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The ACLU and Obama’s Assassination Program

By Binoy Kampmark | Dissident Voice | April 2, 2012

Due process and judicial process are not one and the same.  The Founders weren’t picky.  Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock-paper-scissors – who cares?

— Stephen Colbert, March 6, 2012

The policies around the assassination program of the United States are surreal.

Trafficking in murder while espousing noble things is a habit regimes fall into, though the more sinister ones tend to use weasel words to conceal that fact.  The Obama administration, having long abandoned its role as the knight in shining armour, is now rusting away with the effects of realpolitik.

The ACLU has been trying through Freedom of Information channels to force a disclosure of the guidelines the administration uses in targeting foreign nationals or American citizens through the infamous drone program that has become de rigueur in military circles.  The CIA has insisted that it cannot confirm or deny the existence or non-existence of those records that cover the targeting of individuals, or whether it is even employing such vehicles in the first place.  They are “intelligence sources and methods information that is protected from disclosure by section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949, as amended”. In such circles, the response is termed the Glomar response, after the CIA’s refusal in 1976 to confirm or deny its relationship with Glomar Explorer, a drill ship created at the direction of Howard Hughes for the agency to recover the sunken Soviet submarine, the K-129.

In the words of Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU, as reported by Salon (March 26).  “At this point, the only consequence of pretending that it’s a secret program is that the courts don’t play a role in overseeing it.”  With the courts left out in the cold, the administration can run riot.  This, of course, is its self-appointed prerogative.

The Obama administration is engaging in a lexical game of murder, a game that has certainly silenced many of those who would have expressed outrage at the assortment of abuses perpetrated by the Bush administration.  Tinker with the words, and the result is considered perfectly justifiable in the name of a higher state interest.  This is Cheney with the gloss, Rumsfeld with the polish.  Adjust the terms of reference, and assassination is an entirely rum thing.

Obama’s front man in this entire business, in true tasteless fashion, is Eric Holder.  Instead of defending the law as is the incumbent duty of any Attorney General, he has a nasty tendency to get sick on it.  He brings in his broom to clean up, and in its place he leaves the slime of gibberish. At Northwestern University Law School, he clearly repudiated the position he had taken regarding the Bush administration, whose policies in the ‘war on terror’ had occasioned ‘needlessly abusive and unlawful practices’.  That, however, was in 2008.  The new Holder was a different beast, more prone to splitting hairs.  ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’, we are made to realise, ‘are not one and the same’. The President, according to Holder, is not required to seek permission from any court before targeting American citizens abroad (Washington Times, March 12).

Supposedly, the targeting of such individuals is constrained by guidelines.  The problem with such dangerous talk is that guidelines are merely points on paper, the scrawl of the moment. They have a tendency of disappearing as quickly as they appear.  These guidelines tend to revolve around the nature of the target (an operative of a terrorist group seeking to actively kill American citizens, for one; that the target poses an imminent threat to the US; that the capture of the target is impractical; and that the target is to be eliminated on the basis of ‘relevant law of war principles’ (Washington Times, March 12).  Such determinations do not lie in the legal domain.  They are rather matters of political expediency.

An administration up to its eyeballs with legal rhetoric is bound to eventually be told it has no clothes, that its efforts are simply acts of distortion.  The time it seems, courtesy of the ACLU’s efforts, is now.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He can be reached at bkampmark@gmail.com

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April 2, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | 2 Comments

Destabilizing Arsenals Concealed in US Embassies

By Nil NIKANDROV | Strategic Culture Foundation | 02.04.2012

Over the past years, it has been happening with frightening regularity that U.S. diplomats and CIA agents were caught pulling off operations involving illicit weapons supply in Latin America. The inescapable impression is that the U.S. Department of State has irreversibly learned to regard the Vienna Convention and various national legislation as rules which it has unlimited freedom to overstep.

Pressing for unchallenged hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, Washington keeps the populist regimes in Latin America under permanent pressure. Outwardly, the U.S. Administration pledges not to resort to military force to displace the ALBA governments in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, or Cuba, but in reality Washington’s efforts to undermine them are a constant background of the continent’s political picture. The activity began under president G. Bush and shows no signs of subsiding under president Obama. Supposedly, plans are being devised in the White House that a series of color revolutions will erupt across Latin America in 2013-2014 and derail the continent’s advancement towards tighter integration in security and other spheres. As the fresh experience of Libya showed with utmost clarity, Washington’s new brand of color revolutions will – in contrast to the former coups which used to be accompanied with outpourings of pacifist rhetoric – involve ferocious fighting and massive fatalities figures.

The above should explain why U.S. embassies in Latin America increasingly often become epicenters of political scandals related to illicit weapons supplies. In a recent incident in Bolivia, the country’s mobile patrol service (Umopar) intercepted in Trinidad, the capital of the department of Beni, a vehicle owned by the U.S. diplomatic mission and driven by two Bolivian nationals – chief of U.S. Embassy security Maj. Costas and Sgt. Garcia, a driver – which was found to be heading for the capital of Santa Cruz province with three shotguns, a 38-caliber revolver, and a load of ammunition. Bolivian Interior Minister Carlos Romero announced shortly thereafter that the U.S. embassy had not requested a permit for transporting weapons and, therefore, acted illegally and put Bolivia’s National Security in jeopardy. It remained unknown who was going to secretly receive the weapons seized in the district located hundreds of kilometers away from La Paz.

