Ron Jacobs : Remembering the Resignation of 'Nixon the Crook'

Front page of The Baltimore Sun, August 9, 1974.

Let there be no question:
Richard Nixon was a crook!

He surrounded himself with men who did not believe in democracy but understood what compromise might be required to maintain and consolidate power.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / August 14, 2013

August 9, 1974, is one of my favorite days in history. On that day, Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency of the United States. He only did so because he knew he was facing certain impeachment and a probable conviction on at least some of the charges he was facing.

The look of despair obvious on his face during his last speech from the White House was enough to make anyone who had opposed his rule almost believe that there was such a thing as earthly justice. Of course, Nixon never had to answer for his crimes. Indeed, when he died in April 1994, anyone listening to the speeches at his funeral would have thought he was an honorable man, a great world leader, and a statesman.

Richard Nixon was a crook. He was also a war criminal and mass murderer. He surrounded himself with other men who shared a similar worldview as to his. In other words, he surrounded himself with men who did not believe in democracy but understood what compromise might be required to maintain and consolidate power.

His circle of cronies were, like Nixon himself, paranoid, often petty and infinitely capable of surprising the somewhat naïve population of the United States with the callousness of their words and the Machiavellian nature of their deeds.

Among those deeds was the manipulation of white America’s racial fears to get elected not once but twice. Another highlight on this list would have to be the creation of the secret police-like Plumbers unit whose work it was to bring down Nixon’s political enemies by any means necessary (legal and otherwise).

Yet another was the invasion of Cambodia in spring 1970; an action that was followed by a nationwide rebellion that resulted in the murders of six college students by the forces of law and order and remarks by Nixon that essentially blamed the students for their own deaths. A couple more highlights on this list are the Christmas bombing of 1972 and the 1973 CIA-ITT-Anaconda Copper military coup in Chile.

I could go on, but the point, I believe, is made.

There is an opinion that occasionally pops up among today’s liberals, progressives, and even leftists that Richard Nixon was more progressive than Barack Obama. As proof, this argument cites Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, support of Clean Water legislation, his establishment of OSHA, his support of federal affirmative action and his endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment as a constitutional amendment.

These things happened in spite of Nixon and his crew of megalomaniacs, not because of them.

On top of that, argue those with a truly warped grip on history, he ended the U.S. war on Vietnam. This opinion is nonsense and historically ignorant. The way Nixon ended the war was by killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, at least 20,000 more U.S. troops, and having his henchman Henry Kissinger ultimately sign a peace agreement with conditions almost exactly the same as those that could have been reached with the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front of Vietnam in 1969 when he was inaugurated.

In other words, close to a million more people died before Nixon realized that the U.S. would not win the war.

As far as the environmental, affirmative action, and women’s policies are concerned, Nixon was just reacting to the groundswell of almost universal support for this legislation. Indeed, the underlying reason Nixon did anything progressive was because there was a popular and militant leftist movement in the United States at the time that constantly pushed the political conversation leftward.

Nixon, being a shrewd politician and determined to save capital for his masters in the war industry and on Wall Street, used his immense power to push through certain aspects of the liberal/progressive agenda as a means to placate the more moderate populace and to insure capital’s continued hegemony.

This is not to defend Barack Obama. He has been anything but progressive, despite the fact that he campaigned as if he would be. I believe this is why he provokes the angry response that he does from so many of those who voted for him. These voters actually believed that Obama would change the system that he rules over.

I had thought Richard Nixon and his successors would have removed such naiveté from the U.S. voting booth forever. After all, Richard Nixon certainly made a good part of my generation very cynical about politics, politicians, and government in general. Perhaps that will be Obama’s legacy for this generation.

Richard Nixon expanded the police state. Despite the investigations by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church in 1975 (The Church Committee) and others in and out of Congress, that police state never really went away. In fact, it has continued to expand to the point it is today.

The National Security Agency was spying on U.S. citizens in the 1970s and it’s spying on them now. The FBI and numerous other police agencies were waging counterinsurgency operations against leftist, third world, and anarchist organizations then and they are now.

It was under Nixon that these and numerous other authoritarian tactics intensified and became common practice. Obama is just continuing the tradition. It was also Richard Nixon who established the Drug Enforcement Agency, the most draconian, paramilitary, and covert of all police agencies funded by U.S. taxpayers.

He started the destruction of our civil liberties and civil rights known as the War on Drugs and made the use of racial code words to hide what were blatantly racist policies when put into practice in this and other government programs.

One of my favorite moments in television history remains the few minutes that were shown live the morning after Nixon resigned. Unfortunately, when he waved goodbye, it wasn’t forever. Even worse, the mess he left behind is now business as usual. We are not better off because of that.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His novels, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, and Short Order Frame Up will be republished by Fomite in April 2013 along with the third novel in the series All the Sinners Saints. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Benghazi is the Perfect 'Scandal'

Political cartoon by Daryl Cagle / Cagle Cartoons.

Benghazi:
The perfect 'scandal'

The real 'scandal' is the cover-up of what the U.S. was doing in Libya.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / May 30, 2013

On the night of September 11, 2012, an armed group attacked a diplomatic post in the city of Benghazi in eastern Libya. The next morning a CIA annex was attacked. Out of these two attacks four United States citizens were killed including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

According to a November 2012 Wall Street Journal article (quoted by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic, May 13, 2013):

The U.S. effort in Benghazi was at its heart a CIA operation, according to officials briefed on the intelligence. Of the more than 30 American officials evacuated from Benghazi following the deadly assault, only seven worked for the State Department. Nearly all the rest worked for the CIA, under diplomatic cover, which was a principal purpose of the consulate, these officials said.

On March 17, 2011, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1973 authorizing humanitarian intervention in Libya. It endorsed “Member States, acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, to take all necessary measures to protect civilians under threat of attack in the country, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory...” Five Security Council members abstained from support of this resolution: Brazil, China, Germany, India, and Russia.

Passage of the resolution was followed by a NATO-led air war on targets in that country. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established in 1949 as a military alliance to defend Europe from any possible aggression initiated by the Soviet Union. If words mattered, NATO should have dissolved when the Soviet Union collapsed.

The United States, so concerned for the human rights of people in the Persian Gulf and Middle East, including in Libya, was virtually silent as nonviolent revolutions overthrew dictatorial regimes in Tunisia and Egypt earlier in 2011.

The United States continued to support regimes in Bahrain and Yemen in the face of popular protest and violent response and remained the primary rock-solid supporter of the state of Israel as it continued to expand settlements in the West Bank and blockaded the transfer of goods to Palestinians in Gaza.

And, of course, in the face of growing ferment in the Middle East and Persian Gulf for democratization not a word was said by way of criticism of the monarchical system in Saudi Arabia.

So as the Gaddafi regime in Libya fought its last battles, leading ultimately to the capture and assassination of the Libyan dictator, the NATO alliance and the United States praised themselves for their support of movements for democratization in Libya.

What seemed obvious to observers except most journalists was the fact that the overthrow of the Libyan regime, for better or worse, could not have occurred without the massive bombing campaign against military and civilian targets throughout Libya carried out by NATO forces.

