In Case You Missed It....

The only Democratic senator still left standing took to the floor again today as the lone voice of sanity in DC.  His entire speech can be read here.

Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont

Tepid Immigration Policy Comes to a Boil

Stung by three states pulling out of its Secure Communities dragnet of a program to catch illegal immigrants and deport them, along with increasing political pressure from immigration reform activists and the Hispanic Congressional Caucus, the Obama Administration is now urging "prosecutorial discretion" in kicking undocumented people out of the country.


As is the case with so many of this administration's policies, this latest "compromise" in immigration enforcement is pleasing nobody.  Immigration agents are up in arms about a new directive sent out last week by IME chief John Morton, instructing them how to pick and choose who to arrest and deport, and who to let slide.  Their union claims they are being put in the untenable position of  breaking the law by arresting and charging some people but letting others go.  A unanimous no-confidence vote against Morton has been taken over the new guidelines.

And then Republican Senate Judiciary Chairman Lamar Alexander reacted  by announcing legislation to prevent the president from ever granting amnesty by executive order to DREAM Act candidates.  This is the same guy who was all for a humane path to citizenship last century when John McCain was for it too. 


Obama could sign that executive order today to give immediate protection to thousands of undocumented people who can demonstrate they have lived, worked or studied in the United States since childhood.  He has thus far refused to do so, again preferring that the problem be solved legislatively. (and now, through an under-the-radar internal IME memo). Not a chance of that happening congressionally, and he knows it. Now, if Alexander has his way and his preventive amnesty-freezing bill goes through, that decision will be conveniently wrested from the president's hands.  Another case of "I really wanted to, but the Republicans wouldn't let me."

Instead the IME guy is being thrown under the bus by both his boss and his employees, and the DREAM act candidates continue living their nightmare in legal limbo, counting on IME agents to become selectively humane if they feel like it on any given day.  More stasis we can all believe in.

The immigration debate took on new poignant meaning last week with the publication in The New York Times of two stories.  One was a first-person account by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who has just "come out of the closet" about his illegal status, explaining he just can't stand the deception any more. His own newspaper, The Washington Post, had refused to publish it, probably out of consideration of its own legal position.  Another NYT article chronicled the arrest and imprisonment of an "illegal alien" who also happens to be a decorated Iraq War veteran.  His crime?  Failing to tell the military that a long time ago he applied for a passport but never completed the process.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) is holding a  hearing on the DREAM Act tomorrow, with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Education Secretary Arne Duncan expected to testify.  Can't wait to watch the uncomfortable wriggling by the Democrats and  hear the self-righteous xenophobic ranting of the Republicans in the next episode of Cancel Each Other Out Theater.

Doing the Right Thing

New York is still relatively liberal enough so that even some of its Republican politicians maintain a sense of human decency despite our well-earned reputation for graft and corruption.  Some people were surprised that a few Republicans tipped the scales to help pass the state's new marriage equality act, given the GOP's national reputation as a party of nihilistic homophobic right-wing nutjobs. One of them, a lawyer who lives just across the Hudson River from me in the Town of Poughkeepsie, changed his mind after being initially opposed to same sex marriage..  His about-face isn't really that much of a stretch, considering he has sponsored anti-domestic violence legislation in the past, as well as a recent bill requiring school employees to undergo background checks to weed out the pedophiles. He posted this statement to constituents explaining his position:

In 2009 when the marriage equality bill came before the Senate for a vote, I struggled with the decision.  This is an issue which a great many have a deep and passionate interest, both those for marriage quality and those who support the traditional view of marriage.  In part, the difficulty in arriving at my decision is that I respect and understand the views coming from both sides of the issue.

In fact, my decision today is rooted in my upbringing.  My parents taught us to be respectful, tolerant and accepting of others and to do the right thing. I’ve received thousands of calls, e-mails, post cards and letters.

Many of them, whether they were from proponents or opponents, concluded by calling upon me to do the right thing.  I want to do the right thing, but needless to say, that decision cannot be the “right thing” for both sides of the equation and, whatever my decision, there will be many who will be disappointed.