The Bolivian administration has serious reasons to be on the alert – slightly over a year ago, Ecuador’s police which had been armed, funded, and otherwise courted by the U.S. embassy, used to launch missions directed by U.S. advisers – and gradually evolved to think of the national administration’s control as purely nominal – organized a mutiny and, as the plot unraveled, president Rafael Correa narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. An investigation that followed when law and order were restored in Ecuador failed to clarify the origin of the sniper rifles used to fire on the president, which likely means that the CIA professionals left no trace of their involvement in the coup.

The US embassy in La Paz reacted to the Trinidad incident by releasing a statement to the effect that the Beni police had actually been notified about the supply of firearms to Santa Cruz and that the plan had been to pass them to Bolivian nationals employed as guards by US institutions. Minister Romero was as a result forced to reiterate that no license had been issued on the occasion and said that a probe would be opened into how the firearms and ammunition had crossed the Bolivian border.

For anyone familiar with the scope of the activity of the US intelligence community in Bolivia, the context of minister Romero’s invectives is not hard to grasp. A shocking episode took place in Santa Cruz, a city with a reputation of a hotbed of separatism, in April, 2009 – back then, Bolivian special forces raided the Las Americas hotel and mowed down a group of terrorists who had arrived to the country from Western Europe with the goals of fueling armed resistance to the populist regime and assassinating president Evo Morales. It transpired that the uninvited visitors had a record of fighting against the Serbs in the Balkan region, where the bunch of militants had formed strong links with Western intelligence services. The Bolivian counter-espionage agency’s investigation into various aspects of the case of the group’s leader Eduardo Rózsa-Flores – particularly the part of the probe meant to shed light on the channels through which firearms, grenades, explosives and ammunition had been smuggled into the country – is still underway. In a rather predictable development, a number of individuals who had assisted Rózsa-Flores, including Human Rights Foundation representative Hugo Acha (a.k.a Superman) – fled to the U.S. The Bolivian security service got a hold of e-mail exchanges between Rózsa-Flores and  Belovays, a U.S. national and, reportedly, a career CIA officer whose profile also features a stay in the Balkans.

The U.S. van with firearms on board ended up in the hands of the Bolivian police a month after the U.S. and Bolivian administrations penned a deal normalizing the diplomatic relations between the two countries and exchanged ambassadors. The lesson that Morales has to relearn under the circumstances is that – shifts in diplomacy notwithstanding – the staff of the U.S. embassy in Bolivia has no intention to stop playing its totally unfair game.

There’s hardly a country in Latin America where U.S. agents have not been spotted trafficking firearms. A U.S. national was taken in custody last April in the proximity of the Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires for carrying three rifles, two of them with telescopic sights, in a vehicle with a diplomatic license plate. The U.S. embassy somehow explained away the incident with a reference to an unspecified emergency (no doubt, getting away with a similar offense so easily would have been out of question in the U.S.), and the perpetrator, a U.S. embassy contractor, in his own description, immediately hopped on a plane to the U.S. Argentina’s police were keenly interested in the man’s “hunting” trips to the regions of the country bordering Bolivia and Chile, considering that Argentinian laws strictly prohibit the conduct of intelligence operations, including those against drug trafficking, by foreign agents.

Speaking of Argentina, the loudest story played out about a year ago when boxes containing undeclared firearms, reconnaissance equipment, and narcotic substances were discovered aboard a U.S. Air Force Boeing in the Ezeiza airport. The U.S. mischief was impossible to deny, but, as in the majority of cases, the U.S. easily solved the problem, this time by asserting that all of the above was necessary to train Argentinian police.

It is a recurrent theme in the media that sizable arsenals are stored in U.S. embassies across Latin America. These days, given that the ostensibly anti-terror war has been raging globally for over a decade, nobody is taken aback when this type of information surfaces. The perceived risks are pervasive, be it Mexico, Central America, Columbia, Brazil, or even Uruguay, and alarmist forecasts evidently proliferate. That must be the reason why, in just about every Latin American country, the U.S. embassies increasingly resemble military bases, with reinforced concrete walls, tiny windows, and underground shelters.

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April 2, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , , , , | 2 Comments

Open Letter to Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO

By Ralph Nader | March 28, 2012

Dear Mr. Trumka,

You have come to your leadership position of our country’s labor federation of unions with 13 million members the hard way. Starting by working in the coal mines, then becoming a lawyer, heading the United Mine Workers, then becoming the Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO before assuming your present position in 2009, who can pull rank on you in the formal labor movement?

Yet, the AFL-CIO’s public leadership in three major areas has been far less effective than one would expect. I am referring to your less than assertive response to President Obama: 1) turning his back on raising the federal minimum wage; 2) failing to advance his card check promise to you in 2008; and 3) dropping the ball on backing long-overdue safety and health responsibilities of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

I say this with the awareness of your group’s public stands in favor of these three crucial matters to working families. But as you well know, there is a very marked difference between being on-the-record, as the AFL-CIO is, and being on-the-daily ramparts pushing these issues, as your organization is not.

Even just making a statement, however, took a back seat in your March 13, 2012 endorsement of Barack Obama for a second term as president. In what ways has Mr. Obama “moved aggressively,” as you declared, “to protect workers rights, pay, health and safety on the job?”

He has neither championed nor pressed Congress, when the Democrats were in control in 2009-2010, to give you card check which you have long-said was needed to reverse the serious decline and expand the ranks of organized labor by millions of workers (you told me this in 2004).

