Colombia: Who Is Really In Charge?
By John I. Laun | Colombia Support Network | February 18, 2014
In the last several days a number of stunning disclosures have surfaced concerning the role of the Colombia military. First, the Colombian news magazine Semana revealed that military intelligence had conducted wire-tapping and surveillance for an operation called Andromeda from a listening post set up in a site disguised as a small restaurant named “Buggly Hacker” located in Galerias, a Bogota commercial district. Among the phone calls tapped and overheard it appears there may have been calls of members of the Colombian Government’s delegation involved in peace talks with the FARC guerrillas, whose delegation’s conversations may likewise have been tapped and overheard. When news broke of this activity, President Juan Manuel Santos declared publicly that these wiretaps (chuzadas, as they are referred to in Colombia) were illegal and had to be investigated at once. The President said publicly that he did not authorize and knew nothing about this activity. But the next day, President Santos declared that the chuzadas had been done legally!
Two things are very clear. First, that the President of Colombia is not aware of what a significant part of his government is doing, and that’s all right with him. And second, that the military are (quite literally) calling the shots in Colombia. It appears obvious that Mr. Santos changed his opinion overnight on the legality of the secret wire-tapping activity by military intelligence because military officers told him he could not call the activity illegal. In other words, they’re in ultimate control of the government in Colombia!
How could Mr. Santos determine that this activity was legal? There are laws which have provided great leeway to military intelligence. But they certainly do not extend to overhearing conversations between Colombian Government representatives and FARC representatives meeting in Havana supposedly aimed at arriving at a broad peace agreement through which the guerrilla war would be ended. Who would speak freely his or her ideas on what a peace agreement should consist of—a necessary part of peace conversations if they are to be productive— if he or she knew a third party was overhearing what was being said? No one. Particularly if the party overhearing the conversations is the Colombian military, which has a long record of abusive conduct, and even has a representative at the peace talks, General Mora. The chuzadas are a serious impediment to frank and open dialogue between the Colombian Government and the FARC. One suspects that former President Alvaro Uribe Velez is likely the recipient of the information gained from the chuzadas, as he utilizes his close relationship with military officers to obtain information with which to undercut the peace talks, which he has publicly opposed. He earlier obtained the coordinates for movement of two FARC leaders as they came out of their bases to go to Havana—secret information he could only have gotten through a leak from a military or governmental source. Of course, President Santos has not moved seriously to investigate this leak. Why? Because he is not in control of the Colombian government.
This has been made clear by events in the last couple of days. Semana, much to their credit, has carried out and now published the results of an extensive investigation of corruption in the Colombian military. The investigation found military officers discussing how to skim off funds for their personal benefit from monies received by the military, the likely source of which was the United States Government. One of the persons involved in the recorded conversations is the current Commander of the Colombian Armed Forces, General Leonardo Barrero. Another article reported how supposedly disgraced General Rito Alejo del Rio, confined to a military installation in Bogota for his support of illegal paramilitary forces during his time as Commander of the Seventeenth Brigade in Carepa, near Apartado, essentially commands the installation, freely making supposedly-prohibited cell phone calls. And other military personnel who misbehaved had been involved in the “false positives” scandal in which military officers ordered the kidnapping of young men, had them killed, and then falsely presented them as guerrillas killed in combat.
The reports by Semana show an astonishing level of corruption in the Colombian military. President Santos has promised an investigation of these activities, of which he says he had no knowledge. Again, we see Mr. Santos as being out of the loop, heading a government he does not control. The conclusion is inescapable that the military controls the government and Mr. Santos is an uninformed bystander. He seems to believe that his job is to hob-nob with representatives of multinational corporations, as he did on a recent visit to Spain, inviting them to invest in Colombia and remove its valuable mineral resources for a pittance. The Colombian people deserve much better than this!
There is another aspect of the military’s current “dance of the millions” which is very troubling. The funds that are being stolen by military personnel are almost certainly provided by the United States government (i.e., U.S. taxpayers) as a part of the bloated budget of funds the U. S. government provides to the Colombian military. An obvious question is: Did the U.S. government personnel, such as the country’s military attache and Ambassador in Colombia, know what has been going on? And, if not, why not? This scandal calls for a full review of the U.S. aid program to Colombia and an immediate freezing of any funds in the aid pipeline. We in the human rights community have long known of the pervasive corruption in the Colombian military, though we did not know of the brazen theft of funds which Semana uncovered. It is high time that President Obama, Secretary of State Kerry and Secretary of Defense Hagel give their undivided attention to the Colombia situation. And the members of Congress should insist upon a thorough investigation, dismissal of those government personnel who overlooked these very serious problems, and prosecution of those who may have collaborated with the Colombian military to their own advantage.
Obama Admin’s TPP Trade Officials Received Hefty Bonuses From Big Banks
By Lee Fang | Republic Report | February 18, 2014
Officials tapped by the Obama administration to lead the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations have received multimillion dollar bonuses from CitiGroup and Bank of America, financial disclosures obtained by Republic Report show.
Stefan Selig, a Bank of America investment banker nominated to become the Under Secretary for International Trade at the Department of Commerce, received more than $9 million in bonus pay as he was nominated to join the administration in November. The bonus pay came in addition to the $5.1 million in incentive pay awarded to Selig last year.
Michael Froman, the current U.S. Trade Representative, received over $4 million as part of multiple exit payments when he left CitiGroup to join the Obama administration. Froman told Senate Finance Committee members last summer that he donated approximately 75 percent of the $2.25 million bonus he received for his work in 2008 to charity. CitiGroup also gave Froman a $2 million payment in connection to his holdings in two investment funds, which was awarded “in recognition of [Froman’s] service to Citi in various capacities since 1999.”
Many large corporations with a strong incentive to influence public policy award bonuses and other incentive pay to executives if they take jobs within the government. CitiGroup, for instance, provides an executive contract that awards additional retirement pay upon leaving to take a “full time high level position with the U.S. government or regulatory body.” Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, the Blackstone Group, Fannie Mae, Northern Trust, and Northrop Grumman are among the other firms that offer financial rewards upon retirement for government service.
Froman joined the administration in 2009. Selig is currently awaiting Senate confirmation before he can take his post, which collaborates with the trade officials to support the TPP.
The controversial TPP trade deal has rankled activists for containing provisions that would newly empower corporations to sue governments in ad hoc arbitration tribunals to demand compensation from governments for laws and regulations they claim undermine their business interests. Leaked TPP negotiation documents show the Obama administration is seeking to prevent foreign governments from issuing a broad variety of financial rules designed to stem another bank crisis.
A leaked text of the TPP’s investment chapter shows that the pact would include the controversial investor-state dispute resolution system. A fact-sheet provided by Public Citizen explains how multi-national corporations may use the TPP deal to skirt domestic courts and local laws. The arrangement would allows corporations to go after governments before foreign tribunals to demand compensations for tobacco, prescription drug and environment protections that they claim would undermine their expected future profits. Last year, Senator Elizabeth Warren warned that trade agreements such as the TPP provide “a chance for these banks to get something done quietly out of sight that they could not accomplish in a public place with the cameras rolling and the lights on.”
Others have raised similar alarm.
“Not only do US treaties mandate that all forms of finance move across borders freely and without delay, but deals such as the TPP would allow private investors to directly file claims against governments that regulate them, as opposed to a WTO-like system where nation states (ie the regulators) decide whether claims are brought,” notes Boston University associate professor Kevin Gallagher.
CIA seeks new bases for deadly drones
Press TV – February 17, 2014
The US Central Intelligence Agency is seeking new drone bases in unnamed countries in Central Asia, fearing the full withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan would affect the targeted killings in neighboring Pakistan.
The spy agency asserts that if the US fails to sign a bilateral security deal with Afghanistan and secure an enduring military presence there, it would not be able to fly drones from its Afghan bases because drone operations are covert and need US military protection.
The security deal, which Washington says “ought to be signed” and is not renegotiable, could allow thousands of US troops to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014.
However, despite pressures from the White House and Congress, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has so far refused to sign the deal and the US intelligence community is hoping that the next Afghan president will agree to sign it.
Worried that its drone killings can become a casualty of strained relations between Kabul and Washington, the CIA is reportedly making contingency plans to use bases in other countries.
“There are contingency plans for alternatives in the north,” an unnamed US official briefed on the matter told the Los Angeles Times without specifying the countries.
According to Brian Glyn Williams, a University of Massachusetts professor, the CIA and the Pentagon used to fly drones from an airbase in Uzbekistan until the US was evicted in 2005.
Michael Nagata, commander of US special operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, also traveled last month to Tajikistan, which is Afghanistan’s northern neighbor, to discuss “issues of bilateral security cooperation” and “continued military cooperation.”
Meanwhile, US officials say a new jet-powered drone, called Avenger, which will be able to “get to ‘hot’ targets in Pakistan much faster,” could soon be flying from bases outside Afghanistan.
The CIA is in charge of drone strikes in Pakistan since the country is not officially a war zone and the CIA’s program is covert.
US President Barack Obama has already stated that the responsibility for Washington’s deadly drone attacks could gradually shift from the CIA to the Pentagon. However, the idea of putting the US military in charge of drone attacks is not favored by US lawmakers.
Obamacare: the Final Payment
By Paul Craig Roberts | CounterPunch | February 12, 2014
The anonymous Obamacare expert, who provided us a year ago with the most complete account of Obamacare available, has returned with an explanation of estate recovery. Obamacare herds the poor into Medicaid which requires some enrollees to forfeit homes and other assets they might have to the state to cover the cost of their medical care. The research article below is meticulous and demonstrates that Obamacare was not enacted to serve the people.– Paul Craig Roberts
Raiding the Assets of Low-Income and Poor Americans
Since writing “Obamacare: Devils in the Details” posted on this site on February 3, 2013, I have investigated in detail other aspects of the insurance industry’s program to bring health care to Americans. In this article I explain estate recovery to which poorer Americans herded by Obamacare into Medicaid are subject. In violation of moral philosopher John Rawls’ second principle of justice, some of the poorest Americans will pay the highest cost of health care as they, and they alone, are subject to having the family home and any other assets they might possess confiscated by the state in order to reimburse Obamacare for the cost of their medical expenses. The compassionate rhetoric aside, Obamacare makes the poor pay the most.
Under what was deceptively named the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as Obamacare, which is unaffordable for the patient in more ways than one, beginning January 1, 2014, citizens without health insurance must pay a tax penalty to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Qualified individuals and families with incomes between 138 and 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) can shop for commercial insurance policies at a Health Insurance Marketplace (an exchange) and may be eligible for a subsidy from the government to help pay for a plan. Those with incomes at or below 138 percent of the Federal Poverty Level will be tossed into Medicaid unless there are specific reasons why they would not be eligible.
