Obama Regime Seeks Permission To Lie In Response To Freedom Of Information Requests – Even To The Courts
Jerry Policoff | OEN | October 25, 2011
One of the President Obama’s first promises after becoming President of the United States was a commitment to usher in a new era of unprecedented government transparency. Instead the Obama administration has exhibited what may be an unprecedented obsession with government secrecy including blocking numerous law suits by invoking the doctrine of “State Secrets.” The administration has even come up with an interpretation of the Patriot Act which many in Congress who have seen it claim is overly broad and bestows more power on the Executive Branch than was intended by Congress when they passed it.
Unfortunately those in Congress who have seen this document are not permitted to divulge its content, and we, the public, cannot see it because the administration has chosen to classify it as a “State Secret.” In other words, you might be doing something that the Obama Administration believes violates the Patriot Act, but you won’t know it until they indict you for breaking a law you did not know existed (I might be breaking it just by penning and publishing this article).
Now the Obama/Holder Justice Department is attempting to re-write the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), empowering or even compelling government agencies to deny the very existence of records they know to exist if they believe they are legitimately exempted from disclosure. Of course they are most likely the sole arbiter of whether they are indeed exempt from disclosure. In effect the Obama/Holder Justice Department wants to be free to legally lie about the existence of records in response to FOIA requests. Apparently they want to avoid the embarrassment and inconvenience of being officially rebuked by the courts for doing exactly that (lying to a Federal judge), as occurred earlier this year when, in a strongly worded opinion, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney wrote that the “Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court.” The solution is simple: re-write the law so the government, in many circumstances, can affirmatively mislead the court.
Despite substantial opposition by such groups as the ACLU, The National Press Club, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, OpentheGovernment.org., Judicial Watch, et al to this radical re-write of the FOIA Law, this controversial effort by the Obama Administration to evade the very transparency it so passionately promised to deliver has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media which is supposed to the guardian of the people’s right to know.
Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or neither, this move by the Obama administration should trouble you deeply. Is this change we can believe in???
Below are snippets of reports on this controversy, none of them from a mainstream media source. That was not my intent. I just could not find any. I learned about it just this morning in an e-mail from the National Law Journal:
National Press Club Urges Administration to Reconsider Draft Rule on Freedom of Information
“Under the new Department of Justice proposal, in replying to a request for information under the freedom-of-information law, if the information is allowed to be withheld under certain statutory exceptions, then federal officials “will respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist”– even if that is not the case.
“No rule or law should allow, let alone require, the government to mislead the press or the public about anything,” said Mark Hamrick, a broadcast journalist with the Associated Press who is the 2011 president of the National Press Club. “If enacted, it appears that this proposed rule would offend the precepts that informed the Freedom of Information Act, and it would tarnish the government’s credibility.
“What’s more, the change seems unnecessary,” he said. “If agencies are exercising legally allowable exceptions to the law and withholding certain records, they can just continue to do as they do today: neither confirm nor deny the information’s existence.”
~
Justice Dept. proposes lying, hiding existence of records under new FOIA rule
“The Justice Department has proposed the change as part of a large revision of FOIA rules for federal agencies. Specifically, the rule would direct government agencies who are denying a request under an established FOIA exemption to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist,” rather than citing the relevant exemption.
The proposed rule has alarmed government transparency advocates across the political spectrum, who’ve called it “Orwellian” and say it will “twist” public access to government.
In a public comment regarding the rule change, the ACLU, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org, said the move “will dramatically undermine government integrity by allowing a law designed to provide public access to government information to be twisted to permit federal law enforcement agencies to actively lie to the American people.”
Conservative government watchdog Judicial Watch has also lambasted the proposed rules change
“Upon taking office, President Obama released a memorandum declaring his administration was “committed to operating with an unprecedented level of openness. Specifically, he pledged to bolster the strength of the FOIA act, calling it “the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open government.”
~
Government Could Hide Existence of Records under FOIA Rule Proposal
“The ACLU, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and OpenTheGovernment.org said the move would “dramatically undermine government integrity by allowing a law designed to provide public access to government to be twisted.
“Open government groups also contend that the proposed rule could undermine judicial proceedings.
In a recent case brought by the ACLU of Southern California, the FBI denied the existence of documents. But the court later discovered that the documents did exist. In an amended order , U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney wrote that the “Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court.”
DOJ’s draft FOIA rule was first published in March , but DOJ re-opened comment submissions in September at the request of open-government groups. The new comment period ended October 19.”
Former Obama envoy George Mitchell comes out as ‘Israel’s lawyer’
By Ali Abunimah – The Electronic Intifada – 10/26/2011
While he held the job of President Barack Obama’s peace process envoy, former US Senator George Mitchell generally maintained a good reputation. He came into the job with high regard because of his role in Northern Ireland.
During his Middle East tenure, Mitchell was notoriously tight-lipped, allowing people to believe that behind the stony face was a tough and fair “honest broker” who would privately take Israel to task in ways that the US could not do publicly.
But this was always an illusion. As detailed minutes of previously secret meetings, revealed in the Palestine Papers showed, Mitchell was very much ‘Israel’s lawyer’ – to use Aaron Miller’s famous term – just like all previous US envoys and officials. Mark Perry and I analyzed some of these documents revealing Mitchell’s role as Israel’s enabler.
Now, Mitchell has spoken out at London’s Chatham House on 17 October, and in his own words – as reported by Israel’s Haaretz. His comments largely confirm that in his general approach and in very specific ways, Mitchell was actively working to [further] Israel’s agenda and was never remotely an “honest broker.” Here are some highlights from the Haaretz article with my analysis.
Endorsing collaboration with occupation despite disastrous effects on Palestinians
From Haaretz:
“Order and personal security [in the West Bank] have been established in a way that never was previously,” stated Mitchell. “The problem is that that effort cannot be sustained in the absence of progress, or at least the hope of progress on the political front. It will break down internally on the Palestinian side, and it will break down in relations with the Israelis. And it is to President Abbas’ credit that, notwithstanding the fact that we haven’t been able to get into meaningful negotiations, he has maintained co-ordination and co-operation on the security front and it continues.
