Sen. Bernie Sanders on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer (CNN)
Published on Oct 11, 2013
Showing posts with label Republicans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Republicans. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Senator Bernie Sanders is interviewed on CNN by presstitute Wolf Blitzer RE what should be done about the Republican blackmail
Sen. Bernie Sanders on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer (CNN)
Published on Oct 11, 2013
Monday, September 23, 2013
If any of my Democratic friends still believe that Bill Clinton and Al Gore did right by our humanist hopes and wishes, this extremely well researched article by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn puts an end to our credulity once and for all. Read it and weep.
September 23, 2013 | Original Here Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter
Guest Column — The War On The Poor — Jeffrey St. Clair & Alexander Cockburn
The American poor are being driven into the ground. Not only is owning a home out of the question, but also the poor can’t even afford to rent. They lack the money for a damage deposit, and they lack the cash for the large deposits that utility companies require in order to have utilities connected.
The declining ability of the poor to rent is adversely affecting those who provide rental shelter to the poor.
For the dispossessed middle class, foreclosure on a home is often just the beginning of trouble. If, for example, a bank forecloses on a home with a $200,000 mortgage and sells the house for $100,000, under some circumstances the IRS treats the $100,000 difference as income to the foreclosed homeowner and requires the bank to issue a 1099 form to the homeowner showing taxable income of $100,000. http://www.irs.gov/uac/Home-Foreclosure-and-Debt-Cancellation
Alternatively, if the sale does not cover the mortgage, the bank can come after other property that the foreclosed homeowner might possess, such as a second home, car, work equipment, checking account balance. For example, a construction subcontractor who loses his home and moves his family into the office or construction trailer on the lot where he keeps the backhoe loader and work truck can find himself dispossessed of these assets in order to apply the proceeds to the difference between his mortgage and the price at which the bank sells his foreclosed home.
Americans who have not been personally affected by foreclosure have little idea how the system is rigged in favor of the banks that caused the problem and against the victims of financial deregulation.
In the article below, Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn show that the assault on the poor began with the Clinton administration.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/09/the-origins-of-the-neoliberal-war-on-the-poor/
Copyright CounterPunch, posted with permission
WEEKEND EDITION AUGUST 9-11, 2013
Welfare Reform and an Ever-Expanding Police State
The Origins of the Neoliberal War on the Poor
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and ALEXANDER COCKBURN
In November of 1994 two years of ramshackle government, breached pledges and the Clinton administration’s frequently manifested contempt for its traditional base, exacted their price. In the midterm elections Republicans seized control of both the House and the Senate for the first time since the Eisenhower era. The rout extended to governors’ mansions across the country, where the Republicans captured the majority of governorships for the first time in a quarter-century. Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of the House, became the nation’s political wunderkind.
Yet for Bill Clinton the Democratic defeat held its paradoxical allure. The old-line Democratic Congressional leadership no longer held sway on the Hill. Tom Foley and Dan Rostenkowski were gone altogether–one back to the Inland Empire of the Pacific Northwest and the other to a federal penitentiary. The White House no longer had to dicker with hostility to its agenda from New Deal-oriented Democrats. Without the threat of a presidential veto to lend clout to their resistance, the liberal Democrats on the Hill were impotent against the Republicans flourishing their Contract with America. Thus unencumbered, the Clinton administration could cut deals with the Republican leadership.
All this strategy needed was a name, and soon after the election Bill Clinton summoned in the man who would introduce “triangulation” into the lexicon of the late 1990s.
Dick Morris, a man of elastic political scruple, had enjoyed a fluctuating relationship with Clinton. He’d bailed out the young governor of Arkansas after the latter’s first comeuppance at the hands of the voters in 1980. Since then Morris had served many masters, ranging from the millionaire socialist from Ohio, Howard Metzenbaum, to Bella Abzug of New York, to Trent Lott of Mississippi (“I love his feisty, shit-on-the-shoes style”) and Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Morris worked as a consultant for Helms in 1990, in a particularly foul campaign against the black Democratic challenger, Harvey Gantt.
Morris came to the White House with the purpose of providing new ideas and a new strategy. He says Clinton told him, “I’ve lost confidence in my current team.” Morris commenced his mission of refreshment under conditions of secrecy, code-named Charlie, his function at first known only to the Clintons. His advice: steal the Republicans’ thunder, draw down the deficit, reform welfare, cut back government regulation and “use Gore’s reinventing government program to cut the public sector’s size.” The president should demonstrate toughness, Morris counseled, with decisive action overseas.
As the new Republican leadership took over in January of 1995, Clinton summoned Gore to the Oval Office, disclosed the hiring of Morris and instructed the vice president to work with him. “Charlie” then laid out the new agenda for Gore. Morris later wrote, “He grasped what I was saying at once and offered his full support. Gore told me that he had been increasingly troubled by the drift of the White House. He said he had tried, in vain, to move the administration toward the center, but the White House staff had shut him out, Gore said, ‘We need a change here, a big change, and I’m hoping and praying that you’re the man to bring it.’ We shook hands on our alliance.”
Soon Morris, Gore and Clinton came to two fateful decisions. As part of the strategy of stealing the Republicans’ thunder, Morris urged an intensive fundraising drive, aimed at amassing “soft money” for TV spots designed to boost the new Clinton agenda, trump the Republicans and detour the old-line concerns of the Democrats at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Soft money earns that much-abused name because it can be raised in amounts not limited by campaign spending laws; it can be procured directly from corporations, labor unions or other institutions so long as the money is used to promote “issues” rather than specific candidates. That at least is how the law supposed soft money would work. Morris knew very well that the issue ads would be identified directly with Clinton, because they would sound themes Morris himself had prescribed. To execute these ads Morris and Gore turned to the latter’s longtime media consultant, Bob Squier. Down the road lay many a funding scandal, not least the Buddhist temple imbroglio that found Al Gore on the receiving end of thousands of dollars in contributions from monks and nuns supposedly ennobled by the spiritual distinction of poverty. But such things were still a year away.
The time had come to go public with the new line. Morris drafted a speech for Clinton in which the president would announce that he was ready to work with the Republicans. It laid out the grounds on which the President was prepared to meet Newt Gingrich. Within the White House there was a storm of protest, led by Leon Panetta, Clinton’s chief of staff and onetime California congressman, who was aghast at what he correctly perceived to be the betrayal of his former colleagues on the Hill.
