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Where Will the U.S. Strike Next in Africa?

 A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | August 8, 2012

Under the direction of the United States, the UN Security Council recently extended sanctions for another year against the northeast African nation of Eritrea. The country of 6 million people, nestled against the Red Sea, is on America’s hit list. In the imperial double-speak of Washington, Eritrea is described as a “destabilizing” force in the region – which simply means the government in Asmara has refused to buckle under to U.S. military domination of the Horn of Africa.

Back in 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton threatened to “take action” – and, by that, she meant make war – against Eritrea if it did not stop supporting the Shabab resistance fighters in Somalia. There was no evidence that Eritrea was, in fact, arming the Shabab, and there is no evidence that Eritrea is doing so, now – as the UN Monitoring Group on Eritrea and Somalia admits.

The monitors, who are, in effect, tools of U.S. policy, reported that they found “no evidence” of Eritrean aid to Somali fighters over the past year, and concluded that, if such assistance exists at all, it is “negligible.” Yet, the UN Security Council, under U.S. pressure, extended the sanctions, anyway. Washington claims that Eritrea’s alleged support for the Shabab has only halted because of the sanctions, and it’s, therefore, too early to lift them – which amounts to punishing Eritrea for having the wrong intentions, whether it acts on them or not.

It is, of course, not little Eritrea that is destabilizing the Horn of Africa, but the United States, which has made the region a front line in its so-called War on Terror. Washington’s closest ally in the neighborhood is Ethiopia, from which Eritrea won its independence in 1993, after a 30-year war. The U.S. instigated, armed, financed and gave logistical support to Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia, in 2006, plunging that country into what United Nations observers called “the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa.” Under American direction, Kenya also invaded Somalia, in the midst of a great famine, last year. The U.S. bankrolls, arms and trains the nominally African Union force that occupies Somalia’s capital, and has turned neighboring Djibouti into the main base for the U.S. Africa Command, AFRICOM.

And there sits Eritrea, surrounded by warring American puppets, interfering in no one’s affairs, yet determined to defend her sovereignty – accused by the world’s biggest and most aggressive power of destabilizing the region.

Eritrea’s real sin is to be one of the very few nations in Africa that do not have military relations with AFRICOM, the U.S. war machine. That puts a bulls-eye on her back, along with Zimbabwe and Sudan, which U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice demanded be blockaded and bombed back in the George Bush administration. Barack Obama’s Africa policy is an extension and expansion of Bush’s aim to militarize the continent, and the much older U.S. policy to create chaos and horrific human suffering in those regions it cannot directly control. In practice, Obama’s doctrine is the same as Bush’s: “You are either with us or against us.”

Eritrea rejects that doctrine; that’s why it is a target. For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

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August 8, 2012 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

Obama fights ban on indefinite detention of Americans

RT | August 7, 2012

The White House has filed an appeal in hopes of reversing a federal judge’s ruling that bans the indefinite military detention of Americans because attorneys for the president say they are justified to imprison alleged terrorists without charge.

Manhattan federal court Judge Katherine Forrest ruled in May that the indefinite detention provisions signed into law late last year by US President Barack Obama failed to “pass constitutional muster” and ordered a temporary injunction to keep the military from locking up any person, American or other, over allegations of terrorist ties. On Monday, however, federal prosecutors representing President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta filed a claim with the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in hopes of eliminating that ban.

The plaintiffs “cannot point to a single example of the military’s detaining anyone for engaging in conduct even remotely similar to the type of expressive activities they allege could lead to detention,” Obama’s attorneys insist. With that, the White House is arguing that as long as the indefinite detention law hasn’t be enforced yet, there is no reason for a judge to invalidate it.

Reuters reports this week that the government believes they are justified to have the authorization to lock alleged belligerents up indefinitely because cases involving militants directly aligned against the good of the US government warrants such punishment. Separate from Judge Forrest’s injunction, nine states have attempted to, at least in part, remove themselves from the indefinite detention provisions of included in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, or NDAA.

In section 1021 of the NDAA, the president’s authority to hold a terrorism suspect “without trial, until the end of the hostilities” is reaffirmed by Congress. Despite an accompanying signing statement voicing his opposition to that provision, President Obama quietly inked his name to the NDAA on December 31, 2011. In May, however, a group of plaintiffs including notable journalists and civil liberty proponents challenged section 1021 in court, leading to Justice Forrest to find it unconstitutional one month later.

