Holder: Tough Times Call for Murderous Measures

When you're the U.S. Attorney General whose assignment is to sanitize state-sponsored murder, it is best to do so in a law school a thousand miles away, as opposed to, say, an actual Washington press conference. It helps if you do your 'splainin' to a select group of academics who understand, or pretend to understand, your legal nitpicking and double-speak, and who won't upset your gravitas. You reckon you can get away with saying there is a difference between "due process" and "judicial process" at a friendly place like Northwestern University in Chicagoland, the home turf of your boss's political machine.

You will not be facing a media mob shouting out inconvenient questions -- such as, why hasn't the government responded to a FOIA request for documents relating to the drone strike assassination of Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son? Exactly how many thousands of women and children have been part of your collateral damage, anyway? When you are Eric Holder, you intellectualize the slaughter, and try to get away with bullshit like this:  

Let me be clear: an operation using lethal force in a foreign country, targeted against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al Qaeda or associated forces, and who is actively engaged in planning to kill Americans, would be lawful at least in the following circumstances: First, the U.S. government has determined, after a thorough and careful review, that the individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States; second, capture is not feasible; and third, the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.

Eric Holder conveniently did not find it necessary to mention any evidence of how the government determined that the target of the assassination was actually a "senior operational leader of al Qaeda", rather than, say, a loathesome provocateur, or why the "applicable law of war principles" could be applied in a country (Yemen) with which we are not at war. Here is just a little more of what he said:

Al qaeda leaders are continually planning attacks against the United States, and they do not behave like a traditional military – wearing uniforms, carrying arms openly, or massing forces in preparation for an attack. Given these facts, the Constitution does not require the President to delay action until some theoretical end-stage of planning – when the precise time, place, and manner of an attack become clear....

Some have argued that the President is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of al Qaeda or associated forces.....

The Constitution’s guarantee of due process is ironclad, and it is essential – but, as a recent court decision makes clear, it does not require judicial approval before the President may use force abroad against a senior operational leader of a foreign terrorist organization with which the United States is at war – even if that individual happens to be a U.S. citizen.

So, by repeating the claim over and over again that Awlaki was an al Qaeda mastermind plotting attacks, Holder makes the case that saying something often enough makes it true. Yet, he and his boss refuse to provide the evidence behind the legalese, because they deem it to be top secret. Rather than admit that there is in fact no credible evidence, they hide behind the convenient curtain of national security. Bush taught them well.  

Holder was also careful to add that such targeted killings (he just hates, hates, hates that critics are calling them "assassinations") are ever so humanely carried out, so as not to impose "unnecessary suffering" on hapless innocents who may have the poor taste to get in the way. Here again is his dry legalspeak way of putting it: "Under the principle of proportionality, the anticipated collateral damage must not be excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage. Finally, the principle of humanity requires us to use weapons that will not inflict unnecessary suffering".

In other words, if some women and children get killed along the way, their numbers are acceptable, and their deaths will not be needlessly prolonged. Isn't it too bad that President Obama is being forced into humanely killing people? These are the most extremely unique times in all of recorded history! Here a threat, there a threat, everywhere a threat-threat. "It is an indicator of our times," Holder cravenly pontificated on the need to kill. "Not a departure from our laws and values."

Besides, nobody really cares about targeted assassinations on foreign soil, as long as a photogenic Democratic president who loves his gorgeous wife and and adorable kids and cute puppy dog is doing it. He outlawed torture, didn't he? The drone targets hardly feel a thing when they have the good sense to die quickly, disappear from sight, and not linger on and on, calling attention to themselves. So let's continue expressing 24/7 outrage at a fat slob of a provocateur named Rush Limbaugh, and yammer some more about whether crazy Rick Santorum can win Ohio in the GOP sweepstakes tonight. 

Collateral Damage in Pakistan

Defending the Inquisition

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly

There are false equivalencies, and then there are feckless equivalencies. A newspaper columnist has just compared N.Y. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to  Rush Limbaugh slander victim Sandra Fluke.  Mike Lupica of the Daily News has had it with the abuse being heaped on Kelly for having the guts to trash civil rights in the name of public safety. If you think the War Against Women is bad, says Lupica, then the War Against Ray Kelly is just plain horrid. So much so that Islamophobic anti-civil libertarians are fighting back with a rally today at Police HQ to support continued police surveillance of Muslims of every age, gender, residence -- anywhere and everywhere and forevermore.

