Civil Liberties

President Obama: Don't Lecture China on Censorship

dlindorff — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:22:53 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with
Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the
value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of
non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of
strength.”

And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president
himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US
troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk
about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian
style control over information.

Let’s just take the issue of depleted uranium weapons, over 1000
tons of which have been expended in the US invasion of Iraq, most of it
in populated areas where millions remain exposed to the radioactive
dust of the burned material. There is almost no reporting on this topic
in the US media. The Pentagon has for years lied about and hidden the
effects of this deadly substance, used in shells, bombs and bullets
because of its unique ability to penetrate hard steel armor and
concrete bunker walls. It has refused to disclose where the weapons
were fired, and has denied US troops the tests that would show if they
have been contaminated. It has even resorted to having paid Pentagon
hacks surreptitiously libel, slander and otherwise undermine those
military sources and journalists who have tried to expose this scourge
(this reporter has been the target of such disinformation attacks).

But censorship in the US goes beyond these crude efforts at
government-directed control of information. In America, some of the
most potent censorship is done by the privately owned media—supposedly
a bastion of freedom of expression.

There is no reason why the US media cannot report on depleted
uranium and its deadly legacy in places where it has been used, such as
Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Kosovo, or on and around American
military bases from Maryland to Hawaii. And yet it does not. Just
recently, stories have appeared both on Britain’s SkyTV and in the Guardian newspaper,
reporting on an alarming rise in unusual birth defects and infant
cancers in Fallujah as well as in other Iraqi cities like Basra, Najaf,
Baghdad and Samara—all urban areas where there were major assaults by
US forces both in the initial invasion, when most of the DU weapons
were used, and later during fights against holed-up insurgent groups.

In Fallujah, the Guardian reports that birth defects are up by a
staggering 15 times normal—an increase of 1400%! While the article
doesn’t mention depleted uranium specifically, and says that doctors in
Fallujah have been "reluctant to attribute" the astonishing number of
birth defects to the massive assault on that city by US forces in late
2004, they do say those doctors cite “radiation and chemicals” which
were dumped on the city.

There is no such report about this in the US media.

Is that censorship? Of course it is.

The American government doesn’t tell CBS News or CNN not to report
this story, which amounts to a US war crime. It does not (at least
generally), contact the editors at the New York Times or the Washington
Post and say, “Don’t report on the infant mortality crisis in Iraq, or
on the possible connection to US weaponry” (Though the government did
ask and successfully get the Times to hold a story about the National
Security Agency's massive electronic spying program for a year, and
managed to pressure the Times' editors to kill a Times reporter's story
about President Bush's likely use of a hidden cueing device during the
2004 presidential debates). The editors of those news organizations
themselves most of the time simply decide that either the story is of
no importance to readers or they worry that they may be criticized
either by the government or by other media organizations for being
unpatriotic, or biased.

The end result of such a process of self-censorship, however, is
that the American public is as ignorant about certain things as someone
in China.

More ignorant in fact.

One thing I learned from living and working as a journalist and
journalism teacher in China back in the 1990s is that the Chinese
people, with their long experience of living in a totalitarian
dictatorship in which all media are owned and tightly controlled by the
state and the ruling Communist Party, are acutely aware that they are
being lied to and that the truth is being hidden from them.
Accordingly, they have learned to read between the lines, to pick up
subtle hints in news articles which honest journalists have learned how
to slip into their carefully controlled reports. They have also
developed a sophisticated private system of person-to-person reporting
called xiaodao xiaoxi or, literally, “back-alley news.” This
system used to be word-of-mouth between neighbors and friends. As
telephones became ubiquitous, it was done by phone, allowing
transmission over long distances quickly. Now there is the internet,
which, while it is systematically controlled via what has become known
as China’s “Great Firewall”—effectively all of China is like a vast
corporate “intranet” which blocks access to outside websites—still
allows the flow of email. This is nearly impossible to monitor,
particularly when the messages are not bulk mailed to large numbers of
addressees.

So in China, reports of corruption, of local rebellions or strikes,
of internal struggles within the government or party, or of important
news about the outside world that the government wants to keep at bay,
manage to circulate widely inside China despite a huge state censorship
apparatus.

This alternative highly-personal news network works because the
Chinese people know they are being lied to and kept in the dark, and
they want to break through that official shroud of secrecy and control.

In the US, in contrast, we have a public that for the most part is
blissfully unaware of the extent to which our news is being censored,
filtered and controlled. Like the President (who knows better), we
boast of our “free press,” and our open society, and indeed, as a
journalist, I am free to write what I want to write.

But given that most people get their news either from corporately
owned newspapers or from corporate radio and TV stations, it doesn’t
really matter what I or other journalists critical of the Establishment
write because it won’t appear in the corporate media. Since most
Americans, unlike most Chinese people, assume that they live in a
society with a free press and no censorship or control of information,
they don’t even bother to look beyond the information that is spoon-fed
to them by corporate media sources.

The result is that in my experience I have found peasants in rural
Jiangsu or Anhwei Province to in many cases be better informed about
their own country and the world than are typical American suburbanites.
Certainly if an American wants to be informed, all the information she
or he could want is available, but one has to be first of all aware
that one isn't getting certain information via the obvious sources, and
then one has to want to get it, and make the effort to find it. For
most Americans, all three of these elements are missing.

The list of censored stories and issues in the US, about which the
American public knows almost nothing is staggering, going well beyond
just the use of nasty weapons.

Do Americans know, for instance, that all the other modern western
Democracies in the world have some form of national health care—either
a state-run system like that in the UK or a single-payer model like
that in Canada, or some hybrid like they have in France or
Switzerland—and that in all those countries, the systems are so popular
that they have survived decades of conservative governments? No. Our
corporate media instead report on the crank critics of those systems
and allow us to believe they are hated by their citizens.

Do Americans know that the US no longer boasts the best standard of
living in the world—or even close? No. Because the American media
continue to portray the US as “number one.”

Do Americans know that Al Qaeda was actually a creation of the CIA?
No. This important bit of information doesn’t get mentioned in the US
media, which always starts the organization’s history at 1988, when it
got its name, when actually, its early origins date to the arming of
the mujahadeen by the CIA and the CIA-linked Pakistani intelligence
service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, when the US wanted to create and support resistance to the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

And of course, we rarely get to see the slaughter of women and
children that our beloved soldier “heroes” are conducting in Iraq and
Afghanistan in our name.

No censorship in America?

Mr. President, please. You may fool us, but at least don’t insult the intelligence of your Chinese audience.
____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He spent seven
years in China and Hong Kong and Taiwan as a Fulbright journalism
professor and a correspondent for Businessweek magazine. He is author,
most recently, of "The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006)
and is the winner of a Project Censored award. His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

WTF? Obama Gets the Nobel Peace Prize?

dlindorff — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:13:53 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

It’s not as much of a travesty as when Henry Kissinger, a war criminal of the first order who was an architect of the latter stages of the Indochina War, and was personally responsible for the slaughter of well over a million innocent people, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, while that war was still raging, but the awarding of the latest Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama is travesty enough.

We’re talking about a man whose practically first act upon taking office early this year was to escalate the ugly and pointless war in Afghanistan with the addition of some 20,000 troops, and who, even as the Nobel committee was discussing his award, was meeting with his military and political advisors to consider expanding that war even further, both in Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan.