As Panetta presented his case, Clinton began to tilt toward his position. Morris sensed crisis at hand. At the crucial moment, so he relates, Gore, who had been silently following the debate, made a decisive intervention. “I agree with Dick’s point, that we need to emerge from the shadows and place ourselves at the center of the debate with the Republicans by articulating what we will accept and what we will not in a clear and independent way.” It was music to Morris’s ears, and he cried, “Bravo!”
For Morris, as for his employer, polls were everything. He developed what he called a “neuro-psychological profile” of the American voter, and established an iron rule that no initiative could be undertaken by the White House unless polling showed an approval rating of 60 percent. By constant polling he concocted what he called a “values agenda”. At the top of the list was affirmative action. “Mend it, don’t end it” was the mantra, which meant, in practice, destroy affirmative action from the inside while professing support for the general principle.
Next came TV violence. Intimidate the networks, Morris advised, into adopting a “voluntary” system of ratings for TV shows and movies. Soon media executives were summoned to the White House for a session with Clinton and Gore. Simultaneously Clinton pushed for installation of the so-called V-chip in all new TV sets, which would allow parents to block all offensive material. Next came teen pregnancy, an issue pounded on by the Clinton White House, even though the rate had been falling. Education: go after tenured teachers, an attack increasingly popular in Morris’s focus groups, and demand that at least they be tested. Youth: advocate school uniforms and curfews for teens. Gay marriage: on Morris’s advice Clinton and Gore embraced the Defense of Marriage Act, a purely grandstanding piece of legislation which preemptively bars gay marriages from recognition under federal law for any purpose. Immigration: the poll numbers were off the chart, and the Clinton White House duly set a goal to double the number of turn-backs by the Immigration and Naturalization Service–among other things, enlisting the Labor Department to help speed the pace and breadth of workplace raids. Taxes: Morris believed that Main Street America was now playing the market, so that a 20 percent reduction in the capital gains tax rate would be hugely popular.
But there were two issues that towered above the rest in Morris’s assaying of public opinion: welfare and crime. In the 1992 campaign, Clinton had pledged to “end welfare as we know it.” In 1993, Gore had urged Clinton to declare war on welfare as part of the first 100 days and had implored the president to let him lead the charge. After all, Gore argued, he was one of the few Democratic senators to have supported a welfare-to-work law narrowly approved in 1988, forcing states to require parents getting welfare checks to work at least 16 hours per week in unpaid jobs. But Hillary thought an attack on welfare would divert energy from her health care package, and Gore lost the battle.
By 1995 the welfare rolls were shrinking, from a peak of 18 million in the recession of 1991 to about 12.8 million. Defenders of the system in Clinton’s cabinet, Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Donna Shalala of Heath and Human Services, argued that the total budget for Aid to Families with Dependent Children was a tiny fraction of the federal budget; indeed, it was only 14 percent of the amount devoted to Medicare, a middle-class entitlement. The real problem, they argued, was lack of training for the chronically underemployed and unemployed.
Reflexively hostile to welfare and fortified by Morris’s polls, Clinton pressed ahead. The administration began granting waivers to states to implement their own onslaughts on welfare, feature “workfare” requirements, time limits and “family caps”, a punishment for women who dared to have more than the approved number of children the government would help support. Through 1995 and early in 1996 the Republicans had passed and sent to Clinton two bills to dismantle the federal welfare system. He vetoed both, but in his veto messages he stressed that he agreed with much of their content in principle. Peter Edelman, a high level official at HHS, described this as “the squeeze play”, whereby Clinton would reap approval from Democratic New Dealers for standing up for poor kids while at the same time signaling that in the long run he’d throw the mothers of those kids off the rolls altogether.
As they approached the Democratic convention in the summer of 1996, Clinton was floating on Morris’s magic carpet. Assisted by staggering blunders by Gingrich and a lackluster opponent in Bob Dole, Clinton was ahead by no less than 27 percent in the polls. The Republicans were eager to wrap up their legislative work before the conventions in July and August. They pushed through a welfare bill arguably worse than the ones Clinton had vetoed previously. Many Democrats on the Hill believed that Clinton would veto this bill too. But Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York had more sensitive political antennae. He warned, “I’ve heard that the leaders of the cabinet recommended a veto but that the president remains under the sway of his pollsters.”
On July 30, 1996, Clinton mustered his cabinet to hear arguments on whether or not he should sign the Republicans’ bill. One by one his advisers said he should not. No’s from people like Shalala and Reich came as no surprise. But similarly disapproving were not only Leon Panetta but Laura Tyson, his chief economic adviser, Henry Cisneros of HUD and even Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who said that too many people would be harmed by the bill and that it show an act of political courage to veto it.
Not trusting Shalala’s department to produce objective assessments of the consequences of the bill, the White House staff had commissioned a survey from the Urban Institute, a DC think tank. The numbers were dire. The bill would push 2.6 million people further into poverty–1.1 million of them children. In all, the Institute predicted that 11 million families would lose income. That was the best-case scenario. In the event of a recession (which would come in 2001), the numbers would be far, far worse. In that fateful cabinet meeting Rubin invoked this study, and the numbers seemed to find their mark with Clinton, while Gore remained mute.
The meeting came to an end and Clinton, Panetta and Gore headed for the Oval Office for a private session. All accounts agree that, first, Panetta again made the case for a veto, laying particular emphasis on an appalling provision in the bill that would deny legal immigrants federal assistance, such as food stamps. Finally Gore broke his silence and urged Clinton to sign.
Clinton, Morris and Gore prepared a press statement, delivered by the president later that same day. Clinton admitted that the bill contained “serious flaws” but went on to say, “This is the best chance we will have in a long time to complete the work of ending welfare as we know it.” No one at the press conference quizzed Clinton on this curious claim. After all, the election was only about three months away. By early fall of 1996 it was clear The Democrats had a chance of regaining the House. Would not that recapture afford a better chance of crafting a welfare bill not compromised by Gingrich and the others?
To this day many Democrats in Congress become incensed on the topic of what Clinton and Gore did. One the eve of a Democratic convention, with Gingrich already ensconced in the national imagination as the Bad Guy, Clinton had just made common cause with him, thus undercutting all plans to campaign against the Gingrich Congress. As for Al Gore the consensus was that he was looking ahead to a possible challenge in 2000 from his old rival Dick Gephardt. With Morris’s polls showing that an attack on welfare scored well over the 60 percent bar, Gore would have the advantage over Gephardt or any other liberal challenger.