From the vantage point of the Benghazi crisis of September 11, 2012, humanitarian intervention, which in Benghazi included 23 (of some 30) U.S. representatives who were CIA operatives, suggests that the attacks on U.S. targets might have had something to do with the history of U.S interventionism in the country. Great powers, such as the United States, continue to interfere in the political life of small and poor countries. And, the mainstream media continues to provide a humanitarian narrative of imperialism at work.

The post-9/11 Benghazi story is one of Republicans irresponsibly focusing on inter-agency squabbles and so-called contradictory Obama “talking points” after the killings of the four U.S. representatives in Benghazi. They chose not to address the real issue of the United States pattern of interference in the internal affairs of Libya.

And the Obama Administration defends itself by denying its incompetence in the matter, desperately trying to avoid disclosing the real facts in the Benghazi story which might show that the CIA and the Ambassador’s staff were embedded in Benghazi to interfere in the political struggles going on between factions among the Libyan people.

As Alexander Cockburn put it well in reference to the war on Libya in The Nation in June 2011:

America’s clients in Bahrain and Riyadh can watch the undignified pantomime with a tranquil heart, welcoming this splendid demonstration that they have nothing to fear from Obama’s fine speeches or Clinton’s references to democratic aspirations, well aware that NATO’s warplanes and helicopters are operating under the usual double standard -- with the Western press furnishing all appropriate services.

If Cockburn were alive today he would have added that the Libyan operation was about U.S. covert interventionism, anger on the part of sectors of the Benghazi citizenship, and not about the United States encouraging “democratic aspirations” of the Libyan people.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats want to have a conversation about U.S. interventionism but prefer to debate about a “scandal.” The real “scandal” is the cover-up of what the U.S. was doing in Libya.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Jim Turpin : Is the Imperial Presidency the 'New Normal'? / 2

Photo by Jim Watson / AFP / Getty Images./ Foreign Policy.

The 'new normal'?
The Imperial Presidency / 2

“You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”
-- Talking Heads ("Once in a Lifetime")

By Jim Turpin / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2013

Second in a two-part series.

In my previous installment of this article, I discussed how the codification of the Executive’s imperial power and America's one party political system have contributed to a deeply emboldened presidential authority.

But recent executive branch overreach is also propped up with a troubling combination of additional factors including:

• Assassination by star chamber
• Subjugated and 'craven' media

Assassination by star chamber

Star Chamber (n):

1. A 15th-century to 17th-century English court consisting of judges who were appointed by the Crown and sat in closed session on cases involving state security.
2. star chamber: A court or group that engages in secret, harsh, or arbitrary procedures.

The Department of Justice (DOJ), in an effort to codify extrajudicial killings in the “War on Terror” by the Executive branch had a “white paper” leaked earlier this week.

The contents and justification for killing U.S. citizens or foreign nationals are chilling and this was laid out by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian:

The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice. In September 2011, it killed U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, along with U.S. citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki's 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen.

Since then, senior Obama officials including Attorney General Eric Holder and John Brennan, Obama's top terrorism adviser and his current nominee to lead the CIA, have explicitly argued that the president is and should be vested with this power. Meanwhile, a Washington Post article from October reported that the administration is formally institutionalizing this president's power to decide who dies under the Orwellian title "disposition matrix."

This “disposition matrix” -- more commonly referred to as a “kill list” -- is done in complete secrecy by this administration with the aid of the CIA, the National Counterterrorism Center (NTC), and others in a “star chamber." This unaccountable and unmonitored group metes out justice that is death from above, without a shred of “due process” which has been the center of western legal principles and law since the Magna Carta.

More from Greenwald in The Guardian:

The president's underlings compile their proposed lists of who should be executed, and the President -- at a charming weekly event dubbed by White House aides as "Terror Tuesday" -- then chooses from "baseball cards" and decrees in total secrecy who should die. The power of accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are all consolidated in this one man, and those powers are exercised in the dark. In fact, The Most Transparent Administration Ever™ has been so fixated on secrecy that they have refused even to disclose the legal memoranda prepared by Obama lawyers setting forth their legal rationale for why the president has this power.

With unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), also known as “drones” and having names like “Predator” and “Reaper," the destruction for those on the ground is both horrific and widespread.

Code Pink, a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end U.S.-funded wars and occupations and to challenge militarism globally, recently traveled to the tribal area in Pakistan to both discuss the impact with civilians and protest the use of drones.

Medea Benjamin, one of the founders of Code Pink, recently released her book Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, an “extensive analysis of who is producing the drones, where they are being used, who are ‘piloting’ these unmanned planes, who are the victims and what are the legal and moral implications.”

Code Pink also, as one of the few activist groups still holding the Obama administration accountable for the use of drones, disrupted the confirmation hearing of new CIA director James Brennan. Professed liberal Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein quickly removed Code Pink at the beginning of the proceedings.

Just as important, Stanford and NYU released a report last year, titled “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from U.S. Drone Practices in Pakistan." This report lays out evidence of terrorized populations living in fear 24 hours a day:

• “Drones hover twenty-four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities.
• “The U.S. practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims.”
• “Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may attract the attention of drone operators. Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school.”

The efficacy of the entire drone program is highly suspect. The following is from the same report:

The number of "high-level" targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low -- estimated at just 2%.Furthermore, evidence suggests that U.S. strikes have facilitated recruitment to violent non-state armed groups, and motivated further violent attacks.

Subjugated and 'craven' media

The subject of waterboarding, remarkably, has been a topic in U.S. newspapers since the Phillipine Insurrection at the beginning of the 20th century, when U.S. soldiers were accused of torturing Filipino prisoners with the “water cure”:

A letter by A. F. Miller, of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment, published in the Omaha World-Herald in May, 1900, told of how Miller’s unit uncovered hidden weapons by subjecting a prisoner to what he and others called the “water cure.” “Now, this is the way we give them the water cure,” he explained. “Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I’ll tell you it is a terrible torture.

The Kennedy School of Government published a study by a group of Harvard students in 2010, titled, “Torture at the Times: Waterboarding in the Media." The remarkable results of this study show evidence of no longer using the term “torture” in U.S. newspapers post 9/11, when these horrific acts are committed by U.S. armed forces.

Ironically, when these acts are committed by other countries, the term “torture” is used much more frequently.

One of the worst offenders was The New York Times:

The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture, while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.”

Furthermore, it was revealed this week that The New York Times and other newspapers bowed to this administration’s request to keep drone bases in Saudia Arabia secret and then later decided to publish the story on the eve of the Brennan-CIA confirmation hearings:

According to a reporter on the national security beat, The New York Times participated in an “informal arrangement” to keep secret a Saudi Arabian base for U.S. interests -- and then suddenly withdrew from that arrangement. A story posted on the paper’s Web site last night -- titled “Drone Strikes’ Dangers to Get Rare Moment in Public Eye“ -- summarizes the leak of a white paper on the Obama administration’s targeted killing program and tees up the Senate confirmation hearing of White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Maybe The New York Times' slogan, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” should now be “All the News That’s Fit to Print…When It Makes Us More Money”

The nexus of all these contributing factors to empowering the executive branch is deeply troubling and seems insurmountable. It is rare that when power is given to those in authority, that it is later put aside.

“You may say to yourself, my God, what have I done?" -- Talking Heads ("Once in a Lifetime")

[Rag Blog contributor Jim Turpin is an Austin activist and writer who works with CodePink Austin. He also volunteers for the GI coffeehouse Under the Hood Café at Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas. Read more articles by Tim Turpin on The Rag Blog.]