Second, Mr. Obama appointed an excellent head of OSHA and then betrayed OSHA – an agency that has estimated 58,000 workplace-related American deaths a year from disease and trauma! That is over 1000 people a week, every week, on the average.

Dr. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor and the head of OSHA, cannot get White House approval for issuing long-overdue standards or strengthening weak and outdated standards such as the woefully inadequate silica rule, to save American lives not threatened by terrorists, but by corporate negligence or worse. Why have you not exposed this reality in public? Has Mr. Obama, whom you have socialized with at White House viewings of the Super Bowl, ever invited you to come across Lafayette Square to discuss this serious ongoing, preventable tragedy?

Had he taken worker concerns seriously, he might have asked you why the AFL-CIO for many years, has retained at its large national headquarters so few full-time advocates on occupational health and safety? And you in turn might have asked him why his politicos are blocking Dr. Michaels and why he is content in having only $550 million for OSHA’s annual budget while the U.S. spent $675 million in 2011 paying corporate contractors to guard the overbuilt U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. Are these the Obama “values” you extolled in your endorsement statement?

More dismaying is your touting Mr. Obama for aggressively protecting workers’ pay. By pushing for more NAFTA type “pull-down” trade agreements through Congress, and not moving to revise NAFTA as he promised in his 2008 presidential campaigns, he is undermining both workers’ pay and jobs. By totally abandoning his pledge made to over 30 million workers in 2008 that he would press for a $9.50/hour federal minimum wage by 2011, he left them defenseless with more debt and fewer necessities of life.

The AFL-CIO wants at the least to catch up to 1968 with an inflation-adjusted $10/hour minimum wage law. Where is the visible muscular campaign for such legislation? Keeping up with inflation for the federal minimum wage is historically supported by 70 percent of the people. That includes many Republicans and even Rick Santorum and, until his latest flip-flop, Mitt Romney. A $10 minimum wage, after years of windfall price increases and executive compensation windfalls at labor’s expense, would annually pump tens of billions of dollars into greater consumer demand by low-income families in this recessionary economy.

What is the AFL-CIO waiting for? Hundreds of non-profit organizations will follow your lead. Talk is not enough. Resources and muscular lobbying are required along with far more relevant and tough public advertisements than your members are seeing and paying for on TV these days. Enough, already, of the general feel-good mood spots on TV.

As someone who in earlier days had been a dig-in-your-heels labor negotiator in fights with management, what did you receive for millions of American workers in your early, blanket endorsement of Mr. Obama? No wonder he can get away with giving the trade union movement and unorganized workers the back of his hand. You have unnecessarily allowed him to believe that you have nowhere to go. This is another way of saying that the Republicans, by being worse than the bad Democrats, are holding the American labor movement hostage to the corporatist Democratic Party.

The AFL-CIO is in a deep, defensive rut when in these tough times it should be in an aroused, innovative state of high alert and aggressive action. Workers in the 1930s’ Depression were in worse shape than workers today, yet organized labor was more militant.

People inside and outside the AFL-CIO know the problems. They are: complacent bureaucratic rigidity, fractious relations between member unions over how supine they need to be to Obama and the Democrats (with their costly wars), the lack of union democracy and competitive elections both within member unions and at the AFL-CIO plus, except for a few unions like the California Nurses Association, a distinct lack of sustained fervor and money for organizing drives.

You know all this only too well. Yet, as a 14th Century Chinese philosopher once said, “to know and not to do is not to know.” Unless you shake the AFL-CIO up and reorder its priorities against the corporate state, expect another four years of an Obamabush Administration.

Sincerely,
Ralph Nader

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March 30, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | 3 Comments

UNAC: A Real Anti-War Movement in the Belly of the Beast

By Glen Ford | Black Agenda Report | March 28, 2012

With passage of a short and elegant plank in its Action Plan for 2012, the United National Anti-War Coalition is building a peace movement that is finally prepared to confront President Obama’s global military offensive, cloaked in “humanitarian” interventionist rhetoric. The language states: “End all threats of war and intervention against Iran and Syria! No to sanctions, blockades and embargoes!”

It is a simple expression of the singular mission of anti-warriors in the belly of the beast. That mission is to disarm the beast– not to quibble with the war machine about where best to deploy its overwhelming firepower, or to advise corporate warmongers on the most efficient killing-mix of live troops and automated drones, or to pick and choose from a Democratic administration’s menu of regimes that might be changed to make the world more amenable to Wall Street. Our task as Americans – our overarching responsibility, for which we are uniquely positioned and, therefore, solemnly obligated – is to dismantle from within the monstrous apparatus of imperial aggression. Period.

I was privileged to present the coordinating committee’s draft of the Action Plan to UNAC’s national conference in Stamford, Connecticut, this past weekend. “This action plan does not just target some U.S. wars,” said the committee’s statement. “It does not target the currently unpopular wars. It does not shy away from condemning wars that remain acceptable to half the population because the real reasons for them are obscured in the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention. It does not advocate that we avoid putting U.S. boots on the ground by mounting embargoes that bring economic devastation on the peoples of Iran. It does not condone war by other, more sanitized, means. It does not cheer on wars that minimize U.S. combat deaths by the use of robotic unmanned planes or the highly trained murder squads of the Joint Special Operations Command. It does not see war by mercenary as somehow less threatening to the peoples of the world and the U.S. than war by economic draft. It does not give credit to Washington for removing brigades from one country in order to deploy them in the next.”