As a traditionalist, I have long viewed marriage as a union between a man and woman.  As one who believes in equal rights, I understood that the State was denying marriage to those in same sex relationships.  In 2009, I believed that civil unions for same sex couples would be a satisfactory conclusion. 

Since that time, I have met with numerous groups and individuals on both sides of the issue, especially during the last few months. As I did, I anguished over the importance and significance of my vote.



Stephen Saland

Poughkeepsie is a pretty conservative place, and judging from the comments in the local rag, his vote may have cost him re-election. And some of the comments are downright threatening, with one reader promising "public humiliation in a restaurant."

But I like to think of my own little town of New Paltz as being one of the radical linchpins of the gay marriage movement.  It's a university town, so that explains why we actually elect Green Party candidates from time to time. It's also a stone's throw from Woodstock (actually Bethel) and a lot of aging hippies just never left.  A young man named Jason West, a recent graduate of SUNY here, was mayor in 2004 when he illegally performed the state's very first same-sex marriages in an act of civil disobedience. He was charged with nearly two dozen misdemeanors by the county district attorney, and served with a court injunction to cease and desist the ceremonial political street theater. The case was later thrown out of court, but Jason ultimately lost his re-election bid to a Democrat since he'd tried to force through a pay raise for himself to supplement the proceeds from his defense fund to pay his legal bills.  After a spell of homelessness and a stint as a grad student on the West Coast, a little older and wiser (but still poor), he was just re-elected mayor last month. (before the liberal students left for the summer!)  The mayoral gig still doesn't pay that much, so Jason is also a housepainter by trade.  To his credit, he has turned down an offer from DreamWorks for perpetual rights to his life story.


New Paltz Mayor Jason West


The  marriage equality law here in New York, as well as the repeal of DADT, were not things that politicians decided to hand out from the goodness of their venal little hearts.  They agreed to go along to get along.  It also didn't hurt that a few Wall Street millionaires who support Cuomo and the rest of the political machine have gay relatives.  It was the gay community and its supporters who got this law through the legislature.  Civil rights movements and small acts of civil disobedience are staging a comeback.  Next up:  the Poor People's Coalition, 99ers United, the Gray Panthers and ever-growing groups becoming too numerous to count. The politicians "evolve" only if the people resolve.

The House Democrat Revolt That Wasn't

The 70 Democrats who voted today against authorizing Obama's splendid little Libyan war that is not war at first gave me a faint smidgen of hope that the progressive wing of the party is branching off on its own.  They defied Nancy Pelosi for a change.  They didn't listen when Hillary Clinton fed them her guilt-trip spiel that if they weren't for bombing Libya, then it logically follows that they must love K-Daffy.  The "if you're not for us, you're against us" tripe used to sell the Iraq invasion didn't work this time.


 And one New York congressman actually stood up on the House floor and called his president a monarch in the making as far as his bombing adventure is concerned.  Gerry Nadler, whose district includes the 9/11 site, has been anti-war since Vietnam, when he worked on Gene McCarthy's 1968 campaign. (another one of those dreaded "spoilers").  He is also disgusted with Obama's bait and switch Afghanistan withdrawal plan, and wants the troops brought home -- now. He pointed out, rightly, that each executive administration has given more and more power to successive presidents.  Obama seems to believe that he is Commander in Chief of the entire country, when the Constitution merely makes him commander in chief of the armed forces. He actually does still work for "the people" -- if only in theory.


And then, inexplicably, the House voted to pay for the war it just said was illegal. Never mind.


Of course, the ruling class Democrats in the Senate want to bomb Libya for a whole year more, if necessary, so the House voting on the fact that they hated Obama going behind their backs was purely symbolic anyway.  You have to love the message it's sending Obama, though, as he campaigned at this week's factory.  How ironic that his latest factory makes robotics.  How refreshing that at least 70 House Democrats are not pure robots, but bona fide androids with just a touch of humanity still left in their carcasses.


