Tag: Punting the Pundits

When an American drone fired four Hellfire missiles at a convoy of cars travelling from a wedding in Yemen last December, who died? [..]

The questions raised by the wedding attack go beyond identity, beyond compliance. Another debate to be had is about the existence of the killing program-its legal basis, its strategic benefits, its moral implications-not just adherence to its rules. This is a conversation the administration has tried to avoid. Although Obama has proposed shifting the CIA’s drone program to the Pentagon to increase transparency, the White House has brushed off Congress’s attempt to broaden its oversight. Last week, the administration forbade CIA officers from attending a hearing in the Senate Armed Services Committee, and refused to grant security clearances to committee members so they could be briefed.

We may not know whom we’re killing, but the people left behind know who is responsible for their losses. “We have nothing, not even tractors or other machinery. We work with our hands. Why did the United States do this to us?” the groom asked in a video shown to HRW researchers. No one, so far, has a real answer for him.

Patrick Smith: Nuland and the Ukraine: The Message Beneath the Vulgarity

As Ukraine reaches a breaking point, there’s a lot more to discuss about U.S. policy than a simple F-bomb.

Every time we overhear U.S. diplomats talking when we are not supposed to, the conduct of American foreign policy sounds less imaginative, more reckless, and astonishing in its fidelity to eras many of us thought would never come again. Who would have thought Obama’s conduct abroad would recall so closely Eisenhower’s – the years when the Dulles Brothers, Allen at the CIA and John Foster at State, made sheer havoc in the name of American security – and thus reproduce an eternal state of insecurity?

Allergic to history, American administrations can learn nothing from it. Einstein’s thought on insanity – doing the same thing incessantly and wanting a new result – is the default position. No wonder America’s relations in the Middle East and across both oceans have deteriorated since the Germans took down the Berlin Wall.

The latest lifting of the lid occurred earlier this month, when a covert recording was released via YouTube. The revelations are better than some in the unprecedented tidal wave of material that Wikileaks released in the summer and autumn of 2010.

Jim Haber: Plowshares Sentencing Shows US Government Afraid of Peace Activists

Outside the courthouse in Knoxville, Tenn. where three anti-nuclear activists were severely sentenced on February 18, Michelle Boertje-Obed, the wife of one of the three Transform Now Plowshares members, encouraged everyone to see Judge Amul Thapar’s ruling in a positive light. Despite her husband Greg having just received over 5 years in prison for infiltrating the Y-12 nuclear weapons facility on July 28, 2012 and damaging federal property – along with Michael Walli and 84-year-old Catholic nun Megan Rice – Michelle pointed out that the judge could have easily given them much longer sentences, as recommended by the prosecution. [..]

Sr. Rice was at her most eloquent when addressing the court. “The problem with this trial is that people don’t know the law,” she said. “There is an alternative to nuclear weapons – common sense… If you resist nuclear weapons, you are upholding the law… The need to expose crimes pushed us to our action… To remain in prison for the rest of my life would be the greatest honor this court could bestow on me.”

She pointed out that nuclear weapons were declared illegal under international law and hence aren’t “legitimate property.” Additionally, the three members of the Transform Now Plowshares felt called to uphold their view of God’s law, and called for love and peacemaking, rather than nuclear threats and war.

Yet, these motivations were never allowed to be spoken during the trial itself, thereby preventing the jury from truly understanding their actions. As unjust as this – and the harsh sentences – may seem, it shows that the government actually sees civil resistance and organizing for the power and capacity it truly represents. The powers that be should be afraid of the likes of the Transform Now Plowshares. They’re not alone.

Charles M. Blow: Accommodating Divisiveness

Ted Nugent, a.k.a. the Motor City Madman, an ex-rocker who’s off his rocker, is at it again. [..]

Now, Nugent is a bit player, a bomb-thrower not worthy of much attention in his own right, but the fact that he and so many like him feel at home within the Republican Party and aligned with conservative causes is.