“There is a strong public interest in protecting rights guaranteed by the First Amendment,” Forrest wrote in her 68-page ruling. “There is also a strong public interest in ensuring that due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment are protected by ensuring that ordinary citizens are able to understand the scope of conduct that could subject them to indefinite military detention.”

At the time Justice Forrest made her injunction, attorney Carl Mayer told RT on behalf of the plaintiffs that, although he expected the White House to appeal, “It may not be in their best interest.”

“[T]here are so many people from all sides of the political spectrum opposed to this law that they ought to just say, ‘We’re not going to appeal,’” Mayer said. “The NDAA cannot be used to pick up Americans in a proverbial black van or in any other way that the administration might decide to try to get people into the military justice system. It means that the government is foreclosed now from engaging in this type of action against the civil liberties of Americans.”

The original plaintiffs, who include Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges, have asked Justice Forrest to make her injunction permanent. Oral arguments in the case are expected to begin this week.

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August 7, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Employment Rate In The United States Is Lower Than It Was During The Last Recession

By Michael Snyder | BlackListedNews | August 4, 2012

Did you know that a smaller percentage of Americans are working today than when the last recession supposedly ended?  But you won’t hear about this on the mainstream news.  Instead, the mainstream media obsesses over the highly politicized and highly manipulated “unemployment rate”.  The media is buzzing about how “163,000 new jobs” were added in July but the unemployment rate went up to “8.254%.”  Sadly, those numbers are quite misleading.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in June 142,415,000 people had jobs in the United States. In July, that number declined to 142,220,000. That means that 195,000 fewer Americans were working in July than in June. But somehow that works out to “163,000 new jobs” in July.  I am not exactly sure how they get that math to add up.  Perhaps someone out there can explain it to me.  Personally, I find that the “employment rate” gives a much clearer picture of what is actually going on in the economy.  The employment to population ratio is a measure of the percentage of working age Americans that actually have jobs.  When it goes up that is good.  When it goes down, that is bad.  In July, the employment to population ratio dropped from 58.6 percent to 58.4 percent.  Overall, the percentage of working age Americans that have jobs has now been under 59 percent for 35 months in a row.

The following is a chart of the employment to population ratio in the United States over the past 10 years:

The Employment Rate In The United States Is Lower Than It Was During The Last Recession Employment Population Ratio 2012 440x264

The gray shaded bar in the chart represents the last recession as defined by the Federal Reserve.  As you can see, the percentage of working age Americans with a job dropped sharply from nearly 63 percent at the start of 2008 to a little above 59 percent when the recession ended.

But the “employment rate” kept on dropping even further.

It finally bottomed out at 58.2 percent in December of 2009.

Since that time, it has stayed very steady.  It has not fallen below 58 percent and it has not risen back above 59 percent.

This is very odd, because after ever other recession since World War II this number has always bounced back strongly.

But this has not happened this time.

In essence, it is starting to look like 4 percent of the working age population of the United States has been removed from the workforce permanently.

The good news in all of this is that things have at least not been getting any worse over the last couple of years.  Even though things have been bad, at least we have had a period of relative stability.

The bad news is that the employment rate has not rebounded despite unprecedented borrowing and spending by the federal government and despite reckless money printing by the Federal Reserve.

Considering how desperately the federal government and the Federal Reserve have been trying to stimulate the economy, I truly did expect to see the employment rate bounce back at least a little bit by now.

Unfortunately it has not and now the U.S. economy is rapidly heading for another recession.

But Barack Obama is going to prance around over the next few days and talk about how wonderful it is that the economy created “163,000 new jobs” in July. … Full article

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August 4, 2012 Posted by | Economics, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

Is Iran “The Most Destabilizing Nation in the World”?

By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett | The Race for Iran | August 1st, 2012

Standing reality on its head—at least in the eyes of most Middle Easterners—presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney declared during his recent visit to Israel that the Islamic Republic is “the most destabilizing nation in the world.” In fact, reputable surveys conducted by international and regional polling groups—see here and here—show that, by orders of magnitude, largely Sunni Arab populations see Israel and the United States as much bigger threats to their security and interests than Iran.  Al Jazeera asked our colleague, Seyed Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran, to comment on Governor Romney’s remark; to see the segment, click here or on the embedded video above.

