A No-Brainer

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

Posted in humor, lifestyle | Tagged | 1 Comment

Wisconsin: The Final Nail in the Coffin of American Democracy

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

by Arlen Grossman/ The Big Picture Report

American Democracy had struggled on life support for many years. It took its final breath on January 21, 2010, when a conservative Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in the landmark Citizens United case that since corporations had the same rights as people, and money was equivalent to speech, unlimited amounts could be spent to influence elections. The final nail was hammered into American Democracy’s coffin with the victory of Republican Governor Scott Walker Tuesday in Wisconsin’s recall election.

Sorry for the clichés and the defeatism, but it would be hard to spin this electoral disaster any other way. When an anti-union Tea Party candidate like Walker can handily defeat a fired-up working class opposition in a historically progressive state like Wisconsin, we who call ourselves liberals, progressives, or even Democrats must admit we are in serious trouble. A radically new and more effective strategy will be necessary to navigate this fatally flawed American political system.


Democracy died  in America because the traditional concept of “one-man, one-vote” no longer works.  The power of special interest money from corporate titans and billionaires far surpasses the power of the old-fashioned election ballot, the kind that once gave ordinary citizens a decent opportunity to choose their leaders. The playing field, once relatively level, now slants  at a steep level toward the mansions and gated communities of the wealthy elite. When it comes to politics and elections in this country, now more than ever, money rules.

In an example of elections to come, Governor Walker’s campaign outraised his Democratic challenger roughly 8 to 1, which resulted in a modest win. But it was a clear victory, and now that Republicans can gauge the power of campaign donations, they only need to hit up their willing wealthy contributors for however much they need to win. The only counterbalance on the Democratic side, labor unions, are reeling from multi-prong attacks from GOP governors and legislatures, and their numbers and influence continue to shrink.

It doesn’t matter that most Americans oppose our military presence in Afghanistan, don’t want cuts in Social Security and Medicare, want universal health care, and would like millionaires taxed at a higher rate. What matters most to “our” representatives is what the people who fund their campaigns want.

Candidates who raise the most money win have won very one of the last five presidential contests, and somewhere between 85 and 96% of Congressional races in recent years. President Obama was able to win in 2008 in part because he was able to outspend his Republican opponent. But that was pre-Citizens United.  Corporate money is now flowing into Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, and with the help of huge “Super PACS,”  it won’t be long before he overtakes the lead from the incumbent in campaign donations.

Wall Street was Obama’s top contributor in 2008. That turned out to be a wise investment because when it came time to assign blame and punishment for the 2008 financial meltdown, Obama’s Justice Department looked the other way, and the banksters walked free.  With that worry out of the way, the big bankers have switched horses and are pouring Wall Street’s election-buying money into the presidential campaign of one of their own, Mitt Romney.

The only way for Democrats to compete is to become more like Republicans–a process that’s been happening for years–and find even more ways to please their corporate contributors.

Because of a conservative Supreme Court, Republicans in Congress, a corporate-controlled media, and a president afraid to stand up to corporate interests, that flawed system is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Making major changes will require citizen outrage, political awareness, mass participation, (especially by young people, who are no longer the beneficiaries of the American Dream), and a willingness to stand up to very powerful forces.

Maybe the Occupy movement is the seed of that revolution. Maybe conditions in this country will need to get much worse–which may not take long–before they can get better. But revolutionary change, the kind necessary to restore democracy, is desperately needed. Whether we are capable of it is an open question.

You can call America an oligarchy or a plutocracy, and you would be right. You can call this country a democracy–as most Americans reflexively will–but sadly, you would be wrong.

By the way, was it just a coincidence that the U.S. stock market posted its biggest one-day gain for the year the day after the Wisconsin election? Or does corporate America know which way the political winds are blowing?

ALSO PUBLISHED IN OPEDNEWS.COM June 6, 2012
Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, elections, government, media, Mitt Romney, Occupy, Occupy Wall Street, politics, protests, Republican Party, Supreme Court, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Gender Gap

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

(Click to Enlarge)
Posted in elections, gender, inequality, media, politics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

NO JUSTICE FOR SIEGELMAN

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

Supreme Court Denies Siegelman, Scrushy Appeals

By Andrew Kreig/ Justice Integrity Project/ June 4, 2012

True to recent form, the U.S. Supreme Court denied relief June 4 to former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman on corruption charges. This sets the stage for Siegelman’s reimprisonment in the most notorious federal political prosecution and frame-up of the decade.

