Obama Watch

Is Obama the Biggest Puppet in History?

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 13:17:00 +0000

Is Obama the Biggest Puppet in History?
http://journal-neo.org/2016/01/16/is-obama-the-biggest-puppet-in-history/

Out of all the political prostitutes in the Western world, one man stands out as the perfect illustration of a politician who works solely to serve his puppet masters. Even though the majority of politicians are controlled by economic and corporate elites, the current US President, Barack Obama, is the epitome of a man who is bought and paid for by special interests.

Obama was elected President in November 2008, and inaugurated in January 2009. From the very beginning of his Presidency, it was clear who the “lord and saviour” was beholden to. According to OpenSecrets.org, Obama’s top campaign donors in 2008 included: Goldman Sachs; JPMorgan Chase; Citigroup; Morgan Stanley; Microsoft; Google; and IBM. Considering Obama’s donors, it’s no wonder that (unlike Iceland) the US has not prosecuted the plethora of bankers and financial institutions that have engaged infraud for years, and subsequently played a pivotal role in causing the financial crisis of 2007/08.

“I’ve now been in 57 states; I think one left to go”

In a bizarre speech in 2008, Obama said: “Over the last 15 months, we’ve travelled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states; I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii I was not allowed to go to, even though I really wanted to visit.” Did he simply make a mistake? Was he joking? Or was this just another slip from a person who is really just hypnotically going through the motions anytime he speaks, with no real interest in what he is saying. This bizarre statement is not an isolated one from the US President, as just a few months ago, Obama tried to argue that Russia bombing ISIL is only “strengthening ISIL.”

The Narcissist

In Greek mythology, Narcissus, the son of a river god, fell in love with his own reflection. Judging from his actions in office, Obama also appears to care more about himself than anything else. In a recent 33-minute speech, Obama referred to himself a whopping 76 times; a true mark of a narcissistic, arrogant and egocentric person. Perhaps he was trying to challenge Julius Caesar’s record, as the former Roman general penned the majority of the ‘Commentaries on the Gallic War,’ in which the word “Caesar” is used 775 times, according to the historian Robin Lane Fox.

Tears of Deceit

Emotive propaganda 101; cry and weep during a highly controversial and political speech on gun control, pulling at the heartstrings of the American public to push a political agenda. In this piece, I’m not trying to underplay the death of innocent people, but merely point out the way in which Obama is emotively trying to manipulate the opinions of the American public in order to push through legislation. Whatever your personal views are on gun control in the US, Obama’s tactics should be denounced as deceitful and staged.

Remember, the man who stood up and gave an Oscar winning performance recently, is the same man who is the head of the country that is carrying out more drone strikes around the world than ever before; has been funding and arming terrorists to overthrow the secular Syrian government; bombed a hospital in Afghanistan which killed at least three children; destroyed and destabilized the nation of Libya (which previously had the highest standard of living in Africa); supports Saudi Arabia in its war crime in Yemen; tortures and interrogates people across the world; and countless other crimes that kill and maim innocent people, yet no tears are shed by the US President.

Was San Bernardino a Black Op?

There are also some anomalies in many of the mainstream narratives regarding mass shootings in the US. The tragic shooting in San Bernardino for instance, which the mainstream media claimed was carried out by husband and wife, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, appears to conflict with some eyewitness accounts of the attack. Two reported eyewitnesses claim that the shooters were three tall white men wearing military gear.

Was San Bernardino a black op carried out by military personnel or mercenaries to further legitimize the push for gun control? It is difficult to conclusively say what actually happened, but the official narrative is a shaky one. It should also be noted that some investigative journalists have argued that there has been a dramatic increase in the number of mass shootings under Obama, one of the most pro-gun control President’s in recent decades.

Obama is one of the most disconnected and detached politicians in the world today, and has to go down as one of the biggest puppets in modern history.

Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher, geopolitical analyst and editor of The Analyst Report, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
http://journal-neo.org/2016/01/16/is-obama-the-biggest-puppet-in-history/

The Failure Of Barack Obama's Presidency

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:31:00 +0000

HubPages

The Failure Of Barack Obama's

Presidency

Updated on July 21, 2015

President Barack Obama

Failures Within Obama's Presidency Have Cost Him Support

Don’t let the title fool you.

Barack Obama’s presidency hasn’t been a failure but there have been failures in it.

The biggest failure of Barack Obama’s presidency has been his reluctance or his inability to see the need to tout his successes during his time in office.

Contrary to the Republican Party’s spin, President Obama has accomplished many things that have benefited this country and retrieved it from the depths of a recession that teetered as close to a depression as it could without falling into one.

Those on the right would have you to believe that the bailout of the auto industry was an unnecessary waste of money when in actuality if the auto makers had been left to their own devices they would have collapsed into bankruptcy plunging the country down the deep financial spiral with them while crushing the economy in the process.

President Obama did not tell his success story but instead allowed the Republican spin machine to define the perimeters of his biography and that was a big mistake.

job losses and job gains from 2008 through 2014

Spinning Out Of Control

The old saying that “if you tell a lie long enough people start believing it is the truth” is very true in this instance.

Republicans have been saying for five years that the policies of Barack Obama have made the economy worse.

Not true.

When Barack Obama took office America was losing more than 700,000 jobs each month from the job market.

For almost four years we have been adding an average of nearly 100,000 jobs each month.

Sound worse to you?

Although there is a need to add closer to 200,000 jobs each month, adding jobs is certainly better than losing jobs but to listen to Republicans you would think we were still losing them.

Barack Obama did not do a good job of reminding Americans what the actual job numbers were.

A failure on his part.

Americans have short term memories as was evidenced by the 2010 mid-term elections in which Republicans were put back in charge of the House of Representatives.

And we have seen how that has turned out.

Obstructionism has ruled the day and the government has been in gridlock for the last three years.

Another major accomplishment of President Obama’s presidency was the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

Bin Laden had been on the run from United States military forces since the 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington D.C.

He had eluded America’s search for him for nearly a decade until his death at the hands of special forces units assigned to capture or kill him.

This feat was achieved on President Obama’s watch but with little mention of it even in the light of the Republican Party’s attacks on his foreign policy decisions.

Republicans were again allowed to shape the discussion around there own talking points while leaving out the facts of the Obama administration’s foreign policy success.

Osama Bin Laden

Shine The Light

Barack Obama ran a good presidential campaign in 2008 but his public relations campaign since he has been president has been lacking.

President Obama needs to realize that telling the story of his accomplishments is not bragging or boasting it is simply relating the facts in an effort to dispel the lies.

The big mistake made by the president was that he assumed that the American public would notice what he had done not realizing, sorry to say, that a large segment of the population wasn’t even paying attention to what was going on.

In an interview on one of the major networks shortly after the 2010 mid-term elections President Obama himself admitted that he took some things for granted when he assumed the office of president.

He admitted that he did not promote his health care reform as he should have and that leaving that task to his fellow Democrats was a mistake.

But still his realization did not translate to other areas where he could have done a better job of publishing his policies.

President Obama’s problem is that he is a humble man who is not about self-promotion but what he has to understand is if he does not shape the story of his deeds others will.

And they won’t be doing it in a positive fashion.

14 Facts About Obama's Presidency Most People Don’t Know

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:18:00 +0000

Soapboxie

14 Facts About Obama's Presidency Most People Don’t Know

Updated on March 5, 2016

President Obama visiting Iowa

Obama's Presidency: The Facts

People have many perceptions of how the US economy or the country as a whole has done in recent years. Depending on your political views, you may think the country is doing exceptionally well or is teetering on the verge of collapse.

Listed below are fourteen objective facts, without interjected opinion, about the state of America under the leadership of President Obama. Every statement is followed up with a link to a reputable source where you can verify the fact for yourself.

1. We've now had 71 straight months of economic expansion.

That’s right: For seventy-one consecutive months, the US economy has gotten progressively better. That includes a new record for consecutive months of private sector job growth. Forbes magazine (which is no fan of President Obama) crunched the numbers and demonstrated how the economic recovery under President Obama has been better in just about every measurable way than the recovery under President Reagan.

Source: Obama Out-Performs Reagan on Jobs, Growth, and Investing; Forbesmagazine.

2. We are currently enjoying the longest period of private sector job creation in American history.

This statistic also comes from the Forbes magazine article listed above. In fact, we've enjoyed 68 straight months of private sector job creation. That is the longest period of job creation since the Department of Labor has been keeping statistics.

Source: Obama’s Claim That Businesses Are in the "Longest Uninterrupted Stretch of Job Creation": The Washington Post.

3. Unemployment has dropped from 10.1% in October of 2009 to 4.9% by early 2016.

Not only has the unemployment rate dropped significantly, but since the recession ended, the US economy has gained over twelve million new jobs. (You can refer to the Forbes article above or check the article below.)

Source: Democratic Presidents Bring It: Obama Shatters Clinton’s Record For Private Sector Job Growth: PoliticusUsa.It is also worth noting that during the 2012 presidential election, Obama's opponent, Mitt Romney, promised to lower the unemployment rate to 6% by the end of 2016. President Obama succeeded at lowering unemployment to under 6% two full years earlier than Romney had promised.

Source : Romney vows to lower unemployment to 6% by the end of 2016: The Hill

4. The stock market continues to set new record highs since President Obama took office.

Since early 2009, there has been a steady upward trend in stock market growth. The Dow Jones Industrial averages reached an all-time high of 18,292 in May, 2015. Since most Americans have 401K retirement investments in the stock market, this growth benefits millions of middle class Americans.

Source: Dow Jones Industrial Average Last 10 Years: Macrotrends.

5. The Federal budget deficit is shrinking. It’s been reduced by two-thirds since 2009.

The $1.4 trillion federal budget deficit that Obama inherited in 2009 was in a large part due to the high rate of unemployment. When millions of people were put out of work in 2008 and 2009, it resulted in far less income taxes and less economic activity to generate federal revenue. As eleven million people have regained employment, there have been billions more tax dollars generated. As a result, the deficit has been shrinking each year. The 2015 deficit was $439 billion, the smallest deficit since 2007, and roughly 70% lower than it was in 2009.

Source: What is the Deficit?: USGovernmentSpending.com.

6. Under President Obama, government spending has increased only 3.3% annually, the lowest rate since Eisenhower was president.

You may have heard critics say that President Obama is spending money wildly and running up our debt. According to this article from Forbes, Obama has increased spending by 1.4% annually, far less than President Reagan (8.7%) or George W. Bush (8.1%). According to a more recent article from the Washington Post, Obama has increased spending 3.3% annually. In either case, Obama has increased spending less than any president since Eisenhower.

Sources: Who Is the Smallest Government Spender Since Eisenhower? Would You Believe It's Barack Obama? Forbes magazine.
The Facts About the Growth of Spending Under Obama: Washington Post.

7. For 95% of American taxpayers, income taxes are as low or lower than they were at almost any point in the last 50 years.

After President Obama took office, thousands of Tea Party members all over the country held rallies protesting Obama’s tax increases. At that time, President Obama had actually passed several tax cuts to stimulate the economy. Most of the Tea Partiers who were protesting had only seen their taxes decrease under Obama, yet polls indicated that most Tea Party members wrongly believed their taxes had gone up.

In fact, the only people whose income taxes have gone up during Obama’s presidency are those making $400,000 per year or more. That's less than 2% of the population. Today, for the vast majority of people, tax rates are lower than or exactly where they were when Obama first took office. The article below from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains this in greater detail.

Source: Federal Income Taxes on Middle-Income Families Remain Near Historic Lows, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

8. Dependence on foreign oil has shrunk due to record domestic oil production and improved fuel efficiency standards.

While some claim that oil production has declined under President Obama, the truth is just the opposite. Oil production has reached record highs. The United States now produces so much oil that we export more oil and gasoline than we import.

Source: IndexMundi.

9. At least 18 million more Americans now have health insurance than before.

Depending on whose numbers you use, anywhere from 12 to 18 million Americans acquired health insurance due to the Affordable Care Act. Now that those millions of Americans have insurance, the rest of us are no longer on the hook to pay for their healthcare when they get sick. This saves the American people billions of dollars in the long run.

Source: Obamacare Helped Up to 10 Million Get Insurance, Gallup Finds: NBC News.

10. The Affordable Care Act has added years to the life of Medicare.

The Medicare trust fund had been on course to run out of money by the end of 2016. But due to cost savings from the Affordable Care Act and lower healthcare expenses, Medicare’s trust fund will now remain stable until the year 2030 without cutting benefits.

Source: Medicare, Social Security Disability Fund Headed in Different Directions;The Wall Street Journal.

11. Since passage of the Affordable Care Act, we are seeing the slowest rate of increase in healthcare costs since 1960.

Contrary to the Republican predictions, healthcare costs have increased at a much slower pace since the passage of the ACA.

Source: Trends in Health Care Cost Growth and the Role of the Affordable Care Act; White House Report.

12. We currently have fewer soldiers, sailors, and airmen in war zones than we did at any time in the last 12 years.

With the end of the Iraq war and the steady withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, we have fewer people in war zones now than we did at any time since 2002.

13. There have been zero successful attacks by al Qaeda on US soil since Obama became president.

Despite Dick Cheney’s warning that if voters elected a Democrat as president, we’d be “hit again and hit hard” by al Qaeda, we have actually been far safer from terrorist attacks on US soil in recent years than we were under the previous president. There have been several unsuccessful attacks against the US under both Bush and Obama, but under Obama, al Qaeda has been largely unsuccessful in striking the US on our home soil.

Source: Timeline of Al Qaeda Attacks

14. We now successfully catch and deport more illegal immigrants than ever before.

Despite the mythology being spread by President Obama's political opponents about our "open border" with Mexico, the numbers prove that President Obama has turned back and deported more illegal immigrants than any other president.

Politifact checked the claim that President Obama turned away more illegal immigrants than any other president, and they confirmed that under President Obama, the US has turned back or deported an average of 32,886 people per month. That's a far greater rate than any other president in history by far.

Source: Has Barack Obama deported more people than any other president in U.S. history? Tampa Bay Times.

Additional Facts About Economic Gains with Obama's Presidency

Although all of the facts stated above can be confirmed through multiple sources, most Americans are not aware of these positive statistics. I invite you to do your own research and check these facts for yourself.

The truth is, most other presidents would envy President Obama’s record which has flourished despite the fact that he inherited the results of the worst economic crash since the Great Depression.

If you feel particularly ambitious, feel free to research these additional facts:

Since Obama became president, our economy has gone from losing 750,000 jobs per month to adding 250,000 jobs per month. That’s a net improvement under Obama of about 1 million jobs per month!
Before Obama became president, our financial system was in ruins and millions of people were at risk of losing their life savings. Now, the financial loopholes have been fixed and we are no longer at risk of another financial collapse.
In just 7 years under Obama, there were more than three times as many jobs created as there were in the whole 8 years under George W. Bush.
President Obama passed credit card reforms that protect consumers from excessive fees, rate hikes, deceptive marketing, and unreasonable due dates.
Thanks to Obamacare, senior citizens have saved billions of dollars on prescription drugs.
The Affordable Care Act requires insurance companies to spend at least 80% of collected premiums on healthcare. As a result, millions of Americans have received refunds from their health insurance companies.

Source: Health Insurers Set to Give Out More Obamacare Refunds; Huffington Post Business.

Despite the unprecedented obstructionism and record number of filibusters used by Republicans to kill even the most routine legislation, the fact remains that the American people are profoundly better off today than they were before President Obama took office, in almost every measurable way.

Note From The Author

For those of you who disagree with, or dislike this article and you want to leave a comment, please give some specifics or make some meaningful comment about what you disagree with. I have always kept all comments visible, positive or negative. But if all you are going to do is say this article is BS without elaborating or specifying what you disagree with, then I will no longer keep those kinds of comments.

Feel free to tell me this article is BS but put some thought into your comments and don't just waste time with pointless insults.

Obama's Great Betrayal — and the Cynicism of Calling It a Grand Bargain

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Sat, 06 Aug 2016 13:51:00 +0000

The Huffington Post

THE BLOG

The Great Betrayal — and the Cynicism of Calling It a Grand Bargain

10/30/2012 12:01 pm ET | Updated Dec 30, 2012

Robert Kuttner has written much of the column I intended to write on this subject, so I will point you to his excellent column and add a few thoughts.

Kuttner wrote to warn that Obama intends to seek a “grand bargain” causing the U.S. to adopt the type of austerity program that threw the Eurozone back into a gratuitous recession.

Worse, Obama intends to begin to unravel the safety net (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) to convince the Republicans to enter into this Faustian bargain. Just as only a conservative Republican could visit “Red” China, only a Democrat can begin the destruction of the safety net. The difference, of course, is that normalizing relations with China was a good thing while unraveling the safety net is a terrible thing.

Wall Street’s greatest desire is privatizing Social Security. Wall Street stands to make scores of billions of dollars annually in additional fees should it ever buy enough politicians to privatize Social Security. The Republican Party’s greatest goal is unraveling the safety net. They always wish to attack the most successful and popular programs introduced by the Democratic Party. Their problem is that they know it is toxic for Republican candidates to try to destroy the safety net. Only Democrats, through a “Great Betrayal” can give Republicans the political cover they need to unravel the safety net.

The safety net is so popular with the American people because it consists of superb programs that constantly put the lie to Republican memes that the government is incapable of success. There is no need to allow Social Security to “go bankrupt.” The necessary expenditures can easily be made by the Treasury.

There is a need to contain the rise in medical costs, but we know how to do that without harming health outcomes. Most advanced nations attain the same health outcomes at half the expense (relative to GDP) of the U.S. Obama’s opposition to the “public mandate” was a grave mistake that needs to be reversed.

Because unraveling the safety net is unnecessary, harmful, and politically insane for a Democrat and politically suicidal for Republicans, the proponents of these terrible policies have long failed in their efforts. Republicans, however, have now found a fifth column within the Democratic Party who they hope will open the door to attacking the safety net. This would provide the political cover that Republicans could use to unravel fully the safety net.

The Republican Party’s approach to convincing Obama to commit the Great Betrayal cleverly exploits three human weaknesses. First, Obama wants to be considered a “centrist.” Second, Obama yearns to be considered “bipartisan.” These first two weaknesses are forms of vanity.

The siren song is “do this and you will become known as the President who acted as a statesman to cut across Party and ideological divides and make the hard choices essential to allowing America to continue to be a great nation — while ‘saving’ the safety net.”

The third weakness that the Republicans seek to exploit is fear — and the death of alternatives. The mantra of European austerity proponents is “there is no alternative.” The only choice is between austerity and collapse, and that means there is no real choice. The Republican strategy is to create a series of “moral panics.” As the name implies, this involves the creation of a special form of panic falsely premised on immorality. (Think: “Reefer Madness” or Professor Hill causing River City, Iowans to believe that the arrival of pool hall demonstrated the imminent moral collapse of their children.) The Great Betrayal can only occur if Obama succumbs to mindless (and innumerate) panic.

The Democratic wing of the Democratic Party has to lead the effort to save America from the Great Betrayal. It is essential to focus on the self-destructive nature of austerity. The irony is that a proponent of austerity has just handed us a coup. Becky Quick, co-host of one of CNBC’s business entertainment program, recently wrote a column intended to discredit Paul Krugman. Quick solicited a written statement from former President Bill Clinton to use in her attack on Krugman (who had criticized Quick and her co-host’s stream of “zombie facts” when he appeared on their program). Quick reveled in her success in obtaining ammunition from Clinton to attack Krugman, asserting that it constituted a “damning retort to Krugman” and proved the need to adopt austerity. In fact, Clinton’s statement stated his agreement with Krugman:

[I]t’s important not to impose austerity now before a growth trend is clearly established, because as the austerity policies in the eurozone and the U.S. show, that will slow the economy, cut jobs, and increase deficits....

Clinton is a leader within the Rubin-wing of the Democratic Party that has been seeking to create the moral panic, but even he admits that “austerity now” “will slow the economy, cut jobs, and increase deficits.” The Great Betrayal of the safety net will begin if Obama is able to deliver the “grand bargain” imposing austerity that would “slow the economy, cut jobs, and increase deficits” and unravel the safety nets - the four horsemen of the economic apocalypse.

Obama is telling the media that the Great Betrayal is his first, and overarching, priority should he be re-elected. We are forewarned and we must act now to make clear that we will block the Great Betrayal and crush at the polls any member of Congress who supports it.

Do not concede the phrase “grand bargain” to the proponents of the betrayal. We should heed Camus’ warning that it is essential to call a plague by its real name if one is to resist it — and it is essential to resist the pestilence. “[W]hen you see the suffering and pain that it brings, you have to be mad, blind or a coward to resign yourself to the plague.” We must refuse to resign ourselves to being betrayed by Democratic leaders. Our actions must make it clear that we are not mad, blind, or cowards. We refuse to fall for their faux moral panics. It is our leaders who are all too often mad, blind, and cowards.

This Obama Endorsement Is a Sign Pro-Corporate Democrats Are Getting Nervous

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Thu, 12 May 2016 19:06:00 +0000

TheIntercept_

This Obama Endorsement Is a Sign Pro-Corporate Democrats Are Getting Nervous

David Dayen

PRESIDENT OBAMA ... endorsed Debbie Wasserman Schultz, his handpicked Democratic National Committee chair, in her congressional race. What’s stunning about that is that Obama felt the need to endorse a six-term congresswoman running in a heavily Democratic district at all.

Tim Canova, a law professor and Federal Reserve expert, jumped into the Democratic primary in January, challenging Wasserman Schultz from the left. At that time, my Intercept colleague Glenn Greenwald interviewed Canova, revealing multiple contrasts between his opposition to bank bailouts, corporate-written free trade agreements, and the Patriot Act and Wasserman Schultz’s support of those policies.

Populist primaries of entrenched incumbents don’t usually get the attention of the White House, because success for the challenger is so remote. Obama very rarely involves himself in House primaries. That he felt the need to endorse Wasserman Schultz suggests that Canova’s message is gaining traction in her district.

The endorsement comes fully five months before the primary — and days before the end-of-the-quarter deadline for Federal Election Commission reporting. While Wasserman Schultz has never needed help solicitingcampaign contributions from wealthy donors, the presidential endorsement has the appearance of a vote of confidence to ensure the continued flow of money.

“Debbie has been a strong, progressive leader in Congress and a hardworking, committed chair of our national party since I proudly nominated her to the role in 2011,” Obama said in his endorsement statement. “She always stands up and fights for what is right for her district while passionately supporting middle-class families.”

But Wasserman Schultz is more than anything a creature of the pro-corporate Democratic Party establishment. She has been accused of using her position as DNC chair to favor Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary, including by scheduling low-profile debates on weekend nights. Her opposition to a medical marijuana initiative in Florida and sponsorshipof a failed internet censorship bill in Congress have angered progressives, as have her ties to corporate money.

More recently, Wasserman Schultz sponsored a bill that would severely hamper the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposed regulations for payday lenders. The bill would pre-empt the CFPB rule in favor of state laws like Florida’s, an industry-backed model that permits borrowers to take out an average of nine payday loans a year at an interest rate of 278 percent.

Payday lenders have cost Floridians $2.5 billion in fees over the last decade,according to a recent report, which has fallen disproportionately on African-Americans and Latinos. Wasserman Schultz also voted for a bill that would have gutted CFPB rules prohibiting racial discrimination by auto lenders.

Activist groups in Florida have run ads against Wasserman Schultz over her support for payday lenders. Canova has made the payday lending legislation a key talking point of his campaign, noting that Wasserman Schultz has taken over $68,000 in contributions from the industry.

The Florida Democratic Party initially denied Canova access to the party’s voter information file, but after pressure from the state’s progressive caucus, it reversed course, allowing Canova to use the data. The situation was reminiscent of Wasserman Schultz’s DNC temporarily denying voter-file access to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign after Sanders staffers improperly accessed Clinton campaign data.

Canova, who recently announced support from the National Nurses United union, reacted to Obama endorsing his opponent on Twitter, saying, “Our grassroots movement is undeterred and this is our best fundraising day yet. Thank you @DWStweets,” referring to Wasserman Schultz’s Twitter handle.