The Nobel Committee claimed that during Obama’s short period as president, the US “is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened."

Well, certainly when compared to the prior presidency of George W. Bush, that statement is correct, but that’s not saying much. After all, under President Obama, Guantanamo’s terrorist prison is still in operation and is holding people whom even the government admits are guilty of nothing. Under President Obama, the US has also blocked the Goldstone Report which condemns Israel of war crimes in its recent assault on Gaza. And under Obama, the US military in Afghanistan has continued to slaughter disproportionate numbers of civilians through its wanton use of aerial bombardment, pilotless Predator drones, and antipersonnel weaponry.

President Obama may have, as the Nobel Committee states, put forward a vision of nuclear disarmament, but his administration at the same time continues to refuse to sign the international anti-landmine treaty (putting America in the wretched company of just Russia, India and China). And under Obama, the US continues its role as not only the leading producer and exporter of arms, but also as the major initiator of wars in the world. Under Obama the US continues to outspend the rest of the world’s nations combined on its military. And don’t forget, Obama, like President Bush before him, continues to threaten to attack Iran, over that nation’s alleged nuclear weapons program—a program the very existence of which remains highly debatable.

As for climate change policy, President Obama in practice has taken a largely hands-off approach to getting Congress to act, not using his considerable political clout to force action on climate change legislation. It is now conceded that the US will go to the international climate conference in December with no bill passed to limit or reduce the nation’s CO2 emissions. Nor is the Obama administration likely to push for any significant program of CO2 reductions in the future.

Nominations for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize closed on Feb. 1, less than two weeks after Obama took the oath of office as President, but the Nobel Committee in Norway had a good nine months since then to observe this president’s actions—and his lack of actions—on the key issues weighing on the decision. In the end, committee members were bamboozled by this president’s rhetoric of hope just as were the American people during the election campaign. As the committee wrote in announcing its decision: "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future."

If Nobel Peace prizes are being awarded to people who are simply giving the world hope, surely the judges could have found any number of worthy speechifiers. Hell, even the dictatorial leaders of China and North Korea can make flowery speeches about peace and human dignity. More to the point, the committee had under consideration at least two far more deserving nominees for the award who were actually acting at great personal risk to further peace and human rights: Chinese freedom-fighter Hu Jia and Afghani women’s rights advocate Simi Samar. It is an insult to the memory of former award winners like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jody Williams, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa, and others who put their lives and careers on the line to struggle for peace and human dignity to give this award to a man who has accomplished so little, and who, in fact, in his short time in office, has managed to expand one war, to block the international condemnation of the brutality of another, and who has done nothing to reverse his own country’s leading role as a promoter of war and international violence.

Henry Kissinger hung his blood-drenched Nobel Peace Award on his office wall on Wall Street and continued to make obscene sums of money off human suffering in his dotage. One can only hope (ah, that intoxicating word!) that President Obama will take his award seriously, and will use his new status as official man of peace to halt America’s campaign of violence in Afghanistan, calling a regional peace conference to settle that conflict instead of simply expanding the war, that he will announce a major cut in American military spending and a halt to arms exports, that he will sign the landmine treaty and voluntarily end the production and use of antipersonnel weapons of all kinds, and that he will finally have the US join the International Criminal Court of Justice.

Right. Now that’s the audacity of hope.
_______________

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

Our Neighbors' Keeper: Local Cop Chiefs Want to Create a Nation of Snoops

dlindorff — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:54:04 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and other big city cops
are calling for a new system of “citizen watch” programs, allegedly to
help them spot hidden terrorists. I view this new call for a nation of
private spies with a deep suspicion born of experience with the LAPD
and its historic penchant for spying on law-abiding residents of that
city.

Back in the late 1970s, together with a band of other doughty
journalists, including Tommy Thompson, Ron Ridenour, Ben Pleasants, I
co-founded and ran a spunky little news weekly called the LA Vanguard.
In the course of just one year, we broke stories about secret “security
offices” run by local phone companies (Pacific Telephone and GTE) which
provided unlisted numbers and credit information to police and other
government agencies without requiring a warrant, about the killing of
unarmed citizens by police, about the LAPD’s “shoot to kill” gun use
policy, about judges in landlord-tenant cases who were slumlords
themselves, and many other stories that were being ignored by the LA
Times and the rest of the local establishment media.

For our efforts, we found out years later, we were targeted by the
LAPD’s “red squad,” known at the time as the Public Disorder
Intelligence Division (PDID), for an intensive program of spying that
including planting a young cop, Connie Milazzo, as a member of our
editorial collective. We only learned of Milazzo’s real identity years
later when she admitted disclosed it herself to a judge in a public
hearing (she wanted to avoid being sent to the county lockup along with
a group of activists she had “joined” undercover who had all been
arrested during a protest and who were refusing to provide their
identities to the court).

A subsequent lawsuit filed with the help of the ACLU of Southern
California, eventually settled for a payment of $1.8 million by the
City of Los Angeles, disclosed that the PDID had for years been using
as many as 20 undercover cops to infiltrate and spy on over 200 legal
political and activist organizations in the Los Angeles area, gathering
rooms full of files on everyone from members of the National
Organization for Women to the staffs of certain members of the city
council. We also learned that the LAPD was providing those files to a
shadowy private outfit in San Francisco called Western Goals, which had
links to the ultra-right John Birch Society. Western Goals was
apparently seeking to serve as a private repository of dossiers on
leftists and political activists collected by local police all around
the country in a kind of end run around the restrictions on domestic
spying by the FBI that had been imposed after the post-Watergate
revelations about the abuses of the COINTELPRO era.

This is why Bratton’s idea stinks. Local police, because they are
local, are even more prone to rogue activities that will never be
exposed or monitored than are federal police.

As accommodating of police-state tactics as Congress has been,
especially since 9-11, at least some members of that body have raised
concerns and demanded investigations of some of those abuses by
organizations like the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency. But
city councils have been notoriously uninterested in monitoring the
unconstitutional activities of their local police around the country,
who have extremely powerful political connections and the support of
local media establishments.

Any attempt to organize a citizen’s watch program to look for
suspicious activity is bound to devolve into a police program of spying
on those who are outside of the “norm”: minorities, leftists,
activists, loners, people with alternative life-styles, artists, etc.

Let’s be honest. America faces no existential threat from
terrorism. It does face such threats from rampaging climate change,
political corruption, corporate power, economic collapse, and many
other things, but it is hardly threatened by terrorism, which has
killed far fewer people even in 2001 than have auto defects,
contaminated food, and insurance company denials of care.

Back in 2001, the Bush/Cheney administration stoked an irrational
fear of terrorism in order to win passage of the Patriot Act and
acceptance of other actions, such as creation of a program by the
National Security Agency to use supercomputers to monitor millions of
Americans’ electronic communications. Many of those threats to freedom
remain in place today. Now Chief Bratton and his compatriots in police
departments around the country are trying to stoke that same irrational
fear of terrorism to move the country even further towards a
police-state mentality.

