Mess We Can!

In the world of global politics, President Obama has had his moments.  He was served a plate of excrement, and has managed a fairly decent record on the world stage.

However, there are exceptions:  He has failed to close Guantanamo. He has doubled-down on the empire-sodomizing black hole of Afghanistan. He got some sort of Portuguese dog, which I assume is mostly cork.

And these are sizeable exceptions.  On 90210, Ray Pruitt was a pretty good boyfriend to Donna Martin, except when he would knock her around occasionally.

Now we move to Libya, the 3rd front of our impending 12-front middle eastern military sunday fun day action.

I’m no strict constructionist. In fact, self-proclaimed “strict constructionists” are usually unreasonable and unhinged longbeards with homemade napalm, or (in most cases), politically motivated clowns who hold these views only when self-servingly expedient.

However, I can’t deny the fact that this is another unilateral executive power grab I genuinely abhor.

 As Greenwald points out:

The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.

As Commander-in-Chief, the President does have a duty to protect and defend the United States. In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent.

I understand that it’s hard to put that Executive Power Genie Back in the bottle. 50+ years of unchecked war partying will do that.

But despite the qualifiers trotted out by the President, there’s no getting around the blatant abuse of power this action constitutes. As Michael Lind points out in his excellent reading of constitutional / international law:

However, while the Security Council can authorize member states to undertake a war for purposes other than national or regional self-defense, it cannot order any country to do so. The U.S. agreed to participate in the United Nations only because the U.N. charter makes it clear that each member state has the right to decide, on the basis of its internal constitutional processes, whether to take part in an enforcement action authorized by the Security Council.

In other words, there are two distinct systems of authorization, one international and one national. Under international law, the U.S. lacks the authority to engage in wars unrelated to its own defense or that of its allies. Security Council action might lift that legal restraint. But once the Security Council has acted, Congress must still authorize the military action by formal voting, not by mere “consultation” with the president.

Yes, Qaddafi is crazy. Yes, he controls a lot of oil, and this country uses a lot of refined oil to fuel its transport vehicles and Japanese sex dolls (diesel).  But if we’re truly just going around protecting citizens of other countries from their crazy despots, we still have dozens to go. I’m not sure we want tio get into that. (d.r.a.f.t?)

Eugene Robinson took a moment from his affable chuckling to write an excellent article this morning. This about sums it up…

Gaddafi is crazy and evil; obviously, he wasn’t going to listen to our advice about democracy. The world would be fortunate to be rid of him. But war in Libya is justifiable only if we are going to hold compliant dictators to the same standard we set for defiant ones. If not, then please spare us all the homilies about universal rights and freedoms. We’ll know this isn’t about justice, it’s about power.

Amen.

Same Writ, Different Decade

aging wastefully

When Obama hired Kumar as some sort of White House liaison to Hollywood’s less fortunate, I hoped he would turn the page on the indefinite detention of Guantanamo’s Uncharged Prisoners – a/k/a ‘Havana-Go-Home’ – the world’s biggest a capella group.

In fact, one of his first decrees as President was to ‘close Guantanamo prisons.’ But that was way back in 2009, before he implemented corporate Sharia law on our unsuspecting country.

When it comes to military commissions and indefinite detention, President Obama never listened to candidate Obamz. Why? Don’t you read US Weekly’s Executive Order section? 54% think BO drafted it better. (28% thought W and for some reason, 18% went with Emily Blunt.)

the order establishes indefinite detention as a long-term Obama administration policy and makes clear that the White House alone will manage a review process for those it chooses to hold without charge or trial.

Nearly two years after Obama’s pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo, more inmates there are formally facing the prospect of lifelong detention and fewer are facing charges than the day Obama was elected.

Conveniently, the White House blames this on Congress, and its bedwetters like Peter King who are scared shitless about heavily guarded, malnourished Pakistanis setting foot on American soil to stand trial.

But as Greenwald points out, this is what we in the cliche industry would call a ‘red herring.’ 

It is true that Congress — with the overwhelming support of both parties — has enacted several measures making it much more difficult, indeed impossible, to transfer Guantanamo detainees into the U.S. But long before that ever happened, Obama made clear that he wanted to continue the twin defining pillars of the Bush detention regime: namely, (1) indefinite, charge-free detention and (2) military commissions (for those lucky enough to be charged with something). Obama never had a plan for “closing Guantanamo” in any meaningful sense; the most he sought to do was to move it a few thousand miles north to Illinois, where its defining injustices would endure….

It was Barack Obama’s position — not that of Congress — that detainees could and should be denied trials, that our court system was inadequate and inappropriate to try them, and that he possessed the unilateral, unrestrained power under the “laws of war” to order them imprisoned for years, even indefinitely, without bothering to charge them with a crime and without any review by the judiciary, in some cases without even the right of habeas review (to see why claims of such “law of war” detention power are so baseless, see the points here, especially point 5).In other words, Obama — for reasons having nothing to do with Congress — worked from the start to preserve the crux of the Bush/Cheney detention regime. Even with these new added levels of detention review (all inside the Executive Branch), this new Executive Order is little more than a by-product of that core commitment…

Private Santiago Ahmed was never to be transferred from the base at all, was he Mr. President?!