The Federal Poverty Level incomes for different family sizes for 2014 established by the Department of Health and Human Services can be found here: http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/14poverty.cfm [2] To determine whether you will be put into Medicaid, find the Federal Poverty Level annual income that applies to your family size for 2014 from the HHS tables and multiply the amount by 1.38. If your annual income is not larger than this amount, into Medicaid you go. For example, to avoid being put into Medicaid by Obamacare, a single individual in the 48 states and D.C. needs an income that is more than 138 percent of $11,670 (more than $16,105). A family of four needs an income that is more than 138 percent of $23,850 (more than $32,913). Poverty level incomes in Alaska and Hawaii are higher due to the higher cost of living in those states.
You won’t find estate recovery in the ACA. It’s in the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1993 (OBRA 1993)–a federal statute which applies to Medicaid, and, if you are enrolled in Medicaid, it will apply to you.
Estate Recovery
OBRA 1993 requires all states that receive Medicaid funding to seek recovery from the estates of deceased Medicaid patients for medical services received in a nursing home or other long-term care institution, home- and community-based services and related hospital and prescription drug services regardless of age. It also allows, at state option, recovery for all services used in the Medicaid state plan at age 55 or older. At minimum, states must pursue recovery from the probate estate which includes property that passes to heirs under state probate law, but states can expand the definition of estate to allow recovery from property that bypasses probate. This means states can use procedures for direct recovery from bank accounts and other funds. The state keeps a running tally, and even if you have a will, your heirs are chopped liver. Estate recovery can be exempted or deferred in certain situations after your death, but the regulations for this are limited and complicated with multitudes of conditions.
Your estate is what you own when you die–your home, other real estate in which you have a legal interest, personal property, bank accounts, annuities and so on. For cash-strapped states, recovery provides an income stream, and with the expansion of Medicaid states will be in dire need of money, particularly in the current economy.
You must first understand that if an exchange determines you are eligible for Medicaid, you have no other choice. Code for exchanges specifies that an applicant is not eligible for a subsidized plan to the extent that he or she is eligible for coverage under Medicaid. Therefore, when you apply, if you are found eligible, you will be tossed into Medicaid. You can also be auto-enrolled in Medicaid if you are presumed eligible through a database such as SNAP (food stamps). If you are enrolled in a subsidized private plan through an exchange and your circumstances change making you eligible for Medicaid, in you go.
Obamacare revises Medicaid regulations in order to make more Americans eligible for Medicaid. Revised regulations include an increase in age and income limitations, and the asset test no longer applies. Prior to these revisions, applicants were not eligible for Medicaid if they had more than a specific dollar amount in assets. But, under Obamacare, those who likely own a home or have savings set aside–for example, early retirees or people who have lost their jobs and, as a result, are in a low income bracket–will find themselves in Medicaid, and their assets will be looted by the government when they die for medical services used at age 55 and up.
Estate recovery can have a damaging impact on low-income and poor Americans. It is a pernicious death tax on those who have the least and are the most vulnerable. Often, the only asset they have is the family home and what’s in it, and, for some, this has been the family home for several generations. The threat of losing the home causes people to forego health care.
Home equity is part of a deceased Medicaid recipient’s estate and except under certain circumstances is subject to estate recovery. Surviving family members may either sell the home and use the proceeds to satisfy the Medicaid claim or, if they wish to keep the home in the family, they can satisfy the claim with their own personal funds. This Medicaid clawback not only confiscates family property but also robs people of their dignity as Medicaid allows only an amount it considers reasonable for services provided by a funeral home and burial costs. In some states, funeral homes are responsible for notifying Medicaid if there is excess money in a burial trust fund so it can also be pillaged.
Some might think it fair that those who are enrolled in Medicaid pay back the benefits they received. However, under a mandate that requires all Americans to be covered by health insurance or pay a tax penalty to the IRS, estate recovery is unconscionable since Obamacare offers no other viable option for this income-segment of the population. It also discriminates by age since only Medicaid enrollees who use benefits in the state plan at age 55 and up are subject to estate recovery, but those who use benefits at age 54 or less are home free unless they receive long-term care. Under federal law, discrimination is not permitted on the basis of age, but, obviously, the U.S. government turns a blind eye to to its own law. Perhaps, when states need more money due to the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid, and as the jobless economy continues causing more people to be eligible, age discrimination will be broadened to 45 and up.
You may be eligible for an exemption from having to pay a penalty for being uninsured if you meet specific requirements–for example, if you are in jail, if you have a sincerely-held religious belief that prevents you from seeking and obtaining medical care, if you are eligible for Medicaid under its expansion but live in a state that opted not to expand Medicaid, if you are a member of an Indian tribe, and several other situations. But there is no exemption for people who refuse to sign up for Obamacare because of the Medicaid estate recovery program.
Since the plans at the Obamacare exchanges are income-based, you may be put into Medicaid when you apply for insurance. Or, you may start off enrolled in a subsidized plan, confident that estate recovery won’t apply to you, but several months or a year later, due to a change in your circumstances, find you have been tossed into Medicaid. You can increase your income in order to avoid Medicaid, but it would have to remain over 138 percent of the Federal Poverty Level throughout the taxable year. If paying for insurance will deprive you of food or shelter, you can try filing for a hardship exemption, that is, if the government site is working smoothly, and if you can find the form. It is important to understand how this income-based scheme works so you can figure out how best to survive the many caveats of Obamacare. To learn more and what to watch out for, read my lesson on how Obamacare works.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/02/03/obamacare-a-primer/ [3]
Estate recovery was not an unintended consequence of Obamacare. The House Ways & Means Committee and The House Energy & Commerce Committee share jurisdiction over health care, including Medicare and Medicaid, and both worked extensively on Obamacare. So, don’t bother thinking that the members of these committees didn’t know that estate recovery would impact millions of Americans who would be tossed into Medicaid. The asset test was dropped and the age limit was increased explicitly in order to expand Medicaid. Yet, did We the People hear any concern about estate recovery? Certainly not in the many floor speeches given by Democrats as well as Republicans or from the media.
Obama stated during his 2008 presidential campaign that transparency would be the leverage needed to ensure that people stay involved in the national health care reform process. The expansion of Medicaid was part of the process. Did Obama or your representatives tell you that Medicaid, depending on your age, is a loan subject to deferred payment by your estate? Did they tell you the government subsidy for a private plan at an exchange is a loan, that must be repaid if your income increases? Transparency was highly selective. The bait was shown but not the hook.
Obama also often made the point that the public should receive the same level of coverage and care as members of Congress. Medicaid is hardly the same level of coverage and care, but, aside from that, tell us, Mr. Obama, because your health care is funded by taxpayers, will your estate be subject to recovery?
The fact that Obamacare did not revise existing federal statute–in other words, it retained estate recovery–most certainly undermines the compassionate rhetoric about helping low-income and poor Americans.
Official Response To Estate Recovery Inquiry
In October 2009 during the national health care reform debacle, eight public-spirited citizens, dismayed as they watched Obamacare morph into deception, signed and faxed a letter to 28 members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, including chairs and ranking members of the various health care policy committees working on Obamacare. The letter addressed “Discrimination, Estate Recovery & Exploitation in National Mandated Health Insurance.” Other recipients included President Barack Obama; Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services; and Nancy Ann Deparle, Director of White House Office of Health Reform.
The letter pointed out that absence of choice for Medicaid-eligible citizens other than a costly penalty is discrimination based on economic status. It also stated that the Medicaid estate recovery program discriminates by age and against those who own a home and have other assets versus those who do not. The letter asked if OBRA 1993 had been amended so states would not be allowed to recover assets or place liens on property under national mandated health insurance, and, if there was no amendment, why not?
The citizens who sent the letter received no response from Congress or the Obama administration. The government that comprises ObamaNation, Inc. serves only its money masters.
Depending on their state of residency, Americans can sign up for Obamacare coverage with a federal or with a state exchange. The US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is the federal office that established the federal exchange at healthcare.gov at which residents of the 36 states that chose not to use a state exchange can sign up for Obamacare. (New Mexico and Idaho have state exchanges but are currently using the federal one.) Fourteen states and the District of Columbia submitted proposals, which were approved by CMS, to run their own exchanges.
In June 2013 a letter was sent to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services by a well-informed citizen pointing out that the Medicaid Manual prepared by CMS to provide guidance for states contains procedural rules intended to ensure that individuals are informed about estate recovery before they complete the application process.
There are variations in the ways in which states implement estate recovery, depending upon their Medicaid program and state laws. However, Federal law requires all states to incorporate the following protections for Medicaid recipients into the design of their estate recovery program:
— The State should notify Medicaid recipients about the estate recovery program during their initial application for Medicaid eligibility and annual re-determination process.
— The State must notify affected survivors about the initiation of estate recovery and give them an opportunity to claim an exemption based on hardship.
— The State must establish procedures and criteria to waive recovery if it would cause undue hardship.
The letter went on to say that the final CMS Health Insurance Marketplace application (healthcare.gov) notifies applicants about Medicaid’s right to pursue and recover any money from other health insurance, legal settlements or other third parties but does not disclose estate recovery. Since estate recovery is one of the terms of the Medicaid contract, it is deceptive to omit disclosure of this practice. CMS was asked to provide the reasons for this omission.
CMS responded evasively to the concerned citizen’s question. CMS claimed that the Health Insurance Marketplace application at healthcare.gov does not disclose Medicaid’s right to claim against the estate, because CMS wanted to provide flexibility to state Medicaid agencies as to how each one notifies applicants about estate recovery. Some states have developed pamphlets to address common estate recovery questions or devote a portion of a general Medicaid pamphlet to the subject. Some states also post their state plans, perhaps with additional explanatory text, on their web sites.
Even if we take this claim at face value, it reflects a cavalier attitude. As health insurance is mandated with low-income earners and the very poor having no alternative to Medicaid, certainly those subject to estate recovery have a right to be notified in advance of being herded into this insurance plan.
It is well worth knowing about estate recovery before you sign up at an Obamacare exchange so you can make an informed choice as to whether or not you want to get trapped in this Byzantine sinkhole or steer clear, particularly if you think your income may relegate you to coverage under Medicaid now or in the future. Unfortunately, it appears that CMS as well as some of the state-based exchanges, such as Covered California, decided you don’t deserve to know about this particular term of the Medicaid contract when you apply and sign on the dotted line. So, as of this writing, there is no mention of estate recovery on the Obamacare application at healthcare.gov that services residents of the 36 states which use the federal exchange nor for Californians, residents of a state with a robust estate recovery program! Some states disclose estate recovery on their state exchange applications for Obamacare, and others do not.
Non-disclosure of estate recovery on an Obamacare application does not mean that the state in which you reside will not bill your estate for the cost of your medical treatment under Medicaid. It merely means that a conscious choice was made not to let you know that one consequence of signing up for Obamacare could be the loss of your home.