Suspicions about Gore deepened as the fall campaign proceeded. The president and vice president argued that it was crucial that they be re-elected so that they fix the problems with the welfare bill they had just signed. The problems here concerned not the welfare bill itself but the denial of federal services to legal immigrants and a slash in the food stamp program. In October of 1996, with the presidential election no longer in doubt, Democratic candidates came to the Democratic National Committee urgently seeking infusions of cash to help them in the crucial final weeks. Finally, Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, then the general chairman of the DNC, organized a meeting with Clinton and Gore. Dodd explained that the two were home safe and there was a chance to recapture the House. Clinton seemed amenable to a release of funds. Gore adamantly disagreed. On one account, Gore was the only person in the White House to oppose this transfer of funds from the presidential campaign to congressional races. It’s a measure of how a number of Democrats view Al Gore that some participants in that meeting felt that the only explanation for his conduct was that he did not want the Democrats to re-take control of the House because victory would elevate Gephardt to Speaker of the House.
The cynicism may not have stopped there. Why did Clinton and Gore decide to sign on to that third Republican welfare bill? The only major difference from the previous ones came in the form of the denial of federal services to legal immigrants and a $2.5 billion cut in the food stamp program. It’s likely that these two Republican add-ons were what allured the White House, because (as noted above) Clinton could then turn to the liberals saying they needed him to be re-elected so he could repair part of the damage wrought by the very bill he had just signed. In fact the White House probably could have insisted the riders be dropped, because Dole desperately wanted a legislative victory under the Republicans’ belt.
The welfare bill ended a federal entitlement that had been a cornerstone of the New Deal. It caps the federal contribution to welfare programs at $14.6 billion a year and hands the money over in block grants to the states to distribute as they see fit. The main requirement is that the states agree that welfare recipients can spend no more than a total of five years in their lifetime on welfare. It allows states to adopt even harsher standards. Finally, under the old system, welfare money came to the recipient as cash. Under the new system, the money can be given to intermediaries, for possible conversion to other services such as housing or food. Al Gore particularly liked this provision. In Atlanta in May of 1999, he told an audience why: “It allows faith-based organizations to provide basic welfare services. They can do so with public funds–without having to alter the religious character that is so often the key to their effectiveness. We should extend this approach to drug treatment, homelessness and youth violence prevention. People who work in faith-and values-based organizations are driven by their spiritual commitment. They have done what government can never do: provide compassionate care. Their client is not a number but a child of god.” In other words, treat welfare payments like school vouchers. Gore had just laid out the welcome mat for Bush’s faith-based initiatives.
Not long after Clinton signed the welfare bill, judgment came from Senator Moynihan, who had begun his service to the state back in the sixties with sermons about the “pathology” of the black family and now, bizarrely, was defending the system he’d denounced for years. Even this man of all seasons and all masters was shocked: “It is a social risk no sane person would take, and I mean that. If you think things can’t get worse, just wait until there are a third of a million people on the streets It’s not welfare reform; it’s welfare repeal.”
Hugh Price, president of the National Urban League, called the bill “an abomination for America’s most vulnerable mothers and children” and accused Clinton, Gore and the Congress of defecting from a war on poverty and “waging a war against poor people instead.”
Within weeks three high-ranking officials in the Department of Health and Human Services had resigned: Mary Jo Bane, Walter Primus and Peter Edelman. That was it. Across the length and breadth of the Clinton administration, only these resignations were tendered in principle against this abandonment of the New Deal and the shafting of America’s poor. Since that time Edelman has missed no opportunity to denounce the bill as a punitive strike against defenseless people. “The bill closes its eyes to all the facts and complexities of the real world and essentially says to recipients: find a job.”
The edict “find a job” was central to the bill and to the mythology nourished by opponents of welfare-that freeloaders with jobs available to them were abusing the system. Of course, there is always some abuse, but study after study had shown that most welfare recipients had looked for jobs and couldn’t find a suitable one or had been on welfare for a limited period, then found a job and got off the rolls. In 1999 a University of Michigan study making an assessment three years after the welfare bill went into effect found that the welfare population faces “unusually high barriers to work: such as physical and mental health problems, domestic violence and lack of transportation.” More than 30 percent of the families on welfare are constrained by disability, a sick child, no child care or an infirm relative. Those that want to find work are faced with narrow options even in an economy hyped as in mid-boom. In 1996 the Congressional Budget Office offered some bleak realities about the reserve army of the unemployed. With an official unemployment rate of four percent (the unofficial rate is roughly twice that, since government figures don’t count frustrated people who have given up looking for work), there are still three to five people needing work for each available job. In the Bush recession, this ratio rose to more than 10 to one.
In urban areas the job market is even more constricted. A 1998 study in Harlem showed just how brutally competitive the low-wage job market is. Over a five-month period, an average of fourteen people applied for each job opening at a local McDonalds. A year later researchers from the University of Chicago found that 73 percent of those same job searchers still hadn’t found even minimum wage level work.
In many states, there’s the last resort of workfare, which compels welfare recipients to accept public jobs, such as highway clean-up or garbage picking with the Parks Department, in return for benefits. Nationally the average benefit for workfare jobs is $381 per month, which works out to $4.40 an hour, or 80 percent of the minimum wage. But in some places it’s much worse. Mississippi, for example, requires single mothers to work twenty hours a week at $1.38 an hour, and a two-parent household to work fifty-five hours at 50 cents an hour.
On top of this the people in the workfare labor force are denied such basic rights as collective bargaining, unemployment insurance, the earned income tax credit and Social Security credit. States are finding it to their budgetary advantage to fill job vacancies with these “slavefare” workers. A Senate study in 1996 estimated that the consequences of welfare reform would depress the wages of the working poor by 12 percent.
Allowing the states to freelance their welfare programs has resulted in some particularly cruel policies and inequities. Minnesota spends $50 million a year on child care for single mothers receiving welfare benefits who are working or looking for work. New York spends $54 million to serve a population six times as large. Clinton and Gore repeatedly touted the approach taken by Indiana, where welfare reform was instituted by a Democratic governor, Evan Bayh, and his successor in the governor’s mansion, Frank O’Bannon. The pair presided over the shrinking of the welfare rolls in the Hoosier state by 30 percent. There’s no way to know if those people actually found work. It’s possible that the conditions of supervision of welfare recipients simply became unbearable and they left the program and perhaps the state. Under Indiana’s scheme, one missed job-training course means the loss of a welfare check for two months. A second infraction means loss of benefits for a year. A third strike and you’re out for good.
