Obama. The NY Times reported that operating emotion on Wall Street is Hate for Obama.
Since propaganda is subtle and hard to detect by limiting your reading habits or viewing habits, historically it has been relatively easy to fool the elites of our country. The father of public relations or propaganda as he called his 1928 book "Propaganda", now in reprint, Edward Bernays from Cambridge gave us the techniques of controlling the public mind in advertising, newspapers, television news, and even the Internet. He died in 1995 while writing another book on how to fool the public. Hitler made good use of his book.
I certainly was fooled for a long time by concentrating my news reports from the New York Times. Go back and read Maureen Dowd in 2,000 who made Gore a laughing stock among many elites. Sure their main editorials are fairly liberal, but their real policy is reflected in how the board decides to emphasize the news or as we saw with Gore and Clinton, distorting or even lying about the facts.
Selecting what they publish or the process of deleting or hiding the facts on the jump page as the Times did in the Gore/Bush recount with the front page headline saying Bush would have won anyway. Gore won any permutations of the recount by small to large margins over Bush. Don't get me talking about our Supreme Court!
Basically the NSC-50 was a plan to acquire natural resources all over the world, especially oil, and not consider the moral implications of our policies. Reagan, Bush, Sr, Bill Clinton, and Bush, Jr, and perhaps Obama are continuing this policy. Obama may be slowly trying to change this policy because we are no longer the economic power necessary to carry on these policies. We need to develop a more cooperative world policy.
Some books you might read on these policies: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men in the overthrow of Democracy in Iran in 1953. The best truthful book on our policies is Noam Chomsky's Deterring Democracy, 1991, 1992. I read this largely uncirculated book after the Stolen Election in 2000. I read the one circulating copy was in the main library in Los Angeles, none at the many branches. A couple of years later, all the branches had copies of this book.
Prime Minister of Japan, Yukio Hatoyama just resigned as Prime Minister because he like so many novice rulers, does not have the experience to navigate the deeply entrenched bureaucracy in Japan. Obama has had similar problems with some of his top advisors on Israel historically strong advocates openly or not to maintaining the status quo. He has similar problems in the financial regulation realm. Both the House and Senate finance committees are packed with conservatives.
So Hatoyama has been largely ineffective in changing the status quo and Okinawa has been largely an after-thought in the formulation of Japanese policies. Fear of hard-to-control North Korea nuclear capabilities may have played a part.
Speaking before the Brookings Institute, one of the top Centrist Think Tanks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, obviously tired from the Time Zone changes from trying to resolve the North/South Korea torpedo incident, still decided to speak there.
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Clinton made several very interesting comments which seemed to be largely ignored during the question session. One was that Obama/Clinton is formulating a plan to bring the budgeting of a New National Security department to include the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. This is huge. The plan to stop the competition for funds and have the allocation be more evenly distributed to take all important approaches to our National Security.
Secondly she made an off-the-cuff comment which she wisely said was not the official policy, is that our affluent and wealthy individuals only got to their current positions because of the educational and funding made possible by previous generations. We should consider giving back (higher tax rate) to help the current generations. No questions on that topic by the elite audience.
Obama Takes Down (The Wrong) Prime Minister (Previously published by Steve Clemons in Japan's Kyodo's News Service)
Japan Prime Minister and Democratic Party of Japan leader Yukio Hatoyama, whose amazing electoral victory last year unseating the long dominant Liberal Democratic Party, has announced that he is stepping down from his position for failing to deliver on a key campaign promise to the Japanese people about moving the US Marine Futenma Air Station off of Okinawa.
I will be arriving in Tokyo tomorrow (on Thursday) and will be in Naha, Okinawa this next Monday.
Hatoyama could not withstand the pressure from Obama -- who gave Hatoyama the kind of icy treatment that the White House has also been trying to give Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The problem is Hatoyama wilted, and Netanyahu seems to be thriving.
I recently wrote a piece on the odd dynamic between President Obama and two different Prime Ministers -- Netanyahu and Hatoyama -- for the Kyodo News Service. It has already run in Japanese, but I post the entire English language version here:
Jan ken pon. Scissors cut paper. Paper covers Rock. Rock smashes scissors. There is an interesting drama playing out between several world leaders today that reminds of this game.
President Barack Obama seems to be smashing the political fortunes of Japan Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. On the other hand, Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been rebuffing and constraining Obama. Obama and China's Hu Jintao seem to be stalemated, playing jan ken pon over and over and over again.
"Defining challenges" for leaders and nations are those that represent the highest stakes wins and potential losses. The United States, for example, invested enormous blood and treasure in triggering change in Iraq and the broader Middle East and thus the Middle East today is a self-chosen defining challenge for the country. For Barack Obama, there were other defining challenges that he promised to stand by - including closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, "stopping" climate change, ending the war in Iraq, achieving Israel-Palestine peace and delivering the opportunity of universal health care coverage to American citizens.
Yukio Hatoyama also articulated his own defining challenges - including ending bureaucratic control of government and restoring genuine political leadership, opening up Japan's official records of secret deals done with the U.S., enhancing the quality of life for average Japanese citizens, closing the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station in Okinawa, improving Japan's position and sovereignty within the US-Japan Security Relationship andbuilding stronger relations with China among other challenges.
For Netanyahu, the defining challenge has been to simultaneously protect Israel's security interests and expansion in the Occupied Territories while rallying support to thwart Iran's nuclear pretensions. For Hu Jintao, it has been to incrementally increase China's global economic and geostrategic position while maintaining high economic growth and not destabilizing the country or creating new costly burdens and responsibilities for China.
The interactions between these leaders show how power is deployed and measured, created and destroyed. Netanyahu and Hu Jintao have played their hands best. Obama has been beaten, constrained, but still has global leverage, and Yukio Hatoyama seems to be on the constantly losing end of jan ken pon. ... http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/
Update: Just read this superb short piece by Nathan Gardels on Huffington Post on the tremors in the geostrategic order. Gardels succinctly refutes the notion that there "is no space" between the US and Israel on security issues by referencing the recent nuclear non-proliferation treaty resolution. He also illustrates how China is disavowing an unconditional relationship with North Korea. The world is in flux -- fascinating.
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