Obama Watch

Obama Has Governed as a Conservative

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:11:00 +0000

AlterNet / By Guy T. Saperstein

Andrew Sullivan is Right: Obama Has Governed as a Conservative

Sullivan took Obama's critics to task for not recognizing his accomplishments--sadly, those accomplishments only appeal to "conservative-minded independents" like him.

January 23, 2012 |

Last week, Newsweek magazine and The Daily Beast published an article by Andrew Sullivan, “How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics,” which excoriated left-wing critics for failing to appreciate how much Obama has accomplished, while at the same time trying to convince conservatives that Obama is not a liberal, let alone a socialist, and that, in fact, he has governed as a conservative. The fact that these two critiques are internally inconsistent has somehow managed to escape Mr. Sullivan.

The main case Mr. Sullivan, a self-described “conservative-minded independent,” makes for Obama is that, “he continued the bank bailout begun by George W. Bush, he initiated the bailout of the auto industry, and he worked to pass a huge stimulus package of $787 billion.”

In fact, Obama deserves even more credit for the bank bailout (TARP) than Sullivan gives him: Obama did not simply “continue the bank bail-out,” he, more than Bush, was the main reason TARP passed Congress, as Congress first rejected TARP, then passed it by a narrow margin when Obama, then far in the lead of McCain in the Presidential race, endorsed it and actively campaigned for its passage. It was the first, but not the last, example of Obama promoting a Republican plan.

Sullivan essentially argues that the bank rescue was necessary, so stop whining about it and give Obama the credit he deserves. There are many problems with this theory, the first of which is that TARP, and the subsequent giveaways and guarantees given to banks by the Federal Reserve and overseen by Obama, put too much of a burden on taxpayers, too little on the bank shareholders, and placed almost no conditions on the banks in terms of how they used the federal hand-outs or how they compensated the managers of these failed banks. Normally, when a business fails in a capitalist economy, the shareholders take the losses. But what TARP did was shift losses for toxic investments in poorly collateralized debts (mostly mortgages) to taxpayers. At the same time the private equity market was paying 20 cents on the dollar for toxic assets, Obama’s advisor and later Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, was counseling Obama to agree to pay 100 cents on the dollar for the same junk, which he did. If you read Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’ book, “Freefall,” you will see that Obama did this passively and reflexively, without any serious consideration of alternatives. Not only did the federal government overpay and over-guarantee bank obligations, it imposed no conditions on the banks to loan money to Main Street.

The central economic problem, of course, was the freezing up of credit, which blocked investment and development; even if saving the biggest banks was required (as opposed to other options, such as nationalizing the largest banks or letting banks fail and establishing a federal lending institution), the fact that money was not distributed downward into the economy allowed the economy to continue to stagnate while the banks were awash in cash, which they used mainly to buy up small and mid-sized banks so today the big banks are even bigger and there are fewer community-based and mid-sized banks to compete with them. And, of course, the banks continued their excessive compensation practices unabated while most taxpayers saw their house values, pension plans and net worth fall 30-40%. Arianna Huffington said at the time that Obama had sacrificed 70% of his credibility with voters by standing with the banks, and not average people, and that seems about right to me. The Democrats historic shellacking in the November 2010 election confirms this assessment. Was that huge election defeat part of Obama’s “long game,” Mr. Sullivan?

Sullivan credits Obama with saving the auto industry, and I agree that credit is warranted. But Sullivan fails to note how differently auto workers were treated than bankers by Obama. When the Obama Administration agreed to invest in the auto companies, they did so on the condition that future worker wages and benefits would be substantially diminished, so what you now have in the auto industry is a two-tier wage/benefits scale, with older workers getting good wages and benefits and younger workers getting substantially less now and in their futures. No such wage or compensation limits were placed on bankers, despite the fact that the federal bank bailouts and guarantees were more than a hundred times bigger than the auto bailouts. If and when “long game” historians write the obituary of organized labor, the auto industry’s two-tier wage cram-down by Obama will merit a chapter.

Sullivan credits Obama with creating jobs with his $787 billion stimulus plan, but fails to note that $282 billion of this was tax cuts which no one had asked for and which had very little stimulus effect, as people used their tax rebates to pay off debt. That left only $500 billion for real stimulus---approximately 1/3 of what his economic advisors considered necessary to jolt the economy and bring it back to life. If you read Ron Suskind’s marvelous book, “Confidence Men,” which carefully examines the stimulus decision within the Obama White House, it becomes painfully obvious that the decision had little to do with economic projections, let alone what was needed economically---instead, the decision was driven entirely by politics, with Rahm Emanuel and Obama deciding that the stimulus had to be less than $1 trillion for cosmetic and political purposes. The fact that putting too little money into the economic stimulus might not create sufficient jobs to fix the economy and that Obama might be judged in the 2010 and 2012 elections by economic results, not political perceptions, seems to have escaped Mr. Sullivan. Or, perhaps it is part of Obama’s “long game” that Mr, Sullivan cherishes.

Sullivan cites some job creation statistics, but all his comparisons are to Bush’s presidency, which sets an extremely low bar for job creation. The truth is that Obama, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers badly miscalculated the problems of the economy, projecting that unemployment would top out at 8%, when, in fact, it rose to 10.2% and remains around 9% only because millions of workers have dropped out of the labor market due to discouragement. That is the main reason Obama’s re-election is in doubt, despite the Clown Act that is the Republican Presidential primaries.

Sullivan chides his conservative friends for criticizing Obamacare. He explains that it is a very conservative program, based entirely on Republican principles and ideas developed in conservative think tanks and endorsed by a long line of Republicans: “Obamacare…is based on the individual mandate, an idea pioneered by the archconservative Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and, of course, Mitt Romney, in the past. It does not have the public option, it gives a huge new client base to the drug and insurance companies; its health-insurance exchanges were also pioneered by the right.” In fact, Obamacare is “remarkably similar to Nixon’s 1974 proposal.”

This should put to rest any claim that Obamacare is a progressive healthcare reform; in fact, it brings 30 million involuntary customers and $500 billion per year of new revenues to the private health insurance industry, with no public healthcare competition and no meaningful cost controls---despite the fact that in 2008 Obama had campaigned against the individual mandate and for a public healthcare option (was this flip-flop part of the Obama “long game,” Mr, Sullivan?). Of course, claiming any benefits from this “reform” assumes that the individual mandate is not declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, but most legal analysts think there is at least a 50% chance the Court will strike it down as beyond the powers of the federal government under the Commerce Clause. If the individual mandate falls, Obamacare totally collapses, a fact Mr. Sullivan fails to include in his assessment of Obama’s “long game.”

Sullivan gives credit to Obama for tracking down Osama bin Laden, but fails to ask why a kill order was issued, when clearly the unarmed bin Laden could have been captured and brought back for trial. But Sullivan does not appear bothered by that or the summary executions, often of innocent people, caused by the expanded drone wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan which have fueled Islamic extremism in the most dangerous country on earth.

Sullivan credits Obama for leaving Iraq, despite the fact that the withdrawal was negotiated by President Bush, not Obama, despite the fact that the Obama Administration worked mightily to extend the occupation past the agreed departure date and despite the fact that the only reason the U.S. is finally withdrawing is that the Iraqi Parliament refused to continue to grant immunity to U.S. troops for crimes committed on Iraq soil. In a nutshell, despite running as an anti-Iraq War candidate, Obama surrounded himself with national security advisors who all had supported the invasion of Iraq, including his Secretaries of State and Defense, and his policies and performance in Iraq have not been different in any significant way from Bush/Cheney.

Sullivan also points out that Obama ignored “the war crimes of the recent past,” which Sullivan deplores.

Sullivan acknowledges that, “Not only did he [Obama] agree not to sunset the Bush tax cuts for his entire first term, he has aggressively lowered taxes on most Americans.” Obama’s decision to continue the Bush tax cuts for the rich was extremely unpopular; in fact, a December 3, 2010 CBS News poll showed that only 26% of voters believed tax cuts should be extended to people making more than $250,000 a year and these tax cuts for people who have done extremely well in a bad economy are projected to cost $800 billion. Surely, Sullivan argues, Obama deserves credit from conservatives for those big-ticket giveaways, especially to the rich; in fact, he argues, “You could easily make the case that Obama has been far more fiscally conservative than his predecessor….” But Sullivan fails to acknowledge the fiscal consequence of such fiscal conservatism and continued tax giveaways---a major reduction in federal tax revenues. As a consequence of these and other tax short-falls, Obama was the first Democratic President in American history to put on the table for negotiations with Republicans major reductions in Social Security benefits, Medicare and Medicaid---concessions sure to thrill and delight conservatives.

So, yes, Mr. Sullivan, you have convinced me. Obama has governed as a conservative. Progressives might want to take note.

Guy T. Saperstein is a past president of the Sierra Club Foundation; previously, he was one of the National Law Journal’s "100 Most Influential Lawyers in America."

Why Focus On Obama's Dumbest Critics?

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 03:45:00 +0000

Published on Wednesday, January 18, 2012 by The Atlantic

Dear Andrew Sullivan: Why Focus On Obama's Dumbest Critics?

A conversation-changing defense of the president exaggerates Obama's accomplishments and misses the point: his scandalous transgressions against rule of law

by Conor Friedersdorf

After reading Andrew Sullivan's Newsweek essay about President Obama, his critics, and his re-election bid, I implore him to ponder just one question. How would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following?

No, Obama isn't a radical Kenyan anti-colonialist. But he is a lawbreaker and an advocate of radical executive power. What precedent could be more radical than insisting that the executive is empowered to draw up a kill list of American citizens in secret, without telling anyone what names are on it, or the legal justification for it, or even that it exists? What if Newt Gingrich inherits that power? (Image credit: Reuters)

(1) Codify indefinite detention into law; (2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process; (3) proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens; (4) prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets; (5) reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible; (6) enter and prosecute such a war; (7) institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports; (8) oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots; (9) wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy; (10) invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits; (11) preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries; (12) attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed); (13) reauthorize the Patriot Act; (13) and select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis.

I submit that had Palin or Cheney or Rumsfeld or Rice or Jeb Bush or John Bolton or Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney proposed doing even half of those things in 2008, you'd have declared them unfit for the presidency and expressed alarm at the prospect of America doubling down on the excesses of the post-September 11 era. You'd have championed an alternative candidate who avowed that America doesn't have to choose between our values and our safety.

Yet President Obama has done all of the aforementioned things.

Pretend that you knew, circa 2008, that President Cheney or Palin or Rice or Rumsfeld or Giuliani would do all those things -- but that, on the bright side, they'd refrain from torturing anyone else, end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, sign a bank bailout, and pass a health-care bill that you regard as improving on the status quo starting in 2014. Would you vote for them on that basis?

I submit that you would not. And if they were elected, and four years later were running for re-election, would you focus on the stupidity of the least persuasive attacks on their tenure? Or would you laud their most incisive critics? I believe that you'd be among their most incisive critics.

Back to the present.

The Newsweek cover headline for Sullivan's piece is "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" It's entirely defensible to point out that many critiques of Obama are laughably disconnected from reality -- I've done that myself on many occasions -- so it's arguably a fair headline.

But the one I've chosen is fair too: "Why Focus on Obama's Dumbest Critics?"

No, Obama isn't a radical Kenyan anti-colonialist. But he is a lawbreaker and an advocate of radical executive power. What precedent could be more radical than insisting that the executive is empowered to draw up a kill list of American citizens in secret, without telling anyone what names are on it, or the legal justification for it, or even that it exists? What if Newt Gingrich inherits that power?

He may yet.

Over the years, Sullivan has confronted, as few others have, American transgressions abroad, including torture, detainee abuse, and various imperial ambitions. He's long drawn attention to civil-liberties violations at home too, as a solo blogger and as lead editor and writer of a blogazine. When I worked for Sullivan, he not only published but actively encouraged items I found that highlighted civil-liberties abuses by the Obama Administration, and since I parted ways with The Daily Dish, he and the Dish team have continued to air critiques of Obama on these questions.

But his Newsweek essay fits the pattern I've lamented of Obama apologists who tell a narrative of his administration that ignores some of these issues and minimizes the importance of others, as if they're a relatively unimportant matter to be set aside in a sentence or three before proceeding to the more important business of whether the president is being critiqued fairly by obtuse partisans.

Sullivan should reconsider this approach.

During President Bush's first term, Sullivan will recall the most unhinged attacks on him -- the comparisons to Hitler, the puppets burned in effigy, the comparisons to a chimp. There wasn't anything wrong with lamenting those attacks, just as there's nothing wrong with pointing out exaggerated and baseless attacks on Obama, which have spread through most of the Republican Party. But the priority put on rebutting the least persuasive left-wing critiques of Bush, and pre-election 2004 worrying about the flaws of the Democratic field, are part of what postponed the backlash against Bush's ruinous policies. The backlash should've been the priority all along.

The same is now true of Obama. Like President Bush, he is breaking the law, transgressing against civil liberties, and championing a radical view of executive power -- and he is invoking the War on Terror to get away with it. As much as it was in 2003 or 2007, it is vital in 2012 that there be a backlash against these post-9/11 excesses, that liberty-loving citizens push back so that these are anomalies that are reined in, rather than permanent features of a bipartisan consensus that can only end in a catastrophically abusive executive operating in an office stripped by successive presidents and their minions of both constitutional and prudential checks.

Beyond strenuously objecting to the focus of his piece and what it doesn't mention, and agreeing with some of Sullivan's points, I have important disagreements with others. "Where Bush talked tough and acted counter-productively, Obama has simply, quietly, relentlessly decimated our real enemies, while winning the broader propaganda war," Sullivan writes. "Since he took office, al Qaeda's popularity in the Muslim world has plummeted." But it's surely relevant that, according to surveys like this one from James Zogby in 2011, "After improving with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, U.S. favorable ratings across the Arab world have plummeted. In most countries they are lower than at the end of the Bush Administration, and lower than Iran's favorable ratings (except in Saudi Arabia)." And in the areas where Obama's drone strikes are killing innocent civilians, he is trading short-term terrorist deaths for the possibility that our policies will create more terrorists in the long run. It's a tradeoff some people consider prudent; but that's different from saying he is "winning the propaganda war." In fact, the predictable effect of some of his policies is to increase hatred of the U.S.

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

Why I’m Suing Barack Obama

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 03:24:00 +0000

Chris Hedges' Columns

Why I’m Suing Barack Obama

Posted on Jan 16, 2012

AP / Dusan Vranic

Detainees pray at the U.S. military detention facility known as Camp Bucca in Iraq in this 2009 photo.

By Chris Hedges

Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.

The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing. With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until “the end of hostilities.” It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.

To read Chris Hedges’ legal filing aimed at overturning a new law that would allow the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens deemed terrorism suspects, click here. To read the law itself, click here.

I spent many years in countries where the military had the power to arrest and detain citizens without charge. I have been in some of these jails. I have friends and colleagues who have “disappeared” into military gulags. I know the consequences of granting sweeping and unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation. And while my battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism.

Section 1031 of the bill defines a “covered person”—one subject to detention—as “a person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”

The bill, however, does not define the terms “substantially supported,” “directly supported” or “associated forces.”

I met regularly with leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. I used to visit Palestine Liberation Organization leaders, including Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad, in Tunis when they were branded international terrorists. I have spent time with the Revolutionary Guard in Iran and was in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey with fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. All these entities were or are labeled as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. What would this bill have meant if it had been in place when I and other Americans traveled in the 1980s with armed units of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas in El Salvador? What would it have meant for those of us who were with the southern insurgents during the civil war in Yemen or the rebels in the southern Sudan? I have had dinner more times than I can count with people whom this country brands as terrorists. But that does not make me one.

Once a group is deemed to be a terrorist organization, whether it is a Palestinian charity or an element of the Uighur independence movement, the military can under this bill pick up a U.S. citizen who supported charities associated with the group or unwittingly sent money or medical supplies to front groups. We have already seen the persecution and closure of Islamic charity organizations in the United States that supported the Palestinians. Now the members of these organizations can be treated like card-carrying “terrorists” and sent to Guantanamo.

But I suspect the real purpose of this bill is to thwart internal, domestic movements that threaten the corporate state. The definition of a terrorist is already so amorphous under the Patriot Act that there are probably a few million Americans who qualify to be investigated if not locked up. Consider the arcane criteria that can make you a suspect in our new military-corporate state. The Department of Justice considers you worth investigating if you are missing a few fingers, if you have weatherproof ammunition, if you own guns or if you have hoarded more than seven days of food in your house. Adding a few of the obstructionist tactics of the Occupy movement to this list would be a seamless process. On the whim of the military, a suspected “terrorist” who also happens to be a U.S. citizen can suffer extraordinary rendition—being kidnapped and then left to rot in one of our black sites “until the end of hostilities.” Since this is an endless war that will be a very long stay.

This demented “war on terror” is as undefined and vague as such a conflict is in any totalitarian state. Dissent is increasingly equated in this country with treason. Enemies supposedly lurk in every organization that does not chant the patriotic mantras provided to it by the state. And this bill feeds a mounting state paranoia. It expands our permanent war to every spot on the globe. It erases fundamental constitutional liberties. It means we can no longer use the word “democracy” to describe our political system.

The supine and gutless Democratic Party, which would have feigned outrage if George W. Bush had put this into law, appears willing, once again, to grant Obama a pass. But I won’t. What he has done is unforgivable, unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous. The threat and reach of al-Qaida—which I spent a year covering for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East—are marginal, despite the attacks of 9/11. The terrorist group poses no existential threat to the nation. It has been so disrupted and broken that it can barely function. Osama bin Laden was gunned down by commandos and his body dumped into the sea. Even the Pentagon says the organization is crippled. So why, a decade after the start of the so-called war on terror, do these draconian measures need to be implemented? Why do U.S. citizens now need to be specifically singled out for military detention and denial of due process when under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force the president can apparently find the legal cover to serve as judge, jury and executioner to assassinate U.S. citizens, as he did in the killing of the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen? Why is this bill necessary when the government routinely ignores our Fifth Amendment rights—“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”—as well as our First Amendment right of free speech? How much more power do they need to fight “terrorism”?

Fear is the psychological weapon of choice for totalitarian systems of power. Make the people afraid. Get them to surrender their rights in the name of national security. And then finish off the few who aren’t afraid enough. If this law is not revoked we will be no different from any sordid military dictatorship. Its implementation will be a huge leap forward for the corporate oligarchs who plan to continue to plunder the nation and use state and military security to cow the population into submission.

The oddest part of this legislation is that the FBI, the CIA, the director of national intelligence, the Pentagon and the attorney general didn’t support it. FBI Director Robert Mueller said he feared the bill would actually impede the bureau’s ability to investigate terrorism because it would be harder to win cooperation from suspects held by the military. “The possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to obtain cooperation from the persons in the past that we’ve been fairly successful in gaining,” he told Congress.

But it passed anyway. And I suspect it passed because the corporations, seeing the unrest in the streets, knowing that things are about to get much worse, worrying that the Occupy movement will expand, do not trust the police to protect them. They want to be able to call in the Army. And now they can.

Text of Hedges’ Legal Complaint

NDAA Official Text

Is Obama the Trojan Horse, A Psychopath, A Bad Boyfriend or all Three?