There are a few states that recover for long-term care only. It would be in your best interest to find out your state’s recovery policy so you know where you stand. You should also remain alert to changes.
Here is what you need to know:
When you complete the application at healthcare.gov, it is assumed that when you submit it, you are fully informed and agree to all terms. Submission of the application is akin to signing a contract. Your signature not only means you have provided true answers to all the questions under penalty of perjury, but also that you understand and agree to all the rules and conditions. However, by not disclosing estate recovery CMS expunged your right to make an informed decision. Therefore, you may not realize that your estate can become government property because Obamacare forces you into Medicaid if your income is less than the threshold for a subsidized premium.
When you sign a loan note at a bank, you are agreeing to the terms and conditions of the contract between you and the bank, and these are disclosed in the note. The banker doesn’t say to you, “Just sign here and we’ll let you know the terms later. You can pick up a pamphlet at our local office or request that one be mailed to you. Or, you can visit our website and see if you can find the page that tells you what you just signed yourself into. Thank you. We appreciate your business.”
Even if your circumstances change such that you are no longer eligible for Medicaid and you are shifted into a subsidized Obamacare plan, any Medicaid expenditures you incurred remain as claims on your estate.
According to the federal procedural rules, the state should notify Medicaid recipients about the estate recovery program during their initial application for Medicaid eligibility. Initial is the operative word. It does not mean after an individual has been put into Medicaid. Since healthcare.gov is the initial point of contact for applicants who reside in one of the 36 states using the federal exchange, there is no legitimate excuse for nondisclosure of estate recovery. Healthcare.gov is where the buck stops. The application should contain notification of estate recovery. The same is true for state-based exchanges that omitted this disclosure on their Obamacare applications.
Like terms of a contract, laws are supposed to be known. In Western civilization people are not supposed to be accountable to secret laws or to secret clauses in contracts that they sign. Clearly, if Western legal practice holds, estate recovery is impermissible due to the lack of notice. Only the corrupt architects of Obamacare believe that it is fair to confiscate the assets of an individual or a family without notification that the health care they receive can be charged to their estate.
Liens
Some state-based exchanges requested permission from CMS to add information to their application and chose to include disclosure of estate recovery. The Massachusetts Health Connector application not only includes disclosure of estate recovery, but also goes above and beyond, notifying applicants of liens. “To the extent permitted by law, MassHealth (Medicaid) may place a lien against any real estate owned by eligible persons or in which eligible persons have a legal interest. If MassHealth puts a lien against that property and it is sold, money from the sale of that property may be used to repay MassHealth for medical services provided.”
There are pre-death liens and post-death liens, and whether or not placement of a lien is disclosed on an Obamacare application, this practice is permitted in all states. For more on liens, you should consult an attorney–if you can afford one–or seek information online. It’s not pretty.
Renewal Of Coverage and Auto-enrollment
Note that Obamacare applications contain a section titled Renewal of Coverage in Future Years. An applicant can agree to allow an exchange to use income data, including information from tax returns to automatically renew eligibility for 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 years, or applicants can check “Do not use information from tax returns to renew my coverage.” Exchanges have access to the federal data hub which keeps track of your income and other personal data. If you gave unfettered access to your data by choosing auto-renewal, they have all the information needed to determine whether you are still eligible for your subsidized policy or should be moved into Medicaid.
The letter sent to CMS in June 2013 also asked about estate recovery disclosure in cases where coverage is auto-renewed during the annual redetermination process, when people are shifted from a subsidized plan to Medicaid due to a decrease in income or other change in circumstance, and when people are auto-enrolled on the presumption that they are eligible according to a database such as SNAP (food stamps) or by a hospital or health care center. A similar letter was sent to the Massachusetts Office of Medicaid.
The federal procedural rules on estate recovery say the state should notify Medicaid recipients about the estate recovery program during the annual redetermination process, but according to the Massachusetts Office of Medicaid, you don’t need to be informed about estate recovery during the redetermination process because you presumably read about this on the original application you filled out and submitted.
If you submitted an application that did not disclose estate recovery, it cannot be presumed that you are aware of estate recovery, because notification was not on the application. Thus, the redetermination procedure is one more example of the failure to disclose.
If you are bumped into Medicaid from a subsidized plan due to a change in your circumstances, the Massachusetts Office of Medicaid believes that you don’t need to be informed about estate recovery because you presumably read about this however many years ago when you filled out the original application. You will simply be sent a notice that you are now in Medicaid, and the notice will refer you to the Medicaid Member Booklet for information on the rules. If you obtain and read the booklet, you can learn that you may be subject to estate recovery. But don’t expect to receive a Medicaid Member Booklet with your notice, because “It would be cost prohibitive to include a Member Booklet with every notice. Instead, every notice includes information on how to contact Customer Service with any questions, including to request a copy of the Member Booklet.”
Hope you know what questions to ask and that you do request a copy of the booklet immediately, pray that it arrives before you use any Medicaid services if you are age 55 to 64 and go over it with a fine tooth comb. If you don’t want to be in Medicaid, you can contact your state Medicaid agency to unenroll, but you’ll probably have to pay a penalty for being uninsured unless you can earn more money and get into a subsidized plan.
If you submitted an application that does not disclose estate recovery and you are bumped into Medicaid due to a change in your circumstances, you won’t know about this detrimental practice, but you can learn that your assets may be confiscated if you contact Customer Service and request a Member Booklet.
If you are auto-enrolled into Medicaid because you were presumed eligible through a SNAP (food stamp) database or by a hospital or health care center, you may still need to fill out a full application which may or may not disclose estate recovery.
Now let’s look at how the federal exchange at healthcare.gov will handle these situations.
The federal exchange will not be renewing coverage for Medicaid recipients. Your state Medicaid agency will handle your annual Medicaid eligibility redetermination (renewal). CMS responded to the citizen’s inquiry as follows: “State Medicaid agencies are developing their own renewal forms which may include a notice regarding estate recovery. CMS is in the process of finalizing a model renewal form to assist states, and we appreciate that you highlighted this requirement.”
Why did CMS need to be reminded about notification of estate recovery when the federal procedural rules that CMS is supposed to implement specify that notification is required?
You may receive a renewal form if your state Medicaid agency doesn’t employ the same “streamlined Obamacare procedures” that Massachusetts is using or if you did not choose auto-renewal. Your state Medicaid agency might come up with its own procedure for redetermination regardless of which option you checked on your original application. In any case, the renewal form might not include disclosure of estate recovery although your state Medicaid agency is familiar with the estate recovery notification requirement outlined in the federal procedural rules.
According to CMS, if you are bumped into Medicaid due to a change in your circumstances, your state Medicaid agency may notify you that you are now in Medicaid and “may include Medicaid-specific information as appropriate.”
If the state Medicaid agency sends a notice that you have been bumped into Medicaid, you might also receive Medicaid-specific information–or you might not. The notice will refer you to a pamphlet and provide you with a website address so you can learn that your heirs can be dispossessed in exchange for your being provided with minimal medical care.
If you are auto-enrolled because you were presumed eligible through a SNAP (food stamp) database or by a hospital or health care center, your state Medicaid agency will most likely send you a full application which might or might not disclose estate recovery.
Oregon fast-tracked residents into Medicaid in October 2013 by sending approximately 240,000 letters to those on food stamps. The Oregon Health Authority already had people’s information on file since they were participants in an income-based state program, and, thus, presumed eligible for Medicaid. The letter explained that all they had to do was let the Oregon Health Authority know they wanted to be enrolled in Medicaid by checking the “I-am-interested” box, provide some basic information on the enclosed one-page form and return it to the Authority in the enclosed stamped and addressed envelope. The Oregon Health Authority then worked on enrolling the 75,000 respondents and proceeded to send 177,000 reminder notices.
Did the one-page form contain notification of all rights and responsibilities including estate recovery?
State Policy Changes
Oregon and Washington disclosed estate recovery on their applications and experienced low sign-ups. People are reluctant to accept having their families dispossessed of what little they have. Officials in both states said that state policy would be changed in order to apply estate recovery only to Medicaid patients in long-term care, and Cover Oregon (the state exchange) decided to remove estate recovery disclosure from its application in order to avoid alarming applicants. The Seattle Times reported that Washington’s Health Care Authority has filed an emergency rule to amend Medicaid’s estate recovery policy.
http://blogs.seattletimes.com/healthcarecheckup/topic/estate-recovery/ [6]
Privacy Violations
There is no pretending that your information is private or that Obamacare is concerned with protecting your privacy. California’s state exchange, Covered California, provided insurance agents with names and contact information for tens of thousands of people who either logged onto Covered California’s website to check out plans or who had partially filled out an application but did not finish, and did not ask to be contacted. Exectutive Director, Peter Lee, excused this breach of privacy on the grounds that the exchange’s legal counsel approved it and the state wanted to offer more assistance to Californians.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/06/business/la-fi-exchange-names-disclosed-20131207 [7]
The privacy statement in the application of Colorado’s exchange, Connect for Health Colorado, states: “You release Connect for Health Colorado and the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing from all liability for sharing this information with other agencies.” Some of the sharing agencies include the United States Customs and Immigration Services, Department of Homeland Security and financial institutions (banks, savings and loans, credit unions, etc.).
In the event that your data has been compromised, states must notify you, but the federal government is not required to do the same, and is, therefore, more likely to hide its security flaws and privacy breaches. According to the Washington Post, administration officials knew when the federal site was launched that the privacy of user data would be at risk. An internal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) memo warned that sufficient testing of data security had not been performed.
http://freebeacon.com/expert-healthcare-gov-security-risks-even-worse-after-fix/ [10]
Subsidized Premiums And Cost-sharing Reductions Are Also Subject To Recovery
CMS and many of the state-based exchanges also left out notification that the tax credit you receive for a subsidized plan and the reduction in cost-sharing and deductibles are advance loans and could leave you with an unexpected debt to the IRS. Most likely, the lack of this disclosure as well as estate recovery was intentional so people would not be deterred from signing up for health insurance. Thus, CMS and other exchanges unilaterally surrendered your right to know important rules that can adversely impact you and your family. Non-disclosure of all rules, rights and responsibilities is not a standard and acceptable business practice and could be deemed fraudulent in a court of law.
Connect for Health Colorado states your acceptance in the fine print on its application: “I understand that if I am eligible for the Advance Premium Tax Credit (APTC) and/or Reduced Co-pays and Deductibles these payments will be made directly to my selected insurance carrier(s). Acceptance of (APTC) and/or Reduced Co-pays and Deductibles may impact my coverage year tax liability. I will be given the option to apply all, some, or none of any APTC amount I may be eligible for to my monthly premium.”
Do you know what this means? It is notification that you may have to pay back part or all of your Obamacare health premium subsidy and reduced co-pays and deductibles if your income rises during the year.
