Congress

America's Drug Crisis: Brought to You by the CIA

dlindorff — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:49:14 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Next time you see a junkie sprawled at the curb in the downtown of
your nearest city, or read about someone who died of a heroin overdose,
just imagine a big yellow sign posted next to him or her saying: “Your
Federal Tax Dollars at Work.”

Kudos to the New York Times, and to reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, for their lead article
today reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan’s
stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in the
world’s major opium-producing nation, has for eight years been on the
CIA payroll.

Okay, the article was lacking much historical perspective (more on
that later), and the dead hand of top editors was evident in the overly
cautious tone (I loved the third paragraph, which stated that “The
financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence
agency and Mr. Karzai raises significant questions about America’s war
strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.” Well,
duh! It should be raising questions about why we are even in
Afghanistan, about who should be going to jail at the CIA, and about
how can the government explain this to the over 1000 soldiers and
Marines who have died supposedly helping to build a new Afghanistan).
But that said, the newspaper that helped cheerlead us into the
pointless and criminal Iraq invasion in 2003, and that prevented
journalist Risen from running his exposé of the Bush/Cheney
administration’s massive warrantless National Security Agency
electronic spying operation until after the 2004 presidential election,
this time gave a critically important story full timely play, and even,
appropriately, included a teaser in the same front-page story about
October being the most deadly month yet for the US in Afghanistan.

What the article didn’t mention at all is that there is a clear
historical pattern here. During the Vietnam War, the CIA, and its Air
America airline front-company, were neck deep in the Southeast Asian
heroin trade. At the time, it was Southeast Asia, not Afghanistan, that
was the leading producer and exporter of opium, mostly to the US, where
there was a resulting heroin epidemic.

A decade later, in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, as
the late investigative journalist Gary Webb so brilliantly documented
first in a series titled “Dark Alliance” in the San Jose Mercury
newspaper, and later in a book by that same name, the CIA was deeply
involved in the development of and smuggling of cocaine into the US,
which was soon engulfed in a crack cocaine epidemic—one that continues
to destroy African American and other poor communities across the
country. (The Times' role here was sordid—it and other leading papers, including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times—did
despicable hit pieces on Webb shamelessly trashing his work and his
career, and ultimately driving him to suicide, though his facts have
held up.) In this case, Webb showed that the Agency was actually using
the drugs as a way to fund arms, which it could use its own planes to
ferry down to the Contra forces it was backing to subvert the
Sandinista government in Nicaragua at a time Congress had barred the US
from supporting the Contras.

And now we have Afghanistan, once a sleepy backwater of the world
with little connection to drugs (the Taliban, before their overthrow by
US forces in 20001, had, according to the UN, virtually eliminated
opium production there), but now responsible for as much as 80 percent
of the world’s opium production—this at a time that the US effectively
finances and runs the place, with an occupying army that, together with
Afghan government forces that it controls, outnumbers the Taliban 12-1
according to a recent AP story.

The real story here is that where the US goes, the drug trade soon
follows, and the leading role in developing and nurturing that trade
appears to be played by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Your tax dollars at work.

The issue at this point should not be how many troops the US should
add to its total in Afghanistan. It shouldn’t even be over whether the
US should up the ante or scale back to a more limited goal of hunting
terrorists. It should be about how quickly the US can extricate its
forces from Afghanistan, how soon the Congress can start hearings into
corruption and drug pushing by the CIA, and how soon the Attorney
General's office will begin a grand jury probe into the CIA's drug
dealing.

Americans, who for years have supported a stupid, blundering and
ineffective “War on Drugs” in this country, and who mindlessly back
“zero-tolerance” policies towards drugs in schools and on the job,
should demand a “zero-tolerance” policy toward drugs and dealing with
drug pushers in government and foreign policy, including the CIA.

For years we have been fed the story that the Taliban are being
financed by their taxes on opium farmers. That may be partly true, but
recently we’ve been learning that it’s not the real story. Taliban
forces in Afghanistan, it turns out, have been heavily subsidized by
protection money paid to them by civilian aid organizations, including
even American government-funded aid programs, and even, reportedly, by
the military forces of some of America’s NATO allies (there is
currently a scandal in Italy concerning such payments by Italian
forces). But beyond that, the opium industry, far from being controlled
by the Taliban, has been, to a great extent, controlled by the very
warlords with which the US has allied itself, and, as the Times now reports, by Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s own brother.

Karzai, we are also told by Filkins, Mazzetti and Risen, was a key
player in producing hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots for his
brother’s election theft earlier this year. Left unsaid is whether the
CIA might have played a role in that scam too. In a country where
finding printing presses is sure to be difficult, and where
transporting bales of counterfeit ballots is risky, you have to wonder
whether an agency like the CIA, which has ready access to printers and
to helicopters, might have had a hand in keeping its assets in control
in Kabul.

