If you're having political deja vu as Obama's second term in the White House gets underway, you're not alone.

The supposedly populist candidate - who won re-election promising to tax the rich, protect Social Security, and make the economy fair - has morphed back into an invaluable ally of the economic elite. Yet again, he's willing to let you fall under the bus.

In carving out 2013's first round of self-inflicted budget pain, President Barack Obama has laid the groundwork for much worse to come. By making most Bush tax cuts permanent, he gave away the massive bargaining chip he could have used to protect safety net programs in the next negotiating round. Now, thanks to his pre-emptive capitulation, austerity advocates hold all the cards.

While the deal extends unemployment insurance, this temporary relief is overwhelmed by massive, permanent gifts to the super-rich. Estate taxes have been repealed for all but the wealthiest 0.1 percent with a whopping $10.5 million per couple exemption. The agreement also locks in low capital gains and dividends rates of 15-20 percent, ensuring that billionaire bosses everywhere will pay lower tax rates than their secretaries.

Among new corporate favors, the deal retained one of the loopholes that multinational firms are using to dodge taxes on their foreign subsidiaries - an incentive to export jobs that cost us $1.1 billion in 2012. Meanwhile, vulnerable workers are hit with a big increase in Social Security payroll taxes, as rates revert to 2010 levels.

The fig leaf Obama provided to cover this surrender is a token tax increase on wealthy households earning over $450,000 per year. This marks a brazen retreat from his promise to raise taxes on those earning over $250,000, a meager reform to begin with in a tax system already rife with favors for the rich.

In this past round of budget bargaining, Obama proposed alarming cuts to key safety net programs that will be considered in upcoming negotiations. This tossed aside another key promise: to protect Social Security. It comes as nearly half of Americans are either low-income or living in poverty, and one in three seniors relies on Social Security to stay out of poverty.

Obama also offered to slash needed reductions in bloated military spending from $500 billion over 10 years, the amount included in the 2011 budget deal, to a mere $100 billion.

Obama's abandonment of his progressive base repeats 2008 post-election history, when the hope-and-change candidate suddenly devolved into a fearless defender of economic privilege. His early White House appointments of Wall Street darlings Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner were followed, with breath-taking irony, by the naming of General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, America's leader in layoffs, to head the jobs council.

Team Obama then led the charge for trillions in Wall Street bailouts, corporate-driven trade agreements that send jobs overseas and depress U.S. wages, health care reform that locked public options out of the debate, drill-baby-drill energy policies, the sabotage of international climate accords, foreclosure neglect, surging immigrant deportations, drone attacks, assaults on civil liberties, and more.

As Obama's second term begins, he's again undermining the progressive base, paving the way for more austerity, disparities, war and corporate power.

Washington's failure to deal justly and effectively with the fake fiscal cliff calamity leaves little hope it will resolve the real looming crises - the unraveling economy and accelerating climate catastrophe. The enormity of these threats compel solutions of equal magnitude - like the Green New Deal I promoted as the Green Party's presidential candidate in 2012. It would obliterate the fiscal cliff while putting America back to work, greening the economy, cutting the oversized military, saving trillions through Medicare for All, and taxing the wealthy.

Fortunately, grassroots movements and non-corporate political parties have begun to lead the way. It's time to join them while we still can, putting our voices, bodies, and votes behind real solutions that can truly deliver a peaceful, just, green future for us all.
(c) 2013 Jill Stein was the Green Party's presidential candidate in 2012.

THE ELECTIONS will take place in three days, and they are boring, boring, boring.

So boring, indeed, that even to think about their boringness (if there is such a word) is boring.

For lack of any debate about the issues, media pundits are reduced to discussing the election broadcasts. Some are good, some indifferent, some atrocious. As if this were a contest between spin doctors, copywriters, "strategists" and such, with the public just a bystander.

WHEREVER I meet people, I am told with real worry: "I don't know whom to vote for! There is no party I really like!" and then the question I dread: "Whom do you advise me to vote for?"