In high school, I received a 4-hour detention for messing around and “accidentally” breaking a chalkboard. Luckily, this was before Glenn Beck revealed the sanctity of the writing surface, so I wasn’t thrown in prison at 16 – like dozens of the prisoners at Guantanamo. Maybe one of them is guilty as well.

Wikileaks

Cartoon.

This was linked from Greenwald’s post, which I recommend…

It is a “scandal” when the Government conceals things it is doing without any legitimate basis for that secrecy.  Each and every document that is revealed by WikiLeaks which has been improperly classified — whether because it’s innocuous or because it is designed to hide wrongdoing — is itself an improper act, a serious abuse of government secrecy powers.  Because we’re supposed to have an open government — a democracy —  everything the Government does is presumptively public, and can be legitimately concealed only with compelling justifications.   That’s not just some lofty, abstract theory; it’s central to having anything resembling “consent of the governed.”

But we have completely abandoned that principle; we’ve reversed it.  Now, everything the Government does is presumptively secret; only the most ceremonial and empty gestures are made public.  That abuse of secrecy powers is vast, deliberate, pervasive, dangerous and destructive.  That’s the abuse that WikiLeaks is devoted to destroying, and which its harshest critics — whether intended or not — are helping to preserve.  There are people who eagerly want that secrecy regime to continue:  namely, (a) Washington politicians, Permanent State functionaries, and media figures whose status, power and sense of self-importance are established by their access and devotion to that world of secrecy, and (b) those who actually believe that — despite (or because of) all the above acts — the U.S. Government somehow uses this extreme secrecy for the Good.  Having surveyed the vast suffering and violence they have wreaked behind that wall, those are exactly the people whom WikiLeaks is devoted to undermining.

Al-Haramain v. Obama

Fool me once...

While many of the natives are losing their shit about democratically-elected representatives passing a health care bill to cover ~30 million of their uninsured countrymen, calling for impeachment of their democratically-elected President with his tyrannical tax cuts for 95% of working Americans, a plain-as-day illegal abuse of power was called out yesterday.

The National Security Agency broke the law when it wiretapped two American lawyers working for the El-Haramain Charity Foundation, a judge ruled Wednesday. The government has not decided whether to appeal this long-awaited decision, as it touches on subjects ranging from the state secrets privilege to the breadth of President Bush’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program.”

As Greenwald  notes…

That means that all 3 federal judges to consider the question have concluded that Bush’s NSA program violated the criminal law (FISA).  That law provides that anyone who violates it has committed a felony and shall be subject to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense.  The law really does say that.  Just click on that link and you’ll see.  It’s been obvious for more than four years that Bush, Cheney, NSA Director (and former CIA Director) Michael Hayden and many other Bush officials broke the law — committed felonies — in spying on Americans without warrants.  Yet another federal judge has now found their conduct illegal.  If we were a country that actually lived under The Rule of Law, this would be a huge story, one that would produce the same consequences for the lawbreakers as a bank robbery, embezzlement or major drug dealing.  But since we’re not such a country, it isn’t and it doesn’t.

Although news reports are focusing (appropriately) on the fact that Bush’s NSA program was found to be illegal, the bulk of Judge Walker’s opinion was actually a scathing repudiation of the Obama DOJ.  In fact, the opinion spent almost no time addressing the merits of the claim that the NSA program was legal.  That’s because the Obama DOJ — exactly like the Bush DOJ in the case before Judge Taylor — refused to offer legal justifications to the court for this eavesdropping.  Instead, the Obama DOJ took the imperial and hubristic position that the court had no right whatsoever to rule on the legality of the program because (a) plaintiffs could not prove they were subjected to the secret eavesdropping (and thus lacked “standing” to sue) and (b) the NSA program was such a vital “state secret” that courts were barred from adjudicating its legality.

Those were the arguments that Judge Walker scathingly rejected.  All of the court’s condemnations of the DOJ’s pretense to imperial power were directed at the Obama DOJ’s “state secrets” argument (which is exactly the same radical and lawless version, as TPM compellingly documented, used by the Bush DOJ  to such controversy).  From the start, the Obama DOJ has engaged in one extraordinary maneuver after the next to shield this criminal surveillance program from judicial scrutiny.  Indeed, their stonewalling at one point became so extreme that the court actually threatened the Obama DOJ with sanctions.  And what TPM calls the Obama DOJ’s “Bush-mimicking state secrets defense” has been used by them in one case after the next to conceal and shield from judicial review a wide range of Bush crimes — including torture, renditions and surveillance.  As the Electronic Frontiers Foundation put it:  “In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ’s New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush’s.”

That’s why this decision is such a stinging rebuke to the Obama administration:  because it is their Bush-copying tactics, used repeatedly to cover up government crimes, which the court yesterday so emphatically rejected.  And it’s thus no surprise that media accounts tie the Obama administration to the cover-up of this program at least as much as the Bush administration.  See, for instance:  Charlie Savage and James Risen in The New York Times (“A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush”); Time (“The judge’s opinion is pointed and fiercely critical of the Obama Administration’s Justice Department lawyers” and “The judge claims that the Obama Administration is attempting to place itself above the law“).  The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals also previously condemned the Bush/Obama “state secrets” position as abusive and lawless.