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Jim Turpin : Is the Imperial Presidency the 'New Normal'?

The Imperial Obama? Image from The Express Tribune.

The 'new normal'?
The Imperial Presidency

"Same as it ever was..."
-- Talking Heads ("Once in a Lifetime")

By Jim Turpin / The Rag Blog / February 27, 2013

First of a two-part series.

Many presidents throughout our history, from revered to despised, have ignored the Constitution and taken on the mantle of imperial power. From Lincoln to FDR to Nixon, the examples are easily found.

In the ancient Roman world, the term imperium refers to the amount of power given to individuals of authority such as dictators or consuls and was frequently applied to generals with military power. The term “imperial” usually is linked to an empire or the concept of imperialism.

But how have we gotten to where we are today, where the president of the United States can detain or assassinate an American citizen without due process? Where American citizens are constantly monitored and personal information is subject to review? Where whistleblowers are now detained and prosecuted for exposing war crimes and corruption?

The development of the executive branch’s imperial power has its gnarled roots deep in American history. Frequently presidents have used it as an excuse during times of war, but this has not always been the case.

Abraham Lincoln famously suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War on April 27, 1861, in response to riots, local militia actions, and the threat that the border slave state of Maryland would secede from the Union. Habeas corpus (literally in Latin “you shall have the body [in court]”) is specifically detailed in the U.S. Constitution in Article I, Section 9: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

A writ of habeas corpus is used to bring a prisoner or other detainee before the court to determine if the person's imprisonment or detention is lawful.

Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 over 70 years ago on February 19, 1942, which led to the forced internment of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans that lived on the west coast.

The U.S., citing national security interests, demanded that Japanese-Americans be interned without due process or, it would eventually turn out, any factual basis. Whole communities were rounded up and sent to camps, sometimes just clapboard shelters or converted horse stables, in arid deserts and barren fields in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Arkansas.

Nixon's paranoid presidency..

Richard M. Nixon’s deep paranoia over the civil rights and peace movement led to the continued use of the secret FBI program Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), as a means to monitor, sabotage, and neutralize legitimate dissent across the country. COINTELPRO infiltrated the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the NAACP, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the National Lawyer Guild, and many other groups and organizations.

But what drives today’s constitutional overreach by the Executive Office? Recent history points to a number of factors, including:

• Codification of the Executive’s Imperial Power
• America’s One Party System

Codification of the Executive Imperial Power

Within days of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Congress responded by ramroding a number of open-ended laws that gave the Executive branch a blank check to wage war world-wide and indefinitely detain civilians at home and abroad.

Joanne Mariner of Justia.com neatly fits together the convoluted pieces of the Patriot Act, the Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF), and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which, though initiated by George W. Bush, is now fully promulgated by Barack Obama:

During the Bush years, despite massive public and press attention to the administration’s detention policies, Congress remained largely out of the picture. While the USA PATRIOT Act contained some provisions on detention, they were never put to use; the Bush administration preferred to create a detention system that was, it assumed, largely free of legal constraints and judicial oversight.

The military prison at Guantanamo and the CIA’s secret prison system were therefore created by executive fiat, without congressional input or restriction. When cases challenging Guantanamo and the military detention of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil got to court, however, the administration claimed that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), a joint resolution passed by Congress in September 2001, gave congressional approval for those detentions.

The AUMF, which authorizes the president to use “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who harbored such persons or groups, is silent on the issue of detention. A plurality of the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the administration, nonetheless, that the power to detain is necessarily implied by the power to use military force.

The NDAA, which is renewed every year, also contains sections, according to Mariner, that are deeply troubling to human rights activists:

What is now known as Subtitle D of the NDAA -- the section on detention -- made its first appearance in March of this year (2011). Called the Detainee Security Act in the House, and the Military Detainee Procedures Improvement Act in the Senate, the bills, introduced by Representative Buck McKeon and Senator John McCain, respectively, were meant to shift counterterrorism responsibilities from law enforcement to the military.

The clear goal of the two bills was to require that suspected terrorists either be tried before military commissions or be held in indefinite detention without charge... every provision in subtitle D is objectionable from the standpoint of human rights and civil liberties. Among the controversial provisions are sections 1026, 1027 and 1028 of the bill, which restrict detainee transfers and releases from Guantanamo. But while human rights organizations are worried about these limitations, their gravest concerns pertain to sections 1021 and 1022.

Glenn Greenwald, while still at Salon, addresses Sections 1021 and 1022:

There are two separate indefinite military detention provisions in this bill. The first, Section 1021, authorizes indefinite detention for the broad definition of “covered persons” discussed above in the prior point. And that section does provide that “Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.” So that section contains a disclaimer regarding an intention to expand detention powers for U.S. citizens, but does so only for the powers vested by that specific section.

More important, the exclusion appears to extend only to U.S. citizens “captured or arrested in the United States” -- meaning that the powers of indefinite detention vested by that section apply to U.S. citizens captured anywhere abroad (there is some grammatical vagueness on this point, but at the very least, there is a viable argument that the detention power in this section applies to U.S. citizens captured abroad).

But the next section, Section 1022, is a different story. That section specifically deals with a smaller category of people than the broad group covered by 1021: namely, anyone whom the President determines is “a member of, or part of, al-Qaeda or an associated force” and “participated in the course of planning or carrying out an attack or attempted attack against the United States or its coalition partners.”

For those persons, section (a) not only authorizes, but requires (absent a Presidential waiver), that they be held “in military custody pending disposition under the law of war.” The section title is “Military Custody for Foreign Al Qaeda Terrorists,” but the definition of who it covers does not exclude U.S. citizens or include any requirement of foreignness.

That section -- 1022 -- does not contain the broad disclaimer regarding U.S. citizens that 1021 contains. Instead, it simply says that the requirement of military detention does not apply to U.S. citizens, but it does not exclude U.S. citizens from the authority, the option, to hold them in military custody.

The annual renewal of the NDAA by the Congress of the United States is a sad and deeply troubling testimony to how we empower an Executive branch that is ironically supposed to have their overreach limited by the very branch voting for this law.


America’s One Party System

John Kerry, Winter Soldier.

During the presidential election last fall, if I closed my eyes and listened to speeches on national security, there was basically no policy difference. Both parties called us the “Greatest nation on Earth” and tried to outdo the other with patriotic and nationalistic proclamations and slogans.

As pointed out by Mother Jones during coverage of the election for both party’s conventions, John Kerry (who coincidentally became our new Secretary of State in 2013) spouted, “Ask Osama bin Laden if he is better off now than he was four years ago."

The story went on:

...Democrats have adopted the kind of language that might have been derided as "cowboy rhetoric" four years ago. And Kerry wasn't the first or last speaker to invoke Bin Laden in Charlotte last week [in 2012]. Asking for four more years of Obama, Vice President Joe Biden intoned that "Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive!" Eight years ago, Democrats trying to act tough on national security sounded like kids playing pretend; at times, this year's convention sounded like a Roman triumph.

Let’s remember, this is the same Lieutenant John Kerry who as a member of Vietnam Veteran’s Against the War (VVAW) spoke at Winter Soldier in 1971 in Washington, D.C., decrying militarism and war:

We are here in Washington also to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country, the question of racism, which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions also, the use of weapons, the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage in the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions, in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, the killing of prisoners, accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.