This has nothing and everything to do with Republicans.  Of course the Republicans voted against authorizing Obama to bomb Libya for all the wrong reasons.  If it had been one of their own in the Oval Office, they would have been urging him to invade a dozen more countries and given him a blank check.  Of course it was the Republicans who cheer-led the Iraq War and bankrupted the country.


But they are the known lunatics and the Democrats are supposedly the sane ones -- although by compromising with the GOP on the budget, they're just enabling and colluding with the insanity.  The two parties we have now are the John Birch Society and the Reagan Republicans.  Either Democrats have to start acting like Democrats again after a 50-year hiatus, or the whole party should just implode and allow a new liberal/labor/progressive party to emerge from the ruins.  Right now there is only one Democrat in the Senate, and his name is Bernie Sanders.  And he calls himself a socialist.


Michele Bachmann and her ilk could never have risen to national prominence were it not for the big Democratic sellout.  The vacuum created by the inaction of the so-called liberal class on jobs, the continued bankrupting wars, the deregulation of Wall Street, the infusion of corporate money into national elections, the corporatization of the mass media and the killing of the Fairness Doctrine have left a citizenry so devoid of hope that it creates the perfect atmosphere for the rise of a theocratic demagogue like Bachmann.


Obama, from his waffling on Afghanistan, his capitulation in the name of bipartisanhip to Republicans, his dithering on immigration reform and DREAM Act amnesty, his failure to appoint Elizabeth Warren and protect consumers, his release of oil reserves for pure political expediency, his groveling to Wall Street --is about one thing: his own re-election. We have to stop looking to him, or the plutocratic millionaire-bloated Senate,  for any leadership. We should instead concentrate on voting for representation on the local and state and Congressional levels -- and continuing to organize as progressive groups and to speak out as individuals.


Holding Republican nutjobs up to the ridicule and blame they so richly deserve is fine, but it isn't enough. Not by a long shot.


**Update 6/25:  Some writers are pointing out that the vote against defunding the war was actually a vote against a sneaky provision in it, thus absolving the Congresspeople who voted against authorizing the war and then seemingly doing an about-face.  Glenn Greenwald writes in his Salon column today:  

That was the reason so many anti-war members of Congress -- including dozens of progressives -- rejected the "de-funding" bill despite opposition to the war in Libya: because it was a disguised authorization for a war they oppose, not because they cowardly failed to check executive power abuses.  As Rogin reports, "there were more than enough lawmakers to pass" a true de-funding bill, but GOP leaders -- who have been protecting Obama on Libya from the start -- did not bring that to the floor.

That's the whole trouble with so much of the legislation being voted on these days: the bills are riddles wrapped in secrecy surrounded by enigmas.  Half the Congresspeople probably didn't even realize what they were voting for. Some voted against both measures, some voted for, and some split the difference. Where was House Speaker Boehner in all this?  Probably canoodling with Obama. He was not present to vote on the Libya bills yesterday.

Happy Talk Keep Talkin Happy Talk

How's this for a White House public/private partnership strategy: blame the media for painting a too-gloomy picture of the economy, and keep insisting America is the greatest country on earth, the best of all possible worlds, and the glass is not only half full but almost overflowing.

Reuters Editor- at- Large Chrystia Freeland, who was invited to "moderate" a panel discussion of the White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness in New York this past weekend, quoted a mega-banker as saying just that. According to her article,  Robert Wolf, chairman of UBS Americas, and one of  Obama’s earliest Wall Street supporters said: “Since I sat here a year ago, we have two million jobs that have been created. Exports have gone up by 10 percent and technology is booming, agriculture is booming. But when you look at the TV you hear what we are not doing well. I believe we have built a foundation and are on the right path.”