Mohammad’s observations that, given the record of American policy in the Middle East (and all the death and destruction it has caused), the United States is hardly in a position to “complain very much about Iran” and that, from an Iranian perspective, there is not a lot of difference between Romney and President Obama are well presented.  His explanation why the “soft war” that the Obama Administration is currently conducting against the Islamic Republic is not that different from a “hot war” is especially eloquent.  We, though, want to pick up on Mohammad’s response to the interviewer’s suggestion that it is Iranian intransigence which is blocking progress in the nuclear talks and prompting tougher sanctions:

“The Iranians have been talking.  The Iranians are basically saying that ‘we are willing to negotiate.’  But the Western position is ‘you give up everything and then we’ll start talking.’  The Iranian right to enriching uranium is a right that all sovereign countries have.  And the Iranian Revolution itself was partially about dignity and independence.  The Iranians are not going to accept being a second-rate country.  This is not the Saudi regime or the Jordanian regime.  This is a country that is fiercely independent.  So the Iranians will continue to enrich uranium within the framework of the NPT and international law.  The United States cannot stop Iran from doing so.  If the United States was reasonable and rational, if the Europeans were rational, then the Iranians would be willing to give further assurances to ease tensions.  But the United States isn’t really after that, in the eyes of Iranians.”

We think that is an important statement, both of the Iranian position and of reality.  We have long argued that, if Washington accepted the principle and reality of internationally safeguarded enrichment in Iran, it would become eminently possible—not to say relatively easy—to negotiate a satisfactory resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue.  But the United States—even under the Obama Administration—does not want to do that, for recognizing Iran’s right to enrich implies recognizing the Islamic Republic as a legitimate political entity representing legitimate national interests.  We think that is unlikely to change after the U.S. presidential election in November, regardless of whether Romney or Obama wins. … Full article

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August 3, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Obama signs $70 million Israel military aid bill


US President Barack Obama signs the US-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act in the Oval Office on July 27, 2012.
Press TV – July 28, 2012

US President Barack Obama has signed a piece of legislation ratified by Congress that gives Israel another $70 million in military assistance, on top of the $3 billion the United States had already pledged to provide to the Israeli military this year.

On Friday, Obama signed the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012, which provides more US taxpayer dollars to help Israel expand its Iron Dome short-range rocket defense system, Xinhua reported.

The Iron Dome is a short-range rocket defense system designed to intercept rockets and artillery shells fired from a range of between four and 70 kilometers.

Representatives of the pro-Israeli lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and Israeli journalists were invited to the signing ceremony, which was held at the White House.

“I have made it a top priority for my administration to deepen cooperation with Israel across the whole spectrum of security issues — intelligence, military, technology,” Obama said before signing the bill in the Oval Office.

“And, in many ways, what this legislation does is bring together all the outstanding cooperation that we have seen, really, at an unprecedented level between our two countries that underscores our unshakeable commitment to Israel security,” he added.

According to a White House fact sheet published on Friday, Obama said that “despite tough fiscal times” he “fought for and secured full funding for Israel” in fiscal year 2012, including $3 billion in Foreign Military Financing.

The fact sheet also said that Obama secured an additional $205 million in 2011 to set up the Iron Dome system.

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July 27, 2012 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Leave a comment

Solyndra scandal’s key players pay big bucks to attend Obama fundraiser

RT | July 24, 2012

US President Barack Obama shook hands with some of his wealthiest supporters Tuesday night at a fundraising shindig in San Francisco. Also on hand, though, was a matter the commander-in-chief just can’t seem to shake: his failed deal with Solyndra.

Around sixty patrons paid $35,800 a piece to attend a party in honor of President Obama this week, including a pair of gentlemen who have become central figures in an energy debacle that has haunted the Oval Office since last year. Among those in attendance were two key players in the Solyndra scandal.

President Obama touted Solyndra, a California solar-panel start-up, as an example of perfect American entrepreneurship early on in his presidency. Last year, however, the infant green energy company filed for bankruptcy, despite the president earlier approving a gigantic loan guarantee worth $535 million for the Silicon Valley start-up. The company had borrowed all but $8 million of the massive loan before calling it quits late last year, a move that prompted Obama’s opponents to ridicule the president over what some said was “a dubious investment” and even initiated an investigated by the FBI.