The Advance Premium Tax Credit is the subsidized part of your Obamacare premium. The subsidy and cost-sharing reductions are based on an estimate of your total income for the year in which you apply for insurance at an exchange. If your income at the end of the year is higher than the estimate, you may have a tax liability for part or all of these two items because they were based on a lower income. To avoid this risk, you can choose to negotiate a smaller subsidy and pay more of your premium to reduce your exposure to possible tax liability for overpayment of the subsidy. Alternatively, you can refuse the tax credit, pay full freight and collect your tax credit based on your actual year-end income when you file your federal tax return. You can’t negotiate cost-sharing reductions, but, you can opt not to apply for these unless you don’t mind shouldering a possible payback.
For details see section 4:
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/02/03/obamacare-a-primer/ [3]
For current payback amounts:
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-112publ9/html/PLAW-112publ9.htm [11]
For payback of the entire subsidy:
Medicaid Managed Care Plans
Some states use private insurers to manage health care for their Medicaid population through Medicaid Managed Care Plans, and the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid is a huge money-maker for these private insurers as well as a huge cost booster for U.S. health care. For giants UnitedHealthcare and WellPoint, as well as for smaller publicly-traded companies such as Molina Healthcare, a Fortune 500, multi-state health care organization, an expanded customer base brings revenue growth. Medicaid Managed Care Plans are hoping to enroll the majority of the expanded Medicaid population.
“This is several hundreds of billions of dollars of new market opportunity for these plans over the next couple of years,” says Jason Gurda, managing director of healthcare with investment bank Leerink Swann in New York.”
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/MONEY/usaedition/2013-03-08-Text-03062013-0212-PM_ST_U.htm [13]
Many states are choosing to move all or portions of their Medicaid populations to managed care plans. Thirty-five are expected to make changes to their managed care programs in 2014, up from 28 in 2013 and 20 in 2012. States jumping on the privatized-Medicaid bandwagon will mean more profit for corporations and less money allocated to patient care.
http://www.hms.com/popularity-medicaid-managed-care-expected-grow/ [14]
A Managed Care Plan is a system of health insurance which includes a network of contracted providers that are paid a fixed amount to provide health benefits to a defined population. Needless to say, this model relies on restriction and denial of care putting Medicaid patients at risk.
A Medicaid Managed Care Plan adds more charges subject to estate recovery for those who are tossed into Medicaid. The Medicaid Manual says that when an individual age 55 and older is enrolled either voluntarily or mandatorily in a managed care plan, the state must seek recovery from the individual’s estate for the premium payments. If the state plan recovers for all Medicaid services, the state must recover from the individual’s estate the total capitation rate for the period the beneficiary was enrolled in the managed care plan. If the state plan recovers for only some services covered under the state plan, the state must recover from the individual’s estate that portion of the capitation payment that is attributable to the recoverable services, based on the most appropriate actuarial analysis determined by the state.
The manual also states that when the individual enrolls or is enrolled in the managed care plan, the state must provide a separate notice to the individual that explains that the premium payments made to the managed care plan are included either in whole or in part in the claim against the estate.
States that use private insurers to manage their Medicaid population will most likely have capitation payments but might not have reinsurance or fee-for-service programs which can also be recovered from an estate. Therefore, it is prudent to find out what your state has and who is affected. Here are the fees that can be recovered from estates:
Capitation Payments–a fixed monthly fee paid by the state to the Medicaid Managed Care Plan for each month you are enrolled in one of these plans, regardless of whether or not you use any medical services. If you do seek care, capitation payments can exceed the actual costs of services provided during the month.
According to the Massachusetts EOHHS Privacy Office: The estimated average capitation payment for October 1, 2013 through December 31, 2013 was $449.59 per month– an average annual total of $5,395.08. In other words, a person from age 55 through, let’s say, 62, accumulates $43,160.64 on his or her tally against assets including the home. There goes a chunk of your estate even if you didn’t use any medical care.
Reinsurance Payments–An amount reimbursed to program contractors for certain contract service costs incurred by a Medicaid patient that are beyond a contractual dollar threshold. These payments are in addition to the monthly capitation payment.
Fee-for-Service Payments–A direct payment of some or all of a Medicaid member’s medical bills not covered by other available insurance.
According to the Massachusetts Office of Medicaid, with certain exceptions, persons who are eligible for the Obamacare Medicaid expansion (age 21 to 64) must enroll in one of the state’s Medicaid Managed Care Plans.
The hard sell is on for states to privatize Medicaid, and many who are forced into Medicaid by Obamacare will also be forced into managed care plans as is the case in Massachusetts. This represents yet another noose around the necks of low-income and poor people since the three payments described above are recoverable from estates.
Once the limited estates of poor and low-income Americans have been taken to reimburse Medicaid, the U.S. will be left with a permanently poorer and more desperate population and will be faced with higher Medicaid costs as there will no longer be any private property to confiscate.
Pursuant to the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (DRA) and clarified in the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006, states were given greater authority to impose and increase premium and cost-sharing charges on certain Medicaid enrollees, but despite these charges their estates are still subject to recovery. Under Obamacare, the government has a right to recover reimbursement from estates of those with lower incomes who are enrolled in Medicaid. Yet, individuals with higher incomes who qualify for a subsidized plan are also paying premiums subsidized by the government but are not subject to estate recovery.
http://kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/deficit-reduction-act-of-2005-implications-for/ [15]
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/us/27medicaid.html?_r=0 [16]
Is it fair to impose estate recovery on Medicaid enrollees but not on other subsidy recipients? Is it fair if recovery adheres to the basic requirements in federal statute, but, thereafter, is based on state policy which differs from state to state and, thus, is not applied equally across the nation to all Medicaid enrollees at age 55 and up? Is targeting a specific age group fair? Or legal?
Equal protection is in the Constitution, but ever since the Supreme Court surrendered in the 1930s to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation, equal protection has been curtailed in the economic arena. The Supreme Court, unwilling to face down a President asserting previously unknown executive power, accepted the violation of the 14th Amendment in economic legislation in order to avoid being packed with FDR yes-men.
Obamacare was not written for the benefit of the poor and uninsured. It was written for the profits of the insurance companies giving them millions of new customers subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. The business of America is business. Private insurance company CEOs receive multi-million dollar pay packages, while under Obamacare low-income earners and the poor have to give up their homes and other assets in order to receive medical care.
The Hypocrisy of Human Rights Watch
By Keane Bhatt | NACLA | February 5, 2014
Over more than a decade, the rise of the left in Latin American governance has led to remarkable advances in poverty alleviation, regional integration, and a reassertion of sovereignty and independence. The United States has been antagonistic toward the new left governments, and has concurrently pursued a bellicose foreign policy, in many cases blithely dismissive of international law.
So why has Human Rights Watch (HRW)—despite proclaiming itself “one of the world’s leading independent organizations” on human rights—so consistently paralleled U.S. positions and policies? This affinity for the U.S. government agenda is not limited to Latin America. In the summer of 2013, for example, when the prospect of a unilateral U.S. missile strike on Syria—a clear violation of the UN Charter—loomed large, HRW’s executive director Kenneth Roth speculated as to whether a simply “symbolic” bombing would be sufficient. “If Obama decides to strike Syria, will he settle for symbolism or do something that will help protect civilians?” he asked on Twitter. Executive director of MIT’s Center for International Studies John Tirman swiftly denounced the tweet as “possibly the most ignorant and irresponsible statement ever by a major human-rights advocate.”1
HRW’s accommodation to U.S. policy has also extended to renditions—the illegal practice of kidnapping and transporting suspects around the planet to be interrogated and often tortured in allied countries. In early 2009, when it was reported that the newly elected Obama administration was leaving this program intact, HRW’s then Washington advocacy director Tom Malinowski argued that “under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place” for renditions, and encouraged patience: “they want to design a system that doesn’t result in people being sent to foreign dungeons to be tortured,” he said, “but designing that system is going to take some time.”2
Similar consideration was not extended to de-facto U.S. enemy Venezuela, when, in 2012, HRW’s Americas director José Miguel Vivanco and global advocacy director Peggy Hicks wrote a letter to President Hugo Chávez arguing that his country was unfit to serve on the UN’s Human Rights Council. Councilmembers must uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights, they maintained, but unfortunately, “Venezuela currently falls far short of acceptable standards.”3 Given HRW’s silence regarding U.S. membership in the same council, one wonders precisely what HRW’s acceptable standards are.
One underlying factor for HRW’s general conformity with U.S. policy was clarified on July 8, 2013, when Roth took to Twitter to congratulate his colleague Malinowski on his nomination to be Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL). Malinowski was poised to further human rights as a senior-level foreign-policy official for an administration that convenes weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings. In these meetings, Obama and his staffers deliberate the meting out of extrajudicial drone assassinations around the planet, reportedly working from a secret “kill list” that has included several U.S. citizens and a 17-year-old girl.4
Malinowski’s entry into government was actually a re-entry. Prior to HRW, he had served as a speechwriter for Secretary of State Madeline Albright and for the White House’s National Security Council. He was also once a special assistant to President Bill Clinton—all of which he proudly listed in his HRW biography. During his Senate confirmation hearing on September 24, Malinowski promised to “deepen the bipartisan consensus for America’s defense of liberty around the world,” and assured the Foreign Relations Committee that no matter where the U.S. debate on Syria led, “the mere fact that we are having it marks our nation as exceptional.”5
That very day, Obama stood before the UN General Assembly and declared, “some may disagree, but I believe that America is exceptional.” Assuming that by “exceptional” Obama meant exceptionally benevolent, one of those who disagreed was Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, who had opened the proceedings at the same podium by excoriating Obama’s “global network of electronic espionage,” which she considered a “disrespect to national sovereignty” and a “grave violation of human rights and of civil liberties.” Rousseff contrasted Washington’s rogue behavior with her characterization of Brazil as a country that has “lived in peace with our neighbors for more than 140 years.” Brazil and its neighbors, she argued, were “democratic, pacific and respectful of international law.”6 Rousseff’s speech crystallized Latin America’s broad opposition to U.S. exceptionalism, and therefore shed light on the left’s mutually antagonistic relationship with HRW.
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Malinowski’s background is but one example of a larger scenario. HRW’s institutional culture is shaped by its leadership’s intimate links to various arms of the U.S. government. In her HRW biography, the vice chair of HRW’s board of directors, Susan Manilow, describes herself as “a longtime friend to Bill Clinton,” and helped manage his campaign finances. (HRW once signed a letter to Clinton advocating the prosecution of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes; HRW made no case for holding Clinton accountable for NATO’s civilian-killing bombings despite concluding that they constituted “violations of international humanitarian law.”)7 Bruce Rabb, also on Human Rights Watch’s Board of Directors, advertises in his biography that he “served as staff assistant to President Richard Nixon” from 1969-70—the period in which that administration secretly and illegally carpet bombed Cambodia and Laos.8
The advisory committee for HRW’s Americas Division has even boasted the presence of a former Central Intelligence Agency official, Miguel Díaz. According to his State Department biography, Díaz served as a CIA analyst and also provided “oversight of U.S. intelligence activities in Latin America” for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.9 As of 2012, Díaz focused, as he once did for the CIA, on Central America for the State Department’s DRL—the same bureau now to be supervised by Malinowski.