In December, 2005, The New York Times revealed that the Bush administration had been doing for years exactly that which the law unambiguously said was a felony:  eavesdropping on the electronic communications of Americans (telephone calls and emails) without warrants.  We knew then it was a crime.   Three federal judges have now concluded that it was illegal.  And yet not only do we do nothing about it, but we stand by as the Obama administration calls this criminal program a vital “state secret” and desperately tries to protect it and the lawbreakers from being subject to the rule of law.  This decision may make it more difficult for the Obama administration to hide behind sweeping secrecy claims in the future, but it won’t negate the fact that we have decided that our leading political officials are completely free to commit crimes while in power and to do so with total impunity.

Although I’m a most-of-the-time Obama supporter, I’m just as wary about a continued expansion of executive power under his watch.  I vehemently disagree with the defenses put forth, but I understand it was the Obama’s DOJ job to protect government interests (including their predecessors).   

Getting a FISA warrant is so easy (lower threshold than typical criminal case), any need to circumvent the system would seem to be a total red flag. Kudos to Judge Walker.

Multi-National Corporations United

I tried to read last week’s Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision. I’m not going to lie. I couldn’t make it through. It’s a long opinion and Justice Kennedy just won’t close it out. The man writes with broad strokes and I’ll leave it at that. Stevens’ dissent is no Cliffs Notes opinion either. Regardless, I’m pretty sure I don’t like it.

the wheels...

“Of course, you don’t,” you may say. Progressives don’t like the thought of more corporate control over our laws and elections, and the GOP (& many Dems & corporatists) loves that idea. Simple as that.

Maybe. The resulting outcomes of the decision have been (and will be) discussed ad nauseum. But what about the legal basis + reasoning of the decision? In a nutshell, here’s the practical effect of the 5-4 decision (according to the WSJ):

In regard to Thursday’s decision, it helps to understand what the court didn’t decide. It didn’t rule on an individual’s right to contribute to a federal campaign. Individuals are still permitted to give up to $2,400 to a candidate during the primary and $2,400 to a candidate during the general election. Individuals are also still allowed to give $5,000 to any given political-action-committee. The amount an individual could give a campaign was, yesterday, $115,500 over a two year period. Today it’s the same.

Nor did the court change the law on corporations’ ability to contribute directly to a political campaign. Yesterday, direct contributions to a political campaign were banned. Companies could organize and alert employees to the existence of PACs, but they could not give money out of their general treasuries to PACs. Today, that’s still the case.

What the ruling did, however, was erase bans on corporations’ abilities to spend money in support of a candidate. Yesterday, a company was limited in its ability to create, say, its own television advertisement supporting or ripping a political candidate. Today, there are no limits. So long as a company does not coordinate with a campaign, it can spend as much money as it wants to on a sort of shadow campaign on behalf of a candidate.

Loyola Law School’s Rick Hasen explained it to us this way: “Yesterday, if you wanted to influence the otucome of an election, you had to set up a PAC, contributions int which were limited to $5,000 per individual. But today, things are very differerent. Google or IBM, for instance, can spend an unlimited amount of money in support of a candidate.”

The Court ruled that the 1st Amendment protects these corporations right to Free Speech. While I understand the “personhood” of the Corporation, I didn’t think this meant the Bill of Rights is universally applied to corporations. Some see it differently, and the Court’s decisions over the last few decades have certainly convoluted the issues. The probable outcomes are pretty apparent: More corporate control over government. In particular, there exists the dangerous probability of huge corporate influence, and subsequent conflict of interest, with regard to judicial elections. However, I agree with Glenn Greenwald, who says the following:

Either the First Amendment allows these speech restrictions or it doesn’t.  In general, a law that violates the Constitution can’t be upheld because the law produces good outcomes (or because its invalidation would produce bad outcomes).

True enough. But does this fall under 1st Amendment protection?

It’s absolutely true that the Citizens United majority cavalierly tossed aside decades of judicial opinions upholding the constitutionality of campaign finance restrictions.  But what does that prove?  Several of the liberals’ most cherished Supreme Court decisions did the same (Brown v. Bd. of Education rejected Plessy v. Ferguson; Lawrence v. Texas overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, etc.).   Beyond that, the central principle which critics of this ruling find most offensive — that corporations possess “personhood” and are thus entitled to Constitutional (and First Amendment) rights — has also been affirmed by decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence; tossing that principle aside would require deviating from stare decisis every bit as much as the majority did here.  If a settled proposition of law is sufficiently repugnant to the Constitution, then the Court is not only permitted, but required, to uproot it.

Greenwald’s states that the century of campaign finance laws limiting corporate contributions to elections hindered free speech. However, Greenwald does little to address the precedent, other than to imply he’s a 1st Amendment absolutist. David Kairys disagrees:

The court’s main rationale is that limits on using corporate treasuries for campaigns are a “classic example of censorship.” To get there, Kennedy depends on two legal theories that blossomed as constitutional principles in the mid-1970s: money is speech and corporations are people. Both theories are strange, if not simply wrongheaded—why, according to the Constitution or common sense, would money be speech or corporations be people? The court has also employed theories not uniformly but, rather, as constitutional cover for dominance of the electoral system by corporations and by the wealthy.

Part of the weird dichotomy is as the Court expands the Constitution to protect “rights” of corporations, recent decisions demonstrate a pattern of contracting the Constitutional rights of individuals.