Nearly a year after Solyndra first filed for bankruptcy, the scandal took center stage again this week after Monday’s fundraiser funneled in donations from Matt Rogers, a former adviser at the Department of Energy that helped approve the loan as part of the stimulus plan, and Steve Westly, a venture capitalist that warned the White House against offering a deal to Solyndra before the president offered his own endorsement. Darren Samuelsohn of Politico was on-hand at Monday’s fundraiser and writes that it appears that the president isn’t exactly distancing himself from one of the most costly scandals of his administration.

Officials within the campaign to elect Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney for president have already attacked the administration for still maintaining ties with people privy to the Solyndra deal. In a statement addressing the latest news, Romney spokesman Ryan Williams writes, “The Obama Administration betrayed American taxpayers when it dumped hundreds of millions of public dollars into Solyndra while ignoring clear warnings about the company’s dire financial situation.”

“President Obama’s first term worked out well for his donors who got special access and taxpayer money for their failed ventures. It hasn’t worked as well for the 23 million Americans struggling for work in the worst economic recovery our country has ever had,” Williams adds.

July 24, 2012 Posted by | Corruption, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

Obama: Shooting People “Evil … Senseless”

By Jay Janson | Dissident Voice | July 22nd, 2012

While reading the text of Obama Statement on Shootings in Colorado, one line struck this writer as quite astounding:

“We may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings like this. Such violence, such evil is senseless. It’s beyond reason.”

The President may have realized afterward that since he has been ordering the shooting of thousands in a half-dozen countries, the words “evil, senseless, beyond reason” could easily reflect back on himself. A later Obama statement on the massacre in a Colorado movie house did not contain the words “evil,” “senseless,” “violence beyond reason.”

In any case, history books, in some future, probably not too distant, day will deplore Obama’s pathetic 9/11 excuse for increasing and extending a ten-year-old military occupation war in dirt poor Afghanistan, killing, and killing easily, young and old Afghani, who are fighting invaders of their nation as they have always done. And perhaps one day independent investigative journalism will reveal whose instructions Obama was following from within that “financial element” that FDR confided “has owned the government since the days of Andrew Jackson.”1

Historians will denounce his shameful exceeding of his executive powers under the Constitution, to have assassinated even American citizens without trial, and ridicule the pack of lies he offered in sick defense of his frightening Hellfire and Predator drones murdering intentionally and collaterally while menacing all citizens in some of the most poverty-stricken populations on earth. Historians will judge his character by his once infamous joking about using a drone on his daughters boyfriends — “they’ll never know what hit them.”2

Very possibly, scholars will chronicle a time when Americans were no longer kept in ignorance by a commercial media blackout of the last year of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, when King called his country “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” and condemned US wars as all meant to maintain “unjust overseas predatory investments.”3 Such a time might well arrive in the racing era of instant world-wide personal communication while Barack Obama is still alive and prosecutable for crimes against humanity, or in his own words of 2012, “for violent, evil, senseless and beyond reason, terrorizing fellow human beings.” With the recording of his words, Obama would have difficulty pleading insanity.

  1. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wikiquote.
  2. Obama Jokes About Killing Jonas Brothers With Predator Drones.
  3. Listen or read: King’s April 1967 New York sermon: Beyond Vietnam – a Time to Break Silence click here;
    or see International Awareness Campaign, King Condemned US Wars.
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July 23, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Bagram: Still a Black Hole for Foreign Prisoners

By Andy Worthington | FFF | July 19, 2012

In March 2009, three foreign prisoners seized in other countries and rendered to the main U.S. prison in Afghanistan, at Bagram airbase, where they had been held for up to seven years, secured a legal victory in the District Court in Washington, D.C., when Judge John D. Bates ruled that they had habeas corpus rights. In other words, they had the right to challenge the basis of their imprisonment under the “Great Writ” that prevents arbitrary detention.

The men — among dozens of foreigners held in Afghanistan — secured their legal victory because Judge Bates recognized that their circumstances were essentially the same as the prisoners at Guantánamo, who had been granted habeas corpus rights by the Supreme Court in June 2008.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration appealed Judge Bates’s careful and logical ruling, and the judges of D.C. Circuit Court agreed, overturning the ruling in May 2010, and returned the three men to their legal black hole.