The last thing we need in this era of corporate-media-induced
conformity and citizen passivity is a bunch of self-appointed citizen
snoops calling in to the cops with reports on every neighbor who looks
or acts a little bit different.
______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

A Second Bill of Rights

davidswanson — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:09:51 -0400

Let's Try Democracy By David Swanson, BlackCommentator.com Columnist

This is the second of three excerpts from Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press) by David Swanson published here by the kind permission of the publisher.

Click here to read any of the commentaries in this series.

In places where we are not already protected, or where we have been shown to be vulnerable over the last eight years or before, legislation and amendments can be used to expand our existing rights and establish entirely new ones. All of our rights, new and old, should be properly protected by placing violations of them in the criminal code.

1. The Right to Vote

Proposing a right to vote only surprises people who believe we already have it. Perhaps the most important as well as the least controversial right that we could create is one that Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. has long advocated for: the individual national right to vote (allowing the creation of national uniform standards for elections). I would add as well the right to directly elect the president, vice president, and all other elected officials, and to have one’s vote publicly and locally counted in a manner that can be repeated and verified if questioned (effectively requiring hand-counted paper ballots), and the right to paid time off work to vote on election day, which would be made a national holiday or scheduled on a weekend. I would also propose establishing and enforcing serious criminal penalties for election fraud. I’ll take up the issues of election fraud and voting rights at more length later in this book.

I think we should consider as well a less orthodox proposal, namely the right to be a candidate for elected office. Even if we all had the full and verifiable and unencumbered right to vote, our democracy would remain a weak one as long as only the extremely wealthy and those willing to take payments from the wealthy are able to credibly compete for elected office. We should have a right to know that the candidates in our elections are not corrupted by bribes (including the currently legal bribes we euphemistically call “contributions”), and the right to ourselves be candidates in more than a nominal sense unless prevented by something other than our wealth and income. I’ll take up below some of the policies that might be implemented to protect this right.

2. Right to Expanded Magna Carta Protections

We need to establish strict protection from arbitrary arrest, detention, exile, or enforced disappearance, and from all forms of slavery and forced labor, with criminal penalties for violators and compensation for victims. We need to strengthen our right against unreasonable search and seizure in this electronic age, amending the Constitution and/or replacing FISA with legislation that effectively protects us, creates criminal penalties for violators, and compensates victims. We should place in the Constitution new language to strictly ban all torture, all cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, rendition, medical or scientific experimentation on humans without their consent, and state executions. We should create criminal penalties for violators and compensation for victims.

We need to strengthen or create some additional rights for those who find themselves within our criminal justice system, including the right to presumption of innocence until proven guilty of a crime, the right to be told the charges against you at the time of your arrest, the right not to be detained without being arrested and charged, the right to obtain and to use in court a videotape of any relevant interrogations or confessions, the right of the accused to be detained separately from those already convicted, the right of juveniles to be detained separately from adults, the right not to be imprisoned for inability to fulfill a contract, the right to a penal system aimed at reformation and social rehabilitation, and the right to compensation for false conviction and punishment. The United States currently locks up a greater percentage of its citizens than any other nation, a heavy-handed and backward approach to social problems that mirrors our approach to foreign policy. Protecting innocents from the imprisonment onslaught and redirecting imprisonment to include rehabilitation, education, and preparation for civic participation are essential to undoing this damage.

I refer to all of the above as Magna Carta protections because I see them as part of that living tradition. Peter Linebaugh’s recent book, The Magna Carta Manifesto, documents the meaning of the Magna Carta down through the centuries, prominent in that meaning being the tradition established by the Magna Carta that no man would be above the law, that no man would sit in judgment of himself, that no one would be tried or imprisoned without due process including judgment by a jury of peers.

The Great Charter of Liberties was originally produced together with the Charter of the Forest, and these two documents were paired together for centuries before one of them was forgotten and the other was reinterpreted as the sacred text of private property, capitalism, God, and empire. The Charter of the Forest protects the rights of commoners to “commoning.” That’s a verb that encompasses the rights to use and maintain forests and wild places, to allow livestock to forage, and to gather wood, berries, mushrooms, and water. Linebaugh tells a global story of the loss of commons, of the enclosing of public spaces, of the creation of poverty and criminality, and of the Magna Carta as a manifesto against privatization. It strikes me as important right now that we recognize the power that the rule of law has had for good and its intimate ties to social as well as formal justice. Does Eric Holder—do the rest of us—want to oversee the demise of this tradition or its expansion and enhancement?

3. Equal Rights for All

We need, at long last, to place in our Constitution comprehensive equal rights for women, including the right to equal pay for equal work. We need comprehensive rights for all children, including the right to have their interests given primary consideration in public actions that concern them, and a ban on harmful child labor. We need a right to special care and assistance for mothers, fathers, and children, including paid maternal and family leave. We need these things much more than we need to hear anyone screaming about “family values”! And we need the Constitution to establish a right against any unfair discrimination on the basis of race, color, gender, sexual identity, language, religion or lack thereof, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, citizenship, or other status, including that of a migrant worker.

4. Environmental Rights

Our history is one of slowly expanding the group of people entitled to civil rights, breaking down barriers of wealth, race, sex, and age. But what about species? Although we’ve criminalized cruelty to animals in some cases, we’ve never dared to scandalize the philosophers by giving rights to nonhumans. I’m not proposing that we include dogs and pigs and insects in our Constitution as individuals. I don’t think they have much more place there than do corporations, which have falsely claimed constitutional rights. But we might want to consider giving our environment as a whole a right to survive.

Of course we could simply give humans a right to a clean, safe and sustainable environment, and I think we probably should. But that’s not the only possible solution. In September 2008, Ecuador created a new Constitution by a two-thirds public vote that included some changes that we might want to avoid (such as aggrandized executive power) and others we might want to consider, such as the recognition of legally enforceable rights of nature or ecosystem. The new Constitution provides nature the “right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution” and mandates that the government take “precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.” Of course, an American document couldn’t mention evolution until Americans were properly educated, but the rest of the language here might be useful. While an ecosystem can’t sue on its own behalf over violation of its rights, people can do so for it.

5. Right to Education, Housing, and Health Care

To help give every child a chance and to foster young talent and innovation, America should guarantee the right to public education of equal high quality from preschool through college. We should have a right to decent, safe, sanitary and affordable housing. We should have a right to health care of equal high quality. These are things that ought not to be privileges for the wealthy but things to which we all have adequate access, in other words: rights.

6. Worker Rights

We also need basic rights related to work and income established at the level of our Constitution. These should include the right to form and join a labor union and the right to strike, the right to employment (not to be confused with antilabor laws that go by the misleading name “right to work”), and the right to a living wage—that is to say, just and favorable remuneration for work ensuring for the worker and their family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. We should have the right to a reasonable limitation of working hours and to periodic paid holidays. Not all of this will be acceptable to the US Chamber of Commerce, but most of it will make sense to most Americans.

7. Right to Basic Welfare

I would like to offer two additional proposals that might be somewhat controversial, one ensuring the basic welfare (food and shelter) of each individual whether or not employed and working, the other ensuring some limitation on the division of society into an overclass of super-wealthy families and everyone else.

The basic income guarantee, or BIG as it’s known to the activists and academics who make up the US Basic Income Guarantee Network, is a government-ensured guarantee that no one’s income will fall below the level necessary to meet their most basic needs for any reason, even if they are not working and earning the living wage that I (but not all supporters of a BIG) would also mandate.