Other HRW associates have similarly questionable backgrounds: Myles Frechette, currently an advisory committee member for the Americas Division, served as Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean from 1990-93, and then became U.S. Ambassador to Colombia from 1994-97. Frechette subsequently worked as the executive director of a “nonprofit” group called the North American-Peruvian Business Council, and championed the interests of his funders in front of Congress. His organization received financing from companies such as Newmont Mining, Barrick Gold, Caterpillar, Continental Airlines, J.P. Morgan, ExxonMobil, Patton Boggs, and Texaco.10
Michael Shifter, who also currently serves on HRW’s Americas advisory committee, directed the Latin America and Caribbean program for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a quasi-governmental entity whose former acting president Allen Weinstein told The Washington Post in 1991 that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”11 Shifter, as current president of a policy center called the Inter-American Dialogue, oversees $4 million a year in programming, financed in part through donations from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the embassies of Canada, Germany, Guatemala, Mexico and Spain, and corporations such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Boeing, and Western Union.
To be sure, not all of the organization’s leadership has been so involved in dubious political activities. Many HRW board members are simply investment bankers, like board co-chairs Joel Motley of Public Capital Advisors, LLC, and Hassan Elmasry, of Independent Franchise Partners, LLP. HRW Vice Chair John Studzinski is a senior managing director at The Blackstone Group, a private equity firm founded by Peter G. Peterson, the billionaire who has passionately sought to eviscerate Social Security and Medicare. And although Julien J. Studley, the Vice Chair of the Americas advisory committee, once served in the U.S. Army’s psychological warfare unit, he is now just another wealthy real-estate tycoon in New York.
That HRW’s advocacy reflects its institutional makeup is unremarkable. Indeed, an examination of its positions on Latin America demonstrates the group’s predictable, general conformity with U.S. interests. Consider, for example, HRW’s reaction to the death of Hugo Chávez. Within hours of his passing on March 5, 2013, HRW published an overview—“Venezuela: Chávez’s Authoritarian Legacy”—to enormous online response. In accordance with its headline’s misleading terminology, HRW never once mentioned Chávez’s democratic bona fides: Since 1998, he had triumphed in 14 of 15 elections or referenda, all of which were deemed free and fair by international monitors. Chávez’s most recent reelection boasted an 81% participation rate; former president Jimmy Carter described the voting process as “the best in the world.”12 The article neglected to cite a single positive aspect of Chávez’s tenure, under which poverty was slashed by half and infant mortality by a third.
In contrast, HRW’s August 21, 2012 statement regarding the death of Ethiopian leader Meles Zenawi was decidedly more muted: “Ethiopia: Transition Should Support Human Rights Reform,” read the headline. Leslie Lefkow, HRW’s deputy Africa director, urged the country’s new leadership to “reassure Ethiopians by building on Meles’s positive legacy while reversing his government’s most pernicious policies.” Regarding a leader whose two-decade rule had none of Chávez’s democratic legitimacy (HRW itself documented Ethiopia’s repressive and unfair elections in both 2005 and 2010), the organization argued only that “Meles leaves a mixed legacy on human rights.”13 Whereas HRW omitted all mention of Chávez-era social improvements, it wrote, “Under [Meles’s] leadership the country has experienced significant, albeit uneven, economic development and progress.”
The explanation for this discrepancy is obvious: as a New York Times obituary reported, Meles was “one of the United States government’s closest African allies.” Although “widely considered one of Africa’s most repressive governments,” wrote the Times, Ethiopia “continues to receive more than $800 million in American aid each year. American officials have said that the Ethiopian military and security services are among the Central Intelligence Agency’s favorite partners.”14
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HRW has taken its double standard to cartoonish heights throughout Latin America. At a 2009 NED Democracy Award Roundtable, José Miguel Vivanco described Cuba, not the United States, as “one of our countries in the hemisphere that is perhaps the one that has today the worst human-rights record in the region.” As evidence, he listed Cuba’s “long- and short-term detentions with no due process, physical abuse [and] surveillance”—as though these were not commonplace U.S. practices, even (ironically) at Guantánamo Bay.15 Vivanco was also quoted in late 2013, claiming at an Inter-American Dialogue event that the “gravest setbacks to freedom of association and expression in Latin America have taken place in Ecuador”—not in Colombia, the world’s most dangerous country for trade union leaders, or in Honduras, the region’s deadliest country for journalists (both, incidentally, U.S. allies).16
Latin America scholars are sounding the alarm: New York University history professor Greg Grandin recently described HRW as “Washington’s adjunct” in The Nation magazine.17 And when Vivanco publicly stated that “we did [our 2008] report because we wanted to show the world that Venezuela is not a model for anyone,” over 100 academics wrote to the HRW’s directors, lamenting the “great loss to civil society when we can no longer trust a source such as Human Rights Watch to conduct an impartial investigation and draw conclusions based on verifiable facts.”18
HRW’s deep ties to U.S. corporate and state sectors should disqualify the institution from any public pretense of independence. Such a claim is indeed untenable given the U.S.-headquartered organization’s status as a revolving door for high-level governmental bureaucrats. Stripping itself of the “independent” label would allow HRW’s findings and advocacy to be more accurately evaluated, and its biases more clearly recognized.
In Latin America, there is a widespread awareness of Washington’s ability to deflect any outside attempts to constrain its prerogative to use violence and violate international law. The past three decades alone have seen U.S. military invasions of Grenada and Panama, a campaign of international terrorism against Nicaragua, and support for coup governments in countries such as Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras, and Guatemala. If HRW is to retain credibility in the region, it must begin to extricate itself from elite spheres of U.S. decision-making and abandon its institutional internalization of U.S. exceptionalism. Implementing a clear prohibition to retaining staff and advisers who have crafted or executed U.S. foreign policy would be an important first step. At the very least, HRW can institute lengthy “cooling-off” periods—say, five years in duration—before and after its associates move between the organization and the government.
After all, HRW’s Malinowski will be directly subordinate to Secretary of State John Kerry, who conveyed the U.S. attitude toward Latin America in a way that only an administrator of a superpower could. In an April 17, 2013 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, a member of Congress asked Kerry whether the United States should prioritize “the entire region as opposed to just focusing on one country, since they seem to be trying to work together closer than ever before.” Kerry reassured him of the administration’s global vision. “Look,” he said. “The Western Hemisphere is our backyard. It is critical to us.”19
1. Kenneth Roth, followed by John Tirman’s response, Twitter, August 25, 3013, http://twitter.com/KenRoth/status/371797912210407424.
2. Greg Miller, “Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool,” Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2009.
3. José Miguel Vivanco and Peggy Hicks, “Letter to President Chavez on Venezuela’s Candidacy to the UN Human Rights Council,” Human Rights Watch, November 9, 2012.
4. Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” The New York Times, May 29, 2012.
5. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “Statement for the Record by Tom Malinowski,” September 24, 2013.
6. “Text of Obama’s Speech at the U.N.,” The New York Times, September 24, 2013. Statement by H.E. Dilma Rousseff, United Nations, September 24, 2013.
7. Human Rights Watch, “Major Rights Groups Oppose Immunity for Milosevic,” October 6, 2000. HRW, “New Figures on Civilian Deaths in Kosovo War,” Februrary 8, 2000.
8. Human Rights Watch, “Board of Directors,” www.hrw.org, accessed November 16, 2013.
9. U.S. Department of State, “Franklin Fellows Alumni,” September 8, 2011, http://careers.state.gov/ff/meet-the-fellows/franklin-fellows/miguel-diaz, accessed November 16, 2013.
10. Ways and Means Committee, “Statement of Myles Frechette, the North American Peruvian Business Council,” U.S. House of Representatives, May 8, 2001.
11. David Ignatius, “Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups,” The Washington Post, September 22, 1991.
12. Keane Bhatt, “A Hall of Shame for Venezuelan Elections Coverage,” Manufacturing Contempt (blog), nacla.org, October 8, 2012.
13. Human Rights Watch, “Ethiopia: Government Repression Undermines Poll,” May 24, 2010.
14. Jeffrey Gettleman, “Meles Zenawi, Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Dies at 57,” The New York Times, August 22, 2012.
15. National Endowment for Democracy, “José Miguel Vivanco: 2009 NED Democracy Award Roundtable,” Youtube.com, Jun 29, 2009.
16. Eva Saiz, “Indígenas de Ecuador denuncian en EEUU la norma de libre asociación de Correa,” El Pais, October 28, 2013.
17. Greg Grandin, “The Winner of Venezuela’s Election to Succeed Hugo Chávez Is Hugo Chávez,” The Nation, April 16, 2013.
18. Venezuelanalysis.com, “More Than 100 Latin America Experts Question Human Rights Watch’s Venezuela Report,” December 17, 2008.
19. Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, “Hearing: Securing U.S. Interests Abroad: The FY 2014 Foreign Affairs Budget,” April 17, 2013.
Related articles
US to step up war on Syria after Geneva
By Finian Cunningham | Press TV | February 1, 2014
Just as the designed-to-fail Geneva II negotiations between the Syrian government and the Western-backed fake opposition came to a close at the weekend, another media smear campaign against the Damascus authorities conveniently surfaces.
The latest “sensational” story is that the Syrian state army has been “wiping civilian residential areas off the map” in the cities of Damascus, Aleppo and Hama.
This must be seen as not just another sporadic Western propaganda stunt. It appears to signal a concerted effort to intensify the US-led agenda of regime change in Syria – an agenda that is criminal to the core. It dovetails with the “failure” of Geneva talks and reports of increased weapons supply from the US to the Al Qaeda proxies waging a war of terror inside Syria, as well as renewed threats of military aggression by Washington’s top diplomat, John Kerry.
Human Rights Watch – a proven propaganda tool for the US government – presented satellite images that purport to show large residential areas having been “razed to rubble” by deliberate Syrian army demolition. In an all-too familiar pattern of dissemination, the story was duly given prominence by Western media, including France 24 and the [state-run] BBC.
HRW claims that the alleged demolitions represent a “war crime” and that the UN Security Council should now refer the Syrian government for prosecution.
It is no coincidence that the lurid allegations should emerge just as the Geneva II talks were coming to an inconclusive end. In Geneva, the Syrian government delegation quite rightly rejected the preposterous demands made by the Western, Saudi, Qatari-backed so-called Syrian National Coalition for President Bashar al-Assad to step down.