Sure that’s idle speculation on my part, but when you learn that
America’s spook agency has been keeping not just Karzai, but lots of
other unsavory Afghani warlords, on its payroll, such speculation is
only logical.

The real attitude of the CIA here was best illustrated by an
anonymous quote in the Filkins, Mazzetti and Risen piece, where a
“former CIA officer with experience in Afghanistan,” explaining the
agency’s backing of Karzai, said, “Virtually every significant Afghan
figure has had brushes with the drug trade. If you are looking for
Mother Teresa, she doesn’t live in Afghanistan.”

“The end justifies the means” is America’s foreign policy and military motto, clearly.

The Times article exposing the CIA link to Afghanistan’s
drug-kingpin presidential brother should be the last straw for
Americans. President Obama’s “necessary” war in Afghanistan is nothing
but a sick joke.

The opium, and resulting heroin, that is flooding into Europe and
America thanks to the CIA’s active support of the industry and its
owners in Afghanistan are doing far more grave damage to our societies
than any turbaned terrorists armed with suicide bomb vests could hope
to inflict.

The Afghanistan War has to be ended now.

Let the prosecution of America’s government drug pushers begin.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative reporter.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

How do we fix Social Security/Medicare and the lack of Health Care for the general public?

jtbutler — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:35:52 -0400

September 12th, 2009

Everyone wants to fix the Social Security system, the Medicare system and provide Health Care for the general public. Hello, everyone is going at these issues from the wrong angle. What needs to be introduces is:

1. A law that stops the Senate and House of Reps from drawing such large salaries from the taxes us common folk pay. Yes they should be paid, but come one everyone, Social Security folk will not be getting their normal Cost of Living Increase for the next 2 or so years because the system is failing. But yet members of the Senate and House of Reps will still draw their huge salaries.

2. A law that says that once a Senator or House of Rep retires, the gravy train is done. Right now these people collect their pay for the rest of their lives with not exception. This is not right when we have millions of people that are living in poverty because there are no jobs. This is an issue of no money because the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer.

3. A law that says Senators and House of Reps has to pay into the Social Security System and collect the same amount as the rest of us common folk. After all right now they draw their full salary after leaving the job and never were made to pay into the system... How freaking backwards is this?

Well gee wiz, if Senators and House of Reps were forced to pay into the Social Security System and collect from it after they leave their jobs I would think that the Social Security System would be fixed in no time.

As far as Health Care for the General Public goes. I think the major issue is that when you pay for insurance you are covered for your health care. The insurance companies only pay a portion of the bill that is incurred. If you are an uninsured person you pay 100% of the cost of your health care. So dollar for dollar the poor person is getting hit with a full bill. I think that people that are paying cash/from their pocket should be getting the same deal that insurance companies make with Health Care Providers and Doctors. Then at least the poorer folk that are paying 100% would me more able to pay for their health care because they do not have to pay 100% of the bill.

My opinion is that if Elected Officials had to pay into the Social Security System like everyone else (and not be allowed to vote themselves a raise whenever they feel like it) and collect from it for their retirement instead of getting their full salary without ever paying into the system, the Social Security System would be fixed really quickly. Also, if uninsured people were given the same break that Insurance Companies get they would be able to afford Medical Care.

One other point I would like to make. We have lent millions upon millions of dollars to many countries that have never even attempted to pay us back. Why are we still helping these countries and giving to them when they already owe us? If I over borrow from the bank they will not allow me to borrow anymore until I pay it off... So why are we giving money to people whom on the most part do not even like the American People???

Thank you for reading my statements, it would be nice if the American people woke up and started telling the Government what to do instead of them doing whatever they feel like and totally ignoring the issues that face the general population of our great country.

Sincerely,

Joseph Butler

San Antonio, Tx

Judge Bybee and the Challenge of Removing a Stain on the Legal System

dlindorff — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:54:41 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In December 2001, an appellate judicial panel in the state of New
York ruled that Yonkers City Court Judge Edmund G. Fitzgerald had to
step down from his bench and leave his position following his
disbarment for allegedly “misusing” $9000 in a client’s account prior
to his election as a judge. In 2007, the North Carolina courts faced
something of a dilemma when state judge James Ethridge, who had been
disbarred the prior October by the North Carolina State Bar for
“swindling an older woman of her house and savings” as an attorney six
years earlier, refused to quit his judicial position. Under state law
in North Carolina, judges are required to be licensed lawyers, so Judge
Ethridge was barred from holding court or signing court orders, but he
continued to collect his salary. Only the state’s Judicial Standards
Commission, or the state legislature, through an impeachment, could
remove him from his job.