The Clinton welfare bill also includes a provision that allows states to begin drug testing welfare recipients. In theory the provision was aimed at people suspected of having drug problems. Oregon, for example, initiated a testing policy but soon reversed course when recipients began dropping out of the welfare program to avoid testing. The state found that it was better to stop drug testing, keep people in the program and steer addicts into treatment. Michigan took a different approach. In 1999 the state adopted a mandatory drug-testing policy for all welfare recipients, which prompted a lawsuit by the ACLU. A federal judge ruled in 1999 that the policy was unconstitutional. He noted that in the five weeks of the program’s operation there were positive drug tests in only eight percent of the cases, and all but three of those were for marijuana.
In his 2000 campaign, Al Gore pushed for what he called “Welfare Reform 2″, saying that more remained to be done to weed out cheats and freeloaders. He was particularly vehement in attacking dads behind on child support, vowing that he would make it easier for credit care companies to deny credit to such fathers. This would have come on top of a program, initiated by Janet Reno in her Florida years, whereby fathers behind on their payments get their driver’s license lifted, meaning that they can’t drive to work. In 1995, Clinton, Gore and Morris put into operation a program that saw these father’s mug shots put up in Post Offices, their federal benefits garnished and the IRS sent on their trail. This pattern of inflicting administrative conviction outside the court system and due process is integral to the Clinton/Gore philosophy on crime.
The Clinton crime bill of 1994 introduced mandatory life imprisonment for persons convicted of a third felony in certain categories. It maintained the 100-to-1 disproportion in sentencing for crimes involving powder and crack cocaine, even though the US Sentencing Commission had concluded that the disparity was racist. It expanded to fifty the number of crimes that could draw the death penalty in a federal court, reaching even to crimes that did not include murders–the largest expansion of the death penalty in history. Pell grants giving prisoners an avenue to higher education were cut off. Federal judges were stripped of their powers to enforce the constitutional rights of prisoners and the power of states to set sentencing standards for drug crimes was greatly diminished.
The curtailment of states’ rights went further. Grants for new prisons contained the provision that receipt of the money was dependent on the states ensuring that prisoners served at least 85 percent of their sentences. These inmates, remember, had been convicted in state, not federal, courts so this was simply federal blackmail to curtail parole at the state level. The Clinton administration also pressed the states to try juvenile offenders as adults. Gore articulated the administration’s position: “When young people cross the line, they must be punished. When young people commit serious, violent crimes, they should be prosecuted like adults.” Nonviolent offenders were to be sent to boot camps. Not, it should be noted, his own kids, who evaded punishment for nonviolent infractions such as smoking pot and having an open alcohol container in the car.
The Clinton/Gore administration was particularly assiduous in its assaults on the Fourth Amendment, protecting citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures. In 1994, they successfully pressed for a bill providing all communications providers to make existing and future communication systems wiretap ready. They also pushed hard for the so-called Clipper Chip, an encryption device that makes it easy for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to snoop on private messages.
The high-water mark in the Clinton administration’s attack on the Bill of Rights came in 1996 with the Counter-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which among other horrors allowed the INS to deport immigrants without due process, and denied prisoners the right to appeal to the federal bench based on habeas corpus petitions. “When historians write the story of civil liberties in the twentieth century,” said Ira Glasser, head of the ACLU, “they will say that the Clinton administration adopted an agenda that has everything to do with weakening civil rights and nothing to do with combating terrorism.”
In May of 2000, Gore outlined his campaign posture on crime and drugs in another speech in Atlanta. The erstwhile dope-smoker from Tennessee evidently feared that the man who refused to discuss cocaine use in his early years, George W. Bush, had the edge on the crime issue. Gore proclaimed he wanted to swaddle communities in “a blanket of blue”. He swore that the minute he settled in the Oval Office, President Gore would call for 50,000 more cops (i.e., more half-trained recruits like the ones who shot Amadou Diallo forty-one times in the Bronx) and would allow off-duty cops to carry concealed weapons (which they almost all do anyway).
Gore promised prisoners what he called a simple deal: “Before you get out of jail you have to get clean. If you want to stay out, then you better stay clean. We have to stop that revolving door once and for all. First we have to test prisoners for drugs while they’re in jail”. Gore was so blithe in his disregard for elementary rights that he was unable to see a distinction between a prison sentence fully served and a further punitive add-on: “We have to insist on more prison time for those who don’t break the habit”. Even after prisoners are released the eye of the state would still follow them: “We should impose strict supervision on those who have just been released–and insist they obey the law and stay off drugs”.
Another feature of Al Gore’s prospective war on crime was the especially vigorous targeting of minority youth. “I will fight for a federal law that helps communities establish gang-free zones with curfews on specific gang members, a ban on gang-related clothing and the specific legal authority to break violent teen gangs once and for all”.
Both parties have eagerly conjoined in militarizing the police, extending police powers and carving away basic rights. Often the Democrats have been worse. It was Republican Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois who led the partially successful charge in 1999 against the seizure of assets in drug cases. It was Democrat Senator Charles Schumer of New York who played the role of factotum for the Justice Department in trying to head off Hyde and his coalition.
The rise of the Jackboot State has marched in lockstep with the insane and ineffective War on Drugs. This has been an entirely bi-partisan affair. Its consequences are etched into the fabric of our lives. Just think of drug testing, now a virtually mandatory condition of employment, even though it’s an outrageous violation of personal sovereignty, as well as being thoroughly unreliable. In an era in which America has been led by three self-confessed pot smokers–Clinton, Gore and Bush–the number of people held for drug crimes in federal prisons has increased by 64 percent.
No-knock raids are becoming more common as federal, state and local politicians and law enforcement agencies decide that the war on drugs justify dumping the Fourth Amendment. Even in states where search warrants require a knock on the door before entry, police routinely flout the requirement.
The Posse Comitatus Act forbidding military involvement in domestic law enforcement is rapidly becoming as dead as the Fourth Amendment. Because of drug war exceptions created in that act, every region of the United States now has a Joint Task Force staff in charge of coordinating military involvement in domestic law enforcement. The involvement has now expanded to include anti-terrorism investigations.
