Tag: Politics

“Will I Be Next?”

Two recent reports on America’s drone wars reveal some very disturbing evidence that the use of drones is killing more civilians than the US wants to admit and that their use is a war crime. The report by Amnesty International (pdf) focused on the killing of Mamana Bibi, a 68 year old grandmother who was killed while picking vegetables in a field with her grandchildren in North Waziristan, Pakistan. A few minutes later a second strike injured family members trying to aid her. Amnesty International has stated that the drone strikes are unlawful amounting to war crimes or extrajudicial assassinations.

Based on rare access to North Waziristan, the region in Pakistan where most drone strikes have occurred, Amnesty International conducted detailed field research into nine drone strikes that occurred between January 2012 and August 2013 and which raise serious questions about violations of the right to life.

Among them is the October 2012 killing of 68-year old grandmother Mamana Bibi. She was killed in a double strike, apparently by a Hellfire missile, as she picked vegetables in the family’s fields and while surrounded by a handful of her grandchildren.

“We cannot find any justification for these killings,” said Mustafa Qadri, Amnesty International’s Pakistan Researcher. “There are genuine threats to the U.S. and its allies in the region, and drone strikes may be lawful in some circumstances. But it is hard to believe that a group of laborers, or a grandmother surrounded by her grandchildren, were endangering anyone at all, let alone posing an imminent threat to the United States.”

Amnesty International also documented cases of so-called “rescuer attacks” in which those who ran to the aid of the victims of an initial drone strike were themselves targeted in a follow-on attack. In a July 2012 case, 18 laborers, including 14-year-old Saleh Khan, were killed in multiple strikes on an impoverished village close to the border with Afghanistan as they were about to enjoy an evening meal at the end of a long day of work. Witnesses described a macabre scene of body parts and blood, panic and terror, as U.S. drones continued to hover overhead.

In addition to the threat of U.S. drone strikes, people in North Waziristan are frequently caught between attacks by armed groups and Pakistan’s armed forces. Al-Qa’ida-linked groups have killed dozens of local villagers they accused of being spies for U.S. drone strikes.

In the 97 page Human Rights Watch report (pdf), the focus was on drone strikes in Yemen between 2009 and 2013:

Two of the attacks killed civilians indiscriminately in clear violation of the laws of war; the others may have targeted people who were not legitimate military objectives or caused disproportionate civilian deaths.

“The US says it is taking all possible precautions during targeted killings, but it has unlawfully killed civilians and struck questionable military targets in Yemen,” said Letta Tayler, senior terrorism and counterterrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch and the author of the report. “Yemenis told us that these strikes make them fear the US as much as they fear Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”

As with the unfettered surveillance program, this must be brought out of the shadows and a full accounting of the hundreds of civilians killed. Those responsible for their deaths must be held accountable and brought to justice.

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting thea Pundits”.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Marcy Wheeler: After General Alexander, Obama should split the NSA to make us all safer

The NSA’s aggressive pursuit of Big Data has not only invaded our privacy, but also left us more vulnerable to cyber attack

The NSA is one of its own biggest adversaries in its fight to keep America safe from cyber attacks. To fight this considerable adversary, the president should use the replacement of NSA Director Keith Alexander and his deputy, John Inglis, as an opportunity to split off NSA’s defensive function and rebuild necessary trust.

Commentators have long recognized the NSA had two conflicting missions: one to defend key American networks, and one to collect intelligence on our adversaries. [..]

So long as the NSA prioritizes exploiting data that should be shared for the defense of the country, the agency will be one of America’s most formidable adversaries in the effort to keep the US safe from cyber attacks.

Moira Herbst: Obamacare website woes: another sign of out-of-control private contractors

The Obama team outsourced Healthcare.gov to big corporations that rang up large bills without delivering what they promised

Government outsourcing to private contractors has exploded in the past few decades. Taxpayers funnel hundreds of billions of dollars a year into the chosen companies’ pockets, about $80bn of which goes to tech companies. We’ve reached a stage of knee-jerk outsourcing of everything from intelligence and military work to burger flipping in federal building cafeterias, and it’s damaging in multiple levels. [..]

Fortunately, then, there are alternatives to outsourcing public functions to big corporations padding their profits at taxpayers’ collective expense, and it is time we used them.

Naureen Shah: Time for the truth about ‘targeted’ killings and US drones’ civilian victims

The Obama administration is like a reckless hit-and-run driver. Congress must not let John Brennan’s CIA get away with murder

It is time to demand that the US government, and President Obama in particular, tell the whole truth about the US drone program: not just the claimed successes, but the human costs of its failures. Especially over the last two years, journalists and human rights groups have gathered credible documentation of civilian deaths from drone strikes, suggesting that Mamana Bibi’s death is not an isolated incident. Amnesty International released a report Tuesday raising serious concerns about several recent drone strikes that appear to have killed civilians outside the bounds of the law.

The US government has never committed to investigating these cases. It has never even acknowledged responsibility for most of these strikes.