By no means are all, or even most, Republicans this extreme, nor do they condone this level of extremism. But far too many extremists seem to seek – and find – a home within the Republican ranks. There exists a foul odor of accommodation. [..]

With people like that under the Republican tent, they may as well fold it up where minorities are concerned.

We must confront connected regulators and force them to pull the plug. Our democracy depends on it

Comcast has announced it intends to merge with Time Warner Cable, joining together the largest and second-largest cable and broadband providers in the country. The merger must be approved by both the Justice Department and the FCC. Given the financial and political power of Comcast, and the Obama administration’s miserable record of protecting the public interest, the time to speak out and organize is now. [..]

As for the regulators, the news website Republic Report revealed that the head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, William Baer, was a lawyer representing NBC during the merger with Comcast, and Maureen Ohlhausen, a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission, provided legal counsel for Comcast before joining the commission. If you wonder how President Obama feels about the issue, look at who he appointed to be the new chairperson of the FCC: Tom Wheeler, who was for years a top lobbyist for both the cable and wireless industries.

Robert L. Borosage: Fast Track to Nowhere: America’s Failed Trade Policy

The Obama administration continues to push a fast track to nowhere. U.S. Trade Representative Michael B. Froman now has launched charm offensive, meeting with legislators, consumer, union and environmental groups to try to defuse growing opposition to fast track trade authority.

Fat chance. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid says he has no intention of bringing fast track up on the Senate floor (at least before the election). House Speaker John Boehner couldn’t even round up a Democratic co-sponsor for the bill. Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has voiced her opposition. [..]

Instead, the administration is pursuing trade negotiations in an outmoded and failed mold, behind closed doors with corporations at the table. We know that this model has failed us miserably over the last decades. President Obama was elected in the wake of the global collapse with the promise to develop a new foundation for growth. Isn’t it time to stop pursuing a fast track when the train is already off the rails? Isn’t it long past time to take another look and think anew?

Norman Solomon: Why Amazon’s Collaboration With the CIA Is So Ominous — and Vulnerable

As the world’s biggest online retailer, Amazon wants a benevolent image to encourage trust from customers. Obtaining vast quantities of their personal information has been central to the firm’s business model. But Amazon is diversifying — and a few months ago the company signed a $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency to provide “cloud computing” services.

Amazon now has the means, motive and opportunity to provide huge amounts of customer information to its new business partner. An official statement from Amazon headquarters last fall declared: “We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA.” [..]

Amazon now averages 162 million unique visitors to its sites every month. Meanwhile, the CIA depends on gathering and analyzing data to serve U.S. military interventions overseas. During the last dozen years, the CIA has conducted ongoing drone strikes and covert lethal missions in many countries. At the same time, U.S. agencies like the CIA and NSA have flattened many previous obstacles to Big Brother behavior.

And now, Amazon is hosting a huge computing cloud for the CIA’s secrets — a digital place where data for mass surveillance and perpetual war are converging.

Dan Gillmor: Beware the WhatsApp hype: Mark Zuckerberg is no benevolent overlord

What’s Facebook really up to? Same thing Silicon Valley does with every big deal, people: try to take over the world

By now there have may have been about as many words written about this week’s blockbuster technology deal – Facebook’s $16bn-plus acquisition of the WhatsApp messaging service – as there have been dollars spent. The tech chattering class and the jealous masses are speculating wildly, even as Mark Zuckerberg and WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum hold pretty close to the vest their long-term plans, discussed over years’ worth of coffees and long walks and dinners.

But there’s got to be more to this partnership than a shared goal “to make the world more open and connected“, right? Koum has long been an evangelist of free speech, while Zuckerberg has said recently that he wants to “build great new experiences that are separate from what you think of as Facebook today”.

Indeed, from those billions of words emerge some early clues about the future of a very rich Facebook, which suggest even bigger changes to the future of what we hold in our hands. Not all of them are so utopian.

Clapper thinks if the NSA had informed us they were monitoring every American, that would somehow make it OK. It doesn’t

Director of Intelligence James Clapper now says the National Security Agency (NSA) should have been more open about the fact that they were spying on all Americans.