The livid Lupica sputters that Kelly is being attacked out of pure "turf war" spite by the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Times  and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who've all taken umbrage at his spying spree. Lupica was so mad that he made a typo which unintentionally speaks the truth:

They do this as Kelly continues to do everything he can — and within the law, despite the coverage — to keep the city safe at the most dangerous period in his history. The Times even asserts that the kind of surveillance employed by Kelly and the NYPD produces no “obvious payoff for public safety.”

Even as legal experts are weighing in and speculating that the police spying program is most likely illegal, and Attorney General Eric Holder is "taking a look" at the practice after being intensely pressured to do so, Kelly is fighting back. He could not have picked a more telling venue to defend himself in a speech over the weekend: the Cipriani Club on Wall Street. The Cipriani's balcony was the infamous site of champagne-sipping one percenters hurling insults at OWS protesters last fall. Of course, the NYPD conducts part of its surveillance from the Goldman Sachs office building, so it's no surprise he picked the financial district to give his little talk. Kelly surmises that while most Muslims are law-abiding citizens, you have to keep an eye on them. They're prone to being radicalized:

We know that while the vast majority of Muslim student associations and their members are law-abiding.we have seen too many cases in which such groups were exploited..... The notion that the Police Department should close our eyes to what takes place outside the five boroughs is folly, and it defies the lessons of history. If terrorists aren’t limited by borders and boundaries, we can’t be either.

Kelly conveniently failed to mention that most, if not all, of the "exploited" groups and individuals are actually entrapped by the police and/or FBI and arrested to much fanfare after they are convinced by informants and undercover agents to aspire to blow things up. Law enforcement m.o. is to find marginally intelligent or mentally disturbed people who can be easily used as tools in the phony War on Terror. None of those charged was ever really capable of or even close to carrying out an attack. They got caught on tape saying they hated America, or admired Al Qaeda, or maybe wanted to blow stuff up. That was enough to charge, even convict, them.

In his column today, Lupica gives us two feeble examples of how the NYPD surveillance program has made us safer:

 Let Kelly continue to use NYPD surveillance of conversations inside an Islamic bookstore in Bay Ridge, one attached to a mosque, that helps New York cops keep a Herald Square subway station from being blown sky high.

The names you want to know about on that one, guys who certainly were a threat to public safety, were Shahawar Matin Siraj and James Elshafay, eventually arrested and tried and convicted in federal court. Siraj, who worked in that bookstore, ended up getting 30 years. And there is the “spying” that last year resulted in the arrests of Ahmed Ferhani and Mohammed Mamdouh and a plan from radical Islam to bomb a Manhattan synagogue. 

Lupica doesn't tell you that Siraj was set up by an informant and was strung along with bribes from the police -- or that Elshafay was a schizophrenic who was convinced to plead guilty and testify against Siraj. You can read all the details here. The other two alleged terrorists whom Lupica cites were initially investigated by the FBI, who dropped the case for lack of credible evidence. The NYPD got the sloppy seconds, and the charges were eventually reduced. The duo, in effect, pled guilty to "wanting to" blow up a synagogue.

Lupica chooses to ignore the facts, and instead warns the public to "get off Kelly's back, and get out of his way":

At a time when you look around at what passes for political leaders in a presidential election year from both parties, watch them blow with the wind, you have actual leadership from Kelly, who stands his ground and tells the truth about the city in which he works and the world in which he lives.

You don’t go to war against Ray Kelly on something as important as this; you stand with him. Sometimes you wonder if Kelly’s loudest critics, the ones from politics or the newspapers or the protesters in the street Saturday yelling about him, have forgotten what year it is.

I think Mr. Lupica has forgotten what century it is. He seems to have wandered into a time machine and traveled back to the Spanish Inquisition, or the Salem Witch Trials, or even as recently as the 1950s and Joe McCarthy's Red Scare. Man's inhumanity to man knows no expiration date, though, and Lupica is exactly correct: 2012 is turning out to be a very unforgettable medieval year.

Patriarch in Chief

As a "father of two daughters", Barack Obama's aides said, the president had read about Rush Limbaugh's nasty comments about Sandra Fluke, and wanted to reach out to the health care activist to offer some fatherly support. After carefully "consulting with advisers", Obama called Ms. Fluke from the Oval Office on Friday afternoon. What an amazing coincidence that she was just about to appear on Mrs. Alan Greenspan's Democratic veal pen cable TV show! Obama told the young woman that her parents must be so proud of her. No matter that she is all of 30 years old, and caring about what her parents might think has probably not been part of her agenda for at least a decade.