How would a basic income guarantee work? Each month, every adult would receive a check from the government for the exact same amount. These checks, notes the Citizen Policies Institute, would be “large enough to meet basic costs of food and shelter . . . but not so large as to undermine incentives to work, earn, save, and invest.” Some checks would be wasted on awesomely affluent Americans who have absolutely no financial worries. But there would be no need for a bureaucracy to determine who should receive the checks, and no stigma would attach to receiving them. That some small percentage of people would not work cannot be considered a fatal flaw in the BIG idea, not in a country where we Road Scholar - the world leader in educational travel for adults. Top ten travel destinations for African-Americans. Fascinating history, welcoming locals, astounding sights, hidden gems, mouth-watering food or all of the above - our list of the world’s top ten "must-see" learning destinations for African-Americans has a little something for everyone.already have a significant percentage of people not working, including those unable to work, those with no need to work and no desire to, those searching for work, those who have given up on searching for work, those who have calculated that they would spend more on childcare than they would earn if they took a job, those who are behind bars as a result of crimes that tend to increase with unemployment and poverty, and those working part-time who want full-time jobs. There are also many working full-time or more who would prefer to work part-time and train for other work if they could afford to. Surely anyone’s displeasure with people receiving a basic income without working should not outweigh their displeasure with the current state of affairs in which tens of millions of Americans, including children, live in poverty. The Paulson’s Plunder “bailouts” gave away, to some very wealthy people, far more money than would be required for a BIG, so perhaps it’s best to think of a BIG as a real bailout for everyone, one that would actually stimulate the economy.

The past thirty years have seen tremendous growth in the United States in productivity and wealth, and yet we don’t all seem very appreciative. In fact, as Yale political scientist Robert Lane has documented, surveys have found Americans’ assessment of their level of happiness declining significantly.10 The United States contains 4.5 percent of the world’s population and spends 42 percent of the world’s health care expenses, and yet Americans are less healthy than the residents of nearly every other wealthy nation and a few poor ones as well, as documented by Dr. Stephen Bezruchka of the University of Washington.11 What’s going on? We spend more on criminal justice and have more crime. How can that be? We’re richer and have more poverty. Why is that?

Labor journalist Sam Pizzigati thinks he has a solution to these riddles.12 In his recent book, Greed and Good, Pizzigati focuses on the extreme increase in inequality that the United States has seen over the past generation. The Federal Reserve Board has documented gains by America’s wealthiest 1 percent of more than $2 trillion more than everyone in America’s bottom 90 percent combined. We are now the most unequal wealthy nation on earth, and have reversed the relationship we had to Europe when the founders of this country rejected aristocracy. Today Europeans come to the United States to marvel at the excesses of wealth beside shameful poverty. Perhaps it’s time for a right to some minimal level of equality.

Many of us would like to lift up those at the bottom. Few of us want to bring down those at the top. Pizzigati argues that you cannot do one without the other, because the super-wealthy will always have the political power to avoid contributing to bringing the bottom up. This will leave it to the middle class to assist those less fortunate, even as their own situations are slipping and their concept of success—based on the lifestyles of the CEO-barons—is being driven further out of reach. The middle class won’t want to do this, and instead will support policies that benefit the super-wealthy.

But the existence of the super-wealthy, Pizzigati argues, has a long list of negative impacts on all of our lives. Get rid of vast concentrations of wealth, and all sorts of things happen, including lower murder rates, lower blood pressure, and lower housing prices. Research suggests that when people see their situations improving over time, and when they see their situations as acceptable by the standard of those around them, they tend to be happy. The United States had this in the 1950s and 1960s, a period when working families prospered and income over $200,000 was taxed at roughly 90 percent.

Developed societies with the healthiest and longest living people, extensive research shows, are not those with the highest average wealth, but those with the greatest equality of wealth.13 Explanations for this fact vary from consideration of the levels of stress caused by economic insecurity to the focusing of health care on plastic surgery and other luxuries at the expense of treatment of actual illnesses. Research also shows that a country’s murder rate varies with its inequality, not its overall wealth or its criminal justice spending.14

Pizzigati proposes a new system of income tax that would lower taxes on 99 percent of Americans and allow the wealthiest 1 percent to lower their taxes by lobbying to raise the minimum wage. This system would ensure a living wage and a maximum wage as well. If your household brought in less than the income of two full-time minimum wage workers, you would pay no income tax. Above that level you would pay 1 percent. Above twice the minimum wage you would pay 2 percent. And so on up to 10 percent. Any income above ten times the minimum would be taxed at 100 percent.15 If those with high incomes wanted less of it taxed, all they would need to do would be to lobby Congress to raise the minimum wage.

This would mean significantly lower taxes on 99 percent of us. It would also mean an economy focused on products for a once-again expanding middle class, rather than our new aristocracy. The maximum wage proposal will almost certainly be attacked as being supposedly motivated by a desire to punish successful people (as if restricting someone to ten times the minimum wage is punishment, but the minimum wage itself is not). However, I favor a maximum wage for the simple reason that a democratic republic cannot survive with an aristocracy. My thought here is also a very American way of thinking and by no means new, but I’m afraid it is not nearly as widespread as is support for revenge and belief that revenge is everywhere.

8. Right to Be a Conscientious Objector

Here’s another proposal that’s sure to be controversial: we should create the right not to be made a participant in a war of aggression, as a soldier, contractor, or taxpayer. After all, wars of aggression are already illegal, so there ought not to be anything dangerous in giving individuals the right to obey the law. We should also update the Third Amendment to give us the right to live in towns and cities free from any public presence of military force. In fact, we should create the right to live in a nation either not armed for aggressive war or actively working toward disarmament and actively working toward global disarmament.

9. Freedom of the Press, and Freedom from War Lies

We should expand the First Amendment to require meaningful freedom of the press, and I will discuss later some policies that might make that a reality. But I think we might consider one strictly limited restriction on our First Amendment rights. This would involve the establishment of a right to protection from war propaganda, including any false, misleading, or fraudulent information intended to create support for war, with criminal penalties for violators. We should never underestimate the danger of restricting free speech or of opening up the possibility of further restricting free speech, but the clear fact is that war is much more destructive than any other human activity (with the possible exception of long term environmental destruction). It is already forbidden to falsely scream “Fire!” in a crowded building, so it might makes sense to forbid effectively drenching crowded buildings in lighter fluid. I would, however, expand the right to free speech to include the right to be a whistleblower and expose violations of the law by superiors, in public or private work places, without negative consequences.

10. Right to Know Your Rights

Finally, I think that we need enshrined in explicit terms in our Constitution, as well as perhaps elaborated in a book called “Self-Government for Dummies,” the right to know what the laws are, and to have the laws applied equally to everyone.

Click here to read any of the commentaries in this series.

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, David Swanson, is co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition and a board member of Progressive Democrats of America. He is the author of: Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press). His website is www.davidswanson.org. Click here to contact Mr. Swanson.

Any BlackCommentator.com article may be re-printed so long as it is re-printed in its entirety and full credit given to the author and www.BlackCommentator.com. If the re-print is on the Internet we additionally request a link back to the original piece on our Website.