I’m glad he said this. But there is no excuse for lying in the first place. [..]

The United States needs intelligence gathering, the ability to obtain and keep secrets, spying on foreign powers and genuine threats and all the other tools nations use to protect their security. No one is disputing this.

But Clapper is being somewhat disingenuous here. Part of the reason our government does some things behind Americans’ backs is not for security, but because certain activities, if known, would outrage the public.

Spying on every American certainly falls into this category. I also believe it is blatantly unconstitutional, and bringing these activities to light would immediately spark debates the NSA would rather not hear.

Charles M. Blow: The Bias Against Black Bodies

The Michael Dunn case has caused us to look once again at the American culture and criminal justice system, and many don’t like what they see.

But we shouldn’t look at this case narrowly and see its particular circumstances as the epitome of the problem. They are not. The scope of the problem is far more expansive, ingrained and elusive.

This is simply one more example of the bias against – and in fact violence, both psychological and physical, against – the black body, particularly black men, that extends across society and across their lifetimes. And this violence is both interracial and intra-racial.

Richard (RJ) ESkow: Five Years After the Stimulus, Reality Itself Is Under Attack

It’s been five years since the passage of President Obama’s stimulus bill (officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act). Its successes are well documented: an increase in the GDP of between 2 and 3 percent from late 2009 through mid-2011; six million “job years” created, which comes to 1.6 million additional people on the job each year through 2012; 44 months of uninterrupted job growth; and the reversal of an economy which was plunging into free-fall.

So why did only 37 percent of Americans support the Act three years later? Why has our political discourse become a political Theater of the Absurd in which the preternaturally uninformed Marco Rubio can proclaim, without perceptible embarrassment, that the stimulus “clearly failed”? Fox News even asked whether “the stimulus caused the recession,” despite the fact that the recession happened first.

Conservatism: a delusional force so powerful it can bend the space-time continuum.

Jim Willlis: Stand Your Ground Has No Moral Ground

Some laws are grey, but this one seems to be increasingly black and white. The Stand Your Ground law in Florida — and now 24 other states, including many in the South — was a major factor in jury deliberations for both the Trayvon Martin killing and now, the case of Michael Dunn, who killed 17-year-old Jordan Davis. George Zimmerman was acquitted of shooting an unarmed African-American teenager. The jury in the Dunn case failed to reach a consensus on the murder charge and the judge ruled a mistrial.

Both the Dunn and Zimmerman trials have highlighted a major theological problem with Stand Your Ground laws. In Romans 13, the apostle Paul describes the role of government as a positive one — meant to protect the poor and to promote the common good. The Stand Your Ground laws are based on fear — fear that is often rooted in racism. Rather than promoting a vision of the common good and what our life together should look like, it justifies taking life and codifies fear.

Conservatives keep trying to use America’s religious freedom as a way to limit everyone else’s rights

Last week, the Kansas House of Representatives passed a bill (pdf) that would have broadly legalized discrimination against gays and lesbians. Luckily, after national outrage, the bill was halted. But the fight isn’t over: the bill’s reliance on religious freedom to justify discrimination is a sign of right-wing efforts to come. [..]

The many of us who abhor blatant, legal discrimination are rightly incensed about even the fact that this law was ever put on the table. But we should also see it for what it is: just one piece of a much larger puzzle. The really crucial part – the legal backing for laws like this one – will be decided by the US supreme court very soon. If the court allows for as expansive interpretations of religious freedom as the anti-ACA plaintiffs have argued, expect to see more of these laws proposed and passed in the states. And then, segregating Friends of Dorothy won’t just be in Kansas anymore.

Dinah PoKempner: Privacy in the Age of Surveillance

A strong global right to electronic privacy demands recognition, in U.S. law and internationally.

President Obama had a signature opportunity in his January speech to limit the damage Edward Snowden’s revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance had done to U.S. foreign relations. But global response has been rather cool.

