OBAMA CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS

The Egyptian uprising is not only inspiring a world wide revolt against the status quo but is starkly revealing the hypocrisy of America’s foreign policy with its on going commitment to the status quo: Allen L Roland

If I was advising the leaders of the Egyptian uprising for democracy ~ I would say DON'T STOP YOUR DEMAND FOR ACTION, DON’T LEAVE THE SQUARE AND DON’T SETTLE FOR THE STATUS QUO.

We Americans were coming from the same place in 2008 where, after suffering eight years of an oppressive Bush/Cheney agenda of rationalized dishonesty, illegal preventive wars fueled by an arrogant neoconservative doctrine and corruptive financial practices ~ we thought we were voting for CHANGE with the election of Barack Obama as president. I was one of those progressives who drank the kool aid of Obama’s promised change and I’m now one of millions who realize President Obama is not a change agent ~ Obama is obviously a maintainer of the status quo who answers to the financial elite, aka the old world order, and does not trust the voice of the people.

Obama wants it both ways where he can talk the talk of freedom while walking the walk of the old world order which controls through military power and financial manipulation.

Egypt’s current uprising is bringing this unpleasant truth to the surface of our global consciousness leaving our foreign policy in a most awkward position ~ as Obama straddles America’s decaying old world order devices of control as the people, armed by the truth, revolt and struggle to remove them.

The Nation captures this obvious hypocrisy in glowing detail ~ “The popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, which have sent reverberations throughout the Arab world, reveal some uncomfortable truths about US foreign policy. The contortions of the Obama administration, caught between its desire to stand by a dictator in Cairo who has been a loyal ally and its desire to channel a revolution that could define the future of the region, are replays we have seen over and over. Rhetorically, America trumpets democracy and human rights. In reality, we ally ourselves with repressive dictatorships: Cuba’s Batista, Nicaragua’s Somoza, Chile’s Pinochet, South Africa’s apartheid regime, Iran’s shah, Indonesia’s Suharto and many more. When the people finally revolt, Washington flounders, usually concerned more about shoring up the regime than about supporting democracy… Worse, because foreign policy is dominated by our military and intelligence agencies, our ties with these regimes tend to involve deep complicity with the security services that torture and kill domestic opposition. We are widely ~ and accurately ~ viewed in much of the third world not as neutral or distant supporters of freedom but as the bulwark of dictatorships. We train their police, arm their militaries, and base our troops on their soil. American people and culture are widely admired abroad, but our government is just as widely despised.” The Nation: Egypt Uprising Reveals Hypocrisy of US Foreign Policy
http://act.commondreams.org/go/4450?akid=400.3890.fw686n&t=8

Obama can’t have it both ways and the more he maintains the Obama Straddle ~ the more his credibility sinks throughout a world that is increasingly thirsty for the truth and true democracy.

The nation ends its excellent thought provoking article with these words ~ “ America is exceptional not because we are rich but because we were founded on a revolutionary ideal: that people have the right to govern themselves. And yet we have become a status quo nation, too often invested in maintaining oppressive power. The revolution sweeping the Middle East suggests we had better think very hard about that contradiction.”

Yes, we had better think very hard about that contradiction and be willing to follow our Egyptian brothers and sisters to the streets and voting booths to reclaim our innate revolutionary ideal as well as our morally diminished Republic.

Allen L Roland

http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/obama-cant-have-it-both-ways.html

About the Author: Allen L Roland is a Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist and psychotherapist. Allen L Roland is also available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private consultations. Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website www.allenroland.com . He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net

THE PERFECT STORM / PEOPLE POWER VS DYING OLD WORLD ORDER

Canisters of tear gas used to quell Egyptian uprising and made in the United States

The Egyptian Tsunami of people power is moving so rapidly that the walls of the Old World Order, based on control and military force, cannot hold it in check. The hypocrisy of our selling lethal tear gas canisters to Israel and Egypt to be used to disperse the huge crowds demanding freedom from oppression is indicative of the United State’s morally flawed foreign policy of supporting dictators and suppressing freedom throughout the Middle East: Allen L Roland

It’s Super Bowl Sunday which rings hollow compared to the events that are now rapidly unfolding in the Middle East. American exceptionalism may well be having its last feeble hurrah in Dallas,Texas today where the Steelers meet the Packers ~ for the eyes and ears of most of the world are really trained on Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt where US-Israel shared hegemony is having its greatest test against the rising power of the people.