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:24:00 +0000

January 7, 2012 at 20:10:36

Is Obama the Trojan Horse, A Psychopath, A Bad Boyfriend or all Three?

By Julia Dalton (about the author)

I believe Barack Obama was put into office to do what no Republican could ever have gotten away with. Obama has extended the wars, created new wars, extended the Bush tax cuts for the rich, given additional bail out money to the banks, allowed the health insurance industry to write the healthcare bill, extended the Patriot Act and signed the NDAA.

Barack T-Shirt by self

Under his watch not one member of the Bush Administration has been held accountable for leading us into wars built on false evidence and lies; not one banker has been held accountable for the fraud and corruption that brought down the global economy. And the final nail in the coffin, Mr. Slim Shady signed the NDAA bill on New Year's Eve while most American's sipped champagne and sang Auld Lang Syne . The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) makes America the battlefield and allows indefinite detention of U.S. citizens suspected of "terrorist" leanings without due process.

But why be so negative you might ask? Here are a few things Obama did manage to do. He extended unemployment benefits because they're no jobs as his stimulus package was too small. He also managed to cut payroll taxes, which is a back door way to defund Social Security, He helped cover up the BP oil spill in the Gulf by allowing Coexit, a toxic disbursement not allowed in other countries, to break up the oil which then dropped to the bottom instead of just cleaning it up. In other words, allowing them to hide the body.

Obama hates truth tellers such as Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and whistleblowers like Bradley Manning who's been held in detention for almost two years for, according to Obama, exposing state secrets aka a horrendous war crime. That is if Manning is the alleged leaker who gave the "Collateral Murder" video to WikiLeaks showing 12 civilians murdered by American soldiers. What is the difference between the "Collateral Murder" war atrocity and the 1970 My Lai Massacre and the Court-Martial of Captain Ernest L. Medina? What is the difference between the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning? I mean isn't this evidence we're now living in a corporate/fascist/ military/police state?

Now look, I know they're still plenty of Obama supporters among us but I find it very difficult to understand why so many people still love, honor and support this guy. I voted for this guy too. I fell for his smooth talk, cool demeanor and wide-open smile. I've always been a sucker for tall dark and handsome but if he wasn't lying then he's lying now and I for one am mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.

I know it's hard to admit you made a mistake. I get it. You really believed this guy was "the one" and he is the one for the 1%: Wall Street, the too big to fail banks, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, big oil, big pharma, i.e. the corporate fascist state he's so gingerly locking into place.

We looked the other way when he said he'd put on comfy shoes and march with the unions and then when the unions had their bargaining rights withdrawn, Obama like the good corporate shill he is, remained silent. We made excuses for him when he remained silent as the police brutalized, beat, pepper sprayed and shot projectiles at peaceful demonstrators. Obama, unlike Robert Kennedy who had the balls to stand up to the racists down south and brought in the National Guard to protect those fighting for their civil rights, is a coward.

It could be battered spouse syndrome. I know there are people hospitalized with a broken jaw or collarbone and they won't press charges against their attackers. I can't explain why victims protect their abusers but they do and not only do they protect them, they go back to them over and over only to be beaten again and again.

Or maybe it's the Stockholm syndrome whereby victims fall in love with their captors. It happens. No need to beat yourself up over it.

To me Obama's like the bad boyfriend. He lies to you, cheats on you, forgets to call, but you just keep taking him back and making excuses. "Well, he can't help it. He has to stand up to those mean Republicans." Right?

And, therefore, I feel it's my duty to do an intervention. For those of you still deluding yourselves, who still can't face reality I suggest therapy or better yet maybe pick up a copy of "He's just Not That Into You."

I know it's hard. I told you I voted for him too. I sent him money. I believed him. But let's be honest this guy is a lying, cheating, warmongering, opportunist who serves the 1% so he might get reelected. He's in bed with Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobile, GE and whoever else will pay him for his services.

He does throw us the occasional bone like the recent appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And studies show even rats will keep going back to find the food pellet over and over again even if it only shows up very rarely. But there comes a time when one must admit they were wrong, cut their losses and move on.

Not to worry they're other fish in the sea. Jill Stein of the Green Party has a very sane 5-point program. I know she may seem boring as we all love our bad boys but really a psychopath who murders innocent civilians and destroys countries using drone attacks will eventually turn on you. Didn't you see "Sleeping With the Enemy?" Hello! And there's also Anderson of the Justice Party. So don't despair you'll find somebody new. Maybe not right away but you won't have to sleep alone forever.

The Obama brand is collapsing just as the Bush brand before him became so craven even the most deluded had to recognize the fraud that had been perpetrated upon the American people.

For those of you who still don't see it you're sort of like the Bushies who believed in the Iraq war and defended the honesty and integrity of their fearless leader no matter how many lies he told. I guess it may prove the old adage. Love really is blind.

www.recoveringarmybrat.wordpress.com

Jill Dalton is a recovering army brat/writer/performer/activist who has appeared in film and television as well as performing her solo plays in New York and around the country. Most recently she can be seen in and consulted for William Hurt on the (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Obama's "Mission Accomplished"

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 05:46:00 +0000

Published on Friday, December 16, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Obama's "Mission Accomplished"

Troops and Prisons Move, Wars and Torture Never Ends

by Ted Rall

Most Americans--68 percent--oppose the war against Iraq, according to a November 2011 CNN poll. So it's smart politics for President Obama to take credit for withdrawing U.S. troops.

As it often is, the Associated Press' coverage was slyly subversive: "This, in essence, is Obama's mission accomplished: Getting out of Iraq as promised under solid enough circumstances and making sure to remind voters that he did what he said."

Obama's 2008 campaign began by speaking out against the war in Iraq. (Aggression in Afghanistan, on the other hand, was not only desirable but ought to be expanded.) However, actions never matched his words. On vote after vote in the U.S. Senate Obama supported the war. Every time.

As president, Obama has claimed credit for a December 2011 withdrawal deadline negotiated by his predecessor George W. Bush--a timeline he wanted to protract. If the Iraqi government hadn't refused to extend immunity from prosecution to U.S. forces, this month's withdrawal would not have happened.

"Today I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over," Obama bragged reporters on October 24^th.

The UK Guardian noted: "But he had already announced this earlier this year, and the real significance today was in the failure of Obama, in spite of the cost to the U.S. in dollars and deaths, to persuade the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to allow one or more American bases to be kept in the country."

Obama's talk-no-walk approach to foreign policy is also on display on Guantánamo, the torture camp set up by the Bush Administration where thousands of Afghans and other Muslim men, including children, were imprisoned and tormented without evidence of wrongdoing. Only 171 prisoners remain there today, held under appalling conditions.

Yet the "war on terror" mentality remains in full force.

Obama ordered the construction and expansion of a new concentration camp at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan to house thousands of new and current inmates in the U.S. torture system. Now The New York Times has discovered that the Obama Administration has developed "the other Guantánamo, an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back roads" inside the United States. Hundreds of Muslim men have been imprisoned by means of the thinnest veneer of legality.

"An aggressive prosecution strategy, aimed at prevention as much as punishment, has sent away scores of people. They serve long sentences, often in restrictive, Muslim-majority units, under intensive monitoring by prison officers. Their world is spare," announced the paper.

Aware that "his" war against Afghanistan isn't much more popular among voters than the occupation of Iraq, Obama set a 2014 for withdrawal from the Central Asian state several years ago.

Dexter Filkins called it "the forever war": a post-9/11 syndrome that drives the United States to shoot and bomb the citizens of Muslim nations without end. You can't end a forever war. What if you had to sit down and get serious about taking care of the problems faced by regular, boring, American people?

And so Obama is having his ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, release trial balloons about staying past 2014…forever, in so many words.

Talking to reporters, Crocker said that the U.S. would stay longer if the Karzai regime--its handpicked puppet--asked them to. "They [the Afghans] would have to ask for it," he said. "I could certainly see us saying, 'Yeah, makes sense.'"

Vampires can't come inside unless they're invited.

The Iraq War, at least, seems to be coming to an end. According to the Pentagon, there will only be 150 U.S. troops in Iraq next year--those who guard the embassy in Baghdad.

Sort of.

Just shy of 10,000 "contractors"--the heavily-armed mercenaries who became known for randomly shooting civilians from attack helicopters--will remain in Iraq as "support personnel" for the State Department.

As they say, war is an addiction. If we wanted to, we could quit any time.

Any time. Really.

Ted Rall is the author of the new books "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," and "The Anti-American Manifesto" . His website is tedrall.com.

Obama's 2012 Reelection Strategy: Blame the Republicans

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:08:00 +0000

U.S. Politics

Obama's 2012 Reelection Strategy: Blame the Republicans

Dec 12, 2011 4:45 AM EST

Obama has begun laying out the argument that the GOP screwed up the economy and refused to help fix it, but he needs to explain why the roof fell in and why he’s the best man to repair the damage, says Peter Beinart.

Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast

There are two ways a president can run for reelection. The first is to boast about your success in your first term, and promise to build on it in the next. That’s what Dwight Eisenhower did in 1956; it’s what Ronald Reagan did in 1984; it’s what Bill Clinton did in 1996. For the strategy to work, Americans have to be relatively satisfied with their lot, and relatively optimistic about the future.

For Barack Obama today, with unemployment over 8 percent and three-quarters of Americans convinced that the country is going in the wrong direction, that’s not an option. So he’s relying on strategy number two: telling Americans that their unhappiness is not his fault. It’s the fault of his political opponents, opponents whose victory would doom any hopes for better days to come.

Obama began laying out that argument last week in Kansas, and continued it Sunday on 60 Minutes. The story goes like this: Once upon a time, in the middle of the 20^th century, the American economy was strong, and it benefited all Americans, up and down the class ladder. Then, at some point—perhaps in the 1970s or 1980s, perhaps during the George W. Bush years—things began to go wrong. “Long before the recession hit,” Obama declared in Kansas, “hard work stopped paying off for too many people. Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success.”

Then, the story continues, all hell broke loose: “For many years, credit cards and home equity loans papered over this harsh reality. But in 2008, the house of cards collapsed.” As president, Obama tried to remedy the situation, but was stymied by the very people who had created the disaster in the first place. As he told 60 Minutes, “I think the Republicans [in Congress] made a different calculation, which was, ‘You know what? We really screwed up the economy. Obama seems popular. Our best bet is to stand on the sidelines, because we think the economy’s gonna get worse, and at some point, just blame him.’” In other words, the same Republicans who destroyed the broad-based prosperity of the post-war years, and laid the foundations for the financial crisis, have refused to help fix either problem. And now they want the White House so they can ensure that the problems they created never, ever, get solved.

From Obama’s perspective, this narrative has its advantages. In the face of Republican claims that his policies have failed to revive the economy, Obama is turning the blame on the Republicans themselves. Instead of arguing that his policies have succeeded in keeping the recession from being worse—an argument that could easily sound defeatist—Obama is implicitly conceding that his economic recovery strategy has failed, but laying the responsibility at the feet of the party trying to unseat him. His narrative also lets him insist that the Republican nominee is not a fresh face with fresh ideas, but rather a reincarnation of the people who destroyed the economy in the first place.The fuzziness comes when Obama tries to explain how exactly the Republicans created this mess. In Kansas, he took aim at “you’re on your own” economics, which, as he noted, has been a critique progressives have been leveling since Theodore Roosevelt’s day. But while that may be a plausible summary of the policies that have been hurting middle-class Americans for decades now, it doesn’t really capture the policies that contributed to the financial crisis. The financial crisis wasn’t primarily about rampant individualism. If it had been, the Wall Street bankers who gambled away billions would have, as individuals, paid the price. Instead, after profiting individually when the market went up, they forced the rest of the country to save them when the market went down. The financial crisis was an example of what happens when the richest Americans are allowed to practice “you’re on your own” economics when it suits them but demand that everyone else bail them out when it doesn’t.

Obama doesn’t need to fully embrace Occupy Wall Street, but he needs to understand why the movement has caught on.

Successful presidential candidates do more than simply tell a story. They tell a story that captures the conditions and mood of the country at a particular moment in time. Obama doesn’t need to fully embrace Occupy Wall Street, but he needs to understand why the movement has caught on: Because many Americans believe Wall Street plays a central role in the warping of our economic and political system. A generic attack on Republican individualism isn’t good enough. Most Americans still don’t know why Barack Obama believes the roof fell in on America in 2008, and why he’s still more capable of repairing the damage in a second term than his political adversaries. Unless he answers those questions better over the next 11 months, he won’t get the chance.

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His next book, The Crisis of Zionism, will be published by Times Books in April 2012. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

Obama's Team of Zombies

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:41:00 +0000

Topic

Bill Clinton

Saturday, Feb 7, 2009 6:58 AM EST

Obama’s team of zombies

Even under the new president, Washington is the same one-party town it always has been -- controlled not by Democrats or Republicans, but by thieves.

By David Sirota

Topics:Bill Clinton, Iraq war, Barack Obama, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Robert Gates

Only weeks ago, the political world was buzzing about a “team of rivals.” America was told that finally, after years of yes men running the government, we were getting a president who would follow Abraham Lincoln’s lead, fill his administration with varying viewpoints, and glean empirically sound policy from the clash of ideas. Little did we know that “team of rivals” was what George Orwell calls “newspeak”: an empty slogan “claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.”

Obama’s national security team, for instance, includes not a single Iraq war opponent. The president has not only retained George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, but also 150 other Bush Pentagon appointees. The only “rivalry” is between those who back increasing the already bloated defense budget by an absurd amount and those who aim to boost it by a ludicrous amount.

Of course, that lockstep uniformity pales in comparison to the White House’s economic team — a squad of corporate lackeys disguised as public servants.

At the top is Lawrence Summers, the director of Obama’s National Economic Council. As Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary in the late 1990s, Summers worked with his deputy, Tim Geithner (now Obama’s treasury secretary), and Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel (now Obama’s chief of staff) to champion job-killing trade deals and deregulation that Obama Commerce Secretary Judd Gregg helped shepherd through Congress as a Republican senator. Now, this pinstriped band of brothers is proposing a “cash for trash” scheme that would force the public to guarantee the financial industry’s bad loans. It’s another ploy “to hand taxpayer dollars to the banks through a variety of complex mechanisms,” says economist Dean Baker — and noticeably absent is anything even resembling a “rival” voice inside the White House.

That’s not an oversight. From former federal officials like Robert Reich and Brooksley Born, to Nobel Prize-winning economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, to business leaders like Leo Hindery, there’s no shortage of qualified experts who have challenged market fundamentalism. But they have been barred from an administration focused on ideological purity.

In Hindery’s case, the blacklisting was explicit. Despite this venture capitalist establishing a well-respected think tank and serving as a top economic advisor to Obama’s campaign, the Politico reports that “Obama’s aides appear never to have taken his bid (for an administration post) seriously.” Why? Because he “set himself up in opposition” to Wall Street’s agenda.

The anecdote highlights how, regardless of election hoopla, Washington is the same one-party town it always has been — controlled not by Democrats or Republicans, but by Kleptocrats (i.e., thieves). Their ties to money make them the undead zombies in the slash-and-burn horror flick that is American politics: No matter how many times their discredited theologies are stabbed, torched and shot down by verifiable failure, their careers cannot be killed. Somehow, these political immortals are allowed to mindlessly lunge forward, never answering to rivals — even if that rival is the president himself.

Remember, while Obama said he wants to slash “billions of dollars in wasteful spending” at the Pentagon, his national security team is demanding a $40 billion increase in defense spending (evidently, the “ludicrous” faction got its way). Obama also said he wants to crack down on the financial industry, strengthen laws encouraging the government to purchase American goods, and transform trade policy. Yet, his economic team is not just promising to support more bank bailouts, but also to weaken “Buy America” statutes and make sure new legislation “doesn’t signal a change in our overall stance on trade,” according to the president’s spokesman.

Indeed, if an authentic “rivalry” was going to erupt, it would have been between Obama’s promises and his team of zombies. Unfortunately, the latter seems to have won before the competition even started.

: David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.More David Sirota

20 Ways the Obama Administration Has Intruded on Your Rights

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:17:00 +0000

AlterNet.org

AlterNet / By Bill Quigley

20 Ways the Obama Administration Has Intruded on Your Rights

Is there a fundamental difference between the Bush presidency and the Obama presidency in the area of domestic civil liberties?

November 30, 2011 |

The Obama administration has affirmed, continued and expanded almost all of the draconian domestic civil liberties intrusions pioneered under the Bush administration. Here are twenty examples of serious assaults on the domestic rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, the right to privacy, the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, and freedom of conscience that have occurred since the Obama administration has assumed power. Consider these and then decide if there is any fundamental difference between the Bush presidency and the Obama presidency in the area of domestic civil liberties.

Patriot Act

On May 27, 2011, President Obama, over widespread bipartisan objections, approved a Congressional four year extension of controversial parts of the Patriot Act that were set to expire. In March of 2010, Obama signed a similar extension of the Patriot Act for one year. These provisions allow the government, with permission from a special secret court, to seize records without the owner’s knowledge, conduct secret surveillance of suspicious people who have no known ties to terrorist groups and to obtain secret roving wiretaps on people.

Criminalization of Dissent and Militarization of the Police

Anyone who has gone to a peace or justice protest in recent years has seen it – local police have been turned into SWAT teams, and SWAT teams into heavily armored military. Officer Friendly or even Officer Unfriendly has given way to police uniformed like soldiers with SWAT shields, shin guards, heavy vests, military helmets, visors, and vastly increased firepower. Protest police sport ninja turtle-like outfits and are accompanied by helicopters, special tanks, and even sound blasting vehicles first used in Iraq. Wireless fingerprint scanners first used by troops in Iraq are now being utilized by local police departments to check motorists. Facial recognition software introduced in war zones is now being used in Arizona and other jurisdictions. Drones just like the ones used in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan are being used along the Mexican and Canadian borders. These activities continue to expand under the Obama administration.

Wiretaps

Wiretaps for oral, electronic or wire communications, approved by federal and state courts, are at an all-time high. Wiretaps in year 2010 were up 34% from 2009, according to the Administrative Office of the US Courts.

Criminalization of Speech

Muslims in the US have been targeted by the Obama Department of Justice for inflammatory things they said or published on the internet. First Amendment protection of freedom of speech, most recently stated in a 1969 Supreme Court decision, Brandenberg v Ohio, says the government cannot punish inflammatory speech, even if it advocates violence unless it is likely to incite or produce such action. A Pakistani resident legally living in the US was indicted by the DOJ in September 2011 for uploading a video on YouTube. The DOJ said the video was supportive of terrorists even though nothing on the video called for violence. In July 2011, the DOJ indicted a former Penn State student for going onto websites and suggesting targets and for providing a link to an explosives course already posted on the internet.

Domestic Government Spying on Muslim Communities

In activities that offend freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and several other laws, the NYPD and the CIA have partnered to conduct intelligence operations against Muslim communities in New York and elsewhere. The CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans, works with the police on “human mapping”, commonly known as racial and religious profiling to spy on the Muslim community. Under the Obama administration, the Associated Press reported in August 2011, informants known as “mosque crawlers,” monitor sermons, bookstores and cafes.