Judge Bybee, who sits on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in
Nevada, could eventually present the federal judicial system with a
similar dilemma. Bybee, prior to his short tenure as an Appellate Judge
which began in 2003, was assistant attorney general in the Department
of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, where he wrote a lengthy memo for
the White House justifying the use of torture techniques such as
waterboarding, sleep deprivation, body slamming and other measures on
captives in the Bush/Cheney so-called “War” on Terror.

It is now being reported that the Justice Department is about to
release a review the department’s ethics unit, the Office of
Professional Responsibility, which will report on that memo, as well as
other memos written by Bybee’s then colleagues in the Office of Legal
Counsel, John Yoo, now a professor of law at Berkeley University’s law
school, and Steven Bradbury, and that the report will recommend
disbarment for the three men. That would put the matter in the hands of
the states where each man is licensed to practice law—in Bybee’s case,
the state of Nevada. According to the New York Times, the 220-page
internal review of Bybee’s, Yoo’s and Bradbury’s actions as counsel to
the White House amounted to “serious lapses of judgment” that could
warrant reprimands or disbarment.

What sets Bybee apart from the other two men is that after his work
in the Bush/Cheney administration, he went on to become a federal judge
with a lifetime appointment. Furthermore, unlike North Carolina, and
many other states, there is no requirement that a federal judge have a
law degree or be a lawyer , much less be a licensed one. While every
judge on the federal bench is, in fact, a lawyer in good standing with
their state bar, technically they do not have to be.

Judges in many state courts can be removed from office by the
judicial conduct committees operated by those states’ supreme courts,
but federal judges can only be “disciplined” by the federal judicial
system’s office of judicial conduct, not removed from office. A
disciplined judge might be prevented from hearing cases or from signing
court orders, but removal from office, under the Constitution, requires
impeachment by a majority of the House of Representatives, and
conviction by a two-thirds vote of the US Senate.

At the same time, it would likely be a huge embarrassment to the
judicial system if Judge Bybee were to be disbarred for ethical lapses
and for what the forthcoming Justice Department investigation is
reportedly calling “serious lapses of judgment,” and then continued to
serve as a judge in one of the second highest courts in the land.

Prof. Deborah Rhode, director of the Center for the Legal
Profession at the Stanford University School of Law, commented, “I
would imaging that anything that would be enough to disbar you would be
enough to remove you from the bench,” when asked what the impact of a
disbarment of a judge would be in the federal courts.

Certainly, if Judge Bybee were to be disbarred by the Nevada court,
there would be mounting calls for his impeachment by Congress. It is
certainly possible too, that if Bybee didn’t simply resign at that
point, the House, heavily Democratic, could initiate impeachment
proceedings and that he would be impeached, since not only would he
have been disbarred and criticized strongly by the Justice Department
Office of Professional Responsibility, but his actual memo, released by
the Obama White House, has him offering legal cover for clear
violations of the US Criminal Code and the Geneva Conventions, to which
the US is a signatory.

Whether House prosecutors could convince all Senate Democrats, plus
independent Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and seven Republicans to reach
the required 67 votes needed to convict (assuming no abstentions), is
an open question.

Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson Law School in
San Diego, who is head of the National Lawyers Guild, notes that while
the Constitution says judges may only be removed from office by the
process of impeachment, it also says: “The Judges, both of the supreme
and inferior courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior.”

Bybee in his 2002 memo (actually largely written by his subordinate
at the time, John Yoo, but approved and signed by Bybee), tries to
argue that what the Geneva Conventions and the US Criminal Code define
as torture—namely “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,”—actually is
only “torture” if it is “equivalent in intensity to the pain
accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment
of bodily function, or even death,” a patently absurd interpretation
since it would be impossible to imaging “degrading treatment” rising to
that level of pain. Bybee’s memo went on to say that even if US
personnel did actually torture a captive, it would not be a violation
of the law or the conventions if the torturer didn’t have a “specific
intent” to cause pain. Going even further, he wrote that even if the
torturer had a specific intent to cause pain, “a showing that an
individual acted with a good faith belief that his conduct would not
produce a result that the law prohibits negates specific intent.”

As I wrote in an article on April 20 on my website ThisCantBeHappening.net,
Judge Bybee himself, in an opinion written in 2006, mercilessly mocked
this kind of legal sophism, saying: “The only thing we have to enforce
our judgments is the power of our words. When these words lose their
ordinary meaning—when they become so elastic that they may mean the
opposite of what they appear to mean—we cede our own right to be taken
seriously.” (Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1309 v. Laidlaw Transit Services, Inc.)