I would be curious to know if Kerry as the new Secretary of State remembers the importance of his testimony in 1971 and what his brothers at VVAW think of him now.

The same Mother Jones article deftly points out that:

Barack Obama has a plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, but neither candidate [Democratic or Republican] actually has a plan to end the war that started on September 11, 2001. Both parties accept that conflict as a permanent feature of American life. An American citizen in the U.S. is as likely to be killed by their own furniture as a Muslim terrorist, but fear of violent Islamic extremism has changed this country almost irrevocably.

But let’s compare... are the Democratic and Republican Party really just the same party on issues like national security?

ProPublica recently did a side-by-side comparison of Bush and Obama policies on the use of torture, surveillance, and detention and the results are not very surprising.

To Obama’s credit, CIA “black sites” (outsourced torture sites to foreign countries) and “enhanced interrogation techniques” (also known in the vernacular as “torture”) have been, as far as the American public is aware, discontinued and stopped by this administration.

But... Obama has continued the following policies started by Bush and ramped them up dramatically under his administration:

• Continued renewal of the Patriot Act;
• Wiretaps and data collection of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals;
• Continuation of Guantanamo prison as an indefinite detention center;
• Targeted killings (also known as “assassinations”) of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals without legal oversight;
• Significant increase of drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and possibly now in Mali, that have killed thousands of civilians;
• The use of military commissions to nullify the rights of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals in civilian court.

On issues of national security, America really remains a one-party system that use the “War on Terror” as an excuse to abrogate civil liberties of its’ citizenry.

“You may ask yourself, where does that highway lead to?” -- Talking Heads ("Once in a Lifetime")

In the second installment of this article, I will investigate the use of assassination by "Star Chamber” and how a subjugated and cravenly media has led us down the highway of a fearful nation with fewer and fewer civil liberties.

[Rag Blog contributor Jim Turpin is an Austin activist and writer who works with CodePink Austin. He also volunteers for the GI coffeehouse Under the Hood Café at Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas. Read more articles by Tim Turpin on The Rag Blog.]

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Alan Wieder : Race to the Bottom

Image from Diary of a Public School Teacher.

Race to the bottom:
Educating Obama

Inspiration and curiosity and breadth and depth in learning are often usurped by crowded and underfunded schools, high stakes testing, zero tolerance and incarceration, and the demonization of teachers.

By Alan Wieder / The Rag Blog / February 21, 2013

At about the same time that President Obama was reelected, The Oregonian in Portland ran an article in which a suburban Beaverton teacher told a reporter that she had 64 students in her high school biology class.

There are endless issues that need to be pressed as President Obama enters his second term. Some progressives are hopeful because there is no third term -- and supposedly no further political ambitions. Considering both history and the associations that the President chooses, hopefulness from the left doesn’t represent reality.

However, there is both the need and the responsibility to put pressure on the President for social, political, and economic justice. One area where the Obama administration has been especially deficient is public education. Initially taking their cue from Bush’s No Child Left Behind, they have magnified the push for non-egalitarian, class, race, and gender biased education via their own program, Race to the Top.

Obama, through his appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education, has endorsed the post-neocon educational reform movement, or what some critics refer to as the “educational deformers.” Administration policy is akin to privatization because the deformers view education as a commodity.

Bill Ayers elegantly stated the present educational reality in his recent open letter to the President:

The landscape of “educational reform” is currently littered with rubble and ruin and wreckage on all sides. Sadly, your administration has contributed significantly to the mounting catastrophe. You’re not alone: The toxic materials have been assembled as a bipartisan endeavor over many years, and the efforts of the last several administrations are now organized into a coherent push mobilized and led by a merry band of billionaires including Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Sam Walton, and Eli Broad.

Unfortunately, Obama administration educational policy corresponds directly with the President’s choice of Wall Street over Main Street, in spite of his contradictory assertions during his battle with Romney and his recent State of the Union address. For school children and teachers, it means that inspiration and curiosity and breadth and depth in learning are often usurped by crowded and underfunded schools, high stakes testing, zero tolerance and incarceration, and the demonization of teachers.

In These Times published an article by Leonie Haimson that is wonderfully titled, “Educate All Kids Like Sasha and Malia.” Haimson argues that the current administration is “pauperizing, standardizing, digitizing and privatizing education” even though the President would never do the same to his own daughters.

She warns that although Obama has criticized “teaching to the test,” his administration has done just that by demanding teacher evaluation through student test scores. In addition, Haimson argues that punitive policies like school closings and mass teacher firings condemn poor children to unequal education.

Barack and Michelle Obama’s children attend the Friends School and they went to the University of Chicago Lab School before he became President. Both of these institutions honor teachers and provide a teaching and learning environment that includes small classes, abundant resources, and opportunities for exploration and experimentation by teachers and students. Standardized testing is not a religion and teachers are respected rather than demonized.

But the schools that President Obama's children attend are not the model for his Department of Education or the deformers that they have embraced. The irony is so great because the President and everyone else understand that good teaching and student learning have nothing to do with privatizing schools or high stakes testing or any of the other false measures that the federal government has foisted upon state legislatures. Government educational policy is economic and ideological -- not evidential -- in spite of government and deformer assertions to the contrary.

Another article that speaks to this issue is "How to Destroy Education While Making a Trillion Dollars" by Robert Freeman. The author stresses three assertions.

First, lower the costs so you can jack up the profits. Since the overwhelming cost in education is the salaries of the teachers, this means firing the experienced teachers, for they are the most expensive. Replace them with “teachers” who are young, inexperienced, and inexpensive. Better yet, waive requirements that they have to have any training, that is to say, that they be credentialed. That way, you can get the absolute cheapest workers available. Roll them over frequently so they don’t develop any expectation that they’ll ever make a career out of it.

Second, make the curriculum as narrow, rote, and regimented as you can. This makes it possible for low-skilled “teachers” to “teach.” All they need do is maintain order while drilling students in mindless memorization and robotic repetition. By all means avoid messy things like context, nuance, values, complexity, reflection, depth, ambiguity -- all the things that actually make for true intelligence.

Third, Proliferate franchised, chartered McSchools with each classroom in each McSchool teaching the same thing on the same day in exactly the same way. Develop the lesson literally once, but distribute and reuse it thousands of times with low-cost proctors doing the supervision.

Thankfully, teachers and their allies are fighting for smaller class sizes, limited standardized tests, enhanced arts programs, equitable financing, and strong teacher contracts that protect intellectual freedom, collegiality, and collaboration, as well as bread and butter issues.

And one had to have been in exile the past month not to be aware of the brave stand of teachers in Seattle who have refused to administer the statewide standard examination. Less known is the recent boycott of standardized testing by students, with the support of their parents, in Portland. The latter is lead by a student at Lincoln High School.

Everyone cites teaching and learning in Finland because it is a country where teachers are empowered. But there are great teachers throughout the United States who are ready to lead based on very different values and outcomes than those the Obama administration supports. They are the people who teach America’s children while simultaneously and selflessly fighting for progressive teaching and learning. Education is not a commodity.

Maybe our protests and our actions should remain naïve. Maybe we should be pounding Barack and Michelle Obama, as well as the current administration with Leonie Haimson’s words:

“Educate All Kids Like Sasha and Malia.”