Laura Finley: In Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples

Last I heard, contracts negotiated between two consenting and capable parties are supposed to be binding, with repercussions if one party violates what has been agreed upon and codified into a legal document. That is, of course, unless it is the state entering into such agreements with indigenous peoples. Then these legal documents are little more than lip-service, or so it seems, based on the actions of the U.S., Canadian, and other governments who have and continued to trample the rights of indigenous peoples with impunity. Instead of being held accountable to the legally binding agreements they have signed, these governments continue to deprive indigenous peoples of their land, their livelihoods, and their cultures. Worse yet, they have the gall to point the finger at indigenous peoples and their allies who resist this continued destruction of their land and resources, calling them the criminals. [..]

Indigenous people and their supporters have not and will not be silent about these issues. Groups like Idle No More have organized, taken to the streets, and used traditional indigenous dance and culture as well as teach-ins and other nonviolent direct action to organize communities to speak out about the repressive policies. I was fortunate to hear from representatives from Idle No More recently and to participate in one of their rallies. To call it a humbling experience is an understatement.

Margaret Kimberly: Food Stamp Corporate Welfare

“Discussions about government spending are inherently bogus because the elephant in the room, big business, is absent.”

The federal and state governments operate under a system which is of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. Ordinary governmental functions which could easily be carried out with public money are instead privatized, depriving the public sector of revenue and jobs and making the neediest citizens unnecessarily dependent on the private sector. Governmental largesse on behalf of big business is focused primarily on poor people, the group most at the mercy of the system. Corporations collect child support payments and then imprison the poor people who can’t pay. While imprisoned, another corporation provides what passes for medical care. The crime is a perfect one.

When the Republicans demanded cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps, the debate revolved around human need versus the call for fiscal austerity. Scarcely anyone mentioned that JPMorgan Chase, Xerox and eFunds Corporation make millions of dollars off of this system meant to help the poor.

Jill Richardson: Meat So Cheap You Could Die

Even under normal conditions, as the latest tainted chicken scare illustrates, we’re giving food safety short shrift.

Thanks to the shutdown, the government is doing less to protect Americans from foodborne pathogens and deal with the aftermath of outbreaks.

The timing couldn’t be worse.

Ten days after the shutdown began, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 317 people in 20 states and Puerto Rico had confirmed cases of salmonella from Foster Farms chicken. Although 42 percent of them had to be hospitalized, thankfully none had died by that point.

The CDC had to bring 30 furloughed employees in its foodborne division back to work to cope with the Foster Farms situation. The Food and Drug Administration has furloughed the majority of its 1,602 investigators.

But even under normal conditions, as the latest tainted chicken scare illustrates, food safety gets short shrift.

NSA Busted for Spying on Other Countries For Profit

The revelation that the NSA was using its hoovering of data from other countries broke in August with the Der Spiegel report that the NSA had bugged the UN Headquarters in New York City, as well as,  European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In early September, a week before the UN General Assembly meeting in NYC, Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, cancelled her visit in Washington with President Barack Obama over the NSA’s spying on her, her inner circle of top aides and Brazil’s largest company, the oil giant Petrobras.

Now, this week its Mexico and France and its not about keeping us safe, its about industrial espionage:

In France, grabbed the data of over 70,000 phone calls:

Le Monde said the documents gave grounds to think the NSA targeted not only people suspected of being involved in terrorism but also high-profile individuals from the world of business or politics. [..]

French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault [said]  “I am deeply shocked…. It’s incredible that an allied country like the United States at this point goes as far as spying on private communications that have no strategic justification, no justification on the basis of national defence,” he told journalists in Copenhagen.

Mexico:

   The NSA has been systematically eavesdropping on the Mexican government for years. [..]

   In the space of a single year, according to the internal documents, this operation produced 260 classified reports that allowed US politicians to conduct successful talks on political issues and to plan international investments.

As has been revealed this summer, the NSA was recently revealed to have been spying on Brazil’s largest oil company. We now know they were also spying on the biggest financial payments systems such as VISA and Swift and on the on Chinese technology company Huawei.

One of the slides leaked by Edward Snowden from from a 2012 NSA presentation explained “economic” was one of the main justifications for spying.

The NSA would also like to keep better tabs on Wall Street under the guise of protecting it:

Drawing an analogy to how the military detects an incoming missile with radar and other sensors, (General Keith) Alexander imagined the NSA being able to spot “a cyberpacket that’s about to destroy Wall Street.” In an ideal world, he said, the agency would be getting real-time information from the banks themselves, as well as from the NSA’s traditional channels of intelligence, and have the power to take action before a cyberattack caused major damage.

Wall Street saw through Alexander’s “collect it all” ploy and quickly labeled it “wild:”

His proposed solution: Private companies should give the government access to their networks so it could screen out the harmful software. The NSA chief was offering to serve as an all-knowing virus-protection service, but at the cost, industry officials felt, of an unprecedented intrusion into the financial institutions’ databases.

The group of financial industry officials, sitting around a table at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, were stunned, immediately grasping the privacy implications of what Alexander was politely but urgently suggesting. As a group, they demurred.

“He’s an impressive person,” the participant said, recalling the group’s collective reaction to Alexander. “You feel very comfortable with him. He instills a high degree of trust.”

But he was proposing something they thought was high-risk.

“Folks in the room looked at each other like, ‘Wow. That’s kind of wild.’ ”

DSWRight at FDL News Desk duly notes that the US government has been doing what it has prosecuted others for doing under  the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the same law that was used to harass Aaron Swartz:

The hypocrisy is epic and disgusting. The NSA has disgraced and embarrassed the American people at home and abroad.