Yeah, that TV sure is biased, all right.  I have to give Freeland credit for not being a media stenographer on the meeting that the Public Private Obama Administration so obviously co-opted her into attending as a discussion "moderator" rather than a reporter.  Just beneath the surface of her balanced piece is the wee-est bit of healthy snarky skepticism.  A close reading reveals just what lengths the White House is willing to go in its propaganda campaign of getting the masses to put on their rose-colored glasses and just how they attempt to manipulate public opinion by cultivating the press. I loved this bit about Obama BFF and Chief Cheerleader and Presidential Back-Watcher Valerie Jarrett:

That’s why her determined good cheer at the forum matters. “We have good reason to be optimistic,” she said. “We have great entrepreneurs and the capacity to reinvent ourselves. This is still the best country on earth.”

The other panelists, all members of the Jobs and Competitiveness Council, faithfully chimed in in the same key. Brian L. Roberts, chairman and chief executive of Comcast, the cable giant that recently acquired a majority stake in NBC, said a positive outlook was essential to “make America a great place to live and work. We all want that to be the outcome, so it’s critical to have a sense of optimism."

Jarrett now runs something called The White House Office of Public Engagement and even blogs about it. Her entry today touts the oxymoronic "Corporate Voices for Working Families", a consortium of megabanks (including Goldman Sachs), giant pharmaceuticals and multinationals that strives to make life better for the workers.  Who needs a union or on-site day care or paid maternity leave when the beneficent corporations are now making it okay for new moms to bring breast pumps to work!  And thanks to the miracle of Public/Private, breast pumps are now tax deductible. 

And Jarrett is certainly enthusiastic if not very original: "As we work to Win the Future by out-innovating, out-educating, and out-building the rest of the world, we must use every tool at our disposal, and workplace flexibility is one of those tools!"  (take an extra 10 minutes, Honey, and pump away and we won't even dock your pay!)

In the best of all possible results of this ham-handed White House propaganda campaign of feel-goodism, the American people will at long last arrive at their Candide moment in the face of this hideously happy Panglossian assault.

"...and private misfortunes make the public good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the more everything is well."
- Voltaire, Candide, Chapter 4

What Harry Told Barry



It's Academic and Far, Far Away



State Department head attorney Harold Koh has been universally lauded as a champion of human rights. He is widely reported to be on President Obama's short list of future Supreme Court nominees, precisely because of his stellar record as a trans-global, humanistic legal scholar and public servant in both Republican (Reagan) and Democratic administrations. The son of first-generation immigrants from South Korea, he would be the first Asian-American Supreme Court Justice and its only international law expert.  The former  dean of Yale Law School, he served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor under President Clinton and is currently Legal Adviser to the State Department.  Thus, he has had both Clintons as bosses. 

So it came as a  surprise last week when Mr. Koh, an erstwhile staunch defender of the War Powers Act,  performed a prima facie flip-flop on his interpretation of it. This came after the President had already been advised by two other lawyers in the Departments of Defense and Justice that he needed congressional approval to keep bombing Libya.  But war is not war, according to Koh's conveniently convoluted thinking, when we destroy just a few buildings and people with remote control gizmos.

 He told the president exactly what he wanted to hear, much in the same way George Bush's lawyers told him what he wanted to hear about torture.  It's easy.  All you have to do is mangle the English language. Torture becomes an enhanced interrogation technique.  War becomes a limited kinetic military exercise when you perform surgical strikes with drones and minimal collateral damage.  If these weapons do happen to kill some innocent women and children along the way, it's because of system failure, not human aggression.  Or so the reasoning goes.  It's kind of like a video game, because from a distance, you don't have to deal with even looking at any blood or mangled bodies.  You are at so many degrees of separation.  You can physically be thousands of miles away. Plus, if no American is in imminent danger of bodily harm, the grudgingly acknowledged and always regrettable deaths of civilians simply don't count.  War is war only if someone on our side gets hurt. It has to be a mutual thing.

Since Koh had always been such a defender of the War Powers Act, why has he now seemingly gone out of his way to subvert it through semantics? 