These are heady times in the Middle East as the people of Egypt seize their moment on the world stage and flaunt their demands and grievances to a Middle East audience that has yearned for another choice versus continued oppression from the west and their corrupt puppet governments ~ like Egypt.

What goes around, comes around and the failure of both the Bush and Obama administrations to halt the obvious ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel as well as the murder of tens of thousands of innocent Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan has rightfully infuriated Muslims throughout the Middle East and does not bode well for Israel and the West.

President Obama is not a change agent, Obama is obviously a maintainer of the status quo who answers to the financial elite and the old world order. Right now, Obama’s only choice is to embrace change or be eventually overrun by it ~ there is no more room to straddle or equivocate as he most assuredly will do now under obvious pressure from Israel and AIPAC.

As the Egyptian Tsunami gains strength, it appears that the Mubarak / Suleiman regime will eventually attempt to keep their power through coercion or force ~ CLG reveals that The International Network for Rights and Development has claimed that Israeli logistical support has been sent to Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak to help his regime confront demonstrations. According to reports by the non-governmental organization, three Israeli planes landed at Cairo's Mina International Airport on Saturday carrying hazardous equipment for use in dispersing and suppressing large crowds. In the statement circulated by the International Network, it was disclosed that Egyptian security forces received the complete cargoes on three Israeli planes which were, it is claimed, carrying an abundant supply of internationally proscribed tear gas to disperse unwanted crowds ~ and made in the United states.

It won’t work because this powerful people Tsunami is fueled by the poor, the youth and the disenfranchised of Egypt who have nothing to lose and long for their voice ~ for quite simply, the masses of the poor have been left behind in Egypt. The middle class has actually gone backward leaving a small financial elite at the top who benefit from whatever economic progress there is. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it ~ the unholy marriage of power and capital which fits the description of the whole capitalist world and in particular, the United States ~ where the Tsunami will eventually reach.

As Roger Cohen writes in the New York Times ~ “ Egypt’s not alone in seeing the gulf between its wealthy and the rest widen; that’s a global trend. But in a country of 83 million where almost 30 percent of the population is still illiterate, and the big bucks have often depended on an entrée to Mubarak’s son, Gamal, or his circle, the pattern has been particularly inflammatory…Egypt had a Western-backed free-market economy run by a family with contempt for freedom: That’s problematic. It puts the global forces concentrating wealth into overdrive in the service of the chosen few… . All of this raises a question: In the name of what exactly has the United States been ready to back and fund an ally whose contempt for the law, fake democracy and gross theft flout everything for which America stands? “

Cohen concludes his article with this telling story ~ “ In Tahrir Square, the mini-republic that is the Egyptian uprising’s ground zero, I ran into Seif Salmawy, the managing director of a publishing company. He was smiling; I asked why. “Suddenly we are human beings,” he said. “We think we can decide and that what we decide has worth and that we have some value as humans. Before there was the president, the police, the army and their money: We the people were just there to serve them.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/opinion/05iht-edcohen05.html

However, the real cause of the revolutionary tide that will probably soon sweep the Arab world is Palestine. Let an Israeli, like Israeli writer and founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement, Uri Avnery, tell you that what is happening now in Egypt will forever change the Middle East ~ “ The turmoil in Egypt was caused by economic factors: the rising cost of living, the poverty, the unemployment, the hopelessness of the educated young. But let there be no mistake: the underlying causes are far more profound. They can be summed up in one word: Palestine…In Arab culture, nothing is more important than honor. People can suffer deprivation, but they will not stand humiliation…. Yet what every young Arab from Morocco to Oman saw daily was his leaders humiliating themselves, forsaking their Palestinian brothers in order to gain favor and money from America, collaborating with the Israeli occupation, cringing before the new colonizers. This was deeply humiliating for young people brought up on the achievements of Arab culture in times gone by and the glories of the early Caliphs… Nowhere was this loss of honor more obvious than in Egypt, which openly collaborated with the Israeli leadership in imposing the shameful blockade on the Gaza Strip, condemning 1.5 million Arabs to malnutrition and worse. It was never just an Israeli blockade, but an Israeli-Egyptian one, lubricated by 1.5 billion US dollars every year… A dictator may be tolerated when he reflects national dignity. But a dictator who expresses national shame is a tree without roots ­ any strong wind can blow him over. “