The court denied without comment the certiorari petition of Siegelman and co-defendant Richard Scrushy, former CEO of HealthSouth, Inc. In 2007, U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller sentenced them to seven-year prison terms on multiple charges from Siegelman’s solicitation of donations from Scrushy in 1999 for the non-profit Alabama Education Foundation. Siegelman supported the foundation’s initiatives to increase school funding with a state lottery over the opposition of a Republican-orchestrated coalition.

On receipt of the court’s decision, Siegelman gave a brief comment to his supporters, who have helped him through the years by donating to help pay millions of dollars of legal bills. As published on a list-serve run by Alabama supporter Pam Miles, Siegelman wrote, “Cert Denied…..:)…I’m Blessed by having your love and support…” Later he expanded it to read:

My heart is broken. Not for me, but for my family and friends who have stood by me during this struggle. I am eternally grateful for the work of my attorney Sam Heldman. I am indebted to the 113 state Attorneys General of both political parties who supported my case. And I am thankful for the law professors from around the nation who actively supported my appeal. I pray that something positive will come of this in our future.

The court, as usual, gave no details on its vote to deny the petition. But Democratic Justice Elena Kagan, left, presumably recused herself because she had advocated Siegelman’s imprisonment when she was the Obama Administration’s Solicitor General in 2009. The new administration stood shoulder-to-shoulder with its Bush predecessors in continuing the frame-up and cover-up. This was part of a “look forward, not backward” mantra that President Obama articulated most famously in avoiding accountability for Bush-era torture and cover-up. But events make clear that the cover-ups obviously applied also to Bush political prosecutions. Kagan’s recusal made possible a 5 to 3 Republican majority for the case (although the precise totals aren’t otherwise known) on a Supreme Court increasingly divided on partisan political lines.

Our Justice Integrity Project has been collecting hard evidence from legal scholars that the court’s result-oriented decision-making is becoming an unprecedented disgrace, and is something every thinking voter needs to appreciate. Still to come are the court’s politically-charged, election-year decision on the health care mandate.  But already anyone can see that Democrats and Republicans tend to vote as blocs on tight cases. Important legal scholars discern political motives as vital in such close decisions. Such scholars rarely share such views with the lay public because expert court-watchers do not want to antagonize fellow VIPs in the close-knit, high-prestige world of legal scholarship and advocacy. In that world, a travesty such as the 5-4 Bush v. Gore Florida vote recount decision in 2000 passes as a blip on the screen, forbidden even by the court itself from being cited as precedent.

Evidence of Supreme Court scandal, which our project carefully accumulated and shall provide in-depth later this summer, rarely finds such a tragic and dramatic result as the federal-state persecution of Siegelman, Alabama’s most important Democrat of his era. That is because his frame-up not only involved great suffering for all co-defendants and their families, but helped transform the public policies in an entire state. Beyond that, it helps bring the United States justice system into disrepute in human rights circles nationally and in some case internationally, thus undermining United States foreign policy credibility. The June 4 ruling appears to have been Siegelman’s last chance to avoid revocation of his appeal bond and resentencing by his nemesis, Judge Fuller. The Republican Fuller was chief middle district judge from /2004 to 2011. Fuller allegedly “hated” Siegelman even before the Bush administration’s second secret indictment of Siegelman, and tried to frame him while also benefiting from some $300 million in no-bid Bush contracts for a military contracting company the judge secretly controlled as its largest shareholder. (CONTINUED HERE)

Boldface added by BPR Editor
Posted in Barack Obama, Justice, law, politics, Supreme Court | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

ERIC HOLDER KNOWS THIS WELL

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

 BPR Quote of the Day

“The greatest enemy of justice is privilege.”

Marie von Ebner 

(Von Ebner, 1830-1916,  was an Austrian writer.)

Posted in inequality, Justice, law, Quotations | Tagged | Leave a comment

OBAMA: “GEORGE W. BUSH ON STEROIDS”

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

Drone wars and state secrecy – how Barack Obama became a hardliner

He was once a liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war. Now, according to revelations last week, the US president personally oversees a ‘kill list’ for drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan. Then there’s the CIA renditions, increased surveillance and a crackdown on whistleblowers. No wonder Washington insiders are likening him to ‘George W Bush on steroids’

By Paul Harris/ The Guardian/ June 2, 2012

Image: ACLU

Amos Guiora knows all about the pitfalls of targeted assassinations, both in terms of legal process and the risk of killing the wrong people or causing civilian casualties. The University of Utah law professor spent many years in the Israel Defence Forces, including time as a legal adviser in the Gaza Strip where such killing strikes are common. He knows what it feels like when people weigh life-and-death decisions.