The first theory appeared in a 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, which invalidated some campaign-finance reforms that came out of Watergate. The Court concluded that most limits on campaign expenditures, and some limits on donations, are unconstitutional because money is itself speech and the “quantity of expression”—the amounts of money—can’t be limited.

But in subsequent cases, the conservative justices who had emphatically embraced the money-is-speech principle didn’t apply it to money solicited by speakers of ordinary means. For example, the court limited the First Amendment rights of Hare Krishna leafleters soliciting donations in airports to support their own leafleting. The leafleting drew no money-is-speech analysis. To the contrary, the conservative justices, led by Chief Justice Rehnquist, found that by asking for money for leafleting—their form of speech—the Hare Krishnas were being “disruptive” and posing an “inconvenience” to others. In other words, in the court’s view, some people’s money is speech; others’ money is annoying. And the conservative justices have raised no objection to other limits on the quantity of speech, such as limits on the number of picketers.

Are Corporations entitled to the same Free Speech protections as individuals? What are the 1st Amendment rights of individuals these days?

In Citizens United, Justice Kennedy discusses business corporations as if they were clubs or political associations with political viewpoints and elected leaders. But corporate managers don’t function as representatives or employees of shareholders, who have no say, no shared political views, and no expectation that their investments will be used for political ends. In the wake of the court’s ruling this week, will some corporations pick a party or politics while others channel unheard of amounts of money to both major parties? Will investors be influenced by a corporation’s political portfolio?

The Citizens United decision will make it harder to achieve reforms opposed by major corporations and change business as well as politics. Increasing the constitutional rights of corporations beyond their business purposes is really about increasing the rights and power of corporate managers. Government has enabled corporate managers to control huge accumulations of wealth without any personal risk—an arrangement that contributes to wild, bubble-producing economic swings and collapses. Citizens United invites that arrangement directly into politics and elections.

Both of these theories—that money is speech and that corporations are people—have an easier time than they should in courts and with the public, too, because they are posed as counters to censorship. Many of us, including me, haven’t seen a free-speech argument we don’t like, at least initially.

But some perspective: We limit speech—when it has nothing to do with wealthy people spending money—in many ways. (It wasn’t protected at all until the mid-1930s.) You famously can’t shout fire in a theater. You not-so-famously can’t break the theater’s rules, including rules about speaking, because you don’t really have any First Amendment rights in a privately owned theater or at work. The First Amendment limits only government. And even where it is fully protected, free speech has not been absolute; it’s subject to regulation when it undermines basic societal interests and functions, like voting and democracy. In the last few decades, the conservative justices dominating the court have also limited speech rights for demonstrators, students, and whistle blowers. They have restricted speech at shopping malls and transit terminals. Taken as a whole, the conservative court’s First Amendment jurisprudence has enlarged the speech rights available to wealthy people and corporations and restricted the speech rights available to people of ordinary means and to dissenters.

Are there any limits on the 1st Amendment Rights of corporations? As Tom Geoghegan writes in his excellent book, See You In Court…

…There is a growing view on the right that business has a First Amendment right to lie to people. Or at least that it is illegal, and maybe even unconstitutional, for government to pass a law prohibiting or regulating fraud…Some law professors on the right, like Charles Fried of Harvard, argue that this is one of the greatest legacies of the Rehnquist court. It’s the principle of business free speech. It starts with the right to deceive. In one ERISA case, Varsity Corp v. Howe et al. (1996), workers sued a business for lying to them to take an illusory pension-type benefit. To defend its right to mislead the workers, the company brought in the country’s greatest First Amendment lawyer, Floyd Abrams…

His client lost – but only by 5 to 4. With the new Court, he’d probably win the case today.

That is ridiculous. In Illinois, corporations like State Farm are already buying judicial elections and the verdicts that come with their pocket-judges. Since the corporations are technically not affiliated with these campaigns, many of these judges won’t recuse themselves from their assigned cases brought by or against their campaign funders.

I don’t want to go over-the-top. The reality is that even prior to this decision, Multi-National Corporations already exert more influence on our government than ever before. The corporatists and the plutocrats rule. All one has to do is look at how fast the government came to the rescue of Wall St. while the middle class is left to implode.  Still, the thought of more government control by multi-national corporations who ship jobs overseas, open up foreign shells to avoid paying taxes, and already own our political process can only be seen as discouraging to American democracy.

Holder and the Rule of Law

Holder begins to show some stones:

Attorney General Eric Holder announced the decision Friday to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to trial in a courtroom barely a thousand yards from the site of the World Trade Center’s twin towers they are accused of destroying.

Trying the men in civilian court will bar evidence obtained under duress and complicate a case where anything short of slam-dunk convictions will empower President Barack Obama’s critics. U.S. civilian courts prohibit evidence obtained through coercion, and a number of detainees were questioned using harsh methods some call torture.

Holder insisted both the court system and the untainted evidence against the five men are strong enough to deliver a guilty verdict and the penalty he expects to seek: a death sentence for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people who were killed when four hijacked jetliners slammed into the towers, the Pentagon and a field in western Pennsylvania.

“After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September the 11th will finally face justice. They will be brought to New York – to New York,” Holder repeated for emphasis, “to answer for their alleged crimes in a courthouse just blocks away from where the twin towers once stood.”