Top Photo: DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., introduces President Barack Obama during the DNC’s Women’s Leadership Forum in September 2014.

TTP, TTIP, TISA: Stop Obama’s Insane “Legacy” Trade Deals

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Sat, 07 May 2016 19:24:00 +0000

Global Research

TTP, TTIP, TISA: Stop Obama’s Insane “Legacy” Trade Deals

By Eric Zuesse

Global Research, June 13, 2015

President Obama has many times made clear to congressional Democrats that the most important thing in the “legacy” that he hopes to leave behind from his Presidency is his big-three ‘trade’ deals: TPP with Asia, TTIP with Europe, and TISA for international services including banking and insurance.

It is, indeed, the most ambitious international economic agenda that has ever been pushed by any U.S. President. (It’s not about “trade”; it’s about transferring democratic national sovereignty to dictatorial corporate international sovereignty.) And the leading Democrat in the U.S. Senate, Harry Reid, has called it “insane,” because Bill Clinton’s much smaller but otherwise similar NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) sent so many jobs abroad, and so hollowed-out the American economy, that it significantly caused the soaring economic inequality during the Bush-Obama years.

The first thing that Reid did to kill those ‘trade’ deals — while he was still the Senate’s Majority Leader in 2014 and was thus able to prevent the enabling act, called “Fast Track,” to pass in the U.S. Senate — was to block that “Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority,” which he possessed then the power to block, as the Senate’s Majority Leader, because there were more Democrats than Republicans in the Senate, and so Democrats chose the Senate’s leader. I headlined at the time (which was on 30 January 2014), “Harry Reid Effectively Kills Obama’s TPP and TTIP International Trade Deals.”

After Reid did that, Obama’s only hope to pass those ‘trade’ deals through Congress would be for Reid to lose his position as the Majority Leader in the Senate — in other words, for voters to elect more Republicans than Democrats to the Senate in the 2014 elections — and this is exactly what happened: Obama in 2014 received the Republican victory that he needed in the Senate, in order for his legacy to be able to become what he hoped it would be: these ‘trade’ deals (which would cause America’s soaring wealth-inequality to soar even more). (He probably heaved a private sigh of relief at ‘his’ Party’s losses in November 2014.) Republican Senator Mitch McConnell thus replaced Reid in that position. McConnell, of course, passionately supports Obama’s ‘trade’ deals; and, so, after the November 2014 mid-term elections, it seemed that Barack Obama would, despite Reid’s opposition, finally be racing toward his Presidency’s finish-line with the high likelihood of winning his “legacy,” which would make Bill Clinton’s legacy seem tiny by comparison — and Bill and Hillary Clinton made $25 million in just speakers’ fees for merely the year 2014; so, Obama’s equivalent at a similar time in his retirement might be perhaps a hundred million dollars yearly, just in speaking fees alone, for what would then become his historically unprecedented achievement in serving the perhaps one hundred Americans who control half of the world’s largest international corporations and who would be perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars richer because of Obama’s then-successful efforts on their behalf. Those people are grateful to their biggest servants, and so it’s not at all difficult to understand the reason why Obama was seeking to have this type of legacy, as his own. He aspired to become the super-Clinton.

Here is how Harry Reid was finally enabled perhaps to kill those deals, even though he no longer runs the Senate:

In May, Reid made a deal with the new Senate Majority Leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, that Reid would be able to get enough Democratic Senators to vote with the Republicans to pass Fast Track only if it included “Trade Adjustment Assistance” (TAA) a slight assistance to the workers who would lose their jobs due to these ‘trade’ deals. This idea went against the grain of Republicans (who contemptuously call that “welfare”), but McConnell was finally persuaded to accept it so long as its “pay for” (in order not to increase federal spending) would come out of the hides ofother poor and middle class Americans, not the rich — and the longtime dream of Republicans has been especially to cripple Medicare; so, cutting Medicare was McConnell’s demand; and, on that basis, Reid rounded up enough Senate Democrats to get what McConnell wanted — Fast Track with TAA and Medicare cuts — through the Senate and off to the House, to approve. Everybody at the time thought that it was a shocking sell-out, that Democrats provided the additional votes which were necessary in order to pass that.

Two phenomenally well-connected and knowledgeable pseudonymous bloggers, “Yves Smith” in the field of finance, and “Gaius Publius” in the field of politics, headlined on June 12th, “Gaius Publius: Nancy Pelosi Got a TPP Talking-To from Her Caucus, Plus Where We Are on Fast Track,” and “Gaius” called this Medicare-cut “the Medicare Poison Pill,” because it’s the thing that some Democrats who otherwise would have voted for the TAA bill, could not vote for it, because they’d then be challenged in primaries by a Democratic contender who’d say “That’s the person who voted to reduce your Medicare benefits.” The excuse from the incumbent in such a primary — “I had to do that in order to help the workers who will be displaced by the Obama trade bills that I was helping to fast-track into law” — wouldn’t do them much good; they might even lose their seats, no matter how much money that some appreciative billionaires would be donating to those Democrats’ re-election campaigns.

But there was yet another, though lesser “poison pill,” which caused a few Republicans to peal away from Obama’s “legacy” legislation; and this was Reid’s having also gone along with McConnell’s need to serve McConnell’s big export clients, especially GE and Boeing, by reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank, a big subsidy to exporters. A few libertarian Republicans would refuse to go along with that, because they oppose any subsidies, not even to the rich. Or, as the Heritage Foundation said, “TPA [Trade Promotion Authority] has gotten bogged down in the politics of protectionism [the Export-Import Bank] and welfare spending [TAA].”

So, because TAA died, Fast Track died; and, because Fast Track died, Obama’s ‘trade’ bills (TPP, TTIP, & TISA) probably won’t be able to pass.

Maybe Obama’s hope of becoming a billionaire died along with it, ending in failure his life’s personal business-plan (or career-aspiration): Obama has always had big plans for himself, and he has had an excellent background for a potential billionaire-class type of operator.

Nancy Pelosi, the leading Democrat in the House, was doing all she could to round up enough Democratic votes for Fast Track, but wasn’t willing to vote for it herself unless her vote would be the one that would produce the win and so move the bill to the President’s desk. As “Gaius Publius” headlined on June 4th, “Nancy Pelosi Is Whipping ‘Almost Daily’ for TPP.” Like Obama and the Clintons, she’s a Republican ‘Democrat,’ and thus needs to be able to blame the overt Republicans for America’s decline. She won’t publicly join in it unless that turns out to be the only way that the President’s plan can become law.

Here was the final vote in the House, which killed TAA, by 302 to 126 (HR1314). This vote meant that only a Fast Track without TAA can be voted on. But such a Fast Track will be rejected by the Senate — it’s not in the bill that the Senate passed.

Here was the House vote on that doomed version of Fast Track. It passed with two votes more than needed, and with 28 Democrats saying “Aye” instead of the initially estimated 20; so, 28 Democrats were willing to join 191 Republicans to pass Obama’s trade bills without assisting the displaced workers, but also without cutting Medicare. Republicans got the numbers they needed, with two to spare, but for a version of Fast Track that won’t get enough Democratic votes to pass in the Senate.

USA Today reported that “Pelosi suggested one path out of the tangle: Tying passage of the trade deal to a job-creating highway bill that Democrats would support.” She won’t give up; she’s still trying to pass Obama’s “legacy” into law. And that report also said the final revote in the House (attempting to approve a Fast Track bill that can pass the Senate) “needs to come next week, or it probably won’t come at all. But when the congressional leadership and the president agree that when something must pass, it usually does — even if some arms are broken in the process.”

That “breaking of arms” might entail a huge burst of campaign contributions from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others of Washington’s big lobbies. After all, the benefits for the super-rich could be in the trillions of dollars on this. An extra biullion spent buying members of Congress might turn out to be a bargain for those sponsors.

As the custom has it, children are not supposed to see the way sausage is made — nor the way legislation is made. If ‘democracy’ is just a superficial overlay upon an underlying oligarchy, then its myth must be maintained, in order to sustain the racket. But, maybe Harry Reid was determined that the racket has gone too far and must not go as far as Obama (along with, principally, the overt Republicans) has been fighting to take it. Enough is enough — or, more like,too much.

As Republicans are delighted to point out, their leaders in Congress — and Nancy Pelosi — have higher approval ratings from the American public than Harry Reid does. Unlike Obama and the Clintons, popularity just hasn’t been his thing. There is no gratitude to a politician who really does place the public’s interest first. It’s a thankless type of virtue. Polls show this. The popularity contests get won by others, who care more about that than they do about the public’s welfare. This is ‘democracy’ in action.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Calling Corporate-Backed Deals an "Indisputable" Good, Obama Makes Pitch for TTIP

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 22:00:00 +0000

Published on

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Common Dreams

Calling Corporate-Backed Deals an "Indisputable" Good, Obama Makes Pitch for TTIP

Sitting next to Chancellor Angela Merkel during a summit in Germany, U.S. president continued to ignore opponents as he defended controversial agreement with European nations

Jon Queally, staff writer

US president Barack Obama delivered a strong defense of corporate-backed trade deals like TTIP on Sunday saying their benefits are "undispustable." (Photo: Pool/Getty Images)

Despite the tens of thousands of people who marched against the deal in Germany ahead of his arrival and the steady drop in support for such neoliberal trade deals overall, President Barack Obama stood next to Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday and defended the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and said similar past deals have been an "indisputable" benefit to the U.S. economy.

"It is indisputable that ["free trade"] has made our economy stronger," Obama said during a joint news conference. "It has made sure that our businesses are the most competitive in the world."

Though the failure of past deals like NAFTA have become rallying cries on both sides of the partisan aisle in this year's U.S. presidential campaign—with middle- and working-class Americans speaking out against them like never before—Obama said Sunday that "the majority of people still favor trade" and "still recognize, on balance, that it's a good idea."

Offering a quite visible contradiction to that assertion, tens of thousands marched in the streets of Hanover on Saturday to let both Obama and Merkel how strong their opposition to TTIP remains.

As the New York Times reported from near the summit on Sunday:

Monica Orth, 54, a therapist for teenagers who lives in Bonn, is one of many here who see the trade pact as a plot by big businesses — often American ones — to lower consumer standards, bypass national justice systems and undermine Europe’s way of life.

"I don’t want Monsanto and Bayer to determine which seeds I eat," Ms. Orth said. As two friends nodded in agreement, she added, "Democracy is a really valuable thing, and I don’t want big business to take that from me."

At least a dozen other protesters who were interviewed echoed her words.

All accused corporations like Monsanto — the American biotechnology corporation reviled by some for using genetically modified seeds that it says help battle disease — or the German pharmaceutical company Bayer of trying to force on them products they do not want.

On Sunday, Lori Wallach, director of the Global Trade Watch project for Public Citizen in the U.S., said that the two leaders should reconsider their positions on the agreement.

"President Obama and Chancellor Merkel should continue efforts to deepen the friendship, cooperation, and yes, trade, between our countries," said Wallach, "but the deeply flawed, pro-corporate process and agenda of the TTIP must be rejected."

Wallach further explained:

Two decades of U.S. "trade" agreements becoming delivery mechanisms for extreme investor protections, new monopolies that increase medicine prices and deregulation of food safety and environmental safeguards is fueling the bipartisan revolt against more-of-the-same trade agreements now occupying center stage in the U.S. presidential election.

Unfortunately, the same secretive negotiating process – that is dominated by the interests of 500 corporate advisors, that was used by the Obama administration to conclude the highly unpopular Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) now drives the TTIP negotiations.

When talks were launched in 2013, many hoped TTIP would finally break the U.S. “free trade agreement” model that sets a ceiling on consumer and environmental safeguards and exposes our laws to attack in corporate arbitration tribunals. Instead, the TTIP is shaping up to roll back superior European food safety, chemical and consumer privacy safeguards and climate policies that many Americans would like to see here.

Though Obama recognized the TTIP would likely not be ratified during the final year of presidency, he said he hoped the groundwork would now be laid for his successor to finalize the deal.

"I don’t anticipate that we will be able to complete ratification of a deal by the end of this year," Obama said, "but I do anticipate that we will have completed the agreement."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Barack Obama: Not Perfect But Certainly One of the Better Presidents Ever: The Facts

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Sat, 02 Jan 2016 23:19:00 +0000

Barack Obama: Not Perfect But Certainly One of the Better Presidents Ever: The Facts

December 25, 2015

For Progressives, the Administration of President Obama has been a disappointment in many ways. Here at The Ring of Fire, we have had our own issues with Obama’s positions and actions on the environment, issuing permits allowing oil companies to drill in the Arctic, his questionable support for the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership, his choice of a drug industry insider to head the Food and Drug Administration, and more.

Like all of those who have held executive office throughout U.S. history, President Obama is a flawed man. His promises of “Hope and Change” have fallen far short of what Progressives had hoped for nearly eight years ago. Nonetheless, there has been progress – and there are numbers to prove it. Before delving in to that question, however, let’s point out what President Obama’s job really is – and what he has had to contend with during his tenure in office.

Many American voters have the idea that the President has the ability to do virtually anything. It is one of the unfortunate reasons that voter turnout for off-year elections and local races is so dismal. Too many voters ignore the political process seventy-five percent of the time, then suddenly turn all their attention to the presidential races every four years. This is one major reason that the Green Party has been so ineffective. Once every four years, they trot out their candidate for President – but how much do you hear from them during mid-term elections?

This is a lesson that the right wing learned decades ago. Their strategy, played out over a fifty-year period, was to start by winning local elections, such as those for school boards, mayors’ offices and city councils. From there, right-wing Republicans went on to target state legislatures and gubernatorial races. The next step was to capture Congress. It was a ground-up, step-by-step process that was carefully planned and executed – and has almost succeeded.

Now, let’s take a look at the Office of the President. It is true that, as Head of State, the President has some significant powers. He (or she, as it may one day happen) commands the Armed Forces. S/he has the power to sign or veto legislation. The President may negotiate and enter into treaties with foreign governments. S/he can appoint ambassadors, judges and heads of federal agencies. However, these powers are subject to Congressional constraints; such actions must have the approval of Congress. This is an important aspect of American government that too few people understand (particularly since civics is not always taught effectively in our public schools, anymore). Except in rare cases, a President cannot do anything if Congress stands in the way.

Since the day he took office, Congress has blocked President Obama at almost every turn. Senator Mitch McConnell infamously announced the GOP’s intention to make Obama a “one-term president.”

That hasn’t been the worst of it. As an African-American with a non-European name, President Obama’s very presence in the Oval Office has brought out the ugly, egregious racism and ignorance that continues to run in the undercurrents of U.S. society. His citizenship and his patriotism has been repeatedly questioned and attacked in the mainstream corporate media – the same media that bowed down and practically worshiped George W. Bush, arguably the worst President since Warren Harding.

This is a good place to start in examining the Obama Administration’s record – particularly in light of the grinding opposition that he has had to face.

We’ll begin with the GOP’s biggest issue: federal spending. It is no secret that fiscally, the Administration of George W. Bush was an unmitigated disaster. When President Obama took office in January 2009, he inherited what amounted to a $1.4 trillion deficit. Since that time, the Obama Administration has managed to cut that figure by almost two-thirds, to $492 billion. Over the same period, GDP growth went from -5.4% to +3.5%.

Now, let’s consider the almighty stock market, generally regarded to be a measure of a nation’s economic health (a questionable claim – though it certainly measures the economic well-being of the elite). When George W. Bush left office in the wake of Stock Market Crash II, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) stood at just under 8,000 – having fell from its dizzy heights of 14,000 in October of 2007. Today, that number stands at over 17,500.

Obviously, the economic elites of this country have very little to complain about. But even those who actually work at producing tangible goods and real services for society have benefited. Under Bush II, there was a net loss of private sector jobs of 462,000. Under President Obama there has been a net gain of more than eight million. The unemployment rate is now at 5%. It was at 7.8% when Bush II left office. Not bad for a President whose policies have been labeled by the right wing as “job killers.”

Finally, let’s look at the centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s accomplishments: the Affordable Care Act. For decades, rising health care costs and the control of U.S. health care by greed-driven, bottom-line private corporations had literally been killing Americans. These people died for no other reason than an inability to afford the medical attention they needed. Insurers routinely dropped customers if they contracted a “catastrophic disease,” or denied coverage because of “pre-existing conditions.” Huge amounts of health care dollars went directly into the pockets of overpaid CEOs and corporate shareholders instead of actual medical services. Millions more were driven into bankruptcy by medical bills that nobody else in the industrialized world would be expected to pay. It was a travesty that made the U.S. a target of scorn and pity among nations who have long guaranteed their citizens the right to health care.

The ACA, derisively labeled as “Obamacare,” wasn’t the public option nor the single payer system that Progressives had pushed for. It kept profit-driven private insurers in the drivers’ seat. Arguably, people are still falling through the cracks, particularly in “red” states that have refused to create exchanges or expand Medicaid. Nonetheless, as of this year, 90% of Americans now have affordable health coverage. They can no longer be denied that coverage because of “pre-existing conditions” or dropped because the cost of their treatment is cutting into some private health insurer’s bottom line. Before the ACA went into effect, approximately 18% of Americans lacked any health care coverage at all – and many more were struggling to afford extortion-level insurance payments, with no guarantee that they would actually be covered, should the need arise.

These are just the major accomplishments of the Obama Administration over the past seven years. These battles were won despite a recalcitrant Congress determined to destroy him with lies and unfounded accusations, a GOP hell-bent on dismantling the ACA and rolling back any policy that would benefit the 98%, and a prostituted corporate media with the sole mission of destroying President Obama with more lies and distortions, whipping up racist hysteria among ignorant rednecks and other bigots.

Barack Hussein Obama may not have been everything that Progressives wanted and expected him to be. Nonetheless, he still compares favorably with one of America’s most beloved executives, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Furthermore, while F.D.R. was forced to deal with the worst economic disaster and the most dire national emergency in U.S. history, he never had to deal with relentless corporate media attacks and race-based hatred. Given that President Obama has had to overcome these obstacles, facing his opposition with grace and finesse (let’s just say it – Mr. Obama has class), it’s a good bet that future historians will place our current President alongside John F. Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

None of those men were perfect, by any means – and neither is President Obama. But all things considered, he deserves to be remembered by future historians as one of the greatest executives to sit in the Oval Office.

Obama’s ‘Sealed’ Records

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Sun, 08 Nov 2015 04:59:00 +0000

Ask FactCheck

Obama’s ‘Sealed’ Records

By Brooks Jackson
Posted on July 31, 2012

Q: Are Obama’s early records “sealed”?
A: No. Many records that presidential candidates don’t ordinarily release do remain confidential, but they are not “sealed” by a court. The 16 claims in a widely distributed graphic are mostly false or distorted.

FULL QUESTION

Is this true?

Subj: What?

…and they want 12 years of Romney’s tax returns? THIS should be on billboards all over our nation!

Forward this to others who are interested in re-claiming America and saving our future

FULL ANSWER

This is an example of mostly old baloney in a new casing. It mainly recycles years-old falsehoods and insinuations, most of which we covered long ago, in connection with an earlier viral email.

But with President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign heating up, this new graphic has appeared on countless anti-Obama websites and in viral emails like the one we’ve reprinted here. Very little that it contains is new, and the old falsehoods have not improved with age.

Nothing ‘Sealed’

The idea that any Obama record is “sealed” is a falsehood, to start. The word “sealed” when applied to documents ordinarily refers to records that would normally be public, but that a judge has ruled cannot be released without the court’s permission. Common examples of truly “sealed” documents include records of crimes committed as a juvenile or records of adoptions. None of the claims in this message refers to records actually “sealed” in that usual sense.

In some cases, the records this screed claims are “sealed” are actually public, and open for anyone to see. Other supposedly “sealed” records are normally private documents that Obama hasn’t released — and that other presidential candidates haven’t released either.

So as with earlier versions, this is little more than an attempt to raise suspicions by asking for records that aren’t ordinarily made public, without any evidence that those records contain anything derogatory. We’ll take the claims and questions in the order they appear.

Claims #1, 2 and 4, college records. Obama’s college records are not “sealed” by a court order, as this graphic would have you believe. It would be illegal under federal law (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974) for Occidental, Columbia or Harvard Law School to give any former student’s records to reporters or members of the public without that person’s specific, written permission. Obama hasn’t released them, but neither have other presidential candidates released their college records. George W. Bush’s grades at Yale eventually became public, but only becausesomebody leaked them to the New Yorker magazine. Bush himself refused to release them, according to a 1999 profile in the Washington Post.
Claim #3, thesis paper. Obama did write a paper on nuclear disarmament for an honors course in American foreign policy during his senior year, but it wasn’t the sort of “thesis” that some colleges require for graduation and keep on file in their libraries, like those that Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama released. During the 2008 campaign, reporters were told that Columbia had not retained a copy of Obama’s 1983 paper, and that Obama didn’t have a copy, either. NBC News contacted his former professor, Michael Baron, who said he looked for his copy but couldn’t find it, and thought he probably tossed it out eight years earlier in a move.
NBC quoted Baron as saying the paper likely would have disappointed Obama’s critics. “The course was not a polemical course, it was a course in decision making and how decisions got made,” Baron told NBC. “None of the papers in the class were controversial.”
Claim #5, Selective Service registration. Obama’s Selective Service registration is public. A copy has been posted publicly, and the Selective Service confirmed that Obama registered for the draft on Sept. 4, 1980, and was given registration number 61-1125539-1.
Worth noting is that nobody in the U.S. has been drafted for military service since 1972, the year Obama turned 11. Obama, like other young men turning age 18 since then, was required to register on a standby basis, in case Congress ever resumes an active military draft. Failure to register is technically a crime, and disqualifies a man for federal student aid or from holding certain federal jobs.
Claim #6, medical records. During the 2008 campaign, Obama released summary medical information from his personal physician, who pronounced him to be in “excellent health” with routine test results for such things as cholesterol all within normal levels. (McCain, who is a cancer survivor and was 71 at the time, let reporters see his records for three hours to show he was cancer-free.)
Since taking office, Obama has followed the practice of earlier presidents. He releasedresults of his first “periodic” physical exam on Feb. 28, 2010. Results of his second “periodic” exam were released Oct. 31, 2011. His physician described him as being “in excellent health and ‘fit for duty.'”
Claims #7 and 8, Illinois state Senate records. Obama’s voting record in the Illinois state Senate is a matter of public record, and about as far from being “sealed” as one can imagine. Reporters extensively went over his votes in 2008. Transcripts of Senate debates in which Obama took part while in office (1997 – 2004) can even be found online, at the website of the Illinois General Assembly.
Obama’s personal appointment calendar as a state senator may still be private — if it still exists — but we’ve seen nothing to suggest that would add much to what is already public. As president, Obama has released records of visitors to the White House (2.4 million so far). There are some exceptions. Personal information about visitors, such as Social Security numbers are not released. And there’s an exemption for “particularly sensitive” information, which might include a visit by a potential Supreme Court nominee, for example. But that’s still more disclosure than any previous president has made, by far.
Claim #9, law firm clients. It’s true that Obama has not released a list of the 30 or so clients for whom he worked personally while he was a lawyer with the firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Gallard in Illinois. He did routinely disclose the law firm’s entire client list while he was in the state Senate, however. And his campaign confirmed in 2008 several specific clients that Obama represented personally, when reporters asked about them. For example, he once represented the liberal group ACORN in a 1995 lawsuit against the state of Illinois, to make voter registration easier.
Claims #10 and 11, birth certificates. The claim that Obama’s birth certificate is “sealed” is pure nonsense. Copies of both the so-called “short” and “long” certificates have been released, and state officials in Hawaii have said repeatedly that Obama was born there in 1961 and is a “natural born American citizen.”
Claim #12, baptism record. If a paper record exists (and we’ve seen no evidence that it does), it would most likely show only what numerous, undisputed news accounts have stated: Obama was baptized in 1988 in Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Obama was often seen in attendance at Wright’s church in the 20 years that followed. He was married there, and his two daughters were baptized there.
He remained a member even after some of Wright’s controversial sermons were given national attention in early 2008. When Obama reluctantly severed ties with Wright after weeks of controversy, it was a major news event. Obama and his family now attend St. John’s Episcopal Church, near the White House, though not on a regular basis.
Claim #13: Michelle Obama’s law license. It’s simply not true that the first lady “can no longer practice law as an attorney.” She could resume the practice of law any time she chooses. Both the president and his wife have voluntarily inactivated their Illinois law licenses, thereby avoiding a requirement to take continuing education classes and pay hundreds of dollars in annual fees, which is common for lawyers no longer actively practicing.
Claim #14, first ladies’ assistants. It’s true that the first lady has more than 20 on her staff, but that’s roughly the same as other recent first ladies. The claim that “other first ladies had only one” might conceivably be true of Martha Washington or Dolley Madison, but it’s certainly not true of Laura Bush or Hillary Clinton. Bush had at least 18 that we could count, and probably more with job titles that didn’t make the link clear. The White House has said Michelle Obama’s staff is the same size as Laura Bush’s was.
Claim #15, foreign student aid. The claim that Obama got “foreign student aid” is untrue. That wild falsehood began as an absurd April Fools’ Day hoax in 2009, which we quickly exposed.
Claim #16, Obama’s passport. There’s no reason to think Obama used anything but the then-current version of his U.S. passport when he traveled to Pakistan as a student in 1981. Some who questioned Obama’s birthplace made baseless claims that Pakistan had banned U.S. citizens from visiting in 1981, and speculated that he must have used an Indonesian passport. But they were quite wrong. There was no such travel ban. In fact, the New York Times published a travel piece that year describing the author’s own visit to Lahore, and the U.S. consul later wrote a letter to the Times saying he would “welcome an influx of Americans” and giving advice on how to make the journey.