Yet Guiora – no dove on such matters – confessed he was “deeply concerned” about President Barack Obama‘s own “kill list” of terrorists and the way they are eliminated by missiles fired from robot drones around the world. He believes US policy has not tightly defined how people get on the list, leaving it open to legal and moral problems when the order to kill leaves Obama’s desk. “He is making a decision largely devoid of external review,” Guiroa told the Observer, saying the US’s apparent methodology for deciding who is a terrorist is “loosey goosey”.

Indeed, newspaper revelations last week about the “kill list” showed the Obama administrationdefines a militant as any military-age male in the strike zone when its drone attacks. That has raised the hackles of many who saw Obama as somehow more sophisticated on terrorism issues than his predecessor, George W Bush. But Guiora does not view it that way. He sees Obama as the same as Bush, just much more enthusiastic when it comes to waging drone war. “If Bush did what Obama has been doing, then journalists would have been all over it,” he said.

But the “kill list” and rapidly expanded drone programme are just two of many aspects of Obama’s national security policy that seem at odds with the expectations of many supporters in 2008. Having come to office on a powerful message of breaking with Bush, Obama has in fact built on his predecessor’s national security tactics.

Obama has presided over a massive expansion of secret surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency. He has launched a ferocious and unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. He has made more government documents classified than any previous president. He has broken his promise to close down the controversial Guantánamo Bay prison and pressed on with prosecutions via secretive military tribunals, rather than civilian courts. He has preserved CIArenditions. He has tried to grab broad new powers on what defines a terrorist or a terrorist supporter and what can be done with them, often without recourse to legal process.

The sheer scope and breadth of Obama’s national security policy has stunned even fervent Bush supporters and members of the Washington DC establishment. In last week’s New York Times article that detailed the “kill list”, Bush’s last CIA director, Michael Hayden, said Obama should open the process to more public scrutiny. “Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a [Department of Justice] safe,” he told the newspaper.

Even more pertinently, Aaron David Miller, a long-term Middle East policy adviser to both Republican and Democratic administrations, delivered a damning verdict in a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine. He wrote bluntly: “Barack Obama has become George W Bush on steroids.”

Many disillusioned supporters would agree. Jesselyn Radack was a justice department ethics adviser under Bush who became a whistleblower over violations of the legal rights of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh. Now Radack works for the Government Accountability Project, defending fellow whistleblowers. She campaigned for Obama, donated money and voted for him. Now she has watched his administration – which promised transparency and whistleblower protection – crack down on national security whistleblowers.

It has used the Espionage Act – an obscure first world war anti-spy law – six times. That is more such uses in three years than all previous presidents combined. Cases include John Kiriakou, a CIA agent who leaked details of waterboarding, and Thomas Drake, who revealed the inflated costs of an NSA data collection project that had been contracted out. “We did not see this coming. Obama has led the most brutal crackdown on whistleblowers ever,” Radack said.

Yet the development fits in with a growing level of secrecy in government under Obama. Last week a report by the Information Security Oversight Office revealed 2011 had seen US officials create more than 92m classified documents: the most ever and 16m more than the year before. Officials insist much of the growth is due to simple administrative procedure, but anti-secrecy activists are not convinced. Some estimates put the number of documents wrongly classified as secret at 90%.

“We are seeing the reversal of the proper flow of information between the government and the governed. It is probably the fundamental civil liberties issue of our time,” said Elizabeth Goitein, a national security expert at the Brennan Centre for Justice. “The national security establishment is getting bigger and bigger.”

One astonishing example of this lies high in the mountain deserts of Utah. This is the innocuously named Utah Data Centre being built for the NSA near a tiny town called Bluffdale. When completed next year, the heavily fortified $2bn building, which is self-sufficient with its own power plant, will be five times the size of the US Capitol in Washington DC. It will house gigantic servers that will store vast amounts of data from ordinary Americans that will be sifted and mined for intelligence clues. It will cover everything from phone calls to emails to credit card receipts.

Yet the UDC is just the most obvious sign of how the operations and scope of the NSA has grown since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Under Bush, a key part was a secret “warrantless wiretapping” programme that was scrapped when it was exposed. However, in 2008 Congress passed a bill that effectively allowed the programme to continue by simply legalising key components. Under Obama, that work has intensified and earlier this year a Senate intelligence committee extended the law until 2017, which would make it last until the end of any Obama second term.