I have closely followed all the past 18 Knesset elections, except the first, when I was still a soldier. In several of them I was a candidate myself. I have always written about my preferences, but I have never told my readers how to vote.

I shall follow the same rule now.

FIRST OF ALL, there is an absolute imperative to vote, more than ever.

It is not about the "feast of democracy", "civic duty" and bla-bla-bla. This time it is a vital necessity.

A non-vote is a vote for Binyamin Netanyahu and his allies, pure and simple. As it looks now, more than half the members of the 19th Knesset will belong to the extreme right and beyond, at least a dozen of them honest to goodness fascists.

Not to vote means to strengthen them even more.

This is especially true for Arab citizens. The polls predict that almost half of them will not vote at all. The reasons are many: a general protest against the "Jewish" state, protest against discrimination, despair of any change, disapproval of the "Arab" parties and more. All good reasons.

But abstention means that the Arab citizens are shooting themselves in the foot. If their situation is bad now, it can still become much, much worse: The Supreme court, which generally protects them, cowed into impotence. Discriminatory laws proliferating.

Some on the far right want to deprive them of the right to vote altogether. Why grant them their wish voluntarily?

LET'S PROCEED to the actual choice.

My method is to write down all the competing election lists in a random order.

Then I strike out all those I would not vote for if my life depended on it. That's the easy part.

First of all, there is Likud-Beitenu. Likud alone was bad enough. The addition of Avigdor Lieberman's Israel Beitenu makes it even more destructive.

I agree with President Barack Obama that Netanyahu is leading us to certain disaster. His total rejection of peace, the obsession with the settlements, the deepening of the occupation - all these are turning Israel (Israel proper, not just the occupied territories) inexorably into an apartheid state. Already in the outgoing Knesset, abominable anti-democratic laws have been passed. Now that all the moderate Likud members have been purged, this process will be accelerated.

With Lieberman and his acolytes joining the Likud, things look even more dangerous. Netanyahu will have to posture and act even more extremely, for fear of losing the leadership to Lieberman, who is now No. 2. It is quite probable that Lieberman will still succeed in replacing him somewhere along the road.

The emergence of Naftali Bennett as the star of the elections makes matters even more desperate. It seems to be a rule on the Israeli right that nobody is so extreme that another cannot be found who is even extremer.

THE NEXT group to be struck off the list is the religious one. It consists mainly of two parties: the Ashkenazi "Torah Jewry" and the Sephardi Shas.

Both used to be quite moderate in matters of peace and war. But those days are long gone. Generations of a narrowly ethnocentric, xenophobic education have spawned a leadership of rabid nationalist rightists. Bennett, too, was brought up in this camp.

As if this was not enough, these parties want to impose on us the Jewish Halacha, much as their Muslim counterparts want to impose the Sharia. They oppose almost automatically all progressive ideas, such as a written constitution, separation between synagogue and state, civil marriage, same sex marriage, abortion and what not. Off the list.

OF A different caliber are the self-styled "Center" parties.

The largest is the Labor Party under Shelly Yachimovich, which now stands at about 15%.

I must confess that I have never liked Shelly very much, but that should not influence my vote. She can (and sure does) boast of several achievements. She has taken a moribund party and turned it into a live force again. She has found new and attractive candidates.

The trouble is that she has helped to eradicate peace from the national agenda. She has made overtures to the settlers and their allies. Although she has paid the obligatory lip service to the "two-state solution", she has done absolutely nothing to further it. Her sole concern is with what she calls "social justice".

She has promised not to join a Netanyahu-Lieberman government. Experience has taught us not to take such pre-election promises too seriously - there is always a "national emergency" lurking round the corner - but even as head of the opposition, a peace-denier can do a lot of damage. Sorry, not for me.

Shelly's main competitor is Tzipi. On the face of it, Livni is the exact opposite. Her main and almost sole election plank is the resumption of negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas.