It's Congress: Don't Forget to Wash Your Hands After Hearings

dlindorff — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:06:35 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Some years ago, my wife and I, together with our young daughter,
took a circuitous summer train trip through France, Italy, Austria and
Germany. The last leg was an overnight express from Berlin that
deposited us at the Gare du Nord in Paris just at sunrise. Feeling
washed out from the ride, we made our separate ways to the facilities.
I was standing at the urinal with a bunch of other men, relieving
myself, when I heard this awful groaning coming from a stall. The
groaning grew louder and more painful sounding. Some guy was obviously
having a terrible time with his bowels. The agony continued, to the
point that we who were by now washing our hands at the sinks were
looking at each other in puzzlement, wondering what was going on. I
even wondered if someone should ask if the poor wretch if he needed
help.

Finally there was this enormous, impossibly long fart of incredible
volume and duration. This was followed by a long sigh of relief and an
awful stench.

We men in the rest room all looked at each other, shrugging and
stifling laughs. A few of us couldn’t contain ourselves and actually
burst out laughing.

There was a shuffle in the stall, and the latch was turned. We
couldn’t resist. Everyone turned to see who had just produced such a
prodigious noise and odor, expecting to see some huge, ponderous guy
lumber out. Instead, a shrivled little old man left the booth, nodded
silently at the rest of us, and exited the room.

I’m reminded of this incident by the recent efforts in Congress to
produce a health care reform bill—especially of the efforts in Sen. Max
Baucus’s Senate Finance Committee, which yesterday, after weeks of
allegedly painful negotiating among the so-called Gang of Six—three
conservative Democrats and three Republicans—and several weeks more of
discussions among members of the whole committee, produced a bill that
essentially leaves us with the status quo, except with some rather
smelly additions, such as a mandate that the uninsured and unemployed
buy some crummy health insurance plan offered by the private health
insurers or face a stiff fine by the IRS.

If the stench of corruption from the legal bribes of the insurance
industry lobby were not so vile and pervasive, we would all be rolling
in the aisles at the tiny fart produced by all that straining and
pushing on the part of Sen. Baucus (D-Montana) and his Finance Committee
colleagues.

Of course, it’s not over yet. Once both houses of Congress have
voted to approve the bills that have emerged from committee in House
and Senate, there will be another session on the pot—this time in a
secret conference committee, where members of the leadership of both
houses will negotiate to come up with a single bill to send back to
their respective houses for an up-or-down vote.

It can be safely predicted that the final legislation will resemble
much more the Senate version than the House version, because Senate
Democrats long ago surrendered control of that body to the minority
Republicans by accepting the so-called Rule of 60, whereby any
Republican can simply threaten to filibuster a piece of legislation and
the Democrats will immediately take it back and hack off any offending
piece of it to ensure that either all Democrats will vote for it, or
that one or two allegedly sane Republicans will join the majority of
Democrats, thus making a filibuster impossible.

Not once since at least 2006, when Democrats took over the Senate,
has the Senate Democratic leadership demanded that all Democrats in
that body support a bill or face retaliation, in the form of lost
committee assignments or sabotage of a bill important to local
constituents—the kind of thing that Republicans have done with their
members for years.

Indeed, Democrats seem to like the imaginary Rule of 60, as it
gives them a ready excuse to never have to actually do anything
progressive, as demanded by their electoral base.

And so, whether it’s health care reform, financial industry
regulation and reform, climate change legislation, civil liberties,
investigations into torture and war crimes, or ending the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, Congress has come to resemble a French railway station
lavatory, with committees grunting away in the stalls behind closed
doors, while a little old lady in the corner collects change from the
visitors who regularly come in to take a piss and monitor the
proceedings.
________________

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

You Have Only the Right to Remain Silent

davidswanson — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:57:55 -0400

Let's Try Democracy By David Swanson, BlackCommentator.com Columnist

We welcome David Swanson as a BC columnist. We have publishing his writings a number of times in the past and look forward to what he will be writing in the future.
This first column by Mr. Swanson is the first of three excerpts from Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press) by David Swanson published here by the kind permission of the publisher.

According to the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The men who put their signatures to those words sought to endow each other with those rights, and those rights can be gained or lost. And since that day, people around the world have imagined, created, and struggled for a great many additional rights as well.

Our Constitution came very early in the history of the formal establishment of individual rights. It helped to inspire many other nations to develop the idea further, and to inspire international agreements. Our original Bill of Rights is no longer cutting edge, and yet it does a remarkably good job of providing many basic protections. The most glaring problem with it is not dated concepts or ambiguous wording, but our failure to enforce it. We have to make enforcement happen through Congress and the courts, or there will be no point in making improvements.

To restore and expand our rights, there are three basic steps we should take. The first is to enforce the rights already protected by the Constitution. The second is to ratify and enforce international agreements (some of which the United States has already ratified) providing additional rights. The third is to amend our Constitution to include a second Bill of Rights.

So, first things first: how are we doing on enforcing the rights that we are already supposed to have? Here are the basic rights provided by the US Constitution and its amendments, and a quick summary of the shape they’re in today:

article i, section 9, habeas corpus:

The right not to be kidnapped and detained without charge or trial has been eroded in the United States, its territories, and secret prisons. The Supreme Court has admirably insisted on the right, while Congress has been willing to toss it to the wind. Not a single individual has been held accountable for having violated it, and the violations have not ended. In 2001 and 2002, US Justice Department lawyers put down in “legal” opinions that the right to habeas corpus could be tossed aside. In 2007 Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before Congress that the right to habeas corpus that appears in the Constitution doesn’t really exist. In 2009, the new Obama administration claimed the continued power to render and detain without charge.

article i, section 10, the right against ex post facto laws:

It is clearly unconstitutional to criminalize something that has already been done and then punish a crime that was not a crime when it happened. But what about taking actions that were crimes when they happened and immunizing the violators? This looks like Congress taking over the president’s pardon power. If the ban on ex post facto laws is understood to include laws that grant retroactive immunity from prosecution, then Congress has been busy violating it by passing laws like the Military Commissions Act or the FISA Amendments Act, laws that claim to give immunity to past violators of crimes. We should consider whether to amend the Constitution to clarify that point.

first amendment, freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly, and the right to petition for redress of grievances:

President Bush punched quite a few holes in the wall of separation between church and state. He used agencies including the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Park Service, the Department of Defense (DOD), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Department of Education (DOE), the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Office of the Surgeon General to promote the establishment of a religion. Freedom of Road Scholar - the world leader in educational travel for adults. Top ten travel destinations for African-Americans. Fascinating history, welcoming locals, astounding sights, hidden gems, mouth-watering food or all of the above - our list of the world’s top ten "must-see" learning destinations for African-Americans has a little something for everyone.the press has been severely curtailed by the establishment of a system that bars entry to ownership of effective media outlets to all but the very wealthiest. Pundits in the existing media outlets are often directly paid and told what to say by the Pentagon or the White House. Media outlets in occupied nations like Iraq are paid to publish false stories. Reporters on wars are “embedded” with the military, denied access, and banned from publishing important information and images. Independent reporters were preemptively detained but not charged with any crimes during the 2008 Republican National Convention. Freedom of speech and assembly have been radically curtailed to the point where we now have “free speech zones” consisting of walled-in cages outside and at a distance removed from political events. These freedoms are also absent in the workplace, where unionization is effectively blocked, and in “private” gathering places like shopping malls. While you can appeal to your government for a redress of grievances, you’d better do so by mail. People attempting to do so in person are usually prevented by security guards. A Justice Department memo on October 23, 2001, claimed the president could suspend First Amendment rights.