Holder said he decided to bring Mohammed and the other four before a civilian court rather than a military commission because of the nature of the undisclosed evidence against them, because the 9/11 victims were mostly civilians and because the attacks took place on U.S. soil.

Of course, not everyone thinks our 200+ year-old legal system is up to the task:

GOP House Leader John Boehner, condemning Obama’s decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York for trial, yesterday:

The Obama Administration’s irresponsible decision to prosecute the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks in New York City puts the interests of liberal special interest groups before the safety and security of the American people.

As Greenwald responds:

This is literally true:  the Right’s reaction to yesterday’s announcement —we’re too afraid to allow trials and due process in our country — is the textbook definition of “surrendering to terrorists.”  It’s the same fear they’ve been spewing for years.  As always, the Right’s tough-guy leaders wallow in a combination of pitiful fear and cynical manipulation of the fear of their followers.  Indeed, it’s hard to find any group of people on the globe who exude this sort of weakness and fear more than the American Right.

Amen to that Glenn.  These gate-keepers of patriotism once again demonstrate their lack of faith in the American rule-of-law they pretend to hold so dear.  Honestly, the terrorists could not have hoped for a better reaction – leaders eager to sell out American ideals for some false misconception that selling out these ideals is the only way to protect them.

Next job for Holder is to step up and deal with the rest of the Guantanamo prisoners.  In the spirit of redundancy:

I have discussed preventative detention policies at length, so I will not rehash the particulars of Guantanamo – the many prisoners rounded up not on the battlefields, but because they are political opponents of our “allies.” The fact that the longest amount of time someone can be held without charges in any other western democracy is 28 days (U.K.).  The fact that these prisoners are not afforded access to lawyers, or contact with family members.

I don’t dismiss the lingering effect of 9/11.  Our leaders need to do everything in their power to prevent future attacks.  However, Americans should respect the refractive nature of policies such as rendition, torture, and preventative detention.  There is not a finite amount of terrorists in the world. As long you give them reason to feel oppressed and hated, the crazy, manipulative, End-of-Days Muslim extremists will be able to find unemployed, alienated youth to carry out murder on their behalf.  Selling out constitutional principles is not only un-American – it’s unsafe

8 years.  Charge or release.

Small Non-Profit Destroying America!

This ACORN shit baffles me.  Here are some excerpts from Greenwald’s excellent article on the subject:

Earlier this week, I wrote about how the Fox-News/Glenn-Beck/Rush-Limbaugh leadership trains its protesting followers to focus the vast bulk of their resentment and anxieties on largely powerless and downtrodden factions, while ignoring, and even revering, the outright pillaging by virtually omnipotent corporate interests that own and control their Government (and, not coincidentally, Fox News).  It’s hard to imagine a more perfectly illustrative example of all of that than the hysterical furor over ACORN.

ACORN has received a grand total of $53 million in federal funds over the last 15 years — an average of $3.5 million per year.  Meanwhile, not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars of public funds have been, in the last year alone, transferred to or otherwise used for the benefit of Wall Street.  Billions of dollars in American taxpayer money vanished into thin air, eaten by private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, led by Halliburton subsidiary KBR.  All of those corporate interests employ armies of lobbyists and bottomless donor activities that ensure they dominate our legislative and regulatory processes, and to be extra certain, the revolving door between industry and government is more prolific than ever, with key corporate officials constantly ending up occupying the government positions with the most influence over those industries…

So with this massive pillaging of America’s economic security and its control of American government by its richest and most powerful factions growing by the day, to whom is America’s intense economic anxiety being directed?  To a non-profit group that devotes itself to providing minute benefits to people who live under America’s poverty line, and which is so powerless in Washington that virtually the entire U.S. Senate just voted to cut off its funding at the first sign of real controversy — could anyone imagine that happening to a key player in the banking or defense industry? 

Apparently, the problem for middle-class and lower-middle-class Americans is not that their taxpayer dollars are going to prop up billionaires, oligarchs and their corrupt industries.  It’s that America’s impoverished — a group that is growing rapidly — is getting too much, has too much power and too little accountability.  Anonymous Liberal has a superb post on the manipulative inanity of the Fox-generated ACORN “scandal” (h/t D-day):

Let’s take a step back and consider just what ACORN is. It is a non-profit organization whose mission is to empower and improve the lives of poor people. As with many other organizations, ACORN has a number of legally distinct parts, each of which has different sources of funding and engages in different kinds of activities (ACORN’s conservative enemies routinely conflate these various parts to imply that ACORN is using federal money for improper political purposes). Since its founding the 70s, ACORN and its employees and volunteers have fought successfully to, among other things, increase minimum wages across the country, increase the quality of public education in poor areas, and protect people from predatory lending practices. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, ACORN helped rebuild thousands of homes and assisted victims in relocating and finding housing outside of New Orleans. The ACORN activity that has drawn the most conservative ire is its voter registration efforts which, consistent with ACORN’s mission, are primarily aimed at low-income voters (who tend to vote Democratic). . . .

But even if you take these film-makers at face value and assume the worst, the reality is that ACORN has thousands of employees and the vast majority of them spend their days trying to help poor people through perfectly legal means (and receive very little compensation for doing so). Even before yesterday’s Senate vote, the amount of federal money that went to ACORN was very small. This is a relatively insignificant organization in the grand scheme of things, but it’s an organization that has unquestionably fought over the years to improve the lives of the less fortunate in this country.