“Obama did not reverse what Bush did, he went beyond it. Obama is just able to wrap it up in a better looking package. He is more liberal, more eloquent. He does not look like a cowboy,” said James Bamford, journalist and author of numerous books about the NSA including 2008’s The Shadow Factory.  (CONTINUED HERE)

Boldface added by BPR Editor
Posted in Afghanistan, Barack Obama, civil liberties, foreign policy, government, law, military, Pakistan, Terrorism, war | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

LAPDOG MEDIA

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

Deliberate media propaganda

The media now knows that “militant” is a term of official propaganda, yet still use it for America’s drone victims

By Glenn Greenwald/ Salon/ June 2, 2012

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that the Obama administration, in order to conceal civilian deaths caused by their drone attacks, “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.” Although I wrote at length about the NYT‘s various revelations, Iwrote separately about that specific disclosure, in order to emphasize the implications for media outlets reporting on American drone attacks:

What kind of self-respecting media outlet would be party to this practice? Here’s the New York Times documenting that this is what the term “militant” means when used by government officials. Any media outlet that continues using it while knowing this is explicitly choosing to be an instrument for state propaganda.

Early this morning, the U.S. fired a missile from a drone in northwest Pakistan — its first since the NYT story – and killed two people. Here’s how The Washington Post is now touting the article about this attack on its online front page:

Readers who click on that story are greeted by an Associated Press story bearing this headline:

There is, as usual, no indication that these media outlets have any idea whatsoever about who was killed in these strikes. All they know is that “officials” (whether American or Pakistani) told them that they were “militants,” so they blindly repeat that as fact. They “report” this not only without having the slightest idea whether it’s true, but worse, with the full knowledge that the word “militant” is being aggressively distorted by deceitful U.S. government propaganda that defines the term to mean: any “military-age males” whom we kill (the use of the phrase “suspected militants” in the body of the article suffers the same infirmity).

How is it possible to have any informed democratic debate over a policy about which the U.S. media relentlessly propagandizes this way? If drone strikes kill nobody other than “militants,” then very few people will even think about opposing them (and that’s independent of the fact that the word “militant” is a wildly ambiguous term — militant about what? — though it is clearly designed (when combined with “Pakistan”) to evoke images of those who attacked the World Trade Center). Debate-suppression is not just the effect but the intent of this propaganda: like all propaganda, it is designed to deceive the citizenry in order to compel acquiescence to government conduct.

In light of this week’s revelation about what “militant” actually means when used by “officials,” there really needs to be some concerted, organized campaign to target media outlets every time they use the term this way. Because this particular article lacks a byline, one way to start here would be to complain to the Washington Post Ombudsman (whose contact information is in the last line here) and to Associated Press (at the email listed here). In the meantime, I’ve contacted AP requesting a response, and will work on a more organized effort to target media outlets every time they do this. This is nothing short of a deliberate government/media misinformation campaign about an obviously consequential policy.

* * * * *

Speaking of propaganda, the media watchdog group FAIR notes what was entirely predictable (and specifically predicted): that MSNBC — with the exception of a brief discussion on Morning Joe and this quite good monologue from Ari Melber on The Dylan Ratigan Show – never once mentioned to their progressive audience any of the NYT‘s highly disturbing revelations about President Obama’s “kill list” (even as they droned on and on and on about audience-pleasing trivialities such as Donald Trump’s malice). FAIR adds: “In fact, a far more interesting discussion of these questions can be heard on Fox News Channel,” including “a soundbite from the ACLU to illustrate criticism from the left.” [Chris Hayes, on his morning weekend show, is, as usual, a noble exception].

For those who missed it, here is Stephen Colbert’s three-minute monologue from Thursday night on the way in which the Obama administration has re-defined “militant”:   CLICK HERE

UPDATE: Chris Woods, Senior Reporter with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has done sterling work in documenting drone attacks in Pakistan, emails today to say this:

Today’s strike is far from clear right now: maybe one – or two events. May also involve civilian deaths (Dawn reports that the motorbike was accidentally hit). . . .

There’s also an obverse to this coin. As well as reporting all those killed as “militants”, the mainstream US media is consistently failing to report when civilians are credibly reported killed, even as media internationally do so.

Excepting today, civilians have only been reported killed twice in Pakistan in 2012, from 17 attacks (February 9 and May 24). On both occasions civilian deaths were reported by major international agencies (Reuters, AP etc), and picked up worldwide (eg BBC, Jerusalem Post…) But not within the US. I can find no reference to civilian casualties in any mainstream US publication on either occasion (for the May 24 attack most also censored out the fact that a mosque was hit.)