In April 2011, the Associated Press reported that the three men — Redha al-Najar, a Tunisian seized in Karachi, Pakistan, in May 2002; Amin al-Bakri, a Yemeni gemstone dealer seized in Bangkok, Thailand, in late 2002; and Fadi al-Maqaleh, a Yemeni seized in 2004 and sent to Abu Ghraib before Bagram — had all been cleared for release by review boards at Bagram, or, as it is now known, the Parwan Detention Facility.

That same month, Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First visited Parwan and discovered that 41 foreign prisoners were still being held, even though “more than a dozen” had been recommended for release. She added that the foreign prisoners were “from Pakistan, Tunisia, Kuwait, Yemen, and even Germany,” but could not find any explanation for why, even when cleared, they were still being held. She noted that “one soldier complained about how frustrating it is to be unable to tell innocent prisoners when they’ll be going home, or what’s causing the holdup,” and that U.S. officials in Afghanistan had been able to state only that the problem was “somewhere in Washington.”

One story told to Eviatar concerned Hamidullah Khan, a Pakistani who was just 16 years old when he was seized in the summer of 2008. When he was allowed to communicate with his family in 2010, he explained that his case had been reviewed, and he had been recommended for release, but he was still being held. Khan was one of seven Pakistanis who, in 2010, began the process of suing the Pakistani government “either for its alleged role in their capture or for failing to secure their release.” Two others — Yunus Rahmatullah and Amanatullah Ali — had been seized in Iraq by British Special Forces in 2004 and subsequently had been handed over to U.S. forces who rendered them to Bagram.

The case of Yunus Rahmatullah — also cleared for release by a review board at Bagram in 2010, but still held — has been used to exert pressure on the United States by lawyers in the UK, who succeeded in convincing the Court of Appeal to grant him a writ of habeas corpus last December, and to order the British government to take custody of him, even though, in February this year, the court conceded that it had no power to order his release. As the senior judge, Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, explained, “When the U.K. defense forces handed over [Rahmatullah] to the U.S. authorities in questionable circumstances in 2004 they most unfortunately appear to have sold the pass with regard to their ability to protect him in the future.”

The case is now before Britain’s Supreme Court, and it undoubtedly continues to send ripples of dissatisfaction across the Atlantic, even though, as with all the prisoners mentioned in this article, there appears to be no particular trigger to force the release of any of them.

As for Redha al-Najar, Amin al-Bakri, and Fadi al-Maqaleh, nothing more was heard about them — or the other foreign prisoners still held at Bagram — until January this year At that time the Washington Post noted that, with discussions taking place regarding the transfer of Parwan to Afghan control as part of the planned withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, U.S. officials had begun to think about what to do with the foreign prisoners — now numbering “close to 50,” including “up to two dozen Arabs of various nationalities, according to administration and foreign officials.”

U.S. officials told the Post that they believed the Afghan authorities would be “unlikely to have any interest in either continuing to hold the foreigners or in putting them on trial.” They failed to mention that some of them had been cleared for release and that letting them go should not, therefore, pose a problem.

The only mention of any specific obstruction came in an analysis of the particular problems facing Yemeni prisoners and “complicating their possible repatriation.” That “complication” stems from a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis from U.S. custody, “because of concerns about the security situation in Yemen,” which Barack Obama issued in response to the failed airline bomb plot in December 2009 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen. That moratorium stands to this day.

In March, a memorandum of understanding between the United States and Afghanistan formally agreed on the transfer of prisoners at Bagram to Afghan control by September, although foreign prisoners were not included.

Four months later, it appears that all of the foreign prisoners at Bagram are still being held. This past Monday lawyers for Redha al-Najar, Amin al-Bakri, and Fadi al-Maqaleh returned to the U.S. courts to try to secure their release, arguing that “they were brought to Bagram for the purpose of keeping them out of the courts,” as Tina Foster, the executive director of the International Justice Network, and one of the lawyers for the men, explained to Aram Roston of Newsweek .

Ramzi Kassem, an associate law professor at City University of New York, who also represents the Bagram prisoners, made a similar claim to the Miami Herald, telling Carol Rosenberg, “Our clients are being kept at Bagram to circumvent [a court’s] jurisdiction.”