[Alan Wieder taught at the University of South Carolina for over 20 years and wrote academically on racism and education. His forthcoming book, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid will be available in June through Monthly Review Press in the United States and Jacana Media in South Africa.]

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Tom Hayden : Sticking It to Wall Street

The fallen bull. Image from Tumblr.
A legacy of Occupy:
Sticking it to Wall Street

The Occupy movement energized a vanguard of voters to become more populist in their demands.

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / November 15, 2012

It is unfortunate that Occupy Wall Street lost its momentum after the uprisings of 2011, because the election and its results have opened another opportunity to stick it to Wall Street and choke and reform the “great vampire squid” for another next generation. As I wrote six months ago in The Nation:

This year marks the first presidential campaign in our lifetime when the gluttony of Wall Street, the failures of capitalism, the evils of big money in politics and a discussion of fundamental reform will be front and center in election debates. No doubt the crisis that gave rise to Occupy will not be fixed by an election, but that’s beside the point. Elections produce popular mandates, and mandates spur popular activism. It’s time to organize a progressive majority.

From the general Occupy standpoint, Obama was just another Wall Street candidate, and the elections did not matter much anyway. That is a tragic view to take, since it robbed Occupy of an occasion to take credit and feel empowered -- “Fired up! Ready to go!” as the Obama multitudes say. In fact, Occupy did influence the election, did influence the outcome, and did shape the mandate, without, in most cases, its members even voting for Obama. Hopefully they will try to shape the terms of the bailout ahead.

The Occupy movement influenced the political climate in which Obama and his advisers chose to attack Romney as an agent of Bain Capital; incidentally, against the strong preferences of such powerful Democratic figures as Bill Clinton and Cory Booker, the Newark mayor who publicly said he was “nauseated” by the president’s attack on private equity.

The Occupy movement energized a vanguard of voters to become more populist in their demands. The Occupy movement surely helped make it possible for Elizabeth Warren to ride the wave to Washington. And those were only some of the aftershocks of Occupy long after it faded from the streets and headlines.

Wall Street, which did everything in its considerable power to turn on and defeat Obama, now thinks it is “time to mend fences.” (New York Times, November 8, 2012) But if Obama and Axelrod retain any of their Chicago political instincts, there should be some payback before any mending takes place. If Obama is forced to compromise his preferences on the fiscal cliff, reforming Wall Street is where he should be able to implement his words from the campaign trail.

If Obama had to stock his cabinet with Wall Street players in order to avoid total economic disaster in 2009, now he can offer some new choices and directions. Where is Ralph Nader when we need him?

Obama should stick it to Wall Street and make it hurt so badly that they will never forget the screws in this lifetime.

First, Obama should encourage Harry Reid to put Elizabeth Warren on the Senate Banking Committee and empower a de facto reform bloc of Sherrod Brown, Bernie Sanders, Tammy Baldwin, Richard Blumenthal, Tom Harkin, Chris Murphy, Al Franken, Jon Tester, and Warren, among others. Let progressive populist leadership come out of the new Senate. Second, deeper public hearings should bore into the scandal and call the attention of public watchdogs over the obscure process of writing Dodd-Frank regulations on derivatives and hedge fund manipulations.

Wall Street lobbyists are already preparing a "lobbying frenzy” against the administration’s tentative plan to “apply derivatives rules to American banks trading overseas.” (New York Times, November 8, 2012) As Obama promised long ago about health care, such Wall Street plans should be exposed on television at every turn because, like mushrooms, they only grow in the dark.

This opening of the process for all to see can be achieved if there is aggressive monitoring of a U.S. senator. Wall Street somehow thinks its world will conveniently go dark as they lobby in stealth to weaken the Volcker Rule, contain the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and legislate a diluted authority for other key agencies.

The opportunity to prolong the recent ideological and values debate may increase, not subside. On the left, an opportunity still exists to enter the debate loud and clear with concrete demands.

To “occupy” Wall Street is no longer a policy demand, if it ever was. Extending democracy to Wall Street might be a better and bolder banner -- with proposals for greater disclosure, accountability, regulation in the public interest, a ban on secret donors to campaigns, a Robin Hood transactions tax, and a long state-by-state campaign to eliminate the Citizens United decision.

The theme song might be Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy Is Coming to the USA.”

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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ELECTION 2012 / Jonah Raskin : A View from California

"California Dreaming." Art by Tom Horner / Dribble. Inset image below from San Francisco Sentinal.
A view from California:
Which way the wind blows

Obama’s reelection is only the beginning. The hard work of transforming the nation lies ahead

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 8, 2012

SANTA ROSA, California -- Watching national politics from the coast of California, where I live, and where nearly everyone votes for Democrats, feels weird. It felt especially weird on the evening of Election Day as I waited and watched to hear whether Obama would be reelected or Romney would waltz into the White House along with Paul Ryan and Karl Rove.

Whomever Californians chose for president didn’t seem to matter at all. It was all decided before the vote was counted in my own state, and almost all of the attention was focused on what the media calls “swing states.”

As it turned out, Obama won the swing states, including Ohio. He lost the South big, lost the heartland -- from North Dakota to Texas -- and lost the white male vote over the age of 50. But he won the rest: the urban vote, the black vote, the Latino vote, and the vote of the 47% that Romney abused in a campaign speech that came back to bite him big time.

It seems clear that the future of American politics belongs to the Democratic Party, which is now clearly the party of youth, Latinos, women, and the working class. (Hey and a few liberal millionaires, too.)

It’s also the party of students with loans, families who love Obamacare, same sex couples, both married and unmarried, and marijuana smokers who voted to legalize weed in Colorado and Washington.

If the Obama victory signals anything it signals the continuing wave of the cultural revolution that began in the 1960s, spread in the 1970s, took a beating under Reagan in the 1980s, and again with Bush I and Bush II, and that came back strong in 2008.

Obama’s reelection in 2012 is a victory for grassroots democracy of the kind that appeared in the streets and in the parks of Chicago in 1968 during the Democratic National Convention and that literally took a beating from Mayor Daley’s police. That old Democratic Party is gone.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement played a crucial role in the reelection of Obama because it made Americans aware of social, economic, and political inequalities and injustices. It helped us to see that Romney belonged to the party of the 1%, the party that would like to cut social security, go back to the greed feed of the Bush years, and let citizens fend for themselves without government help in the wake of unemployment, storms such as Sandy, and human-made disasters, too.

Watching it all unfold from California felt pretty good on Election Day. We may not tip the scales, or count in the political balance of things, but we know how to vote, whom to vote for, and we don’t swing back and forth. We want Obamacare; we want legal weed; we want same sex marriages to be lawful; we want the government to help the poor, the needy, the homeless and the hungry, just as Roosevelt’s government helped Americans in the Depression of the 1930s.

In fact, Californians voted for Governor Jerry Brown’s measure to increase the state sales tax and to levy higher taxes on people making over $250,000 a year. The funds are earmarked for education where they’re definitely needed.

I don’t know if California is the dog that wags the tail of the nation, or the rest of the country is the dog and California the tail it wags. Do we start trends or do we finish them? It’s not clear, though I hope that the rest of the country begins to like and to accept the idea of taxing the rich and the super-rich. It’s about time.