In many cases, street deployment of paramilitary units is funded by “community policing” grants from the federal government. The majority of police departments use their paramilitary units to serve “dynamic entry” search warrants. The SWAT Team in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, conducted a large-scale crack raid of an entire block in a predominantly black neighborhood. The raid, termed Operation Redi-Rock, resulted in the detention and search of up to 100 people, all of whom were black. (Whites were allowed to leave the area.) No one was ever prosecuted for a crime. In Albany, New York, not long before the change-of-venue trial there of the four white cops who had killed Amadou Diallo in the Bronx, police in camouflage uniforms went on a ransacking spree in the black neighborhood of Arbor Hill, beating down doors house-to-house in search of a black suspect.
Where there is no social program, there’s always a violence program. For the Clinton/Gore administration welfare reform and expansion of the police state were not only means to trump the Republicans; they were also essential to economic policy. Intense competition for jobs at the lowest rungs would depress wages, pit poor and working-class people against each other and, where workfare recipients displace municipal workers, weaken labor unions. The spectre and reality of incarceration would have the traditional effect of suppressing the dangerous classes, at a time when the wage gap between the rich and the poor grew wider than at any time in recent history.
This essay is adapted from Dime’s Worth of Difference by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Those who continue to tell us that Social Security must be cut (together with other government safety nets) as part of an austerity measure to reduce the deficit in order to restart the economy are either idiots or sociopaths -- particularly if they persist in promulgating this mantra now that the the national deficit is rapidly heading toward zero!!! Moreover, ecomomists who are not whoring for the rich who wish to rob the poor are in agreement that the only way to restart the economy now is by renewed government spending.
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Papantonio: Deficit Reduction Exposes Austerity Lies
KMC >> 12pm - May 25, 2013
Mike Papantonio and Sam Seder talk about the falling deficit, and how both the traditional media and the Republicans don't want Americans to know that Obama's economic policies are actually working.
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Saturday, May 11, 2013
Memo to my fellow Democrats: The enemy is not “the Republicans,” rather it is the Republicans AND Democrats “elected” to Congress and the White House. (I put “elected” in quotes because the elections are systematically rigged.) Here Paul Craig Roberts, a highly educated old-school Republican with on-the-job credentials in both Reagan’s cabinet and Wall Street, relates the work of other educated out-side-the-box thinkers who see the U.S. media for what it is: a propaganda machine that would make Goebbels jealous. Roberts finishes with a critic of Obama’s recent speech to the graduating class of The Ohio State University: “Outdoing George Orwell’s Big Brother, Obama said in public to a graduating class of a great university without shame: ‘You have grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as . . . some sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.’” Well, tyranny is already here my friends. But thanks to the “presstitute” media, the majority of Americans are unaware that the U.S. Constitution has long since been shredded.
How Elites and Media Minimize Dissent and Bury Truth — Paul Craig Roberts
May 11, 2013 | Original Here Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter
Over the last several years I have watched the rise of an important new intellect on the American scene. Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, has demonstrated time and again the extraordinary ability to reexamine settled issues and show that the accepted conclusion was incorrect.
One of his early achievements was to dispose of the myth of immigrant crime by demonstrating that “Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age and gender.” You can imagine the uproar, but Unz won the debate.
Unz provoked and prevailed in another controversy when he concluded that Mexican-Americans have approximately the same innate intelligence as whites, with their lower IQs being due to transitory socio-economic deprivation.
He next surprised by showing the connection between the declining real value of the minimum wage (about one-third less than in the 1960s) and immigration. Americans cannot survive on one-third less minimum income than four decades ago, and the unfilled jobs are taken by Hispanics who live many to the room. A higher minimum wage, Unz pointed out, would cure the illegal immigration problem as American citizens would fill the jobs.
I wrote about some of Unz’s remarkable findings. One of my favorites is his comparison of the responsiveness of the Chinese and US governments to their publics. I found his conclusion convincing that the authoritarian one-party Chinese government was more responsive to the Chinese people than democratic two-party Washington is to the American people.
The person is rare who can take on such controversial issues in such a professional way that he wins the admiration even of his critics. In my opinion, Ron Unz is a national resource. He has established online libraries of important periodicals and magazines from the pre-Internet era, information that otherwise essentially would be lost. I have not met him, but he donates to this site and is an independent thinker free of The Matrix.
Unz’s latest article, “Our American Pravda,” http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/our-american-pravda/ is a striking account of the failure of media, regulatory, and national security organizations and subsequent coverups that leave the public deceived. Unz uses the Iraq war as one example:
“The circumstances surrounding our Iraq War demonstrate this, certainly ranking it among the strangest military conflicts of modern times. The 2001 attacks in America were quickly ascribed to the radical Islamists of al-Qaeda, whose bitterest enemy in the Middle East had always been Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime in Iraq. Yet through misleading public statements, false press leaks, and even forged evidence such as the “yellowcake” documents, the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies utilized the compliant American media to persuade our citizens that Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs posed a deadly national threat and required elimination by war and invasion. Indeed, for several years national polls showed that a large majority of conservatives and Republicans actually believed that Saddam was the mastermind behind 9/11 and the Iraq War was being fought as retribution. Consider how bizarre the history of the 1940s would seem if America had attacked China in retaliation for Pearl Harbor.
“True facts were easily available to anyone paying attention in the years after 2001, but most Americans do not bother and simply draw their understanding of the world from what they are told by the major media, which overwhelmingly—almost uniformly—backed the case for war with Iraq; the talking heads on TV created our reality. Prominent journalists across the liberal and conservative spectrum eagerly published the most ridiculous lies and distortions passed on to them by anonymous sources, and stampeded Congress down the path to war.
“The result was what my late friend Lt. Gen. Bill Odom rightly called the “greatest strategic disaster in United States history.” American forces suffered tens of thousands of needless deaths and injuries, while our country took a huge step toward national bankruptcy [and a police state]. Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and others have estimated that with interest the total long-term cost of our two recent wars may reach as high as $5 or $6 trillion, or as much as $50,000 per American household, mostly still unpaid. Meanwhile, economist Edward Wolff has calculated that the Great Recession and its aftermath cut the personal net worth of the median American household to $57,000 in 2010 from a figure nearly twice as high three years earlier. Comparing these assets and liabilities, we see that the American middle class now hovers on the brink of insolvency, with the cost of our foreign wars being a leading cause.