In court, the government maintained its position, with Justice Department attorney Jean Lin arguing that, although “the United States does not intend to hold anyone longer than necessary,” the administration also wants to “prevent enemy fighters from returning to the battlefield.” Lin also said that “nothing has changed to alter” the D.C. Circuit Court’s ruling in May 2010.

Judge Bates clearly struggled with this, asking, during the two-hour hearing, “How can I possibly make a decision that goes in a different direction from the D.C. Circuit?” However, as the Miami Herald noted, he also took on board the defense attorneys’ complaints, suggesting that “there might be evidence that U.S. officials had shipped prisoners to Bagram specifically to avoid judicial oversight,” and he “pressed the Justice Department hard on whether changing circumstances, including a slowdown in fighting and the coming withdrawal of most U.S. forces from Afghanistan, might warrant a second look.”

In seeking further information, Roston spoke by phone to Amin al-Bakri’s brother Khaled, who runs a furniture shop in Medina, Saudi Arabia. “We don’t know why he is being held,” Khaled al-Bakri said, noting that his brother, who has three children, “wasn’t a religious fanatic pursuing jihad but a businessman.” He acknowledged that in the 1980s, his brother had traveled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union, but he also stated that “his Islam is very moderate.” He added, “My brother is multilingual, he’s open-minded to others, and he’s tolerant. We just don’t think he was involved” in any wrongdoing.

That, of course, makes sense, given that al-Bakri has been cleared for release, so the question that remains is whether continuing to hold foreigners in Bagram who have been cleared for release has to do solely with overwrought security concerns, or is a sign of something more sinister. Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman, told Roston that “Bagram happens to be a legitimate and established military detention facility. That’s what works for now.” He added that America’s “short-term goal” was “to maintain custody of third-country nationals,” even while the Afghan government takes over control of the Afghan prisoners.

Responding to a question about what Roston described as “one of the central conundrums of the ongoing fight against Al-Qaeda — where to put potential detainees,” Colonel Breasseale acknowledged that “[sending] a detainee to Guantánamo Bay is not an option” being considered by the Obama administration. The result, as Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch explained, is, “As the U.S. prepares to withdraw its troops and wind down the war in Afghanistan, what possible rationale is there for continuing to detain these people there unless its purpose is that it is supposed to be the U.S. global jail?”

That is a very good question, and one that, despite years of bluster in and out of courtrooms, the Obama administration seems unwilling to answer.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press). Visit his website at www.andyworthington.co.uk.

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July 20, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Obama’s Media Takeover Powers: The Infrastructure of a Police State

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | July 18, 2012

Earlier this month, on a Friday evening after most of the White House press corps had gone home, President Obama gave himself the power to take over, or shut down, all of the nation’s communications systems – including the Internet. The executive order is supposedly designed to preserve “survivable, resilient, enduring” and effective communications so that the government can speak to the people in the event of some emergency. But what he has authorized is the imposition of total silence except for the sound of his own voice.

Clearly, in a legitimate emergency, the government needs ways to communicate – but that does not require a monopoly. So, why is Obama giving himself – and any president that follows him into the Oval Office – a total communications on-and-off switch?

The administration claims it is authorized to bring all communications under its control by the 1934 Communications Act, which allows the takeover of broadcast stations and other wireless media if there exists a state of war, or the threat of war. Back then, of course, the public was fairly sure that they knew what “war” was: Congresses declared it. The “threat” of war was pretty self-evident, too: it was when other nations were threatening to attack the United States, or vice-versa.

However, we are now in what both Presidents Bush and Obama have made clear is a perpetual war, a war that is not defined by any legal norms or foundational statutes, a war against whoever the president decides is the enemy – which can include American citizens. Both of these War Presidents have told us in multitudinous ways that we are on a war footing – and have not been off it since 9/11, and will not be on any other kind of footing until some future president gives the “all clear” sign.

Obama’s executive order has nothing to do with getting out an effective distress call to the nation during a crisis. The “emergency” he has in mind is a State of Emergency – martial law. He is methodically preparing the infrastructure for a police state. Obama already has in place his preventive detention legislation, which he signed into law in the news-less hours of last New Year’s Eve. It empowers the president to lock up whomever he chooses, without charges or trial, and to keep them for as long as the executive sees fit. Based on the near-limitless powers Obama already claims to possess, he can also kill such enemies of the state if that is in the interests of national security in this time of war. There is nothing that he recognizes as law that says he can’t take such drastic executive action against thousands, or tens of thousands of Americans in one sweep.