The rampant criminality and antisocial behavior of America’s intelligence community has not only diminished American rule of law at home, but is leading to increasing friction internationally with our allies. It is well past time for us to reexamine the power of the NSA and friends.

It is well past time the NSA was stopped before it shreds what remains of US credibility in the international and business community

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting thea Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

"More Paint, Sir" Banksy photo c23cf506_o_zps8c8f3ab0.pngChris Hedges: Let’s Get This Class War Started

“The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.”

The exchange, although it never actually took place, sums up a wisdom Fitzgerald had that eluded Hemingway. The rich are different. The cocoon of wealth and privilege permits the rich to turn those around them into compliant workers, hangers-on, servants, flatterers and sycophants. Wealth breeds, as Fitzgerald illustrated in “The Great Gatsby” and his short story “The Rich Boy,” a class of people for whom human beings are disposable commodities. Colleagues, associates, employees, kitchen staff, servants, gardeners, tutors, personal trainers, even friends and family, bend to the whims of the wealthy or disappear. Once oligarchs achieve unchecked economic and political power, as they have in the United States, the citizens too become disposable. [..]

“There are only two or three human stories,” Willa Cather wrote, “and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”

The seesaw of history has thrust the oligarchs once again into the sky. We sit humiliated and broken on the ground. It is an old battle. It has been fought over and over in human history. We never seem to learn. It is time to grab our pitchforks.

Graphic by Banksey

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Road from Here: What About Medicare and Social Security?

As the Bob Dylan song says: “Things should start to get interesting right about now.” You may think they’re already interesting – what with government closings, threats of a debt default, and extremist rhetoric under the Capitol Dome – but chances are we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

In twelve weeks or so our new system of government-by-crisis will resume its regularly scheduled programming: more threats, more confrontations, and even more extreme rhetoric.

There are only a few ways this could play out, and most of them involve cuts to Medicare and Social Security. The ones which don’t probably involve either A) catastrophic gridlock or B) a mobilized citizenry.

Your personal level of optimism probably correlates closely to whether you think A or B is more likely.

Walter Pincus: Fineprint: A new approach for Israel?

It’s time for Israel to stop making military threats and to propose an imaginative diplomatic move – risky as it may seem – to help ease nuclear tensions in the Middle East.

It can start by acknowledging its own nuclear weapons program.

It has accused Iran of seeking the capability to produce nuclear weapons, when for years Israel has been believed to possess hundreds of nuclear bombs and missiles, along with multiple delivery systems. It continues to insist it doesn’t have them.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders continue to accuse Tehran of deceit in describing its nuclear program as peaceful.

Perhaps Netanyahu sees Iran following the path Israel took 50 years ago when it’s known that his country joined the relatively small nuclear weapons club.

Dylan Ratigan: Forming the Renaissance Preparation Committee

As we suffer in a paradigm where those who nominate dictate, our election finance system (juiced by less than one half of one percent of all Americans dispersing funds from a flawed banking system based on a monkey-wrenched housing and tax code) sprouts rotten fruit such as closed primaries and defective districting that perpetuate what I have longed defined by three nasty syllables — extraction.

With all due respect to the reform-minded types, we need to come to grips with the fact that we are not fixing an old engine. We are preparing for a renaissance, and our metaphors should reflect this reality in order to guide our actions.

How do we look past the debate on debt and taxes to focus on distributed electoral finance, open primaries and banking and tax reform?

Or, to crib a little Thoreau, how do we hack at the roots instead of the branches of our illness?

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus — Campaign Cash

If you want to see how grossly money can distort democracy, just go to the state of Virginia, where there are no limits on how big a check can be written for statewide office. Groups and individuals from outside the Old Dominion are taking full advantage, pouring millions into a governor’s race they see as a dry run for the tactics they’ll use in the 2014 midterms and the 2016 presidential race — sort of the way the Spanish civil war turned out to be a testing ground for many of the deadly weapons of World War II.

Billionaires like environmentalist Tom Steyer on the left and the Koch Brothers on the right are placing their bets, but as they say at the track, the horses they’re backing are just a couple of hay burners. Once the home of Washington and Jefferson, James Madison and Patrick Henry, Virginia now has a choice between two mediocrities slavishly devoted to their wealthy contributors.

William Astore: ‘Shock Doctrine’ Americana: Endless War as the Ultimate Business Model

Disaster Capitalism on the battlefield and in the boardroom

There is a new normal in America: our government may shut down, but our wars continue.  Congress may not be able to pass a budget, but the U.S. military can still launch commando raids in Libya and Somalia, the Afghan War can still be prosecuted, Italy can be garrisoned by American troops (putting the “empire” back in Rome), Africa can be used as an imperial playground (as in the late nineteenth century “scramble for Africa,” but with the U.S. and China doing the scrambling this time around), and the military-industrial complex can still dominate the world’s arms trade.

In the halls of Congress and the Pentagon, it’s business as usual, if your definition of “business” is the power and profits you get from constantly preparing for and prosecuting wars around the world.  “War is a racket,” General Smedley Butler famously declared in 1935, and even now it’s hard to disagree with a man who had two Congressional Medals of Honor to his credit and was intimately familiar with American imperialism.