Other Claims

Besides the numbered claims, the graphic also states that Obama has been endorsed by the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). It’s true that the Communist Party USA supports Obama. Itclaims to have about 2,000 members. Obama didn’t seek the CPUSA endorsement, nor has he endorsed that group.

The graphic also attributes three quotes to Obama, all of which are commonly offered on conservative websites. All the quotes are accurate. Here’s the background:

Obama appeared at the Service Employees International Union Sept. 17, 2007, to seek the union’s endorsement for the Democratic nomination, and he said, “your agenda has been my agenda in the United States Senate.” (The words appear at about 3 minutes and 15 seconds into this video.) And the SEIU eventually endorsed Obama, but not until February 2008, helping him wrap up the nomination battle against Hillary Clinton. The union has endorsed him again for reelection.
At the 2008 National Council of La Raza annual meeting in San Diego, Calif., on July 13, 2008, Obama concluded his remarks by saying, “And together, we won’t just win an election – we will transform this nation. Thank you, and God bless you.”
And speaking to the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle on Jan. 17, 2008, Obama said electricity costs would “necessarily skyrocket” as a result of capping carbon emissions. However, the cap-and-trade legislation he endorsed provided allowances intended to protect consumers from higher bills.

In summary, there are bits here that are true. But most is wrong or misleading, and overall the graphic falls far short of getting our seal of approval for accuracy. Call it “unsealed.”

— Brooks Jackson

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Obama, Barack. “Remarks at the 2008 National Council of La Raza Annual Meeting in San Diego, California.” Transcript at American Presidency Project. 13 Jul 2008.

Editorial Board, San Francisco Chronicle. “An interview with Sen. Barack Obama.” 17 Jan 2008.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Ways in Which Revisions to the American Clean Energy and Security Act Change the Projected Economic Impacts of the Bill.” 17 May 2009.

Categories: Ask FactCheck

Obama's Rejection of Keystone XL Is Victory, But That's Not the Whole Story

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Sat, 07 Nov 2015 15:36:00 +0000

Published on Friday, November 06, 2015

by Common Dreams

Obama's Rejection of Keystone XL Is Victory, But That's Not the Whole Story

'The black snake, Keystone XL, has been defeated and best believe we will dance to our victory!'

by Common Dreams staff

(Photo: tarsandsaction/flickr/cc)

President Obama's official rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline on Friday was met with grand applause from those who opposed the project and organizers who worked tirelessly, despite long odds, to force the adminstration's hand.

However, even as celebrations were enjoyed and an evening rally was scheduled outside the White House, there's more to this story than the simple rejection of a single pipeline and the ultimate climate legacy of a president who has announced a 'historic' decision.

Mass Movements Work

Through years of unprecedented campaigning, ordinary people in the United States and Canada turned what could have been an unremarkable rubber stamping of yet another fossil fuel pipeline into an internationally-watched fight to stop climate change. Since 2011, communities across the United States have staged over 750 direct actions and protests across the country—from mass sit-ins at the White House to a tens-of-thousands-strong march on the National Mall. Farmers, workers, students, Indigenous peoples, and communities on the frontlines of oil refineries and extreme weather put their bodies and relationships on the line—risking arrest, talking to their neighbors, and taking to the streets.

"The black snake, Keystone XL, has been defeated and best believe we will dance to our victory!" —Tom Goldtooth, Indigenous Environmental Network

"We stood our ground and today President Obama stood with us, the pipeline fighters," said Jane Kleeb, director of Bold Nebraska. "Tonight landowners can finally go to sleep knowing their family is safe and sound. Our unlikely alliance showed America that hard work and scientific facts can beat Big Oil’s threat to our land and water."

In the words of Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network: "The black snake, Keystone XL, has been defeated and best believe we will dance to our victory!"

Those interested can sign an online Thank You Card to the Movement that will be delivered to every single person who has participated in an action against the Keystone XL pipeline since over the past four years. And people across the United States are holding rejection parties to relish in "one golden well-deserved moment" of celebration.

Canada's Win, But Trudeau's "Disappointment"

Even as they celebrated the KXL rejection, Canadian climate activists on Friday seized on President Barack Obama's statement that freshly sworn-in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—who publicly supported the project on the campaign trail—had "expressed his disappointment" about the U.S. State Department's decision on the pipeline.

"President Obama just sent a message that Prime Minister Trudeau should heed—you can’t be a climate leader while supporting tar sands pipelines." —Mike Hudema, Greenpeace CanadaSocial activist Naomi Klein, for example, tweeted that Trudeau's reaction was a "BAD way to enter the climate conversation," because "dirty pipelines are the way of the past."

The Keystone development came as Canadian environmentalists entered their second of four days of civil disobedience, aimed at convincing Trudeau to freeze tar sands development and commit to a justice-based transition to a clean energy economy.

They took Friday's news as a chance to double down on their message: "Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline sets a new standard for political climate action," said Clayton Thomas-Muller, Stop it at the Source Campaigner with 350.org Canada. "Justin Trudeau needs to take note that it is time now to listen to the science, to Indigenous Peoples, and to freeze tar sands expansion."

"President Obama just sent a message that Prime Minister Trudeau should heed—you can’t be a climate leader while supporting tar sands pipelines," added (pdf) Mike Hudema, climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace Canada. "The prime minister needs to follow the president's lead and recognize that science demands and the public wants action on climate change and that can't be done while expanding the tar sands."

Economics of Tar Sands

The pipeline rejection comes amid a continuing plummet in crude oil prices, which has forced some oil giants to ditch certain projects and means dwindling enthusiasm for tar sands production, because, as "the world's most expensive crude," it just doesn't make economic sense.

Bloomberg reported the rejection was just a confirmation that "there's less appetite for expensive Canadian oil sands in an era of $45 crude."

Yet the falling price of oil has left TransCanada "undeterred," and as Christine Tezak, an energy market analyst at ClearView Energy Partners, told the New York Times, "How long it takes [to move tar sands crude] is just a result of oil prices. If prices go up, companies will get the oil out."

A 'Historic' Decision? Yes. But Not So Fast on Obama's Climate Leadership

Obama took the occasion of the Keystone announcement to tout his administration's environmental track record—but should rejection of this one project be allowed to overshadow his adminstration's numerous shortcomings when it comes to climate?

"America is leading on climate change by working with other big emitters like China to encourage and announce new commitments to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions," Obama said, adding that "if we're going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground."
However, Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline comes only months after he approved offshore drilling in the Arctic, an affront to climate activists and a near-fatal blow to vulnerable communities and marine life that was only avoided when Royal Dutch Shell called off its exploration project in September.
Through his presidency, Obama has repeatedly been criticized for bragging that he has expanded domestic oil and gas production, and critics say his "all-of-the-above" energy strategy proves he simply does not understand the dangers posed by runaway climate change nor the urgency needed for a rapid and just transition to renewables.

As climate experts have pointed out ahead of the United Nations-sponsored COP21 talks in Paris, beginning later this month, the U.S. is far from a leader in climate action and is one of several wealthy nations that is not meeting its potential to reduce greenhouse gases. Though it has historically been the planet's leading polluter, the U.S. under Obama has continued to evade its financial obligations to help developing countries deal with the immediate impacts of global warming.

Then there's the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the 12-nation agreement and "corporate power grab nightmare" that Obama has pushed for strongly even as experts warn the deal is an absolute "nightmare" when it comes to environment and, in fact, never even mentions the term "climate change."

In The Shadow of KXL, A Troubling Network of Pipelines, Oil Trains, and Climate Denial

As Common Dreams has reported extensively, the fight over Keystone XL has not prevented the fossil fuel and pipeline industries on both sides of the U.S./Canada border from aggressively—if quietly—planning, proposing, and building a network of infrastructure projects that collectively "dwarf" KXL in their capacity.
"While the Obama White House Keystone XL decision has been touted by most environmentalists and criticized by Big Oil and its front groups, the truth is much more complex and indeed, dirty." —Steve Horn, DeSmogBlogFrom the "zombie-like" Northern Gateway pipeline that refuses to die in western Canada to the massive eastward proposal known "Energy East," the major pipeline companies in Canada continue to show their determination in upping the nation's ability to transport their vast reserves of dirty oil. In addition to the those larger and well-known projects, there are numerous others that continue to threaten communities and the climate across Canada.

In the U.S., a vast network consisting of thousands of miles of new pipelines has been built in recent years. As Steve Horn, a freelance investigative journalist who writes for DeSmogBlog, said on Friday: "While the Obama White House Keystone XL decision has been touted by most environmentalists and criticized by Big Oil and its front groups, the truth is much more complex and indeed, dirty. That's because for years behind the scenes the Obama Administration has quietly been approving hundreds of miles-long pieces of pipeline owned by pipeline company goliath Enbridge."

And Daphne Wysham, director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Center for Sustainable Economy in Washington state, added, "The Pacific Northwest is facing the carbon equivalent of five Keystone XL pipelines in the form of coal, gas, and oil via rail and pipeline."

Meanwhile, the exponential growth of oil-by-rail has become an area of serious concern for environmentalists and community members who have done their best to squelch the false argument that we must choose between the inevitable destruction of a pipeline disaster or the wreckage of the next firey oil train derailment.

As Stephen Kretzmann, of Oil Change International, told Common Dreams in 2013, "There is no use talking about the best way to transport a product which climate science tells us shouldn't even be being produced... It's like debating whether or not menthol or regular cigarettes are worse for you. They both kill, and that's the point."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Obama’s Top 50 Accomplishments and Still Counting

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Sat, 19 Sep 2015 00:47:00 +0000

Washington Monthly

Features

March/ April 2012

Obama’s Top 50 Accomplishments

By Paul Glastris, Ryan Cooper, and Siyu Hu

(Also check out the main article, The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama, and the issue’s Editor’s Note.)

1. Passed Health Care Reform: After five presidents over a century failed to create universal health insurance, signed the Affordable Care Act (2010). It will cover 32 million uninsured Americans beginning in 2014 and mandates a suite of experimental measures to cut health care cost growth, the number one cause of America’s long-term fiscal problems.

2. Passed the Stimulus: Signed $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 to spur economic growth amid greatest recession since the Great Depression. Weeks after stimulus went into effect, unemployment claims began to subside. Twelve months later, the private sector began producing more jobs than it was losing, and it has continued to do so for twenty-three straight months, creating a total of nearly 3.7 million new private-sector jobs.

3. Passed Wall Street Reform: Signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) to re-regulate the financial sector after its practices caused the Great Recession. The new law tightens capital requirements on large banks and other financial institutions, requires derivatives to be sold on clearinghouses and exchanges, mandates that large banks provide “living wills” to avoid chaotic bankruptcies, limits their ability to trade with customers’ money for their own profit, and creates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (now headed by Richard Cordray) to crack down on abusive lending products and companies.

4. Ended the War in Iraq: Ordered all U.S. military forces out of the country. Last troops left on December 18, 2011.

5. Began Drawdown of War in Afghanistan: From a peak of 101,000 troops in June 2011, U.S. forces are now down to 91,000, with 23,000 slated to leave by the end of summer 2012. According to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the combat mission there will be over by next year.

6. Eliminated Osama bin laden: In 2011, ordered special forces raid of secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which the terrorist leader was killed and a trove of al-Qaeda documents was discovered.

7. Turned Around U.S. Auto Industry: In 2009, injected $62 billion in federal money (on top of $13.4 billion in loans from the Bush administration) into ailing GM and Chrysler in return for equity stakes and agreements for massive restructuring. Since bottoming out in 2009, the auto industry has added more than 100,000 jobs. In 2011, the Big Three automakers all gained market share for the first time in two decades. The government expects to lose $16 billion of its investment, less if the price of the GM stock it still owns increases.

8. Recapitalized Banks: In the midst of financial crisis, approved controversial Treasury Department plan to lure private capital into the country’s largest banks via “stress tests” of their balance sheets and a public-private fund to buy their “toxic” assets. Got banks back on their feet at essentially zero cost to the government.

9. Repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”: Ended 1990s-era restriction and formalized new policy allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military for the first time.

10. Toppled Moammar Gaddafi: In March 2011, joined a coalition of European and Arab governments in military action, including air power and naval blockade, against Gaddafi regime to defend Libyan civilians and support rebel troops. Gaddafi’s forty-two-year rule ended when the dictator was overthrown and killed by rebels on October 20, 2011. No American lives were lost.

11. Told Mubarak to Go: On February 1, 2011, publicly called on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to accept reform or step down, thus weakening the dictator’s position and putting America on the right side of the Arab Spring. Mubarak ended thirty-year rule when overthrown on February 11.

12. Reversed Bush Torture Policies: Two days after taking office, nullified Bush-era rulings that had allowed detainees in U.S. custody to undergo certain “enhanced” interrogation techniques considered inhumane under the Geneva Conventions. Also released the secret Bush legal rulings supporting the use of these techniques.

13. Improved America’s Image Abroad: With new policies, diplomacy, and rhetoric, reversed a sharp decline in world opinion toward the U.S. (and the corresponding loss of “soft power”) during the Bush years. From 2008 to 2011, favorable opinion toward the United States rose in ten of fifteen countries surveyed by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, with an average increase of 26 percent.

14. Kicked Banks Out of Federal Student Loan Program, Expanded Pell Grant Spending: As part of the 2010 health care reform bill, signed measure ending the wasteful decades-old practice of subsidizing banks to provide college loans. Starting July 2010 all students began getting their federal student loans directly from the federal government. Treasury will save $67 billion over ten years, $36 billion of which will go to expanding Pell Grants to lower-income students.

15. Created Race to the Top: With funds from stimulus, started $4.35 billion program of competitive grants to encourage and reward states for education reform.

16. Boosted Fuel Efficiency Standards: Released new fuel efficiency standards in 2011 that will nearly double the fuel economy for cars and trucks by 2025.

17. Coordinated International Response to Financial Crisis: To keep world economy out of recession in 2009 and 2010, helped secure from G-20 nations more than $500 billion for the IMF to provide lines of credit and other support to emerging market countries, which kept them liquid and avoided crises with their currencies.

18. Passed Mini Stimuli: To help families hurt by the recession and spur the economy as stimulus spending declined, signed series of measures (July 22, 2010; December 17, 2010; December 23, 2011) to extend unemployment insurance and cut payroll taxes.

19. Began Asia “Pivot”: In 2011, reoriented American military and diplomatic priorities and focus from the Middle East and Europe to the Asian-Pacific region. Executed multipronged strategy of positively engaging China while reasserting U.S. leadership in the region by increasing American military presence and crafting new commercial, diplomatic, and military alliances with neighboring countries made uncomfortable by recent Chinese behavior.

20. Increased Support for Veterans: With so many soldiers coming home from Iraq and Iran with serious physical and mental health problems, yet facing long waits for services, increased 2010 Department of Veterans Affairs budget by 16 percent and 2011 budget by 10 percent. Also signed new GI bill offering $78 billion in tuition assistance over a decade, and provided multiple tax credits to encourage businesses to hire veterans.

21. Tightened Sanctions on Iran: In effort to deter Iran’s nuclear program, signed Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act (2010) to punish firms and individuals who aid Iran’s petroleum sector. In late 2011 and early 2012, coordinated with other major Western powers to impose sanctions aimed at Iran’s banks and with Japan, South Korea, and China to shift their oil purchases away from Iran.

22. Created Conditions to Begin Closing Dirtiest Power Plants: New EPA restrictions on mercury and toxic pollution, issued in December 2011, likely to lead to the closing of between sixty-eight and 231 of the nation’s oldest and dirtiest coal-fired power plants. Estimated cost to utilities: at least $11 billion by 2016. Estimated health benefits: $59 billion to $140 billion. Will also significantly reduce carbon emissions and, with other regulations, comprises what’s been called Obama’s “stealth climate policy.”

23. Passed Credit Card Reforms: Signed the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act (2009), which prohibits credit card companies from raising rates without advance notification, mandates a grace period on interest rate increases, and strictly limits overdraft and other fees.

24. Eliminated Catch-22 in Pay Equality Laws: Signed Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009, giving women who are paid less than men for the same work the right to sue their employers after they find out about the discrimination, even if that discrimination happened years ago. Under previous law, as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., the statute of limitations on such suits ran out 180 days after the alleged discrimination occurred, even if the victims never knew about it.

25. Protected Two Liberal Seats on the U.S. Supreme Court: Nominated and obtained confirmation for Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic and third woman to serve, in 2009; and Elena Kagan, the fourth woman to serve, in 2010. They replaced David Souter and John Paul Stevens, respectively.

26. Improved Food Safety System: In 2011, signed FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, which boosts the Food and Drug Administration’s budget by $1.4 billion and expands its regulatory responsibilities to include increasing number of food inspections, issuing direct food recalls, and reviewing the current food safety practices of countries importing products into America.

27. Achieved New START Treaty: Signed with Russia (2010) and won ratification in Congress (2011) of treaty that limits each country to 1,550 strategic warheads (down from 2,200) and 700 launchers (down from more than 1,400), and reestablished and strengthened a monitoring and transparency program that had lapsed in 2009, through which each country can monitor the other.

28. Expanded National Service: Signed Serve America Act in 2009, which authorized a tripling of the size of AmeriCorps. Program grew 13 percent to 85,000 members across the country by 2012, when new House GOP majority refused to appropriate more funds for further expansion.

29. Expanded Wilderness and Watershed Protection: Signed Omnibus Public Lands Management Act (2009), which designated more than 2 million acres as wilderness, created thousands of miles of recreational and historic trails, and protected more than 1,000 miles of rivers.

30. Gave the FDA Power to Regulate Tobacco: Signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (2009). Nine years in the making and long resisted by the tobacco industry, the law mandates that tobacco manufacturers disclose all ingredients, obtain FDA approval for new tobacco products, and expand the size and prominence of cigarette warning labels, and bans the sale of misleadingly labeled “light” cigarette brands and tobacco sponsorship of entertainment events.

31. Pushed Federal Agencies to Be Green Leaders: Issued executive order in 2009 requiring all federal agencies to make plans to soften their environmental impacts by 2020. Goals include 30 percent reduction in fleet gasoline use, 26 percent boost in water efficiency, and sustainability requirements for 95 percent of all federal contracts. Because federal government is the country’s single biggest purchaser of goods and services, likely to have ripple effects throughout the economy for years to come.

32. Passed Fair Sentencing Act: Signed 2010 legislation that reduces sentencing disparity between crack versus powder cocaine possessionfrom100 to1 to 18 to1.

33. Trimmed and Reoriented Missile Defense: Cut the Reagan-era “Star Wars” missile defense budget, saving $1.4 billion in 2010, and canceled plans to station antiballistic missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic in favor of sea-based defense plan focused on Iran and North Korea.

34. Began Post-Post-9/11 Military Builddown: After winning agreement from congressional Republicans and Democrats in summer 2011 budget deal to reduce projected defense spending by $450 billion, proposed new DoD budget this year with cuts of that size and a new national defense strategy that would shrink ground forces from 570,000 to 490,000 over the next ten years while increasing programs in intelligence gathering and cyberwarfare.

35. Let Space Shuttle Die and Killed Planned Moon Mission: Allowed the expensive ($1 billion per launch), badly designed, dangerous shuttle program to make its final launch on July 8, 2011. Cut off funding for even more bloated and problem-plagued Bush-era Constellation program to build moon base in favor of support for private-sector low-earth orbit ventures, research on new rocket technologies for long-distance manned flight missions, and unmanned space exploration, including the largest interplanetary rover ever launched, which will investigate Mars’s potential to support life.

36. Invested Heavily in Renewable Technology: As part of the 2009 stimulus, invested $90 billion, more than any previous administration, in research on smart grids, energy efficiency, electric cars, renewable electricity generation, cleaner coal, and biofuels.

37. Crafting Next-Generation School Tests: Devoted $330 million in stimulus money to pay two consortia of states and universities to create competing versions of new K-12 student performance tests based on latest psychometric research. New tests could transform the learning environment in vast majority of public school classrooms beginning in 2014.

38. Cracked Down on Bad For-Profit Colleges: In effort to fight predatory practices of some for-profit colleges, Department of Education issued “gainful employment” regulations in 2011 cutting off commercially focused schools from federal student aid funding if more than 35 percent of former students aren’t paying off their loans and/or if the average former student spends more than 12 percent of his or her total earnings servicing student loans.

39. Improved School Nutrition: In coordination with Michelle Obama, signed Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act in 2010 mandating $4.5 billion spending boost and higher nutritional and health standards for school lunches. New rules based on the law, released in January, double the amount of fruits and vegetables and require only whole grains in food served to students.

40. Expanded Hate Crimes Protections: Signed Hate Crimes Prevention Act (2009), which expands existing hate crime protections to include crimes based on a victim’s sexual orientation, gender, or disability, in addition to race, color, religion, or national origin.

41. Avoided Scandal: As of November 2011, served longer than any president in decades without a scandal, as measured by the appearance of the word “scandal” (or lack thereof) on the front page of the Washington Post.

42. Brokered Agreement for Speedy Compensation to Victims of Gulf Oil Spill:Though lacking statutory power to compel British Petroleum to act, used moral authority of his office to convince oil company to agree in 2010 to a $20 billion fund to compensate victims of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; $6.5 billion already paid out without lawsuits. By comparison, it took nearly two decades for plaintiffs in the Exxon Valdez Alaska oil spill case to receive $1.3 billion.

43. Created Recovery.gov: Web site run by independent board of inspectors general looking for fraud and abuse in stimulus spending, provides public with detailed information on every contract funded by $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Thanks partly to this transparency, board has uncovered very little fraud, and Web site has become national model: “The stimulus has done more to promote transparency at almost all levels of government than any piece of legislation in recent memory,” reports Governingmagazine.

44. Pushed Broadband Coverage: Proposed and obtained in 2011 Federal Communications Commission approval for a shift of $8 billion in subsidies away from landlines and toward broadband Internet for lower-income rural families.

45. Expanded Health Coverage for Children: Signed 2009 Children’s Health Insurance Authorization Act, which allows the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to cover health care for 4 million more children, paid for by a tax increase on tobacco products.