In other words, Mitchell sees it as positive and praiseworthy that Mahmoud Abbas is unconditionally collaborating with Israeli occupation forces without any benefit for Palestinians. When Mitchell talks about “order and personal security” he means order and personal security for Israeli occupiers and settlers and perhaps at certain periods for Palestinians restricted to the showcase Area A ghetto-cities of Ramallah and Nablus. But for Palestinians living all over the occupied West Bank and eastern occupied Jerusalem there is neither order nor personal security.
In the eastern occupied Jerusalem neighbhorhoods of Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah, hundreds of families live with the insecurity of knowing their houses are targeted for destruction for the benefit of Jewish settlers.
In the southern West Bank tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouin face the prospect of forced removal from their land, and everywhere else – especially during the current olive harvest – Palestinians face attacks by Israeli government-backed colonial settlers.
This is the “order and security” that Mitchell is praising.
Interfering in Palestinian politics, opposing reconciliation
From Haaretz:
Speaking on Gilad Shalit’s release, Mitchell said that the subject is extremely sensitive for Israelis, and that the deal has positive aspects. Yet he insisted that the prisoner exchange had yielded negative results, such as strengthening Hamas vis-a-vis the Palestinian Authority.
It has been known since January, thanks to the Palestine Papers, that the Palestinian Authority lobbied strenuously against the prisoner exchange precisely in order to deny Hamas any credit. Yet there were also persistent reports that Mitchell and the US vetoed the deal going through earlier. Mitchell’s reported comments add weight to that assessment.
Mitchell’s logic can be inferred: his priority was to keep the Palestinian leadership weak and divided so that the most subservient element, the Abbas-led PA, would be more vulnerable to a US-brokered deal on Israel’s terms. This contrasts markedly with his approach in Ireland, where the US supported a broad Irish nationalist common front encompassing the Republic of Ireland government, and the “moderate” and “extremist” nationalist parties in Northern Ireland to strengthen their negotiating positions vis a vis the British-backed unionists.
Shock, horror, Israel might have to “choose” democracy
Haaretz:
Changing demographic realities will compel Israel to make fateful choices, Mitchell suggested.
“Israel, if the two state solution is lost, will have to choose between being a Jewish state and a democratic state,” he said. “And that’s a choice they should not have to make.”
Mitchell makes clear with these words that he shares Israel’s racist perception of Palestinians not as rights-bearing human beings but as a ‘demographic threat’ to Jewish supremacy.
His priority – like that of the rest of the US Zionist foreign policy establishment, and like President Obama – is not justice, or even “peace” but first and foremost maintaining racial and colonial privileges for Israeli Jews. What alarms Mitchell most of all is that Israelis should ever have to abide by democratic principles in which all people have equal political rights, regardless of their membership in one or another ethnoreligious group.
Israel, Mitchell tells us, should never be forced to choose democracy. Instead it was his job to try to goad Palestinians into accepting a bantustan on Israel’s terms that would spare Israel that terrible “choice.”
Palestinian Authority not subservient enough for Mitchell’s liking
If we take the Haaretz report as a complete and accurate report of Mitchell’s comments (admittedly something that can’t be taken for granted), what’s notable is that he attacks the PA for not seizing the opportunity of Israel’s so-called 10-month “settlement freeze” but he was silent about the fact that the freeze was fake all along:
Haaretz says:
Mitchell also criticized the Palestinian Authority’s responses to American efforts to renew negotiations with Israel. He claimed that the Palestinians were unwilling to accept the 10-month settlement construction freeze declared by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in November 2009; the Palestinians contended that this freeze was “useless,” and refused to engage in negotiations.
“They refused to enter into the negotiations until nine months of the 10 had elapsed,” Mitchell said. “Once they entered, they then said [the freeze] was indispensable. What had been worse than useless a few months before then became indispensable and they said they would not remain in the talks unless that indispensable element were extended.”
A few crucial facts: First, the “settlement freeze” never even nominally included eastern occupied Jerusalem, where Israel has been most aggressive in demolishing Palestinian homes and expanding its racist colonies. Second, in the rest of the West Bank the “freeze” was never a freeze since it only included “new” construction and excluded the thousands of colony homes at various stages of completion.
Finally, once the formal 10-month “freeze” ended, Israel immediately embarked on a building boom which Israel’s Peace Now termed “the most active period in many years.”
So Mitchell doesn’t appear to have been concerned about the reality, but only about the PA’s willingness to go along with a fiction that there was a “freeze” when there never was.
All of this only confirms that Mitchell himself learned nothing from his experience in Northern Ireland.
No matter which personalities are appointed to “peace process” roles in a US administration, a commitment first and foremost to Israel’s racist and colonial agenda and to the safety and “security” of its occupation are always the highest priorities, with Palestinian rights nowhere on the horizon.
The Myth of Greek Profligacy
By MARSHALL AUERBACK | CounterPunch | October 24, 2011
Historically, Greeks are very good at constructing myths. The rest of the world? Not so much. Reading the press, one gets the impression of a bunch of lazy Mediterranean scroungers, enjoying one of the highest standards of living in Europe while making the frugal Germans pick up the tab. This is nonsensical propaganda, designing to justify the continued collective execution being inflicted on Athens for the sins of its fathers and grandfathers. As if Greece is the only country ever to cook its books in the European Union! The heart of the problem is in the antiquated revenue system that supports that state, which results in a budget shortfall consistently about 10 per cent of GDP. The top 20 per cent of the income distribution in Greece pay virtually no taxes at all, the product of a corrupt bargain reached during the days of the junta between the military and Greece’s wealthiest plutocrats. No wonder there is a fiscal crisis.