 

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting thea Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: Lousy Medicaid Arguments

[..]Last year’s Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act did strike down one provision, the one that would have forced all states to accept an expansion of Medicaid, the already-existing program of health insurance for the poor. States are now free to reject that expansion. Yet how can states justify turning down a federal offer to insure thousands of their citizens, one that would cost them nothing in the first year and only trivial amounts later? Sheer spite – the desire to sabotage anything with President Obama’s name on it – is the real reason, but doesn’t sound too good. So they need intellectual cover.

Enter the same experts, more or less, who warned about rate shock, to declare that Medicaid actually hurts its recipients. Their evidence? Medicaid patients tend to be sicker than the uninsured, and slower to recover from surgery.  [..]

And the reliance on such arguments is itself deeply revealing, because it illustrates the right’s intellectual decline. I mean, this is the best argument their so-called experts can come up with for their policy priorities?

Meanwhile, many states are still planning to reject the Medicaid expansion, denying essential health care to millions of needy Americans. And they have no good excuse for this act of cruelty.

Robert Kuttner: Billionaires Against Social Security

America’s very rich keep trying to start a movement among college students to blame senior citizens for the sorry state of the economy that kids will inherit. Specifically, the billionaires keep trying to scapegoat Social Security.

This is part of the public relations effort to create a “grand bargain” to cut America’s (fast-declining) budget deficit. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation has spent about a billion dollars of Peterson’s own money to create faux movements to get students to take up this unlikely cause.

The latest of the billionaires to try this gambit is Stanley Druckenmiller, net worth estimated at $2.9 billion, former head of the hedge fund Duquesne Capital. Druckenmiller’s personal campus crusade has been the subject of two fawning profiles, one by Tom Friedman in Wednesday’s Times, the other by James Freeman in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.

Druckenmiller’s campus crusade is based on such preposterous economics that I hereby challenge him to a college debate or series of debates.

Dean Baker: Post Granny Bashers Are Whining for J.P. Morgan

You’ve got to love those Washington Post folks. They continuously use both their news and editorial sections to push for cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and disability insurance, running roughshod over journalistic standards and data. But when it comes to the Wall Street boys, they just can’t help but to tear at our heart strings.

Last week the Post ran an editorial bemoaning the “political persecution” of J.P. Morgan. It complained that the government was pursuing a civil case against J.P. Morgan for misrepresenting mortgage backed securities it sold to investors during the housing bubble years:

Yet roughly 70 percent of the securities at issue were concocted not by JPMorgan but by two institutions, Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, that it acquired in 2008.

There are two points worth making on this. First, if 70 percent of the securities came from Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, then 30 percent came from J.P. Morgan. This means that it could have been involved in misrepresenting tens of billions of dollars in mortgage backed securities sold to investors. We have young men sitting in jail for stealing cars worth a few thousand dollars, but the Post thinks that Wall Street bankers should get a pass on fraudulently passing off tens of billions in bad mortgage backed securities.

Jared Bernstein: What’s Wrong With America?

Reflecting on the recent shutdown/debt ceiling debacle, the resolution of which is only a few months’ respite until the same self-imposed deadlines reappear, you’ve got to wonder: what’s wrong with America? [..]

Imagine a platform based not on deficit reduction but on the realization that lots more people need jobs that pay living wages, which means higher minimum wages, work supports, manufacturing/trade policy, full employment fiscal and monetary policy, direct job creation, and work sharing. BTW, that’s not an expensive agenda (the only new cost would be direct job creation, and I’ve got a pretty cheap model in mind; good fiscal policy is a cyclical cost — not saying it pays for itself, but in terms of lost output, it’s expensive not to do it).

OK, enough blue-skying on a beautiful blue-sky, autumn day. All I’m saying is: I can easily see why the world is deeply nervous about where America is and where we’re headed. But I’m not convinced our electorate is so polarized that we can’t change course. We’ve just got to give people a better choice.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Hope that governance will return to Washington

“Blessed are they who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed.”

It was the early 20th-century socialist Eugene V. Debs who pointed to the utility of this extra Beatitude. You don’t have to be a lefty to appreciate its relevance to our politics after the shutdown disaster.

Cynicism about the political future is a default position with a great deal of evidence behind it. We seem incapable of reaching compromises or even finding ways to differ productively. Even elections don’t seem to settle things.

Against this grain, I suggest that we allow ourselves a margin of hope in the wake of the decisive defeat of the extremists who closed down the government to accomplish absolutely nothing. It is a hope tempered by humility. Giant leaps ahead aren’t in the cards. But some important things changed for the better because of this battle.

Joe Conason: Peterson Study: Tea Party Extremism Cost Millions of Jobs, Risks Millions More

If Americans learn anything from this month’s shutdown-and-debt-ceiling debacle, they ought to realize that political extremism brings real costs-denominated in dollars and jobs, as well as national cohesion and prestige-and that those costs are not small. As long as the tea party faction continues to wield its malign influence over the Republican leadership in Congress, the threat of further and even worse damage will not subside. [..]

Only a dwindling fraction of voters is still mesmerized by such demagogic nonsense, but their anger intimidates enough Republicans to ensure that Cruz and company can seek to sabotage the economy again-and they will. So it is vital for everyone to understand what these vandals have inflicted on us already.