That the GOP and its conservative supporters would single out this particular organization for such intense demonization is telling. In September of last year, the entire world came perilously close to complete financial catastrophe. We’re still not out of the woods and we’re deep within one of the worst recessions in U.S. history. This situation was brought about by the recklessness and greed of our banks and financial institutions, most of which had to be bailed out at enormous cost to the American taxpayer (exponentially more than all of the tax dollars given to ACORN over the years). The people who brought about this near catastrophe, for the most, profited immensely from it. These very same institutions, propped up by the American taxpayer, are once again raking in large profits.

But rather than focus their anger on these folks, conservatives choose to go after an organization composed almost entirely of low-paid community organizers, an organization that could never hope to have even a small fraction of the clout or the ability to affect the overall direction of the country that Wall Street bankers have. ACORN’s relative lack of political influence was on full display yesterday, when the U.S. Senate (in which Democrats have a supermajority) not only entertained a vote to defund ACORN, but approved it by a huge margin (with only seven Democrats opposing).

If one were to watch Fox News or listen to Rush Limbaugh — as millions do — one would believe that the burden of the ordinary American taxpayer, and the unfair plight of America’s rich, is that their money is being stolen by the poorest and most powerless sectors of the society.  An organization whose constituencies are often-unregistered inner-city minorities, the homeless and the dispossesed is depicted as though it’s Goldman Sachs, Blackwater, Halliburton and combined, as though Washington officials are in thrall to those living in poverty rather than those who fund their campaigns.  It’s not the nice men in the suits doing the stealing but the very people, often minorities or illegal immigrants, with no political or financial power who nonetheless somehow dominate the government and get everything for themselves.  The poorer and weaker one is, the more one is demonized in right-wing mythology as all-powerful recipients of ill-gotten gains; conversely, the stronger and more powerful one is, the more one is depicted as an oppressed and put-upon victim (that same dynamic applies to foreign affairs as well).

It’s such an obvious falsehood — so counter-intuitive and irrational — yet it resonates due to powerful cultural manipulations.  Most of all, what’s so pernicious about all of this is that the same interests who are stealing, pillaging and wallowing in corruption are scapegoating the poorest and most vulnerable in order to ensure that the victims of their behavior are furious with everyone except for them.

I don’t care if ACORN gets a dime of federal money.  Some other non-profit will likely take the reins, the money, and perform similar services. So why the big obsession? I don’t understand the conservative outrage over a decentralized organization that operates on a shoestring budget and has absolutely NO power (as can be seen by Congress’ vote). 

And when the Federal government builds inadequate levies, destroys the wetlands naturally protecting the area, and then sits on its hands while an American city is destroyed by a storm, it’s groups like ACORN that help the displaced and marginalized pick up the pieces while the government turns its head and the rest of us sit on our asses watching reality TV and eating KFC gravy bowls. So why the outrage? Why, my friends, why? Is it a case of “providing assistance while colored?”  Who knows? Only the indignant. Crazy times.

Greenwald: Thomas Paine v. The Right’s Torture Defenders

My favorite blogger (other than riproarious  + poorluckyme, of course) is Glenn Greenwald.  I was ready to give my DNOTW  to NY Rep. Peter King for his ridiculous name-calling and fear-mongering regarding Holder’s decision to investigate war crimes. Greenwald does it with 1/2 the sarcasm and triple the substance. Bless him. I’ll post in full:

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

GOP Congressman Peter King — the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee — had this rancid outburst today in Politico regarding Eric Holder’s decision to investigate whether laws were broken by the Bush administration’s torture:

“It’s bullshit. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on. [It’s’ a] declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense. . . . When Holder was talking about being ‘shocked’ [before the report’s release], I thought they were going to have cutting guys’ fingers off or something — or that they actually used the power drill. . . ”

Pressed on whether interrogators had actually broken the law, King said he didn’t think the Geneva Convention “applies to terrorists.”

Never mind that the Supreme Court in Hamdan ruled exactly the opposite:  that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to all detainees, including accused Terrorists.  Never mind that the War Crimes Act makes it a felony to inflict “prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from . . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering. . . .”  and that these acts are therefore criminal whether or not King likes them.

Never mind that scores of people have died — not merely been threatened with death — in American custody as a result of “interrogation tactics.”  Never mind that Ronald Reagan signed the Convention Against Torture which compels the U.S. to prosecute anyone authorizing torture; that the Treaty proclaims that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever . . . may be invoked as a justification of torture”; and that Reagan himself said the Treaty “will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.”  And most of all, never mind that King has no idea whether these people are actually “terrorists” because the people we tortured were never given trials, never proven to have done anything wrong, and in many cases were — as federal courts have repeatedly found and as the CIA IG Report itself recognized — completely innocent. 

My email inbox and comment section are filled with King-like accusatory sentiments that to oppose Torture is to defend Terrorists, because Terrorists deserve to be tortured, and that to oppose their abuse is to be treasonous because it’s terrible to care if Terrorists are abused, etc. etc.  In his 1795 essay, which he entitled Dissertations on First Principles of Government, Thomas Paine wrote this as his last paragraph:

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Can that be any clearer?  Of course, Paine also wrote in Common Sense that “so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king” and “in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”  And in his Dissertations, he also wrote:

The executive is not invested with the power of deliberating whether it shall act or not; it has no discretionary authority in the case; for it can act no other thing than what the laws decree, and it is obliged to act conformably thereto. . . .