Mubarak is a shamed dictator without roots and the strong wind of an empowered and outraged people is blowing him over as Avnery eloquently concludes ~ “ When Egypt moves, the Arab world follows. Whatever transpires in the immediate future in Egypt ­ democracy or an army dictatorship - It is only a matter of (a short) time before the dictators fall all over the Arab world, and the masses will shape a new reality, without the generals…Everything the Israeli leadership has done in the last 44 years of occupation or 63 years of its existence is becoming obsolete. We are facing a new reality. We can ignore it ­ insisting that we are "a villa in the jungle", as Ehud Barak famously put it ­ or find our proper place in the new reality. Peace with the Palestinians is no longer a luxury. It is an absolute necessity. Peace now, peace quickly. Peace with the Palestinians, and then peace with the democratic masses all over the Arab world, peace with the reasonable Islamic forces (like Hamas and the Muslim Brothers, who are quite different from al Qaeda), peace with the leaders who are about to emerge in Egypt and everywhere.” http://www.rense.com/general92/vila.htm

The perfect storm of rising people power versus the Old World Order is now developing in Egypt but its true origins are in the ongoing humiliation of Palestine which touches a deep chord of humiliation throughout the Muslim world.

As such, Israel and the United States are on notice that the leading edge of this powerful storm will soon be crashing on their shores.

Allen L Roland

http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/perfect-storm-people-power-vs-dying-old.html

Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist and psychotherapist Allen L Roland is also available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private consultations ( allen@allenroland.com )

allen@allenroland.com is PayPal Verified

Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com . He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net

EGYPT UPRISING / TWO MINUTE WARNING FOR OLD WORLD ORDER

Egypt’s current uprising is a two minute warning for the old world order which controlled the populace by force and US military aid but are now being crushed by growing public dissent and a long simmering desire for true change, individual liberty and political freedom ~ the times are a changing: Allen L Roland

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Bob Dylan / Times They Are A Changing / 1964

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYQZSDOWwww

Revolution is in the air and particularly in the Middle East. The flood waters of discontent as well as the desire for true change is rising throughout the world and that includes the United States. President Obama still does not get that millions of Americans voted for true change in 2008 and saw him as a self proclaimed agent of that change. Instead, Obama has offered token change and has become a champion of the status quo as well as the economic and moral abuses of power that were the trademark of the Bush/Cheney administration and the rapidly decaying old World order.

Those waters of discontent are still rising and are fueled by worldwide poverty, unemployment and political disenfranchisement as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer under an obviously outdated old world order ~ which holds onto its power through force, fear and propaganda.

As Charles Angoff once wrote ~ “History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses.”

Well, history is now being made with the recent uprisings in Tunisia and particularly Egypt and its echoes are being heard globally ~ particularly in the middle East. As I have argued for many years, truth and transparency are always the first step in social revolution as well as an eventual evolution in consciousness. The worldwide internet, Wikileaks and other sources have fully revealed the rusting infrastructure of the old world order which still relies on force, economic manipulation and propaganda to maintain its hold over the people. Of course, the Global financial elite see the handwriting on the wall and have chosen Obama to be the interim leader of the transition from the old world order to the new world order ~ with America and the secretive Federal Reserve still firmly in financial control of the restless seething masses seeking true change.

Egypt, however, is a game changer because the truth of Egypt’s role as a key staging post for US military actions and Imperialistic designs in the Middle East is now becoming known to the world ~ as Finian Cunningham writes in Global Research ~ “There is clear evidence from international human rights groups that countless “suspects” rendered by US forces in their various territories of (criminal) operations are secretly dumped in Egypt for “deep interrogation”. The country serves as a giant “Guantanamo” of the Middle East, conveniently obscured from US public interest and relieved of legal niceties over human rights. In collaboration with Israel, and openly described as an “ally” by Tel Aviv, Egypt has shown itself to be the anvil to Israel’s hammer against the Palestinian people. In keeping the Raffah Crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip closed, thus denying badly needed humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the aftermath of Israel’s murderous 2009 assault, Mubarak has shown unspeakable callousness and willingness to collaborate with the criminal US/Israeli policy of “collective punishment” of this civilian population.”