Obama called for increased transparency and an institutional advocate for civil liberties before the secret court that oversees the NSA. He recognized that foreigners have an interest in the privacy of their communications. And he announced future restrictions on the use of acquired data as well as his hope to move data storage out of the NSA’s hands. Yet he made clear he did not intend to end bulk collection of data or give foreigners legal rights to defend their privacy against unwarranted U.S. spying. [..]

The administration can do so by immediately ending its indiscriminate, bulk interception programs, giving foreigners the same protections as citizens against unjustified invasion of privacy, ending efforts to weaken privacy protections in both the technical and legal domain, and proposing laws to help these changes survive into the next administration.

And it might help if Obama found a way to enable the man who started the debate – Edward Snowden – to come home without fearing a lifetime in prison. After all, one day they may both be Nobel laureates.

Susan Casey-Lefkowitz: Secretary Kerry Is Right. Climate Change Needs to Be Tackled Like a “Weapon of Mass Destruction”

Secretary Kerry got it right when he identified climate change as one of the most urgent issues facing the world in a February 16 speech in Jakarta. Kerry got it right on the science, the urgency, and the opportunity to be found in clean energy solutions. He ranked climate change right up there with “terrorism, epidemics, poverty, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” He also got it right that we have the clean energy ability to tackle climate change and that American leadership and action is critical as part of the global solution. The US government is moving ahead to reduce carbon pollution at its source from our cars, trucks and power plants. We also need to reject major new infrastructure projects for dirty fuels starting with denial of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline permit. The US can do this without Congressional action, but strong public support is still critical in standing up to the fossil fuel industry and climate deniers. History will remember our actions – and our inactions. It is actions such as these at home that send the strongest message to the world that the US is serious about climate change.

When I entered Congress in 2007, the year the recession began, the second vote I took was to raise the minimum wage $1.40 to $7.25 an hour. I did so recognizing an important fact: This first increase of the minimum wage in 10 years was still less than the minimum wage in 1968 when adjusted for inflation ($10.74).

The reduction in the real value of the minimum wage from half a century ago is particularly tough today because the majority of those working for minimum or low wages are no longer young teenagers. For instance, 68 percent of fast-food workers are adults, of whom over a quarter have children. And 65 percent are woman, all working longer for less. [..]

What we’re missing today is pragmatic leadership where leaders are willing to say, “Here’s where we are, here’s what I think we have to do based on the facts, here’s measurable benchmarks that we need to hit, and if we don’t, hold me accountable.” So what are the facts?

Peter van Buren: Drone Killing the Fifth Amendment

How to Build a Post-Constitutional America One Death at a Time

Terrorism (ter-ror-ism; see also terror) n. 1. When a foreign organization kills an American for political reasons.

Justice (jus-tice) n. 1. When the United States Government uses a drone to kill an American for political reasons.

How’s that morning coffee treating you? Nice and warming? Mmmm.

While you’re savoring your cup o’ joe, imagine the president of the United States hunched over his own coffee, considering the murder of another American citizen. Now, if you were plotting to kill an American over coffee, you could end up in jail on a whole range of charges including — depending on the situation — terrorism. However, if the president’s doing the killing, it’s all nice and — let’s put those quote marks around it — “legal.” How do we know? We’re assured that the Justice Department tells him so.  And that’s justice enough in post-Constitutional America. [..]

At the moment, we are threatened with a return to a pre-Constitutional situation that Americans would once have dismissed out of hand, a society in which the head of state can take a citizen’s life on his own say-so. If it’s the model for the building of post-Constitutional America, we’re in trouble. Indeed the stakes are high, whether we notice or not.

Michael Brenner: The American Public School Under Siege

A feature of the Obama presidency has been his campaign against the American public school system, eating way at the foundations of elementary education. That means the erosion of an institution that has been one of the keystones of the Republic. The project to remake it as a mixed public/private hybrid is inspired by a discredited dogma that charter schools perform better. This article of faith serves an alliance of interests — ideological and commercial — for whom the White House has been point man. A President whose tenure in office is best known for indecision, temporizing and vacillation has been relentless since day one in using the powers of his office to advance the cause. Such conviction and sustained dedication is observable in only one other area of public policy: the project to expand the powers and scope of the intelligence agencies that spy on, and monitor the behavior of persons and organizations at home as well as abroad.