For anyone who believes in the basic principles of the founding, the fact that these acts of torture are illegal — felonies — ought to end the discussion about whether they were justified.

Few things are more repellent than watching the contemporary Right in America invoke the principles of the Founders — in general — to justify their warped and lawless authoritarianism.  But nothing is more repulsive than watching them pretend that Thomas Paine — of all people — has anything to do with them (Glenn Beck actually wrote his most recent book based on the explicit pretense that he is the modern day Paine).  Any casual reading of Paine makes clear that, today, he would be so far on what is deemed the “left” side of the spectrum that you’d be unable to find him.  Paine is nothing but what Joe Klein refers to as a “crazy civil liberties absolutist” and what Rush Limbaugh similarly calls “far, fringe, lunatic kooks, far left radical lunatic fringe.” 

The Right today argues that condemning torture is wrong because the people who were tortured were just Terrorists — barely human — and they deserve no defense, not even the force of law.  Thomas Paine argued as a first principle that those devoted to liberty “must guard even his enemy from oppression.”  Could the contrast be any more stark?

 

UPDATE:  The version of the IG Report released yesterday was heavily, heavily redacted.  It is now being reported that several of the redacted provisions detailed at least some of the deaths of detainees at the hands of their U.S. captors, while other detainees were simply “lost.”

Chuck Todd’s Perfect World

During the (2007-present?) Presidential campaign, my old lady expressed serious contempt for NBC’s ineffectual Chuck Todd.  I often found myself defending him – mostly because I never liked Tim Russert, the Beltway’s quintessential, go-along “journalist.” 

But last night, Colbert nailed it.

From Greenwald’s article today, a reader makes a great point regarding the dangerous precedent of refusing to investigate and prosecute the architects of Bush’s torture program:

The huge problem here is precedent. In specifically directing an investigation of those who exceeded Bush’s torture authorization, our Justice Department is actually giving legal credence to Yoo, Bybee, and the Bush gang who sought to legalize these clearly illegal methods. Investigating only those who went beyond Yoo’s memos affirms, as legal basis, Bush’s detention and torture policies as the backdrop to be measured against; in effect establishing those practices listed in the memo as the legal standard.

It is less damaging to investigate no one at all than to use the Bush standard to measure those few who exceeded even those most grotesque of practices against. All we’ll end up with is a few more Charles Graners in prison, everyone above middle management getting away without so much as public acknowledgment of having done something wrong, and a de facto Justice Department affirmation that not only will Bush’s team not be investigated for having done something wrong, but that they never did anything wrong at all as those same standards become accepted baseline to measure future prosecutions against.

This is far worse than Obama’s previous “look forward, not backward” stance. This is looking backward and establishing crimes and indignities against humanity as solid legal footing.

I Agree With This

Glenn Greenwald pretty much nails it, so I will just post it in full.  Apparently, I can’t post the video clips from here, so to see the ridiculous clips from Glenn Beck’s show, go here.  One of these Glenns has a college degree. 

SUNDAY FEB. 22, 2009 07:36 EST

Fox News “war games” the coming civil war

(updated below)

Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 gave rise to the American “militia movement”:  hordes of overwhelmingly white, middle-aged men from suburban and rural areas who convinced themselves they were defending the American way of life from the “liberals” and “leftists” running the country by dressing up in military costumes on weekends, wobbling around together with guns, and play-acting the role of patriot-warriors.  Those theater groups — the cultural precursor to George Bush’s prancing 2003 performance dressed in a fighter pilot outfit on Mission Accomplished Day — spawned the decade of the so-called “Angry White Male,” the movement behind the 1994 takeover of the U.S. Congress by Newt Gingrich and his band of federal-government-cursing, pseudo-revolutionary, play-acting tough guys.

What was most remarkable about this allegedly “anti-government” movement was that — with some isolated and principled exceptions — it completely vanished upon the election of Republican George Bush, and it stayed invisible even as Bush presided over the most extreme and invasive expansion of federal government power in memory.  Even as Bush seized and used all of the powers which that movement claimed in the 1990s to find so tyrannical and unconstitutional — limitless, unchecked surveillance activities, detention powers with no oversight, expanding federal police powers, secret prison camps, even massively exploding and debt-financed domestic spending — they meekly submitted to all of it, even enthusiastically cheered it all on.  

They’re the same people who embraced and justified full-scale, impenetrable federal government secrecy and comprehensive domestic spying databases conducted in the dark and against the law when perpetrated by a Republican President — but have spent the last week flamboyantly pretending to be scandalized and outraged by the snooping which Bill Moyers did 45 years ago (literally) as part of a Democratic administration.  They’re the people who relentlessly opposed and impugned Clinton’s military deployments and then turned around and insisted that only those who are anti-American would question or oppose Bush’s decision to start wars. 

They’re the same people who believed that Bill Clinton’s use of the FISA court to obtain warrants to eavesdrop on Americans was a grave threat to liberty, but believed that George Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the law was a profound defense of freedom.  In sum, they dressed up in warrior clothing to fight against Bill Clinton’s supposed tyranny, and then underwent a major costume change on January 20, 2001, thereafter dressing up in cheerleader costumes to glorify George Bush’s far more extreme acquisitions of federal power.