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22994

Obama is a political pragmatist who is much more comfortable reacting to events versus taking a firm leadership role. He rationalizes his reluctance to initiate needed action by politically straddling the middle which infuriates his dwindling base and emboldens his opposition. Egypt is the perfect example in that Obama concluded that there was no real chance of serious reform under strongman Mubarak and seriously underestimated the rapidly growing secular opposition which has rallied around former U.N. nuclear director Mohamed ElBaradei who clearly sees Washington’s hypocrisy ~ “ The Obama administration has been at best luke-warm towards our cause of democracy ~ Clinton’s statement on Tuesday~ calling Mubarak’s government “ stable “ and that it was responding to the needs and interests of the Egyptian people ~ reflects the Obama policy for the past two years”. That’s the Obama straddle and Mubarak was so emboldened that he staged a rigged parliamentary election last November, setting himself up for re-election, while the Obama administration muted any criticism, as the old world order lumbered on choosing to ignore the growing public dissent and their rightful demands ~ that is, until now! Incidently, ElBaradei is a moderate who doesn't share Washington's allergy to Islamist parties and has publicly questioned the Obama Administration's strategy on Iran's nuclear program.

Obama has done exactly the same political straddle since his election with his failed promises, infuriating his base and emboldening the opposition which led to his devastating defeat in the mid term elections. Let’s get this straight ~ Obama is not a change agent, Obama is a maintainer of the status quo who answers to the financial elite and the old world order. Right now, Obama’s only choice is to embrace change or be eventually overrun by it ~ there is no more room to straddle.

Yes, the times, they are a changing ~ and the truth and transparency of a decaying old world order, based on military force and financial manipulation, is finally becoming apparent to the masses and they are revolting or as Zbigniew Brzezinski recently declared ~ the entire world has become politically awake !

As Jeff Cohen writes in Truthout ~ "For decades beginning during the Cold War, US policy in the Islamic world has been aimed at suppressing secular reformist and leftist movements. Beginning with the CIA-engineered coup against a secular democratic reform government in Iran in 1953 (it was about oil), Washington has propped up dictators, coaching these regimes in the black arts of torture and mayhem against secular liberals and the left.... One of the mantras on US television news all day this Friday was: Be fearful of the democratic uprisings against US allies in Egypt (and Tunisia and elsewhere). After all, we were told by Fox News and CNN and Chris Matthews on MSNBC, it could end up as bad as when 'our ally' ( the Shah ) was overthrown and the extremists came to power in 1979." http://www.truth-out.org/jeff-cohen-fear-extreme-islamists-arab-world-blame-washington67267

Egypt’s corruption goes deep ~ Their vice president Vice President Omar Suleiman was the C.I.A.’s point man in Egypt for renditions ~ the covert program in which the C.I.A. snatched terror suspects from around the world and returned them to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation, often under brutal circumstances.

In regards to current American policy in the Middle East, Columnist Gilad Altzmon rightfully attributes U.S.’ failed approach’ to a foreign policy that is shaped by Israeli interest and exploited by such Zionist lobbies as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), so expect more U.S. supported force before Mubarak bends to the demands of the masses in the street. But the die has been cast, meaning a irrevocable choice has been made by the Egyptian people and they will not relent.For example, the Israeli embassy has been shut down in Egypt's capital and its diplomatic staff has been flown to Tel Aviv (allegedly) disguised as tourists.The Star of David has been lowered and is no longer visible anywhere in Cairo.

The times they are indeed a changing ~ but some anticipated it.

Naguib Mahfouz , the great Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote of this eventual uprising many years ago ~ We are like a woman with a difficult pregnancy. We have to rebuild the social classes in Egypt, and we must change the way things were.

And it was Teilhard de Chardin who wrote about the chain reaction when the truth finally becomes obvious to all ~ “ Sooner or later there will be a chain reaction, for the truth has to appear only once, in one single mind ( or nation ) for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze.”

And the truth is that we are all one with a common urge to unite ( the Unified Field ) which transcends all nationalities, restrictive monarchies and totalitarian regimes. Egypt has just signaled a two minute global warning to the old world order that their controlling days are numbered, the people are marching ~ they will no longer be oppressed ~ they will no longer be a lap dog for the West !

There are moments when history is written not by the powerful, but by the people. This is one of them. The actions of ordinary Egyptians in the coming hours and days will have a massive effect on their country, the region, and our world. Let’s cheer them on with our own pledge to stand with them in their struggle for freedom from oppression:
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/democracy_for_egypt/?vl

If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Allen L Roland

http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/egypt-uprising-two-minute-warning-for.html

Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist and psychotherapist Allen L Roland is also available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private consultations ( allen@allenroland.com )

allen@allenroland.com is PayPal Verified

Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com . He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net