So it’s not a problem of Greek profligates, or an overly generous welfare state, both of which suggest that the standard IMF style remedies being proposed here are bound to fail, as they are doing right now. In fact, given the non-stop austerity being imposed on Athens (which simply has the effect of deflating the economy further and thereby exacerbating the very problem the Greeks are trying to eliminate), the Greeks really are getting close to the point where they should just default and shift the problem back to those imposing the austerity. It can’t be worse than the slow execution they are facing today.
In reality, the Greeks have one of the lowest per capita incomes in Europe (€21,100), much lower than the Eurozone 12 (€27,600) or the German level (€29,400). Further, the Greek social safety nets might seem very generous by US standards but are truly modest compared to the rest of the Europe. On average, for 1998-2007 Greece spent only €3530.47 per capita on social protection benefits–slightly less than Spain’s spending and about €700 more than Portugal’s, which has one of the lowest levels in all of the Eurozone. By contrast, Germany and France spent more than double the Greek level, while the original Eurozone 12 level averaged €6251.78. Even Ireland, which has one of the most neoliberal economies in the euro area, spent more on social protection than the supposedly profligate Greeks.
One would think that if the Greek welfare system was as generous and inefficient as it is usually described, then administrative costs would be higher than that of more disciplined governments such as the German and French. But this is obviously not the case, according to Eurostat. Even spending on pensions, which is the main target of the neoliberals, is lower than in other European countries.
Furthermore, if one looks at total social spending of select Eurozone countries as a per cent of GDP through 2005 (based on OECD statistics), Greece’s spending lagged behind that of all euro countries except for Ireland, and was below the OECD average. Note also that in spite of all the commentary on early retirement in Greece, its spending on old age programs was in line with the spending in Germany and France.
In fact, Greece has one of the most unequal distributions of income in Europe, and a very high level of poverty, as the following table shows. Again, the evidence is not consistent with the picture presented in the media of an overly generous welfare state—unless the comparison is made against the situation in the US.
Of course, these facts don’t matter. The prevailing myth is that Greece is in the words of the FT’s John Authers, “a country that was truly profligate”, with little in the way of data to support that assertion. The country, however, is truly stuck: they can’t devalue, they can’t pay their way, at current prices, and nobody will voluntarily finance them. So they must exit and devalue or drop their domestic prices. The massive default, though inevitable, is just a step along the way.
To make the problem worse, export earnings also seem to face their own structural cap that is consistently exceeded by import spending, which means that the debt that finances the government shortfall is increasingly held abroad. The debt is issued under Greek law, but now it is payable in Euros which Greece is powerless to print. In this sense, ironically, the fiscal crisis is a consequence of Greece’s success, after a long preparation, in joining the European Union, and hence giving up its own currency.
The point is that, if this analysis of the source of the problem is correct, then standard IMF austerity policy is unlikely to do much to help. If the problem is not the level of wages, or the size of the welfare state, then pushing wages down and shrinking the welfare state is not going to do much. Greece, after all, is still a democracy and if one is to judge from the intensifying riots in the country, it is far from clear whether Greece (or any other euro zone member for that matter) is really willing to cut spending and raise tax rates enough to make a difference. This much is implicitly being conceded by the “Troika” – European Commission (EC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Central Bank (ECB), which was submitted to the EU Summit yesterday, and will no doubt be a part of the deliberations in the Greek debt restructuring proposals to be hammered out by Oct. 26th.
On the first page of the document is not only a pretty open and blatant admission that expansionary fiscal consolidation (EFC) has proven to be a contradiction in terms, at least in Greece, but there is also a serious policy incompatibility problem, at least over the intermediate term horizon, with efforts at internal devaluation (ID) – that is, attempting nominal domestic private income deflation in order to improve trade prospects when one has a fixed exchange rate constraint.
While they stop short of recognizing that their demands and the actions they have imposed on Greek policymakers are setting off a debt deflation implosion of the Greek economy (never mind rupturing any semblance of a social contract, and ripping the social fabric to shreds as well – this is, after all, the jackboot version of neoliberal “reform” designed to stamp out any last vestige of social democracy and organized labor in the eurozone) this is a very large concession for the Troika to have taken.
To admit that EFC is not working, and that pursuing ID will aggravate matters further, including the ability of Greece to hit fiscal targets, is a fairly large step in the recognition of the reality of the situation. This is not something the faith based neoliberal economists in the Troika organizations are often prone to do. It is not what their incentive structures, formal and informal, tend to encourage them to do.
So why pursue it? Well, let’s face it: this has far less at this stage to do with Greece (even as the prevailing mainstream myth continues to perpetuate the picture of a lazy, unproductive country full of profligates and scroungers), than punishing other potential fiscal recalcitrants. They are scapegoating the Greeks – in order to make sure that should Greece take the rumored “hair cut” on its debt and restructure, the other peripheral countries – especially Italy – won’t get any ideas and be tempted down the same path. This is the strategy to prevent what is euphemistically called the “contagion impact”. In reality, it is also called the principle of collective guilt, destroying the livelihoods of thirteen million people for political reasons. Given their own history, the Germans above all other nations, should understand this phenomenon.
If the prevailing mix of fiscal austerity policies continue, there will be spill-over effects to nations that export to Greece. To be sure, Greece is a tiny market in Euroland, but its fiscal problems are by no means unique. As the bigger economies like Spain and Italy also adopt austerity measures, the entire continent can find government revenue collapsing – even Germany, where economic deceleration has become markedly more noticeable in the past few months. Worse, exports to neighbors will be hurt by reduction of demand. Finally, if austerity succeeds in lowering wages and prices in one nation it can lead to competitive deflation, only compounding the problem as each country tries to gain advantage in order to promote growth through exports. What is most remarkable to us is that the largest net exporter, Germany, does not appear to recognize that its insistence on fiscal austerity for all of its neighbors will cook its own golden egg-laying goose.