The audacity of the project is matched by the passive deference that it is accorded. There is no organized opposition — in civil society or politics. Only a few outgunned elements fight a rearguard action against a juggernaut that includes Republicans and Democrats, reactionaries and liberals — from Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York to the nativist Christian Right of the Bible Belt. All of this without the national “conversation” otherwise so dear to the hearts of the Obama people, without corroboration of its key premises, without serious review of its consequences, without focused media attention.

Last year the Republican National Committee conducted an official autopsy after the defeat of presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. It came to the somewhat comfortable conclusion that the party’s biggest problem was its image. “Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes,” it wrote, while “many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” The solution touted by the RNC? Practical Republican governors – “America’s reformers in chief” – who would save a party dominated by right-wing crazies in Washington.

According to the RNC, such Republican governors are successful because they “deliver on conservative promises of reducing the size of government while making people’s lives better.” But this lesson – that business-minded conservatives can overcome the ideological divide – is not quite reflected in reality. In Democratic-leaning but Republican-governed states, government got smaller, and some people’s lives got appreciably worse: Slashed education budgets prompted a widespread outcry in Pennsylvania, and anti-union laws polarized voters in Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan. Indeed, the purple-state governors elected during the 2010 tea party surge – Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, Ohio’s John Kasich, Florida’s Rick Scott, Maine’s Paul LePage, Michigan’s Rick Snyder and Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett – are among those most likely to face defeat in 2014.

This indicates that the Republican Party’s problems run deeper than Sen. Ted Cruz’s filibuster or Rep. Michele Bachmann’s contention that “The Lion King” might be gay-rights propaganda. People subjected to the small-government austerity at the heart of the contemporary conservative consensus sometimes simply do not like it.

Dave Johnson: No Fast Track to TPP: Fix NAFTA First

The big corporations and the Obama administration are trying to push through a giant new trade treaty that gives corporations even more power, and which will send even more jobs, factories, industries and money out of the country. This is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and they are pushing something called “fast track” in Congress to help push it through.

We have to stop this, and we should take the momentum we have generated in our push-back on this to demand Congress and President Obama instead fix NAFTA first. Then fix all of our trade relationships to help working people on all sides of our borders.

David Sirota: PBS Becoming the Plutocrats Broadcasting Service

In a world of screaming cable television hosts and partisan media outlets, PBS is supposed to be the last refuge for honest news. This is ostensibly why taxpayers still contribute money to the public broadcasting system. That money is appropriated to try to guarantee that there remains at least one forum for unvarnished facts, even if such facts offend those with money and power.

The problem, though, is that because our government spends so little on public media as compared to many other industrialized countries, our most prominent public media outlets are becoming instruments for special interests to launder their ideological agenda through a seemingly objective brand. Starved for public resources, these outlets are increasingly trying to get their programming funded with money from corporations and wealthy political activists-and that kind of cash comes with ideological expectations.

Joe Conason: : The Imminent Return of the ‘Clinton Scandals’

Hillary Clinton may well run for president in 2016. Or she may not. But while the nation awaits her decision, both jittery Republican politicians and titillated political journalists-often in concert-will seize upon any excuse to recycle those old “Clinton scandals.”

The latest trip around this endless loop began when Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican of extremist pedigree and nebulous appeal, deflected a question about his party’s “war on women” by yapping about Monica Lewinsky, the former “inappropriate” playmate of Bill Clinton. Then the Free Beacon, a right-wing Washington tabloid, published some old papers about the “ruthless” Hillary and the “loony toon Monica” from the archives of the late Diane Blair, a longtime and intimate Arkansas friend of the Clintons.

Suddenly, the media frenzy of the ’90s resumed, as if there had never even been a pause.