"One possibility is that Koh has a client, the Secretary of State, who is committed to the Libya intervention, and he is serving his client faithfully" writes former  DOJ and DOD lawyer Jack Goldsmith of Harvard University. "Another possibility is that Koh’s commitments to humanitarian intervention and the 'responsibility to protect' outweigh his commitment to his academic vision of presidential war powers.  I certainly do not believe that Koh’s academic views should control his advice and judgment during his government service.  Nor do I think that his academic writings addressed the precise issue under the WPR that he is now advocating in the government.  But for a quarter century before heading up State-L, Koh was the leading and most vocal academic critic of presidential unilateralism in war, and a tireless advocate for institutional cooperation between the political branches in war decisions.  I am thus genuinely surprised, as many people are, by his current stance."


Goldsmith added that "it cannot be pleasant for the men and women involved in this 'kinetic military action' to know that the Defense Department General Counsel and the head of OLC think the intervention in Libya as currently executed is unlawful."


In his capacity as State Department legal advisor, Koh was also instrumental in  writing new international rules governing the behavior of private security contractors in the wake of the Blackwater (now XE) scandal involving the shooting of civilians in Iraq. Of course, the new code of behavior does not include sanctions for previous bad behavior.  It's another one of those aspirational things, apparently, with the purpose of placating the international human rights community.

And then there is that bane of the Administration and of the American Security State, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, subject of an ongoing DOJ investigation for possible violation of the Espionage Act.  Last December, Lawyers Rights Watch Canada, a advocacy group which has an advisory role at the U.N., accused the ubiquitous Mr. Koh of violating ethical standards and putting British barrister Jennifer Robinson in jeopardy by interfering with her representation of her client. Koh had posted a letter online conflating her legal work for Assange with criminality on her own part. (Shades of the Bush Administration's criticism of lawyers defending Gitmo detainees?)  Koh's actions, according to the Canadians, violated both international law and the ethical standards of the American Bar Association.  Details can be found here. LRWC filed a complaint about Koh with Attorney General Eric Holder and Sec. Clinton.  But since Koh not only still has his Foggy Bottom job, but is also now a go-to legal eagle for the White House, we can safely assume the letter was stuffed in a circular file somewhere, eh? 

Koh is a new breed of apparatchik, a tool of the neoliberals who wage war that is not war with a wink and a nod and a path to riches in an oil-rich state that is conveniently not too dedicated to human rights.



It's Collateral Damage and Far, Far Away



Update: Here's a list made by Rep. Dennis Kucinich of 10 reasons to oppose the war in Libya.

Jobs in America and the False Promises of Free Trade

(The following post was written by Valerie Long Tweedie, a regular contributor to the Comments Section of this blog.)

I am anti-Free Trade. Whenever I share this sentiment, I am treated like some stupid, backwater simpleton who doesn’t understand economics. People condescendingly tell me that “protectionism will stall the economy” and “Americans enjoy many benefits of Free Trade.” It reminds me of the period after 9/11 when I questioned the wisdom of attacking Iraq, a country that hadn’t attacked us. People acted like I was completely out of touch with reality to question the wisdom of my government to drag us into a war. Wasn’t it obvious to anyone who had watched FOX or CNN that there were WMDs? Why would our government lie to get us into a war? But here I go again, questioning the wisdom of my government and the policy of Free Trade.

In truth, I am not a total isolationist. However, I believe that a government’s number one job is to watch out for the overall good of its citizenry and in our case that means maintaining the conditions for a strong Middle Class. We all know it to be true, American manufacturing businesses cannot pay their factory workers a liveable wage with benefits and still compete against imported goods made by underpaid factory workers in Third World countries. If we are to revive our manufacturing base in the U.S., we need to level the playing field - and that means tariffs and protectionism.

The bill of goods we were sold by the Republicans and the Clinton Administration was a two part scheme to get the American people to go along with Free Trade.  Part One:  If we ship off our low skilled manufacturing jobs to third world countries, displaced American factory workers will be retrained to do highly-skilled, higher-paying jobs. The problem was not all the blue collar workers were intellectually inclined toward highly skilled technological work and were unable to make the leap. Even those who could make the leap and re-skilled, found that there weren’t enough of those promised higher paying jobs. The result is we now have a large number of factory and semi-skilled workers in our country who don’t have jobs that pay a liveable wage and provide reasonable benefits.  Part Two:  All those people working in the newly off-shored, Third World factories will create a huge market and demand for the more expensive, high tech American made goods. Sounds good in theory but we underestimated (and were kept in the dark about) the obscene amount of corporate greed involved. As it turns out, Third World factory workers are heavily exploited and paid a paltry wage for their work. They barely make enough money to meet their basic needs and certainly not enough money to buy goods made in America.  In both cases, we were conned into believing that Free Trade would be a win-win for the workers on both shores when in reality it has pretty much been a lose-lose.