Fine, but Tzipi and her former boss, Ehud Olmert, were in power for almost four years, during which they started two wars (Lebanon II and Cast Lead) and did not come even close to peace. Why believe her now?

I have never heard Tzipi utter a single word of sympathy or compassion for the Palestinian people. My suspicion is that she is really interested in a an endless Peace Process, not in peace itself.

AN INTERESTING character in these elections is Ya'ir Lapid.

What does he stand for? Well, he looks great . A former TV personality, he is good on TV, the only battleground in these elections. His program equates to the American "motherhood and apple pie".

He reminds me of Groucho Marx: "These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others, too."

For me he is "Lapid Lite", compared to his late father, "Tommy" Lapid, who also moved from TV into politics. Father Lapid was a much more complicated character: very likeable in personal contact, very offensive on TV, an extreme rightist in national affairs and an extreme enemy of the religious camp. His son just pleads: Vote for me because I am a nice guy.

He makes no secret of his yearning to become a minister under Netanyahu. Sorry, not for me. IGNORING THE Arab national lists, which are not interested in Jewish votes, and those which cannot be expected to make the 2% hurdle, there remain only two candidates on the list: Hadash and Meretz.

Both are close to what I believe in: they are actively engaged in the struggle for peace with the Palestinian people and for social justice.

How to choose?

Hadash is basically the public face of the Communist party. Should that deter me?

I have never been a Communist, or even a Marxist. I would define myself as a social-democrat. I have many memories concerning the Communist party, some positive, many negative. It is not easy for me to forget their orthodox Stalinist past. But that is not the point. We are not voting for the past, but for the future.

Hadash, to its credit, defines itself as a joint Arab-Jewish party - the only one (since the party I helped to found in 1984 lost momentum after eight years and disappeared.) However, for the vast majority of Israelis it is an "Arab party", since more than 95% of its voters are Arabs. It does have a Jewish Knesset member, the very active and commendable Dov Hanin. If he had headed a list of his own, he could have attracted many young voters and conceivably changed the election landscape.

ON THE whole, I prefer Meretz, though without much enthusiasm.

There is something old and dreary about this party, which was founded in 1973. It says all the right things about peace and social justice, democracy and human rights. But it says them in a weary voice. There are no new faces, no new ideas, no new slogans.

A large number of leading intellectuals, writers and artists have come out for Meretz. (The party took great pains not to list leftists without clear "Zionist" credentials.) But, as a Labor minister said long ago about the intellectuals: "They don't fill half a refugee camp."

All in all, it is still the best choice in the circumstances. A significant increase of their presence in the Knesset would at least encourage hopes for the future.

AND IT is the future that counts. The day after these disastrous elections, the effort to create a different landscape must begin. Never again should we be faced with such a dilemma.

Sometimes it seems as if the dream of peace moves further into the distance with each passing day...

Outside the "radical fringes" of the political spectrum, the silence is almost deafening. This is despite the palpable and (by now) incontrovertible nature of the conjoined crises in our collective midst, as the nexus of economic, ecological, technological, and militaristic challenges before us deepens by the day. Drudgery, droughts, and drones, oh my! Reality possesses a "fantastic" quality that often makes it seem as if we're moving through a colorized version of an old-school horror flick - a notion reified in the cultural near-obsession with trite invocations of the much-anticipated "zombie apocalypse."

In the midst of communicative plenty, we tend to say very little. Left, right, and center, the songs remain the same. Brows furrow and fingers point, yet the machinery of destruction continues unabated. One calamitous event seamlessly bleeds into the next; one war front yields to another; each contrived political logjam sets the stage for the next round of verbiage sans verisimilitude. If your angst about any of this can't be expressed in 140 characters or less, please just keep it to yourself, thank you very much.