It seems clear that acting as a “mob attorney” for the White House,
artfully misinterpreting a criminal statute (Sections 2340-2340A of
title 18 of the United States Code implements the provisions of the
Geneva Conventions, making them an integral part of US law) outlawing
any form of torture in order to provide legal cover for criminal
behavior by American forces and the CIA towards captives in the “War”
on Terror would meet the definition “Bad Behavior,” warranting
impeachment.

Whether Democrats in Congress, who in recent years have
demonstrated an astonishing lack of courage and respect for the
Constitution, will rise to the occasion is another matter, especially
with a new Democratic president who has made it clear he is loath to
hold the prior administration to account for any of its crimes or
clearly unconstitutional behavior.
____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Free John Walker Lindh, Bush's and Cheney's First Torture Victim!

dlindorff — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:47:31 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Enough is enough. It’s time to free John Walker Lindh, poster boy
for George Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s and John Ashcroft’s “War on Terror,”
and quite likely first victim of these men’s secret campaign of torture.

Lindh is in the seventh year of a 20-year sentence for “carrying a
weapon” in Afghanistan and for “providing assistance” to an enemy of
the United States. The first charge is ridiculously minor (after all,
it’s what almost everyone in Texas does everyday). The second is
actually a violation of a law intended for use against US companies
that trade with proscribed countries on a government “no trade” list
like Cuba or North Korea. Ordinarily, violation results in a fine for
the executives involved.

As I wrote in an article in the Nation back in 2005 (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050214/lindorff),
Lindh was put away for so long on these minor charges not because he
was a traitor or terrorist, but because he was living proof, back at
the time of his trial in 2002, that the US had begun a program of
brutal torture in the so-called “War on Terror.”

Lindh, in fact, was never really an enemy of the US. Son of
middle-class white parents in suburban San Francisco, he had developed
an interest in Islam which, following his graduation from high school,
he decided to pursue by traveling to Pakistan. In 2001, still just 18,
he began studying at a madrassa, or religious school. There he learned
about the struggle of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan to free
that nation of the influence of warlords who had collaborated with a
brutal Soviet occupation. Attracted by what he saw as the nobility of
that struggle, and with a youthful sense of adventure, Lindh
volunteered. In August of 2001, at a time that Bush administration
officials were negotiating about a possible oil pipeline deal with
Afghanistan’s Taliban government, and talking about providing funds for
a program to get farmers to shift away from opium cultivation to more
useful cash crops—a time, that is, when the Taliban were not considered
America’s enemy—Lindh crossed the border and started training to be a
fighter.

A month later, of course, the World Trade Center in New York, and
the Pentagon in Washington, were struck, and the US launched a war
against both Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Lindh, who was
still just in training, found himself suddenly in the wilds of the
Hindu Kush, with American planes bombing and with US Special Forces
troops firing at him and his companions. Whether he wanted to be there
or not, he was in no position at that point to change sides. You don’t
just walk away from a group like the Taliban—especially if you are an
American to begin with, and you’re deep in the bush.

Eventually, a malnourished, dehydrated, and wounded (in the leg)
Lindh was taken prisoner along with a group of Taliban fighters by
American forces.

At that point, when the Americans discovered they had an American
amont their captives, Lindh’s situation worsened dramatically. Stripped
naked and duct-taped, blindfolded, to a gurney, he was then placed
inside an unheated metal shipping container. Left there for days in the
cold and dark, Lindh was removed once daily and interrogated. His
interrogators allegedly tortured him, as well as threatening him
repeatedly with death. His pleas to see an attorney were mocked, and
word that his parents had already arranged for representation was
withheld from him (a situation that led a government lawyer involved in
his case to protest and ultimately resign).

At some point during this abuse, Lindh caved in to his fears of
death at the hands of his captors and signed a “confession” to being a
traitor to America. At that point he was flown back to the US, where
Attorney General Ashcroft touted him as the “American Taliban,”
initially vowing to try him for treason (which carries a death
sentence).