The Doomsday Debt Ceiling

The last imbroglio over raising the debt ceiling may be over for the moment but the threat is still hanging on the horizon. Its use as a bargaining tool by the minority to circumvent laws they don’t like and elections they lost is an extremely dangerous tactic that effects not just the American economy but could bring down the global economy and irreparably harm the value of the dollar and America’s reputation of being a good investment. Even the financial and business sectors have called the debt ceiling toxic to economic health. The CEO of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon, when asked about the consequences of not raising the debt ceiling responded, “you don’t want to know.” Martin Wolf, the chief economic commentator at The Financial Times called the debt ceiling law a “doomsday device” that should be repealed. In simple terms he explained why it is too dangerous to use:

The first is constitutional. In a recent article, Neil Buchanan of The George Washington University and Michael Dorf of Cornell (pdf) argue that a binding debt ceiling would create a “trilemma” for the president: “Ignore the debt ceiling and unilaterally issue new bonds, thus usurping Congress’s borrowing power; unilaterally raise taxes, thus usurping Congress’s taxing power; or unilaterally cut spending, thus usurping Congress’s spending power.” Thus, a binding debt ceiling would force the president to violate his obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed”. The authors conclude that the president should choose the “least unconstitutional” course and ignore the debt ceiling. But, inevitably, whatever the president did would create a constitutional crisis. No responsible Congress would seek to put the president in that position.

The second reason why the debt ceiling is so dangerous is that the administration could not obey it in a non-destructive way. At some point between October 17 and the end of the month, the administration would lack the money to pay its bills. All choices would be dire.

Mr. Wolf explains that the claims of “prioritisation” by the Treasury Department to pick and choose which bills to pay would still be a default (pdf). Mostly, it is not possible since Treasury uses two different computer systems to pay its foreign and domestic bills. The states that the economics effect of choosing which to pay and which to allow to default would effect the Treasury bonds aming them a risky investment. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank heads meeting in Washington last week issued warnings of the grave dangers to the global economy.

In an interview with Bill Moyers’, Mr. Wolf gives his analysis of the debt ceiling crisis.



Transcript can be read here

Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

Punting the Punditsis an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

Up with Steve Kornacki: Steve’s guests this Sunday are msnbc.com’s Dafna Lizner; April Ryan with American Urban Radio Networks; BuzzFeed.com‘s Evan McMorris-Santoro ; Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, fellow at the Center for Politics at the LBJ School of Public Policy at the University of Texas ; NPR’s sports reporter Mike Pesca; historian Sean Wilentz; and msnbc’s Krystal Ball.

This Week with George Stephanopolis: Guests on “This Week” are House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi; Texas Sen. Ted Cruz; and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

The roundtable tackles all the week’s politics, including what comes next in the debate over the budget, with Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL); ABC news political analyst Matthew Dowd; and New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA); Se. Lindsey Graham (R-SC); and the top economist for Moody’s Analytics, Mark Zandi.

His panel guests are Michael Gerson of the Washington Post; Stuart Rothenberg, editor and publisher of the Rothenberg Political Report; and Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: The guests on this Sunday’s MTP are Treasury Secretary Jack Lew; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY); Tom Coburn (R-OK); and Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Shiller.

The roundtable guests are New York Times Columnist David Brooks; Washington Post Columnist E.J. Dionne; host of CNBC’s “Closing Bell,” Maria Bartiromo; and NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests are Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

Her panel guests are CNN Political Commentators, Democratic strategist Donna Brazile; Republican strategist Alex Castellanos and The New Yorker‘s Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza.

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting thea Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

New York Times Editorial: Continuing Salmonella Outbreaks

Months after salmonella-contaminated chicken distributed by a California company sickened people, the dangerous food is still being sold around the country. This disturbing situation is the result of weak federal regulatory powers and the company’s irresponsibility. [..]

Aaron Lavallee, a spokesman for F.S.I.S., said that under statutes and case law, the agency cannot compel a recall in the Foster Farms case with the current evidence. Congress should hold hearings to determine if the Agriculture Department and its food safety service need more power to protect the public from potentially serious harm.

Charles Pierce: The Reign Of Morons: The Presidenting

Was it just me, or was that as pissed-off as we’re likely to see the president in public? Oh, he was still maddeningly vague about who really was behind the Reign Of Morons, all that talk about “the other side,” without using the words, “Republicans,” “conservatives,” or “raving nutballs,” and all that talk about the dangers of “the extremes,’ as though Bernie Sanders was as relevant to the events of the past two weeks as Ted Cruz was. I resemble that remark, sir, and my seconds will be calling on you. And what was that crack conflating “bloggers” with “radio talking-heads” I resemble that remark, sir, and my seconds will be calling on you.

More important, he’s still arguing for an economic compromise in the context of continuing austerity.  He talked about tax reform without tax increases. He talked about jobs without mentioning stimulus. And what he said about “entitlements” sent a cold chill down my spine since it was exactly what Paul Ryan would say. Which is what happens when you conclude that ” creating a budget” is not an “ideological exercise.” [..]

Nevertheless, the president made it plain that, if “the other side” wants to deal, it’s up to them to wring the crazy out of their rag in one quick hurry.

Ralph Nader: The Democrats Can’t Defend the Country From the Retrograde GOP

The Congress, that polls show the American people would like to replace in its entirety, has “kicked the can down the road” again, putting off the government shutdown until January 15 and another debt ceiling showdown until February 7. [..]