Well, I've already exceeded that limit (as well as the carefully cultivated parameters of the cultural attention span), so if you're still reading this - what the heck is wrong with you? I'm sure there's a status update to post, a barrage of tweets to scan, a bevy of emails (if you're still that retro) to delete, a series of voicemails to process, a queue of shows on the DVR beckoning. I used to think that we'd reached a saturation point of "functional distraction" in our workaday lives, but now it appears more dysfunctional in its pervasiveness. The Situationists once cleverly noted that "Big Brother is you, watching," but today we might add the dualistic idea that Big Brother is watching us as we watch.

Indeed, everything you watch watches you. We are both object and subject, voyeurs of our own reality shows, peeping Toms looking in our own windows. In short order, we've reached the totalization of social surveillance, except for the fact that deeper incursions yet remain right around the next corner. Privacy is passe, nearly denigrated as being "quaint and obsolete," and everyone is an amateur publicist. Again, in the fringes one can still find a few hand-wringing lamentations over this state of affairs, but in the vast morass of the majoritarian mass, there's little said about any of this beyond participating in it.

We don't talk enough about the impending death of privacy. We don't talk much about the double-edged nature of technology, about the ways in which the emerging global web both connects and ensnares, about how the Town Square has yielded to Foursquare. We don't say nearly enough about the psychological impacts of these rampant technological changes, particularly on young people. We don't spend enough time discussing the present we're being subjected to and the implications it has for the future we're leaving to our children. We don't address climate disruption in a manner nearly enough to mitigate it, despite a rapidly closing window of time in which to act. We expend our energies coping with and reacting to the world being put before us (one that is both imposed and chosen), but we aren't saying nearly enough about the world we would actually want to live if we could create it anew.

We've probably all heard John Lennon's musical plea to "give peace a chance." It's a powerful sentiment, perhaps a necessary one, but it's not sufficient. Making our voices heard above the din is critical, yet if we merely do this in service of a generic message for "peace" (or any other oft-repeated, decontextualized, and easily coopted moniker) we're not likely to alter the paradigm in any significant way. Yes, we need to say more about peace, but in a manner that highlights actual practices, local initiatives, global networks, human-environmental synergies, historical exemplars, and future prospects.

In the mid-1990s, Pink Floyd released a song called "Keep Talking" that sampled Stephen Hawking's electronic voice: "All we need to do is make sure we keep talking." In principle, this is crucial: as long as we continue to be in dialogue with ourselves, each other, and the world around us, we can continue the human experiment and strive to achieve elusive, asymptotic goals like peace. Yet just as many social movements have learned, merely providing people with information is insufficient in itself to change behavior. Talking is good in general, but it still matters what we're talking about. In other words, more speech is better if it corresponds with substance; there needs to be a fit between quantity and quality.

In today's sociopolitical climate, we seem to have allowed quantity (and its cousins, volume and growth) to trump quality (along with its corollaries, value and utility). Those with the loudest voices, the biggest budgets, and the largest stockpiles of armaments tend to set the agenda. The small-is-beautiful communards, the soft-spoken storytellers, and the free-economy practitioners are often relegated to either second-class status or outright persecution. The Lorax (re-released absent some of its most profound lessons) may have spoken for the trees, but today it may be more poignant to create moments in which humans fall silent long enough to hear what the trees are saying for themselves: breathe.

The quiet experiences, the spaces between our urge to speak - these may help us to find meaning in listening rather than talking. Or, perhaps more to the point, this may help us to talk about what's truly important rather than what's currently trending. Reality sometimes feels a bit like a perpetual RSS feed beamed wirelessly throughout the course of our day right into our cerebral cortexes. Indeed, the near future may literally hold such things in store for us - as children are implanted with RFID technology (in the name of security, of course), as our e-credentials (and thus our locations, histories, statuses, etc.) are always with us in a fully-wired world, and as mere thought becomes sufficient to navigate this web.