Angela Merkel likes to say that no real economic union is possible if one party to the union (Greece) works shorter hours and takes longer holidays than another (Germany). What she should say is that no real economic union is possible if the governing plutocrats of ALL nations (not just the billionaire Greek shipowners who probably have already moved their money offshore, but also wealthy bankers who have suffered no consequence of their own fraudulent and willfully destructive lending practices) consistently evade their fair share of the cost of that party’s own state expenditure, expecting the union either to pay the bill itself, or to force the bottom 80 per cent to pay it.
Greece is not a special case, but rather a case in point of what happens when you impose fiscal consolidation on countries with high private debt to GDP ratios, high desired private net saving rates, and large, stubborn current account deficits. What is needed is a way to redistribute demand toward the trade deficit nations—for example, by having the trade surplus nations spending euros on direct investment in the trade deficit nations. Germany did this with East Germany. Such a mechanism could be set up under the aegis of the European Investment Bank very quickly. Effective incentives to “recycle” current account surpluses in this manner via foreign direct investment, equity flows, foreign aid, or purchases of imports could be easily crafted. If it could be accomplished, it will be a way Greece and the others could become competitive enough to secure their future through higher exports.
Failure to embrace this kind of growth option will ultimately give the Greeks little alternative but to default, leaving the euro zone’s policy makers with an even bigger and costlier mess on their hands. Admittedly, this will not fully solve Greece’s problems as they would likely have to leave the euro zone as well and reintroduce the drachma. This would entail capital controls, which will cause people to head for the exits (this is, after all, a country with lots of boats). If they default, it would be more akin to a “Samson moment” for the entire euro zone. Like Samson in his last days, blinded and beaten by the Philistines, Greece is weakened, blind and bound. Default would represent one last defiant burst of strength with which it “pulls down the temple” (in this case the euro zone) via default and takes down everybody. Myth-making at the expense of the Greeks does not serve anybody’s interests, as there will be a cascade of defaults everywhere, and a Soviet style collapse in incomes, hardly an enticing prospect for the global economy. Not an attractive ending, but this is the kind of outcome which the troika’s self-surviving, immoral and cruel policies could lead to. The Greeks, and the vast majority of Europe’s citizens, deserve better.
MARSHALL AUERBACK is a market analyst and commentator. He can be reached at MAuer1959@aol.com
The Real Agenda Behind the Cain Tax Scheme
By MIKE LOFGREN | CounterPunch | October 21, 2011
The tax plan of Republican candidate Herman Cain is the best current example of the real agenda of the GOP. It is a masterpiece of marketing, with its simple “9-9-9” label being reminiscent of a two-for-one pizza special. It would lower all Federal income tax rates to a single 9-percent rate, set the corporate rate at 9 percent, and levy a national sales tax of 9 percent. It has the sort of meretricious simplicity that appeals both to the simple-minded and the mainstream media. True to its “horserace” philosophy of covering politics, early on most of the the press declared Cain’s plan a brilliant campaign move without making any effort to evaluate its substantive merits.
Bruce Bartlett, formerly an economist in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations (and a fellow Republican apostate), analyzed the 9-9-9 tax plan. His conclusion: it decreases revenue as it drastically cuts the taxes of the wealthy and – here’s the kicker – raises taxes on the least well-off. And it does not in fact tax all income at 9 percent (so much for its appealing tripartite simplicity): it lowers the capital gains and dividend rates to zero. Generally, the richer the individual is, the more likely his income is to be derived from capital gains and dividends, which are already taxed at less than half the top marginal income tax rate. This current inequity in the tax code accounts for the fact that the 400 richest Americans have been paying an average effective Federal income tax rate of 17-18 percent since passage of the Bush tax cuts: little more than half the effective rate they had paid since the early 1990s – even as their combined income quadrupled. Cain’s plan would sharply increase this disparity.
The usual rationale for reducing tax rates on capital below the rates on labor – and Cain abolishes them entirely – is that capital gains and dividends are “double taxed,” that is, the corporation that pays them out is taxed, and the recipient is taxed. But this is a smokescreen. The American revenue system is about taxing individual legal entities. Taxes on an individual, be he a wager-earner or sole proprietor of a business, are only levied once; that said, all income from whatever source (unless it is specifically exempt) is taxed in those cases. Corporations, on the other hand, pay rates on profits, a narrower category whose definition is more susceptible to creative bookkeeping. This is how GE can pay zero Federal taxes in a given year; yet that does not preclude its shareholders from realizing capital gains. Those GE shareholders are individual entities who are legally separate from the corporations whose shares they own. They are taxed once on the investment income they receive.
While Bartlett did not do a net estimate of the total revenue change, it appears to me that just executing the tax cuts in only the second phase of Cain’s three-phase plan would result in gross revenue losses of over a trillion dollars per year (so much for the GOP’s abiding concern for the deficit). The plan’s revenue raisers, on the other hand (including its Federal consumption tax with no allowance for deductions, even for food), would fall disproportionately on the non-rich and would in any case be unlikely to make up the revenue loss.
As Bartlett describes it, the Cain plan would eliminate deductions to corporations for the workers they hire. Therefore, Corporate America would have even less incentive to hire workers than now, when they are sitting on close to $2 trillion in cash. They would have all the more incentive to park their loot at a commercial bank (which would in turn park the deposits at a Federal Reserve bank), or arbitrage sweat labor overseas. On the other hand, according to Bartlett’s reading, corporations could borrow money to pay shareholder dividends and deduct the expense!
The Tax Policy Center did a distributional analysis of Cain’s plan. The Center’s conclusion: “A middle income household making between about $64,000 and $110,000 would get hit with an average tax increase of about $4,300, lowering its after-tax income by more than 6 percent and increasing its average federal tax rate (including income, payroll, estate and its share of the corporate income tax) from 18.8 percent to 23.7 percent. By contrast, a taxpayer in the top 0.1% (who makes more than $2.7 million) would enjoy an average tax cut of nearly$1.4 million, increasing his after-tax income by nearly 27 percent . . . a typical household making more than $2.7 million would pay a smaller share of its income in federal taxes than one making less than $18,000.”