In doing so, they revealed themselves as motivated by no ideological principles or political values of any kind.  It was a purely tribalistic movement motivated by fear of losing its cultural and demographic supremacy.  In that sense — the only sense that mattered — George Bush was one of them, even though, with his actions, he did everything they long claimed to fear and despise.  Nonetheless, his mere occupancy of the White House was sufficient to pacify them and convert them almost overnight from limited-government militants into foot soldiers supporting the endless expansion of federal government power.

But now, only four weeks into the presidency of Barack Obama, they are back — angrier and more chest-beating than ever.  Actually, the mere threat of an Obama presidency was enough to revitalize them from their eight-year slumber, awaken them from their camouflaged, well-armed suburban caves.  The disturbingly ugly atmosphere that marked virtually every Sarah Palin rally had its roots in this cultural resentment, which is why her fear-mongering cultural warnings about Obama’s exotic, threatening otherness — he’s a Muslim-loving, Terrorist-embracing, Rev.-Wright-following Marxist:  who is the real Barack Obama? — resonated so stingingly with the rabid lynch mobs that cheered her on.

With Obama now actually in the Oval Office — and a financial crisis in full force that is generating the exact type of widespread, intense anxiety that typically inflames these cultural resentments — their mask is dropping, has dropped, and they’ve suddenly re-discovered their righteous “principles.”  The week-long CNBC Revolt of the Traders led by McCain voter Rick Santelli and the fledgling little Tea Party movement promoted by the Michelle Malkins of the world are obvious outgrowths of this 1990s mentality, now fortified by the most powerful fuel:  deep economic fear.  But as feisty and fire-breathing as those outbursts are, nothing can match — for pure, illustrative derangement — the discussion below from Glenn Beck’s new Fox show this week, in which he and an array of ex-military and CIA guests ponder (and plot and plan) “war games” for the coming Civil War against Obama-led tyranny.  It really has to be seen to be believed.

Before presenting that to you, a few caveats are in order:  There is nothing inherently wrong or illegitimate with citizens expressing extreme anger towards the Government and the ruling political class.  There isn’t even anything wrong or illegitimate with citizens organizing themselves into a movement that — whether by design or effect — is threatening to entrenched elites.  If anything, we’ve had too little of that.  In fact, it’s only a complete lack of fear of a meek, passive and impotent citizenry on the part of political and financial rulers — a certainty that there will be no consequences no matter what they do — that could have given rise to the endless corruption, deceit, lawbreaking, destruction, and outright thievery of the last eight years.  A political and financial elite that perceives itself as invulnerable from threat or consequence will inevitably vest itself with more power and more riches.  That’s what we’ve had and, largely, still have.

But this Rush-Limbaugh/Fox-News/nationalistic movement isn’t driven by anything noble or principled or even really anything political.  If it were, they would have been extra angry and threatening and rebellious during the Bush years instead of complicit and meek and supportive to the point of cult-like adoration.  Instead, they’re just basically Republican dead-enders (at least what remains of the regional/extremist GOP), grounded in tribal allegiances that are fueled by their cultural, ethnic and religious identities and by perceived threats to past prerogatives — now spiced with legitimate economic anxiety and an African-American President who, they were continuously warned for the last two years, is a Marxist, Terrorist-sympathizing black nationalist radical who wants to re-distribute their hard-earned money to welfare queens and illegal immigrants (and is now doing exactly that).

That’s the context for this Glenn Beck “War Games” show on Fox News this week — one promoted, with some mild and obligatory caveats, by Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air.  In the segment below, he convened a panel that includes former CIA officer Michael Scheuer and Ret. U.S. Army Sgt. Major Tim Strong.  They discuss a coming “civil war” led by American “Bubba” militias — Beck says he “believes we’re on this road” — and they contemplate whether the U.S. military would follow the President’s orders to subdue civil unrest or would instead join with “the people” in defense of their Constitutional rights against the Government (they agree that the U.S. military would be with “the people”):

They don’t seem very interested in bipartisanship and in transcending ideological divisions.

Immediately prior to that segment, Fox viewers were warned (as usual) that the unruly, uncivilized, violent Muslims are coming, and only Benjamin Netanyahu will be able to subdue them with a massive attack:

In one sense, all of this drooling rage is nothing more than the familiar face of extreme right-wing paranoia, as Richard Hofstadter famously described 45 years ago:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

But it’s now inflamed by declining imperial power, genuine economic crises, an exotic Other occupying the White House, and potent technology harnessed by right-wing corporations such as Fox News to broadcast and disseminate it widely and continuously.  At the very least, it’s worth taking note of.  And I wonder what would happen if MSNBC broadcast a similar discussion of leftists plotting and planning the imminent, violent Socialist Revolution against the U.S. Government.

 

UPDATE:  Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and “Pajamas Media”:

Glenn Beck: The End is Nigh . . . .

Is it irresponsible for Fox News to be airing this over the top, creepy alarmist stuff during a financial crisis? Well, yeah, I think so.

If someone like that — like this — thinks that Fox News is being irresponsibly, even dangerously, inflammatory, then that’s a pretty compelling sign of how far over the line they actually are.