Supreme Court Rulz/Open Thread

Check the SCOTUSblog on Blogroll to your right for live updates and the link to the opinion. Chief Justice Roberts apparently cares about his legacy and the well-being of the private insurance cabal and has thus ruled with the "libs" in upholding the Affordable Care Act.

Here is the continuing New York Times coverage.

Here is the full opinion.

Weigh in, if and when are you able.

Nobody Knows Nuthin

There hasn't been this much nail-biting and speculation since the nation awaited the series finale of The Sopranos. And when that last episode ended, not with a bang but with a quick whimpering fade to black, the reaction was a mixture of "huh?" to "cop-out!" to "this was the most meaningful and epochal moment in the history of mafia dramedy."

Same for Thursday's much-ballyhooed Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act. There are as many theories on the outcome as there are pundits with too much time on their hands, so I won't add to the arcane clutter. Possible endings are all over the map. I read this morning that the jurists may even punt on the issue until right before Election Day, following that old Washington tradition of can-kicking important issues into oblivion, as well as the gimmick of the season-ending summer cliffhanger.

I imagine this would piss off the VIPs who are sticking around the swamp just to be the first to pontificate on this momentous decision instead of raising campaign cash, serving their constituents or going on their bi-monthly vacations. Wouldn't it be something if it turned out the Supremes were just a bunch of Bada-Bing teases, that they had been playing us all along with their come-hithers on health care? 

If you are a suspense junkie, do tune in to the ScotusBlog this Thursday around 10 a.m. for the final (maybe) episode. I'm embarrassed to admit I succumbed yesterday, finding myself hooked on their live clicks. It was a real tease, all right. I could just envision the politburo dancers in their black robes, casting off one decision at a time to a ravening audience of thousands. First, Arizona immigration law, next came sentencing rules for murderous youth, and in between there was that contemptuous bump and grind affirming Citizens United. And no health care! Not one little hint! Oh, the agony.

Of course, lost in the hoopla is the fact that these decisions affect real people. Hispanics will continue to be subjected to the fascist "papers please" law in Arizona, until the Supremes decide to think it over some other time. Corporations will continue to steal our democracy and not even have to tell us who they are or where they come from.

Same with health care. As much as I dislike the Affordable Care Act, I will not rejoice if it is struck down. For one thing, the insurance leeches would be absolved from refunding billions of dollars this summer in overpaid premiums that were not spent directly on patient care. For another thing, there are some people who are already benefiting from the law, such as children with pre-existing conditions. Would they be cut off from chemo without a second thought by the for-profit health insurance mafia?

The only thing we can be sure of come Thursday is the cacophany of the chattering class and the unctuous spin of the politicians. Here's what Michael Shear of the New York Times is forecasting:

But the momentary chaos could be downright dangerous for political candidates who move too quickly to embrace or condemn the court’s actions. A stray statement made before all the facts are understood could easily come back to haunt a political candidate.

In the White House race, Mitt Romney and President Obama are both preparing for any eventuality.

Mr. Romney’s top advisers have been working with Republicans on Capitol Hill to coordinate the health care message, according to senior aides. Various scenarios have been sketched out and statements prepared.

Aides say they believe Mr. Romney can benefit politically no matter what the court decides.

At the White House, Mr. Obama’s lawyers and political advisers are said to be preparing their own responses — both legal and political.

But the trick for both men will be to calibrate their statements appropriately in the moments after the decision is announced. And that won’t be easy if the court’s decision is a complicated one affecting different provisions in different ways.

And the trick for the 50 million people who currently lack health insurance will be either to calibrate a game plan for hanging on until 2014 if the ACA survives, or coordinating a more open-ended agenda for the rest of their foreshortened lives. Whatever happens, the Obama family and the Romney family and the Supreme Families and the Congressional families and crime families of all stripes will all maintain their own guaranteed health coverage today and for thousands of tomorrows.

A new report by Families USA estimates that lack of health insurance now accounts for 26,000 needless deaths every single year in this country. These are working age people in the prime of their lives. (25-64). Although this number is about seven time as high as the tally of those killed in the 9/11 attacks, their deaths simply don't garner anywhere near the same amount of attention and government response. These deaths are not a national emergency because they are mundane, protracted and lonely deaths. And our government likes its crises to be dramatic, immediate and profitable.

Sick and poor people do not have a lobby, nor a newspaper column, nor a seat on the cable talk shows. And if they're uninsured, they're dying off at the rate of three per hour. They're being whacked at about the same rate as in an average Sopranos episode.

We spend the most money on health care of any civilized country, yet we have the worst results in terms of morbidity and mortality. No politician can spin those stats, so they just ignore them, and campaign, and echo the words of mob boss Tony Soprano: "Let me figure out how to take care of you."