What changed things dramatically, as I reported in 2005, was a
decision by Federal District Judge T.S.Ellis to permit Lindh and his
defense team—over strenuous government objections--to challenge that
confession letter by introducing evidence that Lindh had signed it will
being subjected to torture at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan. The judge
ruled that Lindh would be able to call witnesses from Guantanamo and
from among the soldiers where he had been held in Afghanistan.
Suddenly, the Justice Department, in the person of Michael Chertoff,
then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division and in charge
of terrorism prosecutions, offered a one-day-only, take-it-or-leave-it
a plea deal. Chertoff (acting with an alacrity that stands in marked
contrast to his sluggish response time several years later when faced,
as secretary of homeland security, with the Katrina disaster in New
Orleans) offered to drop the serious charges in return to a guilty plea
to the two minor charges, but only if—and this is the key—Lindh would
cancel the scheduled evidentiary hearing into torture. Under the
offered deal, Lindh would also have to sign a letter stating that he
had “not been intentionally mistreated” by his American captors, and
waiving any right to claim such mistreatment or torture any time in the
future. Lindh agreed, but following sentencing, Chertoff also added a
gag order, technically a “special administrative measure,” barring
Lindh from even talking about his experience for the duration of his
sentence.

It is now clear why Chertoff went to such hurried great lengths to
completely silence Lindh. His wasn’t just the first trial in the “War
on Terror.” Lindh was the first victim of the secret Bush/Cheney
torture program.

Now that we have the trail of memoranda that set that wretched
torture campaign in motion, it’s time for the Obama Justice Department
to free Lindh. If President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder
think Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens suffered from malicious prosecution and
were willing to drop charges against him, they certainly should toss
out the case against Lindh, who besides being innocent of the original
serious charges leveled against him, was a victim of war crimes
perpetrated by his own fellow Americans, and authorized by his own
government. His arrest, conviction and sentencing are a travesty of
justice, and perhaps, given that torture is a criminal offense in the
US Code, even constitute a crime of cover-up. He should be the first
witness in any official investigation by Congress or the attorney
general’s office into the origins of the Bush/Cheney torture campaign.

Free John Walker Lindh!
_______________
(Note: This article was offered to the Nation magazine, and
rejected. It was also offered to Salon magazine, which never responded.)
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

3.5 Trillion budget has now passed BOTH houses of congres!!!

seawolf1957 — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 01:29:33 -0400

HOUSE and SENATE have now BOTH passed the BUDGET...

FLASH

WASHINGTON POST

just off the press

Department of Homeland Lunacy

dlindorff — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:33:10 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

I am not a terrorist.

How can I prove this in these paranoid times? Easy. The New York
Department of Motor Vehicles took my $30 payment over the phone to
clear what they said was a record of my NY drivers license having once
been withdrawn, and informed the National Driver Register in Washington
that I’m a good guy deserving of a renewal of my Pennsylvania drivers
license.

Let me explain.

After 9-11, Congress and the Bush Department of Homeland Security
went into overdrive passing things like the USA PATRIOT Act, the
establishment of the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) to
monitor air passengers and to develop lists of people to harass at air
terminals, a network of black sites to detain and torture suspected
terrorists, and more recently the National Driver Register, a federal
data bank designed to link all drivers licenses and car registrations
to a central computer system, and thus ferret out would be terrorists
trying to create false identities courtesy of the state DMVs.

I, like uncounted tens of thousands of innocent Americans, ran
afoul of this latest catch-a-terrorist system as my Pennsylvania
drivers license, which I first obtained in 1997 when I moved from New
York to Pennsylvania, came up for a third renewal. Several months ahead
of my renewal date, I got a coldly worded and ominous letter from the
Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles saying my license could not
be renewed because the new federal data base was reporting that my New
York license had been “withdrawn” by the NY DMV.

When I called the Pennsylvania DMV to explain that my New York
license had never been withdrawn or suspended (it had to have been in
good order for me to have used it under the state’s reciprocity
agreement with neighboring New York to obtain my new Pennsylvania
license), and to ask what the problem might be, I was told that they
couldn’t tell me, because the federal report doesn’t say what the
problem is. Nor is there any way to contact or appeal to Washington.

My only recourse was to deal with the New York State DMV—probably one of the blackest of bureaucratic black holes known to man.

I called the number that the Pennsylvania DMV provided, and found
myself connected to a maddening automated system which had no options
that could respond to my problem, and that offered no way to reach a
human being. Finally, by calling the media relations office of the
Pennsylvania DMV and using my reporting credentials, I was able to get
someone who could at least check enough into the case with New York to
establish that the problem was that when I moved to Pennsylvania,
transferring my car registration from New York to Pennsylvania, New
York kept my car’s registration active in that state. (I don’t know
what I would have done had I not been a journalist.) Then, since I had
stopped paying for New York car insurance when I switched over to
Pennsylvania plates and Pennsylvania insurance, my New York insurer had
sent in word to the New York DMV saying my car no longer had insurance.

Never mind that my car was by then in Pennsylvania and properly
insured for months before the date that New York showed my car to have
become uninsured. Pennsylvania couldn’t do anything about it because
the federal law says they may not issue me a license as long as there
is a problem with my license in another state. There is no statute of
limitations on any of this, and no method of appeal of the federal
listing.