And now, with his new executive order, if the president finds it convenient, he can take over the national communications network – down to the last, feeble Internet voice – to explain why it was necessary for all those people to disappear.

Or maybe he’ll say nothing at all. And nobody else will dare to say anything, either.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

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July 18, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Obama’s Justice Department Rushes to the Rescue of LIBOR Criminals

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | July 18, 2012

The Obama Justice Department is in theater mode, again, pretending to threaten the bankster class with criminal penalties – prison time! – for their manipulation of the global economy’s benchmark interest rates. The Justice Department claims to be building criminal and civil cases in the LIBOR scandal, which in sheer scope is the biggest fraud by international capital in history. But that’s all a front, a farce. Barack Obama has spent his entire presidency protecting Wall Street, starting with his rescue of George Bush’s bank bailout bill after it’s initial defeat in Congress, in the last days of Obama’s candidacy. He packed his administration with banksters, passed his own bailout and, in collaboration with the Federal Reserve, channeled at least $16 trillion dollars into the accounts of U.S. and even European banks – by far the greatest transfer of capital in the history of the world. Obama has reminded the banksters that it was he who saved them from the “pitchforks” of an outraged public. He pushed through Congress so-called financial reform legislation that left derivatives – the deadly instruments of mass financial destruction that were at the heart of the meltdown – untouched.

Wall Street may or may not remain loyal to Obama, but Obama has been loyal to Wall Street, the guys who gave him the campaign cash to become a viable candidate. His Attorney General, Eric Holder, a corporate lawyer to the core, is busily staging a pre-emptive LIBOR prosecution of bankers in order to shield them from legal action by a host of other government agencies and, ultimately, from the global universe of parties that have been harmed by the bankster’s schemes– a list that stretches to infinity. Holder’s job is to monopolize the LIBOR case, to the extent legally and humanly possible, grabbing jurisdiction and consolidating the cases against the banks with the aim of reaching a settlement that does not further destabilize the financial system.

Holder and his boss already pulled that trick earlier this year with settlement of the bank “robo-signing” scandal – a scheme that would have ranked as the “crime of the century” until LIBOR came along. A small group of state attorney generals were holding up an administration-brokered settlement that effectively gave the banksters immunity from prosecution, in return for a measly $25 billion payout. Obama used every power of his office to pressure the state law officers into line. The last one capitulated with a promise from Obama that a “special unit of prosecutors” would expand the investigation into abusive mortgages practices. You haven’t heard a peep about it, since.

Now Obama and Holder are playing the same diversionary game, making tough noises about criminal investigations of the LIBOR conspirators. But the Justice Department has already given immunity to Barclay’s Bank, of Britain, and to the Swiss banking giant UBS. More immunities will follow. The reason Eric Holder is staging criminal investigations is because that’s the only way he can protect the bankers, through immunities and by gradually narrowing the scope of the case. In the end, there will be settlements all around, and the banksters will move on to even more fantastic heights of criminality – thanks to the loyal, protective hands of President Obama.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

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July 18, 2012 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Pensions Under Attack

By MARK VORPAHL | CounterPunch | July 13, 2012

On Friday, July 6, President Obama signed into law a bill that would renew transportation programs and extend low interest rates on student loans for one year. While this minimal gesture resulted in, no doubt, sighs of relief from those burdened by student debt, tucked away within the bill’s pages was a little-noticed proposal to further erode the funding of workers’ pensions. The bill was a brilliant sleight of hand where what it appeared to be giving with one hand distracted the public from what it was taking away with the other.

Aside from the more publicly known parts of this bill, it also reduced the amount that corporations pay into an already grossly underfunded pension system. The way it achieved this is with a complex equation factoring in interest rates, changes in how businesses calculate what they must contribute to retirement premiums, and how these contributions are tax deductible. The end result of this opaque process of number crunching is that, according to the Society of Actuaries, employer pension contributions will be reduced overall from a mandatory $80 billion to $45 billion this year alone. Next year this amount will be slashed by $73 billion. (1)

While the amount of company pension contributions would increase afterwards, there is no guarantee that this can be counted on to make up for the short-term cuts. Without a fundamental change in the political climate, it can be assumed that this distant increase will be reversed.