The document demands an end to “all wars, interventions, targeted assassinations and occupations” and U.S. withdrawal from “NATO and all other interventionist military alliances.”

UNAC’s reasoning is rooted in the principle that all the world’s peoples have the inherent right to self-determination,to pursue their own destinies – the foundation of relations among peoples, enshrined in international law but daily violated by the United States.

American exceptionalism – the belief that rules of international conduct, or even the rules of history and human development, do not apply to the United States – is deeply entrenched in the popular American psyche and has long been the bane of the U.S. anti-war movement. It encourages Americans to think they have a privileged perspective on the world and a consequent right to preach, lecture and ultimately intervene in other people’s affairs – just as their government does. In anti-war movements, this national arrogance (deeply entwined with racism) allows self-styled peaceniks to behave like little imperialists, imposing conditions and caveats on their willingness to confront their own government’s aggressions. They reserve the right to pick and choose which U.S. violations of international law to oppose. Unmoored by principle and crippled by national chauvinism, such “peace” movements inevitably disband at the earliest opportunistic juncture.

UNAC emerged with the disintegration of United for Peace and Justice, which showed itself to be more of an anti-Republican formation than an anti-war movement. UFPJ disintegrated at the first whiff of the new Democratic administration, clearing the way domestically for a new imperial strategy: “humanitarian” intervention. At its founding conference, in July of 2010, UNAC tackled the first taboo of American foreign policy with a plank to “End all U.S. aid to Israel, military, economic and diplomatic!” – a direct confrontation with Israeli “exceptionalism.” Last week, UNAC broke decisively with Obama’s humanitarian “exception” to the rules of international behavior. There now exists a place for genuine anti-imperialists to gather and plot for peace – and that is a beginning. No repeats of Libya, no more equivocations in the face of U.S. carnage.

A luta continua – the struggle continues, in the belly of the beast.

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

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March 28, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Partisan Confusion

By Kevin Zeese | Dissident Voice | March 28th, 2012

I was standing outside the U.S. Supreme Court holding a sign that said: “Single Payer Now, Strike Down the Obama Mandate.” It was the second day of argument on the Affordable Care Act. As I watched the crowds it was evident this was an organized partisan event.

As the Washington Post reports, the mandate was a Republican idea that originated with conservatives: “The tale begins in the late 1980s, when conservative economists such as Mark Pauly, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of business, were searching for ways to counter liberal calls for government-sponsored universal health coverage. Pauly then proposed a mandate requiring everyone to obtain this minimum coverage, thus guarding against free-riders…Health policy analysts at the conservative Heritage Foundation, led by Stuart Butler, picked up the idea and began developing it for lawmakers in Congress. The Heritage Foundation worked with then-Gov. Mitt Romney (R) to pass Massachusetts’ 2006 health reform law, which required all Bay State citizens to purchase coverage.”

Someone from the Heritage Foundation came up to us, wanting to take a photo of our sign. I asked him – does the Heritage Foundation oppose the mandate? He said “yes.” I told him that the idea came out of the Heritage Foundation. He looked confused, mumbled an unclear answer “not since 2006” and walked away.

Of course, Democrats opposed this Republican idea. They saw it for what it is: a massive giveaway to the insurance industry that will lead to their entrenchment and continued domination of heath care. The idea was used by Republicans to oppose the Clinton health plan. Of course, the Clinton’s opposed it. But, by the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton supported the mandate (by then the insurance industry was a big financial backer of hers), but candidate Barack Obama opposed it. One of his campaign advertisements said: “What’s she not telling you about her health-care plan? It forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can’t afford it, and you pay a penalty if you don’t.”

So, while I was out there watching groups like the National Organization for Women, who supports single payer favoring this pro-insurance law, as part of a coalition of Democratic Party aligned groups, I thought, what if President McCain had passed this law. My conclusion, we’d have the same people out here protesting, they’d just reverse sides. This was really not about healthcare, it was about Obama vs. the Republicans in this 2012 election year.

The people protesting followed their leader’s orders, said the chants they were told to say, and held the signs they were given to hold, but they were confused. When we talked to people on both sides the partisan confusion was evident.

My colleague, Margaret Flowers, asked two women carrying an Americans for Prosperity sign (a group opposed to Obama’s law) whether they were on Medicare. They said “yes.” “Do you like it?” Again, “yes.” “Do you know Medicare is a government program?” A confused look. “Do you know the Republicans want to end Medicare, make it into private insurance?” “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You probably support Obama”; and they started to walk away. “No, we oppose ObamaCare,” the women stopped and listened again, “We think everyone should have Medicare. Don’t you think it would be a good idea if every American could have the Medicare you have and like?” “Hmm, yes” then, more confusion in their faces.

Then, talking to the Democrats showed equal partisan confusion. I explained: “We oppose the Obama mandate because we want to end insurance control of health care. We support single payer, Medicare for all?” Response: “So do I.” I asked: “Single payer ends insurance, and Obama’s law entrenches insurance more deeply in control of health care, aren’t those opposites?” Response, obviously not understanding what ‘opposite’ means: “It’s a step in the right direction.” I ask: “How can it be a step in the right direction when it is going in the opposite direction?” No longer able to say it is the right direction, spouts another talking point: “This is the best we can get, we can build on this.” Me, trying to figure out what the Democrat thinks there is to build on, asks: “But, if we want to end insurance domination, how do we build on a law that is based on insurance?” Unable to explain it, the Democrat answers: “We can’t get what we want.” I say: “Of course, not, if people like you and organizations like yours who support single payer, spend their time advocating for the insurance industry, we can’t get what we want. But, if people who support single payer work for it we could.” Answer: “But, we have to re-elect President Obama.”