I called a number that was kindly provided by the media officer in
Pennsylvania, and got through to an actual person in the New York DMV.
She told me that the problem came up because when I moved to
Pennsylvania and shifted my plates over to my new state of residence, I
didn’t send my old license plate to New York. Never mind that there’s
no way I would have known I had to send that plate in. And never mind
that I did obtain a new title for the car in Pennsylvania, and that the
record of that title transfer is in the national computer system. Any
cop with a computer could find that out. Never mind. Eleven years after
the fact, New York still needed the plates.

Of course, I’d long since sold that car for junk and didn’t have
the plates. I didn’t even remember what the license number was.

The DMV woman in New York told me I could clear the whole thing up
for a $30 charge, which she could take care of with a credit card over
the phone.

Note that she had absolutely no way of identifying me, to know that
I wasn’t a terrorist just paying her $30 so I could get a dreaded
Pennsylvania drivers license to use as an ID for whatever nefarious
purposes I might have in mind. She just took down the credit card
number and bingo, I’m cleared to go. The New York DMV, happy with its
little act of extortion, is now notifying the National Driver Register
computer that I’m clear, and next week, Pennsylvania’s DMV will find my
record on the National Driver Register clean and will be ready to renew
my license.

This is the DMV and Homeland Security automotive equivalent of the
TSA rules that have now every flier taking off her or his shoes (even
baby’s’ booties!), and surrendering tubes of toothpaste and mouthwash
at airport security checkpoints.

A fundamental rule about rules should be that if there are records
being kept, and if actions are being taken on the basis of those
records, then there has to be a way for errors to be corrected by the
agency that is maintaining and disseminating those records and
by any agency that is acting on the basis of those records. But in the
case of America’s terrorism fetish, this rule is being violated
routinely.

The “no-fly” and the “let-fly-but-first-harass” lists maintained by
the TSA, which both reportedly now contain tens of thousands of names,
are used by the TSA at airport checkpoints, but developed not by the
TSA, but by the dozens of police and intelligence agencies of the
federal government—the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, the ATF, the State
Department, the FBI, etc., etc. If your name turns up on the TSA list,
and you end up getting strip searched every time you try to fly, the
TSA will tell you you’re on the list, but they won’t tell you who put
you there, and they won’t take you off either. That has to be done by
the agency that reported your name—the one they won’t identify to you.
It’s straight out of Kafka.

The National Driver Register is the same kind of thing. It collects
information about license “problems” from all of the state DMVs, and
disseminates that information widely to all the other states, but it
doesn’t provide any details about what your “problem” might be. It
could be anything from conviction of vehicular homicide or DWI to a
15-year old case of being late with a car insurance payment. In fact,
DMV officials in both PA and NY, before they had the details,
repeatedly referred to my case as a “crime” when no crime had ever been
committed. And although, once I had discovered the nature of my
particular “transgression,” even though the Pennsylvania DMV people
agreed that it was a silly reason to withhold my licence renewal, and
that in fact I had done nothing wrong and was already fully switched
over to a Pennsylvania licence and car registration by the time the New
York license was “withheld,” they said they were “powerless” to renew
my license because of the federal law.

Kafka again.

We are at the mercy of lunatics
____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Idiots and Bailouts

dlindorff — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:54:55 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

It’s a safe bet that within the next several months, Congress will
vote to bail out General Motors. It will be a colossal boondoggle
involving, probably, upwards of $50 billion when it’s through, and it
will fail in the end.

The reason is before our eyes. This bloated megacorporation is being run by idiots.

For years, as it became evident to everyone that oil prices were
going to soar because demand has been exceeding both production and
supply and will continue to do so, it has been obvious that to succeed,
a car company had to offer well-made cars that could demonstrate high
gas mileage. GM, perhaps more than any other company, ignored that
reality and has been paying the price, watching its share of the car
market wither.

Now the company, worth about what Starbucks used to be worth, its
stock now down to where it was in the depths of the Great Depression,
has bet the farm on a new car, the Volt, which it promises will, two
years from now, be able to go all of 40 miles purely on electric power.
It will have a motor too, and not a small one, but rather one the size
of what you get in a typical conventional Honda Civic—1.4 ltr. That
motor wouldn’t drive the car; rather it would keep charging the Volt’s
huge lithium-ion battery so the car could keep going for a few hundred
miles.

Wow.

The management wizards at GM obviously don’t do much driving. If
they did, and found themselves in typical commuter traffic, they’d see
that maybe 90% of the cars, or more, have only one person in them.
Occasionally, they’d see a passenger. On a typical 45-minute trip from
the burbs into Philadelphia at rush hour, I can count the number of
cars I see with three or more people in them on my fingers.