“But no one involved in the debacle ultimately suffered any serious consequences, and most of the same prominent politicians and highly paid media figures who were responsible remain just as prominent and highly paid today. For most Americans, reality is whatever our media organs tell us, and since these have largely ignored the facts and adverse consequences of our wars in recent years, the American people have similarly forgotten. Recent polls show that only half the public today believes that the Iraq War was a mistake.”
Unz covers a number of cases of criminality, treason, and coverups at high levels of government and points out that “these dramatic, well-documented accounts have been ignored by our national media.” One reason for “this wall of uninterest” is that both parties are complicit and thus equally eager to bury the facts.
Unz is raising the question of the efficacy of democracy. Does the way democracy works in America provide any more self-rule than in undemocratic regimes? He offers this example:
“Most of the Americans who elected Barack Obama in 2008 intended their vote as a total repudiation of the policies and personnel of the preceding George W. Bush administration. Yet once in office, Obama’s crucial selections—Robert Gates at Defense, Timothy Geither at Treasury, and Ben Bernake at the Federal Reserve—were all top Bush officials, and they seamlessly continued the unpopular financial bailouts and foreign wars begun by his predecessor, producing what amounted to a third Bush term.”
In an article not long ago, I raised the issue whether Americans live in The Matrix with their perceptions and thoughts controlled by disinformation as in George Orwell’s 1984.
Unz adds to this perspective. He tells the story of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky’s plan to transform Russia into a make-believe two-party state complete with heated battles fought on divisive and symbolic issues. Behind the scenes the political elites would orchestrate the political battles between the parties with the purpose of keeping the population divided and funneling popular dissatisfaction into meaningless dead-end issues. In such a system, self-serving power prevails. After describing Berezovsky’s plot, Unz asks if Berezovsky got his idea from observing the American political scene.
Thinking further about the propagandistic nature of the US media, Unz writes:
“Individuals from less trusting societies are often surprised at the extent to which so many educated Americans tend to believe whatever the media tells them and ignore whatever it does not, placing few constraints on even the most ridiculous propaganda. For example, a commentator on my article described the East German media propaganda he had experienced prior to Reunification as being in many respects more factual and less totally ridiculous than what he now saw on American cable news shows. One obvious difference was that Western media was so globally dominant during that era that the inhabitants of the German Democratic Republic inevitably had reasonable access to a contrasting second source of information, forcing their media to be much more cautious in its dishonesty, while today almost any nonsense uniformly supported by the MSNBC-to-FoxNews spectrum of acceptable opinion remains almost totally unquestioned by most Americans.” http://www.theamericanconservative.com/american-pravda-reality-television/
Unz’s view of the US media as propagandists for power is consistent with that of John Pilger, one of the last remaining real journalists who refuses to serve power, and with Gerald Celente, who sums up the sordid American media in one word–”presstitutes.” I know from my own media experience that an independent print and TV media no longer exists in the West. The American media is a tightly controlled disinformation ministry.
Those few Americans who are free of the constraints imposed by dogmas on their ability to think and to process information have a huge responsibility for their small number. The assault on the rule of law began in the last years of the Clinton regime, but the real destruction of the US Constitution, the basis for the United States, was achieved by the neoconservative George W. Bush and Obama regimes. Wars without declarations by Congress, torture in violation of both US and international law, war crimes in violation of the Nuremberg standard, indefinite detention and assassination of US citizens without due process of law, universal spying on US citizens without warrants, federalization of state and local police now armed with military weapons and uniforms, detention centers, “your papers, please” (without the Gestapo “please”) not only at airports but also on highways, streets, bus terminals, train stations, and at sporting events.
On May 5 Obama gave the commencement address at Ohio State University. No doubt that the graduates thought that they were being honored by being addressed by the world’s greatest tyrant.
Obama told the graduating class, to applause, that their obligation as citizens is to trust the government. Outdoing George Orwell’s Big Brother, Obama said in public to a graduating class of a great university without shame: “You have grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as . . . some sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.”
Listen to my propaganda, not to those constitutional experts, legal authorities, and critics of me, the First Black President, who tell you to beware of unaccountable government. Due process is decided by the demands of the war on terror. If there is a war on terror, do you want a fair trial or do you want to be safe? I am going to make you safe by not giving defendants accused of terrorism, who some liberal-pinko-commie judge would set free, a fair trial.Blogger's Note: You should understand the monologue below as PCR's parody of what Obama might have been thinking in that moment, as opposed to the words he was actually using at the Ohio State commencement.
Making you safe by enveloping you in a police state is a nonpartisan undertaking. Just listen to Lindsay Graham and Peter King and John McCain. These Republican leaders are demanding the police state that I am providing.
As my own legal department, The US Department Of Justice, decided, the Dictator, I mean, elected president, has the power to save the country from domestic and foreign terrorists by abrogating the US Constitution, an out-of-date document that binds our hands and prevents us from keeping you, our serfs and minions, I mean our cherished citizens, safe.
Trust me. That is your obligation as a US citizen. Trust me and I will make you free, happy, employed sometime later in this century when the Amerikan Empire controls the world.
The US Constitution was written by people who opposed Empire. These people were misguided, just like the Roman Republicans who did not understand the need for a Caesar. The American Empire, as the neoconservatives have made clear, is what keeps you free from terrorism. We have to kill them over there before they come over here. And those who are over here will be killed too. We tolerate no dissent. That part of the Constitution is gone, along with the rest of it.
Now give me my honorary doctorate, another sign of approval of my usurpation.