So much for the policy; what of the political strategy? At first I wondered: did Herman Cain dream this plan up himself? If not, who whispered it in his ear, and what interests did that person represent? Now we know: Rich Lowrie, a Cain economic advisor who lives in Gates Mills, Ohio, a village of 2400 inhabitants east of Cleveland, and one of the wealthiest suburbs in the country. Lowrie’s day job is as an investment advisor, and he has been involved with such groups as the Koch brothers-funded Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity. His plan has had substantive input from long-time Republican operatives Arthur Laffer (who, with his Laffer Curve, is one of the fathers of the current generation of crackpot right-wing economists), and Steve Moore, a pioneer in the operation of 501(c)4 organizations that promote the political views of billionaires while remaining tax-exempt.
Still, it is a little surprising that after the greatest financial meltdown in 80 years, widespread unemployment and destitution, and rising public anger over the greatest income disparity in America since the 1920s, a declared presidential candidate would tout a plan that would raise taxes on low and moderate income-earners while drastically reducing them on the wealthy. Potential Republican primary voters are notoriously tolerant of lunatic-fringe nostrums, but one would think even they might blanche at a plan that would raise taxes on the majority of them.
But, at least so far, not a bit of it. Cain surged in the polls after unveiling his tax plan. According to the mainstream media, he surged because of it. The underlying causes of this phenomenon would make a fascinating case study in psychopathology. Nevertheless, one suspects that Cain will begin to sink in the polls now that the big media have finally begun to evaluate 9-9-9 and as his rivals start to chip away at his front-runner status. Still, Cain’s tax plan is a startling illustration of how to use kamikaze tactics to advance a political agenda.
In the case of other policies with substantial fiscal (and social) consequences, for instance the privatization of Social Security, right-wing think tanks fronting for billionaires have worked for decades to mainstream heretofore politically unthinkable policies by endlessly repeating simple, misleading memes and touting faked “analysis.” Eventually they succeed in changing the debate and dragging the Washington Consensus (regardless of what the country at large thinks) in the direction of serving our ever-more-entrenched plutocracy.
Viewed in the light of how he advanced the GOP’s tax agenda, Cain is not a “vanity” candidate or a joke, even if he has no realistic chance of winning. His strategic purpose would appear to be to normalize bad policy and shape the Beltway’s hive mind gradually to accept a tax system with few major precedents – save that in France’s ancien régime, where the aristocracy was exempt from taxes while the poor were squeezed. And we all know how well that historical episode ended.
While Cain’s lowering of taxes on the wealthy is a well-known formula in the GOP’s playbook, the really interesting and heretofore less well-known aspect of his plan was its increase in taxes for the working poor. Republicans have of late become quite uncharacteristically enamored of raising taxes, but not on the rich. They are targeting the less well-off.
The first public laying of the groundwork for the idea of taxing low-income earners came in a November 2002 Wall Street Journal editorial page comment. The working poor, less well-off retirees, and others who do not pay Federal income taxes were “lucky duckies.” The Journal followed up with two additional editorials using that infantile phrase.
Most Republican office holders did not yet come out publicly to make the Journal’s argument. But a few, like Jim DeMint and Orin Hatch, occasionally commandeered the Senate chamber to denounce a tax policy that has allegedly allowed almost half of Americans to avoid paying Federal income taxes.
Since Obama’s election, Republicans have amped up the “soak the poor” theme. They are strangely lukewarm about maintaining a payroll tax cut, despite the fact that it would increase the purchasing power of tens of millions of Americans who would have no choice but to recycle the money into the economy in order to buy necessities. Strange behavior indeed from a party that never met a tax cut it didn’t like.
And now Rick Perry is said to be producing a flat tax, one likely to be similarly regressive in the manner of 9-9-9, even if differing in details. The normalization of bad policy continues.
Cain has never bothered to put together a proper campaign organization. Given that his campaign is spending tens of thousands of dollars of scarce funds to buy copies of his auto-hagiography, it is possible that his whole candidacy, like that of Donald Trump or Sarah Palin, is mainly a bid to boost his personal income: book sales, speaking fees, a gig as a Fox News commentator. As year chased weary year in the pizza pie business, Cain no doubt grew tired of being a huckster for his own brand of ketchup sauce and easer-like mozzarella on a soggy cardboard crust; he wanted to augment his income in the more respectable realm of ideas. The Club for Growth, Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Tax Reform, and all the other front organizations for billionaires would agree: regardless of what happens to his candidacy, Herman Cain has succeeded in the world of ideas.
Mike Lofgren is a former professional staff member of the House and Senate Budget Committees. He retired this year.
Former Mujahadeen Khalq Leader Confirms Alleged Iran Terror Plot Conspirator Affiliated with MEK
By Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam | October 19, 2011
You’ll recall that the the U.S. claimed that the Iranian alleged conspirator in the terror plot against the Saudi ambassador, Gholam Shakuri, was a Revolutionary Guard (IRG) official. Though many Iranians have scoured every resource they could think of, none have found evidence of such a person with any IRG affiliation. If the U.S. has such evidence it ought to produce it if it wants to be believed. Yesterday, the well-placed Alef site, run by an Iranian majlis member who’s run for president twice, alleged that Shakuri is in fact a high level Mujahadeen al Khalq (MEK) leader. It offered evidence to support the charge.
Today, the official MEK leadership has denied that Shakuri is a member and the U.S. has also denied the charge. But in fact, a former high-ranking MEK leader, Massoud Khodabandeh (he has allowed me to use his name), writing in the Gulf2000 listserv, confirmed that Shakuri is in fact an MEK member. He cautions that there may be more than one Gholam Shakuri, and the one who is the MEK member may not be the same Shakuri the U.S. has named. While this may be true, this new development moves Shakuri a lot closer to being MEK than being IRG. And moves the entire U.S. account of this supposed crime closer to the trash heap.