Top Secret America

In July 2010, the Washington Post released “Top Secret America,” a series of articles detailing the results of a two year investigation into the rapidly expanding world of homeland security, intelligence and counter-terrorism. It found 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence at about 10,000 locations across the US. Every single day, the National Security Agency intercepts and stores more than 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications. The FBI has a secret database named Guardian that contains reports of suspicious activities filed from federal, state and local law enforcement. According to the Washington Post Guardian contained 161,948 files as of December 2009. From that database there have been 103 full investigations and at least five arrests the FBI reported. The Obama administration has done nothing to cut back on the secrecy.

Other Domestic Spying

There are at least 72 fusion centers across the US which collect local domestic police information and merge it into multi-jurisdictional intelligence centers, according to recent report by the ACLU. These centers share information from federal, state and local law enforcement and some private companies to secretly spy on Americans. These all continue to grow and flourish under the Obama administration.

Abusive FBI Intelligence Operations

The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented thousands of violations of the law by FBI intelligence operations from 2001 to 2008 and estimate that there are over 4000 such violations each year. President Obama issued an executive order to strengthen the Intelligence Oversight Board, an agency which is supposed to make sure the FBI, the CIA and other spy agencies are following the law. No other changes have been noticed.

Wikileaks

The publication of US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks and then by main stream news outlets sparked condemnation by Obama administration officials who said the publication of accurate government documents was nothing less than an attack on the United States. The Attorney General announced a criminal investigation and promised “this is not saber rattling.” Government officials warned State Department employees not to download the publicly available documents. A State Department official and Columbia officials warned students that discussing Wikileaks or linking documents to social networking sites could jeopardize their chances of getting a government job, a position that lasted several days until reversed by other Columbia officials. At the time this was written, the Obama administration continued to try to find ways to prosecute the publishers of Wikileaks.

Censorship of Books by the CIA

In 2011, the CIA demanded extensive cuts from a memoir by former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan, in part because it made the agency look bad. Soufan’s book detailed the use of torture methods on captured prisoners and mistakes that led to 9-11. Similarly, a 2011 book on interrogation methods by former CIA agent Glenn Carle was subjected to extensive black outs. The CIA under the Obama administration continues its push for censorship.

Blocking Publication of Photos of U.S. Soldiers Abusing Prisoners

In May 2009, President Obama reversed his position of three weeks earlier and refused to release photos of US soldiers abusing prisoners. In April 2009, the US Department of Defense told a federal court that it would release the photos. The photos were part of nearly 200 criminal investigations into abuses by soldiers.

Technological Spying

The Bay Area Transit System, in August 2011, hearing of rumors to protest against fatal shootings by their police, shut down cell service in four stations. Western companies sell email surveillance software to repressive regimes in China, Libya and Syria to use against protestors and human rights activists. Surveillance cameras monitor residents in high crime areas, street corners and other governmental buildings. Police department computers ask for and receive daily lists from utility companies with addresses and names of every home address in their area. Computers in police cars scan every license plate of every car they drive by. The Obama administration has made no serious effort to cut back these new technologies of spying on citizens.

Use of “State Secrets” to Shield Government and Others from review

When the Bush government was caught hiring private planes from a Boeing subsidiary to transport people for torture to other countries, the Bush administration successfully asked the federal trial court to dismiss a case by detainees tortured because having a trial would disclose “state secrets” and threaten national security. When President Obama was elected, the state secrets defense was reaffirmed in arguments before a federal appeals court. It continues to be a mainstay of the Obama administration effort to cloak their actions and the actions of the Bush administration in secrecy.

In another case, it became clear in 2005 that the Bush FBI was avoiding the Fourth Amendment requirement to seek judicial warrants to get telephone and internet records by going directly to the phone companies and asking for the records. The government and the companies, among other methods of surveillance, set up secret rooms where phone and internet traffic could be monitored. In 2008, the government granted the companies amnesty for violating the privacy rights of their customers. Customers sued anyway. But the Obama administration successfully argued to the district court, among other defenses, that disclosure would expose state secrets and should be dismissed. The case is now on appeal.

Material Support

The Obama administration successfully asked the US Supreme Court not to apply the First Amendment and to allow the government to criminalize humanitarian aid and legal activities of people providing advice or support to foreign organizations which are listed on the government list as terrorist organizations. The material support law can now be read to penalize people who provide humanitarian aid or human rights advocacy. The Obama administration Solicitor General argued to the court “when you help Hezbollah build homes, you are also helping Hezbollah build bombs.” The Court agreed with the Obama argument that national security trumps free speech in these circumstances.

Chicago Anti-war Grand Jury Investigation

In September 2010, FBI agents raided the homes of seven peace activists in Chicago, Minneapolis and Grand Rapids seizing computers, cell phones, passports, and records. More than 20 anti-war activists were issued federal grand jury subpoenas and more were questioned across the country. Some of those targeted were members of local labor unions, others members of organizations like the Arab American Action Network, the Columbia Action Network, the Twin Cities Anti-War Campaign and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. Many were active internationally and visited resistance groups in Columbia and Palestine. Subpoenas directed people to bring anything related to trips to Columbia, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Israel or the Middle East. In 2011, the home of a Los Angeles activist was raided and he was questioned about his connections with the September 2010 activists. All of these investigations are directed by the Obama administration.

Punishing Whistleblowers

The Obama administration has prosecuted five whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all the other administrations in history put together. They charged a National Security Agency advisor with ten felonies under the Espionage Act for telling the press that government eavesdroppers were wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on misguided and failed projects. After their case collapsed, the government, which was chastised by the federal judge as engaging in unconscionable conduct allowed him to plead to a misdemeanor and walk. The administration has also prosecuted former members of the CIA, the State Department, and the FBI. They even tried to subpoena a journalist and one of the lawyers for the whistleblowers.

Bradley Manning

Army private Bradley Manning is accused of leaking thousands of government documents to Wikileaks. These documents expose untold numbers of lies by US government officials, wrongful killings of civilians, policies to ignore torture in Iraq, information about who is held at Guantanamo, cover ups of drone strikes and abuse of children and much more damaging information about US malfeasance. Though Daniel Ellsberg and other whistleblowers say Bradley is an American hero, the US government has jailed him and is threatening him with charges of espionage which may be punished by the death penalty. For months Manning was held in solitary confinement and forced by guards to sleep naked. When asked about how Manning was being held, President Obama personally defended the conditions of his confinement saying he had been assured they were appropriate and meeting our basic standards.

Solitary Confinement

At least 20,000 people are in solitary confinement in US jails and prisons, some estimate several times that many. Despite the fact that federal, state and local prisons and jails do not report actual numbers, academic research estimates tens of thousands are kept in cells for 23 to 24 hours a day in supermax units and prisons, in lockdown, in security housing units, in “the hole”, and in special management units or administrative segregation. Human Rights Watch reports that one-third to one-half of the prisoners in solitary are likely mentally ill. In May 2006, the UN Committee on Torture concluded that the United States should “review the regimen imposed on detainees in supermax prisons, in particular, the practice of prolonged isolation.” The Obama administration has taken no steps to cut back on the use of solitary confinement in federal, state or local jails and prisons.

Special Administrative Measures

Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) are extra harsh conditions of confinement imposed on prisoners (including pre-trial detainees) by the Attorney General. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons imposes restrictions such segregation and isolation from all other prisoners, and limitation or denial of contact with the outside world such as: no visitors except attorneys, no contact with news media, no use of phone, no correspondence, no contact with family, no communication with guards, 24 hour video surveillance and monitoring. The DOJ admitted in 2009 that several dozen prisoners, including several pre-trial detainees, mostly Muslims, were kept incommunicado under SAMS. If anything, the use of SAMS has increased under the Obama administration.

These twenty concrete examples document a sustained assault on domestic civil liberties in the United States under the Obama administration. Rhetoric aside, how different has Obama been from Bush in this area?

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. He is also a member of the legal collective of School of Americas Watch.

Obama: Assassinating the Rule of Law

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 04:50:00 +0000

In these times.
With liberty and justice for all...

Dressed in orange prisoner uniforms, students and other activists demonstrate against the Guantanamo Bay detention center on August 17, 2011, in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Views » November 25, 2011

Assassinating the Rule of Law

President Obama has carried on where former President George W. Bush left off.

BY Leonard C. Goodman

The lawyers declared that Obama may accept the word of the CIA, which is able to bury evidence so it can never be second-guessed.

Of all the promises made by candidate Barack Obama, it was his promise to end the lawlessness of the Bush years by closing Guantanamo, ending torture and restoring the United States’ reputation for justice that got me out in the streets and knocking on doors. And it is President Obama’s failure to keep these promises that makes it impossible for me to support him again.

President Bush’s foreign policy was roundly criticized by most of the world and by candidate Obama. Following 9/11, Bush’s foreign policy was simple: If my administration decides that you are a terrorist or a terrorist supporter, we reserve the right to invade and occupy your country, kill you or send you halfway around the world to a prison camp.

To implement this policy, administration lawyers wrote memos making it all legal for their masters. First, Bush’s lawyers declared that the one-sentence “Authorization for Use of Military Force” enacted by a frightened Congress one week after September 11, 2001, authorized undeclared wars and the mass incarceration of terror suspects.

But Bush’s team wanted still more power–they wanted legal authority to torture suspects. So Bush’s lawyers wrote memos stating that torture under the president’s command would not violate federal law (which proscribes “torture”), or the U.N. Convention Against Torture, as long as the torturer lacks the intent to cause “prolonged mental harm” or “death or organ failure.” One of these memos, authored by Office of Legal Councel attorney Jay Bybee, included a convenient section called “Interpretation to Avoid Constitutional Problems.”

Bush’s lawyers also wrote memos authorizing the incarceration of U.S. citizens suspected of terror links without charge or trial. But here the Supreme Court drew the line. In the case of U.S. citizen Yaser Hamdi, a terror-suspect born in Louisiana, raised in Saudi Arabia, captured in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo, government lawyers argued that it would be “constitutionally intolerable” to require the government to submit any evidence to support its claim that Hamdi is a terrorist. The Supreme Court disagreed. While the court permitted the government to strip Hamdi of most of his constitutional rights, it nevertheless ordered the government to give Hamdi a hearing at which it must present some minimal amount of evidence. But because the government had no evidence that Hamdi was a terrorist, it sent him back to Saudi Arabia–on the condition that he renounced his citizenship.

Obama has carried on where Bush left off. Realizing that captured American-born terror suspects must be given a hearing, Obama decided it would be more convenient to kill them. And he asked the lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel to write memos stating that killing Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Muslim cleric living in Yemen, would not violate the Constitution or federal statutes banning murder and assassinations. Once again, the lawyers set aside the most fundamental rules of legal ethics to serve their master.

The Obama administration has not released these assassination memos, but it did leak an outline of the memos’ legal reasoning to the New York Times. Their analysis is every bit as shoddy as that found in the torture memos. Obama’s lawyers concluded that the administration could legally kill al-Awlaki so long as the CIA says he is playing an operational role in al-Qaeda and that it was not feasible to capture him. The lawyers don’t actually analyze any of the evidence against al-Awlaki–they just declare that Obama may accept the word of the CIA, which is able to bury evidence so it can never be second-guessed.

Al-Awlaki was killed September 30 by a drone strike in Yemen. Presumably his executioner was a CIA agent rather than a soldier in uniform, but the Obama lawyers said that this would also be lawful. The drone strike also killed a second American named Samir Khan, who had produced a jihadist web magazine titled Inspire. Two weeks after killing al-Awlaki and Khan, the administration used its newfound powers to kill another American: al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. This strike also killed eight other human beings.

As of this writing, the administration has not come forward with any explanation for the killing of the American juvenile or his companions. Presumably, an unprincipled government lawyer is at work on the justification memo right now.

ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

Leonard Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense lawyer and Adjunct Professor of Law at DePaul University.

More information about Leonard C. Goodman

#OWS Cheers As Defiant Judge Stops Obama From Selling Immunity To Wall Street

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:50:00 +0000

November 28, 2011 at 23:22:46

#OWS Cheers As Defiant Judge Stops Obama From Selling Immunity To Wall Street

By Gustav Wynn (about the author)

Judge Rakoff Pummels Obama and Wall Street by GW

In an audacious move against Citigroup, the SEC, and the practice of "selling immunity", a Federal Judge in a NY District Court abruptly put the brakes on a settlement agreement proposed between the Obama Administration and another giant Wall Street firm accused of betting against their own investors.

Judge Jed Rakoff sent a message today to Wall Street and the Securities Exchange Commission that may send shockwaves through the financial world, refusing to approve a $285 million dollar payout to drop an investigation against Citigroup for defrauding investors without admitting any guilt.

Business Insider's haunting pullquote is a somber reminder of a core message of the Occupy movement. : "Judge Rakoff: Truth is Confined to Secretive, Fearful Whispers"

You might recall last year Goldman Sachs paid a $535 million dollar settlement "without admitting guilt" in a case brought by investors claiming fraud in a somewhat similar collateralized debt obligation scam. Goldman squirmed by, conceding they had provided 'incomplete information' but in this case, Citigroup had profited more blatantly at the expense of their clients.

With prosecutions for bank fraud today at a twenty year low, the Occupy movement has widely decried the questionable glad-handing between Wall Street titans and federal officials who are supposed to keep them honest. On his way out in 2008, President Bush issued a DOJ directive that encouraged the practice of "deferred prosecutions" which gave DOJ and SEC desk jockeys incredible latitude to craft immunity deals in secret in exchange for millions in fines and promises to be better.

But you might be disgusted to learn that the fines paid out to the government were at times equal to the payments made to legal firms, enriched by banks as grants of immunity prevented victimized investors from seeking further damages.

Rakoff's stand is consequential because any finding of guilt at last empowers the little-guy investor to bring civil suits.

As we contrast coverage of this ruling in the NY Times' Behind Rakoff's Rejection of Citigroup Settlement with Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal piece Citi Ruling Could Chill SEC, Street Legal Pacts, taxpaying voters might wonder what in God's name 'street legal' pacts means.

Indeed, this might be heralded as a rousing victory by #OWS protestors who in recent weeks have seen a number of anti-Wall Street actions proposed by leaders in business, politics and clergy.

#OccupyWallStreet was just weeks old when Bill Gates, America's richest citizen taxpayer stood up in front of the G20 in France calling for a 'Robin Hood Tax' that would impose as little as a one-tenth of a penny fee on stock or bond transactions. Gates explained massive volumes of speculative, volatile computerized trades were preventing more productive sectors of business from attracting sorely needed capital.

The call for this same transaction fee was echoed by the Pope as part of his updated canons against the "obscene" unethical accumulation of wealth, intentionally hoarded "at the expense of others".

In Congress, House and Senate bills recently proposed call for Constitutional amendments to reverse the Citizens United ruling that granted horribly lopsided new powers for the wealthy to crowd out political messaging during elections via unlimited, anonymous media spending.

Not surprisingly, the Senate bill, co-sponsored by Chuck Schumer, Jeff Merkeley, Tom Udall, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Dick Durbin has been "whitewashed" for weeks - given virtually no coverage by the major media networks who expect to reap exorbitant profits on upcoming US elections for selling prime-time ad spots.

The failure of the so-called Super-Committee is also supposed to have steeled populist candidates to run against Republicans whose crucial 'sticking point' was the claim that raising taxes on the rich would stifle job growth. They called revenue increases as "a job-killing tax hike on small business." But Brookings debunks this: "less than 2 percent of tax returns reporting small-business income are filed by taxpayers in the top two income brackets".

Putting up a first-of-it's-kind roadblock in the decades long slide towards rigged backroom settlements, Rakoff noted the proposed deal would have benefitted Citi and the SEC - but not the public interest.

Rakoff was critical not only of the "insufficient" amount offered as a pay-off, but the lack of transparency and especially the idea of shirking accountability for serious misconduct.

This closely parallels a line in the OWS proclamation of Sept. 27 which notes Wall Street firms "determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce."

The banks, who have till now witnessed a plethora of judges rubber-stamping anything approved by the SEC, will now have to work up a new deal with the SEC to resubmit to the court, negotiate a limited admission of guilt directly with Rakoff, or try to prove their innocence to a jury at trial.

It is not known whether Rakoff would accept any settlement that does not make Citi acknowledge guilt and give redress to individual investors.

The public recognition and debate of Rakoff's rejection here will be keenly observed by other judges, banks, the Obama Administration and particularly the understaffed SEC, exposed here for serially horsetrading harmful shortcuts.

Lastly, for those still claiming the #OWS movement lacks focus and cohesion, concentrating on "street level" issues like pitching tents or public urination instead of important socioeconomic issues, here is the full text of that declaration approved by the NYC General Assembly, which aired in full on cable TV by October 5:

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one's skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers' healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.

They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people's lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.

They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*

*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

(OpEdNews Contributing Editor since October 2006) Inner city schoolteacher from New York, mostly covering media manipulation. I put election/finance reform ahead of all issues but also advocate for fiscal conservatism, ethics in journalism and (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Why is Obama failing to protect the First Amendment? As Occupy attacks continue

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 02:45:00 +0000

November 24, 2011 at 08:21:46

Why is Obama failing to protect the First Amendment? As Occupy attacks continue

by Charlene Smith

President Barack Obama has remained silent about violent police actions to remove Occupy Wall Street protestors across the nation whether New York, Oakland, Chicago, Los Angeles or elsewhere. As president, Obama should be the primary defender of the Constitution, yet he remains silent as violent police actions against peaceful protestors take place.

A friend wrote from London after the 1am raid on Zuccotti Park in New York to evict Occupy Wall Street protestors: "Seems like the U.S. police are resorting to measures more reminiscent of a dictatorship. I hope Obama is happy!" How similar that early morning raid was to those in South Africa during the dark days of anti-apartheid repression when police would conduct raids during the early morning hours knowing that their victims would be groggy and fearful in the dark.

New York's Mayor Bloomberg, who claims he is a defender of the constitution's First Amendment, used the health excuse we heard from the Oakland mayor for her attacks on Occupy Wall Street protestors. If Mayor Bloomberg has suddenly developed an interest in the health of New York residents he may want to do something about the New York subway, which is a filthy, poorly air-conditioned sewer that millions of New Yorkers are forced to use daily, and sometimes skirt rats the size of cats.

Bloomberg said: "No right is absolute and with every right comes responsibilities. The First Amendment gives every New Yorker the right to speak out -- but it does not give anyone the right to sleep in a park or otherwise take it over to the exclusion of others -- nor does it permit anyone in our society to live outside the law. There is no ambiguity in the law here -- the First Amendment protects speech -- it does not protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space. Protestors have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments."

Bloomberg is wrong in his views morally and legally, the U.S. Constitution, Amendment One says:

" Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Originally, Wikipedia informs us, the First Amendment applied only to laws enacted by Congress . However, starting with Gitlow v. New York , 268 U.S. 652 (1925), the Supreme Court held that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applies the First Amendment to each state , including local government .

In United States v. Cruikshank , 92 U.S. 542 (1875), the Supreme Court held that "the right of the people peaceably to assemble for the purpose of petitioning Congress for a redress of grievances, or for anything else connected with the powers or duties of the National Government, is an attribute of national citizenship, and, as such, under protection of, and guaranteed by, the United States." For most of the 20th century tests to the First Amendment were about those espousing socialism or communism, most were defeated. There were challenges to burning draft papers during the Vietnam war, but the Supreme Court enshrined the right of protestors to do this, even the right to wear a jacket saying "Fuck the Draft" in the corridors of the Los Angeles County courthouse In Cohen v. California , 403 U.S. 15 (1971), this act was seen as legitimate comment and not punishable. Even burning the flag has consistently defied tests to view it as desecration.