46. Recognized the Dangers of Carbon Dioxide: In 2009, EPA declared carbon dioxide a pollutant, allowing the agency to regulate its production.

47. Expanded Stem Cell Research: In 2009, eliminated the Bush-era restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, which shows promise in treating spinal injuries, among many other areas.

48. Provided Payment to Wronged Minority Farmers: In 2009, signed Claims Resolution Act, which provided $4.6 billion in funding for a legal settlement with black and Native American farmers who the government cheated out of loans and natural resource royalties in years past.

49. Helped South Sudan Declare Independence: Helped South Sudan Declare Independence: Appointed two envoys to Sudan and personally attended a special UN meeting on the area. Through U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, helped negotiate a peaceful split in 2011.

50. Killed the F-22: In 2009, ended further purchases of Lockheed Martin single-seat, twin-engine, fighter aircraft, which cost $358 million apiece. Though the military had 187 built, the plane has never flown a single combat mission. Eliminating it saved $4 billion.

Paul Glastris, Ryan Cooper, and Siyu Hu collaborated on this article. Glastris is the editor in chief of the Washington Monthly. Cooper and Hu are interns at the magazine.

In Defense of Obama

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Sat, 19 Sep 2015 00:05:00 +0000

In Defense of Obama

The Nobel Prize-winning economist, once one of the president’s most notable critics, on why Obama is a historic success

By Paul Krugman October 8, 2014

March 23, 2010: President Obama signs the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a historic piece of legislation that will expand health insurance ...

When it comes to Barack Obama, I've always been out of sync. Back in 2008, when many liberals were wildly enthusiastic about his candidacy and his press was strongly favorable, I was skeptical. I worried that he was naive, that his talk about transcending the political divide was a dangerous illusion given the unyielding extremism of the modern American right. Furthermore, it seemed clear to me that, far from being the transformational figure his supporters imagined, he was rather conventional-minded: Even before taking office, he showed signs of paying far too much attention to what some of us would later take to calling Very Serious People, people who regarded cutting budget deficits and a willingness to slash Social Security as the very essence of political virtue.

And I wasn't wrong. Obama was indeed naive: He faced scorched-earth Republican opposition from Day One, and it took him years to start dealing with that opposition realistically. Furthermore, he came perilously close to doing terrible things to the U.S. safety net in pursuit of a budget Grand Bargain; we were saved from significant cuts to Social Security and a rise in the Medicare age only by Republican greed, the GOP's unwillingness to make even token concessions.

But now the shoe is on the other foot: Obama faces trash talk left, right and center – literally – and doesn't deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it's working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it's much more effective than you'd think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy.

I'll go through those achievements shortly. First, however, let's take a moment to talk about the current wave of Obama-bashing. All Obama-bashing can be divided into three types. One, a constant of his time in office, is the onslaught from the right, which has never stopped portraying him as an Islamic atheist Marxist Kenyan. Nothing has changed on that front, and nothing will.

Sean Gallup/Getty

There's a different story on the left, where you now find a significant number of critics decrying Obama as, to quote Cornel West, someone who ''posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit.'' They're outraged that Wall Street hasn't been punished, that income inequality remains so high, that ''neoliberal'' economic policies are still in place. All of this seems to rest on the belief that if only Obama had put his eloquence behind a radical economic agenda, he could somehow have gotten that agenda past all the political barriers that have con- strained even his much more modest efforts. It's hard to take such claims seriously.

Finally, there's the constant belittling of Obama from mainstream pundits and talking heads. Turn on cable news (although I wouldn't advise it) and you'll hear endless talk about a rudderless, stalled administration, maybe even about a failed presidency. Such talk is often buttressed by polls showing that Obama does, indeed, have an approval rating that is very low by historical standards.

But this bashing is misguided even in its own terms – and in any case, it's focused on the wrong thing.

Yes, Obama has a low approval rating compared with earlier presidents. But there are a number of reasons to believe that presidential approval doesn't mean the same thing that it used to: There is much more party-sorting (in which Republicans never, ever have a good word for a Democratic president, and vice versa), the public is negative on politicians in general, and so on. Obviously the midterm election hasn't happened yet, but in a year when Republicans have a huge structural advantage – Democrats are defending a disproportionate number of Senate seats in deep-red states – most analyses suggest that control of the Senate is in doubt, with Democrats doing considerably better than they were supposed to. This isn't what you'd expect to see if a failing president were dragging his party down.

More important, however, polls – or even elections – are not the measure of a president. High office shouldn't be about putting points on the electoral scoreboard, it should be about changing the country for the better. Has Obama done that? Do his achievements look likely to endure? The answer to both questions is yes.

HEALTH CARE

When Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, an excited Joe Biden whispered audibly, ''This is a big fucking deal!'' He was right.

The enactment and implementation of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, has been a perils-of-Pauline experience. When an upset in the special election to replace Ted Kennedy cost Democrats their 60-vote Senate majority, health reform had to be rescued with fancy legislative footwork. Then it survived a Supreme Court challenge only thanks to a surprise display of conscience by John Roberts, who nonetheless opened a loophole that has allowed Republican-controlled states to deny coverage to millions of Americans. Then technical difficulties with the HealthCare.gov website seemed to threaten disaster. But here we are, most of the way through the first full year of reform's implementation, and it's working better than even the optimists expected.

We won't have the full data on 2014 until next year's census report, but multiple independent surveys show a sharp drop in the number of Americans without health insurance, probably around 10 million, a number certain to grow greatly over the next two years as more people realize that the program is available and penalties for failure to sign up increase.

It's true that the Affordable Care Act will still leave millions of people in America uninsured. For one thing, it was never intended to cover undocumented immigrants, who are counted in standard measures of the uninsured. Furthermore, millions of low-income Americans will slip into the loophole Roberts created: They were supposed to be covered by a federally funded expansion of Medicaid, but some states are blocking that expansion out of sheer spite. Finally, unlike Social Security and Medicare, for which almost everyone is automatically eligible, Obamacare requires beneficiaries to prove their eligibility for Medicaid or choose and then pay for a subsidized private plan. Inevitably, some people will fall through the cracks.

Still, Obamacare means a huge improvement in the quality of life for tens of millions of Americans – not just better care, but greater financial security. And even those who were already insured have gained both security and freedom, because they now have a guarantee of coverage if they lose or change jobs.

What about the costs? Here, too, the news is better than anyone expected. In 2014, premiums on the insurance policies offered through the Obamacare exchanges were well below those originally projected by the Congressional Budget Office, and the available data indicates a mix of modest increases and actual reductions for 2015 – which is very good in a sector where premiums normally increase five percent or more each year. More broadly, overall health spending has slowed substantially, with the cost-control features of the ACA probably deserving some of the credit.

In other words, health reform is looking like a major policy success story. It's a program that is coming in ahead of schedule – and below budget – costing less, and doing more to reduce overall health costs than even its supporters predicted.

Of course, this success story makes nonsense of right-wing predictions of catastrophe. Beyond that, the good news on health costs refutes conservative orthodoxy. It's a fixed idea on the right, sometimes echoed by ''centrist'' commentators, that the only way to limit health costs is to dismantle guarantees of adequate care – for example, that the only way to control Medicare costs is to replace Medicare as we know it, a program that covers major medical expenditures, with vouchers that may or may not be enough to buy adequate insurance. But what we're actually seeing is what looks like significant cost control via a laundry list of small changes to how we pay for care, with the basic guarantee of adequate coverage not only intact but widened to include Americans of all ages.

It's worth pointing out that some criticisms of Obamacare from the left are also looking foolish. Obamacare is a system partly run through private insurance companies (although expansion of Medicaid is also a very important piece). And some on the left were outraged, arguing that the program would do more to raise profits in the medical-industrial complex than it would to protect American families.

You can still argue that single-payer would have covered more people at lower cost – in fact, I would. But that option wasn't on the table; only a system that appeased insurers and reassured the public that not too much would change was politically feasible. And it's working reasonably well: Competition among insurers who can no longer deny insurance to those who need it most is turning out to be pretty effective. This isn't the health care system you would have designed from scratch, or if you could ignore special-interest politics, but it's doing the job.

And this big improvement in American society is almost surely here to stay. The conservative health care nightmare – the one that led Republicans to go all-out against Bill Clinton's health plans in 1993 and Obamacare more recently – is that once health care for everyone, or almost everyone, has been put in place, it will be very hard to undo, because too many voters would have a stake in the system. That's exactly what is happening. Republicans are still going through the motions of attacking Obamacare, but the passion is gone. They're even offering mealymouthed assurances that people won't lose their new benefits. By the time Obama leaves office, there will be tens of millions of Americans who have benefited directly from health reform – and that will make it almost impossible to reverse. Health reform has made America a different, better place.

Susan Walsh/AP

FINANCIAL REFORM

Let's be clear: The financial crisis should have been followed by a drastic crackdown on Wall Street abuses, and it wasn't. No important figures have gone to jail; bad banks and other financial institutions, from Citigroup to Goldman, were bailed out with few strings attached; and there has been nothing like the wholesale restructuring and reining in of finance that took place in the 1930s. Obama bears a considerable part of the blame for this disappointing response. It was his Treasury secretary and his attorney general who chose to treat finance with kid gloves.

It's easy, however, to take this disappointment too far. You often hear Dodd- Frank, the financial-reform bill that Obama signed into law in 2010, dismissed as toothless and meaningless. It isn't. It may not prevent the next financial crisis, but there's a good chance that it will at least make future crises less severe and easier to deal with.

Dodd-Frank is a complicated piece of legislation, but let me single out three really important sections.

First, the law gives a special council the ability to designate ''systemically important financial institutions'' (SIFIs) – that is, institutions that could create a crisis if they were to fail – and place such institutions under extra scrutiny and regulation of things like the amount of capital they are required to maintain to cover possible losses. This provision has been derided as ineffectual or worse – during the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney claimed that by announcing that some firms were SIFIs, the government was effectively guaranteeing that they would be bailed out, which he called ''the biggest kiss that's been given to New York banks I've ever seen.''

But it's easy to prove that this is nonsense: Just look at how institutions behave when they're designated as SIFIs. Are they pleased, because they're now guaranteed? Not a chance. Instead, they're furious over the extra regulation, and in some cases fight bitterly to avoid being placed on the list. Right now, for example, MetLife is making an all-out effort to be kept off the SIFI list; this effort demonstrates that we're talking about real regulation here, and that financial interests don't like it.

Another key provision in Dodd-Frank is ''orderly liquidation authority,'' which gives the government the legal right to seize complex financial institutions in a crisis. This is a bigger deal than you might think. We have a well-established procedure for seizing ordinary banks that get in trouble and putting them into receivership; in fact, it happens all the time. But what do you do when something like Citigroup is on the edge, and its failure might have devastating consequences? Back in 2009, Joseph Stiglitz and yours truly, among others, wanted to temporarily nationalize one or two major financial players, for the same reasons the FDIC takes over failing banks, to keep the institutions running but avoid bailing out stockholders and management. We got a chance to make that case directly to the president. But we lost the argument, and one key reason was Treasury's claim that it lacked the necessary legal authority. I still think it could have found a way, but in any case that won't be an issue next time.

A third piece of Dodd-Frank is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That's Elizabeth Warren's brainchild, an agency dedicated to protecting Americans against the predatory lending that has pushed so many into financial distress, and played an important role in the crisis. Warren's idea was that such a stand-alone agency would more effectively protect the public than agencies that were supposed to protect consumers, but saw their main job as propping up banks. And by all accounts the new agency is in fact doing much more to crack down on predatory practices than anything we used to see.

There's much more in the financial reform, including a number of pieces we don't have enough information to evaluate yet. But there's enough evidence even now to say that there's a reason Wall Street – which used to give an approximately equal share of money to both parties but now overwhelmingly supports Republicans – tried so hard to kill financial reform, and is still trying to emasculate Dodd-Frank. This may not be the full overhaul of finance we should have had, and it's not as major as health reform. But it's a lot better than nothing.

THE ECONOMY

Barack Obama might not have been elected president without the 2008 financial crisis; he certainly wouldn't have had the House majority and the brief filibuster-proof Senate majority that made health reform possible. So it's very disappointing that six years into his presidency, the U.S. economy is still a long way from being fully recovered.

Before we ask why, however, we should note that things could have been worse. In fact, in other times and places they have been worse. Make no mistake about it – the devastation wrought by the financial crisis was terrible, with real income falling 5.5 percent. But that's actually not as bad as the ''typical'' experience after financial crises: Even in advanced countries, the median post-crisis decline in per- capita real GDP is seven percent. Recovery has been slow: It took almost six years for the United States to regain pre-crisis average income. But that was actually a bit faster than the historical average.

Or compare our performance with that of the European Union. Unemployment in America rose to a horrifying 10 percent in 2009, but it has come down sharply in the past few years. It's true that some of the apparent improvement probably reflects discouraged workers dropping out, but there has been substantial real progress. Meanwhile, Europe has had barely any job recovery at all, and unemployment is still in double digits. Compared with our counterparts across the Atlantic, we haven't done too badly.

Did Obama's policies contribute to this less-awful performance? Yes, without question. You'd never know it listening to the talking heads, but there's overwhelming consensus among economists that the Obama stimulus plan helped mitigate the worst of the slump. For example, when a panel of economic experts was asked whether the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus, 82 percent said yes, only two percent said no.

Still, couldn't the U.S. economy have done a lot better? Of course. The original stimulus should have been both bigger and longer. And after Republicans won the House in 2010, U.S. policy took a sharp turn in the wrong direction. Not only did the stimulus fade out, but sequestration led to further steep cuts in federal spending, exactly the wrong thing to do in a still-depressed economy.

We can argue about how much Obama could have altered this literally depressing turn of events. He could have pushed for a larger, more extended stimulus, perhaps with provisions for extra aid that would have kicked in if unemployment stayed high. (This isn't 20-20 hindsight, because a number of economists, myself included, pleaded for more aggressive measures from the beginning.) He arguably let Republicans blackmail him over the debt ceiling in 2011, leading to the sequester. But this is all kind of iffy.

The bottom line on Obama's economic policy should be that what he did helped the economy, and that while enormous economic and human damage has taken place on his watch, the United States coped with the financial crisis better than most countries facing comparable crises have managed. He should have done more and better, but the narrative that portrays his policies as a simple failure is all wrong.

While America remains an incredibly unequal society, and we haven't seen anything like the New Deal's efforts to narrow income gaps, Obama has done more to limit inequality than he gets credit for. The rich are paying higher taxes, thanks to the partial expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the special taxes on high incomes that help pay for Obamacare; the Congressional Budget Office estimates the average tax rate of the top one percent at 33.6 percent in 2013, up from 28.1 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, the financial aid in Obamacare – expanded Medicaid, subsidies to help lower-income households pay insurance premiums – goes disproportionately to less-well-off Americans. When conservatives accuse Obama of redistributing income, they're not completely wrong – and liberals should give him credit.

THE ENVIRONMENT

In 2009, it looked, briefly, as if we might be about to get real on the issue of climate change. A fairly comprehensive bill establishing a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse-gas emissions actually passed the House, and visions of global action danced like sugarplums in environmentalists' heads. But the legislation stalled in the Senate, and Republican victory in the 2010 midterms put an end to that fantasy. Ever since, the only way forward has been through executive action based on existing legislation, which is a poor substitute for the new laws we need.

But as with financial reform, acknowledging the inadequacy of what has been done doesn't mean that nothing has been achieved. Saying that Obama has been the best environmental president in a long time is actually faint praise, since George W. Bush was terrible and Bill Clinton didn't get much done. Still, it's true, and there's reason to hope for a lot more over the next two years.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

First of all, there has been much more progress on the use of renewable energy than most people realize. The share of U.S. energy provided by wind and solar has grown dramatically since Obama took office. True, it's still only a small fraction of the total, and some of the growth in renewables reflects technological progress, especially in solar panels, that would have happened whoever was in office. But federal policies, including loan guarantees and tax credits, have played an important role.

Nor is it just about renewables; Obama has also taken big steps on energy conservation, especially via fuel-efficiency standards, that have flown, somewhat mysteriously, under the radar. And it's not just cars. In 2011, the administration announced the first-ever fuel-efficiency standards for medium and heavy vehicles, and in February it announced that these standards would get even tougher for models sold after 2018. As a way to curb green house-gas emissions, these actions, taken together, are comparable in importance to proposed action on power plants.

Which brings us to the latest initiative. Because there's no chance of getting climate-change legislation through Congress for the foreseeable future, Obama has turned to the EPA's existing power to regulate pollution – power that the Supreme Court has affirmed extends to emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. And this past summer, the EPA announced proposed rules that would require a large reduction over time in such emissions from power plants. You might say that such plants are only a piece of the problem, but they're a large piece – CO2 from coal-burning power plants is in fact a big part of the problem, so if the EPA goes through with anything like the proposed rule, it will be a major step. Again, not nearly enough, and we'll have to do a lot more soon, or face civilization-threatening disaster. But what Obama has done is far from trivial.

NATIONAL SECURITY

So far, i've been talking about Obama's positive achievements, which have been much bigger than his critics understand. I do, however, need to address one area that has left some early Obama supporters bitterly disappointed: his record on national security policy. Let's face it – many of his original enthusiasts favored him so strongly over Hillary Clinton because she supported the Iraq War and he didn't. They hoped he would hold the people who took us to war on false pretenses accountable, that he would transform American foreign policy, and that he would drastically curb the reach of the national security state.

None of that happened. Obama's team, as far as we can tell, never even considered going after the deceptions that took us to Baghdad, perhaps because they believed that this would play very badly at a time of financial crisis. On overall foreign policy, Obama has been essentially a normal post-Vietnam president, reluctant to commit U.S. ground troops and eager to extract them from ongoing commitments, but quite willing to bomb people considered threatening to U.S. interests. And he has defended the prerogatives of the NSA and the surveillance state in general.

Could and should he have been different? The truth is that I have no special expertise here; as an ordinary concerned citizen, I worry about the precedent of allowing what amount to war crimes to go not just unpunished but uninvestigated, even while appreciating that a modern version of the 1970s Church committee hearings on CIA abuses might well have been a political disaster, and undermined the policy achievements I've tried to highlight. What I would say is that even if Obama is just an ordinary president on national security issues, that's a huge improvement over what came before and what we would have had if John McCain or Mitt Romney had won. It's hard to get excited about a policy of not going to war gratuitously, but it's a big deal compared with the alternative.

SOCIAL CHANGE

In 2004, social issues, along with national security, were cudgels the right used to bludgeon liberals – I like to say that Bush won re-election by posing as America's defender against gay married terrorists. Ten years later, and the scene is transformed: Democrats have turned these social issues – especially women's rights – against Republicans; gay marriage has been widely legalized with approval or at least indifference from the wider public. We have, in a remarkably short stretch of time, become a notably more tolerant, open-minded nation.

Barack Obama has been more a follower than a leader on these issues. But at least he has been willing to follow the country's new open-mindedness. We shouldn't take this for granted. Before the Obama presidency, Democrats were in a kind of reflexive cringe on social issues, acting as if the religious right had far more power than it really does and ignoring the growing constituency on the other side. It's easy to imagine that if someone else had been president these past six years, Democrats would still be cringing as if it were 2004. Thankfully, they aren't. And the end of the cringe also, I'd argue, helped empower them to seek real change on substantive issues from health reform to the environment. Which brings me back to domestic issues.

As you can see, there's a theme running through each of the areas of domestic policy I've covered. In each case, Obama delivered less than his supporters wanted, less than the country arguably deserved, but more than his current detractors acknowledge. The extent of his partial success ranges from the pretty good to the not-so-bad to the ugly. Health reform looks pretty good, especially in historical perspective – remember, even Social Security, in its original FDR version, only covered around half the workforce. Financial reform is, I'd argue, not so bad – it's not the second coming of Glass-Steagall, but there's a lot more protection against runaway finance than anyone except angry Wall Streeters seems to realize. Economic policy wasn't enough to avoid a very ugly period of high unemployment, but Obama did at least mitigate the worst.

And as far as climate policy goes, there's reason for hope, but we'll have to see.

Am I damning with faint praise? Not at all. This is what a successful presidency looks like. No president gets to do everything his supporters expected him to. FDR left behind a reformed nation, but one in which the wealthy retained a lot of power and privilege. On the other side, for all his anti-government rhetoric, Reagan left the core institutions of the New Deal and the Great Society in place. I don't care about the fact that Obama hasn't lived up to the golden dreams of 2008, and I care even less about his approval rating. I do care that he has, when all is said and done, achieved a lot. That is, as Joe Biden didn't quite say, a big deal.

Another TPP lie exposed: How Medicare is getting stiffed in Obama’s massive trade deal

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Wed, 20 May 2015 14:11:00 +0000

SALON

Tuesday, May 19, 2015 06:00 AM EDT

Another TPP lie exposed: How Medicare is getting stiffed in Obama’s massive trade deal

The administration has undermined the public trust in its campaign to pass TPP yet again

David Dayen Follow

Topics: Trans-Pacific Partnership, Barack Obama, Paul Krugman, Trade agreements, TPP, Medicare, News, Politics News

(Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

In their bid to sell a skeptical Democratic Party on a free trade agenda, the Obama Administration has insisted that no U.S. laws would change as a result. “Our trade agreements would not weaken our ability to implement the law now or in the future,” Treasury Department spokeswoman Whitney Smith told Bloomberg. Top White House officials contended to Politico that the “fast-track” trade bill “expressly forbids changing U.S. law.” As I said last week, this is only partially true, at best. In fact, the companion bill to fast track itself does include a change to U.S. law, paying for assistance for workers who lose their jobs from trade deals — by cutting medical assistance to the elderly.

The Senate will consider two companion trade bills this week. There’s the fast-track bill, which would allow any president over the next six years to negotiate trade agreements and get an expedited Congressional vote, without amendments or filibusters. And there’s also trade adjustment assistance (TAA), a bill that provides federal funds for workers displaced by free trade agreements. Workers receive job training and placement services, relocation expenses, income support, and help with health insurance premiums.

There’s substantial disagreement on whether TAA actually helps workers get new jobs, but Democrats strongly support the program. Even pro-trade Democrats made renewing TAA a condition of passing fast track, and the two bills will move together in the Senate this week. But even though supporters constantly talk up the economic benefits of trade, they nevertheless offset the $2.9 billion in TAA funding by cutting other spending. Supposedly, trade increases jobs and therefore federal revenue, leaving enough money available to pay for TAA. But in Congress’ eyes, some other priority has to pony up that cash nonetheless.

That priority happens to be Medicare. TAA is partially financed through $700 million in Medicare cuts. Sequestration expires in fiscal year 2024, but the TAA bill expands it by piling those cuts onto the back end. Most of the other $2.2 billion gets financed through customs user fees.

Let’s keep some perspective: these cuts are very small. Medicare spent $492 billion in fiscal year 2013, so you’re talking about a bit more than 1/1000th of the cost. But it’s true that this continues a very dangerous precedent: When anyone in Congress wants to pay for something, they just push sequestration out a bit more or expand it a hair, chipping away at social services and essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul. This has happened twice before; once to pay for the Ryan-Murray budget, and once to pay for reversing pension cuts for veterans. Sequestration was only supposed to last until 2021; after TAA, the date would be pushed out to 2024 and counting.

As National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare President and CEO Max Richtman told the National Journal, “Apparently using Medicare as a piggy bank to pay for everything under the sun has become the new legislative norm for Congress.” The signature single-payer health care program for seniors has become a Congressional slush fund.

The other problem here is that it fundamentally breaks that promise — already, before any vote on the Trans-Pacific Partnership or any other fast-tracked agreement — that no laws will change in this new era of corporate-friendly “free trade.” This continues a troubling trend, identified by Paul Krugman, about not being able to trust the White House’s categorical denials about the consequences of their trade agenda. They said the investor-state dispute settlement process couldn’t weaken regulatory priorities; that’s not true. They said Dodd-Frank would be protected in any trade deals; that’s not true either. To quote Krugman, “The Administration is in effect saying trust us, then repeatedly bobbling questions about the deal in a way that undermines that very trust.” The Medicare cuts represent another drop in that bucket.