There is another story about how all this gridlock came to be, fronted by the question: “Why didn’t the Democrats landslide the cruelest, most ignorant, big-business-indentured Republican Party in its history during the 2010 and 2012 Congressional elections? (See “The Do Nothing Congress: A Record of Extremism and Partisanship”)

There are a number of answers to this fundamental political question. First and most obvious is that the Democrats are dialing for the same commercial campaign dollars, which beyond the baggage of quid pro quomoney, detours the party away from concentrating on their constituents’ needs, in a contrasting manner with the GOP.

Mark Gongloff: 4 Ways The Shutdown Deal Helps The Tea Party, Hurts Everyone Else

With the government back open and the hellstorm of a U.S. debt default delayed, you’re probably feeling pretty good about things, right? Like maybe we’ve thwarted the Tea Party’s quest to destroy the U.S. economy? Sadly, no.

Although House Republicans seem to have failed miserably to ransom the economy over Obamacare or “spending” or “disrespect” or whatever the last three weeks of idiocy and terror were about, they actually won, Bloomberg Businessweek points out in its latest cover story. The deal Congress struck to get the government back to work and raise the debt ceiling maintains a Tea Party pogrom happening since at least 2010, slashing spending at the fastest rate since the end of World War II, according to Businessweek. Rather than helping the economy, the latest debt deal is another disaster for it in four very specific ways: [..]

Dylan Ratigan: Those Who Nominate Dictate

Power, whether in an electoral system or a corporate boardroom, originates with the people who control the nomination of candidates — not with those who “vote” after this process is complete.

This is why the best-run companies consider a wide variety of potential nominees and include as many people as they can in the nomination process. This creates the highest possibility of hiring the best candidates. [..]

The extraordinary power of those who control the nominating process is not lost on power-hungry corporate board members. Why else would Carl Icahn risk billions to simply acquire board seats in hopes of introducing his nominees?

This strategy is definitely not lost on those who finance and nominate our political aspirants.

Henry A. Giroux: The Ghost of Authoritarianism in the Age of the Shutdown

In the aftermath of the reign of Nazi terror in the 1940s, the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote:

   National Socialism lives on, and even today we still do not know whether it is merely the ghost of what was so monstrous that it lingers on after its own death, or whether it has not yet died at all, whether the willingness to commit the unspeakable survives in people as well as in the conditions that enclose them.

Adorno’s words are as relevant today as they were when he first wrote them. The threat of authoritarianism to citizen-based democracy is alive and well in the United States, and its presence can be felt in the historical conditions leading up to the partial government shutdown and the refusal on the part of the new extremists to raise the debt ceiling. Adorno believed that while the specific features and horrors of mid-century fascism such as the concentration camps and the control of governments by a political elite and the gestapo would not be reproduced in the same way, democracy as a political ideal and as a working proposition would be under assault once again by new anti-democratic forces all too willing to impose totalitarian systems on their adversaries.

Homeland Security Nominee an Assassination Apologist

A high up administration official, speaking anonymously, confirmed rumors that former Defense Department general counsel, Jeh Johnson, is President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Janet Napolitano at the Department of Homeland Security. Secretary Napolitano stepped down in August to become president of the University of California.

In an article at Washington’s blog that outlines Johnson’s career at DoD, it is not surprising that as the top Pentagon lawyer Johnson was the lead apologist for the endless war on terror and the abuses of the Obama administration, including arguing for the justification of targeted assassinations including American citizens, as reported by the Associated Press in 2011.

U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets when they take up arms with al-Qaida, top national security lawyers in the Obama administration said Thursday.

***

The government lawyers, CIA counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson … said U.S. citizens do not have immunity when they are at war with the United States.

Johnson said only the executive branch, not the courts, is equipped to make military battlefield targeting decisions about who qualifies as an enemy.

In a speech at Yale Law School in 2012, Johnson said

Belligerents who also happen to be U.S. citizens do not enjoy immunity where non-citizen belligerents are valid military objectives.

Washington Blog also noted a major concern about Johnson’s Yale speech:

[..] Johnson invoked a lawsuit filed by Mr. Awlaki’s father before the killing that had sought an injunction against targeting his son, citing with approval a district judge’s decision to dismiss the case and saying that targeting decisions are not suited to court review because they must be made quickly and based on fast-evolving intelligence.

***

“The legal point is important because, in fact, over the last 10 years Al Qaeda has not only become more decentralized, it has also, for the most part, migrated away from Afghanistan to other places where it can find safe haven,” Mr. Johnson said.

This is particularly concerning since the U.S. wants to expand the assassination program to cover “ASSOCIATES of ASSOCIATES” of Al Qaeda … and blurs the lines between bad guys and average Americans.    This violates a little thing called the Fifth Amendment.

The Washington Post points out:

[A senior administration official] added that Johnson was “responsible for the prior legal review and approval of every military operation approved by the president and secretary of defense” during Obama’s first term.

That presumably includes supporting Al Qaeda in Libya.