Monday, March 25, 2013
There are two forms of debt, public and private. Public debt is accrued by the government, and in the case of the U.S. does not have to be repaid (so long as the rest of the world continues to tolerate continued printing of more dollars). In fact, since the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. (via the Fed) has printed $13 TRILLION(!) to bail out the big banks from their reckless mortage loans. Most of the private debt was socked on American citizens when the bank-created real-estate bubble burst. In the past, when there was a financial crisis the banks had to eat their losses, and private debts were written down to whatever the market could afford. But now the government is saying that there cannot be a market solution (because it would hurt its largest campaign contributers, the big banks). So the Obama administration and the Republicans are saying that more private debt (in the form of reinflating the real estate market) is the solution to the present "financial crisis." But in order to appear fiscally "responsible" the government claims that it should cut some part of the deficit ...and the only thing left to cut is Social Security, Medicare, and other social spending. But not only would this be stealing from the rapidly disappearing American middle class (whose payroll taxes have fully paid for these things), it would also be poor economics: As a result, the growth of private debt would grow to even more than the current 75 to 80 percent of family income, essentially shutting down all discretionary consumption ...whereas consumers consuming comprise 70% of the U.S. GDP. "We must destroy the village in order to save it"?
theREALnews Permalink
March 25, 2013
Government Debt and Deficits Are Not the Problem - Private Debt Is
Michael Hudson: Why do they call for governments to balance the budget by pushing the economy at large deeper into debt, while trying to save the banks from taking a loss? -
Government Debt and Deficits Are Not the Problem - Private Debt Is
Michael Hudson: Why do they call for governments to balance the budget by pushing the economy at large deeper into debt, while trying to save the banks from taking a loss? -
Bio
Michael Hudson is a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971). His most recent book is "Beyond the Bubble."
Monday, March 18, 2013
It's good that the GOP has admitted to lying about the fiscal crisis. However, the question remains: Will Obama now back off his plan to cut Social Security and Medicare?
GOP: We’ve been lying all along
Boehner's admission that we don't really have a debt crisis reveals his party's ulterior, program-cutting motives
 |
| John Boehner (Credit: AP/Susan Walsh) |
I never thought I’d write these words, but here goes: Thank you, John Boehner. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for finally admitting on national television that all the fiscal cliffs, sequestrations and budget battles you’ve created are, indeed, artificially fabricated by ideologues and self-interested politicians and not the result of some imminent crisis that’s out of our control.
America owes this debt of gratitude to Boehner after he finally came clean on yesterday’s edition of ABC’s “This Week” and admitted that “we do not have an immediate debt crisis.” (His admission was followed up by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, who quickly echoed much the same sentiment on CBS’ “Face the Nation”).
In offering up such a stunningly honest admission, the GOP leader has put himself on record as agreeing with President Obama, who has previously acknowledged that demonstrable reality. But the big news here isn’t just about the politics of a Republican House speaker tacitly admitting they agree with a Democratic president. It is also about a bigger admission revealing the fact that the GOP’s fiscal alarmism is not merely some natural reaction to reality, but a calculated means to other ideological ends.
Before considering those ends, first remember that Boehner (like Obama) is correct on the facts.
As Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman has pointed out, “Even if we do run deficits, federal debt as a share of GDP will be substantially less than it was at the end of World War II” and “it will also be substantially less than, say, debt in several European countries in the mid- to late 1990s.” It is also lower than the 80 percent of GDP level that many economists say starts to put countries in a precarious position. Additionally, citing Congressional Budget Office data, the Center for American Progress notes that the long-term debt outlook is only dire because the projections simply assume without question that “future Congresses will enact huge new deficit-increasing tax cuts and spending hikes.”
MORE DAVID SIROTA.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Is the United States of America the greatest country on the world?
http://youtu.be/16K6m3Ua2nw
The most honest three and a half minutes of television, EVER...
Published on Jun 26, 2012
Beginning scene of the new HBO series The Newsroom explaining why America's Not the Greatest Country Any Longer... But It Can Be.
Thursday, March 07, 2013
Yet another life-long Republican comes to the conclusion that the present wealth inequality in the U.S. is not due to high productivity of those at the top or the laziness of those at the bottom. Rather the cause has been government actions including taxpayer bailouts of too-big-to-fail banks, central-bank-engineered financial asset bubbles, and unjustified tax breaks that favor the rich.
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR ORIGINAL HERE
Grand Old Parity
By SHEILA C. BAIR
Published: February 26, 2013
WASHINGTON
LAST month Emmanuel Saez, a celebrated economist at the University of California, Berkeley, issued another depressing report on income inequality.
Among other things, Mr. Saez examined how real family incomes changed
in the United States from 2009 to 2011, the first two years of the
recovery. The richest 1 percent of Americans, he found, saw their
incomes grow, on average, by more than 11 percent. As for the other 99
percent? You guessed it: incomes shrank by nearly half a percent.
The phenomenon is hardly new. The yawning gap between rich and poor has
been growing since the 1970s and reached a 90-year peak in 2007, just
before the financial crisis. The Great Recession narrowed the gap a bit,
but now, once again, the richest Americans are vacuuming up what wealth
is out there, a trend that Mr. Saez expects to continue.
I am a capitalist and a lifelong Republican. I believe that, in a
meritocracy, some level of income inequality is both inevitable and
desirable, as encouragement to those who contribute most to our economic
prosperity. But I fear that government actions, not merit, have fueled
these extremes in income distribution through taxpayer bailouts,
central-bank-engineered financial asset bubbles and unjustified tax
breaks that favor the rich.
This is not a situation that any freethinking Republican should accept. Skewing income toward the upper, upper class hurts our economy because the rich tend to sit on their money — unlike lower- and middle-income people, who spend a large share of their paychecks, and hence stimulate economic activity.
But more fundamentally, it cuts against everything our country and my
party stand for. Government’s role should not be to rig the game in
favor of “the haves” but to make sure “the have-nots” are given a fair
shot.
President Obama, who has rightly made income inequality a signature
issue, cannot be pleased that the über-rich have gained under the
policies pursued by his administration, while the bottom 99 percent have
not. Unfortunately, his economic team, populated by acolytes of the
former Treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin, has relied on the same
“growth” policies that got us into trouble precrisis: generous treatment
of the financial sector and easy money from the Federal Reserve. These
strategies have done little to encourage sustainable economic growth,
but they have worked wonders to increase Wall Street profits and inflate
the value of stocks and bonds — which are disproportionately owned by
the rich.
Why haven’t Republicans made an issue out of this? No doubt some fear
that discussing it openly would catalyze support for redistributionist
policies, which are anathema to a party that prides itself on increasing
the pie, not redividing it. But there are other policy options to
demonstrate Republicans’ commitment to the average Joe and Jane that are
very much in the party’s tradition.
For instance, as part of renewed fiscal discussions over sequestration,
Republicans should put fundamental tax reform on the table and make it
our priority to end preferential treatment of investment income, which
lets managers of hedge funds pay half the tax rate of managers of shoe
stores.
Defenders of this giveaway make the unsubstantiated claim that it
encourages job-creating investments. But what we have now is merely an
immense pool of investment funds that has created far too few jobs. A report
last year by Bain and Co. projected that by 2020 there will be $900
trillion in financial assets around the globe, chasing investments in a
real economy worth only $90 trillion in gross domestic product. Why in
heaven’s name do we need to keep a tax preference to encourage more?