The right to petition was an echo of the English Bill of Rights 1689 which, following the Seven Bishops case, stated it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.

It's worth noting that attacks on the First Amendment by Congress or local government have always preceded necessary changes in law -- the people have led, and local or federal government have always resisted. For example, in 1835 the House of Representatives adopted the Gag Rule , barring abolitionist petitions calling for an end to slavery. In 1865, 30 years later, slavery was abolished.

These freedoms are not ours alone; they are beloved in every nation that calls itself democratic.

"We don't want to make this about police and protesters," said Stephen Squibb, an organizer with Occupy Boston, "It is about jobs and other things. That has been our message for two months and we are going to keep saying it." The fat cats in New York, Washington and elsewhere have jobs, they have stretch limos that drive past the unemployed, they don't care today, but someday they will be forced to stop, get out and speak to those with banners on the sides of roads.

Charlene Smith is an award winning journalist and writer. Her authorized biography on Nelson Mandela, "Mandela" is a best seller and "Mandela in America" will be released in 2012. She is presently writing a book, "America the Overmedicated," on (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Combative Obama Renounces Progressives, Socialism and the Occupy Movement

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:27:00 +0000

Combative Obama Renounces Socialism

by Michael K. Smith / November 14th, 2011

Washington (CNN) — Seeking to recover his once-impressive standing in the polls, President Obama on Monday continued to position himself as the most responsible candidate in the 2012 presidential race.

Speaking to about 500 Mussolini Democrats and more than a dozen reporters at the tactically sophisticated Invertebrates For Obama think tank in Washington, Obama lashed out at “so-called progressives” clamoring for an expanded New Deal.

“Far too many Americans are looking for a hand-out, not a hand up,” he said, apparently targeting the growing Occupy Wall Street movement and its sympathizers. “The reason we must reject socialist economics is that it conflicts with our core political philosophy about the purpose of government.”

“We cannot preserve liberty for ourselves and our posterity if government fails to fulfill its obligation to sustain the free market system with trillions of dollars of bailout money for selfless Wall Street firms deemed ‘too big to fail.’” Therefore we must seek common ground with the GOP and renounce relics of the Communist era like Social Security and Medicare.” To sustained applause the president added, “I hereby do so.”

Obama called for a reform of his own health care law to include a “private option” that would allow HMOs to deport Americans without health insurance to Cuba, in hopes of bankrupting the free health care system available on the Communist-ruled island. “The cost of treating fifty million uninsured Americans should bring down the Castro brothers once and for all,” proclaimed Obama gleefully.

The president said he would grant federal aid to states expelling the medically needy to Cuba, adding that he would veto any attempt to have them treated in the U.S. “We’ve got to get beyond the idea that democratic government means doling out aid to irresponsible citizens who refuse to pull their own weight.” The president emphatically rejected appeals for government assistance from ordinary Americans. “As we all know from civics lessons the only legitimate function government has is performing those tasks that Americans cannot perform themselves – like carpet-bombing foreign nations and giving away the store to transnational corporations and international banks.”

The president went on to state that his reformed health care reform bill would prove itself a more efficient system than the universal care available through Medicare. “Obviously the market is more efficient than government,” said Obama. “I mean, how much equity is returned to stockholders under Medicare? Absolutely none! Whereas under HMOs investors are making a killing, if you’ll pardon the expression,” the president said. Asked about the much higher administrative costs under privatized care, Obama explained that those “don’t count,” because they are passed on to the public.

On issues like declaring the war in Iraq “over,” Obama portrayed himself as the candidate who goes the extra mile for peace. “George Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ in Iraq only once, while I am now working on my second final withdrawal from that liberated country,” the president said with obvious pride.

Obama also called for “staking out the middle ground” by privatizing Social Security, outsourcing the public schools to China, and handing over municipal water systems to corporate polluters in need of infusions of public capital in order to pay off fines imposed for systematically polluting the environment.

Michael K. Smith is the author of The Madness of King George from Common Courage Press. He co-blogs with Frank Scott at www.legalienate.blogspot.com. Read other articles by Michael.

This article was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Cuba, Obama, Satire, Socialism.

Obama Ignores Global Warming

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:52:00 +0000

Obama Ignores Global Warming

by Jack A. Smith / November 14th, 2011

The Obama Administration has largely remained passive about the critical imperative to reduce greenhouse gases to limit catastrophic global warming.

Washington continues to insist upon exercising world leadership in all key global endeavors, including the environment, but has failed dramatically in terms of climate change.

In fact, the White House is greatly expanding U.S. access to fossil fuel energy sources even as scientific and environmental organizations are intensifying their warnings about the need to immediately reduce greenhouse gas carbon emissions that are warming the planet.

Although the U.S. recently has ranked second to China in fossil fuel burning, it is by far the greatest polluter of the atmosphere in the last century and a half. Given the differences in population, America still uses three times more per capita than China.

White House policy is fixated on reducing dependence upon Middle Eastern oil and gas by greatly increasing the extraction of fossil fuels closer to home — mainly a vast increase in natural gas production from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) throughout the United States, expanded drilling for offshore oil, and importing dirty tar sands oil from Canada.

While increasing the development and use of global warming fuels, President Obama is advancing no significant program to replace high carbon emitting fossil fuels with renewable non-carbon solar and wind power.

The U.S. government is subsidizing some major “green” corporations, providing them with nearly no-risk guarantees for developing solar and wind, but this remains a relatively minor enterprise. Progress made so far is being stalled by the unexpected abundance (and thus cheaper price) of domestic natural gas secreted in shale, more secure oil reserves than anticipated, and the probability of reduced federal and state subsidies.

In a major statement from London November 9, the International Energy Agency (IEA) called for a “bold change of policy direction toward the use of low-carbon fuels within the next five years. If the major industrial states do not do so quickly, the world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system,” which is precisely what the Obama Administration is doing.

This recommendation seeks to prevent the rise in global temperatures in this century from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius, which is based upon keeping carbon emissions in the atmosphere below 450 parts per million (ppm). Anything above the target standards will cause irreparable damage to life on Earth.

According to many scientists and environmental groups these standards are inadequate, and that 350 ppm is the maximum amount that can be accommodated without causing a disaster. Atmospheric carbon, which occurs naturally, has reached dangerous levels due to industrialization. It has increased from 280 ppm at the beginning of the industrial era to approximately 392 ppm today, which is why it is said warming is well underway and its effects are being felt throughout the world.

Introducing the new report, IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven declared, “Growth, prosperity and rising population will inevitably push up energy needs over the coming decades…. Governments need to introduce stronger measures to drive investment in efficient and low-carbon technologies.”

The Environment News Service reports that the “agency’s warning comes at a critical time in international climate change negotiations, as governments prepare for the annual UN climate summit in Durban, South Africa, Nov. 28-Dec. 9. ‘If we do not have an international agreement whose effect is put in place by 2017, then the door will be closed forever,’ IEA chief economist Fatih Birol warned.’” (The main goal of the 17th climate summit is to agree on a resolution to replace the Kyoto Protocols, which will expire next year.)

The IEA describes itself as “an autonomous organization which works to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy for its 28 member countries and beyond.” Its members represent the world’s leading capitalist countries. Greenpeace and some other environmental groups are critical of the group’s approval of tar sands oil, lower carbon fuels and nuclear energy. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are not IEA members.

Reporting October 26 on America’s hunt for more carbon-emitting fuels, the New York Times quoted Daniel Lashof, director of the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, as declaring:

Giving new life to fossil fuels is a devil’s bargain, probably making solutions to climate change, and the development of renewable energy, even more difficult. Not only are you extending the fossil fuels era, but you are moving into fossil fuels that are dirtier and release more carbon pollution in the process of extracting and using them.

The Obama Administration has been leaning toward approving a $7 billion investment in a pipeline to transport Canadian tar sands oil to Texas but encountered a fusillade of activist opposition from the environmental movement in recent months. Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, has declared that “Tar sands oil is the dirtiest oil on Earth.” Dr. James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist, says that fully developing the tar sands in Canada would mean “essentially game over” for the climate.

Environmental movement criticisms have been compounded by objections from residents of Nebraska with concerns that pipeline spills might pollute the irreplaceable Ogallala aquifer, which occupies 10,000 square miles north to south from South Dakota to Texas and is a major source of water for the High Plains.

In August and September 1,200 anti-tar sands activists were arrested for offering civil disobedience in front of the White House. On November 6, 12,000 people surrounded the presidential mansion demanding an end to construction of the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas.

Four days later, President Obama announced that his final decision would now be postponed until months after next year’s elections, implying that the pipeline route might have to circumnavigate the immense aquifer.

Some environmental groups have interpreted Obama’s delay as a victory, suggesting that the project is being abandoned, but this view is too optimistic. The White House seeks abundant and stable supplies of oil for the next several decades from sources other than (or in addition to) the volatile Middle East, and tar sands oil from nearby friendly Canada is a most attractive alternative. Canadian oil has been entering the U.S. for many years in existing pipelines, and this is continuing. In all probability, some version of Keystone will greatly increase the supply.

Environmentally-concerned Americans have also launched campaigns against fracking, mainly because of the danger to water supplies inherent in an extraction method that requires the high pressure injection of deadly chemicals deep underground.

The Obama Administration is so intent upon vastly increasing natural gas production that it has been brushing objections aside, as have state governors — such as New York State’s Andrew Cuomo — who argue that what really matters are the additional jobs and tax revenue from massive fracking operations.

Advocates of natural gas argue that burning gas for electricity emits 30% less carbon dioxide than oil, and about 45% less than coal. But recent studies have shown that the process of fracking releases sufficient stores of methane into the atmosphere to compensate for any reduction in carbon from natural gas. Methane creates a greenhouse heat trap about 20 times greater than carbon dioxide. The gas industry maintains that the reduction in emissions from natural gas “outweighs” the detrimental effects of methane.

The New York Times article points out that:

Temporary or permanent fracking bans have been put in place in New York, New Jersey and Maryland. Other states are toughening drilling regulations, and the industry is responding with tighter wastewater management, while the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to complete a study on fracking next year. Nevertheless, gas shale drilling appears likely to continue at a fast pace in the most important gas-producing states.

The rest of the world is watching. Moratoriums have been put in place in parts of France, Germany, South Africa and the Canadian province of Quebec; Britain, Ukraine and other countries are moving cautiously forward. Still, the Energy Department projects that gas from shale could account for 14% of global supplies by 2030, with as many as 32 countries having production potential.

If world countries, led by the U.S., continue to disregard environmental objections to fracking, enhanced natural gas production combined with a major increase in oil production by the U.S., it will further subvert incentives toward ending use of fossil fuels. So far, shale gas extraction in the U.S. has increased 500% in the last five years, and that’s just the beginning.

Quoting Ivan Sandrea, president of the Energy Intelligence Group, the Times concluded its article with these words: “The fossil fuel age will be extended for decades. Unconventional oil and gas are at the beginning of a technological cycle that can last 60 years. They are really in their infancy.”

It has been five months since Democratic former Vice President Al Gore stuck his neck out in an article he wrote for Rolling Stone by publicly criticizing Democrat Obama for inaction on reducing America’s addiction to fossil fuels. So far, Obama has done nothing but live up to Gore’s critique:

“President Obama,” he declared, “has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change…. The president made concessions to oil and coal companies without asking for anything in return. He has also called for a massive expansion of oil drilling in the United States, apparently in an effort to defuse criticism from those who argue speciously that ‘drill, baby, drill’ [a conservative slogan] is the answer to our growing dependence on foreign oil.”

Washington’s refusal to take more than token steps to alleviate global warming would be relatively inconsequential were the U.S. a much smaller player on the world stage. But American governments have insisted for decades — based on economic strength and unparalleled military power — on being recognized as the world’s dominant and irreplaceable hegemonic state. Uncle Sam’s leadership is enormously influential, especially in the industrialized world, and America’s sluggish response toward global warming is a global disincentive toward taking speedy, responsible and united action.

U.S. financial institutions, corporations, and the wealthiest proportion of its population are “deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives,” economist Paul Krugman noted recently. These powerful elements are not prepared to accept the economic and political rearrangements required to transform America into an environmentally sound society of minimal carbon usage and many other ecological safeguards.

Such a transformation involves greater government investments, potentially smaller profits for many years, strategic alterations in the country’s disproportionate consumption of resources and products, and substantial changes beyond today’s gridlocked and essentially conservative political process.

In effect — given its disinclination to interfere in the workings of America’s neoliberal capitalist economy, even to protect all life on Earth — Washington’s continuing unipolar leadership is guiding the world toward irreversible climate change.

The U.S. may change its ways, but economic and political realities suggest an alteration of this magnitude is hardly on the foreseeable agenda. Climate change, however, is taking place now. At issue are two necessities: (1) strengthening of the environmental and social change movements in the U.S., and (2) a dramatic initiative by other powerful countries and regional blocs to take significant concerted global action to save the Earth regardless of Washington’s dithering.

Jack A. Smith is editor of the Activist Newsletter and a former editor of the Guardian (US) radical newsweekly. He may be reached at: jacdon@earthlink.net. Read other articles by Jack.

This article was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Canada, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Obama, Oil, Gas, Pipelines.

Obama to Betray the Middle Class, Seniors and the Poor

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 22:23:00 +0000

November 12, 2011 at 19:05:50

Super Collusion: Will Obama and Capitol Dems Betray the Middle Class, Seniors and the Poor?

By Richard (RJ) Eskow (about the author)

Two new reports suggest that the President and Congressional Democrats are about to betray everything Democrats once stood for. Under pressure from Barack Obama, Democrats on the "Super Committee" have sketched out an appalling "compromise" proposal that would almost certainly doom both their 2012 electoral chances and his own.

They'd have it coming. Their draft plan literally takes crutches away from poor people to protect tax breaks for the wealthy.

Unfortunately, middle class and impoverished Americans would suffer much more than they would. Career politicians can always look forward to comfortable sinecures from the wealthy interests who will benefit from their proposal. But the rest of us would once again be punished for the excesses of the rich, then left to the untender mercies of our new Republican leaders.

That, and not the fate of a President or a party, would be the real tragedy.

Pain Threshold

The President's actively pressuring Super Committee members from both parties to come up with a budget-slashing deal, according to a report in today's Washington Post. In addition, Obama is also urging them not to cancel the automatic $1.2 trillion in cuts that would be triggered under current law if they fail to make an agreement.

Another story, from the Huffington Post's Sam Stein, gave details on the Democrats' latest proposed "compromise." These two stories paint the picture of a President and a party who are willing to keep taxes low for the wealthy, and who would pay for it by proposing cuts that punish seniors, doctors and the poor.

Why? So they can say they "successfully governed" with extremist Republicans? To please international markets that, in reality, couldn't care less? So the President can campaign as "above left and right," as if differences in principle are a bad thing? Because they've been spiritually suffocated by the cultural norms of Washington's insular culture?

There are more questions than answers. Here's one more: With Democrats like this, who needs Republicans?

Low rates for the wealthy

Stein reports that the Democratic proposal would keep tax rates for the wealthiest Americans at the historically low Bush-cut rate of 35 percent to please the GOP. (That rate was 91 percent under Eisenhower, 50 percent at the start of Reagan's term, and 39 percent under Clinton.) The very wealthiest among us would continue to savor these unusually low tax rates to sweeten the fruits of ever-increasing wealth inequity.

The Dems would also accept the principle of "corporate tax reform to enhance competitiveness," which sounds a lot like a bid for lower tax rates for corporations. That would be offset by reductions in overly indulgent tax breaks, such as those that apply to corporate jets. But corporations would still retain expensive accountants and even more expensive lobbyists. I'll bet you a big chunk of your future Medicare benefits how that would turn out.

Oh, wait. These Democrats are already placing that bet. We'll get to that shortly.

Those are the breaks

The party's internal discussion document includes "triggers" that would take effect if Congress can't cut these deductions itself. One of those triggers is described as "a Feldstein-type limitation on itemized deductions for higher income taxpayers." They're referring to Martin S. Feldstein, the former Reagan advisor who wants to eliminate tax breaks for solar panels or electric cars. More significantly, Feldstein also wants to cap tax deductions at 2 percent of income -- for everyone.

Feldstein's op-ed in the New York Times explained that "Taxpayers with incomes of $25,000 to $50,000 would pay about $1,000 more in taxes; those with incomes of more than $500,000 might pay $40,000 more." In other words, the poor must pay part of the bill for the excesses of the rich.

To be sure, the Democratic proposal says it would target "higher income taxpayers," which is not Feldstein's plan. But who'll have better lobbyists when those tax exemptions are being defined -- the rich and the corporations, or the middle class? And we learned what conservatives mean by "higher income" when the Concord Coalition suggested that anyone earning over $20,000 per year should be targeted for Social Security means testing when they retire.

That's the kind of person the Dems would be dealing with in their detailed tax negotiations.

Here's one more thing these Democrats should understand and explain: Tax breaks for items like solar power or electric cars are a good thing. They serve the public interest, which is what public policy is supposed to do. They reduce our dependence on foreign oil, protect our environment, and improve public health. That saves us money, too.

The unkindest cuts of all

The Democratic proposal also includes cuts of $250 billion to providers under Medicare. Unless they're very well designed (they won't be), that will mean problems with access to doctors and adequacy of care.

There's also a cut of $100 billion in benefits for seniors. That would affect every single person in the United States who reaches retirement age, along with those who become disabled.

Depending on how those "Feldstein tax increases" were structured, many retired Americans could see their Medicare benefits reduced -- and lose a tax deduction for paying those costs out of their own pockets.

There would also be cuts to Medicaid's prevention and public health trust fund, one of the most "Democratic" aspects of last year's health care bill. So the proposal would subvert one of the provisions in the law they just passed. This cut doesn't just target the vulnerable. It's also economically foolish, since it cuts programs that can prevent costlier illnesses later on. And the Democrats would also cut $5 billion for Medicaid's "DME," which presumably means "durable medical equipment" like crutches and wheelchairs.

It looks like Democrats will literally propose taking wheelchairs away from poor people so we can keep tax rates low for the wealthy.

Tone Deaf

The White House issued a stunningly inappropriate statement about the Committee, saying the automatic "trigger" cuts the President's defending were "agreed to by both parties to ensure there was a meaningful enforcement mechanism to force a result from the Committee." The statement went on to say:

"Congress must not shirk its responsibilities. The American people deserve to have their leaders come together and make the tough choices necessary to live within our means, just as American families do every day in these tough economic times."

That's not merely an economically silly statement, although it's certainly that. The analogy between the U.S. budget and that of a family is fatuous (how many families print their own currency, which is the world's standard?), misleading (even families will invest in their future sometimes), and ruthless (few families would argue that a balanced budget is more important than a wheelchair or crutches for Grandma).

This statement revives the troubling question of whether this White House and this President have lost their moral compass along with their understanding of economics.