second amendment, the right to bear arms:

The Second Amendment was written to protect the Southern states’ right to use armed militias to enforce slavery. We no longer have slavery, but we do have the National Guard, which is supposed to be under the control of state governors. We need to correct the current situation in which the US president controls the National Guard and sends its members to fight foreign wars for empire. If we read the Second Amendment as providing an individual right to bear arms, it is important to notice that it makes no distinction between the right to bear arms to violently protect oneself and the right to bear arms to easily slaughter masses of people, or the fact that some types of arms are much better suited to the latter than the former. Clearly, this is one right that needs to be limited by legislation or amendment to the extent that it conflicts with that “self-evident” right to “life.”

third amendment, the right not to have soldiers quartered in your house:

This is perhaps the only right we have that has not been threatened or eroded in any way in recent years. But, of course, that’s because—counter to everything the framers of the Constitution intended—we are all paying significant portions of our income to the government in order to provide soldiers with their own homes on thousands of permanent military bases maintained in times of war and peace.

fourth amendment, the right against unreasonable searches and seizures without warrant, probable cause, and specificity:

That same memo that brushed aside the First Amendment, mentioned above, also claimed the president could toss out the Fourth Amendment. Our Fourth Amendment has been erased by legislation amending FISA, and should instead be protected by the repeal of FISA and the passage of new legislation. Rather than permitting the government to sidestep a rubber stamp court that routinely and even retroactively approves violations of the Fourth Amendment, such a procedure should be replaced by one that does not violate our rights. The Fourth Amendment requires a warrant describing specifically what is to be searched, and requires that the warrant be based on probable cause. FISA permits, and always permitted, retroactive warrants based on the flimsiest of evidence.

fifth amendment, the right to grand jury, due process, and just compensation for property taken, and protection against double jeopardy and self-incrimination;

sixth amendment, the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial local jury, to be informed of the charges against you, to confront witnesses against you, to compel witnesses in your favor to appear, and to have the assistance of counsel;

and seventh amendment, the right to trial by jury:

These rights have been eroded by Bush and Cheney so that they now apply in some cases but not others. If the president calls you an “enemy combatant” you lose these rights. In June of 2002, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo wrote a pair of secret memos denying an American citizen named Jose Padilla these rights on the grounds that he was guilty of various offenses. But the memos themselves served as his trial as well as his sentence; Padilla had never been charged with the crimes, much less found guilty. In 2009, the new Justice Department under Eric Holder sought to dismiss a case that Padilla brought against Yoo alleging that his memos had led to Padilla’s detention and torture. Our due process rights must be restored to their intended state and then expanded to include protections unavailable in the eighteenth century, including the videotaping of all interrogations and confessions.

eighth amendment, the right against excessive bail or fines or cruel and unusual punishment:

The cruelest punishments imaginable have been employed in violation of the Eighth Amendment, with the disgusting defense sometimes offered that “interrogation techniques” are not punishment at all. While torture and any degrading treatment are banned by numerous treaties and statutes, the Constitution would be improved by the clarification of the ban provided here.

thirteenth amendment, the right against slavery except as punishment for crime:

Slavery is alive and well in US territories like the Marianas Islands and for immigrants held by force and compelled to work without compensation on farms in the United States; slavery should be banned even as a punishment for crime, and that ban should be enforced.

fifteenth amendment, the right to vote cannot be denied or abridged because of race:

Names are removed from registration rolls on the basis of race, and provisional ballots are rejected on the basis of race. If provisional ballots from African-Americans in Florida in 2000 had been rejected merely at the same rate as those for whites, President Al Gore’s victory margin would have been substantial.

sixteenth amendment, the right to vote cannot be denied or abridged because of sex:

This right cannot be protected for women any better than it can be for men. We do not have an individual right to vote, but only a guarantee that nobody be denied that right because of their race or sex. We require that everyone register, and then sometimes dump their names off the rolls. We hold elections on a weekday, when many people have to work. We provide insufficient staff at polling places, so voting can take many hours out of someone’s day. We insert the electoral college between the voters and the president. And we insert private corporations between the voters and the counting of the votes. We should create the right to directly elect the president and the right to have our votes publicly and verifiably counted on paper ballots at each polling place.

twenty-fourth amendment, the right to vote without paying a poll tax:

We no longer have poll taxes, but we have registration procedures, long lines, elections on a work day, voting rights denied as punishment for a crime, and a system so prone to errors that many voters are disenfranchised. Hollywood actor Tim Robbins had to spend a full day traveling around his city appealing to judges before he could get a glitch corrected and be able to vote in 2008; most people are not rich, white, famous movie actors with a full day to spare.

twenty-sixth amendment, the right to vote beginning at age eighteen:

This right cannot be protected for young people any better than for old. We should have universal registration when people reach eighteen. If we can register everyone for the military draft, why can’t we register everyone to vote?

There you have it. We’ve got rights, but they are threatened. They need restoration and enforcement. They also need expansion and updates. But that’s not the half of it. There’s also the matter of rights we ought to have that were never imagined by the creators of our Bill of Rights.

[Any BlackCommentator.com article may be re-printed so long as it is re-printed in its entirety and full credit given to the author and www.BlackCommentator.com. If the re-print is on the Internet we additionally request a link back to the original piece on our Website.]

A Safe Substitute for Alcohol

davidswanson — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:44:08 -0400

By David Swanson

The U.S. Department of Justice says that alcohol plays a pivotal role in two-thirds of all cases of violence against an intimate (a spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend), and blames alcohol for contributing to 100,000 sexual assaults against young people every year. That's right, alcohol hurts more people than al Qaeda.

Of course, alcohol does not always lead every consumer of it to violence. Most people who drink alcohol don't hurt anyone. But a large percentage of those who do get violent have been drinking alcohol. Should we ban it? We tried that once with miserable results, and we've banned other substances with equally bad outcomes.

We could stop promoting alcohol so heavily, but the impact of doing so would probably not be large. What to do? Well, what if there were a substitute for alcohol that didn't make anyone violent? What if this substitute were far less dangerous than alcohol to the health of the person using it, as well as to those around him or her? What if this alternative substance even had health benefits and medicinal properties and potentials? What if this substance satisfied the desire for intoxication without actually containing anything toxic, and you woke up the next morning without a hangover? What if this magical substitute for alcohol could boost the economy, free prisoners, reduce prison budgets, free up police to address serious crimes, and subtly improve our culture if only we could discover what it was?