These cuts have been part of the TAA bill for a while: The American Hospital Association and American Medical Association formally opposed the bill on those grounds back in April. But progressive groups have added to that alarm in recent days. Democracy for America called it a “brand new attack on Medicare,” and urged supporters to contact Senators to stop it.

Every hit on the credibility of the free trade agenda makes it less likely that the bill will pass the House. Republicans claim they are gaining momentum in picking up votes, but all public whip counts show the tally coming up short. Adding Medicare cuts into the mix makes voting for fast track an even heavier lift for the House Democrats likely needed to get the bill the required votes. Republicans have repeatedly torched Democrats for Medicare cuts in campaign ads. They cannot relish giving another opening for that attack.

The situation really shows that trade supporters don’t have any belief that their system will work for everyday Americans. If free trade is such an economic benefit for the United States, then re-allocating some of that benefit so workers on the wrong side can recoup a sliver of their losses still allows everyone to come out ahead. But they feel compelled to pay for that assistance, perhaps because they aren’t confident that the benefits of trade will ever get past corporate executives and into the hands of American workers or consumers. If pro-free traders can’t be trusted on this point – the entire rationale for enacting their program – what can they be trusted on?

David Dayen is a contributing writer for Salon. Follow him on Twitter at @ddayen.

Obama launches tax ploy against GOP

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 15:13:00 +0000

ALJAZEERA AMERICA

Obama launches tax ploy against GOP

State of the Union address pushes tax reforms to set stage for 2016 electoral fight

January 21, 2015 2:00AM ET

by David Cay Johnston @DavidCayJ

The most political law in America is the federal tax code. Far from being grounded in sound economics and the Constitutional duty to promote the general welfare, it’s shaped by influence won with campaign contributions and lobbying. We are about to see just how political tax law is thanks to a savvy move by President Barack Obama to frame the 2016 election in ways that will help Democrats keep the White House.

In his State of the Union address, the president proposed a host of tax ideas Republicans have long advocated in order to force them to choose between Main Street and Wall Street. He believes they will side with the rich, whose campaign donations are increasingly significant in elections and whose companies provide jobs for friends and family of politicians.

But the president’s strategy is not full-proof. There is a clever way for congressional Republicans to turn his proposal into a trap for the Democrats.

Obama’s tax plan

Obama’s proposals are pro children, family, savings and work. He would prevent a scheduled 11-percent tax increase in 2017 for full-time workers earning the minimum wage. He also wants tax simplifications that the IRS Taxpayer Advocate — a post that GOP lawmakers created in 1998 — has urged annually, to no avail.

Top Congressional Republicans immediately dismissed these proposals. Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said Obama was fomenting “class warfare.” Rep. Charles Boustany, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, called Obama’s proposals “just another poke in the eye at Republicans.”

The president’s plan, which has no chance of adoption by the Republican majorities in the House and Senate, would raises taxes on the top half of one percent to benefit those in the middle class who pay taxes plus individuals among the working poor.

Obama’s proposals would cost $230 billion over ten years — less than $2 billion per month. The cost of this modest tax relief for middle class Americans would be paid by raising taxes at the top by $320 billion — a bit more than $2.6 billion per month.

The net effect would be to further reduce the federal budget deficit.
Republicans have steadily hammered Obama for increasing the federal debt even though on his watch the annual federal budget shortfall, the deficit, has fallen from 10 percent of the economy to under 3 percent. By the time Obama leaves office in two years the budget may even be in surplus for the first time since Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Polling suggests that Americans are increasingly aware of rampant inequality, especially as their own fortunes decline.

Most of the Obama tax increases would fall on people who inherited their wealth and those with incomes of more than $2 million — roughly the top tenth of one percent. Obama would raise the capital gains tax rate on incomes above $500,000 to 28 percent, the rate signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Only the top half of one percent would be affected by this increase, which would not apply to salaries.

He also wants capital gains taxes paid on appreciated assets people inherit, closing what the White House calls the “trust fund loophole.”

Obama’s proposals have popular support. Large majorities of Americans, polls show, believe the best off Americans should pay more taxes. Surveys report that many Republicans favor high taxes on the rich, including one in which more than half of Republicans supported a 50-percent tax rate on incomes of more than $1 million annually.

Growing inequality

Such polling suggests that Americans are increasingly aware of rampant inequality, especially as their own fortunes decline. Obama’s State of the Union address came the day after OxFam, the British charity, issued a report showing that next year more than half of the planet’s wealth will be owned by just 1 percent of the global population. Credit Suisse, in its own report on inequality, said that just 80 people own as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people.
This growing concentration of wealth is largely driven by government policies, including reducing tax rates on the highest incomes, radically reducing audits of the wealthy and of corporations and a plethora of complex regulatory rules that take from the many to benefit the few, all of which I have been exposing for two decades.

In America real per capita income was $1,000 less in 2012 than in 2000. The same period saw a severe narrowing of stock and bond ownership. The number of taxpayers reporting capital gains, for example, fell from 1 in 8 in 2000 to 1 in 15 in 2012. The total share of dividends going to Americans making $2 million or more rose from 50 to 62 percent in that time period.

Inequality has become such a major issue that even former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney sought last week to remake himself into an economic populist as he readies a possible third campaign for the White House. “Under President Obama the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty in American than ever before,” Romney said to Republican National Committee members in San Diego on Jan. 16.

Republican strategy

If the Republicans instead follow the lead of Hatch, Boustany and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, it will enable Democrats in the 2016 elections to pillory them as tools of the plutocrats with no real concern for most Americans.

That may not help much in House races, where gerrymandering by state legislatures has corralled Democrats and their allies into highly concentrated districts. But it could provide a big boost in 2016 for Senate races and the race for the White House, where demographic factors favor the Democrats.
But Republicans could turn the tables on the president if they think strategically. Instead of dismissing the proposals, they could strip out the tax increases on the wealthy in the bill and pass the rest of it as presented.

That would put Obama in the hot seat. He could veto the bill because the tax relief for the middle class would not be paid for from higher taxes on the wealthy, but that decision might anger middle-class voters who wanted lower taxes. Or he could sign it, leaving the rich with their tax breaks and risking public scorn for lacking a set of principles while also allowing the federal budget deficit to increase.

However this fight goes, keep in mind that what we will witness is not real tax reform, tax simplification or basing tax burdens on the common sense principle of ability to pay. It’s all about electoral politics.

David Cay Johnston, an investigative reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize while at The New York Times, teaches business, tax and property law of the ancient world at the Syracuse University College of Law. He is the best-selling author of “Perfectly Legal,” “Free Lunch” and “The Fine Print” and editor of the new anthology “Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality.”

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.

Obama ditches the centrists: How a break from neoliberalism boosted his popularity

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 15:43:00 +0000

SALON

Saturday, Jan 17, 2015 08:00 AM EST

Obama ditches the centrists: How a break from neoliberalism boosted his popularity

The president's more popular than he's been in nearly two years. Here's why that should have neoliberals scared

Elias Isquith Follow

Topics: Andrew Sullivan, Jonathan Chait, sam wang, neoliberalism, Rahm Emanuel, Andrew Cuomo, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, Third Way, Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, Ronald Reagan, Editor's Picks, Media News, News, Politics News

Andrew Cuomo, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel (Credit: AP/Mike Groll/Reuters/Junko Kimura-Matsumoto/Larry Downing/Photo montage by Salon)

For quite some time now, the media’s desire to see the American economy return to its ’90s-era peak — or at least improve enough to be safely ignored in favor of a new overarching narrative — has been nearly palpable. Which is why it’s not shocking to see how a spate of good news about the economy has changed the conventional wisdom about the President Obama’s record, with “objective” reporters describing him as on the rebound, and with his most ardent defenders busting out superlatives like it’s 2008. Andrew Sullivan is once again calling him the center-left version of Ronald Reagan. And Jonathan Chait believes history will ultimately recognize his performance as not just good but capital-G great. That’s that, I guess; do we really need to bother with the rest of his second term?

Even though I snark, and even though the persistence of stagnant wages means we’re still experiencing a McJobs recovery, it’s certainly true that the president’s followed his second midterm shellacking with a surprisingly good few weeks. His poll numbers are looking better than they have in almost two years, and Princeton election analyst Sam Wang says it’s “a real phenomenon,” not a fluke. But while Sullivan, and especially Chait, write as if Obama’s comeback were basically inevitable, I think there’s a case to be made that the president’s rising popularity — while certainly due in part to his decision to enact less crippling austerity than the Eurozone has and Republicans wanted — has more to do with recent actions of his that were a break from the approach that defined most of his second (and nearly all of his first) term.

Before I describe that change, though, I want to make a few things clear up front, so nobody gets the wrong idea. As Chait partially acknowledges, and as any political scientist will tell you, Americans give their presidents entirely too much blame and credit for the state of the economy (usually their No. 1 metric), which is often considerably outside any politician’s immediate control. What’s more, there’s reason to believe that at least some part of Obama’s recent good fortune owes to the plummeting price of oil, which despite what politicians of both parties tell you when they’re campaigning, has essentially nothing to do with whatever’s happening in the Oval Office. Last but not least, the president’s approval rating is not the product of an exact science; it’s more like a blurry snapshot of a moment in time. So we shouldn’t conclude too much from the recent polling, one way or another.
All that said, both Wang’s data and an anecdotal impression of recent (not-conservative) media will tell you that Obama’s ascending popularity kicked off sometime between late November and mid-December. Not incidentally, this was also the period when the president began not only acting more aggressively in terms of using his power unilaterally, which he’s actually been doing in some form or another since last year, if not earlier, but also supporting policies that could be easily characterized as typically liberal. In November, he announced a major change in how the federal government handled undocumented immigrants, which predictably cost him support from working-class whites but further established his party as the pluralist, multicultural alternative to the overwhelmingly white GOP. And in December, he not only spoke more frankly about his blackness than he had at any point in his presidency, but also announced a break from a half-century-plus-old policy by taking steps to normalize relations with Cuba.

Having walked head-on toward what have historically been two of the Republicans’ most effective attacks on Democrats — the party’s association with nonwhites and its “softness” in the realm of foreign policy, especially regarding communists — Obama went even further in January by unveiling a plan to offer millions of Americans a college education for free. He did this despite the fact that the policy would easily be described by conservatives as promoting “big government” (as indeed it was), and despite the fact that the plan’s funding would be unapologetically redistributionist. Much more than the Affordable Care Act, which also relied on using high-end taxes to provide health insurance for the working class and the poor but did so through an embrace of subsidies and by relying on market incentives, Obama’s college plan represented a straightforward argument for having government do what a broken market could not. This was not a DLC, neoliberal-style proposal to encourage the market to act, through outsourcing and tax incentives. This was simply using government.

To many, that probably seems like a distinction without a difference. But that would only be true if the neoliberal model of deregulation, outsourcing, privatization and free trade that was made Democratic Party orthodoxy by Bill Clinton (and Labour Party orthodoxy by Tony Blair) could actually reach traditional liberal ends through traditionally conservative means. You’ll certainly be able to find those who disagree, but I believe the verdict is in, and it is negative. That doesn’t mean the era of neoliberal government is over, of course; there are still plenty of high-profile “New Democrats,” like Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo or the woman who is likely to be the party’s next presidential nominee. For that matter, Obama’s recent “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative and his continued support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade proposal show that he himself has hardly made a clean break from the “third way.”

Still, even if his steps are halting, and even if part of his willingness to flirt with old-fashioned liberalism stems from his knowledge that a GOP Congress all but ensures none of his proposals will come to pass during the rest of his term, Obama’s clearly begun to reverse the rightward drift his party has experienced over the past generation. (Or at the very least, he hasn’t been an implacable foe of those who’d like to reverse the trend further.) Posterity may look back at this as a far cry from the center-left Reagan and transformational president liberals dreamed of back in 2008, but American politics changes at a glacial pace, and if President Obama leaves office in 2016 with the mainstream to the left of where it was when he first started, that would be no small thing.

Elias Isquith is a staff writer at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith, and email him at eisquith@salon.com.

Obama Outperforms Reagan on Jobs, Growth and Investing

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Sun, 07 Sep 2014 18:06:00 +0000

FORBES

Obama Outperforms Reagan on Jobs, Growth and Investing

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) today issued America’s latest jobs report covering August. And it’s a disappointment. The economy created an additional 142,000 jobs last month. After 6 consecutive months over 200,000, most pundits expected the string to continue, including ADP which just yesterday said 204,000 jobs were created in August.

One month variation does not change a trend

Even though the plus-200k monthly string was broken (unless revised upward at a future date,) unemployment did continue to decline and is now reported at only 6.1%. Jobless claims were just over 300k; lowest since 2007. Despite the lower than expected August jobs number, America will create about 2.5 million new jobs in 2014.

And that is great news.

Back in May, 2013 (15 months ago) the Dow was out of its recession doldrums and hitting new highs. I asked readers if Obama could, economically, be the best modern President? Through discussion of that question, the #1 issue raised by readers was whether the stock market was a good economic barometer for judging “best.” Many complained that the measure they were watching was jobs – and that too many people were still looking for work.

To put this week’s jobs report in economic perspective I reached out to Bob Deitrick, CEO of Polaris Financial Partners and author of “Bulls, Bears and the Ballot Box” (which I profiled in October, 2012 just before the election) for some explanation. Since then Polaris’ investor newsletters have consistently been the best predictor of economic performance. Better than all the major investment houses.

This is the best private sector jobs creation performance in American history

Bob

Deitrick – “President Reagan has long been considered the best modern economic President. So we compared his performance dealing with the oil-induced recession of the 1980s with that of President Obama and his performance during this ‘Great Recession.’

As this unemployment chart shows, President Obama’s job creation kept unemployment from peaking at as high a level as President Reagan, and promoted people into the workforce faster than President Reagan.

President Obama has achieved a 6.1% unemployment rate in his 6th year, fully one year faster than President Reagan did. At this point in his presidency, President Reagan was still struggling with 7.1% unemployment, and he did not reach into the mid-low 6% range for another full year. So, despite today’s number, the Obama administration has still done considerably better at job creating and reducing unemployment than did the Reagan administration.

We forecast unemployment will fall to around 5.4% by summer, 2015. A rate President Reagan was unable to achieve during his two terms.”

What about the Labor Participation Rate?

Much has been made about the poor results of the labor participation rate, which has shown more stubborn recalcitrance as this rate remains higher even as jobs have grown.

Bob Deitrick: “The labor participation rate adds in jobless part time workers and those in marginal work situations with those seeking full time work. This is not a “hidden” unemployment. It is a measure tracked since 1900 and called ‘U6.’ today by the BLS.

As this chart shows, the difference between reported unemployment and all unemployment – including those on the fringe of the workforce – has remained pretty constant since 1994.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics – Databases, Tables and Calculators by Subject

Labor participation is affected much less by short-term job creation, and much more by long-term demographic trends. As this chart from the BLS shows, as the Baby Boomers entered the workforce and societal acceptance of women working changed, labor participation grew.

Now that ‘Boomers’ are retiring we are seeing the percentage of those seeking employment decline. This has nothing to do with job availability, and everything to do with a highly predictable aging demographic.

What’s now clear is that the Obama administration policies have outperformed the Reagan administration policies for job creation and unemployment reduction. Even though Reagan had the benefit of a growing Boomer class to ignite economic growth, while Obama has been forced to deal with a retiring workforce developing special needs. During the 8 years preceding Obama there was a net reduction in jobs in America. We now are rapidly moving toward higher, sustainable jobs growth.”

Economic growth, including manufacturing, is driving jobs

When President Obama took office America was gripped in an offshoring boom, started years earlier, pushing jobs to the developing world. Manufacturing was declining in America, and plants were closing across the nation.

This week the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) released its manufacturing report, and it surprised nearly everyone. The latest Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) scored 59, 2 points higher than July and about that much higher than prognosticators expected. This represents 63 straight months of economic expansion, and 25 consecutive months of manufacturing expansion.

New orders were up 3.3 points to 66.7, with 15 consecutive months of improvement and reaching the highest level since April, 2004 – 5 years prior to Obama becoming President. Not surprisingly, this economic growth provided for 14 consecutive months of improvement in the employment index. Meaning that the “grass roots” economy made its turn for the better just as the DJIA was reaching those highs back in 2013 – demonstrating that index is still the leading indicator for jobs that it has famously always been.

As the last 15 months have proven, jobs and economy are improving, and investors are benefiting

The stock market has converted the long-term growth in jobs and GDP into additional gains for investors. Recently the S&P has crested 2,000 – reaching new all time highs. Gains made by investors earlier in the Obama administration have further grown, helping businesses raise capital and improving the nest eggs of almost all Americans. And laying the foundation for recent, and prolonged job growth.

Bob Deitrick: While most Americans think they are not involved with the stock market, truthfully they are. Via their 401K, pension plan and employer savings accounts 2/3 of Americans have a clear vested interest in stock performance.

As this chart shows, over the first 67 months of their presidencies there is a clear “winner” from an investor’s viewpoint. A dollar invested when Reagan assumed the presidency would have yielded a staggering 190% return. Such returns were unheard of prior to his leadership.

However, it is undeniable that President Obama has surpassed the previous president. Investors have gained a remarkable 220% over the last 5.5 years! This level of investor growth is unprecedented by any administration, and has proven quite beneficial for everyone.

In 2009, with pension funds underfunded and most private retirement accounts savaged by the financial meltdown and Wall Street losses, Boomers and Seniors were resigned to never retiring. The nest egg appeared gone, leaving the ‘chickens’ to keep working. But now that the coffers have been reloaded increasingly people age 55 – 70 are happily discovering they can quit their old jobs and spend time with family, relax, enjoy hobbies or start new at-home businesses from their laptops or tablets. It is due to a skyrocketing stock market that people can now pursue these dreams and reduce the labor participation rates for ‘better pastures.”

Where myth meets reality

There is another election in just 8 weeks. Statistics will be bandied about. Monthly data points will be hotly contested. There will be a lot of rhetoric by candidates on all sides. But, understanding the prevailing trends is critical. Recognizing that first the economy, then the stock market and now jobs are all trending upward is important – even as all 3 measures will have short-term disappointments.

There are a lot of reasons voters elect a candidate. Jobs and the economy are just one category of factors. But, for those who place a high priority on jobs, economic performance and the markets the data clearly demonstrates which presidential administration has performed best. And shows a very clear trend one can expect to continue into 2015.

Economically, President Obama’s administration has outperformed President Reagan’s in all commonly watched categories. Simultaneously the current administration has reduced the deficit, which skyrocketed under Reagan.
Additionally, Obama has reduced federal employment, which grew under Reagan (especially when including military personnel,) and truly delivered a “smaller government.” Additionally, the current administration has kept inflation low, even during extreme international upheaval, failure of foreign economies (Greece) and a dramatic slowdown in the European economy.

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History says Democrats are better at growing the economy than Republicans
Investor returns have been better during Obama administration than any other presidency
Why Wall Street forecasters have consistently missed the Obama market run-up

Myth Busted: Republicans Wrong Again as Obamacare Premiums Set to Decrease in 2015

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Sat, 06 Sep 2014 18:59:00 +0000

Myth Busted: Republicans Wrong Again as Obamacare Premiums Set to Decrease in 2015

By: Trevor LaFaucimore from Trevor LaFauci

Saturday, September, 6th, 2014, 12:45 pm

Republicans were hoping that some great Obamacare news would slip out on a Friday afternoon and go completely unnoticed by the media.

They thought wrong.

This afternoon the non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation released a report projecting premium increases for the 2015 year under the Affordable Care Act. After years of double-digit increases, next year’s premiums will not only drop into single digits, but there will be an average decrease of premiums by roughly 0.8 percent. Overall the trends are clear: a few small states will show rate increases but large states, and more specifically large cities, are will show fairly small changes. Since the small states tend to show higher variation, they also don’t affect the overall average very much so when all is said and done there’s a very realistic chance the overall premium levels will be close to zero.

As Mother Jones puts it, this result is “genuinely stunning.”

The result should be especially stunning for our Republican friends who have insisted for five years that Obamacare would be unable to support itself in the long run. They deemed it a “death spiral” and insisted the program would be crushed under its own weight. For five years, they’ve insisted that the program would be unsustainable in the long run, with a major reason being the fact that premiums would increase to levels that would be unaffordable for the average American. In fact, as recently as May of this year, The Hill released a report stating that double-digit premium hikes were set to emerge for 2015.

Yet, despite these Chicken Little predictions, Obamacare has once again proven to be an unqualified success.

The reason for this is that Obamacare is doing exactly what it was intended to do. Despite the repeated doomsday predictions Republicans have given us for the past five years, the law is not only not failing, but it’s achieving a remarkable string of successes that even proponents of the law did not see coming. In fact, it’s doing so well that’s it has now entered what economist Paul Krugman has called a “life spiral.” Krugman explains that good news continues to breed more and more good news because “the huge surge in enrollments late in the day meant that the risk pool this year is better than insurers expected, and they now expect 2015 to be better still. Also, importantly, big enrollments mean that more insurers are entering the market, increasing competition. And, of course, the better the deal, the more people will sign up: success feeds success.”

In other words, the exact opposite of what Republicans predicted would happen.

Perhaps Ezra Klein said it best today, when he wrote:

Imagine taking a time machine back to 2010 and telling Republicans in Congress, who were arguing that the CBO was wildly underestimating Obamacare’s cost, that the law would be cheaper than predicted and, at least in the states that accepted its Medicaid dollars, cover more people than the Congressional Budget Office thought. After the laughing and mocking and the calling of security, let’s say you offered this prediction in the form of a bet. What odds do you think Obamacare’s critics would have offered? 2:1? 5:1? 10:1?

As both Klein and Krugman point out, our Republican friends were dead wrong about the law. Notice how little we have heard about the ACA the closer and closer we get to the mid-term elections. Republicans bet the farm on opposing Obamacare and history will show that the entire party opposed a law that was the most significant piece of social legislation in a generation. As more and more good news about the law continues to emerge, Republicans will do their best to pretend like they never opposed the law in the first place. In fact, now Republican governors like Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett are expanding Medicaid, and there are a handful of other states whose Republican governors are also considering doing the same. Governors like Rick Scott and Scott Walker, who openly denied their citizens Medicaid, are now facing the fight for their political lives.

Democrats have a tremendous opportunity to use Obamacare’s successes for the upcoming midterm elections. As the good news continues to pour in, Democrats should hammer their opponents, and especially sitting members of Congress, for continually using fear and propaganda to deny their constituents health care. For Democrats to win big in November, they need to continue to advocate for the people that the Affordable Care Act has helped the most: The working class. If Democrats can successfully appeal to this group and can honestly and openly say how Republicans continue to deny their fellow citizens health care out of political spite, then they should be able to successfully get people to the polls who are fed up with being consistently lied to and manipulated by the Republican Party.

If Democrats can do that, they will have made a compelling case for a blue House and Senate this fall.

93 Countries Who Have Changed Their Minds About Obama

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 19:23:00 +0000

NEWS & POLITICS

AlterNet / By Nicolas J.S. Davies

93 Countries Who Have Changed Their Minds About Obama

And 31 where he's less popular than George W. Bush—including Kenya.

April 29, 2014

Photo Credit: Pete Souza, The Obama-Biden Transition Project (l) / Wikimedia Commons; yourecoveredinbees (r); Screenshot / YouTube.co

During the Bush years, people all over the world were horrified by America's aggression, human rights abuses and militarism. By 2008, only one in three people around the world approved of the job performance of U.S. leaders. The election of President Obama broadcast his message of hope and change far beyond U.S. shores, and Gallup's 2009 U.S.-Global Leadership Project (USGLP) recorded a sharp rise in global public approval of U.S. leadership to 49 percent.