It's true that the President and Congress should not "shirk their responsibilities" -- to provide jobs for the unemployed and reduce the swelling ranks of the impoverished. It's devastating that the President chose to apply those words to a lopsided, premature, and misguided exercise in austerity economics instead.

The Bottom Line

There comes a time when ethical people have to take a stand, and this is one of them. Democrats must reject the premise behind these negotiations. If they don't, it raises serious questions about their party's values, future and social worth.

Today's deficits were caused by wild and reckless tax cuts for the wealthiest among us, along with the cost of two unnecessary wars and the consequences of bank greed and recklessness. It's a terrible mistake to ask the Americans who were wounded most by deficit-causing behavior to carry so much of the cost of fixing it. And to propose cuts to Medicare and Medicaid simply to preserve low tax rates for the wealthy is nothing less than a moral obscenity.

In these dark times, here are the President's and Congress's real and unshirkable responsibilities: To help 25 million un- or under-employed Americans get back on their feet. To stop Wall Street looters from making off with our nation's riches. To restore tax fairness and economic justice. To invest in our crumbling infrastructure. To create economic growth that will fix deficits in the long term. To ensure retirement security for all Americans. To ensure genuine access to health care for all. And to stem the growing tide of poverty.

Maybe these professional politicians are constitutionally hardwired to compromise and deal, and are therefore incapable of recognizing when doing so is to reinforce great wrongs. But if they can't see it, we'll have to show them -- with phone calls, emails and a very clear message about the consequences they'll face next November if they go through with this plan.

This proposal, along with the whole Super Committee process, is a dying gasp from the failed "bipartisan" economic consensus that brought us deregulation, the financial crisis, rampant banker criminality, and inequitable distribution of wealth. It must be discarded with all the other refuse of that cynical, tragical, failed experiment.

Politicians who don't understand that may wind up being discarded, too.

Richard (RJ) Eskow is a former executive with experience in health care, benefits, and risk management, finance, and information technology. Richard worked for AIG and other insurance, risk management, and financial organizations. He was also a (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

New Big Brother fears as CIA's 'vengeful librarian' team pore over the web and report to Obama every day

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 22:33:00 +0000

New Big Brother fears as CIA's 'vengeful librarian' team pore over the web and report to Obama every day

By Associated Press

Last updated at 5:23 PM on 4th November 2011

In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following up to five million tweets a day.

At the agency's Open Source Center in McLean, a team known affectionately as the 'vengeful librarians' also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms – anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.

From Arabic to Mandarin Chinese, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in native tongue.

Keeping track: The CIA team follow up to five million tweets a day around the world to gauge what is going on in different regions

They cross-reference it with the local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation.

From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.

Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming - they just didn't know exactly when revolution might hit, said the center's director, Doug Naquin.

The center already had 'predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime,' he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press at the center.

CIA officials said it was the first such visit by a reporter the agency has ever granted.

The CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, with its first priority to focus on counterterrorism and counterproliferation.

They saw it coming: The CIA's cyber snoopers knew a revolution was about explode in Egypt, but they weren't sure of exactly when

But its several hundred analysts – the actual number is classified – track a broad range, from Chinese internet access to the mood on the street in Pakistan.

While most are based in Virginia, the analysts also are scattered throughout U.S. embassies worldwide to get a step closer to the pulse of their subjects.

The most successful analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who 'knows how to find stuff other people don't know exists.'

Those with a masters' degree in library science and multiple languages, especially those who grew up speaking another language, 'make a powerful open source officer,' Naquin said.

More...

The center had started focusing on social media after watching the Twitter-sphere rock the Iranian regime during the Green Revolution of 2009, when thousands protested the results of the elections that put Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in power.

'Farsi was the third largest presence in social media blogs at the time on the Web,' Naquin said.

The center's analysis ends up in President Barack Obama's daily intelligence briefing in one form or another, almost every day.

After bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May, the CIA followed Twitter to give the White House a snapshot of world public opinion.

Since tweets can't necessarily be pegged to a geographic location, the analysts broke down reaction by languages.

The result: The majority of Urdu tweets, the language of Pakistan, and Chinese tweets, were negative.

China is a close ally of Pakistan's. Pakistani officials protested the raid as an affront to their nation's sovereignty, a sore point that continues to complicate U.S.-Pakistani relations.

Hacker heroine: CIA's best analysts are said to be like the fictional hacker, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, depicted here by Rooney Mara in the new movie of the same name

When the president gave his speech addressing Mideast issues a few weeks after the raid, the tweet response over the next 24 hours came in negative from Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, the Persian Gulf and Israel, too, with speakers of Arabic and Turkic tweets charging that Obama favoured Israel, and Hebrew tweets denouncing the speech as pro-Arab.

In the next few days, major news media came to the same conclusion, as did analysis by the covert side of U.S. intelligence based on intercepts and human intelligence gathered in the region.

The center is also in the process of comparing its social media results with the track record of polling organizations, trying to see which produces more accurate results, Naquin said.

'We do what we can to caveat that we may be getting an overrepresentation of the urban elite,' said Naquin, acknowledging that only a small slice of the population in many areas they are monitoring has access to computers and internet.

But he points out that access to social media sites via cellphones is growing in areas like Africa, meaning a 'wider portion of the population than you might expect is sounding off and holding forth than it might appear if you count the internet hookups in a given country.'

Sites like Facebook and Twitter also have become a key resource for following a fast-moving crisis such as the riots that raged across Bangkok in April and May of last year, the center's deputy director said.

The Associated Press agreed not to identify him because he sometimes still works undercover in foreign countries.

One step ahead: The CIA's online team worked to protect U.S. diplomats during the anti-government demonstrations in Bangkok last year

As director, Naquin is identified publicly by the agency although the location of the center is kept secret to deter attacks, whether physical or electronic.

The deputy director was one of a skeleton crew of 20 U.S. government employees who kept the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok running throughout the rioting as protesters surged through the streets, swarming the embassy neighbourhood and trapping U.S. diplomats and Thais alike in their homes.

The army moved in, and traditional media reporting slowed to a trickle as local reporters were either trapped or cowed by government forces.

'But within an hour, it was all surging out on Twitter and Facebook,' the deputy director said.

The CIA homed in on 12 to 15 users who tweeted situation reports and cellphone photos of demonstrations.

The CIA staff cross-referenced the tweeters with the limited news reports to figure out who among them was providing reliable information.

Tweeters also policed themselves, pointing out when someone else had filed an inaccurate account.

'That helped us narrow down to those dozen we could count on,' he said.

Ultimately, some two-thirds of the reports coming out of the embassy being sent back to all branches of government in Washington came from the CIA's open source analysis throughout the crisis.

President Everything is Nowhere Man to Everybody

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:40:00 +0000

November 1, 2011 at 12:13:59

President Everything To Nearly Everybody - The Hero With 1000 Faces

By Robert S. Becker (about the author)

Flexibility, the Obama Credo by crooksandliars.com

Scene: The Oval Office

Time: Daily briefing with senior staff

Speaker : The President, perplexed, pacing, nodding

Let's talk politics today and re-election, no holds barred. I arrive here every morning bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, flush with my perpetual audacity of hope, but lately my dander is up. Maybe no one could preside over this warring country. But we hover at 40% approval -- with our wave of legislative triumphs second in modern times to LBJ -- and under greater duress? Who'd predict only a year ago our re-election would be in doubt -- especially against this gang of has-beens, misfits, clowns, losers and wannabes? If I didn't have my formidable self-esteem, I'd feel insulted [smiles, boyishly].

Look, I appreciate how staff plays to every audience, Tea Party aside -- with a scattergun as wide as anything since Reagan. That's what made the Gipper impressive, capturing men and women, old and young, the right, the center, and blue collar Democrats. Chockablock with anti-government fanatics Reagan never knew, we must firmly stay the course we set from Day One -- talk Democratic, rule Republican.

Talk about a tightrope presidency, staking out the center yet besieged by extremes. When will grumbling leftwingers get why my being against the "dumb" Iraq war meant being gungho in Afghanistan? Push-pull is the key, encouraging whatever voter projections suit our Rorschach regime. Don't critics appreciate our finesse, taking multiple sides on major issues while deflecting attack for flip-flopping? Eat your heart out, Mitt.

Yet we announce the Holy Grail -- withdrawal of U.S. troops from that interminable Iraqi quagmire -- and it barely ripples our positives. Isn't successful withdrawal from a dumb war a win, at least politically? Our balancing act works -- delivering a pro-peace, anti-war credo while executing a pro-peace, pro-war agenda. Likewise, we promote strong government stimulus, like a good Democrat, while assailing big deficits, a Republican talking point. Who else calls for taxing millionaires plus promises tax relief -- or pitches a modest jobs program knowing the House will never pass it? Finesse is having it both ways without getting stung -- or saying you're sorry.

Being For It -- and Against It

As Clinton proved twice, and we once, ideological fixations don't win national elections. Our stay here depends on regaining centrists -- and that means pillaging Republicans for knee-jerk, out-of-touch orthodoxy. Not a hard task -- after all, their notion of political debate is which absurd flat tax they like best; or how high the wall with Mexico should be; or what terrifying yet non-threatening country we must bomb next. Our core principles are unchanged: we stay devoutly non-ideological, in short seeming everything to everybody. Here, friends, is our working Obama credo -- we're not red states, nor blues states but only states that could go Democratic [smiles].

Is it a mystery why we campaigned sharply against Bush rights violations, but in office had to match, even outdo him? Talk left, go right, and never look back. Doesn't the left appreciate that knocking off a few bad guys shows how tough we are? And terminating our own untried citizens, like in a western film shootout, shows we're as tough as Cheney. Anything but looking "soft on crime," like Kerry or Dukakis, or in today jargon, "soft on terrorists." What excites Americans are clear war cries against a looming enemy, not espionage or subterranean police work in alleys. Why, we're even tough enough to take on liberal sacred cows -- one week defending Social Security and Medicare, the next week agreeing to reforms to save the country from budget Armageddon.

Item: need to countermand the "Obama campaign betrayals" mantra, justifying our compromises as positive, American pragmatism serving the majority. Romney shows it's better to be maligned as a socialist -- easy to disprove that -- than branded an unprincipled flip-flopper -- impossible to disprove. Perry, too, cornered himself, endorsing a dreadful immigration stance that outrages the far right and moderate Hispanics. Apparently, these guys never studied my favorite mythological figure, the two-headed Janus who looks in multiple directions without blinking.

Item: need to get more credit for real overseas gains. Dramatic wins -- like shooting down bin Laden, decimating terrorists with drones, and especially dethroning hated dictators -- must be translated into homefield political leverage. You'd think 9/11 would have convinced voters the USA is not the whole world. Still work here to be done. Fortunately, we're running out of potential invasion sites so let's make the most of the cards we've been dealt.

Back-door Decoy Play

Item: need to offset nonsense we're "unfriendly to business." Right, with government loans, contracts, credits, subsidies, war spending and research grants? Any more corporate-friendly, and I'd have to be listed on a dozen boards of directors [another big smile]. One positive to the OWS is we can stop badgering banks, oil companies, and rich people as the enemy. Why risk our capital when protesters make the same point? We state we "fully understand" public anger without risk of subsequent embarrassment. Good timing: the perfect backdoor decoy play.

Item: need environmental wins before the election. Luckily, we're holding our own, despite letting BP run its own Gulf clean-up, adding new roads to log public lands, lowering EPA pollution measures, while approving new offshore permits plus the Canada-Oklahoma pipe line. With Republicans taking the unfeeling, predatory Robber Barons gagging on regulations, all we need are a few splashy headlines next year. Maybe a new national park, or national forest, and more alternative energy programs to shore up our anti-global warming creds. Environmentalists cheer even when only handed crumbs.

Finally, we must prepare for a curious problem -- that this presidency could be tarnished, made ordinary, by debating the likes of Herman Cain or Rick Perry. Remember how VP Biden evoked sympathy for Palin, flush with winking, smirking, and dismissing questions. It's challenging for knowledgeable officials to debate know-nothing amateurs without appearing condescending, so let's work up strategies here. We all know none of us here suffer fools lightly, unless they're in the cabinet already [smiles]. But with luck and enough campaign cash -- plus as competition either a buffoon or a Romney jammed into ideological corners -- I still like our chances.

Educated at Rutgers College (BA) and UC Berkeley (Ph.D, English) Becker left university teaching (Northwestern, U. Chicago) for business, founding and heading SOTA Industries, high end audio company from '80 to '92. From '92-02 he did marketing (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Obama Admin Seeks Permission To Lie In Response To Freedom Of Information Requests - Even To The Courts

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 03:59:00 +0000

October 25, 2011 at 15:31:46

Obama Admin Seeks Permission To Lie In Response To Freedom Of Information Requests - Even To The Courts

By Jerry Policoff (about the author)

One of the President Obama's first promises after becoming President of the United States was a commitment to usher in a new era of unprecedented government transparency . Instead the Obama administration has exhibited what may be an unprecedented obsession with government secrecy including blocking numerous law suits by invoking the doctrine of "State Secrets." The administration has even come up with an interpretation of the Patriot Act which many in Congress who have seen it claim is overly broad and bestows more power on the Executive Branch than was intended by Congress when they passed it.

Unfortunately those in Congress who have seen this document are not permitted to divulge its content, and we, the public, cannot see it because the administration has chosen to classify it as a "State Secret." In other words, you might be doing something that the Obama Administration believes violates the Patriot Act, but you won't know it until they indict you for breaking a law you did not know existed (I might be breaking it just by penning and publishing this article).

Now the Obama/Holder Justice Department is attempting to re-write the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), empowering or even compelling government agencies to deny the very existence of records they know to exist if they believe they are legitimately exempted from disclosure. Of course they are most likely the sole arbiter of whether they are indeed exempt from disclosure. In effect the Obama/Holder Justice Department wants to be free to legally lie about the existence of records in response to FOIA requests. Apparently they want to avoid the embarrassment and inconvenience of being officially rebuked by the courts for doing exactly that (lying to a Federal judge), as occurred earlier this year when, in a strongly worded opinion, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney wrote that the "Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court." The solution is simple: re-write the law so the government, in many circumstances, can affirmatively mislead the court.

Despite substantial opposition by such groups as the ACLU, The National Press Club, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, OpentheGovernment.org., Judicial Watch, et al to this radical re-write of the FOIA Law , this controversial effort by the Obama Administration to evade the very transparency it so passionately promised to deliver has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media which is supposed to the guardian of the people's right to know.

Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or neither, this move by the Obama administration should trouble you deeply. Is this change we can believe in???

Below are snippets of reports on this controversy, none of them from a mainstream media source. That was not my intent. I just could not find any. I learned about it just this morning in an e-mail from the National Law Journal:

National Press Club Urges Administration to Reconsider Draft Rule on Freedom of Information

"Under the new Department of Justice proposal, in replying to a request for information under the freedom-of-information law, if the information is allowed to be withheld under certain statutory exceptions, then federal officials "will respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist"--even if that is not the case.

"No rule or law should allow, let alone require, the government to mislead the press or the public about anything," said Mark Hamrick , a broadcast journalist with the Associated Press who is the 2011 president of the National Press Club. "If enacted, it appears that this proposed rule would offend the precepts that informed the Freedom of Information Act, and it would tarnish the government's credibility.

"What's more, the change seems unnecessary," he said. "If agencies are exercising legally allowable exceptions to the law and withholding certain records, they can just continue to do as they do today: neither confirm nor deny the information's existence.""

Justice Dept. proposes lying, hiding existence of records under new FOIA rule

"The Justice Department has proposed the change as part of a large revision of FOIA rules for federal agencies. Specifically, the rule would direct government agencies who are denying a request under an established FOIA exemption to "respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist," rather than citing the relevant exemption.

The proposed rule has alarmed government transparency advocates across the political spectrum, who've called it "Orwellian" and say it will "twist" public access to government.

In a public comment regarding the rule change, the ACLU, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org, said the move "will dramatically undermine government integrity by allowing a law designed to provide public access to government information to be twisted to permit federal law enforcement agencies to actively lie to the American people."

"Conservative government watchdog Judicial Watch has also lambasted the proposed rules change

"Upon taking office, President Obama released a memorandum declaring his administration was "committed to operating with an unprecedented level of openness. Specifically, he pledged to bolster the strength of the FOIA act, calling it "the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open government."

Government Could Hide Existence of Records under FOIA Rule Proposal

"The ACLU, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and OpenTheGovernment.org said the move would "dramatically undermine government integrity by allowing a law designed to provide public access to government to be twisted.

"Open government groups also contend that the proposed rule could undermine judicial proceedings.

In a recent case brought by the ACLU of Southern California, the FBI denied the existence of documents. But the court later discovered that the documents did exist. In an amended order , U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney wrote that the "Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court."

DOJ's draft FOIA rule was first published in March , but DOJ re-opened comment submissions in September at the request of open-government groups. The new comment period ended October 19"

redacted documents flickr image By wnjr

I have been an advertising executive most of my career with a long-time interest in progressive politics and journalism. I am now running as the Democartic candidate for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives on PA-41 where one of my objectives (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors

Afghan and Iraq Wars Will Remain As Endless As Obama's Lies

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 22:17:00 +0000

Afghan War Remains Endless While Obama’s Iraq Plan Fails

by Jack A. Smith / October 25th, 2011

The 10th anniversary of Washington’s invasion, occupation and seemingly endless war in Afghanistan was observed October 7, but despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to terminate the U.S. “combat mission” by the end of 2014, American military involvement will continue many years longer.

The Afghan war is expanding even further, not only with increasing drone attacks in neighboring Pakistani territory but because of U.S. threats to take far greater unilateral military action within Pakistan unless the Islamabad government roots out “extremists” and cracks down harder on cross-border fighters.

Washington’s tone was so threatening that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to assure the Pakistani press October 21 that the U.S. did not plan a ground offensive against Pakistan. The next day, Afghan President Hamid Karzai shocked Washington by declaring “God forbid, If ever there is a war between Pakistan and America, Afghanistan will side with Pakistan…. If Pakistan is attacked and if the people of Pakistan needs Afghanistan’s help, Afghanistan will be there with you.”

At the same time, Washington has just suffered a spectacular setback in Iraq, where the Obama Administration has been applying extraordinary pressure on the Baghdad government for over a year to permit many thousands of U.S. troops to remain indefinitely after all American forces are supposed to withdraw at the end of this year.

President Obama received the Iraqi government’s rejection from Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki October 21, and promptly issued a public statement intended to completely conceal the fact that a long-sought U.S. goal has just been obliterated, causing considerable disruption to U.S. plans. Obama made a virtue of necessity by stressing that “Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.”

This article will first discuss the situation in Afghanistan after 10 years, then take up the Iraq question and what the U.S. may do to compensate for a humiliating and disruptive rebuff.

The United States is well aware it will never win a decisive victory in Afghanistan. At this point, the Obama Administration is anxious to convert the military stalemate into a form of permanent truce, if only the Taliban were willing to accept what amounts to a power sharing deal that would allow Washington to claim the semblance of success after a decade of war.

In addition, President Obama seeks to retain a large post-”withdrawal” military presence throughout the country mainly for these reasons:

• To protect its client regime in Kabul led by Karzai, as well as Washington’s other political and commercial interests in the country, and to maintain a menacing military presence on Iran’s eastern border, especially if U.S. troops cannot now remain in Iraq.