So why is GM making the Volt as a full-sized four or five-passenger
car? That’s not where the market for an electric car is. What is needed
is a two-seater little car.

Because GM is trying to make an electric family car, they’ve made
something so big that, if they are lucky, they’ll be able to get it to
40 miles on electric drive only, but at a cost in excess of $40,000 and
perhaps much higher, which will put it out of almost everyone’s reach.
The car is destined to be a bust.

And yet, because President-elect Obama will want to win Michigan
next election, and because Congressional Democrats don’t want to be
seen as ignoring the fate of GM’s workers, GM will be bailed out and
the Volt will be funded right through to its introduction and
subsequent disaster in the market.

I’m not opposed to the idea of government support of industry, but
that support has to involve government input or even control over
decision-making.

Maybe GM wouldn’t make much profit on a little electric commuter
car, but a little two-seater electric commuter car would have a huge
impact on reducing the output of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere,
particularly if efforts were made to increase solar and wind-generated
electricity. A small electric commuter car would also massively reduce
the amount of oil the US imports, making a major contribution to
reducing the nation’s trade deficit. Those are results that justify a
bailout.

Making an overpriced electric family car is not.

At this point, since the Democrats in Congress and the White House
are congenitally incapable of imagining a state-owned or partially
state-owned enterprise, it would be better to just let GM go under, and
maybe Ford too, if it comes to that (another stupid company). The
pieces could be sold off, and allowed to sink and swim on their own.
Maybe one of those smaller, more entrepreneurial fragments would see
the wisdom of developing what the public really needs.

The truth is that the entrepreneurs over at Tesla, a star-up in
California, have already made that car—a high-performance two-seater
commuter car that can go 200 miles on a charge and that doesn’t need an
auxiliary engine. Their problem is that small size and too little
capital have forced them to pimp it up into a high-priced luxury
show-off item for rich people costing $100,000. If they were to team up
with a GM spin-off—say Saturn—they could make a stripped-down version
of that baby and crank out 100,000 of them to start at a price ordinary
people could afford.

Meanwhile, regarding those poor autoworkers, they have a legitimate
complaint. While Republicans like to blame the auto industry’s problems
on them, saying they have demanded too much pay, and too much in
healthcare benefits, it’s not their fault that GM and Ford executives
have been stupid and greedy and short-sighted (besides, the high wages
and benefits that the United Auto Workers won over decades of bitter
struggle helped to set standards that raised the wages of all workers
across the nation). But let’s do the math. There are about 125,000
unionized hourly workers at the two companies. For a lousy $8.7
billion, every one of those people could receive a $70,000 buyout from
Congress. Double that if you want to give them two years to adjust and
find new work at an electric car plant or something else. That would
cost $17 billion, or less than half of what the doomed bailout of GM is
going to end up costing.

And of course, with the rest of us suffering from the massive
mismanagement of the nation’s economy by its corporate leaders and
their puppets in Washington, there’s no reason why our tax dollars
should be subsidizing those particular workers tat that high a level.
After all, companies are failing and will be failing all over the
place, without such largesse. Besides, if the bailout goes ahead, all
it will do is delay the time these workers will be out on the street
anyhow.

The point is, however, there are more cost-effective ways to help
out workers in failing businesses than to have the government simply
subsidize the continued operation of enterprises that have been
destroyed by management. In truth, all the talk in congress and in the
Obama camp about rescuing jobs is just a cover for bailouts that are
really aimed at rescuing managers and investors, not workers.

___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

We Need to Demand Hearings!

dlindorff — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:03:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

With the Bush Administration, the two leading presidential
candidates, and the Congressional leadership, as well as a phalanx of
Wall Street lobbyists all pushing hard for a massive transfer of
taxpayer money to the coffers of banks and investment banks, the
American people need to demand a halt to this bums' rush to a bailout.

We've seen what happens when Congress forgoes the time-tested
process of deliberative and investigative hearings and simply takes a
floor vote on a Bush Administration-backed measure. First there was the
October 18, 2001 resolution for use of military force against Al Qaeda
in Afghanistan. Because there were no hearings on that measure, its
loose, deliberately ambiguous wording has been used ever since by the
Bush/Cheney crew as authorization for their global so-called "War" on
Terror, including the claim that the president has the dictatorial
power ignore treaties, US law, and bills passed by the Congress.
Shortly thereafter, there was the Patriot Act, a compendium of
anti-Democratic measures that had failed to win passage in Congress
over the years which were cobbled together in the dead of night by
Bush/Cheney zealots and passed on a voice vote the next day by a
Congress too cowed to hold hearings on the measure. Then, in October
2002, there was the second authorization for use of military force
resolution, this time against Iraq, which has ended up miring the US in
a disastrous five-year-long war without end that has killed 4500
Americans, chewed up 40,000 more, and killed in excess of one million
innocent Iraqi civilians.