As previously noted in this column, the SNC – which exists only in the figment of exiled imagination – has negligible mandate from the Syrian people. The only “mandate” it has is from Washington and its allies, who created the front to do their political bidding for regime change in Syria.
The fake “peace conference” never had a chance of succeeding in its ostensible purpose. By placing impossible demands on the Syrian government it appears that the real agenda of the conference, from the Western point of view, was aimed at casting the Syrian government as intransigent.
The sensational claims of “wiping civilian residences off the map” are timed to add further smear on the Syrian government.
Just before the Geneva II conference opened, we had another synchronized Western media psyops campaign courtesy of the Guardian and CNN, which claimed that they had been provided with over 50,000 images of “industrial-scale killing” of prisoners carried out by Syrian state forces. The alleged source of the images was an un-named single individual who was described as an ex-policeman.
As with all smear tactics, the telling thing is that they never seem to be followed up with substantiation. How many times during the three-year Syrian conflict have we been told of “massacres” committed by the Syrian state, only for these massacres to fade into obscurity with no conclusive evidence? Indeed, in some cases, it quietly emerges much later that the culprits of massive violations were the Western-backed foreign mercenaries.
One such notorious incident was the alleged chemical weapons attack on civilians near Damascus on 21 August last year. Recall that the incident nearly resulted in an all-out US military attack on Syria.
Both the New York Times and Human Rights Watch have since slyly backed away from their once-adamant claims that the Syrian army was responsible, as evidence subsequently shows that the perpetrators of that horror – involving hundreds of deaths – were the Western-backed terror gangs.
So what were the alleged demolitions in Damascus, Aleppo and Hama about? For a start, what the Western propaganda complex of human rights groups, media and governments conveniently omits is that the residential areas in question were already vacated by civilians. The innuendo that the Syrian forces were bombing civilians out of their homes does not stand up.
Secondly, the Western-backed foreign insurgents are typically operating by holding towns and city districts under a siege of terror. It is these foreign mercenaries that are the ones creating a humanitarian crisis in Syrian urban areas by cutting off the supply of food and medicines.
This nefarious criminal practice of holding civilians as hostages and human shields was clearly demonstrated this past week in the Yarmouk district of Damascus, where aid convoys finally began arriving to besieged civilians after the stranglehold of the Western-backed al-Qaeda-linked militants was broken. It was also seen in the town of Qusayr when the Syrian army liberated it from the vice of the mercenaries last June.
The same criminal practice of holding civilian communities to ransom is extant in other areas of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and Hama. There are credible reports of civilians protesting against the militants over their inhumane conditions and being brutalized or killed for daring to protest.
The Syrian army’s demolition of buildings from which civilians have fled under the reign of terror imposed on them by the regime-change Western covert army – buildings which are then turned into sniper nests, explosive dumps and operating centers to further inflict sieges on adjacent civilian areas – is therefore an entirely legitimate national security response.
It is the legitimate right of the Syrian authorities to use such military force to root out the foot soldiers of this Western covert war of terror against Syria.
And it is risible that Western media and so-called human rights groups then turn around and try to blame the Syrian government for “war crimes”.
This is all part of an odious choreography. Set up a “peace process” designed to fail and combine it with heaps of smear against the Syrian government. Add that to reports this week of the US Congress voting secretly for increased weapons supply to the extremists in Syria, and now we have US secretary of state John Kerry threatening Syria with more war because it is allegedly “failing to meet targets for handing over chemical weapons”. (Ironically, chemical weapons that the Syrian army never even used in the first place, but most probably were fired by Western-backed militants.)
The concerted propaganda campaign in the context of “failed negotiations” at Geneva has a foreboding meaning – Western regime-change efforts in Syria are about to be intensified.
Obama’s ‘Raise’ for Federal Workers is a Bad Joke
By Dave Lindorff | This Can’t Be Happening | January 30, 2014
President Obama, five years late, in his fifth State of the Union speech, decried the terrible income gap in the US, a gap which has worsened during his years in the White House. Saying he was tired of the obstruction of his policies by Republicans in Congress, he said he would take action on his own, and as evidence offered up the puny “fix” of raising the minimum wage paid to employees working on federal projects from its current $7.25 to $10.10 per hour. This executive order, which could have been done when he took office in the depths of the Great Recession back in 2009, would be not immediate but would be phased in over the next three years.
What a pathetic joke!
As the New York Times pointed out the next day in its report on the president’s speech, the “raise” he was offering would only apply to “a few hundred thousand” workers. If we assume that “few” to be 300,000 people, and that each of those people works a 40-hour week 50 weeks per year, that would mean that in the first year, when the incremental increase will be 95 cents/hour, each worker currently earning $7.25 per hour will earn an extra $1900, for a total gain by all the impacted workers of $570 million.
Just to give a sense of how little that $570 million is, it works out to just over one-third of the unit cost of one F-35 Joint Strike Fighter [1]. That’s the Pentagon’s latest new fighter jet, designed and built by Lockheed-Martin, the one that has no enemy to fight and that is probably too flawed and too costly to ever risk in battle anyhow.
What is really obscene about the president’s token wage-increase gesture is that the $10.10 wage that he is saying the federal government will ultimately pay to its contract workers in three years would, in constant dollars, still be less than what the federal minimum wage was back in 1968, almost half a century ago! Heck, if the president had really wanted to show the obstructive Republicans and the American people that he meant business about going it alone, he could have used that same executive authority to grant those impoverished workers an immediate raise to $15 per hour — the rate that voters approved as a minimum wage last November in Seattle, Washington, and that labor activists say would actually go a ways towards alleviating rampant US poverty.
Even worse is the reality that we wouldn’t even be talking about this pathetic offer, or about a current federal hourly wage of $7.25, if Obama, back in 2009, fresh off a huge election win and with Democratic Party control of both houses of Congress, had honored his campaign pledge to re-establish fairness in the National Labor Relations Act by passing “card check” legislation, making it possible for workers to unionize their workplaces by simply having a majority of workers sign cards saying they wanted a union. As things stand, and as the Obama the candidate denounced on the stump, employers are able to use the NLRA to delay union elections for years, during which time they typically engage in a campaign of lawless intimidation, illegally fire union organizers and end up defeating union drives, suffering no penalty afterwards (labor law limits employers found guilty of violations to having to pay back lost wages. There is no provision in the law to hit violators with penalties.)
Had Obama not reneged on his promise to the workers who voted him into office, dropping, right after his oath of office was taken, all efforts to reform the labor laws relating to union organizing, and had he instead, back when he had a Congress that, as a (then) popular new president he could have pressed for passage of the needed legislation, we would not today have only 11.3 percent of Americans in unions (and only 6.7% of workers in private-sector businesses!).
The reality is that even as the percentage of unionized American workers has continued to decline from over 30 percent in the 1950s to 11.8 percent in 2011 and 11.3 percent today, Bloomberg News reports [2] that the percentage of those workers who tell pollsters they would prefer to be in a union has continued to grow, with a majority of workers saying they would prefer to be working in a unionized workplace. In fact, the percentage of workers saying they would prefer to be unionized is higher than it has been since 1980. (As for those right-wing claims that unionized workers don’t like their unions, the same polling shows that 90 percent of union members would vote for their union if given the chance.)
Obama screwed his worker supporters from day one, when he decided to “delay” reforming the labor laws to make the unionization process fairer and illegal anti-union tactics by employers more difficult. Now he’s down to insulting them with his latest pathetic offer of a puny “raise” for the lowest paid federal contract employees.
Meanwhile, it is in his power to take another action which would, albeit indirectly, profoundly impact the wage and wealth gap currently afflicting this country. He could reverse his 2009 instructions to his lickspittle Attorney General Eric Holder not to criminally prosecute the executives of the giant financial corporations that robbed the American people and trashed the US economy, throwing it into what continues to be the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression. Prosecuting the financial tycoon/crooks and clawing back their hundreds of billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains would not only dramatically level the wealth divide by hacking away the high incomes; it would also send a message to the whole corrupt capitalist class that ill-gotten gains would no longer be ignored.
Sadly, though, instead of prosecution of the criminal syndicate that is the banking industry, the Obama administration, when it has even bothered to prosecute larger institutions, has only levied fines on these companies — always without even requiring them to admit to guilt — fines that barely even dent the banks’ record profits, and that usually can be deducted from income, thus making them effectively subsidized by the very taxpayers who have been injured by the industries crimes.
The latest such outrage was the non-prosecution settlement reached by the Attorney General’s office with JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank. Under that settlement, JPMorgan Chase pays $20.5 billion in fines for its conscious and deliberate role in enabling the $65-billion ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff, all of which was conducted through an account at JPMorgan Chase. There was no effort to prosecute JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, who headed the bank through years of the entire Madoff scam, and AG Holder didn’t even insist, as he could have, that the bank dump Dimon as Chair and CEO. So Dimon continues in his role as head of the bank despite what has to be seen as either his complicity in an unprecedentedly huge criminal conspiracy, or his incomprehensively inept leadership.
And just to show how little the banking industry fears the Obama administration and its “Justice” Department, within less than two weeks of this outrageous “settlement,” the JPMorgan Chase Board of Directors voted to raise Dimon’s salary and bonus package by 75% to $20 million. No doubt the board members voting for this raise think Dimon earned the extra $8 million for keeping them all out of jail, along with himself.
It used to be that Democratic presidents would coddle and enrich the wealthy and powerful, while tossing crumbs to working people. Obama has taken this favor-the-rich tradition further. He openly serves the rich and powerful and then insults the intelligence of the working people who voted him into office.
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Efforts to cap CO2 emissions are adverse to human health and welfare
By Craig D. Idso, Ph.D. | The Hill | January 30, 2014
In his State of the Union address, President Obama advocated an energy policy aimed at reducing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), which he claims are causing catastrophic changes to the earth’s climate and “harming western communities.” In his policy prescription, the president advocates a combination of increased regulation of the energy and transportation industries and more government spending on research designed to bring low-carbon-emitting sources of energy, i.e., so-called renewables, to market. He considers those actions to be the only viable options “leading to a cleaner, safer planet.”
But the president’s concerns for the planet are based upon flawed and speculative science; and his policy prescription is a recipe for failure.
With respect to the science, Obama conveniently fails to disclose the fact that literally thousands of scientific studies have produced findings that run counter to his view of future climate. As just one example, and a damning one at that, all of the computer models upon which his vision is based failed to predict the current plateau in global temperature that has continued for the past 16 years. That the earth has not warmed significantly during this period, despite an 8 percent increase in atmospheric CO2, is a major indictment of the models’ credibility in predicting future climate, as well as the president’s assertion that debate on this topic is “settled.”
Numerous other problems with Obama’s model-based view of future climate have been filling up the pages of peer-reviewed science journals for many years now, as evidenced by the recent work of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, which published a 1,000-page report in September highlighting a large and well-substantiated alternative viewpoint that contends that rising atmospheric CO2 emissions will have a much smaller, if not negligible, impact on future climate, while generating several biospheric benefits.