In its story containing the U.S. denial, the NY Times quotes U.S. sources responding to the Iranian charge that Shakuri held or holds a U.S. passport:
Mr. Shakuri is not a United States citizen and does not have an American passport.
I have no doubt that Shakuri is not a U.S. citizen and also that he may not currently have a U.S. passport. But this statement, at least as portrayed by Scott Shane, does not say the U.S. never issued such a passport in his name. There are many ways and reasons a non-U.S. citizen may obtain a U.S. passport including fraud and the possibility that Shakuri was performing a task for the U.S. government or CIA and needed such a document. I am speculating, but in light of the paucity of evidence the U.S. has offered to support its claims, we must parse the information it has distributed to try to determine credibility and accuracy.
There is another intriguing element that the Alef story added to the mix. It claimed that Interpol had released information allowing confirmation of Shakuri as an MEK official. The NY Times says this:
An Interpol spokeswoman declined to comment. But an American official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Interpol had discovered no link to the opposition group, calling the Iranian news report “pure fiction.”
While I do not know the protocols that Interpol follows in making public statements, I’d think that if the organization had been portrayed falsely by Iran, that it would want to say so. I’d also think that the U.S. would be a far more important national partner to Interpol than Iran and that Interpol would also want to deny this story if it were false because the U.S. would benefit from this. The fact that it refuses to do so raises if not a red, then surely a yellow flag for me.
The fact that a U.S. official seeks to speak on behalf of Interpol and under the cloak of anonymity is highly dubious. If they want us to believe what they claim, then I’m afraid it will have to be Interpol speaking on its own behalf.
Provoking a Path to Persia
The Saban Center’s prescient paper on war with Iran
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | October 20, 2011
In June 2009, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy published “Which Path to Persia?—Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran.” Writing in a tone strikingly reminiscent of the Project for a New American Century’s infamous pre-9/11 paper “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the six co-authors noted that, “It seems highly unlikely that the United States would mount an invasion without any provocation or other buildup.” For a think tank specifically established by media mogul Haim Saban to protect Israel, this could prove to be a formidable obstacle impeding their desired march—of U.S. troops—to Tehran.
“In fact, if the United States were to decide that to garner greater international support, galvanize U.S. domestic support, and/or provide a legal justification for an invasion, it would be best to wait for an Iranian provocation, then the time frame for an invasion might stretch out indefinitely,” Saban’s think-tankers ruefully observed.
“With only one real exception, since the 1978 revolution, the Islamic Republic has never willingly provoked an American military response, although it certainly has taken actions that could have done so if Washington had been looking for a fight. Thus it is not impossible that Tehran might take some action that would justify an American invasion. And it is certainly the case that if Washington sought such a provocation, it could take actions that might make it more likely that Tehran would do so (although being too obvious about this could nullify the provocation). However, since it would be up to Iran to make the provocative move, which Iran has been wary of doing most times in the past, the United States would never know for sure when it would get the requisite Iranian provocation. In fact, it might never come at all.”
Seemingly undeterred by Iran’s frustrating unwillingness to provide the requisite provocation, the analysts continued to examine this option:
“As noted above, in the section on the time frame for an invasion, whether the United States decides to invade Iran with or without a provocation is a critical consideration. With provocation, the international diplomatic and domestic political requirements of an invasion would be mitigated, and the more outrageous the Iranian provocation (and the less that the United States is seen to be goading Iran), the more these challenges would be diminished. In the absence of a sufficiently horrific provocation, meeting these requirements would be daunting.”
Ruling out the likelihood of “an overt, incontrovertible, and unforgivable act of aggression—something on the order of an Iranian-backed 9/11 … given Iran’s history of avoiding such acts,” the authors went on to explore where “the question of provocation gets murky.”
“Most European, Asian, and Middle Eastern publics are dead set against any American military action against Iran derived from the current differences between Iran and the international community—let alone Iran and the United States,” they wistfully noted. “Other than a Tehran-sponsored 9/11, it is hard to imagine what would change their minds.”
Even Iran’s long-time Sunni rival in the region appeared recalcitrant to the idea. “Saudi Arabia is positively apoplectic about the Iranians’ nuclear program, as well as about their mischief making in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories,” the pro-Israeli analysts empathised. “Yet, so far, Riyadh has made clear that it will not support military operations of any kind against Iran. Certainly that could change, but it is hard to imagine what it would take.”
Would a dastardly plot to blow up King Abdullah’s “hand-picked, trusted envoy” in a D.C. restaurant suffice, perchance?
At least, the lead author of “Which Path to Persia?” seems to think so. On October 11, Kenneth Pollack opined on “Iran’s Covert War Against the United States”: “It’s shocking, but not entirely surprising to learn that the United States government has evidence that the Iranian regime was trying to kill Saudi Ambassador to the United States Adel al-Jubeir.”
Posing as a responsible sceptic regarding the ludicrous plot, Pollack concluded that the ultra-cautious regime he analysed for the Saban Center two years previously—relevant information not provided to the reader—may have changed for the worse: “But, if this incredible claim is proven true, it should remind us that Iran also is not a normal country by any stretch of the imagination, and that in a Middle East already in turmoil we now face a more aggressive, more risk-taking Iran that may be looking to stir the pot in ways that it once found imprudent.”
As Stephen M. Walt remarked about an earlier Tehran-baiting paper by the Saban Center director, “It is hard to read this piece without hearkening back to Pollack’s The Threatening Storm, the book that convinced many liberals to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003. What made that book especially persuasive was Pollack’s depiction of himself as a former dove who had oh-so-reluctantly concluded that there was no option but to go to war.”
Interestingly, The Daily Beast/Newsweek which published Pollack’s op-ed is partly owned by Jane Harman, whose service in Congress reportedly included a quid pro quo with an Israeli agent, involving political donations from billionaire Haim Saban, to lobby the Department of Justice to reduce espionage charges against two officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Pollack, a former member of the National Security Council, was mentioned in the indictment against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman as one of the government officials who provided information to the two former AIPAC employees about—you guessed it—Iran.