Had there been serious hearings on any of these three terrible
measures, there is a chance none of them would have passed, or that at
least, had they been passed, they would have been reworded to tie the
administration's hands. The first AUMF could have limited military
actions to attacking Al Qaeda. Period. The Patriot Act's constitutional
overrides could have been exposed early, and challenged. And the
administration's lies about the alleged threats posed by Iraq could
have been challenged in public by other witnesses, plus a clear
requirement could have been included that any attack on Iraq would need
UN authorization.

Now Congress is being pressured to pass an equally horrific bill
with no hearings. We know that 200 leading economists, including at
least three Nobel Laureates, one of them former World Bank economist
Joseph Stiglitz, are opposed to the bailout, saying throwing a trillion
dollars at Wall Street won't work and will be a waste of taxpayer money
or worse. We know that it fails to address the root problem--the
housing and mortgage crisis. We know that it could be a crippling blow
to the dollar. Yet without hearings to expose this giant scam, the only
ones getting through to members of Congress are Wall Street lobbyists,
their pockets stuffed with campaign cash.

Citizens can't even get past the Capitol switchboard, which is
jammed with angry callers trying to get through to their
representatives and senators.

The point that needs to be made is that there is no great urgency to
pass a bill. The administration's claim that the bottom will fall out
of the economy and that the country will be plunged into a depression
if the bill isn't passed immediately is nonsense. The Great Depression
took years to develop after the 1929 stock market crash.

The current market could collapse, and there'd be plenty of time to
act to revive the national economy. Meanwhile, the credit crisis, which
is serious, has been underway for months and months. It is not
something that came up last week and needs to be resolved tomorrow (as
if that were possible by the mere passing of a give-away bill). There
is plenty of time to hold the kind of hearings that will let members of
Congress, and the American public, learn about the causes of the
crisis, of its impacts, and about what the various strategies are that
might most effectively address it.

So the public demand should not be for passage of a "good" bailout
bill. It should be for a halt to this rush to passage of any bill. The
demand should be for "No Bill Without Hearings!"

So call Congress (202-225-3121, 202-224-3121 or 800-828-0498) and
tell your representative and your two senators that you don't want them
railroaded. Tell them you demand hearings before legislation. And tell
them, again, that you will vote against anyone who votes for the
current bailout for Wall Street. (Hint: If you can't get through, then
call one of their local offices, which are listed in the blue pages of
your phonebook, or go visit a local office.)

Don't forget to write letters, too, to your local paper demanding hearings and a reasoned response to the crisis, not a bailout.
_________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Iraq $165B VOTE

schuman — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:21:40 -0400

I am starting this post for members of Rep. Kildee's district to post the results of thier phone call to Kildee's office. My results: I called his office at 2:00PM (not sure if the vote already took place) and spoke with a secrectary. I told him I was calling to make sure Rep Kildee votes "NO" on the Iraq budget today. He said "OK" and took my name and city. Everyone PLEASE CALL and STOP this from passing! 202-225-3611

Re Elect No One

paulkruger — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:01:03 -0400

Re Elect No One.

Everyone has an opinion so here is mine. I welcome and encourage feedback on this idea.

I am a liberal in most things and a registered democrat. However that does not mean I believe anyone who is a politician and a democrat is a good public servant. In the past ten years both D's & R's have increasingly sold out their seats to the highest bidder to fund campaigns, leaving those they swore their oath of office to server, "We the People" flowing in the wind.

There are many reasons this happend. It is more about power than greed on the part of the elected party but ALL about greed on the part of those big corporations handing over money by the basket full to get their "man/woman" in office. And they expect, and get, something in return for their money.

The primary cause is the enormous cost of a successful campaign. Then there are loopholes that allow big money contributions that must be closed. Politicians don't want to close those holes through which their contributions flow.

My logic is that "We the People" can use the one effective tool we have, our vote, to correct these problems by kicking them all out and starting over. Send the message "Listen to us". If this is done through a couple of election cycles, politicians will start to get the message. Big corporations will also get the message that funding their candidate may actually casue them to lose the election.

Once we get some people in office who are really "public servants" and not just professional politicians, they will start to correct election problems including closing permanently, methods that allow big business to donate money, including "bonus's" to employees to be donated as individuals.

Watching the same people re-elected over and over is not progress, It is a continuation of the same bad politics we have had for years. Time for a change.