Obama’s reelection is only the beginning. The hard work of transforming the nation lies ahead. We’ve got to stop war, stop Wall Street greed, stop corporations from funding politicians, stop old conservative white men from bullying and beating up their own sons and daughters, nephews and nieces.

Hey, there’s as much of a generation gap now as there was in 1968, though today it’s clearer which way the winds are blowing, and clearer, too, that history is on the side of youth and change, not on the side of the Mitt Romney’s and the Karl Rove’s of the world.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of American Scream, The Radical Jack London and Rock ‘n’ Roll Women and a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Jack A. Smith : America's Conservative Era

Image from Research Digest.
The election reflects
America's conservative era

As the Republicans moved ever further to the right... so too did the Democrats. This leaves the U.S. as the world's only rich capitalist state without a mass party left of center to at least offer some protection to working families.

By Jack A. Smith / The Rag Blog / July 15, 2012

This year's presidential campaign is taking place within an extremely conservative era in American political history that will substantially influence the domestic and foreign priorities of the next administration, regardless of whether it's headed by Democrat Barack Obama or Republican Mitt Romney.

Romney and his party, of course, embrace rigid right wing politics influenced by Tea Party extremism, while Obama and the Democrats -- campaign rhetoric aside -- basically echo the now extinct "moderate Republicans" of a quarter-century ago in a number of particulars.

A case in point about our decades-long conservative era is the Obama Administration's major "progressive" achievement -- the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance plan, which was upheld by the Supreme Court two weeks ago.

The ACA, which congressional Republicans fought furiously to oppose when put forward by President Obama, was devised nearly 20 years ago by the conservative Heritage Foundation and implemented in Massachusetts by Romney when governor in 2006.

In his column in The New York Times June 29, the liberal Keynesian economist Paul Krugman pointed out that the act, which he supports, is "not perfect, by a long shot -- it is, after all, originally a Republican plan, devised long ago as a way to forestall the obvious alternative of extending Medicare to cover everyone."

A page one news analysis in the Times has referred to the measure as "the most significant piece of social legislation since the New Deal," ignoring Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and the civil rights achievements of the 1960s in order to embellish its significance.

Doubtless, the new health measure contains several important new benefits, as well as several key shortcomings. (For details and analysis of the ACA by Physicians for a National Health Program, go here.)

Many liberals are now suggesting the ACA -- which will still leave over 25 million people without insurance and may deprive millions more poor families of Medicaid as well (thanks to a ruling by arch-conservative Chief Justice John Roberts allowing states to reject enlarging the program) -- is a first step toward the development of a truly inclusive national healthcare system. The second step, however, may be decades in coming, if ever, given probable conservative attempts to repeatedly weaken the ACA, much less allow an expansion.

Another of President Obama's major first term "progressive" initiatives was taken from the conservatives as well. This was his proposal for a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, where they contribute to global warming. This flexible market-based program allowed high greenhouse gas emitters to buy the right to continue polluting the atmosphere from companies with low emissions.

Cap-and-trade was a less stringent alternative to tougher regulations sought by environmentalists and it was supported by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush (who adopted a similar measure in the early 1990s to curb acid rain), and by George W. Bush.

By the time Obama took office, the Republicans had lurched further to the right and corporate interests, led by Big Oil and Dirty Coal, were campaigning passionately against cap and trade. Conservatives scuttled the legislation in the Senate.

In both instances progressive legislation far more appropriate to healthcare and environmental needs was waiting in the wings but Obama -- a champion of bipartisanship despite continual humiliating rebuffs -- opted for the moderate Republican plans. When cap and trade failed, Obama in effect abandoned the fight against global warming rather than introduce progressive alternatives and fighting for them.

[One of America's best known environmentalists and outspoken climate scientist, James Hansen, head the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been leading a campaign against cap-and-trade for several years, charging it "does little to slow global warming or reduce our dependence on fossil fuels." Some groups fighting climate change support the measure as a first step.]

The White House didn't even allow the labor movement's most important legislative request -- the Employee Free Choice Act that would have removed roadblocks to union organizing -- to come to a vote in the first term when the Democrats controlled both congressional chambers. A probable reason is that Blue Dog conservative Democrats would have voted with the minority to quash the measure.

Today's conservative era is the product of an unrelenting drive for strategic ideological dominance by the right wing and its big business and financial sector allies for almost four decades. It is a reaction to the liberal reforms of the post-World War II era and social advances from the mass popular struggles of the 1960s-early '70s period.

As the Republicans moved ever further to the right in the intervening years, so too did the Democrats, now situated in the center-right of the political spectrum. This leaves the U.S. as the world's only rich capitalist state without a mass party left of center to at least offer some protection to working families.

The conservative assault accelerated with the implosion of the USSR and the dismantling of most socialist societies two decades ago. The existence of extensive social welfare programs, first in the Soviet Union and then in various socialist countries after World War II, obliged the capitalist "West" to implement reforms lest its own working classes be attracted to "the communist menace." The ending of the Cold War also ended the adoption of significant social programs in America, and the weakening of existing benefits.

Many conservative goals have already been attained since the mid-'70s, and a number of them have taken place with partial or complete support of the Democratic party. They include:

The severe weakening of the labor union movement; the redistribution of massive wealth to the already rich through individual and corporate tax cuts while the standard of living for most Americans is in decline; off-shoring of manufacturing to enhance corporate profits; increased wage exploitation; deregulation of the financial economy, enhancing its casino configuration; privatization of government services; the elimination of social programs for the multitudes; threatened cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are now "on the table," says Obama; the fact that about half the American people receive low wages or live in poverty; inaction on needed tax increases for the wealthy; undermining the U.S. educational system; setbacks for civil liberties; and a massive increase in the prison population.

The conservatives made considerable progress during the presidencies of Reagan (1981-89), Bush I (1989-93) and Bush II (2001-2009). But rightist policies also spread during the Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton (1993-2001) and incumbent Obama from 2009.

Clinton's two principal domestic achievements during eight years in office weakened two key Democratic reforms, much to the delight of the Republicans. In 1996 he conspired with conservatives to dismantle "welfare as we know it" by passing the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act."

In 1999, Clinton joined forces with the congressional right wing to repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act -- a decision that in large part was responsible for the Great Recession and several more years of economic stagnation, unemployment, and some six million home foreclosures.

Obama's first term in office is most noteworthy for his continual concessions to the right wing and refusal to fight for progressive goals, leading his wavering centrist party to the right of center in the process. He demobilized his enthusiastic and massive 2008 constituency upon taking office, evidently because he didn't want a large activist organization in the streets pushing toward the liberalism many Democratic voters incorrectly believed he embodied.

The conservative campaign for even more control of the political system was signaled by the emergence of the activist right wing populist Tea Party soon after Obama took power. The political impact of this nationwide organization of older white conservatives, libertarians, and the religious right -- bankrolled in part by billionaires -- has been considerable, not least because no mass activist liberal movement was available to challenge Tea Party activism or put forward a progressive counter-agenda.

The liberal rank and file has been isolated by the party leadership, as have liberals in Congress. The few remaining center-left politicians have been objects of criticism from the White House and Democratic big wigs.

The Tea Party added a new element to the decades-long conservative campaign for dominant power in the U.S. Now the GOP isn't just ideologically driven right-wing politicians, their business backers, and the wealthy 1% who finance their campaigns, but grassroots activists with their own selfish axes to grind.