As in the U.S., the reality of Obama's policies has gradually eroded global approval of his leadership, which dropped to 41 percent in 2012 before rebounding to 46 percent in 2013. The 2013 USGLP report includes a caveat that Europe and other areas were surveyed in early 2013, soon after Obama's reelection and beforerevelations of NSA wire-tapping, so the improved 2013 figures may reflect a fleeting revival of hope rather than a favorable response to U.S. policy.

A closer look at the U.S.-Global Leadership Project report reveals an erosion of approval for U.S. leadership in countries all over the world since 2009. The specific question Gallup asks is, "Do you approve or disapprove of the job performance of the leadership of the United States?" Large numbers in some countries refuse to answer or express no opinion, masking unvoiced disapproval behind fear, deference or politeness. I don't believe that 71 percent of Vietnamese really have no opinion of U.S. global leadership. But the approval figures are probably not as flawed as the disapproval ones.

In 2008, a majority of respondents approved of the job performance of U.S. leaders in only 30 out of 109 countries. After Obama's election, this jumped to 54 out of 112 or almost half the countries surveyed. But, in the 2013 report, only 37 percent, 48 out of 130, still had majorities who approved of U.S. leadership. Overall, the number of people who approve of U.S. leadership has declined in 93 countries since 2009, as the impact of Obama's policies has gradually displaced his iconic image in people's minds.* In 31 countries, Obama's leadership approval figures have sunk below Bush's.**

The most striking drops in approval of U.S. leadership have come in Africa, where U.S. leadership has always enjoyed its highest approval ratings. The continent's high hopes for Obama may partly account for lower approval in 28 out of 34 countries compared to his "honeymoon" in 2009. But that doesn't explain why people in 15 out of 27 countries, or most of the continent, now rate U.S. leadership under Obama worse than under Bush. That even includes Kenya, the home of the Obama family. The enthusiasm Obama's election generated in Kenya and the rest of Africa led Africans to pay greater attention to U.S. policy, but what they discovered has left them severely disillusioned.

Europe was the continent that most unequivocally rejected Bush's leadership. Only 18 percent of Europeans approved of U.S. leadership in 2008, with approval falling as low as 8 percent in Austria and Belgium and 6 percent in Spain. Obama's charm offensive was also more effective in Europe than anywhere else, boosting approval to 47 percent in 2009. This fell back to 34 percent by 2012, but recovered to 41 percent in early 2013. But Gallup surveyed Europe in 2013 before Edward Snowden's revelations of NSA spying, and before Assistant Secretary Nulandorganized a coup in Ukraine, turning it into the latest battlefield in the global American war that so alienated Europeans during the Bush administration. So we'll have to wait for the 2014 report for a read-out on Europe's reaction to mass wiretapping and "Fuck the E.U." regime change.

The approval rating of U.S. leadership in Asia varies a lot but has grown along with the region's economic growth, to 45 percent in 2013, also sweetening the global approval ratings. Latin America looks more like Europe, with a 34 percent rating in the Americas at the end of the Bush administration spiking to 53 percent in 2009, declining to 40 percent in 2013. Argentina rose from 11 percent in 2008 to 42 percent in 2009 but fell back to 19 percent in 2012 and 23 percent in 2013.

Barack Obama's 2008 campaign promises of hope and change have faded from the headlines around the world as they have in America. His foreign and military policy has conspicuously failed to make a clean break with the Bush policies that alienated so much of the human race. He has failed to close Guantanamo or to hold senior U.S. officials accountable for war crimes. He escalated the war in Afghanistan, where he has conducted 22,000 air strikes, along with hundreds of illegal drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. He has expanded special forces operations to an incredible 134 countriesand launched bloody proxy wars in Libya andSyria, reducing them to chaos and warlordism to rival Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama has overseen an evolution in U.S. war policy from mass military occupations to a greater reliance on covert operations, proxy wars and a naval buildup in the Pacific. But this evolution was dictated by the failed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of China rather than by any new vision Obama brought to U.S. policy. A President McCain would have followed roughly the same policy and likely committed many of the same crimes.

Obama's global charm offensive was always more about style than substance, and the substance behind the mask of "change" was "continuity.” Neither the American nor the global public would have submitted quietly to another George W. Bush. So the challenge for the power brokers of America's capitalist political system in 2008 was to find and promote a face and a voice that a jaded public would welcome but who would ensure continuity for Wall Street's control of the economy and America's relentless but ever more elusive quest for global military dominance. The pretense of change was essential to sidetrack and silence growing demands for actual changes in U.S. policy.

This was the challenge that defined Obama's inherently deceptive role as the new CEO of America Incorporated. How to change public perceptions without changing the underlying policies that they were based on? The U.S.-Global Leadership Project explicitly defines itself as a tool in such efforts. Its introduction reads, "The (USGLP) gives public- and private-sector leaders a better understanding of what is driving global views of U.S. leadership, creates a context for collaboration on how to improve those views, and enhances U.S. public and private global engagement efforts."

But the report does not suggest fundamental changes in U.S. policy. The authors implicitly accept that the views of the people they are polling have no voice in such matters. But U.S. leaders must "engage" with them to manufacture consent and minimize resistance to U.S. policy. This was precisely what American power brokers hired Barack Obama to do, and the USGLP is a useful report card on his performance.

The parameters of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy were first defined in 1992, to provide a stable and predictable framework for "public- and private-sector leaders" to exploit the power dividend gained by the collapse of the Soviet Union. They were spelled out in a "Defense Planning Guidance" document drafted by Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz and his assistant Scooter Libby, which was leaked to the New York Times in March 1992. The document was substantially revised to obscure its globally offensive implications before it was officially released a month later. But the policy framework outlined by Wolfowitz in 1992 was later codified in the Clinton administration's 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review and the 2002 National Security Strategy, which Senator Edward Kennedy described as "a call for 21st-century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept."

The policy Wolfowitz outlined in 1992 was to establish a world order in which the U.S. military would be so dominant and so ready to use overwhelming force that "potential competitors" would be discouraged "from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." Even NATO allies would be discouraged from acting independently of the U.S. or forming European security arrangements outside NATO. Once this policy was established, the U.S. would "sufficiently account for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order."

The 1992 "Defense Planning Guidance" implicitly violated the U.N. Charter's prohibition on the threat or use of force by threatening unilateral U.S. military force against "potential competitors." As the New York Times noted at the time, "the Pentagon document articulates the clearest rejection to date of collective internationalism, the strategy that emerged from World War II when the five victorious powers sought to form a United Nations that could mediate disputes and police outbreaks of violence."

During the Bush administration, the "neoconservative" political philosophy of Wolfowitz, Libby and their cabal came out of the shadows and became a target of widespread public criticism. The roots of U.S. aggression against Iraq were traced to the neoconservative "Project for the New American Century," founded in 1997 by Robert Kagan and William Kristol, the editor of the Murdoch-funded Weekly Standard. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Libby were all PNAC members.

But the role of Kagan's wife, Victoria Nuland, as the leader of the State Department/CIA team that organized the U.S. coup in Ukraine has drawn new attention to the fact that the neocons still hold positions of power and influence in Washington under Obama. The neocons today are not just influencing policy as an outside pressure group as they did with their "Team B" in the 1970s and PNAC in the 1990s. They remain comfortably ensconced in Obama's State Department, the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and corporate-funded Washington think-tanks.

Victoria Nuland was Deputy National Security Adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and then U.S. Ambassador to NATO. Hilary Clinton installed her as State Department spokesperson, and then John Kerry appointed her as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Her husband, PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan, works at the Brookings Institution, and he and Kristol have now co-founded the Foreign Policy Initiative, widely seen as the successor to PNAC and lampooned as, "The Project for the Rehabilitation of Neoconservatism."

But Robert Kagan doesn't seem to need rehabilitating. President Obama prepared for his State of the Union speech in January 2012 by studying Kagan's essay, "The Myth of American Decline" and discussing it paragraph by paragraph with network news anchors at a White House meeting. In contrast to the USGLP report, Kagan's essay completely fails to consider the point of view of anybody outside America, but of course that's not necessary in a propaganda piece for an American audience. Obama drew heavily on the essay in his speech, climaxing with a cheap applause line based on Kagan's wishful thinking, "Anyone who tells you that America is in decline, or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they're talking about."

Anther neocon with influence in the Obama administration is Kagan's brother Frederick.Frederick Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberlyis president of the Institute for the Study of War. They were among the principal advocates of escalation in Afghanistan in 2009 and their close relationships with Secretary Gates and Generals Petraeus and McChrystal gave them critical influence in Obama's decision to escalate and prolong the war.

Former PNAC director Bruce Jackson is the president of the Project on Transitional Democracies, dedicated to integrating Eastern Europe into the EU and NATO. Reuell Marc Gerecht, of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a former CIA officer in Iran, is one of the most strident voices in Washington urging U.S. aggression against Syria and Iran and working to torpedo diplomatic solutions to either crisis.

Carl Gershman and Vin Weber are president and chairman respectively of the National Endowment for Democracy, which laid the groundwork for the coup in Ukraine, spending more than $3.4 billion of our tax dollars on 85 projects there. Ron Paul has called NED, "an organization that uses U.S. tax money to actually subvert democracy, by showering funding on favored political parties or movements overseas."

But the influence of neoconservatism extends well beyond the cabal of neocons who rode in with the Bush administration. Despite failing every test in their application to the real world for 22 years, the policy framework and goals developed by Paul Wolfowitz in 1992 have become set in stone throughout Democratic and Republican administrations alike. The goal of U.S. military supremacy has become such an article of faith that rational alternatives are viewed as sacrilege or treason.

As Gabriel Kolko noted in "Century of War" in 1994, "options and decisions that are intrinsically dangerous and irrational become not only plausible but the only form of reasoning about war and diplomacy that is possible in official circles." There are no limits to the crimes that American exceptionalism can justify, and genuine compliance with the rule of law is viewed as an unthinkable existential threat to the new premises of American power.

The only way a government can maintain such an illegitimate position is by the most elaborate use of propaganda, deception and secrecy, both against its own people and the rest of the world. The Obama model has evolved beyond traditional propaganda with techniques of branding and image-making developed in the corporate public relations sector, not least to build a deep sense of trust into the iconic image of a hip, sophisticated president with strong roots in African-American and modern urban culture. The contrast between image and reality, which is such an essential element in Obama's role, represents a new achievement in "managed democracy," enabling him to continue and expand policies that are the polar opposite of the change his supporters thought they were voting for.

But this regime of secrecy, deception and propaganda is an essential feature of the neoconservative political philosophy that now drives the leadership of both major political parties. Leo Strauss, the intellectual godfather of the neocons, was a refugee from 1930s Germany who believed that any genuine effort to achieve "government of the people, by the people, for the people" was doomed to end as the Weimar Republic did in Germany with the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Strauss had a very dark Hobbesian view of human nature, which he justified with "secret" meanings he claimed were hidden in the works of Plato, Nietzsche and all philosophers. Strauss did not believe that the general public could handle the truth as he saw it, so that any system in which the public held real power would surely end in barbarism.

The Straussian solution to this imaginary problem is a system of "managed democracy," in which a privileged high priesthood or oligarchy monopolizes real power as it oversees a superficial structure of democracy and promotes patriotic and religious myths to ensure the loyalty of the public and the cohesion of society. Political scientist Sheldon Wolin has dubbed this "inverted totalitarianism." Because it is less openly offensive than "classical totalitarianism,” the inverted form may be more sustainable and therefore more successful in achieving a total concentration of wealth and power, paradoxically making it more insidious and dangerous than the classical totalitarianism the Straussians claim to be saving us from.

In her 1997 book, Leo Strauss and the American Right, Shadia Drury wrote,

Strauss believes that every culture and its morality are human fabrications designed by philosophers and other creative geniuses for the preservation of the herd. Because the truth is dark and sordid, Strauss maintains that the philosophic love of truth must remain the hidden preserve of the very few. But in their public posture, philosophers must pay lip service to the myths and illusions they have fabricated for the many. They must champion the immutability of truth, the universality of justice, and the selfless nature of goodness, while secretly teaching their acolytes that all truth is fabrication, that justice is doing good to friends and evil to enemies, and that the only good is one's own pleasure. The truth must be deliciously savored by the few, but it is surely dangerous for the consumption of the many.

If this sounds uncannily like the cynical attitude of the people who run America today, it is because we are now living under a neoconservative, Straussian political system, and President Obama, far from representing some sort of alternative, is a neoconservative, Straussian president. In fact, by drawing on the sensibility and tools of Hollywood and the advertising industry to carefully balance traditional appeals to patriotism and religiosity with urban identity politics and inclusive and populist rhetoric, Obama and the Clintons are more sophisticated and masterful practitioners of Straussian politics than Bush or Cheney ever were.

The 2013 U.S.-Global Leadership Project report is the latest evidence that you can fool all the people some of the time and some people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time. And yet fooling all the people all the time is precisely the Straussian model for American politics and government. Behind a smokescreen of democracy and American values, a capitalist political system recycles wealth into political power and vice versa. Behind a consumerist American Dream, a corporate command economy drives a concentration of wealth and power such as 20th-century totalitarians never imagined, supported by a corresponding explosion of poverty, debt and mass criminalization. And behind an endlessly waving flag, a militarized foreign policy wrecks country after country in the name of democracy.

If Leo Strauss was right, the American people will passively accept a diet of endless propaganda and deception fed to us by a wealthy, powerful high priesthood as they gorge themselves on the fruits of our labor. If he was wrong, we will reject Straussian politics, organize effectively to elect a very different political class, and ensure that they democratically represent us to build the better world we all know is possible. But the problems facing the world today will not wait very long for us to make up our minds whether Leo Strauss was right or wrong in his dark, disdainful view of who we are.

___________________

* Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Congo Brazzaville, Congo Kinshasa, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Liberia, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Palestine, Panama, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, Somaliland, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

** Afghanistan, Armenia, Chad, Colombia, Congo Brazzaville, Djibouti, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kenya, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Nicaragua, Nigeria, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, Zimbabwe.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of "Blood On Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq." Davies also wrote the chapter on "Obama At War" for the book, "Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader."

BP Gets an Anniversary Gift From the Obama Administration

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Sat, 19 Apr 2014 23:19:00 +0000

Published on Saturday, April 19, 2014 by Common Dreams

BP Gets an Anniversary Gift From the Obama Administration

by Richard Schiffman

This Sunday April 20th is the fourth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed 11 workers and dumped over 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over a three month period in 2010.

You wouldn't think that the London-based company that spilled the oil would get an anniversary gift from the federal government. But the Environmental Protection Agency has just given BP a big one. The EPA ruled that the corporation could start bidding on lucrative new oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico after having been suspended from doing any new business with the government ever since the accident.

That suspension was lifted on March 13th less than a week before the yearly government auction for drilling rights. The company whose negligence was responsible for the worst marine oil-spill in history won 43 new leases in the Gulf that is still fouled by million of gallons of unrecovered crude.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster was not the first time that BP was found culpable in a major accident. In 2005 the company was deemed criminally liable for a refinery explosion in Texas City which killed 15 people. Yet again in 2006, a Justice Department investigation found that BP had willfully ignored evidence of serious corrosion in its pipeline, which led in Alaska to the largest oil spill ever in the Arctic.

BP's critics say this was not just a run of bad luck, but the result of an ingrained corporate culture which routinely put profits above safety. In an interview, Tyson Slocum of the public interest group Public Citizen said: "If ordinary people are found guilty in three felony cases, they will be imprisoned-- suspension from contracts is a kind of corporate imprisonment."

However, under intense pressure from BP, which filed a lawsuit challenging the contract ban, and the British government, which filed a brief in the case criticizing the US for its action, the company was just granted a get-out-of-jail-free card by the Obama administration.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the head of the EPA suspension and debarment office which ordered the original ban against the oil giant, "retired" just days after the administration caved to BP's demand to end their 5-year criminal probation period early.

After the Gulf oil spill, there were calls in the environmental community and in Congress to reform the outdated regulatory system. "The last time that regulations for offshore drilling were written," says Slocum “was 1978. Deepwater wells, like the Deepwater Horizon were introduced in 1994. So what you've got is regulations for the typewriter age applying to IPhones."

In the aftermath of the disaster, Congress passed a bill in the summer of 2010 which called for a comprehensive reorganization of the Offshore Oil Agency, and for tougher new environmental standards. But, under pressure from the American Petroleum Institute that bill died in the Senate.

The Obama administration then took matters into its own hands calling for a temporary moratorium on drilling. By executive decree, the President reintroduced many of the same rules that had been included in the ill-fated bill. These rules, however, do not have the force of law and can be reversed by future administrations.

Moreover, the central problem, according to Slocum, remains: "Remember, we all watched in horror over a period of two and a half months how one of the largest and most profitable multinationals on the planet with some of the smartest engineers in the world had absolutely no idea how to cap that well... We still do not have clear certification that any driller-- whether they be BP or Exxon or Shell-- has the right equipment and the proven technology to stop a deepwater blowout."

Slocum says drillers need to be required by law to have equipment on hand to drill a relief well in case of a future blowout. And we also need to require companies to thoroughly test in advance critical equipment-- like the faulty blowout protector which malfunctioned to cause the Deepwater Horizon accident.

However, we're unlikely to get these critical regulations anytime soon. The American Petroleum Institute has said that they will oppose any efforts to impose new regulations on offshore drilling. One of the wealthiest and most powerful lobbies in Washington, the API generally gets what it asks for.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Richard Schiffman is the author of two books and a former journalist whose work has appeared in, amongst other outlets, the New York Times and on a variety of National Public Radio shows including Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

The Refusal of Democrats to Recognize that They've 'Been Had'

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Sun, 30 Mar 2014 01:53:00 +0000

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The Refusal of Democrats to Recognize that They've 'Been Had'

By Eric Zuesse (about the author) Permalink
Related Topic(s): Barack Obama; Democrats Progressive; Ideology Progressive; Obama Cabinet; Obama Effect; Obama Hope; Obamacare; President Barack Obama

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Barack Obama
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I am a Democrat, but I hold "Democratic" politicians to the same standards as I do ones who are self-professedly Republicans.

Sadly, only few Democrats do: they refuse to recognize that they voted for a Republican-at-heart in "progressive" sheep's clothing, a conservative who had pretended to be a progressive in order to win the Democratic Presidential nomination.

I learned about this closed-mindedness of liberals, by means of the reader-comments to my recent article at Huffington Post, "Obama: 'I Don't Care About the Public's Welfare'."

Respondents to it didn't challenge the facts that it summarized, which were damning in the view of any progressive -- and some even in the view of any non-fascist. Instead, these readers listed the good things that Obama has done as President, such as, "Rescuing the Auto Industry." Every President has done some good things. Such readers were simply refusing to believe that Obama is a liar and is at least as conservative as he is liberal. Instead, they diverted onto irrelevancies: onto the good things he has done, which have nothing to do with those bad things.

A real progressive doesn't avoid the truth, but instead faces and tries to understand the truth.

For example, the progressive magazine Mother Jones headlined on 25 August 2005, "Bush's Biggest Achievements," and listed four: "Humanitarian Aid in Africa," "Tsunami Relief," "Marine Protections," and "Executive Branch Diversity." Even that man who might have been America's worst-ever President, did some excellent things.

Oddly (and admirably), The American Conservative bannered on 5 February 2009, "Bush's Good Deed," and praised a different action by him, which also happened to be actually a progressive action that he had taken: "Bush's last -- it might seem his only -- good deed: rejection of an Israeli request for overflight permission and perhaps military assistance in bombing Iran's nuclear reactor. There's been very little about this in the mainstream press -- though it's the kind of major incident that history often turns on." That's correct.

Should we assume, therefore, that Bush was a good President? Of course, that would be silly.

My article didn't merely list a few middling-bad things that President Obama has intentionally done: it described many very-bad things he's done (not things done very badly -- very bad things), and then ended the litany with: "Anyone who doubts that Obama is a liar (except when addressing banksters in private), whose actual values are often the exact opposite of his sanctimonious public statements, should read not only the IG's report, but, regarding other issues, things such as," and I then linked to six more -- each of which, likewise, entailed Obama's intentionally doing things that were exactly contrary to his publicly expressed (and always more-liberal) stated objectives.

As to the question of why Obama would have entered politics in 1996 as a "Democrat," instead of a "Republican," perhaps the reason for this is he recognized that, after Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," starting in the 1970s, the likelihood for any person with a dark skin-color to win the Republican Presidential nomination was clearly nil; whereas in the Democratic Party, there would be lots of voters who would actually like the idea of voting the first Black into the White House. Being a "Democrat" was thus the only path by which a young black person in 1996 could realistically hope to become the U.S. President. To an ambitious black person entering politics in 1996, being a "Democrat" instead of a "Republican" was a no-brainer choice. And Obama is clearly not a no-brainer person: he could figure this out.

But Obama is no progressive. He isn't even much of a liberal. He is an enormously gifted politician. Unfortunately, part of that gift-set is a phenomenal ability to deceive.

This isn't to say that he's purely a conservative, either. Some of his remarks, such as the famous one about which the Romney campaign headlined against him "You Didn't Build That," were obviously stated by him with an actual progressive intent.

Obama told donors on 24 November 2013, "I'm not a particularly ideological person," and that statement by him was unfortunately true: he has never even thought seriously about his values, his ideology; he just accepts unquestioningly the ones that he has absorbed from the people around him, especially from the aristocrats who enabled him to receive a first-rate education. Not everything that he says is a lie.

Perhaps that will satisfy Obama-bots that he's okay, after all. Far from it.

At best, Obama is a bad President. And I say this as a progressive historian who respects, above all Presidents, the progressive Republican Abraham Lincoln, whose Party transformed into something very different and vastly more conservative practically as soon as he was murdered by an extreme conservative; and as one who respects almost as highly the progressive Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose impact on our entire world was more beneficial than that of any other leader in all of human history (if you consider what would the world be like if Hitler had won?), but who additionally has the unquestionable black mark on his record, of having rounded up and imprisoned Americans of Japanese descent for no good reason.

An authentic progressive applies the same standards, scientific standards, empirical facts, to everything, including human relations. But it seems that many people who consider themselves to be liberal or even progressive, are actually too filled with some kind of tribal loyalty (to "Democrats," in this instance), which prevents them from being that. To the extent they do, they're being conservative.

Perhaps that's not as bad as being a Republican, but it can turn out to be worse than being a Republican if what it means is that one will vote for a conservative like Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic Presidential nominee, which will mean that the nation will "choose" a conservative President no matter what.

Our main obligation as progressives is to do everything we can to assure that one of the two Parties' Presidential nominees will be a progressive; because, if we fail to do that, then we will have failed the country.

Anyone who relies upon a third-party candidate to deliver the nation a progressive as a serious contender for President, is entertaining a fantasy, not a strategy, because the two political parties are ideologically polarized so that the Democrat will inevitably be less fascist than the Republican, and no third-party candidate will stand a chance to win unless he's a billionaire who can fund his own campaign, which won't happen. (Nader's efforts, especially to get onto the states' ballots, were funded largely by big-money Republican donors, and it gave them a Bush "win" in 2000, so that's what happens when progressives bury their heads in the sand: bad news that turns into catastrophic history.)

----------

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity .

Obama plans to outspend Reagan on Nukes

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Sat, 22 Mar 2014 03:57:00 +0000

Obama plans to outspend Reagan on Nukes

Monday, March 17, 2014

Steve Breyman,, Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency

Barack Obama has outlined a nuclear weapon expansion plan that beats Ronald Reagan's 'Star Wars' debacle in both dollars and dangers.

The anti-nuclear movement spent much of the eighties resisting Ronald Reagan’s new Cold War, and his new nuclear weapons of all shapes and sizes. We pushed back against his giant ‘defense’ budgets and countered his harrowing rhetoric. We knew Star Wars was a scam, and the MX missile a danger. We grimaced at his appointments to key policy making positions, and scoffed at his insincere arms control efforts.

In the end, the tireless work of professional activists, plowshares heroes, and a handful of stalwart others who stayed in the anti-nuclear weapons movement trenches deserve some credit for preventing planetary incineration that seemed frighteningly close at the time (Gorbachev deserves some too). Although nukes were not abolished with the end of the Cold War, most of the rest of us nonetheless moved on to fight other evils, and to work on one or more better world construction projects.