There's a constant din of incessant information swirling around us. Sometimes we're able to make something of this information and deploy it in the form of knowledge. Infrequently, we demonstrate the capacity to discern its efficacy and ethicality as a nascent expression of wisdom. Perhaps in the end, amidst all the chatter, it's what's not being said that broaches the latter. And so, on a day when we celebrate one of history's greatest orators for the cause of peace, here's a nod to all we aren't saying...
(c) 2013 Randall Amster J.D., Ph.D., teaches peace studies at Prescott College and serves as the executive director of the Peace & Justice Studies Association. Amonsg his most recent books are Anarchism Today (Praeger, 2012) and the co-edited volume "Building Cultures of Peace: Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action" (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).

PARK CITY, Utah-As President Barack Obama prepared to be sworn in for his second term as the 44th president of the United States, two courageous journalists premiered a documentary at the annual Sundance Film Festival. "Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield" reaffirms the critical role played by independent journalists like the film's director, Rick Rowley, and its narrator and central figure, Jeremy Scahill. The increasing pace of U.S. drone strikes, and the Obama administration's reliance on shadowy special forces to conduct military raids beyond the reach of oversight and accountability, were summarily missed over the inaugural weekend by a U.S. press corps obsessed with first lady Michelle Obama's new bangs. "Dirty Wars," along with Scahill's forthcoming book of the same title, is on target to break that silence ... with a bang that matters.

Scahill and Rowley, no strangers to war zones, ventured beyond Kabul, Afghanistan, south to Gardez, in Paktia province, a region dense with armed Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network, to investigate one of the thousands of night raids that typically go unreported.

Scahill told me: "In Gardez, U.S. special operations forces had intelligence that a Taliban cell was having some sort of a meeting to prepare a suicide bomber. And they raid the house in the middle of the night, and they end up killing five people, including three women, two of whom were pregnant, and ... Mohammed Daoud, a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the U.S."

Scahill and Rowley went to the heart of the story, to hear from people who live at the target end of U.S. foreign policy. In Gardez, they interviewed survivors of that violent raid on the night of Feb. 12, 2010. After watching his brother and his wife, his sister and his niece killed by U.S. special forces, Mohammed Sabir was handcuffed on the ground. He watched, helpless, as the U.S. soldiers dug the bullets out of his wife's corpse with a knife. He and the other surviving men were then flown off by helicopter to another province.

Sabir recounted his ordeal for Rowley's camera: "My hands and clothes were caked with blood. They didn't give us water to wash the blood away. The American interrogators had beards and didn't wear uniforms. They had big muscles and would fly into sudden rages. By the time I got home, all our dead had already been buried. Only my father and my brother were left at home. I didn't want to live anymore. I wanted to wear a suicide jacket and blow myself up among the Americans. But my brother and my father wouldn't let me. I wanted a jihad against the Americans."

Before leaving, Scahill and Rowley made copies of videos from the cellphones of survivors. One demonstrated that it was not a Taliban meeting, but a lively celebration of the birth of a child that the raid interrupted. Rowley described another video: "You can hear voices come over it, and they're American-accented voices speaking about piecing together their version of the night's killings, getting their story straight. You hear them trying to concoct a story about how this was something other than a massacre."

The film shows an image captured in Gardez, by photographer Jeremy Kelly, sometime after the massacre. It showed a U.S. admiral named McRaven, surrounded by Afghan soldiers, offering a sheep as a traditional gesture seeking forgiveness for the massacre. The cover-up had failed.

William McRaven headed the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. Following the thread of JSOC, painstakingly probing scarcely reported night raids, traveling from Afghanistan to Yemen to Somalia, Scahill's reporting, along with Rowley's incredible camerawork, constructs for the first time a true, comprehensive picture of JSOC and Commander in Chief Obama's not-so-brave new world.

The Inauguration Day drone strike in Yemen was the fourth in as many days, along with a similar increase in strikes in Pakistan. The Washington Post reported that Obama has a "playbook" that details when drone strikes are authorized, but it reportedly exempts those conducted by the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan. On Inauguration Day, Obama officially nominated John Brennan, a strong advocate for the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that many call torture, and architect of the drone program, to head the CIA.