Jimmy Carter Strikes Back

Don't miss this op-ed by former President Jimmy Carter, running in Monday's New York Times.

At long last, a Democratic elder statesman is taking aim at the horrendous human rights violations being perpetrated in our name by an American president and Congress. It's about time somebody of Carter's stature struck back, joining the dwindling chorus of protests from the left in this election year. Because the USA has seen fit to chuck human rights in the garbage, we no longer have any right to pretend to be a human rights champion of the world. Writes Carter:

In addition to American citizens’ being targeted for assassination or indefinite detention, recent laws have canceled the restraints in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications. Popular state laws permit detaining individuals because of their appearance, where they worship or with whom they associate.

Despite an arbitrary rule that any man killed by drones is declared an enemy terrorist, the death of nearby innocent women and children is accepted as inevitable. After more than 30 airstrikes on civilian homes this year in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has demanded that such attacks end, but the practice continues in areas of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that are not in any war zone. We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington. This would have been unthinkable in previous times.

These policies clearly affect American foreign policy. Top intelligence and military officials, as well as rights defenders in targeted areas, affirm that the great escalation in drone attacks has turned aggrieved families toward terrorist organizations, aroused civilian populations against us and permitted repressive governments to cite such actions to justify their own despotic behavior.

Hats off to Jimmy Carter, who speaks truth to power in a frightening period of our history in which almost two-thirds of Americans find it acceptable for a politician to unilaterally decide who lives and who dies in lands far, far away from their own blinkered little existences. The chickens came home to roost on 9/11 and they'll be coming home again sooner or later unless more of us stand up and say "Enough."

Obama Wants All Your Swag

When Valerie from Australia sent this to me just now, I thought it was a joke:

Got a birthday, anniversary, or wedding coming up?

Let your friends know how important this election is to you—register with Obama 2012, and ask for a donation in lieu of a gift. It’s a great way to support the President on your big day. Plus, it’s a gift that we can all appreciate—and goes a lot further than a gravy bowl.

Setting up and sharing your registry page is easy—so get started today!

If you have already made the mistake of selfishly putting your own needs before  the president's, try this. Take all your undeserved gift clutter, including that rock-hard fruitcake Aunt Sally sent you five Christmases ago, and dump it in front of the Obama campaign HQ nearest you. Maybe the Bots can find a pawnshop, or place an ad on Craigslist. I do not suggest tossing your swag directly on the White House lawn, since I don't want any arrests (or worse) by the Secret Service on my conscience.

Unfortunately the President is unable to accept any dinnerware for his campaign war chest at this time. The Secret Service confiscates knives and forks in selected venues -- most recently at that Latino campaign event in Florida. yesterday. Besa mi culo, puto.*

Anyway, why even stop at happy events? If a loved one dies, don't forget to add to the obituary: "In lieu of flowers, please send a donation to Obama for America."

Think of this as a wonderful way to teach your child the true meaning of altruism. You might say something like "President Obama needs our help, so we're sending him all the money we set aside for your birthday. Maybe you can get your Tickle Me Elmo next year, when he's safely back in the White House. Remember: Supreme Court, Supreme Court, Supreme Court!"

Gimme Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Gravy Boats


(*Kiss my ass, bastard!)

Hillary Hearts WikiLeaks

When the WikiLeaks cables first burst upon the scene in November 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned and deplored their publication until she was blue in the face. But now that she's had a chance to think things over, she actually credits the cable dump for being the real catalyst for the Arab Spring. Without the Tunisians learning that American diplomats were just as disgusted with the excesses of their despot as they were,  they never would have had the courage to take on the regime. It was only a few weeks after the publication of "Tunileaks" that a desperate vegetable vendor self-immolated, lighting the spark of revolution.

Who knew that Hillary may actually, albeit grudgingly, admire the imprisoned Bradley Manning and asylum-seeker Julian Assange? This new nugget of information is buried deep within the pages of New York Times reporter David Sanger's "Confront and Conceal", a book which garnered attention mainly because of its scoop that the United States is conducting a secret cyberwar against Iran's nuclear program.

According to Sanger, a Tunisian blogger and activist named Sabi Ben Gharbia was gleeful that the cables sent from the American embassy contained scathing criticism of President Zine El Abedine:

"President Ben Ali was an American ally, sporadically cooperative in counterterrorism initiatives. But cooperation came at a high cost: Americans had to look the other way when it cameto Ben Ali’s habit of throwing challengers in jail and giving his family the first crack at his favorite sport, looting the national economy. Since Ben Ali had been in power for twenty-three years, Ben Gharbia figured the cables would be rich with anecdotes of excess. He was not disappointed. WikiLeaks yielded a gold mine—mostly about stolen gold.