Partisan confusion reigned.

And, sadly partisan confusion dominates our airwaves as well. Of course, the right wing radio continues to attack Obama and confusingly calls a market-based, insurance-dominated health law socialism. But, sadly the “liberal” media sends out equal partisan confusion. We were able to go into Radio Row, where all the liberal radio outlets were interviewing “experts” on health care. The talking points, like in the conversation, were repeated and repeated. When one radio host wanted to interview me, really debate me since he was a Democratic apologist, I sat down. An organizer in the room asked the host to speak with her. She came back and told me I had to leave. This was private property and only people allowed to be here were allowed to be here. I explained I was invited by a station to be interviewed. She explained: “I tell them who to interview. The stations have slots and we fill them.” I asked: “Do you mean only people who support Obama can be interviewed.” She explained “The Republicans do it to.”

So, partisan confusion reigns and it permeates the airwaves leaving many people confused. We need to clear the FOG (Forces Of Greed) and get the truth on the air.

Despite all this supermajorities of Americans have consistently supported single payer, whether inaccurately called socialism or correctly described as “Medicare for all” 60% or more support it. Why? For the same reason that the great salesman President Obama and his superb marketing team have been unable to sell forced purchase of health insurance: Every family, business whether large or small; and every doctor or other health care provider have suffered insurance abuse. Two thirds of those who go bankrupt from a health problem have health insurance. The American experience is that health insurance is expensive, provides inadequate coverage and tries to avoid paying for health care. We all know this. So, no matter what the politicians say – Americans do not trust the health insurance industry.

But, one thing the two parties in Washington agree on – they will protect health insurance at all costs. After-all, they are a great source of campaign contributions – as the two politicians responsible for forcing Americans to buy insurance, President Obama and Mitt Romney, well know.

Kevin Zeese is executive director of Voters for Peace.

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March 28, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Angela Davis Lost Her Mind Over Obama

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | March 27, 2012

The “delusional effect” that swept Black America with the advent of the First Black President has warped and weakened the mental powers of some of our most revered icons – and it has been painful to behold. Earlier this month, Angela Davis diminished herself as a scholar and thinker in a gush of nonsense about the corporate executive in the White House. The occasion was a conference on Empowering Women of Color, in Berkeley, California. Davis shared the stage with Grace Lee Boggs, the 96-year-old activist from Detroit. The subject was social transformation, but Davis suddenly launched into how wonderful it felt to see people “dancing in the streets” when Barack Obama was elected. She called that campaign a “victory, not of an individual, but of…people who refused to believe that it was impossible to elect a person, a Black person, who identified with the Black radical tradition.”

There was a hush in the room, as if in mourning of the death of brain cells. Angela Davis was saying that Barack Obama is a man who identifies with the Black radical tradition. She said it casually, as if Black radicalism and Obama were not antithetical terms; as if everything he has written, said and done in national politics has not been a repudiation of the Black radical tradition; as if his rejection of his former minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was not a thorough disavowal of the Black radical tradition. In his famous 2008 campaign speech in Philadelphia, Obama blamed such radicals for compounding the nation’s problems. He viewed people like Rev. Wright as having been mentally scarred by battles of long ago, who were unable to see the inherent goodness of America, as he did. This is the man who said he agreed with President Ronald Reagan, that the Sixties were characterized by “excesses.” Can anyone doubt that Obama considers the historical Angela Davis, herself, to be a part of the political “excesses” of the Sixties and early Seventies that he so deplores?

And that is the saddest part of the story. Angela Davis, who retired as a professor of the history of human consciousness, in 2008, seems not to be conscious of the fact that she is repudiating herself, her history, her comrades – all in a foolish attempt to artificially graft a totally unworthy Barack Obama onto the Black radical tradition – a place he not only does not belong, but most profoundly does not want to be. This is the guy who declared, at his first national broadcast opportunity, that “there is no Black America…only the United States of America.”

How, then, did Angela Davis connect Barack Obama to the Black radical tradition? She didn’t, because even an icon cannot do the impossible. Instead, Davis quickly told the crowd, in Berkeley, that “we need to figure out how to prevent somebody like Mitt Romney from getting elected.” But the vast majority of Black people are going to wind up voting for Obama, anyway, because he’s not white and Republican. There is no need to pollute the proud tradition of Black radicalism by dipping the corporate warmonger, Obama, into the historical mix. In doing so, Professor Davis has soiled herself, and done a terrible injustice to Black history and tradition. And, the biggest shame of all is, she has diminished herself and insulted our people for the sake of a president who doesn’t give a damn for their history or their future.

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

March 28, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , | 4 Comments

US to grant more funds to Israel’s Iron Dome missile system

Press TV – March 28, 2012

The United States is planning to grant more money to Israel’s Iron Dome missile system designed to intercept short-range rockets and mortars.

“Supporting the security of Israel is a top priority of President Obama and Secretary (Leon) Panetta… [The Department of Defense] intends to request an appropriate level of funding from Congress to support such acquisitions based on Israeli requirements and production capacity,” Pentagon Press Secretary George Little said in a statement on Tuesday.