Concerning these benefits, atmospheric CO2 is the building block of plant life. It is used by earth’s plants in the process of photosynthesis to construct their tissues and grow. And as has been conclusively demonstrated in numerous scientific studies, the more CO2 we put into the air, the better plants grow. Among other findings, they produce greater amounts of biomass, become more efficient at using water, and are better able to cope with environmental stresses such as pollution and high temperatures.
The implications of these benefits are enormous. One recent study calculated that over the 50-year period ending in 2001, the direct monetary benefits conferred by the atmospheric CO2 enrichment of the Industrial Revolution on global crop production amounted to a staggering $3.2 trillion. And projecting this positive externality forward in time reveals it will likely bestow an additional $9.8 trillion in crop production benefits between now and 2050.
By ignoring these realities, Obama’s policy prescription is found to be erroneous. The taxation or regulation of CO2 emissions is an unnecessary and detrimental policy option that should be shunned. Why would any government advocate to increase regulations and raise energy prices based on flawed computer model projections of climate change that will never come to pass? Why would any government advance policy that seeks to destroy jobs, rather than to promote them? Why, in fact, would they actually “bite the hand that feeds them?”
We live in a time when half the global population experiences some sort of limitation in their access to energy, energy that is needed for the most basic of human needs, including the production of clean water, warmth, and light. One-third of those thus impacted are children. An even greater portion finds its ranks among the poor.
As a society, it is time to recognize and embrace the truth. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Its increasing concentration only minimally affects earth’s climate, while it offers tremendous benefits to the biosphere. Efforts to regulate and reduce CO2 emissions will hurt far more than they will help.
Idso is lead editor and chief scientist for the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.
American State of the Union: A Festival of Lies
By Glen Ford | Black Agenda Report | January 29, 2014
“Believe it,” said the current Prevaricator-in-Chief, in the conclusion to his annual litany lies. President Obama’s specialty, honed to theatrical near-perfection over five disastrous years, is in crafting the sympathetic lie, designed to suspend disbelief among those targeted for oblivion, through displays of empathy for the victims. In contrast to the aggressive insults and bluster employed by Republican political actors, whose goal is to incite racist passions against the Other, the sympathetic Democratic liar disarms those who are about to be sacrificed by pretending to feel their pain.
Barack Obama, who has presided over the sharpest increases in economic inequality in U.S. history, adopts the persona of public advocate, reciting wrongs inflicted by unseen and unknown forces that have “deepened” the gap between the rich and the rest of us and “stalled” upward mobility. Having spent half a decade stuffing tens of trillions of dollars into the accounts of an ever shrinking gaggle of financial capitalists, Obama declares this to be “a year of action” in the opposite direction. “Believe it.” And if you do believe it, then crown him the Most Effective Liar of the young century.
Lies of omission are even more despicable than the overt variety, because they hide. The potentially most devastating Obama contribution to economic inequality is being crafted in secret by hundreds of corporate lobbyists and lawyers and their revolving-door counterparts in government. The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, described as “NAFTA on steroids,” would accelerate the global Race to the Bottom that has made a wasteland of American manufacturing, plunging the working class into levels of poverty and insecurity without parallel in most people’s lifetimes, and totally eviscerating the meager gains of three generations of African Americans. Yet, the closest Obama came to even an oblique allusion to his great crime-in-the-making, was to announce that “new trade partnerships with Europe and the Asia-Pacific will help [small businesses] create even more jobs. We need to work together on tools like bipartisan trade promotion authority to protect our workers, protect our environment and open new markets to new goods stamped ‘Made in the USA.’” Like NAFTA twenty years ago – only far bigger and more diabolically destructive – TPP will have the opposite effect, destroying millions more jobs and further deepening worker insecurity. The Trans Pacific Partnership expands the legal basis for global economic inequalities – which is why the negotiations are secret, and why the treaty’s name could not be spoken in the State of the Union address. It is a lie of omission of global proportions. Give Obama his crown.
The president who promised in his 2008 campaign to support a hike in the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011, and then did nothing at all to make it happen, says this is the “year of action” when he’ll move heaven and earth to get a $10.10 minimum. He will start, Obama told the Congress and the nation, by issuing “an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay their federally-funded employees a fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour because if you cook our troops’ meals or wash their dishes, you should not have to live in poverty.” Obama neglected to mention that only new hires – a small fraction, beginning with zero, of the two million federal contract workers – will get the wage boost; a huge and conscious lie of omission. The fact that the president does not even propose a gradual, mandated increase for the rest of the two million shows he has no intention of using his full powers to ameliorate taxpayer-financed poverty. We can also expect Obama to issue waivers to every firm that claims a hardship, as is always his practice.
What is Obama’s jobs program? It is the same as laid out at last year’s State of the Union, and elaborated on last summer: lower business taxes and higher business subsidies. When you say “jobs,” he says tax cuts – just like the Republicans, only Obama first cites the pain of the unemployed, so that you know he cares. “Both Democrats and Republicans have argued that our tax code is riddled with wasteful, complicated loopholes that punish businesses investing here, and reward companies that keep profits abroad. Let’s flip that equation. Let’s work together to close those loopholes, end those incentives to ship jobs overseas, and lower tax rates for businesses that create jobs right here at home.” Actually, Obama wants to lower tax rates for all corporations to 28 percent, from 35 percent, as part of his ongoing quest for a Grand Bargain with Republicans. For Obama, the way to bring jobs back to the U.S. is to make American taxes and wages more “competitive” in the “global marketplace” – the Race to the Bottom.
In the final analysis, the sympathetic corporate Democrat and the arrogant corporate Republican offer only small variations on the same menu: ever increasing austerity. Obama bragged about reducing the deficit, never acknowledging that this has been accomplished on the backs of the poor, contributing mightily to economic inequality and social insecurity.
Obama offers nothing of substance, because he is not authorized by his corporate masters to do so. He takes his general orders from the same people as do the Republicans. That’s why Obama only speaks of minimum wage hikes while Republicans are in power, rather than when his own party controlled both houses of Congress. Grand Bargains are preferred, because they are the result of consensus between the two corporate parties. In effect, the Grand Bargain is the distilled political will of Wall Street, which feeds the donkey and the elephant. Wall Street – the 1 percent – believes the world is theirs for the taking, and they want all of it. Given this overarching truth, Obama has no choice but to stage a festival of lies.
~
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
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Torture in the Age of Obama
Article 5 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights expressly forbids that any person “be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
When then-Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama promised to end torture, close the Guantanamo Bay gulag and restore habeas corpus, he was speaking to a fundamental desire within the American public consciousness to restore the ideals upon which the United States is based – ideals which had been all but discarded under the Bush administration.
Americans wanted an end to CIA torture sites, an end to “enhanced interrogation” and an end to arbitrary and indefinite detention. Once elected, President Obama did his best to present the appearance that the country had restored its humanity by signing Executive Order #13,491, effectively ending the “enhanced interrogation” policies enacted under George W. Bush.
Yet the United States, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, has engaged in systematic torture and inhuman treatment in blatant violation of international law. Buried in the text of Obama’s Executive Order was the condition that, “an individual in the custody… of the United States Government… shall not be subjected to any interrogation technique or approach, or any treatment related to interrogation, that is not authorized by and listed in Army Field Manual 2 22.3.” Essentially then, the Obama administration began its first term of office by sanctioning the use of the Army Field Manual and the standards, protocols and methods of interrogation outlined within it. Rather than officially ending the torture practices implemented during the Bush years, Obama simply put an end to certain egregious methods while validating others.
As the Center for Constitutional Rights noted at the time: “While the current Army Field Manual does not allow waterboarding, it does include approved techniques that constitute torture.” Some of these techniques are outlined in the infamous Appendix M of the field manual which describes the use of “Separation” which is applied to the ambiguously termed “unlawful combatants” who, because of their status as something other than prisoners of war, are subjected to gross violations of international law. Appendix M describes techniques such as prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation and the use of fear and humiliation of prisoners. And yet Obama claims to have “ended torture.”
It should be noted also that, instead of pushing for strict anti-torture legislation that would have codified policies against the use of “enhanced interrogation,” Obama chose to issue an executive order that can be reversed with the stroke of a pen from any future president. Moreover, he chose to limit the scope of the order in order to provide political wiggle-room for himself in case he was seen as “soft on terror.” It is within this context that one should remember that, despite his promises, Guantanamo Bay remains open, rendition programs continue and not one person from the CIA or any other agency has ever been held to account for their myriad crimes. As Obama said in 2009 “[I have a] belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards… at the CIA you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders.”
In 2013, the non-partisan Constitution Project issued a report that, among other things, documented in painstaking detail many of the ways in which the Obama administration has cleverly manipulated and ignored the laws, not to mention Obama’s campaign promises, in order to continue the torture and rendition programs. The report noted: “Taken as a whole, the lack of successful prosecutions demonstrates major gaps in enforcement of the laws against torture and war crimes, which likely reduces their deterrent effect.” Essentially then, the current administration, by turning a blind eye to crimes committed by interrogators under Bush as well as Obama, has effectively negated any perceived anti-torture stance it might have taken.
While the president has managed, through rhetoric and spin, to keep up the appearance that he has put a stop to torture when it comes to the so-called “War on Terror,” he has maintained a deafening silence when it comes to torture at home.
Torture and the American Gulag
Despite managing to lecture countries such as Russia, China and Cuba for human rights abuses and political prisoners, the United States continues to be, by far, the greatest police state in the world. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the US has 25 percent of the world’s prison population. Within this pervasive prison-industrial complex, many thousands of prisoners are held in extended solitary confinement, which undoubtedly constitutes torture. In fact, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan E. Mendez stated in 2011:
“Segregation, isolation, separation, cellular, lockdown, Supermax, the hole, Secure Housing Unit… whatever the name, solitary confinement should be banned by states as a punishment or extortion technique… Solitary confinement is a harsh measure which is contrary to rehabilitation, the aim of the penitentiary system… Considering the severe mental pain or suffering solitary confinement may cause, it can amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment when used as a punishment, during pre-trial detention, indefinitely or for a prolonged period, for persons with mental disabilities or juveniles.”
It should of course be noted that, like the prison population in general, solitary confinement is disproportionately applied to people of color. More to the point, it is most often utilized to break the mind, body and spirit of political prisoners, especially those from civil rights and radical political movements. So, if the president were actually interested in putting an end to torture, not to mention paying attention to the issues most directly affecting people of color in the US, wouldn’t it stand to reason that he might have something to say about this abhorrent practice in the US prison system? Obama meets such questions with silence.