When asked “who would want to create the impression” that the United States needs to engage in military activity against Iran, former CIA operative Michael Scheuer replied, “If I was looking at a counterintelligence operation to decide where this information came from, I’d be very interested to see if I could find an Israeli hand or a Saudi hand.”
Thanks to Kenneth Pollack, that search can now be narrowed.
Maidhc Ó Cathail is a political analyst and editor of The Passionate Attachment.
Iran and the Hollywood Script: A Collaborative Effort
By Daniel McAdams on October 16, 2011
According to FBI director Robert Muller, the latest FBI-created-and-miraculously-defeated terror threat — this time straight out of Iran and straight from the top — was something “straight out of a Hollywood script.” Well, he should know so we’ll take him at his word.
Although the same neocons who are probably writing these Hollywood scripts are screaming “this means war!!”, we cannot help but wonder just how deep is the manipulation of our media and our government by shadow forces both foreign and domestic pushing us covertly toward another war.
Considering the latest news out of the UK, where the male partner of recently-departed-in-scandal Defense Secretary Liam Fox is revealed to have been working covertly with the Mossad to overthrow the Iranian government, these speculations should no longer be written off as the conspiratorial thinking of feverish minds.
Disgraced Secretary Fox had been jet-setting all over the world with his “best man,” Adam Werritty, in tow; Werrittty passed himself off as Fox’s de facto chief of staff, and it is in this capacity that he has been engaged over the past several years covertly bumping up the Iranian “opposition” — the same Green Movement that some of us were attacked for suggesting had a very, umm, Western flavor — and attempting to overthrow the Iranian regime.
Just the outlandish suggestion that a booze-addled Iranian immigrant used car salesman was plotting to have the Saudi ambassador assassinated was enough to have the media, ThinkTankistan, and the Left/Right interventionists screaming that an “act of war” had been committed by Iran and demanding an invasion. Yet why is it never an act of war when Western spooks go into Iran in a blatant attempt to overthrow its government and foment phony “Green Revolutions” where scores are killed?
With the Fox scandal breaking big in the UK, it is increasingly obvious that these scripts written to bring the US and its allies to a disastrous war on Iran are more of a collaborative effort, perhaps Hollywood, Langley, and Tel Aviv.
The Legend of Sirte
By Jeremy Salt | Palestine Chronicle | October 17, 2011
A legend is being created that is going to haunt the people who have been propelled into power in Tripoli. In Sirte a handful of men have set an example of bravery in the face of impossible odds that will eventually find its place in Arab history. Weeks of missile and bomb attacks have reduced the centre of the city to ruins and killed an unknown number of civilians. The photos coming out of the city show Beirut-style devastation. The fighters defending the city would seem to be doomed. They have their backs to the sea and are surrounded on three sides. We don’t know who they are or how many of them there are. Some might be the remnants of the Libyan army and others civilians who have taken up arms to defend their city. We don’t know why they are fighting. We are told that they are just fighting for their lives. We are told that they are mercenaries, but mercenaries put down their arms when the money runs out. We are told that they are ‘Gaddafi loyalists’. That discredits them immediately. Noone really knows what they are fighting for, but their country has to be a possibility for at least some of them.
Why was this war launched? The Gaddafi who has now been dislodged is the same old Gaddafi who arrived in Rome a couple of years ago with photos of Umar al Mukhtar pinned to his tunic as he stepped off the plane. He is the same Gaddafi who was embraced in Paris by Sarkozy and, according to Saif al Islam, gave generously to Sarkozy’s election campaign. He is the same Gaddafi who was embraced by the ever-smiling Tony Blair in Tripoli. He was the same Gaddafi with whom Shell was very happy to do business. Between those occasions and now he didn’t change. Years ago it was the ‘stray dogs’ – Libyan dissidents – he wanted to hunt down. This year it was the ‘greasy rats’ he vowed to pursue street to street – zenga zenga – and house to house. This was what gave the US, Britain and France their justification for taking military action. This was not supposed to be about regime change, but that is how it ended and if it was not planned from the start it was inevitable once these three powers intervened.
Whatever Libyans thought of Muammar Gaddafi, there were no signs that anything like the majority supported the uprising against him. As Gaddafi himself asked on October 6: ‘The NTC, who gave them legitimacy? How did they obtain legitimacy? Did the Libyan people elect them? Did the Libyan people appoint them? And if only the power of NATO bombs and fleets grants legitimacy, then let all rulers in the Third World beware, for the same fate awaits you. To those who recognize this council as legitimate, beware. There will be transitional councils created everywhere and imposed upon you and one by one you shall fall’.
This was not a popular revolution or a war of liberation. This was not Egypt or Tunisia, where it was the people who overthrew the government. This was a war of conquest by Britain, France and the US, coordinating their efforts with armed groups on the ground. These three powers turned an uprising into a civil war, and then ensured victory for one side through the massive use of aerial fire power. The soldiers on the ground – the ‘Gaddafi loyalists’ – were as defenseless from the missiles being rained down on them as civilians in plain clothes. By themselves the ‘rebels’ would have been quickly scattered.
With the attack building up and the outcome all but certain, senior Libyan government ministers began to defect. The common metaphor is rats jumping from a sinking ship. Musa Kusa flew to London and told British intelligence everything he knew, which must have been quite a bit, because whatever crimes Gaddafi committed over the past four decades, Musa Kusa was in them up to his neck. Mustafa Abd ul Jalil was the Minister for Justice in the old regime. He also got out just in time. Deserting Gaddafi, he then agreed to head an interim governing council set up in collaboration with the attacking foreign powers. People who do this kind of thing are usually called traitors. In the Second World War Marshal Petain collaborated with the Nazis and would have been executed afterwards but for his advanced age and his distinguished war record in 1914-18. William Joyce (‘Lord Haw Haw’) was executed just for broadcasting Nazi propaganda against his own country, Britain. Vidkun Quisling acted as the regent for the Nazis in occupied Norway and was executed after the war for treason. The foreign powers with whom Mustafa Abdul Jalil has collaborated have attacked his country and killed thousands of his fellow countrymen, women and children. Unless the word has lost its meaning, that makes him a traitor, too.