Now I have nothing against Third World factory workers. If they were paid a decent wage and quality products were made under sustainable environmental conditions, I wouldn’t be barking up this particular tree. I have no problems with importing Western European or Japanese goods, for example, which are high quality products, made to last, and built under decent working and environmental conditions. I don’t deny the chance for third world countries to industrialise - but let’s be honest here, that is not what is really driving this issue. Corporations off-shoring their production are treating vulnerable, desperate, human beings like expendable beasts of burden; they have no rights, no benefits,  no protection against injury or illness and they are grossly underpaid.

It should be evident to everyone by now that the big winners in Free Trade are the corporations - especially the multi-national ones. They pay low to no taxes and are allowed to bring all their goods into our markets with minimal costs – disregarding both the human and environmental destruction they leave in their wake.  Most importantly, and more dangerous to our way of life, is the fact that these same corporations use their ill-gotten profits to lobby (bribe) our elected officials through (often anonymous) campaign donations and force through (or slip through undetected) legislation that makes their dirty dealings legal. As long as Free Trade goes on as it is, these companies will only grow richer, more powerful and more destructive.

Sadly, the one group that could have put the brakes on this descent into plutocratic rule was Organised Labour. Their demands on politicians in exchange for their block of voters - the right to organise and hold politicians accountable to those who elected them, a decent retirement, a fair wage for an eight hour day’s work, health care, safe working conditions - benefitted all of us. As those human rights are being eroded in our country and the corporations get stronger and stronger as a result of Free Trade, organised labour has been transformed from a lion into a mouse and the Middle Class has lost its champion.

I read a lot of articles and comments proposing that new technologies are the answer to our economic woes. President Obama campaigned on green jobs back in the days when he was inspiring a nation. But green technology will require A LOT of government investment for R &D as well as incentives to make products like solar panels affordable to average citizens.  I am ALL for it! We should have been on the green energy bandwagon in the seventies when Jimmy Carter first proposed it! But I worry that even if those green energy companies get the governmental support they need to be up and going, will their CEO’s find it cheaper to move their factories overseas?  Will they use the excuse of having to compete with Chinese green energy products as a reason for doing so? Will green jobs be yet another casualty of Free Trade?

Admittedly, the ramifications of import taxes are big – but I suggest not as bad as we are led to believe. If we put a tariff on foreign made goods, our goods will be taxed in return - no doubt about it.  But America is the world’s biggest consumer so we would be in the position of being able to buy our own products and sustain our markets. As citizens we would have to be willing to pay more for the products we buy – and that is a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow – but I argue that the secure economy engendered by strong employment would be worth it.

As a nation, we have to stop blindly accepting the belief, promoted by those who profit most from it, that factory jobs are gone forever from our shores. We need these jobs in order to have a strong Middle Class and a stable economy - and must find a way to bring them back.

We’ve tried Free Trade for almost twenty years and like deregulation and trickle-down economics, it doesn’t work – at least for most of us. When we discuss the terrible job situation in the U.S. and the decline of the Middle Class are we ignoring the elephant in the room? Is it time to examine another option?

This particular entry only addresses the consequences of Free Trade as it applies to the blue collar jobs issue in the U.S. There are huge environmental ramifications and social justice issues concerning the exploitation of indigenous people and poor citizens of Third World countries.  We are also starting to see the off-shoring of white collar jobs. I am not minimizing these grave consequences of Free Trade. They deserve specific attention and will be addressed in another entry.

-- Valerie Long Tweedie