This is the Wikipedia summation of Johnson’s tenure at the Defense Deaprtment that began in January of 2009:

As General Counsel of the Defense Department, Johnson was a major player in certain key priorities of the Obama Administration, and he is considered one of the legal architects of the U.S. military’s current counterterrorism policies. In 2009, Johnson was heavily involved in the reform of military commissions, and testified before Congress numerous times in support of the Military Commissions Act of 2009. [..]

In January 2011, Johnson provoked controversy when, according to a Department of Defense news story, he asserted in a speech at the Pentagon that deceased civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. would have supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite King’s outspoken opposition to American interventionism during his lifetime. Johnson argued that American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq were playing the role of the Good Samaritan, consistent with Martin Luther King Jr.’s beliefs, and that they were fighting to establish the peace for which Dr. King hoped. Jeremy Scahill called Johnson’s remarks “one of the most despicable attempts at revisionist use of Martin Luther King Jr. I’ve ever seen,” while Justin Elliott of Salon.com argued that based on Dr. King’s opposition to the Vietnam War, he would likely have opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the covert wars in Pakistan and Yemen. Cynthia Kouril has defended Johnson’s remarks, arguing in her blog that his speech has been misinterpreted.

In a February 2011, speech to the New York City Bar Association, Johnson “acknowledged the concerns raised” about the detention of alleged WikiLeaks source Private Bradley Manning and “stated that he had personally traveled to Quantico to conduct an investigation.” Human rights attorney and journalist Scott Horton wrote that “Johnson was remarkably unforthcoming about what he discovered and what conclusions he drew from his visit.

Johnson’s tenure as General Counsel was also notable for several high-profile speeches he gave on national security. In a speech he delivered at the Heritage Foundation in October 2011, Johnson warned against “over-militarizing” the U.S. government’s approach to counterterrorism: “There is risk in permitting and expecting the U.S. military to extend its powerful reach into areas traditionally reserved for civilian law enforcement in this country.”  

Finally, at the Oxford Union in England in November 2012, shortly before his resignation, Johnson delivered a widely noted address entitled “The conflict against al Qaeda and its affiliates: how will it end?” in which he predicted a “tipping point” at which the U.S. government’s efforts against al Qaeda should no longer be considered an armed conflict, but a more traditional law enforcement effort against individual terrorists.

Johnson’s speech in England was highly praised for the acknowledgment that the war on terror would eventually come to an end but, as Bob Deyfuss noted in his article at The Nation on Johnson’s nomination, actions speak louder that words:

Problem is, of course, until that as-yet-undefined moment when the “war” against Al Qaeda ends and the “counterterrorism effort against individuals” begins has not, it appears, yet occurred-at least in the eyes of the Obama administration. So, as a result, the White House continues to order drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere, launch Special Forces raids to kill or capture alleged Al Qaeda officials in Africa and Asia, and, in Afghanistan, insist on the continuing right of U.S. forces to seek and destroy Al Qaeda units in that country, even though experts say only about 75 members of the organization remain there. And, as long as the “war” continues, then everything that goes with it-extra-judicial detention of captured fighters, vast electronic surveillance of U.S. and foreign citizens by the National Security Agency and its partners, the Guantanamo prison, and the rest, continues too. All of that, in his Oxford speech, Johnson-as the then-DOD lawyer-was willing to support, justify and explain, even while admitting, as he did:

Some legal scholars and commentators in our country brand the detention by the military of members of al Qaeda as “indefinite detention without charges.” Some refer to targeted lethal force against known, identified individual members of al Qaeda as “extrajudicial killing.”

Indeed, The Wall Street Journal, in reporting Johnson’s 2012 speech, noted that in fact it was delivered primarily as a justification to the Europeans for Obama’s widely reviled counterterrorism policies:

Pentagon officials and legal experts also noted that Mr. Johnson chose to deliver the speech in the United Kingdom, in part to reassure European allies about the Obama administration’s legal justification for its continuing war on al Qaeda as well as other counterterrorism operations.

“It’s important that the DOD General Counsel has chosen to give this speech in Britain where many legal experts disagree with the concept that the U.S. is in a war with al Qaeda,” said John Bellinger, a former State Department legal adviser during the George W. Bush administration. “Most of the previous speeches by administration officials have been given inside the U.S.”

Anyone who thought that New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly was a terrible choice for head of DHS was just proven wrong. Don’t let Johnson;s support of the repeal of “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell” fool you, he makes Kelly look like a good guy.  

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting thea Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: The Damage Done

The government is reopening, and we didn’t default on our debt. Happy days are here again, right?

Well, no. For one thing, Congress has only voted in a temporary fix, and we could find ourselves going through it all over again in a few months. You may say that Republicans would be crazy to provoke another confrontation. But they were crazy to provoke this one, so why assume that they’ve learned their lesson?

Beyond that, however, it’s important to recognize that the economic damage from obstruction and extortion didn’t start when the G.O.P. shut down the government. On the contrary, it has been an ongoing process, dating back to the Republican takeover of the House in 2010. And the damage is large: Unemployment in America would be far lower than it is if the House majority hadn’t done so much to undermine recovery.