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Now that the Congressional Budget Office has explicitly denied saying that Obamacare destroys jobs, some (though by no means all) Republicans have stopped lying about that issue and turned to a different argument. O.K., they concede, any reduction in working hours because of health reform will be a voluntary choice by the workers themselves – but it’s still a bad thing because, as Representative Paul Ryan puts it, they’ll lose “the dignity of work.” [..]

The truth is that if you really care about the dignity and freedom of American workers, you should favor more, not fewer, entitlements, a stronger, not weaker, social safety net.

And you should, in particular, support and celebrate health reform. Never mind all those claims that Obamacare is slavery; the reality is that the Affordable Care Act will empower millions of Americans, giving them exactly the kind of dignity and freedom politicians only pretend to love.

Chase Madar: Cecily McMillan’s Occupy trial is a huge test of US civil liberties. Will they survive?

For years, comparing American freedom to Russian tyranny seemed like an exaggeration. But maybe we’re not so different after all

The US constitution’s Bill of Rights is envied by much of the English-speaking world, even by people otherwise not enthralled by The American Way Of Life. Its fundamental liberties – freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom from warrantless search – are a mighty bulwark against overweening state power, to be sure.

But what are these rights actually worth in the United States these days?  [..]

McMillan is one of over 700 protestors arrested in the course of Occupy Wall Street’s mass mobilization, which began with hopes of radical change and ended in an orgy of police misconduct. According to a scrupulously detailed report (pdf) issued by the NYU School of Law and Fordham Law School, the NYPD routinely wielded excessive force with batons, pepper spray, scooters and horses to crush the nascent movement. And then there were the arrests, often arbitrary, gratuitous and illegal, with most charges later dismissed. McMillan’s is the last Occupy case to be tried, and how the court rules will provide a clear window into whether public assembly stays a basic right or becomes a criminal activity.

Thomas S. Harrington: Hypocrisy in Sochi: On Slamming Russian Repression, But Rarely Our Own

Oh, what fun it is to mock Putin and his attempts to present a civilized and modern face to the world.

In the Boston Globe this week, David Filipov who is manning the paper’s “life on the street” beat in Sochi, explains with clear scorn and condescension how, in Putin’s Russia, those that want to protest against the government are relegated to doing so in “protest parks” far from the cameras and the crowds.

Funny how in 2004, at the Democratic National Convention in Filipov’s home town of Boston, neither he nor anyone at his famously “liberal” paper made much fuss about the “free speech zones”-chain link cages with constant video surveillance-that were set up as the sole place where protestors against the political order could say their piece during that key political event.

Indeed, the “free speech zone,” a patently illegal absurdity in the context of the most elemental reading of the US constitution, has become a ubiquitous part of our life in the US, justified, of course, in the name of “security”-or as the more suave disdainers of basic constitutional rights like Obama like to put it, in the name of the “necessary balance” between security and freedom in our society.

Andrea Bower: The Difference Between a Farmer and a Global Chemical Corporation

We are witnessing a strange, though remarkably predictable public discourse, where State lawmakers claim that those “truly serious about supporting local farmers” must abolish Counties’ rights “forever,” and transnational corporations call themselves “farmers.” Legislators attempt to contort the “Right to Farm” into a mechanism for chemical companies to evade health and environmental concerns, as water grabs by these same companies undermine the actual rights of farmers. Meanwhile, the Hawaii Farm Bureau advocates the interests of a few mega-corporations as synonymous with the interests of local farmers (despite never having asked the farmer members that they professedly speak for).

The intentional blurring in the difference between farmers, and the global corporations that use Hawaii as a testing ground for their new technologies, demands some clarity.[..]

Whether one is skeptical, hopeful, or a mix of both about the science and technology of genetic engineering, we must differentiate between what is good for Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, Syngenta, BASF and Bayer, and what is good for farmers and farmworkers. As we debate various policies related to the agrochemical corporations’ experimentation in Hawaii, we do a grave disservice to the future of food and farming locally and globally when we allow the relationship between farmers and mega-agribusiness to be obscured.