The Obama administration and the US Congress allocated $205 million to Israel’s Iron Dome system in the 2011 budget. The budget for next year demands $3.1 billion in military aid to Israel, which is more than the current level and the highest for any foreign country.

Although the Pentagon statement provided no specific numbers, congressional sources said the purchase of 10 battery systems at a cost of $50 million each is likely to be requested.

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March 28, 2012 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | , , , | 1 Comment

Afghan War ‘Just Needs a Better Sales Pitch’

By Peter Hart – FAIR – 03/27/2012

The big New York Times story on the Afghan War today (3/27/12) focuses on public opinion in the United States, which is now dramatically anti-war: 69 percent think we shouldn’t be there.

An interesting point argument is raised later in the piece, when two sources make the argument that the war wouldn’t be so unpopular if Barack Obama would just do a better job of selling it:

Peter Feaver of Duke University, who has long studied public opinion about war and worked in the administration of President George W. Bush, said that in his view there would be more support for the war if President Obama talked more about it. “He has not expended much political capital in defense of his policy,” Mr. Feaver said. “He doesn’t talk about winning in 2014; he talks about leaving in 2014. In a sense that protects him from an attack from the left, but I would think it has the pernicious effect of softening political support for the existing policy.”

And later we get this from Brookings Institution hawk Michael O’Hanlon:

“I honestly believe if more people understood that there is a strategy and intended sequence of events with an end in sight, they would be tolerant,” Mr. O’Hanlon said. “The overall image of this war is of U.S. troops mired in quicksand and getting blown up and arbitrarily waiting until 2014 to come home. Of course you’d be against it.”

This is a pretty widespread belief in recent press coverage of Afghanistan– that somehow Obama could better explain the Afghan War if he’d just decide to do so. Here’s Liz Marlantes of the Christian Science Monitor (Chris Matthews Show, 3/18/12):

The criticism that you keep hearing from Republicans, and I think there’s some validity to this, is that the president also didn’t really spend any political capital selling this mission to the public. I’m not sure the public really understands what the mission is there anymore. Once bin Laden was dead, I think a lot of Americans feel like, “OK, we’ve solved our main problem over there.” In terms of our goals there, it keeps getting defined down. We’re not going to, you know, build a perfect democracy there anymore. And so I think people are thinking, “Well, why are we even there anymore?”

The Washington Post editorial page (3/20/12):

Mr. Obama must do more to build support in the United States for his policy. The president has given just a handful of speeches on Afghanistan during his first term, and his recent public comments have focused on bringing troops home, rather than completing their mission.

And Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson (3/22/12):

Obama has made broadly responsible decisions on Afghanistan. He bears the private burdens of wartime leadership with dignity as he comforts the families of the fallen. He has a strong national security team, a serious military strategy and measurable successes to highlight. But with a nation in need of rallying, his public voice is weak.

The assumption, of course, is that there is, in fact, an Afghan War “strategy” to defend. And that if Americans really understood what their country was doing there, they would support it.

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March 27, 2012 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Left Takes ObamaCare To Court – Supreme Court

By John V. Walsh | Dissident Voice | March 27th, 2012

The struggle over the Affordable Care Act (aka, Obamacare) is facilely cast as a battle between Left and Right. Nothing could be farther from the truth. A tussle between the dominant factions of the Democratic and Republican Parties it certainly is in a superficial and temporary way, until the kabuki politics of the presidential campaign is over. But a battle between Left and Right, it most assuredly is not. Obamacare is opposed by the Left, which has long sought Single-Payer (Medicare for All) as a proven way to universal and egalitarian coverage. But many Leftists have been too cowed by Democratic operatives or by Obama loyalists in their midst to speak their convictions. Now that silence has been shattered.

Recently 50 physicians, all strong supporters of Single-Payer, along with the Left wing non-profits, Single Payer Action and It’s Our Economy, have joined conservative and libertarian opposition to Obamacare. They have submitted to the Supreme Court an amicus brief which is a dagger aimed at the noxious heart of Obamacare, the individual mandate which codifies in law the domination of the health care system by the insurance companies. The brief states:

Amici thus submit this brief for the purpose of disputing the primary tenet of the Government’s position, that Congress cannot regulate the national healthcare market effectively unless it has power to require that citizens purchase insurance from private insurance companies. On the contrary, as set forth herein, Congress has already demonstrated that it can regulate healthcare markets effectively by implementing a single payer system such as Medicare or the VHA (Veterans Health Administration).

And in case the dagger failed to pierce its mark with that, the brief plunges deeper:

Government contends that the provision is not only “reasonable” but also “necessary” to its broader regulation of the national healthcare market. In particular, the Government contends that the individual mandate is “key to the viability of the Act’s guaranteed-issue and community-rating provisions.” But while it might be true that these provisions will adversely impact private insurers’ profits, and that the individual mandate offsets this adverse impact by guaranteeing the private insurers a large stream of new customers who are required by law to purchase insurance, that is not sufficient to render the individual mandate constitutional. If it were, Congress could “reform” any private industry – whether it be automobiles, coal, pharmaceuticals or any other – by enacting legislation requiring that every American purchase the industry’s goods or services in exchange for some perceived public good the industry provides. Yet Congress has never before enacted such a mandate.