"Ben Gharbia and his colleagues translated and posted seventeen of the cables describing Ben Ali’s most outrageous behavior. More would follow. TuniLeaks made it clear that behind the high walls of the American embassy, diplomats had long been disgusted by Ben Ali’s corrupt regime. In a June 2008 cable wonderfully entitled 'What’s Yours Is Mine' (Who said diplomats have no sense of humor?), the American ambassador at the time, Robert Godec, wrote, 'Whether it’s cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali’s family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants.' He wasn’t kidding about the yacht: Ben Ali’s nephews had, in fact, expropriated the beautiful pleasure craft of a French businessman. The cables showed that, years before the Arab uprisings, signs of discontent with Ben Ali were well known. 'It is the excesses of President Ben Ali’s family that inspire outrage among Tunisians,' Godec wrote. “With Tunisians facing rising inflation and high unemployment, the conspicuous displays of wealth and persistent rumors of corruption have added fuel to the fire.…"

Thanks to the sudden transparency previously lacking in American diplomacy, the Tunisians finally realized that the regime was vulnerable. Within a month, Ben Ali had fled the country. Like wildfire, revolutions erupted in Egypt and throughout the Middle Eastern region. Sanger writes:

“I’m not sure the vegetable vendor killing himself all by itself would have been enough,” Clinton told me later. “I think the openness of the social media, I think WikiLeaks, in great detail, describing the lavishness of the Ben Ali family and cronies was a big douse of gasoline on the smoldering fire.” Given how furious Clinton had been at the publication of the State Department cables—an understandable reaction, given the huge breach of secrecy, the embarrassing phone calls she had to make explaining the leak to world leaders, and the expulsion of a handful of her ambassadors—it was a surprising statement. When American diplomats had raised the issue of WikiLeaks to me, it was usually to chew out the Times for risking American national security. (Clinton expressed her displeasure to me too, as we prepared the publication in November 2010 of “State’s Secrets,” the Times’ series drawn from the WikiLeaks revelations.) But with the passage of time, she had finally found a leak she liked—an obscure set of her own department’s cables that, by revealing the excesses of a brutal and corrupt dictator, may have helped ignite the most massive democracy movement in the Middle East in anyone's memory.  

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange remains holed up in the Equadorian embassy in London, seeking political asylum to avoid probable prosecution in the United States under the Espionage Act.  Private Bradley Manning, the original source of the cables, remains holed up in a military jail cell while his court martial proceeds at a snail's pace. You think maybe attorneys should subpoena Hillary as a witness for the defense? You think Assange and Manning should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, or at least a Pulitzer, instead of being reviled and ridiculed and imprisoned?

I think Hillary's admission is the biggest scoop in Sanger's book, but I have yet to find anyone writing about it as such. Here is one review outlining the top five "reveals."

Most of the book, incidentally, is a fawning synopsis of President Obama's foreign policy: a light footprint instead of nation-building invasions and occupations. Sanger is obviously a government insider, constantly referencing intimate conversations with Administration higher-ups, cozy dinners with generals and national security honchos, global press junkets, being summoned to the West Wing for emergency briefings. If Congress or Attorney General Holder are serious about investigating the "leaks" in his book, they won't have to try very hard. Sanger's main source appears to be Obama national security adviser (and former banking lobbyist) Thomas Donilon, and the rest of the book's material comes from a veritable Who's Who of government VIPs -- some named, some anonymous. Sanger also has obvious cachet with the president himself. I would rate the book as part pretty good investigative journalism, but mostly run-of-the-mill stenography. And that's being generous. The working title might have been "Conspire and Canoodle."

To give credit where it's due, though, Sanger does, in fact, characterize Obama's drone strikes as "assassinations" and likely war crimes, because they are in violation of an order signed by President Gerald Ford. If Obama rescinded the order, he did it behind closed doors. Maybe we'll find out in the next tell-all. Sanger described his tome as a narrative of Obama's first term, the implication being that he fully expects a second.

Excuses, Excuses

Methinks the Obama Administration doth protest too much about its dubious record of the most whistleblower prosecutions in presidential history. The New York Times today has the White House and its Justice Department actually blaming their predecessors for the number of petty leak cases they were apparently forced to prosecute.

They also blame technology and emails for the ease in prosecuting stupid leak cases at the same time they insist that the blatant paper and e-trails of Wall Street crimes are just too hard to parse. They're twisting themselves into enough pretzels to choke ten Dubyas. They're desperately trying to wipe off the well-deserved egg on their face for their dumb prosecutions of John Edwards and Roger Clemens.

Eric Holder apparently just realized he does not want incompetence and pettiness to be his legacy. And President Obama doesn't want anyone to think that going back on a campaign promise to protect government whistleblowers is going to be part of his legacy, either. The six whistleblower prosecutions done under his watch in the past three years are totally accidental! From The Times:

When we took office in January 2009, I don’t think bringing a lot of leak cases was high on anyone’s agenda,” said Matthew Miller, who was director of public affairs at the Justice Department until July. “But then they came up one by one, and without anyone realizing it, we had set a record.”