The common name for this life-saving drug is marijuana, and in "Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?" the authors Steve Fox, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert argue for legalizing marijuana as a regulated substitute to reduce the societal damage done by alcohol. In the book's foreword, Norm Stamper, former Chief of the Seattle Police Department, writes:

"I've been asking police officers throughout the U.S. (and Canada) two questions. First: 'When's the last time you had to fight someone under the influence of marijuana?' (And by this I mean marijuana only, not pot plus a six-pack or fifth of tequila.) My colleagues pause; they reflect. Their eyes widen as they realize that in their five or fifteen or thirty years on the job they have never had to fight a marijuana user. I then ask, 'When's the last time you had to fight a drunk?' They look at their watches. It's telling that the booze question is answered in terms of hours, not days or weeks."

The case for making pot more available to those who might choose it over alcohol seems straightforward. Unless, of course, you've heard any of the pervasive myths that have been spread about it in this country for nearly a century. In 1927, lacking any Iraqi aluminum tubes to peddle yet, the New York Times published this fantasy:

"Mexican Family Go Insane
"Five Said to Have Been Stricken By Eating Marihuana
"A widow and her four children have been driven insane by eating the Marihuana plant, according to doctors, who say there is no hope of saving the children's lives and that the mother will be insane for the rest of her life…."

This is not terribly different from the stories promoted by our government today, and much of the book is devoted to debunking myths. While television networks are not required to give back even a smidgen of our airwaves for political campaigns or information, they have been required to air anti-pot propaganda, or to incorporate it into the plots of shows (such as "ER" and "Beverly Hills 90210"). In 2005, the Government Accountability Office determined that the government's anti-pot campaign had violated the law against covert propaganda by producing video news releases that news programs aired as if they had been created completely independently of the government.

When Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps was shown in a photograph using marijuana, both USA Swimming and the US Olympic Committee came down hard on him, just as the NFL does to its players. These are all organizations that live off massive funding from the makers of alcohol. So, incidentally, do members of Congress. It's a good thing THEY are never influenced by money.

David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book

David Swanson on Rights and Amendments, with Q and A in Toledo, Ohio

davidswanson — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 08:53:25 -0400

When 1st and 2nd Amendment Conflict: Protests, Guns and Double Standards

dlindorff — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:25:17 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Let me state from the get-go that I'm no opponent of gun ownership
(got my first rifle at the age of 12 and am still a crack shot). But
something weird is going on when you have guys wandering around a
political rally or protest site with pistols strapped to their thighs,
or semi-automatic assault rifles strapped brazenly to their backs, as
has been happening outside of venues where President Obama is speaking.

Before we get to the legal issues here, I just want to paint you a mental picture:

Take yourself back to the time when George W. Bush was president and
Dick Cheney was Vice President. Both men were barnstorming around the
country in those years, either ginning up support for their pointless
war in Iraq or campaigning for Republicans in Congressional races, or
for their own re-election. The response of police in charge of crowd
control at these events--always the same--was dependent upon who was
lining the streets. If there were people sporting signs that backed the
administration, they were left alone. If, however, it was someone
wearing something like an "Impeach Bush" T-shirt, or carrying a sign
saying "US Out of Iraq" or some other critical statement, he or she was
given a choice: move to a fenced in "Free Speech Zone" out of sight of
the presidential or vice-presidential entourage, or face arrest.

I investigated and wrote about what was happening
back then, and learned that the order to clear protesters away from
wherever the president or vice president would be was being made by the
Secret Service and the White House advance team. As I was told at the
time by Paul Wolf, a deputy police chief for Allegheny County, PA,
where Bush had come in 2003, the decision to pen in Bush critics at
that event originated with the Secret Service. "Generally, we don't put
protesters inside enclosures," Wolf said. "The only time I remember us
doing that was a Ku Klux Klan rally, where there was an opposing rally,
and we had to put up a fence to separate them."

Of the September, 2003 Bush event, he said, "What the Secret
Service does is they come in and do a site survey, and say, `Here's a
place where the people can be, and we'd like to have any protesters be
put in a place that is able to be secured.' Someone, say our police
chief, may have suggested the place, but the request to fence them in
comes from the Secret Service. They run the show."

Now I don't have to tell you that if those protesters who were
being moved away from a political rally or motorcade back then had been
visibly armed, much less armed with loaded assault rifles, they would
not have simply been herded into a "Free Speech" pen. They'd have been
arrested, probably tased into the bargain, their guns would have been
confiscated, and they might well have found themselves on a flight to
Guantanamo Bay.

What's different now?

For one thing, we aren't seeing the "Free Speech Zones" at Obama
events. Clearly the Secret Service is not being instructed by White
House operatives to have local police cart away protesters. That's a
good thing. The Bush/Cheney tactic against protest was a gross
violation of the First Amendment right of free speech and free
association. For another, it seems like the Secret Service is letting
local police make the decisions about who poses a threat to the
president--and in some states, like upstate New York, Colorado and
Arizona, for example--those local police seem perfectly comfortable
with having armed citizens in the crowds.

Let me just state for the record that this is sheer madness.

I've been to a lot of demonstrations in my life, and one thing that
has been pretty standard is that police have banned the use of wooden
sticks for holding up signs. The reason is obvious: They are afraid
that sticks might end up being used as weapons in any confrontation,
whether with them, or perhaps with angry opponents of whatever is being
protested. So protesters use cardboard tubes instead.

How is it that sticks or baseball bats can be banned at rallies and protests, but not guns?

I'm not talking here about the right to bear arms. People have the
right under the Constitution to own guns, and various states like
Virginia, for example, have passed laws even allowing them to be worn
into public places like restaurants. But police also have a duty to
protect the public, and the right to carry guns is not universal. They
cannot, for instance, be carried near schools in any jurisdiction I
know of. Does that violate the Constitution? Apparently not, according
to the Supreme Court.

Why aren't people allowed to carry guns near or in schools? You
tell me. Clearly it's because there have been some nasty incidents
involving people with guns blowing away kids at schools. It's not that
people haven't killed kids in other settings, but there's an emotional,
visceral response to seeing an armed person near a playground, so we
outlaw it. It would scare parents, scare kids and scare teachers, and
that's not an environment we want for our kids.

So what about political events? Don't we want political events to
be free from intimidation? The essence of a free society is the right
to go to a public political event and express one's support for or to
protest against some political figure or political policy. That can
involve having to confront people with an opposite perspective, which
can get tense and nasty, but the conflict is verbal, not physical, and
of course if it gets physical, the police intervene, as they
should--hopefully with even-handedness.

Guns at such events introduce a different factor. If police--and
the Secret Service--allow guns at political events, then members of the
public have to fear for their safety and their very lives. No amount of
police scrutiny can prevent a gun-holder, whether based upon a plan of
action or in the heat of the moment, from suddenly firing into a crowd.
That reality is certain to deter some people from speaking their mind,
and others from even showing up.

Furthermore, just as we've had plenty of gun violence at schools,
which has led to state and local bans everywhere on gun-toting near
schools, we've also had our share of political assassinations and
assassination attempts, usually by people who brought guns to political
events.

Should someone at some point make an assassination attempt against
the country's 44th president, I can see all the conspiracy theories
already, looking at how the Secret Service did nothing to keep guns
away from the president's appearances, and how local cops stood idly by
while armed gunmen milled around motorcades and outside the venues
where the president was speaking. Sure it would probably be someone who
came with a concealed weapon, not someone publicly carrying one, but
when you have people carrying them openly, it is bound to divert police
and Secret Service attention from the person or people in the crowd who
are up to something more sinister.