The amicus brief makes no argument against other features of Obamacare, for example, regulation of insurance companies and coverage of those with pre-existing conditions. Such “severability” has been advocated by many, most recently by Columbia law professors, Abbe Gluck and Michael Graetz in a New York Times Op-ed on March 23. But the Obama administration has resisted this separation and many Left groups have been pushed into silence for fear that they will be seen as opposing the “good” features of Obamacare. Severability, never mentioned by Obama loyalists, provides a simple way to oppose the nefarious features of Obamacare and yet allow the other features to go forward.

Much of the rest of the brief is devoted to describing the superiority of single-payer systems, most notably affordability and equality of care. The simplest argument for Single-Payer is that it works as advertised, as can be seen readily in Canada or France, for example.

It is a grave misperception to regard Obamacare as a stepping stone to Single-Payer, as promoted by Obama loyalists. It is not. In fact, it is a massive obstacle. Once in place it will create the impression that universal coverage with cost controls has been achieved, postponing genuine change to another day. And until that day there will be much needless suffering, even as we spend ever more on health care.

Quite simply, Obamacare is the preferred option for both the Republican and Democratic establishments and their backers in the financial sector. Romneycare, its older, Republican twin, has failed to deliver on the promise of cost control and decent care for all. Instead it has delivered a captive population up to the tender mercies of the insurers. Obamacare is more of the same. The coinage Obomneycare says it all.

The real struggle is not between Left and Right but between the top, which favors Obomneycare, and the bottom, the 99% in the parlance of the moment. Hence it is no surprise to see groups of diverse political philosophies, even divergent ones at first sight, rise from among the vast majority to oppose this latest scheme to make money from human illness in the guise of health care reform.

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March 27, 2012 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

Real Health Care Advocates Should Support Repeal of the Insurance Mandate

By Kevin Zeese | Dissident Voice | March 26th, 2012

It’s Our Economy, the organization I co-direct with Margaret Flowers, MD, Single Payer Action and 50 doctors filed an amicus brief in HHS v. Florida, the challenge to the Affordable Care Act being heard in the Supreme Court this week.

We support health care reform but oppose the insurance mandate.  Merely removing two words from existing law will achieve the President’s stated goals of universal, affordable and guaranteed health care.  By removing the words “over 65” from the Medicare law, every American will have health care based on a proven public health care model that has been in existence since 1965.  This will control costs and immediately provide health care to everyone in the United States.

Forcing Americans to buy insurance is both unconstitutional and bad policy.  Even the most favorable estimates of the Affordable Care Act predict that tens of millions of Americans will not have health insurance when it is fully implemented in 2019. The number of employers offering health benefits will decline under the ACA pushing employees into the individual insurance market where coverage is skimpier and more expensive.  The cost of premiums continues to rise and insurance coverage continues to shrink, putting patients at risk of personal bankruptcy when they suffer a serious accident or illness.

The United States already spends enough to provide health care to all.  As the amicus brief states:

Studies conducted by the nonpartisan General Accounting Office and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office have consistently concluded that if a national single payer system were implemented in the United States, administrative cost-savings alone would be enough to guarantee universal coverage without increasing overall healthcare spending.

In addition, improved Medicare for all will slow the growth in the cost of health care. The cost of health care under Medicare is growing more slowly than private insurance-based health care, despite the fact that it deals with America’s elderly and disabled populations, groups that generally need more health care services.  Unlike private insurance, under Medicare the increased cost is not due to administrative costs and bureaucracy. Medicare’s administrative costs have been consistently about 2% while private insurance is 16% administrative costs.

Instead, the ACA builds and expands the system of private insurance. This system is among the least efficient of any healthcare system currently operating in developed nations.  The brief states:  “In 2009, 28 healthcare expenditures accounted for 17.4 percent of GDP in the United States, compared with only 9.6 percent in the average OECD [The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] nation” and “measured per capita, healthcare expenditures in the United States ‘are by far the highest among OECD countries.’”

Medicare provides health services that people like, as the brief points out:  “In addition to achieving universal coverage for Americans aged 65 and older and maintaining consistently low administrative costs, Medicare is also highly rated by senior citizens who are its primary beneficiaries – 51 percent of whom give their health insurance an ‘excellent” rating.’”

If the US Congress had considered an evidence-based approach to health reform instead of writing a bill that funnels more wealth to insurance companies that deny and restrict care, it would have been a no brainer to adopt improved Medicare for all. All the data points to a single payer system as the only way to accomplish universal health care and control health care costs.

It is also bad precedent to allow the federal government to mandate all Americans buy a corporate product.  This takes corporate welfare to new levels of extreme.  If this is upheld, will a future president facing an economic crisis require Americans to buy cars made in the USA – of course, with a government subsidy?  Or, will the pension crisis in the United States be ‘solved’ by setting up a pension exchange of JP Morgan, Bank of America, Well Fargo, Chase and Citibank and require Americans to buy a federally subsidized pension from Wall Street?

Finally, an improved Medicare for all system will give everyone in the United States the greatest control of their own healthcare.  The insurance industry will be removed from between doctors and patients.  Doctors will not have to convince an insurance, profit-minded, bureaucrat to pay for a treatment.  And, people will no longer be threatened with increased premiums, decreased coverage and financial ruin caused by an insurance industry that puts profits before people.

We filed the amicus brief because forcing people to purchase a flawed product, private health insurance, is not necessary and will not achieve the goals of universal, guaranteed and affordable health care. There is a health care model in the US already that will achieve these goals – that’s improved Medicare for all. Medicare for all is constitutional and simple to attain – just drop a few words from existing law and we will be on the path to joining the rest of the civilized world when it comes to health care.