If we eliminate this and other unjustified tax breaks, we can produce
enough new revenues to lower marginal rates and reduce the deficit,
according to both the Simpson-Bowles and Domenici-Rivlin debt-reduction plans.
Republicans should also put rebuilding the nation’s transportation and
energy infrastructure high on our political agenda. From Lincoln’s
transcontinental railroad to Eisenhower’s highway system, Republicans
have understood that investing in critical infrastructure projects
creates jobs and expands commerce.
And given that the Federal Reserve insists on giving us cheap money,
let’s use it for the benefit of the country by issuing long-term debt to
finance such projects and repay it over decades through dedicated taxes
and user fees.
Some may say I am tilting at the windmills of Tea Party orthodoxy in
making these suggestions, but I believe that most Republican politicians
would be sympathetic to them, if only they could overcome their fear of
primary challenges and the loss of Wall Street money. Having worked for
Senate Republicans in the 1980s, I remember a time when Republicans
stood up to special interests and purged the tax code of preferences for
investment income and other special breaks.
They managed to survive re-election by showing leadership, taking
principled positions and defending them vigorously. It’s time for the
Grand Old Party to return to those roots.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on February 27, 2013, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Grand Old Parity.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: "The institutionalization of tyranny is the achievement of the Bush/Obama regimes of the 21st century." "One decade was time enough for two presidents to make Americans the least free people of any developed country, indeed, perhaps of any country. In what other country or countries does the chief executive officer have the right to murder citizens without due process?"
The Institutionalization of Tyranny — Paul Craig Roberts
January 18, 2013 | Original Here
Republicans and conservative Americans are still fighting Big Government in its welfare state form. Apparently, they have never heard of the militarized police state form of Big Government, or, if they have, they are comfortable with it and have no objection.
Republicans, including those in the House and Senate, are content for big government to initiate wars without a declaration of war or even Congress’ assent, and to murder with drones citizens of countries with which Washington is not at war. Republicans do not mind that federal “security” agencies spy on American citizens without warrants and record every email, Internet site visited, Facebook posting, cell phone call, and credit card purchase. Republicans in Congress even voted to fund the massive structure in Utah in which this information is stored.
But heaven forbid that big government should do anything for a poor person.
Republicans have been fighting Social Security ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it into law in the 1930s, and they have been fighting Medicare ever since President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law in 1965 as part of the Great Society initiatives.
Conservatives accuse liberals of the “institutionalization of compassion.” Writing in the February, 2013, issue of Chronicles, John C. Seiler, Jr., damns Johnson’s Great Society as “a major force in turning a country that still enjoyed a modicum of republican liberty into the centralized, bureaucratized, degenerate, and bankrupt state we endure today.”
It doesn’t occur to conservatives that in Europe democracy, liberty, welfare, rich people, and national health services all coexist, but that somehow American liberty is so fragile that it is overturned by a limited health program only available to the elderly.
Neither does it occur to conservative Republicans that it is far better to institutionalize compassion than to institutionalize tyranny.
The institutionalization of tyranny is the achievement of the Bush/Obama regimes of the 21st century. This, and not the Great Society, is the decisive break from the American tradition. The Bush Republicans demolished almost all of the constitutional protections of liberty erected by the Founding Fathers. The Obama Democrats codified Bush’s dismantling of the Constitution and removed the protection afforded to citizens from being murdered by the government without due process. One decade was time enough for two presidents to make Americans the least free people of any developed country, indeed, perhaps of any country. In what other country or countries does the chief executive officer have the right to murder citizens without due process?
It turns one’s stomach to listen to conservatives bemoan the destruction of liberty by compassion while they institutionalize torture, indefinite detention in violation of habeas corpus, murder of citizens on suspicion and unproven accusation alone, complete and total violation of privacy, interference with the right to travel by unaccountable “no-fly” lists and highway check points, the brutalization of citizens and those exercising their right to protest by police, frame-ups of critics, and narrow the bounds of free speech.
In Amerika today only the executive branch of the federal government has any privacy. The privacy is institutional, not personal–witness the fate of CIA director Petraeus. While the executive branch destroys the privacy of every one else, it insists on its own privilege of privacy. National security is invoked to shield the executive branch from its criminal actions. Federal prosecutors actually conduct trials in which the evidence against defendants is classified and withheld from defendants’ attorneys. Attorneys such as Lynne Stewart have been imprisoned for not following orders from federal prosecutors to violate the attorney-client privilege.
Conservatives accept the monstrous police state that has been erected, because they think it makes them safe from “Muslim terrorism.” They haven’t the wits to see that they are now open to terrorism by the government.
Consider, for example, the case of Bradley Manning. He is accused of leaking confidential information that reveals US government war crimes despite the fact that it is the responsibility of every soldier to reveal war crimes. Virtually every one of Manning’s constitutional rights has been violated by the US government. He has been tortured. In an effort to coerce Manning into admitting trumped-up charges and implicating WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, Manning had his right to a speedy trial violated by nearly three years of pre-trial custody and repeated trial delays by government prosecutors. And now the judge, Col. Denise Lind, who comes across as a member of the prosecution rather than an impartial judge, has ruled that Manning cannot use as evidence the government’s own reports that the leaked information did not harm national security. Lind has also thrown out the legal principle of mens rea by ruling that Manning’s motive for leaking information about US war crimes cannot be presented as evidence in his trial. http://www.armytimes.com/news/2013/01/ap-judge-limits-motive-evidence-wikileaks-case-bradely-manning-011613/
Mens rea says that a crime requires criminal intent. By discarding this legal principle, Lind has prevented Manning from showing that his motive was to do his duty under the military code and reveal evidence of war crimes. This allows prosecutors to turn a dutiful act into the crime of aiding the enemy by revealing classified information.
Of course, nothing that Manning allegedly revealed helped the enemy in any way as the enemy, having suffered the war crimes, was already aware of them.
Obama Democrats are no more disturbed than conservative Republicans that a dutiful American soldier is being prosecuted because he has a moral conscience. In Manning’s trial, the government’s definition of victory has nothing whatsoever to do with justice prevailing. For Washington, victory means stamping out moral conscience and protecting a corrupt government from public exposure of its war crimes.
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