• To retain territory in Central Asia for U.S. and NATO military forces positioned close to what Washington perceives to be its two main (though never publicly identified) enemies — China and Russia — at a time when the American government is increasing its political pressure on both countries. Obama is intent upon transforming NATO from a regional into a global adjunct to Washington’s quest for retaining and extending world hegemony. NATO’s recent victory in Libya is a big advance for U.S. ambitions in Africa, even if the bulk of commercial spoils go to France and England. A permanent NATO presence in Central Asia is a logical next step. In essence, Washington’s geopolitical focus is expanding from the Middle East to Central Asia and Africa in the quest for resources, military expansion and unassailable hegemony, especially from the political and economic challenge of rising nations of the global south, led China.

There has been an element of public deception about withdrawing U.S. “combat troops” from Iraq and Afghanistan dating from the first Obama election campaign in 2007-8. Combat troops belong to combat brigades. In a variant of bait-and-switch trickery, the White House reported that all combat brigades departed Iraq in August 2010. Technically this is true, because those that did not depart were simply renamed “advise and assist brigades.” According to a 2009 Army field manual such brigades are entirely capable, “if necessary,” of shifting from “security force assistance” back to combat duties.

In Afghanistan, after the theoretical pull-out date, it is probable that many ”advise and assist brigades” will remain along with a large complement of elite Joint Special Operations Forces strike teams (SEALs, Green Berets, etc.) and other officially “non-combat” units — from the CIA, drone operators, fighter pilots, government security employees plus “contractor security” personnel, including mercenaries. Thousands of other “non-combat” American soldiers will remain to train the Afghan army.

According to an October 8 Associated Press dispatch, “Senior U.S. officials have spoken of keeping a mix of 10,000 such [special operations-type] forces in Afghanistan, and drawing down to between 20,000 and 30,000 conventional forces to provide logistics and support. But at this point, the figures are as fuzzy as the future strategy.”

Estimates of how long the Pentagon will remain in Afghanistan range from 2017 to 2024 to “indefinitely.”

Obama marked the 10th anniversary with a public statement alleging that “Thanks to the extraordinary service of these [military] Americans, our citizens are safer and our nation is more secure”— the most recent of the continuous praise of war-fighters and the conduct of these wars of choice from the White House since the 2001 bombing, invasion and occupation.

Just two days earlier a surprising Pew Social Trend poll of post-9/11 veterans was made public casting doubt about such a characterization. Half the vets said the Afghanistan war wasn’t worth fighting in terms of benefits and costs to the U.S. Only 44% thought the Iraq war was worth fighting. One-third opined that both wars were not worth waging. Opposition to the wars has been higher among the U.S. civilian population. But it’s unusual in a non-conscript army for its veterans to emerge with such views about the wars they volunteered to fight.

The U.S. and its NATO allies issued an unusually optimistic assessment of the Afghan war on October 15, but it immediately drew widespread skepticism. According to the New York Times the next day, “Despite a sharp increase in assassinations and a continuing flood of civilian casualties, NATO officials said that they had reversed the momentum of the Taliban insurgency as enemy attacks were falling for the first time in years…. [This verdict] runs counter to dimmer appraisals from some Afghan officials and other international agencies, including the United Nations. With the United States preparing to withdraw 10,000 troops by the end of this year and 23,000 more by next October, it raises questions about whether NATO’s claims of success can be sustained.”

Less than two weeks earlier German Gen. Harald Kujat, who planned his country’s military support mission in Afghanistan, declared that “the mission fulfilled the political aim of showing solidarity with the United States. But if you measure progress against the goal of stabilizing a country and a region, then the mission has failed.”

According to Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is a critically important “long term commitment” and “we’re going to be there longer than 2014.” He made the disclosure to the Senate Armed Services Committee September 22, a week before he retired. In a statement October 3, the Pentagon’s new NATO commander in Afghanistan, Marine Gen. John Allen, declared: “The plan is to win. The plan is to be successful. And so, while some folks might hear that we’re departing in 2014… we’re actually going to be here for a long time.”

Lt. Gen. John Mulholland, departing head of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, told the AP October 8: “We’re moving toward an increased special operations role…,whether it’s counterterrorism-centric, or counterterrorism blended with counterinsurgency.” White House National Security Advisor Tom Donilon said in mid-September that by 2014 “the U.S. remaining force will be basically an enduring presence force focused on counterterrorism.” Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta strongly supports President Obama’s call for an “enduring presence” in Afghanistan beyond 2014.

Former U.S. Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was fired last year for his unflattering remarks about Obama Administration officials, said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations October 6 that after a decade of fighting in Afghanistan the U.S. was only “50% of the way” toward attaining its goals. “We didn’t know enough and we still don’t know enough,” he said. “Most of us — me included — had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history, and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years.”

Washington evidently had no idea that one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world — a society of 30 million people where the literacy rate is 28% and life expectancy is just 44 years — would fiercely fight to retain national sovereignty. The Bush Administration, which launched the Afghan war a few weeks after 9/11, evidently ignored the fact that the people of Afghanistan ousted every occupying army from that of Alexander the Great and Genghis Kahn to the British Empire and the USSR.

The U.S. spends on average in excess of $2 billion a week in Afghanistan, not to mention the combined spending of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, but the critical needs of the Afghan people in terms of health, education, welfare and social services after a full decade of military involvement by the world’s richest countries remain essentially untended.

For example, 220,000 Afghan children under five — one in five — die every year due to pneumonia, poor nutrition, diarrhea and other preventable diseases, according to the State of the World’s Children report released by the UN Children’s Fund. UNICEF also reports the maternal mortality rate with about 1,600 deaths per every 100,000 live births. Save the Children says this amounts to over 18,000 women a year. It is also reported by the UN that 70% of school-age girls do not attend school for various reasons — conservative parents, lack of security, or fear for their lives. All told, about 92% of the Afghan population does not have access to proper sanitation.

Even after a decade of U.S. combat, the overwhelming majority of the Afghan people still have no clear idea why Washington launched the war. According to the UK’s Daily Mail September 9, a new survey by the International Council on Security and Development showed that 92% of 1,000 Afghan men polled had never even heard of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — the U.S. pretext for the invasion — and did not know why foreign troops were in the country. (Only men were queried in the poll because many more of them are literate, 43.1% compared to 12.6% of women.)

In another survey, conducted by Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation and released October 18, 56% of Afghans view U.S./NATO troops as an occupying force, not allies as Washington prefers. The survey results show that “there appears to be an increasing amount of anxiety and fear rather than hope.”

Perhaps the most positive news about Afghanistan — and it is a thunderously mixed “blessing” — is that the agricultural economy boomed last year. But, reports the October 11 Business Insider, it’s because “rising opium prices have upped the ante in Afghanistan, and farmers have responded by posting a 61% increase in opium production.” Afghani farmers produce 90% of the world’s opium, the main ingredient in heroin. Half-hearted U.S.-NATO eradication efforts failed because insufficient attention was devoted to providing economic and agricultural substitutes for the cultivation of opium.

Another outcome of foreign intervention and U.S. training is the boundless brutality and corruption of the Afghan police toward civilians and especially Taliban “suspects.” Writing in Antiwar.com John Glaser reported:

“Detainees in Afghan prisons are hung from the ceilings by their wrists, severely beaten with cables and wooden sticks, have their toenails torn off, are treated with electric shock, and even have their genitals twisted until they lose consciousness, according to a study released October 10 by the United Nations. The study, which covered 47 facilities sites in 22 provinces, found ‘a compelling pattern and practice of systematic torture and ill-treatment’ during interrogation by U.S.-supported Afghan authorities. Both U.S. and NATO military trainers and counterparts have been working closely with these authorities, consistently supervising the detention facilities and funding their operations.”

In mid-September Human Rights Watch documented that U.S.-supported anti-Taliban militias are responsible for many human rights abuses that are overlooked by their American overseers. At around the same time the American Open Society Foundations revealed that the Obama Administration has tripled the number of night time military raids on civilian homes, which terrorize many families. The report noted that “An estimated 12 to 20 raids now occur per night, resulting in thousands of detentions per year, many of whom are non-combatants.” The U.S. military admits that half the arrests are “mistakes.”

Meanwhile, it was reported in October that in the first nine months this year U.S.-NATO drones conducted nearly 23,000 surveillance missions in the Afghanistan sky. With nearly 85 flights a day, the Obama Administration has almost doubled the daily amount in the last two years. Hundreds of civilians, including nearly 170 children, have been killed in the Afghan-Pakistan border areas from drone attacks. Miniature killer/surveillance drones — small enough to be carried in backpacks— are soon expected to be distributed to U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

So far the Afghanistan war has taken the lives of some 1,730 American troops and about a thousand from NATO. There are no reliable figures on the number of Afghan civilians killed since the beginning of the war. The UN’s Assistance Mission to Afghanistan did not start to count such casualties until 2007. According to the Voice of America October 7, “Each year, the civilian death toll has risen, from more than 1,500 dead in 2007 to more than 2,700 in 2010. And in the first half of this year, the UN office reported there were 2,400 civilians killed in war-related incidents.”

At minimum the war has cost American taxpayers about a half-trillion dollars since 2001. The U.S. will continue to spend billions in the country for many years to come and the final cost — including interest on war debts that will be carried for scores more years — will mount to multi-trillions that future generations will have to pay. At present there are 94,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan plus about 37,000 NATO troops. Another 45,000 well paid “contractors” perform military duties, and many are outright mercenaries.

Washington is presently organizing, arming, training and financing hundreds of thousands of Afghan troops and police forces, and is expected to continue paying some $5 billion a year for this purpose at least until 2025.

The U.S. government has articulated various different objectives for its engagement in Afghanistan over the years. Crushing al-Qaeda and defeating the Taliban have been most often mentioned, but as an October 7 article from the Council on Foreign Relations points out: “The main U.S. goals in Afghanistan remain uncertain. They have meandered from marginalizing the Taliban to state-building, to counterinsurgency, to counterterrorism, to — most recently — reconciliation and negotiation with the Taliban. But the peace talks remain nascent and riddled with setbacks. Karzai suspended the talks after the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the government’s chief negotiator, which the Afghan officials blamed on the Pakistan-based Haqqani network. The group denies it.”

There is another incentive for the U.S. to continue fighting in Afghanistan — to eventually convey the impression of victory, an absolute domestic political necessity.

The most compelling reason for the Afghan war is geopolitical, as noted above — finally obtaining a secure military foothold for the U.S. and its NATO accessory in the Central Asian backyards of China and Russia . In addition, a presence in Afghanistan places the U.S. in close military proximity to two volatile nuclear powers backed by the U.S. but not completely under its control by any means (Pakistan, India). Also, this fortuitous geography is flanking the extraordinary oil and natural gas wealth of the Caspian Basin and energy-endowed former Soviet Muslim republics such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

In Iraq, the Obama Administration’s justification for retaining troops after the end of this year was ostensibly to train the Iraqi military and police forces, but there were other reasons:

• Washington seeks to remain in Iraq to keep an eye on Baghdad because it fears a mutually beneficial alliance may develop between Iraq and neighboring Iran, two Shi’ite societies in an occasionally hostile Sunni Muslim world, weakening American hegemony in the strategically important oil-rich Persian Gulf region and ultimately throughout the Middle East/North Africa.

• The U.S. also seeks to safeguard lucrative economic investments in Iraq, and the huge future profits expected by American corporations, especially in the denationalized petroleum sector. Further, Pentagon and CIA forces were stationed — until now, it seems — in close proximity to Iran’s western border, a strategic position to invade or bring about regime change.

Under other conditions, the U.S. may simply have insisted on retaining its troops regardless of Iraqi misgivings, but the Status of Forces compact governing this matter can only be changed legally by mutual agreement between Washington and Baghdad. The concord was arranged in December 2008 between Prime Minister Maliki and President George W. Bush — not Obama, who now takes credit for ending the Iraq war despite attempting to extend the mission of a large number of U.S. troops.

At first Washington wanted to retain more than 30,000 troops plus a huge diplomatic and contractor presence in Iraq after “complete” withdrawal. Maliki — pushed by many of the country’s political factions, including some influenced by Iran’s opposition to long-term U.S. occupation — held out for a much smaller number.

Early in October Baghdad decided that 3,000 to 5,000 U.S. troops in a training-only capacity was the most that could be accommodated. In addition, the Iraqis in effect declared a degree of independence from Washington by insisting that remaining American soldiers must be kept on military bases and not be granted legal immunity when in the larger society. Washington, which has troops stationed in countries throughout the world, routinely insists upon legal exemption for its foreign legions as a matter of imperial hubris, and would not compromise.

The White House has indicated that an arrangement may yet be worked out to permit some American trainers and experts to remain, perhaps as civilians or contractors. Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a staunch opponent of the U.S. occupation, has suggested Iraq should employ trainers for its armed forces from other countries, but this is impractical for a country using American arms and planes.

Regardless, the White House is increasing the number of State Department employees in Iraq from 8,000 to an almost unbelievable 16,000, mostly stationed at the elephantine new embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone quasi-military enclave, in new American consulates in other cities, and in top “advisory” positions in many of the of the regime’s ministries, particularly the oil ministry. Half the State Department personnel, 8,000 people, will handle “security” duties, joined by some 5,000 new private “security contractors.”

Thus, at minimum the U.S. will possess 13,000 of its own armed “security” forces, and there’s still a possibility Baghdad and Washington will work out an arrangement for adding a limited number of “non-combat” military trainers, openly or by other means.

In his October 21 remarks, Obama sought to transform the total withdrawal he sought to avoid into a simulacrum of triumph for the troops and himself: “The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops…. That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.”

Heads held high, proud of success — for an unjust, illegal war based on lies that is said to have cost over a million Iraqi lives and created four million refugees! It has been estimated that the final U.S. costs of the Iraq war will be over $5 trillion when the debt and interest are finally paid off decades from now.

If President Obama is reelected— even should the Iraq war actually end — he will be coordinating U.S. involvement in wars and occupations in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and now Uganda (where American 100 combat troops have just been inserted). Add to this various expanding drone campaigns, and such adventures as Washington’s support for Israel against the Palestinians and for the Egyptian military regime against popular aspirations for full democracy, followed by the backing of dictatorial regimes in a half-dozen countries, and continual threats against Iran.

Washington’s $1.4 trillion annual military and national security expenditures are a major factor behind America’s monumental national debt and the cutbacks in social services for the people, but aside from White House rhetoric about reducing redundant Pentagon expenditures, overall war/security budgets are expected to increase over the next several years.

The Bush and Obama Administrations have manipulated reality to convince American public opinion that the Iraq and Afghan wars are ending in U.S. successes. Washington fears the resurrection of the “Vietnam Syndrome” that resulted after the April 1975 U.S. defeat in Indochina. The “syndrome” led to a 15-year disinclination by the American people to support aggressive, large-scale U.S. wars against small, poor countries in the developing third world until the January 1991 Gulf War, part one of the two-part Iraq war that continued in March 2003.

According to an article in the October 9 New York Times titled “The Other War Haunting Obama,” author, journalist and Harvard emeritus professor Marvin Kalb wrote: “Ten years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, an odd specter haunts the Obama White House — the specter of Vietnam, a war lost decades before. Like Banquo’s ghost, it hovers over the White House still, an unwelcome memory of where America went wrong, a warning of what may yet go wrong.”

This fear of losing another war to a much smaller adversary — and perhaps suffering the one-term fate of President Lyndon Johnson who presided over the Vietnam debacle — evidently was a factor behind President Obama’s decision to vastly expand the size of the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan and why the White House is now planning a long-term troop presence beyond the original pullout date.

Today’s combat directly touches the lives of only a small minority of Americans — military members and families — and much of the majority remains uninformed or misinformed about many of the causes and effects of the Iraq/Afghan adventures. Obama may thus eventually be able to convey the illusion of military success, which will help pave the way for future imperial violence unless the people of the United States wise up and act en masse to prevent future aggressive wars.

Jack A. Smith is editor of the Activist Newsletter and a former editor of the Guardian (US) radical newsweekly. He may be reached at: jacdon@earthlink.net. Read other articles by Jack.

This article was posted on Tuesday, October 25th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Afghanistan, China/Tibet, Crimes against Humanity, Disinformation, Drones, Imperialism, India, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Mercenaries, Military/Militarism, NATO, Obama, Pakistan, Russia, Somalia, Torture, Uganda, Viet Nam, War Crimes, Yemen.

President Obama’s “Unforced Errors”

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 18:22:00 +0000

Published on Saturday, October 22, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

President Obama’s “Unforced Errors”

by Jeff Bachman

On January 27, 2010, Rachel Maddow said, “Republicans have been as unanimous as they can be in opposition to every major thing this president has tried to do and they expect to continue to be as best as I can tell, calculating that the political benefit of stopping a president from accomplishing anything is worth a lot more than any risk of being seen as obstructionist.”

Are the Republicans to blame for Obama’s apparent deviation from his campaign promises, as many now claim, or does plain evidence demonstrate that the problem is much deeper, residing within President Obama himself? From economic policy to drug policy to foreign policy and human rights to his policies on the environment, President Obama has repeatedly made unilateral decisions that call this conventional storyline into question.

It has been thoroughly documented that the President is a Constitutional scholar. Yet, President Obama has declared the innocence of those responsible for the national and global financial collapse, despite ongoing investigations, stating, “One of the biggest problems…is that a lot of this stuff wasn’t necessarily illegal, it was just immoral or inappropriate or reckless.” In an attempt to comfort those who suffered the consequences of the perfectly legal misrepresentation and fraud perpetrated by the financial sector, the President reminds us that the members of the financial sector were simply doing their job. Can we really blame them for “looking for ways to make money”? Meanwhile, President Obama has been pressuring U.S. attorneys general to accept a settlement that includes blanket immunity from future prosecution, which is confusing considering the lack of illegal behavior. But the confusion lifts once one sees the revolving door at the White House.

President Obama promised change. Yet, he reserved many of the most important and influential positions for former Clinton officials, the same officials candidate Obama criticized for their role in creating the conditions that would be exploited by all those innocent bankers. The appointment of Larry Summers as Director of the National Economic Council, a position free of the need for Senate confirmation, is incomprehensible. It was Summers, along with Robert Rubin, who encouraged Congress to pass the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, effectively overturning Glass-Steagall. Lawrence Summers, as published in the Wall Street Journal in April 2009, “received about $5.2 million over the past year in compensation from hedge fund D.E. Shaw, and also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from major financial institutions.” Those major financial institutions included J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers. Nothing to see here; no conflict of interests.

Destroy the national and global economy, leading to massive unemployment and home foreclosures and you are declared innocent by our president before the conclusion of an investigation, grow and distribute medical marijuana to those who benefit from it, including cancer patients, and to whom it is prescribed by licensed doctors and face the wrath of President Obama. In 2007, Senator Obama stated, “The Justice Department going after sick individuals using this as a palliative instead of going after serious criminals makes no sense.” Apparently, the President has changed his mind. In Rhode Island, Governor Chafee has decided not to move forward with the licensing of three medical marijuana dispensaries or, as Chafee refers to them, “medical marijuana compassion centers.” Why? Because Chafee has received communications from Obama’s Department of Justice that dispensaries “will be potential targets of ‘vigorous’ criminal and civil enforcement efforts by the federal government.”