Two recent events should serve to re-awaken this movement and return to this struggle. First is the situation in the Ukraine, where old Cold War Hawks have been re-animated to again advise nuclear armed leaders, East and West, to show 'strength' and beat their chests at one another.

The second call to action has received much less attention. President Obama released his FY 2015 budget on Tuesday, March 4. It asks for considerably more money (in constant dollars) for nuclear weapons maintenance, design and production than Reagan spent in 1985, the historical peak of spending on nukes: $8.608 billion dollars, not counting administrative costs (see graph below). The Los Alamos Study Group crunched the numbers for us.

Next year’s request tops this year’s by 7%. Should the President’s new Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative (OGSI) be approved, yet $504 million more would be available for warhead spending. The OGSI is $56 billion over and above the spending agreed to in the December 2013 two-year budget (unlikely to pass given that it’s an election year, would be paid for by increased taxes on the retirement funds of the rich, and reduced spending in politically dicey areas like crop insurance).

The US currently deploys some 4650 nuclear weapons. That these are mere dangerous remnants of the Cold War, and of no use to counter contemporary security threats, was confirmed by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s 2014 Worldwide Threat Assessment which said not a word about Russian nuclear weapons but instead focused on cyber threats, mass atrocities, and the extreme weather events attendant to climate change. (Yeah, Clapper is the guy who lied with impunity to Congress about NSA bulk data gathering on Americans; he’s probably not lying this time).

The Congressional Budget Office reports that current nuclear complex spending plans total $335 billion through FY2023. Then, believe it or not, the Pentagon and Department of Energy plan to begin replacing current weapons systems by new ones. There’s $100 billion to design and construct twelve new missile submarines, $81 billion for new strategic bombers, tens of billions for a new long-range cruise missile, a new ICBM, and revamped command and control infrastructure. Add to this the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plans for at least $60 billion to “extend the life” of current weapons, and more than $11 billion for the Uranium Processing Facility. None of these CBO figures factored in the usual cost overruns.

For the Administration to find record funds to invest in nuclear weapons in budget under so much political and fiscal pressure reveals how far Obama’s rhetoric has drifted from his actions.

Obama's Nuclear Contradiction

Increased lucre for the nuclear weapons complex maintains Obama’s inconsistency on the Bomb. He wrote his senior thesis at Columbia on the arms race and the nuclear freeze campaign. Two months after his first inauguration, he uttered these words in Prague: “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

The Pentagon’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review promised to avoid “new military missions or... new military capabilities” for nuclear weapons (don’t laugh, you’d be surprised how imaginative those guys can be). 2011 was even better: Obama signed the New START Treaty. It limits the number of operationally deployed nuclear warheads to 1550, a 30% decrease from the previous START Treaty, signed in 2002. New START also lowered limits on the number of launch platforms — ICBMs, ballistic missile launching subs, and nuke-equipped bombers.

At the same time, his State Department refuses—under first Hillary Clinton and now John Kerry—to present the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to the Senate for ratification out of timidity over expected resistance (never mind that the U.S. has essentially figured out ways to circumvent the Treaty’s spirit if not letter; the CTB was once the ‘holy grail’ for arms control and disarmament advocates).
That same State Department refrains—under both Hillary Clinton and John Kerry—from getting tough with Pakistan over its years-long obstruction of United Nations-sponsored negotiations over a global ban on the stuff needed to make bombs. (Pakistan is the country building them faster than any other; how about: ‘we’ll ground the killer drones in exchange for a fissile material cut-off?’). And Obama now wants to outspend Reagan on nuclear weapons maintenance, design and production.

Winding down nuclear weapons spending, and eventually abolishing the things (for which no negotiations are underway) has been the right thing to do since the first bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert in 1945. State Department support for the coup in Ukraine and the resultant saber rattling make it as urgent as ever.

~ Steve Breyman serves as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Ecology Branch of the Green Shadow Cabinet.

‘Most Transparent Administration Ever™’—Obama Administration Makes Mockery of Open Government

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 04:35:00 +0000

Published on Monday, March 17, 2014 by FireDogLake

‘Most Transparent Administration Ever™’—Obama Administration Makes Mockery of Open Government

by Kevin Gosztola

Days after President Barack Obama’s inauguration, he pledged to have his administration create an “unprecedented level of openness in government.” Then-chief of staff, Jack Lew, later contended the administration was the “most transparent administration ever.” At a rally in 2010, Obama told the public, “We have put in place the toughest ethics laws and toughest transparency rules of any administration in history.” But this slogan suggesting the Obama administration is the “most transparent” ever has been nothing but a marketing ploy, the product of an administration that Advertising Age recognized as “marketer of the year” in 2008.

US government photo.

The Associated Press conducted its annual review of government data related to the Freedom of Information Act. It found that the “government’s efforts to be more open about its activities last year were their worst since President Barack Obama took office.”

While the AP could not tell if the public was simply requesting more sensitive information than the previous year, the administration claimed a record number of “national security” exemptions. A record number of times the administration also withheld information and cited a “deliberative process” exemption, claiming it dealt with “decision-making behind the scenes” so could not be released.

“[T]he government more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully denied access to them, in 244,675 cases or 36 percent of all requests. On 196,034 other occasions, the government said it couldn’t find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the government determined the request to be unreasonable or improper,” according to the AP.

Plus, “Journalists and others who need information quickly to report breaking news fared worse than ever last year.”

…Blocking news organizations from urgently obtaining records about a government scandal or crisis — such as the NSA’s phone-records collection, Boston bombings, trouble with its health care website, the deadly shootings at the Washington Navy Yard or the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi — can delay uncovering significant developments until after decisions are made and the public’s interest has waned…

A request AP submitted for information on “contracts with public relations companies to promote Obama’s health care law” has been pending for over an year. The AP has also been waiting for over ten months to receive emails “between the IRS and outside Democratic super PACs about Tea Party groups.”
Agencies are taking longer to respond to requests too. The AP noted, “The Pentagon reported at least two requests still pending after 10 years and the CIA was still working on at least four requests from more than eight years ago.” (But, the White House, for some reason, claimed it was responding “more quickly” to FOIA requests. AP mentioned the White House did not elaborate on how it arrived at this conclusion.)

Some of the more stunning episodes in the administration’s efforts to be the “most transparent”—which in effect is more secretive—administration in history include conduct in the midst of disclosures from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had been fighting the administration for the release of information that would detail secret legal interpretations of a section of the PATRIOT Act. Once Snowden began to reveal details related to what the administration had kept secret, Director for National Intelligence James Clapper had the agency put up an “IC on the Record” Tumblr where documents could be posted. The administration disingenuously made it seem like it was voluntarily posting the documents, however, after Snowden’s disclosures began, a court ordered the administration to begin declassifying documents that EFF had requested.

The Justice Department fought the release of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion, which underpinned the PRISM program that Snowden revealed.
This year, in January, a case brought by EFF ended with a federal appeals court in Washington, DC, ruling that the Justice Department could keep Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions secret. EFF had sought the release of an opinion because it “purportedly allows the FBI to access the private call records of phone company subscribers without providing any legal process.” The New York Times reacted, “The office’s advice often serves as the final word on what the executive branch may legally do, and those who follow that advice are virtually assured that they will not face prosecution.”

Secret legal opinions have often been drafted to authorize illegal activity, such as torture, warrantless wiretapping and the killing of American citizens with drones. The Obama administration has succeeded in keeping legal opinions secret—essentially expanding a growing body of secret law (that was much growing even more vast before Snowden blew the whistle on top secret surveillance by the NSA).

However, the department did lose a lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). A federal appeals court ruled the department had tried to pervert freedom of information law with its preferred legal interpretation that government agencies were only required to communicate a “determination” on whether they would comply within 20 working days.

By law, as the court ruling described, “A FOIA requester must exhaust administrative appeal remedies before seeking judicial redress. But if an agency does not adhere to certain statutory timelines in responding to a FOIA request, the requester is deemed by statute to have fulfilled the exhaustion requirement.” That means the requester can appeal or sue the agency for the release of documents.

The administration effectively would have created a Catch-22 that further limited citizens’ ability to challenge government when agencies refused to release information.

The AP reported in June of last year, “The nation’s top special operations commander ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public.” This clearly appears to be a circumvention of freedom of information law.

The administration also refused requests for photos of bin Laden possibly because, according to a member of SEAL Team Six who was part of the raid, “Operator after operator took turns dumping magazines-worth of ammunition into Bin Laden’s body,” and, “When all was said and done, UBL had over a hundred bullets in him, by the most conservative estimate.”

The release of White House visitor logs was fought by the Obama administration, and the administration won in an appeals court last August.
According to the National Security Archive, “Nearly half (50 out of 101) of all federal agencies have still not updated their Freedom of Information Act regulations to comply with Congress’s 2007 FOIA amendments, and even more agencies (55 of 101) have FOIA regulations that predate and ignore President Obama’s and Attorney General Holder’s 2009 guidance for a ‘presumption of disclosure.’”

The administration seems to expend resources and energy trying to develop strategies to block the release of information to the public more than it spends working to fulfill its pledge to be transparent.

It would not release GPS location tracking memos that would have showed how the Justice Department interpreted the law in the aftermath of a major Supreme Court decision. (A court ruled in favor of this secrecy last week.)

For years now, the ACLU has been fighting the government in court as it maintains it should be able to conceal information on the “targeted killings” of three US citizens: Anwar al-Awlaki, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son, and Samir Khan.

The ACLU also has two other FOIA lawsuits the Obama administration has fought—one for the “legal and factual basis for its use of predator drones” and a lawsuit for information on a December 2009 missile strike the administration launched on al Majalah in Yemen, which killed dozens of civilians including 21 children.

As ProPublica outlined in November, even though Obama made some kind of a promise that his administration would share more information on drones, the groups considered to be “associated forces” of al Qaeda remain classified. Whether any compensation has been paid to drone victims is unknown. Sometimes it is hard to figure out if strikes are, in fact, US drone strikes because officials will not confirm them.

The administration has largely avoided confronting government secrecy, especially the culture in Washington, which reinforces such secrecy. That has made leaks of government information even more critical to enhancing the public’s understanding (but if Obama has his way, this flow of information will be stopped entirely too).

Gannett News noted recently, “A study by researchers at Penn State University found that government denials of the public’s requests for information increased during the first three years of the Obama administration compared to the last three years of the George W. Bush administration.”

Each year the Obama administration has become progressively worse at openness in government and yet it still promotes this illusion that it has this sterling record when it comes to transparency.

In the CIA’s fight against the Senate’s torture report, the administration has sought to invoke executive privilege to an alarming extent in order to cover up abuses.

Not only is the Obama administration not the “most transparent administration ever,” it has become the inverse of the “most transparent administration ever.” It is now one of the most secretive administrations ever, outpacing Bush in his commitment to keep government actions concealed from the public.

Kevin Gosztola is a writer and documentary filmmaker whose blog, The Dissenter, is posted at FireDogLake.

What Became of the Leader Many Wanted Obama to Be?

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 14:22:00 +0000

Visions

Tom Dispatch / By David Bromwich

What Became of the Leader Many Wanted Obama to Be?

Obama may now see himself to be something like a benevolent monarch — a king in a mixed constitutional system, where the duties of the crown are largely ceremonial.

Photo Credit: By United States Senate [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

March 9, 2014 |

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Like many days, March 3rd saw the delivery of a stern opinion by President Obama. To judge by recent developments in Ukraine, he said, Russia was putting itself “on the wrong side of history.” This might seem a surprising thing for an American president to say. The fate of Soviet Communism taught many people to be wary of invoking History as if it were one’s special friend or teammate. But Obama doubtless felt comfortable because he was quoting himself. “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent,” he said in his 2009 inaugural address, “know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” In January 2009 and again in March 2014, Obama was speaking to the world as its uncrowned leader.

For some time now, observers -- a surprisingly wide range of them -- have been saying that Barack Obama seems more like a king than a president. Leave aside the fanatics who think he is a “tyrant” of unparalleled powers and malignant purpose. Notions of that sort come easily to those who look for them; they are predigested and can safely be dismissed. But the germ of a similar conclusion may be found in a perception shared by many others. Obama, it is said, takes himself to be something like a benevolent monarch -- a king in a mixed constitutional system, where the duties of the crown are largely ceremonial. He sees himself, in short, as the holder of a dignified office to whom Americans and others may feel naturally attuned.

A large portion of his experience of the presidency should have discouraged that idea. Obama’s approval ratings for several months have been hovering just above 40%. But whatever people may actually think of him, the evidence suggests that this has indeed been his vision of the presidential office -- or rather, his idea of his function as a holder of that office. It is a subtle and powerful fantasy, and it has evidently driven his demeanor and actions, as far as reality permitted, for most of his five years in office.

What could have given Obama such a strange perspective on how the American political system was meant to work? Let us not ignore one obvious and pertinent fact. He came to the race for president in 2007 with less practice in governing than any previous candidate. At Harvard Law School, Obama had been admired by his professors and liked by his fellow students with one reservation: in an institution notorious for displays of youthful pomposity, Obama stood out for the self-importance of his “interventions” in class. His singularity showed in a different light when he was elected editor of the Harvard Law Review -- the first law student ever to hold that position without having published an article in a law journal. He kept his editorial colleagues happy by insisting that the stance of the Review need not be marked by bias or partisanship. It did not have to be liberal or conservative, libertarian or statist. It could be “all of the above.”

This pattern -- the ascent to become presider-in-chief over large projects without any encumbering record of commitments -- followed Obama into a short and uneventful legal career, from which no remarkable brief has ever been cited. In an adjacent career as a professor of constitutional law, he was well liked again, though his views on the most important constitutional questions were never clear to his students. The same was true of his service as a four-term Illinois state senator, during which he cast a remarkable number of votes in the noncommittal category of “present” rather than “yea” or “nay.” Finally, the same pattern held during his service in the U.S. Senate, where, from his first days on the floor, he was observed to be restless for a kind of distinction and power normally denied to a junior senator.

Extreme caution marked all of Obama’s early actions in public life. Rare departures from this progress-without-a-trail -- such as his pledge to filibuster granting immunity to the giants of the telecommunications industry in order to expose them to possible prosecution for warrantless surveillance -- appear in retrospect wholly tactical. The law journal editor without a published article, the lawyer without a well-known case to his credit, the law professor whose learning was agreeably presented without a distinctive sense of his position on the large issues, the state senator with a minimal record of yes or no votes, and the U.S. senator who between 2005 and 2008 refrained from committing himself as the author of a single piece of significant legislation: this was the candidate who became president in January 2009.

The Man Without a Record

Many of these facts were rehearsed in the 2008 primaries by Hillary Clinton. More was said by the Republicans in the general election. Yet the accusations were thrown onto a combustible pile of so much rubbish -- so much that was violent, racist, and untrue, and spoken by persons manifestly compromised or unbalanced -- that the likely inference was tempting to ignore. One could hope that, whatever the gaps in his record, they would not matter greatly once Obama reached the presidency.

His performance in the campaign indicated that he had a coherent mind, did not appeal to the baser passions, and was a fluent synthesizer of other people’s facts and opinions. He commanded a mellow baritone whose effects he enjoyed watching only a little too much, and he addressed Americans in just the way a dignified and yet passionate president might address us. The contrast with George W. Bush could not have been sharper. And the decisiveness of that contrast was the largest false clue to the political character of Obama.

He was elected to govern when little was known about his approach to the practical business of leading people. The unexplored possibility was, of course, that little was known because there was not much to know. Of the Chicago organizers trained in Saul Alinsky’s methods of community agitation, he had been considered among the most averse to conflict. Incongruously, as Jeffrey Stout has pointed out in Blessed Are the Organized, Obama shunned “polarization” as a valuable weapon of the weak. His tendency, instead, was to begin a protest by depolarizing. His goal was always to bring the most powerful interests to the table. This should not be dismissed as a temperamental anomaly, for temperament may matter far more in politics than the promulgation of sound opinions. The significance of his theoretical expertise and practical distaste for confrontation would emerge in the salient event of his career as an organizer.

As Obama acknowledged in a revealing chapter of his memoir, Dreams from My Father, the event in question had begun as a protest with the warmest of hopes. He was aiming to draw the attention of the Chicago housing authority to the dangers of asbestos at Altgeld Gardens, the housing project where he worked. After a false start and the usual set of evasions by a city agency, a public meeting was finally arranged at a local gymnasium. Obama gave instructions to two female tenants, charged with running the meeting, not to let the big man from the city do too much of the talking. He then retired to the back of the gym.
The women, as it turned out, lacked the necessary skill. They taunted and teased the city official. One of them dangled the microphone in front of him, snatched it away, and then repeated the trick. He walked out insulted and the meeting ended in chaos. And where was Obama? By his own account, he remained at the back of the room, waving his arms -- too far away for anyone to read his signals. In recounting the incident, he says compassionately that the women blamed themselves even though the blame was not all theirs. He does not say that another kind of organizer, seeing things go so wrong, would have stepped forward and taken charge.

“I Can’t Hear You”

“Leading from behind” was a motto coined by the Obama White House to describe the president’s posture of cooperation with NATO, when, after a long and characteristic hesitation, he took the advice of Hillary Clinton’s State Department against Robert Gates’s Defense Department and ordered the bombing of Libya. Something like that description had been formulated earlier by reporters covering his distant and self-protective negotiations with Congress in the progress of his health-care law. When the phrase got picked up and used in unexpected ways, his handlers tried to withdraw it. Leading from behind, they insisted, did not reflect the president’s real attitude or the intensity of his engagement.

In Libya, all the world knew that the planning for the intervention was largely done by Americans, and that the missiles and air cover were supplied by the United States. Obama was the leader of the nation that was bringing down yet another government in the Greater Middle East. After Afghanistan and Iraq, this marked the third such American act of leadership since 2001. Obama, however, played down his own importance at the time; his energies went into avoiding congressional demands that he explain what sort of enterprise he was leading.
By the terms of the 1973 War Powers Resolution, a president needs congressional approval before he can legally commit American armed forces in “hostilities” abroad. But according to the argument offered by Obama’s lawyers, hostilities were only hostilities if an American was killed; mere wars, on the other hand, the president can fight as he pleases -- without the approval of Congress. No American soldier having been killed in Libya, it followed that Obama could lead the country from behind without congressional approval. This delicate legal sophistry served its temporary purpose and the bombing went forward. Yet the awkward description, “leading from behind,” would not go away. These days, the phrase is mostly used as a taunt by war-brokers whose idea of a true leader runs a remarkably narrow gamut from former president George W. Bush to Senator John McCain. These people would have no trouble with Obama if only he gave us more wars.

The curious fact remains that, in Obama’s conception of the presidency, leading from behind had a concrete meaning long before the Libyan intervention. When approached before the 2008 election by labor leaders, community organizers, foreign policy dissenters, and groups concerned with minority rights and environmental protection, each of which sought assurance that he intended to assist their cause, Obama would invariably cup his ear and say, “I can’t hear you.”

The I-can't-hear-you anecdote has been conveyed both in print and informally; and it is plain that the gesture and the phrase had been rehearsed. Obama was, in fact, alluding to a gesture President Franklin Roosevelt is said to have made when the great civil rights organizer A. Philip Randolph put a similar request to him around 1940. Roosevelt, in effect, was saying to Randolph: You command a movement with influence, and there are other movements you can call on. Raise a cry so loud it can’t be mistaken. Make me do what you want me to do; I’m sympathetic to your cause, but the initiative can’t come from me.

It was clever of Obama to quote the gesture. At the same time, it was oddly irresponsible. After all, in the post-New Deal years, the union and civil rights movements had tremendous clout in America. They could make real noise. No such combination of movements existed in 2008.

And yet, in 2008 there had been a swell of popular opinion and a convergence of smaller movements around a cause. That cause was the candidacy of Barack Obama. The problem was that “Obama for America” drank up and swept away the energy of all those other causes, just as Obama’s chief strategist David Plouffe had designed it to do. Even in 2009, with the election long past, “Obama for America” (renamed “Organizing for America”) was being kept alive under the fantastical conceit that a sitting president could remain a movement leader-from-behind, even while he governed as the ecumenical voice of all Americans. If any cause could have pulled the various movements back together and incited them to action after a year of electioneering activity on Obama’s behalf, that cause would have been a massive jobs-creation program and a set of policy moves to rouse the environmental movement and address the catastrophe of climate change.

Civil Dissociation

By the middle of 2009, Barack Obama was no longer listening. He had already picked an economic team from among the Wall Street protégés of the Goldman Sachs executive and former economic adviser to the Clinton administration, Robert Rubin. For such a team, job creation and environmental regulation were scarcely attractive ideas. When the new president chose health care as the first “big thing” he looked to achieve, and announced that, for the sake of bipartisan consensus, he was leaving the details of the legislation to five committees of Congress, his “I can’t hear you” had become a transparent absurdity.

The movements had never been consulted. Yet Obama presumed an intimacy with their concerns and a reliance on their loyalty -- as if a telepathic link with them persisted. There was a ludicrous moment in the late summer of 2009 when the president, in a message to followers of "Obama for America," told us to be ready to knock on doors and light a fire under the campaign for health-care reform. But what exactly were we to say when those doors opened? The law -- still being hammered out in congressional committees in consultation with insurance lobbyists -- had not yet reached his desk. In the end, Obama did ask for help from the movements, but it was too late. He had left them hanging while he himself waited for the single Republican vote that would make his "signature law" bipartisan. That vote never came.

The proposal, the handoff to Congress, and the final synthesis of the Affordable Care Act took up an astounding proportion of Obama’s first year in office. If one looks back at the rest of those early months, they contained large promises -- the closing of Guantanamo being the earliest and the soonest to be shelved. The most seductive promise went by the generic name “transparency.” But Obama’s has turned out to be the most secretive administration since that of Richard Nixon; and in its discouragement of press freedom by the prosecution of whistleblowers, it has surpassed all of its predecessors combined.

In the absence of a performance to match his promises, how did Obama seek to define his presidency? The compensation for “I can’t hear you” turned out to be that all Americans would now have plenty of chances to hearhim. His first months in office were staged as a relaxed but careful exercise in, as was said at the time, “letting the country get to know him.” To what end? The hope seemed to be that if people could see how truly earnest, temperate, patient, thoughtful, and bipartisan Obama was, they would come to accept policies that sheer ideology or ignorance might otherwise have led them to doubt or reject.

It was magical thinking of course -- that Americans would follow if only we heard him often enough; that people of the most divergent tempers and ideas would gradually come to approve of him so visibly that he could afford to show the country that he heard the call for reform. But one can see why his presidency was infused with such magical thinking from the start. His ascent to the Oval Office had itself been magical.

To be known as the voice of the country, Obama believed, meant that he should be heard to speak on all subjects. This misconception, evident early, has never lost its hold on the Obama White House. The CBS reporter Mark Knoller crunched the first-term numbers, and some of them are staggering. Between January 2009 and January 2013 Obama visited 44 states, led 58 town hall meetings, granted 591 media interviews (including 104 on the major networks), and delivered 1,852 separate speeches, comments, or scheduled public remarks. From all those planned interactions with the American public, remarkably few conversions ever materialized.

By following the compulsion (which he mistook for a strategy) of coming to be recognized as the tribune of all the people, Obama squandered indefinite energies in pursuit of a finite opportunity. For there is an economy of gesture in politics, just as there is in sports. Show all your moves too early and there will be no surprise when the pressure is on. Talk steadily on all subjects and a necessary intensity will desert you when you need it.

In Confidence Men,the most valuable study so far of the character and performance of Obama as president, the journalist Ron Suskind noticed the tenacity of the new president’s belief that he enjoyed a special connection to the American people. When his poll numbers were going down in late 2009, or when his “pivot to jobs” had become a topic of humor because he repeated the phrase so often without ever seeming to pivot, Obama would always ask his handlers to send him out on the road. He was convinced: the people would hear him and he would make them understand.