William K. Black: The Tea Party’s Tactical Brilliance and Strategic Incompetence

The Tea Party and its (non) think tanks have proven that they are tactically brilliant in manipulating the Republican Party, but strategically incompetent.  Today’s Senate Bill, which will be forced down the House Tea Party members’ throats, is the result of that strategic incompetence.  The Tea Party has learned that there are a few things many GOP elected officials are still unwilling to do.  Specifically, once the admittedly slow-witted House GOP leadership realized that the Tea Party had marched it to the far edge of a bridge to nowhere and the choices were (Option One: suicide) to keep marching off the bridge into the river (doing grave harm to the Nation and the world, ruining the GOP “brand,” returning the House to control by the Democratic Party, and threatening their own seats or (Option Two: truce) to stop and beg the Democrats for a truce – the GOP leadership would abandon the Tea Party and blame it for the humiliating rout. [..]

The Tea Party’s transcendent strategic failure however was picking Obamacare as the objective rather than the safety net.  I have been warning that Obama’s confidants have repeatedly revealed that Obama believes his best hopes of a positive “legacy” is what he calls the “Grand Bargain” (which I explained actually represented the “Grand Betrayal”).  The Grand Betrayal would raise some taxes, make materially deeper discretionary spending cuts in social programs, and make very large but opaque cuts in the safety net.  The Grand Betrayal would inflict triple damage on our Nation.  It would inflict even greater austerity, further weakening the recovery.  It would harm effective social programs at a time when they are most needed give the large increases in poverty.  It would harm the safety net directly and would serve to legitimize much deeper cuts in the future when the GOP controls the federal government.  Only a president that the GOP can portray as a “liberal” can make it safe for Republicans to attack the safety net and to work towards their great dream – privatizing Social Security so that Wall Street’s billionaires can get even wealthier by looting our retirement savings.

Obama has been eagerly seeking to inflict the Grand Betrayal since 2011.  The irony is that had he succeeded the resultant second recession would have made him a one-term president.  The Tea Party has prevented the deal by being unwilling to take “yes” for an answer from Obama.  The Tea Party could have skipped all the extortion and negotiated the Grand Betrayal with Obama.  The Republican leadership has attempted to negotiate the deal, but the Tea Party keeps blocking it.  Nevertheless, the Grand Betrayal is so available and so obviously in the political interests of the GOP and the Tea Party that the odds remain good that even the Tea Party will eventually say yes and give Obama the legacy he desires as the Democrat who led the unraveling of the safety net.  Obama may yet snatch defeat from victory and the Tea Party, when all else fails, may snatch victory from defeat by agreeing to the Grand Betrayal.

Dylan Ratigan: Debt and Taxes: Symptoms of Our Core Problem

The three charts below offer insight to the rottenness at the core of a banking and political system that relies entirely on the money of others–taxpayers, pensioners, those who pay insurance and, most disturbingly, future American earnings–to create short-term, private-sector income around housing and finance. With these profits, the banking system deals in politicians by offering political bulletproofing in the form of low-cost financing for housing using–you guessed it– other people’s money.

Until we deal with this problem, which is deeply entrenched in our election finance system, our government will continue to borrow and tax us to serve its short-term interests even as our lives become more expensive and offer less in return.

Robert Reich: What to Expect During the Cease-Fire

The war isn’t over. It’s only a cease-fire.

Republicans have agreed to fund the federal government through January 15 and extend the government’s ability to borrow (raise the debt ceiling) through Feb. 7. The two sides have committed themselves to negotiate a long-term budget plan by mid-December.

Regardless of what happens in the upcoming budget negotiations, it seems doubtful House Republicans will try to prevent the debt ceiling from being raised next February. Saner heads in the GOP will be able to point to the debacle Tea Partiers created this time around – the public’s anger, directed mostly at Republicans; upset among business leaders and Wall Street executives, who bankroll much of the GOP; and the sharply negative reaction of stock and bond markets, where the American middle class parks whatever savings it has.

Gary Younge: And so America’s skewed democracy lurches on toward its next crisis

A last-minute deal to raise the debt ceiling and end the shutdown solves nothing. US politics is stuck in chronic dysfunction

Because America is powerful, the world has to take notice of these self-inflicted crises. But because it has become so predictably dysfunctional and routinely reckless, they are difficult to take seriously or, at times, even fathom. To the rest of the world and much of America, this is yet another dangerous folly. The fact that the nation did not default should come as cold comfort. The fact that we are even talking about it defaulting is a problem.

This particular flirtation with fate was driven by a visceral opposition to the moderate provision of something most western nations take for granted: healthcare. The reforms they opposed had been been passed by the very body of which they are a member and had been been approved by the US supreme court, the guardian of the very constitution they claimed to be defending. For this, they started a fight they never had the numbers to win and carried on waging it long after it was clear they had lost.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Winning the Peace: The Post-Shutdown Challenge

It’s a major victory. The shutdown’s ending, the government isn’t defaulting (at least not yet), and Democrats didn’t yield in the face of threats and bullying. But what happens next could shape our fate for many years to come.

Congratulations are in order. The President vowed not to negotiate over the debt ceiling, and he was as good as his word. He stood up to the closet ideologues of the artificial “center,” the ones who unwisely argued that being the “adult in the room” meant surrendering to the tantrums of children. [..]

But the celebrations are premature. Yes, the public is furious at Republicans – Tea Partiers and plain-vanilla GOP extremists alike – for causing so much damage in pursuit of an ideology so far outside the political mainstream. Most Americans have rejected the things Republicans stand for: their values, their priorities, and their apocalyptic economic vision.

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