In April, the President made another foray into the judiciary, announcing his verdict in the case of Bradley Manning, whistleblower and alleged Wikileaks source, claiming that Manning “broke the law.” Manning spent ten months in solitary confinement and was forced to undergo degrading treatment such as forced nudity. The UN Human Rights Committee and the Committee Against Torture believe solitary confinement alone could amount to violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, both of which the U.S. has ratified. Yet, President Obama stated that Manning’s confinement met “our basic standards.” The President doubled-down on this assessment, forcing PJ Crowley, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, to resign because of his honest assessment that Manning’s conditions of confinement were “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”

Despite Manning’s obvious guilt and the just conditions in which he was imprisoned, Obama has refused repeated requests from the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, for private access to Manning. This led Mendez to say, “I am deeply disappointed and frustrated by the prevarication of the US government with regard to my attempts to visit Mr. Manning.” That might not sound like much, but in diplomatic-speak that’s a serious tongue-lashing.

Though President Obama chose “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” when it comes to members of the Bush Administration, who have openly admitted to authorizing torture, and the activities of many on Wall Street, his Department of Justice has waged an unprecedented assault on whistleblowers. Notwithstanding the President’s 2009 expression of esteem for whistleblowers who are “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government,” the Obama administration has charged five individuals with violating the Espionage Act, more than all previous administrations combined. Take for example Thomas Drake, former senior official with the NSA and decorated veteran of the U.S. military. Drake was accused of espionage, the charge being motivated by his blowing the whistle on illegal NSA activities and mismanagement of billions of dollars.

The Bush administration executed a search warrant of Drake’s home in 2007. By the time President Bush left office, no indictment was forthcoming. Yet, 2 ½ years later, Obama’s DOJ decided to move forward with the case. Judge Richard Bennett lambasted the DOJ, stating, “That’s four years of hell that a citizen goes through. It was not proper. It doesn’t pass the smell test…I don’t think that deterrence should include an American citizen waiting two and a half years after their home is searched to find out if they’re going to be indicted or not. I find that unconscionable. Unconscionable.” This case was dead until President Obama decided to resuscitate it. Fortunately, Judge Bennett had the wisdom to put it back down.

Perhaps President Obama’s record on human rights is stronger abroad. If we were to judge him on his words alone, the answer would be a resounding ‘yes’. In May, the President threw his support behind the Arab Spring’s demand for the fulfillment of their rights, stating that “every man and woman is endowed with certain inalienable rights.” He continued, “And now we cannot hesitate to stand squarely on the side of those who are reaching for their rights, knowing that their success will bring about a world that is more peaceful, more stable, and more just.” Obama’s support for human rights, of course, all depends on whether we need the cooperation of an oppressive government in allowing the U.S. to assassinate its own citizens, including teenagers, within the oppressive regime’s territory. Remember, indefinite detention bad, targeted assassinations and summary executions good.

And let us not forget all of the innocent victims of our human-guided robot warfare. In a 2010 speech, Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Tawakkul Karman stated, “We also support the fight against terror. However, we do not accept that this fight against terror be carried out at the expense of innocent civilians….This is what happened exactly in 2009 in December, when tens of women and children were killed in Majalah, in Abyan. They were killed by U.S. drone airplanes, with a shameful coordination with the Yemeni government.” Karman provides just one example of an ever growing list of deaths that continue to soak this country’s hands in blood.

As witnessed in Yemen, as well as Bahrain, President Obama wasn’t actually talking about all movements for more responsive government and more rights. In Bahrain, dozens have been killed, many more injured, and even more arrested and fired from their jobs for participating in the Arab Spring, not to mention the arrest of medics who provided care for injured protesters, but their movement happens to be in the wrong country. Instead of Security Council resolutions condemning Bahrain, the government awaits a $53 million weapons contract with the U.S. Republicans had nothing to do with this, President Obama could have chosen a different path, but didn’t.

It could be that Obama’s policies on Yemen and Bahrain are but bad apples. It could be, but isn’t. The President is currently pressuring Congress to waive restrictions on military aid to Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan was designated by Freedom House as one of the nine “Worst of the Worst” countries in the world in terms of political rights and civil liberties. In the report it states, “Having silenced nearly all critics and perceived opponents of the regime—including independent journalists, rights activists, and political opponents—in 2010, the state went after individuals who spoke about or showed aspects of the country that the government felt damaged Uzbekistan’s image both domestically and abroad.” To the people of Uzbekistan, I am sorry that President Obama sees our war in Afghanistan as more important than supporting your inalienable rights.

I would be remiss if I omitted the very real dangers faced by union leaders and labor activists in Colombia, the lucky recipient of a free trade agreement facilitated by, you guessed it, President Obama. In 2008, according to Amnesty International, “Year after year, Colombia has symbolised the most serious and consistent abuses of this human right [to form and join trade unions]…So far this year, some 22 trade unionists have been killed in Colombia, a significant increase on the number killed in the same period last year.”

Thank goodness for the President’s record on the environment. Otherwise, this would all be bad news. President Obama, he who was going to facilitate “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” stated in North Carolina on Monday that the Republican plan for this country means “dirtier air, dirtier water.” Yet the President, from his own volition, continued use of BP’s low estimates of the rate of the spill in the Gulf, despite both the Wikileaks revelation that the administration was fully aware of similar manipulation by BP in Azerbaijan and the findings by research scientists that the flow was significantly higher than official estimates. In May 2010, NPR conducted an analysis of the flow rate. Steven Wereley, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University, concluded the rate of the spill was 70,000 barrels a day, while the President continued to propagate the rate being 5,000 barrels a day. There is also the President’s unilateral decision not to change the smog standards, as recommended by the EPA, from 75 parts per billion measured over eight hours to 70 parts per billion. In other words, it is the President’s plan that means dirtier air.

Blaming the Republicans for all of President Obama’s failed policies and weak compromises is a failure to understand reality. That the Republicans have not bargained in good faith is something I fully recognize, but I also recognize the need to objectively assess the policies of this president. Failure to do so leads to the partisan trap, one in which members of both sides of the partisan divide vehemently defend the indefensible and use terms like ‘pragmatic’ to do so. Lucky for us, the only thing that stands in the way of the indefensible Keystone XL pipeline is President Barack Obama. As stated by James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the President’s next unforced error, approval of the pipeline, would mean “game over” for the long-term health of this planet.

Jeff Bachman is currently writing his dissertation for a PhD in Law and Public Policy from Northeastern University. His focus is in international law and human rights. He is also currently a Visiting Lecturer in Political Science and Women's Studies at University of Rhode Island.

Financial Polarization and Corruption: Obama’s Politics of Deception

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 03:19:00 +0000

Financial Polarization and Corruption: Obama’s Politics of Deception

Don’t Let Him Get Away With It...

by Prof. Michael Hudson

Global Research, October 7, 2011

The seeds for President Obama’s demagogic press conference on Thursday were planted last summer when he assigned his right-wing Committee of 13 the role of resolving the obvious and inevitable Congressional budget standoff by forging an anti-labor policy that cuts Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and uses the savings to bail out banks from even more loans that will go bad as a result of the IMF-style austerity program that Democrats and Republicans alike have agreed to back.

The problem facing Mr. Obama is obvious enough: How can he hold the support of moderates and independents (or as Fox News calls them, socialists and anti-capitalists), students and labor, minorities and others who campaigned so heavily for him in 2008? He has double-crossed them – smoothly, with a gentle smile and patronizing patter talk, but with an iron determination to hand federal monetary and tax policy over to his largest campaign contributors: Wall Street and assorted special interests – the Democratic Party’s Rubinomics and Clintonomics core operators, plus smooth Bush Administration holdovers such as Tim Geithner, not to mention quasi-Cheney factotums in the Justice Department.

President Obama’s solution has been to do what any political demagogue does: Come out with loud populist campaign speeches that have no chance of becoming the law of the land, while quietly giving his campaign contributors what they’ve paid him for: giveaways to Wall Street, tax cuts for the wealthy (euphemized as tax “exemptions” and mark-to-model accounting, plus an agreement to count their income as “capital gains” taxed at a much lower rate).

So here’s the deal the Democratic leadership has made with the Republicans. The Republicans will run someone from their present gamut of guaranteed losers, enabling Mr. Obama to run as the “voice of reason,” as if this somehow is Middle America. This will throw the 2012 election his way for a second term if he adopts their program – a set of rules paid for by the leading campaign contributors to both parties.

President Obama’s policies have not been the voice of reason. They are even further to the right than George W. Bush could have achieved. At least a Republican president would have confronted a Democratic Congress blocking the kind of program that Mr. Obama has rammed through. But the Democrats seem stymied when it comes to standing up to a president who ran as a Democrat rather than the Tea Partier he seems to be so close to in his ideology.

So here’s where the Committee of 13 comes into play. Given (1) the agreement that if the Republicans and Democrats do NOT agree on Mr. Obama’s dead-on-arrival “job-creation” ploy, and (2) Republican House Leader Boehner’s statement that his party will reject the populist rhetoric that President Obama is voicing these days, then (3) the Committee will get its chance to wield its ax and cut federal social spending in keeping with its professed ideology.

President Obama signaled this long in advance, at the outset of his administration when he appointed his Deficit Reduction Commission headed by former Republican Sen. Simpson and Rubinomics advisor to the Clinton administration Bowles to recommend how to cut federal social spending while giving even more money away to Wall Street. He confirmed suspicions of a sellout by reappointing bank lobbyist Tim Geithner to the Treasury, and tunnel-visioned Ben Bernanke as head of the Federal Reserve Board.

Yet on Wednesday, October 4, the president tried to represent the OccupyWallStreet movement as support for his efforts. He pretended to endorse a pro-consumer regulator to limit bank fraud, as if he had not dumped Elizabeth Warren on the advice of Mr. Geithner – who seems to be settling into the role of bagman for campaign contributors from Wall Street.

Can President Obama get away with it? Can he jump in front of the parade and represent himself as a friend of labor and consumers while his appointees support Wall Street and his Committee of 13 is waiting in the wings to perform its designated function of guillotining Social Security?

When I visited the OccupyWallStreet site on Wednesday, it was clear that the disgust with the political system went so deep that there is no single set of demands that can fix a system so fundamentally broken and dysfunctional. One can’t paste-up a regime that is impoverishing the economy, accelerating foreclosures, pushing state and city budgets further into deficit, and forcing cuts in social spending.

The situation is much like that from Iceland to Greece: Governments no longer represent the people. They represent predatory financial interests that are impoverishing the economy. This is not democracy. It is financial oligarchy. And oligarchies do not give their victims a voice.

So the great question is, where do we go from here? There’s no solvable path within the way that the economy and the political system is structured these days. Any attempt to come up with a neat “fix-it” plan can only suggest bandages for what looks like a fatal political-economic wound.

The Democrats are as much a part of the septic disease as the Republicans. Other countries face a similar problem. The Social Democratic regime in Iceland is acting as the party of bankers, and its government’s approval rating has fallen to 12 percent. But they refuse to step down. So earlier last week, voters brought steel oil drums to their own Occupation outside the Althing and banged when the Prime Minister started to speak, to drown out her advocacy of the bankers (and foreign vulture bankers at that!).

Likewise in Greece, the demonstrators are showing foreign bank interests that any agreement the European Central Bank makes to bail out French and German bondholders at the cost of increasing taxes on Greek labor (but not Greek property and wealth) cannot be viewed as democratically entered into. Hence, any debts that are claimed, and any real estate or public enterprises given sold off to the creditor powers under distress conditions, can be reversed once voters are given a democratic voice in whether to impose a decade of poverty on the country and force emigration.

That is the spirit of civil disobedience that is growing in this country. It is a quandary – that is, a problem with no solution. All that one can do under such conditions is to describe the disease and its symptoms. The cure will follow logically from the diagnosis. The role of OccupyWallStreet is to diagnose the financial polarization and corruption of the political process that extends right into the Supreme Court, the Presidency, and Mr. Obama’s soon-to-be notorious Committee of 13 once the happy-smoke settles from his present pretensions.

Michael Hudson is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Michael Hudson

Obama’s Analysts: Oops! We Put Muslim Radicals in Charge of Libya

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 18:56:00 +0000

Obama’s Analysts: Oops! We Put Muslim Radicals in Charge of Libya

Posted by Ben on September 30, 2011 · Comments (25)

Ben Johnson, The White House Watch

Even as the Obama administration celebrates the killing of American-born al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki and his traitorous friend Samir Khan in Yemen, its analysts are beginning to admit their war by decree in Libya empowered Islamic extremists bent on exporting jihad throughout the region. Thanks to Obama’s policies, al-Qaeda-linked radicals may be pillaging Muammar Qaddafi’s stockpile of weapons and receiving shipments of contraband from overseas.

In the closest thing to an admission Obama administration figures lied us into war, Reuters reports:

During the half-year campaign by rebels to drive Muammar Gaddafi from power, U.S. and NATO officials downplayed fears that al Qaeda or other militants would infiltrate anti-Gaddafi forces or take advantage of disorder to establish footholds in Libya.

Since then, however, the assessment of top experts inside the U.S. government has sharpened.

Former CIA asset and Obama adviser Bruce Riedel summarizes, “There is a great deal of concern that the jihadi cadre now are going to be exporting their ideas and weapons toward the east and west.”

This author reported the cause of their alarm a month ago. The National Transitional Council (NTC), the body the United States now exclusively recognizes as the official government of Libya, elected Abdel Hakim Belhaj commander of the Tripoli Military Council in late August. Belhaj is the co-founder of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which the State Department designated a foreign terrorist organization in December 2004. The New York Times relates that LIFG members received “combat experience in Iraq or Afghanistan” — fighting the United States. Belhaj, who met Osama bin Laden twice, now commands 8,000 troops, Libya’s largest fighting force.

U.S. analysts, who covered up the links the “rebels” have to Islamic fundamentalists, now worry Belhaj and his LIFG warriors have raided Qaddafi’s arsenal, despoiling it of anti-aircraft weapons that could one day be turned against U.S. or NATO planes.

The radicals may not need Qaddafi’s weapons, as other nations in the area are reportedly replenishing their cache. Rebels in the city of Zintan intercepted a cargo shipment to Belhaj from the nation of Qatar, which Belhaj insisted contained food and milk. Those who opened it say it contained weapons. Taking note of the interference Mohamed Benrasali, a leading figure in the Libyan government, replied, “We are very sorry the Qataris have taken the decision to support Belhaj’s brigade. This will backfire on our Qatari friends.”

Despite Benrasali’s tough talk, one suspects the fire will aimed in his direction.

Qatar was influenced to support the rebels by Sheik Ali Salabi, a Libyan Islamic scholar who lives in the monarchy….

Impeach Obama: Obama Double Crosses The Environmentalists

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 18:48:00 +0000

October 2, 2011 at 10:38:04

Obama Double Crosses The Environmentalists

By Sherwood Ross (about the author)

President Obama's betrayal of the environmental protection movement could cause him to lose his activist base and ruin his bid for re-election next year. That's the editorial opinion of "The Nation" magazine in its October 3rd issue and there's a lot to it.

"Obama has 13 months to persuade voters that they should blame not him but the GOP for his presidency's shortcomings. He has much less time to convince the thousands of activists nationwide---who do the grunt work of getting out the vote---that he's worth their sweat and sacrifices one more time," the editorial said.

While noting that Obama "has done some good things on the environment," including the fuel efficiency standards he pushed through this year, "he has done bad things as well, including opening vast tracts of the West to coal mining and providing much more funding to nuclear and fossil fuel than to green alternatives," "The Nation" said.

One of those "bad things," the liberal magazine charged, was his decision September 2nd "ordering the EPA to delay new regulations on ozone emissions because the rules pose undue 'burdens' on corporate polluters." Environmental activists want Obama to live up to the pledge he made when running for office that during his watch the global warming trend would slow.

Environmentalists want Obama to block the "climate-killing tar sands pipeline projected to run from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico," "The Nation" said. That's the 1,700-mile-long Keystone XL tar sands pipeline to be built at a cost of $13 billion from Alberta and which would, in the words of activist Bill McKibben, "transport the dirtiest fossil fuel on earth" across the American heartland, including over the Ogallala aquifer.

Citing EPA's estimate the Alberta, Canada, tar sands, if burned, would emit 82% more greenhouse gases than conventional fossil fuels, one environmental activist called the pipeline "a fuse to the second-largest pool of carbon on the planet," after Saudi Arabia.

"If Obama approves the pipeline, explains Courtney Hight, his Florida youth-vote director in 2008 who was arrested in the protest outside the White House, 'it is just human nature that the resulting disappointment will sap the enthusiasm that drove us to work so hard last time." Hight was one of 1,253 arrested outside the White House in the two weeks ending September 3rd demonstrating against environmental degradation. It was the largest such pro-environmental non-violent protest in U.S. history.

By delaying his promised action against ozone emissions, the magazine said, Obama "repudiated science," as the independent panel of experts advising EPA were unanimous in recommending tougher regulations "which would reduce the incidence of child asthma and avoid 12,000 deaths a year."

"Obama blatantly double-cross environmentalists," the magazine said, "who were suing the EPA over these regulations when Obama took office. His aides persuaded them to drop the suit because Obama's EPA would soon strengthen the regulations."

"Overriding the EPA in this manner," the magazine continued, "sets an ominous precedent for the tar sands decision which Obama is scheduled to make by year's end."

Obama's action also undercut EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, raising questions about whether she will resign. If she does, the liberal weekly said, it will cost the administration "its strongest environmental voice."

The president has already turned off countless supporters by launching wars without first seeking the approval of Congress; by expanding the illegal use of drone assassinations; by taking it upon himself to assassinate American citizens without a court order; by failing to close Guantanamo prison; by compromising on universal health care; and by following the pro-Big Oil /CIA policy line, which calls for building a pipeline across Afghanistan.

There's some suspense as to whether Obama will decide for or against the Keystone XL pipeline route from Canada, until, of course, one looks at his war in Afghanistan and all the blood he is spilling there to secure control of that pipeline route. Any wagers? #

(Sherwood Ross is an American public relations consultant who also writes on military and political topics.)

Sherwood Ross worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and contributed a regular "Workplace" column for Reuters. He has contributed to national magazines and hosted a talk show on WOL, Washington, D.C. In the Sixties he was active as public (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Obama: A Disaster for Civil Liberties

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 21:46:00 +0000

Published on Friday, September 30, 2011 by The Los Angeles Times

Obama: A Disaster for Civil Liberties

He may prove the most disastrous president in our history in terms of civil liberties.

by Jonathan Turley

With the 2012 presidential election before us, the country is again caught up in debating national security issues, our ongoing wars and the threat of terrorism. There is one related subject, however, that is rarely mentioned: civil liberties.

President Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay, continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals and asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP Photo)

Protecting individual rights and liberties — apart from the right to be tax-free — seems barely relevant to candidates or voters. One man is primarily responsible for the disappearance of civil liberties from the national debate, and he is Barack Obama. While many are reluctant to admit it, Obama has proved a disaster not just for specific civil liberties but the civil liberties cause in the United States.