He sustained this free-floating confidence even though he knew that his town halls, from their arranged format to their pre-screened audiences, were as thoroughly stage-managed as any other politician’s. But Obama told Suskind in early 2011 that he had come to believe “symbols and gestures... are at least as important as the policies we put forward.”

The road trips have proved never-ending. In 2014, a run of three or four days typically included stops at a supermarket outlet, a small factory, and a steel mill, as the president comforted the unemployed with sayings such as “America needs a raise” and repeated phrases from his State of the Union address such as “Let’s make this a year of action” and “Opportunity is who we are.”

In discussions about Obama, one occasionally hears it said -- in a mood between bewilderment and forbearance -- that we have not yet known the man. After all, he has been up against the enormous obstacle of racism, an insensate Republican party, and a legacy of bad wars. It is true that he has faced enormous obstacles. It is no less true that by postponement and indecision, by silence and by speaking on both sides, he has allowed the obstacles to grow larger. Consider his “all of the above” energy policy, which impartially embraces deep-sea drilling, wind farms, solar panels, Arctic drilling, nuclear plants, fracking for natural gas, and “clean coal.”

Obama’s practice of recessive management to the point of neglect has also thrown up obstacles entirely of his devising. He chose to entrust the execution and “rollout” of his health-care policy to the Department of Health and Human Services. That was an elective plan which he himself picked from all the alternatives. The extreme paucity of his meetings with his secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, in the three years that elapsed between his signing of the law and the rollout of the policy makes a fair epitome of negligence. Indeed, the revelation of his lack of contact with Sebelius left an impression -- which the recent provocative actions of the State Department in Ukraine have reinforced -- that the president is not much interested in what the officials in his departments and agencies are up to.

The Preferential President

Obama entered the presidency at 47 -- an age at which people as a rule are pretty much what they are going to be. It is a piece of mystification to suppose that we have been denied a rescue that this man, under happier circumstances, would have been well equipped to perform. There have been a few genuine shocks: on domestic issues he has proven a more complacent technocrat than anyone could have imagined -- a facet of his character that has emerged in his support for the foundation-driven testing regimen “Race to the Top,” with its reliance on outsourcing education to private firms and charter schools. But the truth is that Obama’s convictions were never strong. He did not find this out until his convictions were tested, and they were not tested until he became president.

Perhaps the thin connection between Obama’s words and his actions does not support the use of the word “conviction” at all. Let us say instead that he mistook his preferences for convictions -- and he can still be trusted to tell us what he would prefer to do. Review the record and it will show that his first statement on a given issue generally lays out what he would prefer. Later on, he resigns himself to supporting a lesser evil, which he tells us is temporary and necessary. The creation of a category of permanent prisoners in “this war we’re in” (which he declines to call “the war on terror”) was an early and characteristic instance. Such is Obama’s belief in the power and significance of his own words that, as he judges his own case, saying the right thing is a decent second-best to doing the right thing.

More than most people, Obama has been a creature of his successive environments. He talked like Hyde Park when in Hyde Park. He talks like Citigroup when at the table with Citigroup. And in either milieu, he likes the company well enough and enjoys blending in. He has a horror of unsuccess. Hence, in part, his extraordinary aversion to the name, presence, or precedent of former president Jimmy Carter: the one politician of obvious distinction whom he has declined to consult on any matter. At some level, Obama must realize that Carter actually earned his Nobel Prize and was a hard-working leader of the country. Yet of all the living presidents, Carter is the one whom the political establishment wrote off long ago; and so it is Carter whom he must not touch.

As an adapter to the thinking of men of power, Obama was a quick study. It took him less than half a year as president to subscribe to Dick Cheney’s view on the need for the constant surveillance of all Americans. This had to be done for the sake of our own safety in a war without a visible end. The leading consideration here is that Obama, quite as much as George W. Bush, wants to be seen as having done everything possible to avoid the “next 9/11.” He cares far less about doing everything possible to uphold the Constitution (a word that seldom occurs in his speeches or writings). Nevertheless, if you ask him, he will be happy to declare his preference for a return to the state of civil liberties we enjoyed in the pre-2001 era. In the same way, he will order drone killings in secret and then give a speech in which he informs us that eventually this kind of killing must stop.

What, then, of Obama’s commitment in 2008 to make the fight against global warming a primary concern of his presidency? He has come to think American global dominance -- helped by American capital investment in foreign countries, “democracy promotion,” secret missions by Special Operations forces, and the control of cyberspace and outer space -- as the best state of things for the United States and for the world. We are, as he has told us often, the exceptional country. And time that is spent helping America to dominate the world is time that cannot be given to a cooperative venture like the fight against global warming. The Keystone XL pipeline, if it is built, will bring carbon-dense tar sands from Canada to the Gulf Coast, and probably Obama would prefer not to see the pipeline built. Yet it would be entirely in character for him to approve and justify its construction, whether in the name of temporary jobs, oil industry profits, trade relations with Canada, or all of the above.

He has already softened the appearance of surrender by a device that is in equal parts real and rhetorical. It is called the Climate Resilience Fund: a euphemism with all the Obama markings, since resilience is just another name for disaster relief. The hard judgment of posterity may be that in addressing the greatest threat of the age, Barack Obama taught America dimly, worked part time at half-measures, was silent for years at a stretch, and never tried to lead. His hope must be that his reiterated preference will count more heavily than his positive acts.

Copyright 2014 David Bromwich

© 2014 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175816/

David Bromwich, the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke's speeches, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform, has written on the Constitution and America's wars for The New York Review of Books and The Huffington Post.

Obama’s 2015 Budget: Waging Populist Fights in Strategic Retreat

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 04:24:00 +0000

Published on Wednesday, March 5, 2014 by Campaign for America's Future Blog

Obama’s 2015 Budget: Waging Populist Fights in Strategic Retreat

by Robert Borosage

President Obama’s 2015 Budget sets up many of the right fights with the right opponents. Republicans who dismiss it out of hand – “most irresponsible budget yet” fumed House Speaker John Boehner – are exposed for what they are: defenders of privilege and entrenched interests against working Americans. Yet, the good fights it sets up are waged within a continued long-term retreat. It is like walking up an escalator headed down.

U.S. President Barack Obama, left, and Emily Hare, right, watch the press pool depart during a presidential visit to a classroom of 4 and 5 year olds at Powell Elementary School on March 4, 2014 in Washington, D.C. Obama later delivered remarks on the FY 2015 and also took a question on the situation in the Ukraine. (Photo by Ron Sachs-Pool/Getty Images)

Why Not Common Sense?

Obama’s budget calls for a series of sensible reforms. He’d tax multinationals to fund the rebuilding of America’s infrastructure at home, putting Americans to work on good jobs that need to be done. He’d expand funding for research and development, establish more manufacturing innovation centers, expand work on renewable energy, while ending the billions that go in subsidies to Big Oil, the most profitable companies in recorded history. He’d save money by reducing the size of the military and winding down the war in Afghanistan. He’d boost universal pre-school for American children, paid for by hiking taxes on tobacco. He’d both lift the minimum wage and expand the earned income tax credit to lift millions more out of poverty, and to reduce taxpayer subsidies to Wal-Mart’s billionaire owners. He would pay for the EITC expansion by closing indefensible tax dodges, like the “carried interest” tax deduction for hedge fund billionaires. He’d protect Social Security, and continue his efforts to curb the rapacity of health care insurance companies and providers. He calls once more for comprehensive immigration reform that would bring millions out of the shadows, aiding growth and the economy, and thereby reduce deficits.

None of these common sense reforms is likely to become law. Republicans march in lockstep to block closing loopholes for the wealthy and multinationals, to defend subsidies to Big Oil and Big Pharma, to bloat the military while denouncing the president for refusing to offer up cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, child nutrition, education and more. They oppose extending unemployment insurance to the jobless, or raising the minimum wage for the working poor. They will rail that poverty programs trap the poor, that a hike in the minimum wage will cost jobs, that taxing multinationals and the rich will slow the economy, that global warming is a hoax and Big Oil a solution. And they will stop the reforms, even as they reveal who they are.

House Budget Committee Chair Rep. Paul Ryan dismisses the president’s budget as “an election brochure.” Well, it damn well better be, because no matter what the president put in it, Republicans would pronounce it D.O.A.

This budget, as the president stated, frames the choice: ”Our budget is about choices. It’s about our values. As a country, we’ve got to make a decision if we’re going to protect tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, or if we’re going to make smart investments necessary to create jobs and grow our economy, and expand opportunity for every American."

The Strategic Retreat

Progressives will stand with the president on that choice, as would most Americans if they believed it. The president picks good fights against the right enemies. Yet over the long-term, this budget remains mired within a deeply conservative and wrong-headed set of assumptions.

America need more public investment, not less

The president makes the case for rebuilding our infrastructure and investing in areas vital to our growth, but his long-term budget is focused on reducing deficits, not on expanding investment. The deficit, which has already fallen faster than anytime since the post-World War II demobilization crippling the recovery, is slated to decline to less than 2% GDP over ten years. The domestic discretionary account – everything the US spends outside the military, shared security guarantees like Social Security and Medicare and interest on the national debt – is slated to decline to levels of the economy not seen since the 1950s.

This is a guarantee that, despite the rhetoric, America’s infrastructure — the essential sinews of its economy – will continue to age and decline, growing more decrepit and more dangerous. It accepts that America’s children will continue to go without the basics in education – from universal pre-school to affordable college. It accepts that we will continue to raise the highest percentage of children in poverty of any industrialized nation.

Corporations and the rich need to pay their fair share of taxes.

The president sensibly calls for limiting some tax breaks on the wealthy and corporations to invest in primarily in deficit reduction and some sensible reforms. But he continues to argue that corporate tax reform should be “revenue neutral,” lowering corporate tax rates while closing loopholes. In fact, multinationals have grown ever more adept at avoiding taxes. As Citizens for Tax Justice has shown, profitable Fortune 500 companies pay a lower tax rate at home than they do in other industrial countries. With profits at record percentages of the economy and the richest few making off with virtually all the income growth in the society, we need progressive tax reform that raises resources to pay for the investments we need.

The U.S. Should Lead the Green Industrial Revolution, Not Just Clean Up After It

President Obama pushes for greater investment in renewable energy, greater controls on carbon, increased efficiency standards for cars, buildings and appliances. But any real commitment to dealing with climate change, and to grabbing a lead in the green industrial revolution that is already sweeping the world has been beaten out of his budget. His energy budget, for example, devotes $11.7 billion for nuclear security, mostly to maintain our nuclear weapons arsenal. An additional $5.6 billion goes to clean up nuclear waste at Cold War sites across the nation. In contrast, $2.3 billion is devoted to efficiency and renewable energy – solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower. We’ll spend more maintaining a bloated arsenal of weapons we don’t need and won’t use than in capturing the renewable energies that will fuel the future. That means we’ll continue to pay rising costs for cleaning up after the catastrophes wrought by climate change.

The zombie economy that exploded is back.

The president begins his budget statement, as he began his State of the Union, by boasting that "After 5 years of grit and determined effort, the United States is better positioned for the 21st Century than any other nation on Earth.”
Well, the world is in dire straits, but the reality here is different: the American Dream is haunted by a nightmare zombie economy that has come back from the dead.

The old economy blew up in 2008, causing a global economic calamity. The old economy was plagued by unsustainable imbalances – growing Gilded Age inequality and a declining middle class, increasing financialization and the devastation of manufacturing, unprecedented trade deficits, growing indebtedness, a decrepit infrastructure and starved public investment in vital areas, an unsustainable commitment to police the world, a purblind refusal to address increasingly destructive and costly climate changes.

President Obama managed to rescue an economy in free fall, while promising to find a new foundation for growth. That effort clearly has stalled. The old order stymied reforms and now revives to haunt us. The rich capture even more of the national income. The big banks are bigger and more consolidated than ever. The trade deficits remain over $1 billion a day. Public investment remains starved. The national security state continues to generate crises and consume resources and attention. Big oil even retains its subsidies. The unsustainable rise of costs in the health system have been slowed, but the system remains broken.

Kutusov, if we’re lucky

Perhaps we should see President Obama as pursuing the wily course of Russia’s famous general Kutusov, who responded to Napoleon’s bold invasion of Russia by retreating back into Mother Russia, confident that the Russian expanse, its harsh winter and the survival needs of its peasants would eventually expose Napoleon’s troops and his folly.

Perhaps, by picking the right fights, revealing the Republican extremes, pointing the right direction even while in slow retreat, the president is exposing the right, exhausting their troops, and awakening Americans to meet the challenges of the day. As fanciful as that may be, it is much more plausible than expecting this budget’s long-term direction to take us where we need to go.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Robert L. Borosage is the founder and president of the Institute for America’s Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America’s Future.

Silencing Whistleblowers Obama-Style

noreply@blogger.com (NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDE) — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 06:47:00 +0000

Published on Tuesday, March 4, 2014 by TomDispatch

Silencing Whistleblowers Obama-Style

Supreme Court Edition?

by Peter Van Buren

The Obama administration has just opened a new front in its ongoing war on whistleblowers. It’s taking its case against one man, former Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Air Marshal Robert MacLean, all the way to the Supreme Court. So hold on, because we’re going back down the rabbit hole with the Most Transparent Administration ever.

Despite all the talk by Washington insiders about how whistleblowers like Edward Snowden should work through the system rather than bring their concerns directly into the public sphere, MacLean is living proof of the hell of trying to do so. Through the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice (DOJ) wants to use MacLean’s case to further limit what kinds of information can qualify for statutory whistleblowing protections. If the DOJ gets its way, only information that the government thinks is appropriate -- a contradiction in terms when it comes to whistleblowing -- could be revealed. Such a restriction would gut the legal protections of the Whistleblower Protection Act and have a chilling effect on future acts of conscience.

Having lost its case against MacLean in the lower courts, the DOJ is seeking to win in front of the Supreme Court. If heard by the Supremes -- and there’s no guarantee of that -- this would represent that body’s first federal whistleblower case of the post-9/11 era. And if it were to rule for the government, even more information about an out-of-control executive branch will disappear under the dark umbrella of “national security.”

On the other hand, should the court rule against the government, or simply turn down the case, whistleblowers like MacLean will secure a little more protection than they’ve had so far in the Obama years. Either way, an important message will be sent at a moment when revelations of government wrongdoing have moved from the status of obscure issue to front-page news.

The issues in the MacLean case -- who is entitled to whistleblower protection, what use can be made of retroactive classification to hide previously unclassified information, how many informal classification categories the government can create bureaucratically, and what role the Constitution and the Supreme Court have in all this -- are arcane and complex. But stay with me. Understanding the depths to which the government is willing to sink to punish one man who blew the whistle tells us the world about Washington these days and, as they say, the devil is in the details.

Robert MacLean, Whistleblower

MacLean’s case is simple -- and complicated.

Here’s the simple part: MacLean was an air marshal, flying armed aboard American aircraft as the last defense against a terror attack. In July 2003, all air marshals received a briefing about a possible hijacking plot. Soon after, the TSA, which oversees the marshals, sent an unencrypted, open-air text message to their cell phones cancelling several months of missions for cost-cutting reasons. Fearing that such cancellations in the midst of a hijacking alert might create a dangerous situation for the flying public, MacLean worked his way through the system. He first brought his concerns to his supervisor and then to the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general. Each responded that nothing could be done.

After hitting a dead end, and hoping that public pressure might force the TSA to change its policy, MacLean talked anonymously to a reporter who broadcast a critical story. After 11 members of Congress pitched in, the TSA reversed itself. A year later, MacLean appeared on TV in disguise to criticize agency dress and boarding policies that he felt made it easier for passengers to recognize marshals who work undercover. (On your next flight keep an eye out for the young man in khakis with a fanny pack and a large watch, often wearing a baseball cap and eyeing boarders from a first class seat.) This time the TSA recognized MacLean’s voice and discovered that he had also released the unclassified 2003 text message. He was fired in April 2006.

When MacLean contested his dismissal through internal government channels, he discovered that, months after firing him, the TSA had retroactively classified the text message he had leaked. Leaking classified documents is more than cause enough to fire a federal worker, and that might have been the end of it. MacLean, however, was no typical cubicle-dwelling federal employee. An Air Force veteran, he asserted his status as a protected whistleblower and has spent the last seven years marching through the system trying to get his job back.

How Everything in Government Became Classified

The text message MacLean leaked was retroactively classified as “security sensitive information” (SSI), a designation that had been around for years but whose usage the TSA only codified via memo in November 2003. When it comes to made-up classifications, that agency’s set of them proved to be only one of 28 known versions that now exist within the government bureaucracy. In truth, no one is sure how many varieties of pseudo-classifications even exist under those multiple policies, or how many documents they cover as there are no established reporting requirements.

By law there are officially only three levels of governmental classification: confidential, secret, and top secret. Other indicators, such as NOFORN and ORCON, seen for instance on some of the NSA documents Edward Snowden released, are called “handling instructions,” although they, too, function as unofficial categories of classification. Each of the three levels of official classification has its own formal definition and criteria for use. It is theoretically possible to question the level of classification of a document. However much they may be ignored, there are standards for their declassification and various supervisors can also shift levels of classification as a final report, memo, or briefing takes shape. The system is designed, at least in theory and occasionally in practice, to have some modicum of accountability and reviewability.

The government’s post-9/11 desire to classify more and more information ran head on into the limits of classification as enacted by Congress. The response by various agencies was to invent a proliferation of designations like SSI that would sweep unclassified information under the umbrella of classification and confer on ever more unclassified information a (sort of) classified status. In the case of the TSA, the agency even admits on its own website that a document with an SSI stamp is unclassified, but prohibits its disclosure anyway.

Imagine the equivalent at home: you arbitrarily establish a classification called Spouse Sensitive Information that prohibits your partner from seeing the family bank statements. And if all this is starting to make no sense, then you can better understand the topsy-turvy world Robert MacLean found himself in.

MacLean Wins a Battle in Court

In 2013, after a long series of civil service and legal wrangles, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit handed down a decision confirming the government’s right to retroactively classify information. This may make some sense -- if you squint hard enough from a Washington perspective. Imagine a piece of innocuous information already released that later takes on national security significance. A retroactive classification can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube, but bureaucratically speaking it would at least prevent more toothpaste from being squeezed out. The same ruling, of course, could also be misused to ensnare someone like MacLean who shared unclassified information.

The court also decided that, retrospective classification or not, MacLean was indeed entitled to protection under the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989. That act generally limits its protections to “disclosures not specifically prohibited by law,” typically held to mean unclassified material. This, the court insisted, was the category MacLean fit into and so could not be fired. The court avoided the question of whether or not someone could be fired for disclosing retroactively classified information and focused on whether a made-up category like SSI was “classified” at all.

The court affirmed that laws passed by Congress creating formal classifications like "top secret" trump regulations made up by executive branch bureaucrats. In other words, as the Constitution intended, the legislative branch makes the laws and serves as a check and balance on the executive branch. Congress says what is classified and that say-so cannot be modified via an executive branch memo. One of MacLean’s lawyers hailed the court’s decision as restoring “enforceability for the Whistleblower Protection Act's public free speech rights. It ruled that only Congress has the authority to remove whistleblower rights. Agency-imposed restraints are not relevant for whistleblower protection rights.”
The ruling made it clear that the TSA had fired MacLean in retaliation for a legally protected act of whistleblowing. He should have been offered his job back the next day.

Not a Happy Ending But a Sad New Beginning

No such luck. Instead, on January 27, 2014, the Department of Justice petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the lower court’s decision. If it has its way, the next time a troublesome whistleblower emerges, the executive need only retroactively slap a non-reviewable pseudo-classification on whatever information has been revealed and fire the employee. The department is, then, asking the Supreme Court to grant the executive branch the practical power to decide whether or not a whistleblower is entitled to legal protection. The chilling effect is obvious.

In addition, the mere fact that the DOJ is seeking to bring the case via a petition is significant. Such petitions, called writs of certiorari, or certs, ask that the Supreme Court overturn a lower court's decision. Through the cert process, the court sets its own agenda. Some 10,000 certs are submitted in a typical year. Most lack merit and are quickly set aside without comment. Typically, fewer than 100 of those 10,000 are chosen to move forward for a possibly precedent-setting decision. However, only a tiny number of all the certs filed are initiated by the government; on average, just 15 in a Supreme Court term.

It’s undoubtedly a measure of the importance the Obama administration gives to preserving secrecy above all else that it has chosen to take such an aggressive stance against MacLean -- especially given the desperately low odds of success. It will be several months before we know whether the court will hear the case.

This Is War

MacLean is simply trying to get his old air marshal job back by proving he was wrongly fired for an act of whistleblowing. For the rest of us, however, this is about much more than where MacLean goes to work.

The Obama administration’s attacks on whistleblowers are well documented. It has charged more of them -- seven -- under the Espionage Act than all past presidencies combined. In addition, it recently pressured State Department whistleblower Stephen Kim into a guilty plea (in return for a lighter sentence) by threatening him with the full force of that act. His case was even more controversial because the FBI named Fox News’s James Rosen as a co-conspirator for receiving information from Kim as part of his job as a journalist. None of this is accidental, coincidental, or haphazard. It’s a pattern. And it’s meant to be. This is war.

MacLean’s case is one more battle in that war. By taking the extraordinary step of going to the Supreme Court, the executive branch wants, by fiat, to be able to turn an unclassified but embarrassing disclosure today into a prohibited act tomorrow, and then use that to get rid of an employee. They are, in essence, putting whistleblowers in the untenable position of having to predict the future. The intent is clearly to silence them before they speak on the theory that the easiest leak to stop is the one that never happens. A frightened, cowed workforce is likely to be one result; another -- falling into the category of unintended consequences -- might be to force more potential whistleblowers to take the Manning/Snowden path.

The case against MacLean also represents an attempt to broaden executive power in another way. At the moment, only Congress can “prohibit actions under the law,” something unique to it under the Constitution. In its case against MacLean, the Justice Department seeks to establish the right of the executive and its agencies to create their own pseudo-categories of classification that can be used to prohibit actions not otherwise prohibited by law. In other words, it wants to trump Congress. Regulation made by memo would then stand above the law in prosecuting -- or effectively persecuting -- whistleblowers. A person of conscience like MacLean could be run out of his job by a memo.

In seeking to claim more power over whistleblowers, the executive also seeks to overturn another principle of law that goes by the term ex post facto. Laws are implemented on a certain day and at a certain time. Long-held practice says that one cannot be punished later for an act that was legal when it happened. Indeed, ex post facto criminal laws are expressly forbidden by the Constitution. This prohibition was written in direct response to the injustices of British rule at a time when Parliamentary laws could indeed criminalize actions retrospectively. While some leeway exists today in the U.S. for ex post facto actions in civil cases and when it comes to sex crimes against children, the issue as it affects whistleblowers brushes heavily against the Constitution and, in a broader sense, against what is right and necessary in a democracy.

When a government is of, by, and for the people, when an educated citizenry (in Thomas Jefferson’s words) is essential to a democracy, it is imperative that we all know what the government does in our name. How else can we determine how to vote, who to support, or what to oppose? Whistleblowers play a crucial role in this process. When the government willfully seeks to conceal its actions, someone is required to step up and act with courage and selflessness.

That our current government has been willing to fight for more than seven years -- maybe all the way to the Supreme Court -- to weaken legal whistleblowing protections tells a tale of our times. That it seeks to silence whistleblowers at a moment when their disclosures are just beginning to reveal the scope of our unconstitutional national security state is cause for great concern. That the government demands whistleblowers work within the system and then seeks to modify that same system to thwart them goes beyond hypocrisy.

This is the very definition of post-Constitutional America where legality and illegality blur -- and always in the government’s favor; where the founding principles of our nation only apply when, as, and if the executive sees fit. The devil is indeed in the details.

Peter Van Buren spent a year in Iraq as a State Department Foreign Service Officer serving as Team Leader for two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). Now in Washington, he writes about Iraq and the Middle East at his blog, We Meant Well. His new book is We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books).