Kevin Zeese is executive director of Voters for Peace.

March 26, 2012 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Demolishing Due Process

By Ron Paul | March 19, 2012

It is ironic but perhaps sadly appropriate that Attorney General Eric Holder would choose a law school, Northwestern University, to deliver a speech earlier this month in which he demolished what was left of the rule of law in America.

In what history likely will record as a turning point, Attorney General Holder bluntly explained that this administration believes it has the authority to use lethal force against Americans if the President determines them to be a threat to the nation. He tells us that this is not a violation of the due process requirements of our Constitution because the President himself embodies “due process” as he unilaterally determines who is to be targeted. As Holder said, “a careful and thorough executive branch review of the facts in a case amounts to ‘due process.'” That means that the administration believes it is the President himself who is to be the judge, jury, and executioner.

As George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley wrote of the Holder speech:

“All the Administration has said is that they closely and faithfully follow their own guidelines — even if their decisions are not subject to judicial review. The fact that they say those guidelines are based on notions of due process is meaningless. They are not a constitutional process of review.”

It is particularly bizarre to hear the logic of the administration claiming the right to target its citizens according to some secret selection process, when we justified our attacks against Iraq and Libya because their leaders supposedly were targeting their own citizens! We also now plan a covert war against Syria for the same reason.

I should make it perfectly clear that I believe any individual who is engaging in violence against this country or its citizens should be brought to justice. But as Attorney General Holder himself points out in the same speech, our civilian courts have a very good track record of trying and convicting individuals involved with terrorism against the United States. Our civilian court system, with the guarantee of real due process, judicial review, and a fair trial, is our strength, not a weakness. It is not an impediment to be sidestepped in the push for convictions or assassinations, but rather a process that guarantees that fundamental right to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

I am encouraged, however that there appears to be the beginning of a backlash against the administration’s authoritarian claims. Just recently I did an interview with conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham who expressed grave concern over using these sorts of tactics against Americans using the supposed war on terror as justification. Sadly, many conservative leaders were silent when Republican President George W. Bush laid the groundwork for this administration’s lawlessness with the PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention without trial, and other violations. Similarly, as Professor Turley points out, “Democrats previously demanded the ‘torture memos’ of the Bush administration that revealed poor legal analysis by Judge Jay Bybee and Professor John Yoo to justify torture. Now, however, Democrats are largely silent in the face of a president claiming the right to unilaterally kill citizens.” The misuse of and disregard for our Constitution for partisan political gain is likely one reason the American public holds Congress in such low esteem. Now the stakes are much higher. Congress and the people should finally wake up!

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March 21, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | 1 Comment

Obama and Sarkozy: How Imperialists Deal With Defeat

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | March 21, 2012

Fifty years ago this week, the French admitted defeat in their war against Algerian independence, by signing a formal ceasefire. The government of Nicholas Sarkozy said it would hold no formal ceremonies, because to mark the anniversary would reopen “deep wounds of a painful page in the recent history of France.” It’s all about the French, you see – their pain at being defeated by a people they had subjugated and treated as lesser forms of life for 132 years; their loss of face as a great imperial power, not the Algerian’s pain at the loss of one million men, women and children in the final struggle for nationhood.

This week also marks the 9th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Americans have, of course, never admitted defeat in that war – although defeat is the only reason U.S. troops are no longer in Iraq. President Barack Obama very reluctantly carried out the troop withdrawal agreement that President George Bush was forced by the Iraqis to sign in November of 2008, after it had become clear that America’s unprovoked war of aggression was lost.

Obama was even less gracious in defeat than French President Sarkozy, who at least had the manners to keep personally silent. In proclaiming March 19th “A National Day of Honor,” Obama praised the “unshakeable fortitude and unwavering commitment” of U.S. troops who fought “block by block to help the Iraqi people to seize the chance for a better future.” Other obscenities and damnable lies flowed from Obama’s mouth, as the president embraced George Bush’s great crimes against global peace and his holocaust against the Iraqi people. “The war left wounds not always seen, but forever felt,” said Obama – speaking, of course, only about the wounds suffered by Americans, just as Sarkozy spoke only of the pain of the French. The anniversary of a U.S. invasion of another people’s country, is all about the Americans, you see – the 4500 American dead, to whom, Obama said, “we owe a debt that can never be fully repaid.” No mention of the blood debt that is owed to the more than one million dead Iraqi men, women and children whose country, once the most advanced in the Arab world, was utterly destroyed by the United States, and who hope to never see an American in uniform again.

What are a million Algerians worth to the French? The same as one million Iraqis are worth to the United States. They are not even worth mentioning.

There is no word that can describe the absolute moral turpitude of imperialists, the casualness of their genocides, their infinite capacity for narcissism, and their whining self-pity when confronted with minimal casualties to themselves in the course of their global depredations.

The Americans and western Europeans regret nothing but their own setbacks in the 500-year war they have waged against the darker peoples of the Earth. They have annihilated and enslaved whole continents, and dare to call it civilization. Their only remorse is for their loss, in recent times, of total dominance over the human species, of which they still consider themselves the superior fraction. It is during weeks such as this, when the French and American governments note the historical markers of their national depravity, that affirm the inseparability of racism and imperialism, and the necessity to defeat them once and for all.

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

March 21, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Leave a comment

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