Civil libertarians have long had a dysfunctional relationship with the Democratic Party, which treats them as a captive voting bloc with nowhere else to turn in elections. Not even this history, however, prepared civil libertarians for Obama. After the George W. Bush years, they were ready to fight to regain ground lost after Sept. 11. Historically, this country has tended to correct periods of heightened police powers with a pendulum swing back toward greater individual rights. Many were questioning the extreme measures taken by the Bush administration, especially after the disclosure of abuses and illegalities. Candidate Obama capitalized on this swing and portrayed himself as the champion of civil liberties.

However, President Obama not only retained the controversial Bush policies, he expanded on them. The earliest, and most startling, move came quickly. Soon after his election, various military and political figures reported that Obama reportedly promised Bush officials in private that no one would be investigated or prosecuted for torture. In his first year, Obama made good on that promise, announcing that no CIA employee would be prosecuted for torture. Later, his administration refused to prosecute any of the Bush officials responsible for ordering or justifying the program and embraced the "just following orders" defense for other officials, the very defense rejected by the United States at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay as promised. He continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals that denied defendants basic rights. He asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists. His administration has fought to block dozens of public-interest lawsuits challenging privacy violations and presidential abuses.

But perhaps the biggest blow to civil liberties is what he has done to the movement itself. It has quieted to a whisper, muted by the power of Obama's personality and his symbolic importance as the first black president as well as the liberal who replaced Bush. Indeed, only a few days after he took office, the Nobel committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize without his having a single accomplishment to his credit beyond being elected. Many Democrats were, and remain, enraptured.

It's almost a classic case of the Stockholm syndrome, in which a hostage bonds with his captor despite the obvious threat to his existence. Even though many Democrats admit in private that they are shocked by Obama's position on civil liberties, they are incapable of opposing him. Some insist that they are simply motivated by realism: A Republican would be worse. However, realism alone cannot explain the utter absence of a push for an alternative Democratic candidate or organized opposition to Obama's policies on civil liberties in Congress during his term. It looks more like a cult of personality. Obama's policies have become secondary to his persona.

Ironically, had Obama been defeated in 2008, it is likely that an alliance for civil liberties might have coalesced and effectively fought the government's burgeoning police powers. A Gallup poll released this week shows 49% of Americans, a record since the poll began asking this question in 2003, believe that "the federal government poses an immediate threat to individuals' rights and freedoms." Yet the Obama administration long ago made a cynical calculation that it already had such voters in the bag and tacked to the right on this issue to show Obama was not "soft" on terror. He assumed that, yet again, civil libertarians might grumble and gripe but, come election day, they would not dare stay home.

This calculation may be wrong. Obama may have flown by the fail-safe line, especially when it comes to waterboarding. For many civil libertarians, it will be virtually impossible to vote for someone who has flagrantly ignored the Convention Against Torture or its underlying Nuremberg Principles. As Obama and Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. have admitted, waterboarding is clearly torture and has been long defined as such by both international and U.S. courts. It is not only a crime but a war crime. By blocking the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for torture, Obama violated international law and reinforced other countries in refusing investigation of their own alleged war crimes. The administration magnified the damage by blocking efforts of other countries like Spain from investigating our alleged war crimes. In this process, his administration shredded principles on the accountability of government officials and lawyers facilitating war crimes and further destroyed the credibility of the U.S. in objecting to civil liberties abuses abroad.

In time, the election of Barack Obama may stand as one of the single most devastating events in our history for civil liberties. Now the president has begun campaigning for a second term. He will again be selling himself more than his policies, but he is likely to find many civil libertarians who simply are not buying.

Jonathan Turley is a professor of law at George Washington University.

Obama’s Badge of Shame and Disgrace on the U.S. and All Who Support It.

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 03:30:00 +0000

Obama’s Badge of Shame

Abandoning principles for a seat in the White House

by Gulamhusein A. Abba / September 28th, 2011

The portion of Obama’s speech in the United Nations that referred to the Palestinian bid for membership in the UN earned for him a “badge of honor” from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (those are the very words used by Netanyahu when he congratulated Obama on his speech!). But, in the eyes of most of the world, it brought shame and disgrace on Obama and the US and made a laughing stock of both.

There are three points he made in his speech. One was that the Palestinian state cannot come into being through resolutions in the UN. He forgets that but for a resolution of the UN, Israel would not be even existing today. And it was a UN resolution that enabled NATO to actively help the Libyan rebels get control of Tripoli and most of Libya. Again, it was UN resolutions that resulted in the formation of the Alliance of the Willing and launching of Desert Storm. Once again, it was a UN resolution that enabled the launching of the war on Iraq purportedly to find and destroy Weapons of Mass Destruction.

In Tunisia the US, along with the rest of the world, cheered the Tunisian rebels when they got rid of their tyrannical government. In Egypt the US supported, slowly, hesitatingly, cautiously and, at times, seemingly reluctantly, the Egyptian people and applauded the departure of dictator Hosni Mubarak, a long time and loyal ally of the US. In Libya the US went one step further. It spent billions of dollars and actively participated, along with NATO forces, in bombing Libya. But for the UN resolution sanctioning NATO intervention, the elected government would still be in power in Libya.

Not so long back, Iraq reclaimed Kuwait, which was once its province and an integral part of Iraq, and would have remained so had not the British, as was their common practice, drawn a line in the sand, carved out from Iraq what is now Kuwait and put a puppet on its throne. There are those who even today believe that Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait was done with a nod and a wink from the then American ambassador to Iraq.
US and the whole civilized world, notwithstanding any “justification” that Iraq may have had, was outraged at this breach of international law by Iraq. The question of sovereignty of lawfully constituted nations was involved. It acted promptly and decisively to end this illegal occupation of Kuwait and, in a reasonably short time, the Iraqi occupying force was not only driven out of Kuwait but chased almost to the gates of Basra.

No one told the Kuwaitis that the only way to end Iraq’s occupation was for them to negotiate with Iraq. There were some negotiations of sorts but not between the occupied and the occupier. Rather, it was with world powers.

In none of the above cases were the desired results obtained through negotiations.

More to the point is the recent prominent example, Kosovo. It was unilaterally recognized by the United States three years ago, even though its statehood did not come about through a negotiated settlement with Serbia

It is ridiculous to ask Palestinians to negotiate with Israel. Israel is the aggressor, the occupier and Palestinians are the victims of this aggression, the occupied. Besides, there is no comparison between them. Israel has the fourth largest army in the world and is heavily armed, its arsenal including nuclear arms. Palestinians have no army at all. They are completely asymmetrical.

Besides, one does not ask the raped to negotiate with the rapist or the robbed to negotiate with the robber as to which of the robbed items s/he is going to return, when s/he is going to do it and on what terms. The keepers of law and order step in and do the needful.

In this case particularly, more than in any other case, it is the duty and responsibility of the international community to step in. It is they who, in 1949, ignoring the strong objections and protests of the indigenous people, the Palestinians, and of all the neighboring Arab states which surround Palestine, carved out a little more than 50% of Palestine as it then exited, and gifted it to the Jewish community, which promptly started its ethnic cleansing activities in the demarcated area and its surroundings.

In the war that followed the attacks launched by the surrounding Arab nations, chiefly to halt the massacre of the Palestinians, Israel went beyond the area granted to it by the international community, and the truce lines at the end of that war added more territory to Israel.
Not satisfied, Israel in 1967 launched an attack on Jordan (which was then in control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem), Egypt (which controlled the Gaza Strip) and Syria (to which belonged the Golan Heights).As a direct result of this aggression Israel gained control of and occupied all the said territory in Palestine, thus fulfilling its objective of establishing Eretz Israel, with Judea and Samaria, in all of the land between the Jordan river and the sea to the west. It continues this illegal occupation to this day, with impunity.

This occupation is the longest occupation in present history, and it is a brutal and tyrannical one. Human rights violations and violations of international law occur regularly in open sight of the whole world. Massive transfer of population by the occupying power into occupied lands, destruction of villages in the occupied territories, building illegal constructions thereon – all violations of international law — go on almost on a daily basis.

That this occupation and the Israeli settlements built on lands beyond what was earmarked for Israel is illegal is recognized and accepted by the whole world, including the USA. The international community, which created the state responsible for these illegal acts, instead of doing its duty and carrying out its obligations and responsibilities, asked the Palestinians to negotiate with the aggressor, Israel!

Having no other alternative, the Palestinians did just that. Arafat even signed, eighteen years back, the disastrous Oslo Accords, believing that under its terms, within five years all the occupied territory would be fully under the control of the Palestinians.

Israel used this agreement to expand exponentially its settlements in the occupied territories. The expected transfer of power after five years never happened. Instead fresh demands and conditions were put forward by Israel. When the Palestinians refused to accede to these preposterous demands, Israel shamelessly alleged that the Palestinians had rejected peace and chosen the path of terrorism!

Notwithstanding all this, the Palestinians have persevered and negotiated and negotiated and negotiated — Madrid (1991), Oslo (1993), Wye River (1997), Camp David (2000), Taba (2001), Quartet’s road map (2002), Annapolis (2007), bilateral negotiations (2008) and on and on. All to no avail. The grabbing of land, demolitions of Palestinian homes and even entire villages,, uprooting of produce, building of illegal Israeli settlements and “for Jews only” roads and highways has continued unabated.

Even the powerful USA and strong ally of Israel could not get Israel to at least cease and desist from further violation of international law by putting a halt to the construction of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.

All that these “negotiations” got for Palestinians is almost 6500 Palestinian civilians killed since September 2000 alone, over 45,000 Palestinians injured (some maimed for life), over 6,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails, many with no charges (including over 250 females and children under the age of 16), over 650,000 Palestinians detained and imprisoned, over 25,000 Palestinian homes demolished since 1967 – over half since 2003, including over 4300 during the Israeli military assault on Gaza in 2008-2009.

The number of Israeli settlers has more than doubled during the last ten years of “negotiations”, reaching a staggering figure of 650,000. There are 236 illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. These occupy about 43 per cent of the land in the truncated West Bank and East Jerusalem and have displaced thousands of Palestinians. There are over four hundred checkpoints and Jewish-only roads. And, of course, the monstrous separation and land grabbing wall snaking through Palestinian territories.

Clearly the sole beneficiary of these “negotiations” is Israel, which is using the negotiations for this very purpose. The Palestinians have gained nothing. To the contrary. they have lost much from the meager amount they had.

Under these circumstances, to say that the only course for the Palestinians is to negotiate with Israel is, to say the least, cruel.
It is time for the international community to end this farce of direct negotiations between the helpless occupied and the all-powerful occupier. It is time for it to live up to its duty and obligations and take action to end the illegal occupation.

The first step is to approve the Palestinians’ application for full membership.

Regrettably, of all persons, Obama has threatened to veto any resolution granting this request!

Coming from the man who started his presidency by choosing the Palestinians to be the first to be called on phone, who gave the Cairo speech so full of hope and promise to the Arab world, who not so long ago snubbed Netanyahu, this stance by Obama is inexplicable and strange indeed.

But then, the President’s chair has magical powers. It changes men. Its occupant becomes addicted to it. S/he will do anything to retain this seat.

Alas, Obama has obviously chosen this path. From being a world statesman he has sunk to being a contender in the coming general elections in the USA. He used the international forum to speak to the electorate in the USA. Aware of the power of AIPAC, desperate to shore up his sagging popularity back home, he spoke what powerful donors and supporters wanted to hear.

In doing so, he has shown a complete disregard for justice and international law, has diminished himself, tarnished the image of America and, as between Israel and Palestine, has aligned himself with the oppressor against the oppressed.

Gulamhusein A. Abba is an 83-year-old writer with more than 50 years in journalism. Originally from Bombay (now Mumbai), he has been in the USA since 1982. He was co-producer of a weekly TV show Earth Matters and is presently sponsoring another weekly TV show The Struggle. He is chairman of The Danbury Committee for World Peace and of Justice for Palestinians Committee and is a member of the Danbury Alliance, an advocacy group for the rights of immigrants and just and humane treatment of undocumented immigrants. He can be reached at: gaabba2000@yahoo.com. Read other articles by Gulamhusein.

This article was posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Egypt, Elections, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Kuwait, Libya, Obama, Tunisia, United Nations.

Left vs. Obama Over Mortgage Deal

noreply@blogger.com ("Bear") — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 17:26:00 +0000

Published on Sunday, September 25, 2011 by Politico

Left vs. White House Over Mortgage Deal

by Edward-Isaac Dovere

President Barack Obama’s liberal base says he’s on the verge of selling out to the banks again.

This time, the problem is a subprime mortgage settlement that his administration is pressuring state attorneys general to sign off on — a deal that could stop many state investigations and prosecutions about mortgage lending practices.

That settlement, a collaboration between the Justice Department and the 50 state attorneys general much like the one that produced the landmark 1998 agreement with tobacco companies, would mean a lump-sum payment from the banks in exchange for a release from liability. But with negotiators in Washington this week trying to finalize a deal, it’s become the latest flashpoint of left-wing disenchantment with Obama.

“The least charitable view ties it directly to campaign donations,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which this week began mobilizing its 700,000 supporters against the broader deal. “The most charitable view, it’s a bunch of Wall Street hacks in the position of economic advisers who truly believe that giving billions to banks will trickle down to the middle class. The most charitable view is that they’re just wrong.”

For Obama, a settlement would be a chance ahead of next year’s election to claim progress on a key kitchen-table issue that’s particularly pronounced in several swing states — and tout it as an example of rare bipartisan success to boot.

For liberals, the fight over this issue — how much responsibility lenders have for the mortgage crisis — is an opportunity to put the banks on trial, forcing greater consumer protections and bigger payouts along the way. Between the bailouts and financial regulations, they say Obama’s already caved to the banks too much.

“There are a lot of progressives, and frankly everyday voters, who wish this White House would cut their ties with Wall Street, stop the sucking up to Wall Street,” Green said.

And the fear that the White House is pushing for an agreement that doesn’t go far enough is fitting into the larger frustration with Obama for how he’s handled negotiations over everything from health care to the debt ceiling.

“Yes, we have to get something done, but we’re not going to accept the false choice that requires us to take a settlement that doesn’t meet the scale of the problem — and it’s another example of the White House not knowing how to bargain effectively,” said one labor official, who asked not to be named because of ongoing involvement with the discussions.

For the past year, the 50 attorneys general and federal government have been negotiating a settlement with Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Ally Financial and Wells Fargo. While the terms of the settlement aren’t finalized, a draft release submitted by the coalition to the banks — details of which were obtained by POLITICO — shows an agreement that addresses more than the original target of “robo-signing,” the practice of lenders signing mortgage documents without sufficient review of borrowers’ credit or ability to pay back the loans.

The problem, critics say, is that the settlement is being done without any investigations of the banks, which means that the extent of their wrongdoing isn’t known. The critics are not willing to sign away their own rights to get involved and bring their own cases for a possible deal that they see as a “slap on the wrist,” as MoveOn called the possible settlement, or “a nice, big gift to the banks,” as former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold of the group Progressives United predicted.

“If you as a state haven’t investigated because you’ve relied on someone else to do your investigation, then I think states fear they could be accused of not doing their due diligence,” said Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, who became the latest official to raise concerns with the deal. “It goes against the DNA of an AG to say, ‘I’m going to agree to a waiver of liability without investigation.’ ”

Eliot Spitzer, who made a name for himself browbeating financial institutions into concessions through the threat of prosecution during his time as New York attorney general a decade ago, urged against a broad settlement.

“Given the reality that every time you turn over a new leaf or turn over a new rock, there’s a new layer of impropriety … why give up the right to continue investigating, for what doesn’t appear to be dramatic or radical givebacks on the part of the banks?” Spitzer said.

The administration has quietly been trying to rally support for a faster and fuller agreement by turning up the heat on supporters of Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden and current New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who have been leading the resistance to any agreement that’s too broad or done without more investigation. With the number of banks based in those two states, they’ve got the jurisdiction to throw off the entire agreement.

Biden’s resistance has sparked speculation that there’s division within the administration about making the deal that’s being back-channeled through the vice president’s son, while Schneiderman, who’s new in the office, is being accused of playing politics in the interests of making a name for himself.

The White House has been trying to stop them both through leaning on their political supporters with a variety of sticks and carrots. The Treasury Department has gotten involved, as has the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. There have been a barrage of phone calls, as well as a closed Washington meeting in mid-August that HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan — whose ties to Obama go back to their simultaneous rise in Chicago Democratic politics and is known to have her eyes on his old Senate seat — in which community, minority and labor groups were told that they were risking blowing up the whole deal by sticking with Biden and Schneiderman.

“The political pressure is huge. The danger is, I have not seen the administration or the other attorneys general talk about the releases [of liability]. That seems to be Biden’s and Schneiderman’s story to tell, and they come out as heroes,” said Janis Bowdler of the Latino civil rights organization the National Council of La Raza, who participated in the Aug. 19 meeting.

But Geoff Greenwood, a spokesman for Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller — a Republican leading the multi-state effort in tandem with Tom Perelli, the No. 3 official in Obama’s Justice Department — said there was a need to go for a broad settlement that effectively ends legal action for the states for foreclosures.

“It’s simplistic to say that this is all about robo-signing. Robo-signing was the catalyst, but this case goes beyond robo-signing. That being said, we’re not here to address everything under the sun — our main focus is homeowners, not investors,” Greenwood said. “It’s about servicing and foreclosure, past, present and future. Our concern about broadening the case is that it would add potentially months, if not years, to a potential resolution.”

The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s coming lawsuit against 12 mortgage banks has only further incensed the left — if the Obama administration thinks there’s enough cause for a federal lawsuit, the effort to stop a group of Democratic state attorneys general from pursuing their own efforts makes even less sense, they say, especially with the federal government trying to get all the attorneys general on board with a settlement before they’ve even seen it.

“We’ve got to look under the hood of this deal. We don’t want to do it without checking the details on it,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who’s pursuing some of her own negotiations and has already signaled that she’s likely to join Biden and Schneiderman in holding off. “It’s not just about getting the job done — it’s about getting the job done right.”

A settlement of $20 billion to $25 billion is expected to be included in the deal, which the Biden-Schneiderman camp points out is only a fraction of the underwater assets in the country. That figure could drop the more states opt out, especially if they’re joined in the no column by California AG Kamala Harris — who many expect to sign on but whose office declined to comment on its current position.

Schneiderman’s fight with the Iowa attorney general has gotten so intense that he was kicked off the executive committee of attorneys general overseeing the negotiations in August.

That’s only led to him going more public with his fight, enabling him to round up support among progressive groups and editorial boards.

And rather than getting them to fold, the White House pressure has managed to strengthen the resolve of many of the Biden and Schneiderman supporters they’ve been leaning on.

The result: a growing number of attorneys general have joined the resistance. In addition to Conway and Coakley, Minnesota’s Lori Swanson and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto have now said publicly they’re against the broader deal. Masto’s pursuing her own open case against Bank of America amid her concerns that the federal government hasn’t done nearly enough on the mortgage crisis so far, and says she’s not signing off on anything that limits her own prosecutions.

Masto — who’ll be term limited out of her current office in 2014 and is seen as a rising political star in the state — says she’s determined to give people in Nevada the action they’re eager to see.

“If you’re somebody who’s impacted because you’re losing your home, you’re paying attention,” she said. “You’re watching, wanting to know if there’s relief out there for you or not.”