(snip) 

Like most presidents, Mr. Obama has been infuriated by some leaks, but aides say he never ordered investigations. Current and former officials said Mr. Obama and Mr. Holder, who are social friends, have avoided discussing investigations and prosecutions to avoid any appearance of improper White House influence, a charge Democrats lodged against the Bush administration.

Asked whether the White House had a role in the leak cases, a spokesman for the National Security Council, Tommy Vietor, said, “Decisions about leak prosecutions are made by the Department of Justice.”

For decades, the Justice Department was where leak complaints from the intelligence agencies went to die. The department’s counterespionage section was more interested in finding foreign spies than American blabbermouths, officials said.

Now that Holder has ordered, or pretended to order, leak investigations into recent revelations on  American cyber-attacks against an Iranian nuclear facility and another underwear bombing plot involving a double or maybe a triple CIA agent, his department is trying to downplay its own role in prosecuting leaks that simply exposed government stupidity and wrongdoing. For example, the prosecution of Thomas Drake deservedly fell apart because far from exposing government secrets, he was merely exposing government waste.

According to The Times, Holder could have halted any of the left-over cases but went ahead anyway for fear that the lawyers under him might get mad. That, to put it delicately, is quite a stretch. Especially since it was only two weeks ago that Eric Holder bragged to Congress that the Obama Administration is a gung-ho champion of going after leakers.

Damned if he does and damned if he doesn't, the poor guy. Having it both ways is so exhausting. And to be slapped with a contempt of Congress charge to boot, and be forced to beg his own boss for executive privilege protection. Oh, the humanity. Oh, what a racket.

Robin Hood vs. Bling King of The Hill

Last week, when JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon schmoozed with the Senate Banking Committee, he wore his magical Presidential Seal cufflinks to protect him from all government harm. The Bling King was back in Washington today to give a reprise of his fake apology. If you have a strong stomach, you can catch the theatrics here.

If not, you can always celebrate the 797th anniversary of the Magna Carta by signing a letter to Dimon, demanding that he share the wealth. Not that he will immediately cower with fear when he is compared to King John, not that he will lose any beauty sleep over the possibility that he might be forced to accomodate the hoi polloi. He's got a horde of Sheriffs of Nottingham protecting him, in the guise of the president, the Treasury Secretary, his SEC and Fed minions along with several hundred medieval Congress critters meekly grazing at his trough of campaign largesse. But engaging in quixotic exercises like an email to Jamie is better than nothing. If he breaks out in just one nervous bead of sweat when thousands of peasants wield their symbolic pitchforks at him, it will be worth it.

The Robin Hood tax on financial transactions is so popular that even Austerian Queen Angela Merkel of Germany likes the idea. Deposed French President Nicholas Sarkozy, another hardcore conservative, liked it too.
  

Simply put, the big idea behind the Robin Hood Tax is to generate hundreds of billions of dollars.That money could provide funding for jobs to kickstart the economy and get America back on its feet. It could help save the social safety net in the US and around the world. And it will come from fairer taxation of the financial sector.

This small tax of less than ½ of 1% on Wall Street transactions can generate hundreds of billions of dollars each year in the US alone. That's enough to protect American schools, housing and hospitals.

Enough to get local governments back on their feet. Enough to pay for lifesaving AIDS medicines.

Enough to support people and communities around the world – and to deal with the new climate challenges our world is facing.

It's a small tax with a huge benefit.

It won't affect ordinary Americans, their personal savings, or every day consumer activity, such as use of ATMs or debit cards. It's easy to enforce and tough to evade.

Sounds like a no-brainer. So why don't we hear Candidate Obama yammering for the financial transaction tax?  Simply put, he doesn't like it because his Wall Street paymasters don't like it. Of course, he won't say so in so many words. His excuse, direct from the Republican playbook of conservative talking points, is that taxing Wall Street will damage "confidence."  He prefers to levy his bank fees upfront, he says, so as not to punish investors and traders. He is afraid that the ultra-sensitive bankers will take out their wrath on the rest of us. He is afraid that banks will increase fees to consumers. He is just.... afraid!

American nurses have been among the most vocal proponents for the Robin Hood tax, most recently having marched for it in Chicago during the NATO summit.  RoseAnn DeMoro of National Nurses United explains her group's goals in an interview with Bill Moyers here.

Letters to Jamie Dimon are fine, and we should sign them every day. But what we really need are arsenals of populist arrows (and hypodermics) aimed at the political class, every member of which survives courtesy of bankster bribery.

We need to keep yammering and hammering and leave them stammering. Let's reverse the trajectory of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

(Photo Courtesy of RootsAction)