Some have said that these employer pension payment deductions will not amount to much given the $1.9 trillion employers have already invested into these plans over the decades. Yet the political importance of this bill cannot be calculated by arithmetic alone. It is another example of a pattern of how politicians have enabled corporations to minimize their responsibility towards their employees’ pensions to the point where the entire system is in danger and the dream of a comfortable retirement is approaching collapse.

How far has the pension system fallen into disrepair? According to The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), the quasi-government agency responsible for retirement funds, the public employees pension was being funded at 103 percent in 1999. The pension funds for the private sector were likewise robust.

By 2008, according to the Pew Center, the public sector pensions were short $452 billion. By 2009 the PBGC reported a funding shortfall of $355 billion and a shortfall of $407 billion for “single employer pensions.”

Why this dramatic change? The corporations, their politicians, and media lay the blame on growing pension costs (though many have been frozen) and an increased number of workers retiring. This is turning the reasons behind the pension system’s shortfall on its head. Fundamentally, the reason for the growing threats to retirement is corporate greed, backed up by their political power, as well as the effects of the economic crisis.

There are numerous examples of how big business and their two parties, the Democrats and Republicans, have colluded to erode their legal responsibility to fund pensions. The Pension Protection Act of 2006 enabled pension funds to partner with high-risk speculators, resulting in massive loses to the system in 2008-2010. Corporations have been allowed to declare phony bankruptcies in order to dump their pensions on the PBGC. They are also allowed to divert funds that should go into pension funds towards covering health care costs as well as buying back company stocks and making dividend payouts to stockholders. The list could go on for the ways the political system lets the corporations off the hook at the cost of threatening workers’ retirement. The effect of these measures is to starve the pension system in order to fatten corporate profits.

In addition, the Great Recession has also had a debilitating effect on pension funding. A jobless recovery means fewer workers able to contribute. If corporations were adequately taxed on the trillions they are hoarding to finance a real jobs program, this would not be a problem. Instead, the corporations and their politicians are pursuing the opposite course. They are using the bad economy to justify making the problem worse by cutting away at company obligations to their workers and their pensions.

The provision of the bill Obama signed into law on July 6th regarding pension funding demonstrates the bipartisan priorities geared towards benefiting corporations at the expense of workers. The public justification for this scheme is that the economy is bad and it wouldn’t help workers if these companies went broke as a result of trying to cover the pension shortfalls.

This is a variation of the same line of argument used to justify all austerity measures. Playing on the assumption of common cause between the economic elite and workers, corporations plead poverty and sermonize on the need for “shared sacrifice.” The truth, however, is that big business isn’t broke. There is plenty of money to assure a comfortable retirement for all workers, not to mention universal health care, social security, and full employment. The problem isn’t fiscal, it’s political. The corporations do not want to pay their fair share, and they own the political system.

Solutions to the pension crisis will not be found within the Democratic or Republican Parties. It will take the force of an independent social movement to make the rich pay. Such a social movement could start with the demands of “Jobs – Not Cuts” “Tax the Rich.” From this starting point, it could mature to take on other issues that unite workers such as a solution to the pension crisis.

What kind of solution could be proposed? A demand that a mass movement can get behind. In order for this to happen the demand would have to solve the crisis, be easily understood to inspire, and make a clear demarcation between the interests of the 99% and 1%. To do this a social movement around the pension crisis should call on the federal government to takeover pensions with a heavy tax on corporations that would ensure that they are fully funded and fine those who have willfully failed to properly pay into their pension funds. Then we could demand that Social Security be strengthened so that it could gradually replace the precarious pensions offered in both the public and private sectors. But demands around pensions should be linked to the more immediately pressing demand for most workers, namely a massive jobs creation program. In this way working people will be united and in a position to mount a massive campaign.

Mark Vorpahl is an union steward, social justice activist, and writer for Workers’ Action – www.workerscompass.org. He can be reached at Portland@workerscompass.org.

Notes.

(1) “New law gives US companies a break on pensions” by Alan Fram. http://www.dailytribune.com/article/20120709/FINANCE01/120709544/new-law-gives-us-companies-a-break-on-pensions&pager=full_story

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July 13, 2012 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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