Did you think that the United States only operated secret prisons abroad? If so, you’d be wrong. Under the Obama administration there has been an expansion of the use of so called “Communication Management Units” (CMUs) – secret prisons specifically designed to house political prisoners in isolation and in blatant violation of their constitutional rights. Prisoners of Middle Eastern descent, animal rights activists, environmental activists and others have found themselves locked up in CMUs with little to no contact with family and/or their legal representatives. Naturally, the President has never spoken on this issue as it would once again fly in the face of the picture of the constitutional scholar-cum-president and his image as a defender of human rights.
There has been resistance to these inhuman policies carried out by the United States. In Guantanamo, the world watched as a number of prisoners risked their lives in a prolonged hunger strike to call attention to their continued illegal imprisonment. Similarly, recent hunger strikes in US prisons, most notably at California’s infamous Pelican Bay prison, have attempted to focus media attention and public scrutiny on the continued torture of inmates. Luis Esquivel, an inmate at Pelican Bay, succinctly illustrated the point when he said: “I feel dead. It’s been 13 years since I’ve shaken someone’s hand and I fear I’ll forget the feel of human contact.”
Whether engaging in systematic torture abroad or at home, the United States continues to be a world leader in this regard. Despite the rhetoric from President Obama, substantive changes have not been made to the way in which the US treats its prisoners, nor to the rights afforded them. Indeed, despite the high-minded ideals Obama espouses in speech after speech, the sad reality is that, like Bush before him, Obama is the figurehead of the most aggressive and repressive power in the world today.
Obama and Friends Discover Inequality
By Jack Rasmus | January 28, 2014
Today, January 28, 2014, President Obama will address the nation in his State of the Union (SOTU) speech to Congress. A major theme of the address will be the growing income inequality in the US.
His speech represents an echo of similar themes and talks that have been presented this past week at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. That’s where every January the big capitalists of the world gather to discuss amongst themselves the major issues of the past year and what to do about them—in between being entertained by various cultural celebrities and performers who have been allowed into their club as junior partners in wealth. The annual Davos cultural events are not unlike the small venue side-shows held in the big Las Vegas casinos: the entertainers strut and sing while the real betting and dice-rolling discussions involving future capitalist policy initiatives go on behind ‘invitation-only’ doors requiring tickets for entry costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend ( the typical ticket price of entry for a Corporate CEO and his entourage at Davos, for example, exceeds $500,000).
This year the WEF and global capitalists have ‘discovered’ income inequality, now accelerating and intensifying worldwide to a dangerous degree, and especially in the US. The dimensions of the inequality problem have grown so severe in recent years it may, they themselves are now warning, result in unwanted ‘social unrest’ in the near future.
Now that it has become an ‘acceptable’ discussion theme, Obama and Democrat party politicians (and a few clever Republicans) have also discovered income inequality. Together they plan to raise the rhetoric on the topic in upcoming midterm and 2016 national elections. Therefore, in Obama’s SOTU speech today we’ll hear some basic facts about the problem, some vague proposals that are never intended get to the earliest legislative stages, and a lot of general talk about how improving ‘opportunity’ is the only answer to reducing inequality—all of which means let’s not do anything significant in the short run but instead focus on very long run solutions like improving childhood education, creating long run opportunities, and other very long term solutions.
The politicians’ new discovery of inequality follows liberal academics discovery of the same in recent years. Well known fellows like Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Joe Stiglitz, James Galbraith and others have all written their books on the topic in recent years. But they too, like the politicians they support, have been very careful about recommendations for resolving the problem, mostly repeating time-worn, mushy old liberal proposals involving ‘education and opportunity’ once again.
The growing income inequality in the US goes back at least to the late 1970s, accelerating during the 1980s and early 1990s, and then again after 2000 under George W. Bush. It’s grown the worst under Barack Obama, with latest figures showing the wealthiest 1% households accruing for themselves since 2009 nearly all (more than 90%) of all the income gains during the so-called ‘recovery’.
More recent, damning revelations about the extent of growing inequality go back to 2002 at least—long before the politicians and the more well known liberal economists acknowledged it. In 2002 University of California, Berkeley economist, Emmanuel Saez, began publishing his analyses of IRS income data, since all pre-existing sources of income inequality by the government and business more or less obfuscated the true picture. Saez has updated his ground-breaking results periodically ever since. Most of what is reported and published about the income gains of the wealthiest 1% are from his researches.
This writer relied heavily on Saez’s data in his 2004 book, ‘The War At Home: The Corporate Offensive From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush’, which attempted to identify the various policies since the late 1970s that have been largely responsible for the inequality shift that Saez so well documented in 2002. Saez’s hard data—then and ever since—is irrefutable. However, the political implications behind Saez’s data were not spelled out, except for some suggestions concerning the tax structure.
But Income inequality in the US is no accident. It has conscious, deliberate origins, to be found in the policy initiatives of corporate America since the late 1970s, and the willingness of the politicians Corporate America elects in Congress, Presidents, and at State levels—Democrat and Republican alike—to implement those policy initiatives.
There’s the tax restructuring in favor of the rich and their businesses, the free trade and offshoring, the atrophying of the real minimum wage, the dismantling of real pensions and employer contributions to healthcare, the shift from full time permanent jobs to part time and temp work, the destruction of unions and higher paying union jobs, the displacing of higher paid jobs with technology, substitution of credit for lack of wage growth, failure to invest in the US by corporate America, so on and so on. That’s why jobs, real wages, and incomes for the vast majority of American households has stagnated at best, and declined in real terms for most. That’s why wage earners’ income of the bottom 80% households have contributed to income inequality.
But all that’s still only half the story of income inequality. The other ‘half’ of the story is why the incomes of the 1% have risen so sharply as well. Both their rise, and the stagnation-decline of the bottom 80%, are jointly responsible for the income inequality.
Corporate America and their politicians, and the policies they’ve initiated and implemented, are responsible for the accelerating capital incomes of the rich (1%), very rich (0.1%), and mega-rich (0.01%). And much of that has to do with the enabling of financial asset speculation and financial securities inflation that has been the defining characteristic of the US (and global) economy since at least the 1980s. Reagan unlocked that door. Clinton opened it. And George W. kicked it in. And Obama has done nothing to repair the entry.
Real solutions to income inequality would have to include proposals not only to enable the recovery of incomes of the middle working class, and the working and non-working poor, but would have to include proposals to reign in the runaway income accumulation of the very rich, the mega-rich and their friends. But you won’t hear the latter even suggested in Obama’s SOTU speech. What you’ll hear are token long run proposals to slow the decline in income growth for the working poor perhaps, and a lot of vague suggestions about the middle class.
What the middle class needs is decent jobs and tens of millions of them, just to restore what has been lost in the past 15 years. There are still 20 million unemployed in the US, and more than 5 million more have left the labor force. 60% of the jobs that have been created since 2009 have been low paid, while 58% lost have been high paid. Retirement systems are broken and retirees income for tens of millions are in freefall. Obamacare has meant those with insurance now have to pay more for less. Tens of millions of students are effectively indentured and can’t find jobs. If Obama and his politicians want to do something about income inequality, let’s hear concrete legislative proposals to address these issues now, immediately, in the short run.
It took the Krugmans, Reichs, and Stiglitzes only a decade to ‘discover’ their academic colleague, Saez’s, significant work. Better late than never, I suppose. However none of the liberal economists bother to point the finger at the politicians responsible, especially their Democratic party friends, for the inequality trends. But if anything serious is going to be done about income inequality in the US, it will have to include not only real, short term solutions to raise the incomes of the many but also serious, real measures to take back the excessive income gains of the rich and super-rich as well. For the latter will be necessary to fund and restore decent jobs and wages, to revitalize a crumbling retirement system, to save a collapsing healthcare system, and, yes, even to provide affordable education opportunities for all.
Independent review board: NSA phone data collection ‘illegal’
Press TV – January 23, 2014
An independent review board working to protect Americans’ civil liberties and privacy has concluded that the US National Security Agency’s phone data collection program is illegal and should be stopped.
In a 238-page report to be issued on Thursday, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has said that a law known as Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act “does not provide an adequate basis to support” the NSA’s program for collecting billions of Americans’ phone records on a daily basis.
The report, which was obtained by The Washington Post and The New York Times, also says that there has been no single instance in which the US government’s spying program contributed to the discovery of a terrorist threat to the United States.
“We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation,” the report said.
“Moreover, we are aware of no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack,” it added.
While the board had shared its conclusions with US President Barack Obama prior to his speech on Friday, the report is in contrast to Obama’s speech which portrayed the program as useful and lawful.
During his speech on Friday in which Obama promised some modest changes to the NSA’s spying programs, the US President did not indicate that the phone data collection program should be stopped. He said the NSA’s database of phone records should be moved out of government hands and be kept by private phone companies.
However, the PCLOB says the program should be shut down.
“Cessation of the program would eliminate the privacy and civil liberties concerns associated with bulk collection,” said the board in its report.
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Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu: Leave No Palestinian or Arab Alive
By Jonas E. Alexis | Veterans Today | July 23, 2017
Israeli Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu seems to have picked up where the late Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef left off. The Israeli army, Eliyahu said, must slaughter the Palestinians “and leave no one alive.” The Palestinians, the good rabbi continued, must be “destroyed and crushed in order to end violence.” Here is Eliyahu’s algorithm:
“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill 1,000. And if they do not stop after 1,000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million.”
There is more to this “logic” than meets the eye and ear. Eliyahu even postulated that the Israeli army ought not to get involved in arresting Palestinians because “If you leave him alive, there is a fear that he will be released and kill other people. We must eradicate this evil from within our midst.”
You may say that this is just an isolated case. No Israeli official believes that, right? … continue
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- In Gaza, One Man Is Searching for the Remains of His Family With a Flour Sifter
- Horrific situation in Gaza, West Bank – Not a ceasefire Day 124
- No Tricks Zone
- German Gas Crisis…Chancellor Merz Allegedly Bans Gas Debate Ahead of Elections!
- Pollen Reconstructions Show The Last Glacial’s Warming Events Were Global, 10x Greater Than Modern
- Germany’s Natural Gas Storage Level Dwindles To Just 28%… Increasingly Critical
- New Study Rebuts The Assumption That Anthropogenic CO2 Molecules Have ‘Special’ Properties
- Climate Scientist Who Predicted End Of “Heavy Frost And Snow” Now Refuses Media Inquiries
- Polar Bear Numbers Rising And Health Improving In Areas With The Most Rapid Sea Ice Decline
- One Reason Only For Germany’s Heating Gas Crisis: Its Hardcore-Dumbass Energy Policy
- 130 Years Later: The CO2 Greenhouse Effect Is Still Only An Imaginary-World Thought Experiment
- New Study Affirms Rising CO2’s Greening Impact Across India – A Region With No Net Warming In 75 Years
- Germany’s Natural Gas Crisis Escalates … One Storage Site Near Empty …Government Silent
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