Some are fuming because their taxes help the "undeserving" poor. Some think immigrants are "freeloaders." Some are racists who do not accept a black president in the White House. Some will not abide gays and lesbians. Some reject separation of church and state. Some want to subvert the hard-earned rights of American women.

The conservatives rage against "big government" and "wasteful spending," but this is demagogic rhetoric convincing or confusing a sector of the electorate largely ignorant of history and the details of current events. Both the Reagan and Bush II administrations -- vocal proponents of a smaller state and lower spending -- increased the size of government and created huge deficits.

The real Republican objective isn't a "smaller" government per se but a government driven by free market laissez-faire capitalism and entirely controlled by monopoly corporations, Wall Street financiers, and the 1% ruling class. In the process, most government regulation of the economy and financial system will be eliminated, social programs will wither along with collective bargaining and the trade union movement, and key services will be transferred to profit-driven corporations.

Since the Affordable Care Act or cap-and-trade are conservative initiatives to begin with, why did congressional Republicans and the entire right wing, including arch opportunist Romney, fight against them?

The conservative movement has gravitated further to the right than it was five years ago, and the Democrats have moved in tandem, perhaps a dozen steps behind and two or three to the left, but quite distant from the domestic liberalism of the 1960s and the 1930s. The last significant social programs took place during conservative Republican President Richard M. Nixon's first term (1969-72) -- a product of the still popular though fading liberal era of social reform that he could not ignore. The conservative era began soon afterward.

Experience has taught the Republicans that the modern Democratic Party -- particularly during the centrist Clinton and center-right Obama incarnations -- hastily retreats and offers remarkably big concessions when confronted with obdurate opposition from the right. This is one reason why Republicans have adopted a policy of non-cooperation with Obama and Democrats in Congress. Even when the right-wing political resistance doesn't get everything it seeks, it always seems to get something.

For instance, to gain big business and conservative backing for the healthcare act, Obama first rejected the progressive option of a less expensive and far more inclusive universal Medicare (single payer) covering all Americans, then dropped the liberal halfway notion of a "public option" in favor of the Republican plan.

He then privately reached agreements with the major pharmaceutical and health insurance companies and hospitals, assuring them of huge profits for many years to come. Lastly he made further concessions to Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats.

The Republican leaders who demonize "Obamacare" are well aware of its limited nature but the absurdly characterized "socialist" ACA will remain a useful conservative target for years to come as long as the opposition party would rather compromise than fight for genuine progressive objectives.

Had President Obama initiated a hard-fought populist educational campaign for single payer, he may have lost the vote but he could have won many additional supporters and tried again and again until victory. Medicare for all has important advantages in addition to covering everyone. Overhead is only 3% compared to about 30% for the profit making insurance companies.

Single-payer type health coverage exists in virtually all the leading industrialized capitalist countries of the world but will remain ridiculously overdue in the U.S. until a mass progressive movement or party takes up the challenge. By not daring to struggle, the Democrats don't dare to win.

One of the major conservative strengths, despite various internal factions, is that the Republicans entertain several concrete long-range political and ideological goals and are willing to fight for them over the years. And their dishonest, obstructionist politics during Obama's tenure have paid conservative dividends, even at the expense of deepening the nation's economic crisis and further burdening workers and the unemployed by refusing to finance recovery.

The Democrats have no such long range progressive goals -- or any serious progressive goals, for that matter -- and the party seems to have forgotten how to fight.

Even the staunchly pro-Democratic liberal magazine The Nation noted June 25 that aside from populist campaign speeches, Obama

will offer no transformational agenda, no new foundation for an economy that works for working people, no plan for reviving the middle class. And no matter who wins, only sustained popular pressure will forestall a debilitating "grand bargain" that will further undermine the middle class and the poor...

Americans understand that the system is broken -- and rigged against them. They increasingly see both parties as compromised, and they have little sense of an alternative and even less of a sense that anyone is prepared to fight for them. Progressives must therefore be willing to expose the corruption and compromises of both parties. This requires not only detailing the threat posed by the right but honestly about the limits of the current choice.

These are extremely sharp words from a publication that virtually worshiped Obama during the last campaign and has often offered excuses for him since then.

It is clear today that as a result of conservative gains in recent decades the United States has become much more of a plutocracy than a democracy, the electoral system is now utterly corrupted by big money, gross inequality is our capitalist system's norm, and civil liberties are being shredded.

Public consciousness of this reality has been expanding in recent years, particularly since the onset of the Great Recession -- an unusually severe periodic economic failing that "officially" ended three years ago but remains a disaster for the over 60% of the U.S. labor segment who constitute the working class. But the two mass ruling parties, each rejecting or ignoring progressive goals in favor of Republican "heavy" or Democratic "lite" conservative politics, cannot fight the plutocrats or urgently reconstruct what is left of American democracy.

Only a left of center contending party or a truly mass and activist movement that puts forward a fighting progressive program has a chance of dumping the conservative era. The Democrats may be several political degrees better than the Republicans, but they have been gradually tilting toward the right without respite since the demise of the party's final center-left manifestation 44 years ago. They now appear to be hopelessly stagnant and ideologically ill-equipped to transform the conservative era they helped create, even if Obama is reelected in November.

[Jack A. Smith was editor of the Guardian -- for decades the nation's preeminent leftist newsweekly -- that closed shop in 1992. Smith now edits the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter. Read more articles by Jack A. Smith on The Rag Blog.

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Jack A. Smith : The U.S. and Irreversible Climate Change

Cartoon from Saida Online.
With U.S. leading the way:
Irreversible climate change looms

By Jack A. Smith / The Rag Blog / November 29, 2011

The Obama Administration has largely remained passive about the critical imperative to reduce greenhouse gases to limit catastrophic global warming.

Washington continues to insist upon exercising world leadership in all key global endeavors, including the environment, but has failed dramatically in terms of climate change.

In fact, the White House is greatly expanding U.S. access to fossil fuel energy sources even as scientific and environmental organizations are intensifying their warnings about the need to immediately reduce greenhouse gas carbon emissions that are warming the planet.

Although the U.S. recently has ranked second to China in fossil fuel burning, it is by far the greatest polluter of the atmosphere in the last century and a half. Given the differences in population, America still uses three times more per capita than China.

White House policy is fixated on reducing dependence upon Middle Eastern oil and gas by greatly increasing the extraction of fossil fuels closer to home -- mainly a vast increase in natural gas production from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) throughout the United States, expanded drilling for offshore oil, and importing dirty tar sands oil from Canada.

While increasing the development and use of global warming fuels, President Obama is advancing no significant program to replace high carbon emitting fossil fuels with renewable non-carbon solar and wind power.

The U.S. government is subsidizing some major "green" corporations, providing them with nearly no-risk guarantees for developing solar and wind, but this remains a relatively minor enterprise. Progress made so far is being stalled by the unexpected abundance (and thus cheaper price) of domestic natural gas secreted in shale, more secure oil reserves than anticipated, and the probability of reduced federal and state subsidies.

In a major statement from London November 9, the International Energy Agency (IEA) called for a "bold change of policy direction toward the use of low-carbon fuels within the next five years. If the major industrial states do not do so quickly, the world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system," which is precisely what the Obama Administration is doing.

This recommendation seeks to prevent the rise in global temperatures in this century from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius, which is based upon keeping carbon emissions in the atmosphere below 450 parts per million (ppm). Anything above the target standards will cause irreparable damage to life on Earth.