So the US mainstream media is not only classing all victims – regardless of known status – as “militants.” It is actively censoring out actual reports of civilian deaths.

This is the same American media that loves to mock Pakistanis for being so very propagandized.

Posted in Afghanistan, foreign policy, government, media, military, Pakistan, Terrorism, Uncategorized, war | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

Posted in civil liberties, government, Justice, law, media | Tagged , | Leave a comment

OPAQUE TRANSPARENCY

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

Is the Government Holding Back Crucial Documents?

By Russ Baker/ WhoWhatWhy/ May 30, 2012

Next year will be a half-century since the death of JFK. And the Obama Administration thinks we need to keep secret the records on the matter….a little longer yet.

Believe it or not, more than 50,000 pages of JFK assassination-related documents are being withheld in full. And an untold number of documents have been partially withheld, or released with everything interesting blacked out. But why?

Since the government and the big media keep telling us there was no conspiracy, and that it was all Lee Harvey Oswald acting on his own, why continue to keep the wraps on?

We don’t have an answer, but in understanding this and any number of other mysteries, we can begin looking for patterns in the way the administration handles information policy.

We Want to Hear From You (But That’s It—We Just Want to Hear From You)

Earlier this year, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) asked [2], on its online Open Government Forum, for suggestions from the public about what it could do to create greater transparency. The #1 most popular idea? Get those Kennedy records out—before Nov. 22, 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of the Dallas tragedy.

But instead of dealing honestly with this matter, the feds have resorted to disinformation. In an interview with the Boston Globe, the Archivist of the United States claimed [3] that at two public forums held on open records, the most public comments came from people interested either in the JFK assassination or….in UFOs.

Except for one thing: James Lesar, an attorney and co-founder of the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), a DC-based nonprofit that has fought a long and valiant fight on behalf of the public interest in disclosure, attended both of those forums and says that as he recalls there were no people there asking about UFOs, or that at most it was of negligible interest. In fact, a look at NARA’s online idea forum (now closed)showed no UFO proposals or comments.

So, what’s with claiming otherwise? One could be excused for seeing in the Archivist’s statement a deliberate, and unworthy, attempt to smear the legitimacy of JFK inquiries by trying to make them appear “kooky.” (Not to judge the merits of the idea that there could be life elsewhere in the Universe, but the term “UFO conspiracist” is a well-worn dysphemism.)

Here’s what actually happened at the NARA forums.

The first was held in 2010. The assistant archivist, Michael Kurtz, said that withheld JFK assassination records would be processed, along with other documents, for declassification—and that the process should be completed by the end of 2013.

But by 2011, Kurtz, who had been at NARA for decades, had retired. At the 2011 forum, Jim Lesar was told that JFK assassination records are not part of the declassification process. Hence, they will not be reviewed for release.

Huh? What Happened

For some perspective, meet Sheryl Shenberger. She’s the head of the Archives’ National Declassification Center. What would you guess Sheryl’s professional background would be? Library of Congress? Academic research? Nope. Before NDC, Sheryl worked for….the Central Intelligence Agency [4].

The most logical and reasonable explanation for this is that the Obama administration placed an ex-spook in charge of declassification because this would induce her old colleagues in Langley to cooperate. (Which of course raises the question of whether, in a real democracy, you would want to have a bunch of people secretly deciding to do whatever they wanted with 50-year-old documents pertaining to a supposed loony loner who whacked a president.)

Frustrated by the administration’s foot-dragging on JFK, AARC sent a letter urging the government to get off its duff. One signer was G. Robert Blakey, who served as a Chief Counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (which in its 1978 final report said that, um…it looks like an organized conspiracy [5] was responsible for JFK’s death.)

ARRC’s letter [6] was dated January 20, 2012. According to Lesar, there has still been no reply—though NARA says it is working on it.

Release of the remaining documents, under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, can be postponed until October 26, 2017. Not so bad, you say? Actually, the Act further states that even in 2017, the president may decide to drag this on further, by withholding records indefinitely.

Records activists expect the CIA to petition for just such a decision.  Any bets on President Hillary or President Mitt—or, quite possibly, President Jeb Bush [7], doing the right thing? With all the secrets [8] Jeb’s father has to hide?   (CONTINUED HERE)


Posted in Barack Obama, crime, government, Justice, media | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

You Can’t Be Serious?

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Arlen Grossman

BPR Quote of the Day

“I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious — unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force.”

Mark Twain

Posted in Quotations, religion | Tagged , , | Leave a comment