Am I crazy, or is this all just nuts? Does the Secret Service
really want another dead president on its hands? Do local police really
want to have people killed, or a president shot, on their watch?

We've established that this is the United States of Gun Owners, so
if you want a gun, go out and buy yourself one. Heck, buy a hundred if
you like. But nobody should be allowed to carry a gun at a political
event.

If we are going to keep our First Amendment, or what's left of it,
we have to make sure that freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are
not intimidated by wackos with weapons. If we can keep rallies free of
sticks and bats, we can and must keep them free of guns too.

___________________

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

Clinton and Obama: The Worst and Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

dlindorff — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:20:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

Not because he is the Great Black Hope of progressives, but because
he has taken the concept of selling out to corporate interests and
compromising with Republicans to such remarkable heights that
progressives hopefully can no longer be confused about the
irretrievably corrupted nature of the Democratic Party.

On virtually every issue of importance, President Obama has sided with corporate interests and the wealthy.

On the issue of war and peace, he has sided with the
military-industrial complex, with a policy of permanent occupation of
Iraq and endless war in Afghanistan, as well as continued funding of
the country’s colossal armory of death, from strategic missiles and
submarines to aircraft-carrier-group armadas to high-tech fighter
squadrons and space weaponry.

On civil liberties, he has sided with the police state, supporting
continuation of the Bush/Cheney administration’s insidious National
Security Agency spying program, defended military spying within the US,
and refused to prosecute obvious abuses by the prior administration.

On torture, the Obama administration is continuing the imprisonment
and torture of captives in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world
at Bagram Air Base and, probably, at other secret sites, and instead of
closing Guantanamo as promised, is looking into transferring that
hellhole of torture and abuse to one or several sites in the mainland
US.

Health care reform has become a sad joke, with the emerging
“reform” bill looking for all the world like the Rube Goldberg creation
of the Clinton era that properly went down in flames. Instead of taking
on the insurance industry, the hospital companies and the
pharmaceutical industry and other parts of the profit-making
medical-industrial complex, Obama cut deals with all of them behind
closed doors, assuring that their profits would be left untouched, and
that they could essentially write their own “reform” bill through the
offices of bought-and-paid members of Congress like Senator Max Baucus.
Obama and his congressional allies carefully kept any discussion of the
single-payer idea—essentially Medicare for all, and the approach that
even Obama himself admits would be cheaper and more universal—out of
sight and off the table.

Climate change action, too, has been sold out, with Obama adopting
the approach favored by the energy industry—“cap and trade.” That
concept is a gold mine for Wall Street trading firms, which will be
doing trades next in pollution credits instead of subprime mortgages,
and for energy companies which will get free credits to sell, courtesy
of the taxpayer. And because it’s a system so easy to game, it will do
nothing or next to nothing to reduce greenhouse gases.

Finally, there’s economy and banking reform. Here Obama didn’t even
make a pretense of taking a progressive approach. There is a stimulus
program, but half of it was in the form of tax cuts—token for the poor
and middle class and significant for the rich and for businesses, and
half in the form of federal grants, often for unneeded projects like
roads and road repair which go to some of the higher paid members of
the working class, leaving the poor and the ununionized with no job
help. Meanwhile, bankers were the recipients of trillions of dollars in
bailout assistance, while nothing was done to break up the huge
mega-bank holding companies that brought on the financial and economic
crisis in the first place. Instead of picking economic advisers and
bank regulators from the many talented system critics like Nobelists
Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Obama picked veterans of the
Bush/Cheney administration, and Wall Street shills like Larry Summers
and Timothy Geithner.

Last fall, I and many progressives urged voters to elect Obama, not
because we thought he was a progressive, but because we hoped that his
background—community organizer, raised by a single mother, experience
living in a third world country (Indonesia), multi-racial—would lead
him to make at least some right decisions. We, or certainly I, hoped
too that the energized young and working class electorate that came out
for him in the fall would continue to press him aggressively to do the
right thing on war, environment, civil liberties and the economy.

I was wrong on the first count: Obama has been a corporatist
through and through on all the major issues that matter. And I was
wrong on the second. Most of the left in the US, from the labor
movement to the environmentalist movement to the anti-war movement, has
to date remained glumly quiescent as Obama has sold them out on each of
their key issues.

But here is the silver lining: The sell-out this time is so much
more blatant, and so much more serious, than it was with Clinton, and
for all the talk about Obama’s ability to string words together, he is
so much less of a charismatic figure than the gregarious Bill Clinton,
that he is unlikely to hang on to the ardent support that propelled him
to his victory last November. The disappointment and sense of betrayal
among progressives this time is palpable, especially because, while
Clinton, by 1994, had the excuse that he was working with a Republican,
or partially Republican Congress, Obama has solid control of both
houses, but refuses to use it. If, as I expect, the recession continues
to deepen, with more and more people losing jobs and homes, if, as I
predict, health care continues to be unaffordable and inaccessible, if,
as I know will happen, evidence of deadly climate change continues to
pile up, and if, as I am equally certain, Iraq explodes and the war in
Afghanistan continue to worsen, the left is going to see Obama and the
Democrats in Congress as the failures and corrupt frauds they are, and
will abandon them.

That leaves the question of what to do, and where those frustrated progressives will turn.

I don’t claim to have the answer to that. Clearly the labor movement
needs to recognize that hitching its fortunes to the Democratic Party
has been and will continue to be a dismal failure. It needs to pull all
its political money back and only support those who are 100% allies in
the struggle for the rights of workers. No money for the party as a
whole. It should also go back to the pioneering work of people like the
late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil and Chemical and Atomic Workers Union,
who before his death was tirelessly working to establish an American
labor party.

Other third parties on the left need to drop their individual
agendas and work towards unity, especially with the labor movement, in
order to create a broad-based left party that doesn’t have litmus tests
for inclusion—just broad principles like steeply progressive taxation,
an end to NAFTA and the WTO, democratization of the Federal Reserve
Bank, national health care, a wholesale slashing of the military
budget, by perhaps two-thirds or more, free education through four
years of college for all, and a crisis plan to attack climate change.

If the ever fractious US left, and the somnolent labor movement,
cannot come together as one, there is little hope of political change
in America. At that point the alternative would be an increasing
militancy over these critical issues, outside of the electoral
arena—something that has to happen anyhow, regardless of whether a real
third party force can be put together. We know that simply organizing
occasional polite marches in Washington, or in key cities, accomplishes
nothing. We have learned that email campaigns to deluge members of
Congress with canned opinions don’t work. What has worked, and will
always work, is massive campaigns of civil disobedience, tent cities in
Washington, organized disruption of war preparations, and door-to-door
organizing. The corrupt hacks who inhabit the halls of Congress and the
White House will not do the right thing just because it is the right
thing, or because we ask them nicely. They may, if we make them fear
that they will actually lose our votes in the next election. For the
most part, incumbent Democrats know that the people who peacefully
march down Connecticut Avenue are still likely to vote for them come
the next election. They’re not going to be so sure about people who are
being hit by tear gas and water cannons and who are being hauled off en
masse to jail at protests.

We may need to start sending that stronger message.
___________________

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 www.thiscantbehappening.net