According to many scientists and environmental groups these standards are inadequate, and that 350 ppm is the maximum amount that can be accommodated without causing a disaster. Atmospheric carbon, which occurs naturally, has reached dangerous levels due to industrialization. It has increased from 280 ppm at the beginning of the industrial era to approximately 392 ppm today, which is why it is said warming is well underway and its effects are being felt throughout the world.

Introducing the new report, IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven declared, "Growth, prosperity and rising population will inevitably push up energy needs over the coming decades... Governments need to introduce stronger measures to drive investment in efficient and low-carbon technologies."

The Environment News Service reports that the "agency's warning comes at a critical time in international climate change negotiations, as governments prepare for the annual UN climate summit in Durban, South Africa, November 28-December 9. 'If we do not have an international agreement whose effect is put in place by 2017, then the door will be closed forever,' IEA chief economist Fatih Birol warned.'" (The main goal of the 17th climate summit is to agree on a resolution to replace the Kyoto Protocols, which will expire next year.)

The IEA describes itself as "an autonomous organization which works to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy for its 28 member countries and beyond." Its members represent the world's leading capitalist countries. Greenpeace and some other environmental groups are critical of the group's approval of tar sands oil, lower carbon fuels and nuclear energy. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) are not IEA members.

Reporting October 26 on America's hunt for more carbon-emitting fuels, The New York Times quoted Daniel Lashof, director of the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, as declaring:

Giving new life to fossil fuels is a devil’s bargain, probably making solutions to climate change, and the development of renewable energy, even more difficult. Not only are you extending the fossil fuels era, but you are moving into fossil fuels that are dirtier and release more carbon pollution in the process of extracting and using them.

The Obama Administration has been leaning toward approving a $7 billion investment in a pipeline to transport Canadian tar sands oil to Texas but encountered a fusillade of activist opposition from the environmental movement in recent months. Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, has declared that "Tar sands oil is the dirtiest oil on Earth." Dr. James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist, says that fully developing the tar sands in Canada would mean “essentially game over” for the climate.

Environmental movement criticisms have been compounded by objections from residents of Nebraska with concerns that pipeline spills might pollute the irreplaceable Ogallala aquifer, which occupies 10,000 square miles north to south from South Dakota to Texas and is a major source of water for the High Plains.

In August and September, 1,200 anti-tar sands activists were arrested for offering civil disobedience in front of the White House. On November 6, 12,000 people surrounded the presidential mansion demanding an end to construction of the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas.

Four days later, President Obama announced that his final decision would now be postponed until months after next year's elections, implying that the pipeline route might have to circumnavigate the immense aquifer.

Some environmental groups have interpreted Obama's delay as a victory, suggesting that the project is being abandoned, but this view is too optimistic. The White House seeks abundant and stable supplies of oil for the next several decades from sources other than (or in addition to) the volatile Middle East, and tar sands oil from nearby friendly Canada is a most attractive alternative. Canadian oil has been entering the U.S. for many years in existing pipelines, and this is continuing. In all probability, some version of Keystone will greatly increase the supply.

Does fracking affect the water supply? Graphic from Desmogblog.
Environmentally-concerned Americans have also launched campaigns against fracking, mainly because of the danger to water supplies inherent in an extraction method that requires the high pressure injection of deadly chemicals deep underground.

The Obama Administration is so intent upon vastly increasing natural gas production that it has been brushing objections aside, as have state governors -- such as New York State's Andrew Cuomo -- who argue that what really matters are the additional jobs and tax revenue from massive fracking operations.

Advocates of natural gas argue that burning gas for electricity emits 30% less carbon dioxide than oil, and about 45% less than coal. But recent studies have shown that the process of fracking releases sufficient stores of methane into the atmosphere to compensate for any reduction in carbon from natural gas. Methane creates a greenhouse heat trap about 20 times greater than carbon dioxide. The gas industry maintains that the reduction in emissions from natural gas "outweighs" the detrimental effects of methane.

The New York Times article points out that

"Temporary or permanent fracking bans have been put in place in New York, New Jersey and Maryland. Other states are toughening drilling regulations, and the industry is responding with tighter wastewater management, while the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to complete a study on fracking next year. Nevertheless, gas shale drilling appears likely to continue at a fast pace in the most important gas-producing states.

The rest of the world is watching. Moratoriums have been put in place in parts of France, Germany, South Africa and the Canadian province of Quebec; Britain, Ukraine and other countries are moving cautiously forward. Still, the Energy Department projects that gas from shale could account for 14% of global supplies by 2030, with as many as 32 countries having production potential.

If world countries, led by the U.S., continue to disregard environmental objections to fracking, enhanced natural gas production combined with a major increase in oil production by the U.S. will further subvert incentives toward ending use of fossil fuels. So far, shale gas extraction in the U.S. has increased 500% in the last five years, and that's just the beginning.

Quoting Ivan Sandrea, president of the Energy Intelligence Group, the Times concluded its article with these words: "The fossil fuel age will be extended for decades. Unconventional oil and gas are at the beginning of a technological cycle that can last 60 years. They are really in their infancy."

It has been five months since Democratic former Vice President Al Gore stuck his neck out in an article he wrote for Rolling Stone by publicly criticizing Democrat Obama for inaction on reducing America's addiction to fossil fuels. So far, Obama has done nothing but live up to Gore's critique:

"President Obama," he declared,

has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change... The president made concessions to oil and coal companies without asking for anything in return. He has also called for a massive expansion of oil drilling in the United States, apparently in an effort to defuse criticism from those who argue speciously that "drill, baby, drill" [a conservative slogan] is the answer to our growing dependence on foreign oil.

Washington's refusal to take more than token steps to alleviate global warming would be relatively inconsequential were the U.S. a much smaller player on the world stage. But American governments have insisted for decades -- based on economic strength and unparalleled military power -- on being recognized as the world's dominant and irreplaceable hegemonic state.

Uncle Sam's leadership is enormously influential, especially in the industrialized world, and America's sluggish response toward global warming is a global disincentive toward taking speedy, responsible and united action.

U.S. financial institutions, corporations, and the wealthiest proportion of its population are "deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives," economist Paul Krugman noted recently. These powerful elements are not prepared to accept the economic and political rearrangements required to transform America into an environmentally sound society of minimal carbon usage and many other ecological safeguards.

Such a transformation involves greater government investments, potentially smaller profits for many years, strategic alterations in the country's disproportionate consumption of resources and products, and substantial changes beyond today's gridlocked and essentially conservative political process.

In effect -- given its disinclination to interfere in the workings of America's neoliberal capitalist economy, even to protect all life on Earth -- Washington's continuing unipolar leadership is guiding the world toward irreversible climate change.

The U.S. may change its ways, but economic and political realities suggest an alteration of this magnitude is hardly on the foreseeable agenda. Climate change, however, is taking place now. At issue are two necessities: (1) strengthening of the environmental and social change movements in the U.S., and (2) a dramatic initiative by other powerful countries and regional blocs to take significant concerted global action to save the Earth regardless of Washington's dithering.

[Jack A. Smith was editor of the Guardian -- for decades the nation's preeminent leftist newsweekly -- that closed shop in 1992. Smith now edits the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Jack A. Smith on The Rag Blog.

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