With NATO planes clearing the path ahead all the way to Tripoli and then to Sirte, the end result was inevitable. Without air cover and without ground defence against aerial attack the Libyan army – the ‘Gaddafi loyalists’ – had no chance. There are numerous parallels in the long history of western attacks on Muslim countries. In 1882 a British fleet bombarded Alexandria and then blamed arsonists and brigands for the massive destruction they had caused. Troops were landed to restore the order which had just been destroyed. Egyptians tried to defend their country but against the firepower, training and and organization of a modern European army, they had no chance. In 1898 about 60,000 followers of the Sudanese khalifa, the successor to the mahdi, stormed across a plain outside Omdurman towards the British battle lines. It was their country and they fought for it with enormous bravery but against Maxim guns, lined up in a row on the battlefield, they also had no chance. There were exceptions to the rule. In the early 1880s the Sudanese destroyed the Hicks expeditionary army, but that was before the invention of the Maxim gun. In 1896 an Ethiopian army all but wiped out an Italian army in the battle of Adowa. Nearly four decades later an Italian army invaded Ethiopia again, suffering severe battlefield defeats before superior weaponry and the use of mustard gas gave them victory. Driven into exile, the emperor Haile Selassie told the League of Nations ‘It was us today. It will be you tomorrow’. Indeed it was.
In 1911 the Italians invaded Libya but failed to penetrate the interior because of the resistance of the Sanusi tribes and the small Ottoman force sent to do what it could, Libya then being part of the Ottoman Empire. In the 1920s Italy embarked on a full-scale program to tame the Libyans. Thousands were moved from Jabal al Akhdar in Cyrenaica and penned up in concentration camps. The resistance was led by a Quran teacher, Umar al Mukhtar, who was captured in 1931 and hanged in the Suluq concentration camp. Now, getting on for a century later, Libyans themselves have opened the door to another foreign attack on their country.
Without the ‘humanitarian’ intervention of the US, Britain and France, Gaddafi would be still be in Tripoli but thousands people now dead would be alive. The buildings and the infrastructure that has been destroyed would still be standing. Libya would still be the most advanced country in Africa, instead of a country that has been battered by war and will now need repairing in accordance with the prescriptions of ‘disaster capitalism’.
As an investment this war was not even a risky one. Libya is a large country with a relatively small population and almost no capacity to defend itself against outside attack by powerful states. It is rich in oil, foreign reserves and gold bullion. Would the attack even have been considered if it were poor? Its financial situation was far healthier than that of the countries attacking it. The notion that this was done for altruistic reasons has to be scotched immediately. Whatever the humanitarian packaging, ulterior motives lie behind every war launched by the western powers in the Middle East and North Africa over the last two centuries. The war on Libya is no exception. At a time of extreme financial crisis, the attacking countries are not sinking billions of dollars into the war without expecting a generous strategic and commercial return on their investment.
In all the weeks Sirte was being devastated from the air, where was the UN Security Council, which opened the door to the attack on Libya with its ‘no fly’ zone resolution but has taken no responsibility for the consequences? Where was the EU, where was the OIC, where was the Arab League, where was the outrage in the media, where were all the governments upholding a ‘responsibility to protect’ which had turned into a license to kill? They were all mute. Not a word of concern or even of condemnation passed their lips. They only wanted to talk about Syria. The pictures of destruction now coming out of Sirte give some indication of what Britain, France and the US have done. How many civilians have been killed we don’t know, but the estimates being made for the country as a whole suggest a death toll running into the tens of thousands. Such is the cost of ‘humanitarian intervention’. Such is the price the Libyans have had to pay for their own ‘liberation’. They did not want this war. It was the governments of the US, Britain and France who wanted this war, for reasons of their own, and used the rising in Benghazi as their leverage.
A country which was stable is now in turmoil. The news agencies refer to the government in Tripoli but there is no government in Tripoli. The ‘National Transitional Council’ has still not got its act together. Uncertainty, turbulence and possibly a spreading war of resistance lie ahead, as the implications of what has been done sink in. History is written by the victors, so we are told, but if this western triumph over yet another Middle Eastern madman cannot be consolidated, the day may yet come when Libyans will be building statues to commemorate the bravery of the small band of men who fought to the last for Sirte.
~
Jeremy Salt is associate professor in Middle Eastern History and Politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Previously, he taught at Bosporus University in Istanbul and the University of Melbourne in the Departments of Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science. Professor Salt has written many articles on Middle East issues, particularly Palestine, and was a journalist for The Age newspaper when he lived in Melbourne.
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Book Review
New paperback: Butchered by “Healthcare”
Lies are Unbekoming | October 20, 2026
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
“Screening Tests Are Useless”, on tests that find diseases that would never have hurt you. “The FDA Protects the Big Drug Companies”, on an agency funded by the companies it regulates. “The Journals’ Sins Are the Editors’ Sins”, on ghostwritten studies and captured peer review. “Opioids and ‘Pain Management’”, on how a generation was prescribed its way into addiction. “Prozac and Relatives” and “Antipsychotics Are Disastrous”, on what psychiatry does to adults and children. “Surgery: Money Before Patients”. “Failed Cancer Treatments”. “Futile CPR and Overprescribing”. “Billing Scams & Specialty Warfare”. “Hospitals Are Sharks”. Each with a Patient Tips section at the end on how to survive it.
If you have ever walked out of a doctor’s office with a prescription you didn’t ask for, or watched a parent put through a treatment that made them worse, this is the book you want on your shelf before the next appointment. … Full review
Butchered by “Healthcare” is available on Lulu now.
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Iran’s Next Strike May Not Explode. It Could Shut You Down /Col Doug Macgregor
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- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
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- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
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