The very next day, the president bumped the first woman editor of the New York Times from her commencement gig at all-female Barnard College, and invited himself to speak instead. "As the father of two daughters," the White House announcement proclaimed, "President Obama wanted to speak to some of America’s next generation of women leaders.” Father Knows Best, apparently more so than one of the world's most powerful women leaders. Adoration, not emulation, little girls! Who is that in the front lines of the war against women again?

Every time I hear Barack Obama preface a remark with that cringe-worthy "as the father of two daughters" I know the news will be (a) A really bad public policy decision, such as overriding science and his own female FDA commissioner to ban the sale of Plan B contraceptives to teenage girls; (b) a blatant pitch for female votes and an appeal to all who crave authoritarianism; (c) an indication of his ingrained male chauvinism, or (d) a lame joke betraying an unhealthy fixation on the future sex lives of Sasha and Malia.... not to mention a creepy obsession with the drones and guns he will use to protect them.

Long before the newly declared War Against Women reached a fever pitch with the Rush Limbaugh rants of hate, and congressional Republicans frothing at the mouth about the gateway-to-promiscuity drug of birth control pills, the Democratic president was fretting about the chastity of his own two kids -- who are only 10 and 13 years old. The most recent (known) occasion was a campaign photo-op at the Master Lock factory in Milwaukee last month.  "As I was looking at some of the really industrial-size locks, I was thinking about the fact that I am the father of two girls who are soon to be in high school and it might come in handy to have these super-locks," he joked. "For now I'm just counting on the fact that when they go to school there are men with guns with them."  Heh, heh, heh. Video here.

At the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2010, Obama warned the singing Jonas Brothers to keep their hands off his offspring, as if they even had any interest in the pre-teen girls. "Boys! Don't get any ideas," he sternly intoned. "I have two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming.” 

And the following year, speaking at a high school commencement, he noted that the principal’s daughter had chosen to go to a different school because she “was worried that the boys would be afraid to talk to her if her mom was lurking in the hallways.” Because of this, he said, he’d decided to announce that his “next job will be principal at Sasha and Malia’s high school — and then I’ll be president of their college.”

There's more. The Chicago Tribune's Lynn Sweet wrote last August:

CNN's Wolf Blitzer, interviewing President Obama on Tuesday asked him what he would get daughters Malia and Sasha if he wins a second term. The girls got Bo, the dog after the Obama family moved to the White House.

BLITZER: What are you going to get them the next time, if you're reelected?

OBAMA: When I'm reelected, what I'll be getting them is a continuation of Secret Service so that when boys want to start dating them they are going to be surrounded by men with guns. That's their gift.

From another interview last year on ABC's Good Morning America:"But I understand teenage-hood is complicated. I should also point out that I have men with guns that surround them often.’

From a 2009 Newsweek interview: "Now, I worry about them when they're teenagers where, you know, you're already embarrassed about your parents and even more embarrassed on TV all the time. And dating I think will be an issue because I have men with guns surrounding them at all times [laughter], which I'm perfectly happy with, but they may feel differently about it.

At his National Prayer Breakfast speech last month, Obama carefully refrained from mentioning weaponry before his religious audience, but admitted that he will pray for strength when eldest daughter Malia "goes to her first school dance and begins dating" and hopes that she "keeps her skirt long as she grows up." Video here.

Of course, the worst episode of paternalism came in December, when Obama nixed the purchase of the "morning after" pill by girls under the age of 18. Being "the father of two daughters" apparently makes you forget everything you learned in your Ivy League schools. It puts you right down there with the most rabidly ignorant anti-feminist GOPers. And when his own base lashed out at him, he blamed yet another woman -- HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius -- as well as all those stupid teeny-boppers who can't tell a contraceptive from a pack of gum:

I will say this, as the father of two daughters. I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine. And as I understand it, the reason Kathleen made this decision was she could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old go into a drugstore, should be able—alongside bubble gum or batteries—be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect. And I think most parents would probably feel the same way.

Tell me again where this man gets off addressing a group of women at a commencement ceremony, or how he and his fellow Democrats think they have any standing when it comes to women's rights and health issues. This is a perfectly convenient wedge issue for him as well as for the Republicans.

ObamaCare, besides not kicking in for another two years even as 50 million people remain uninsured, is a poster child for the Law of Unintended Consequences. The president blew it when he allowed private insurance leeches, employers and the clergy to have a say in his quasi-public health plan. Now is the perfect time to point out yet again that Single Payer (Medicare for All) is the only way to go.

Lucrative Lunacy

If you've been paying any attention to corporate-sponsored news and cable gab-fests, and opening up emails from politicians and and their fund-raising lackeys, you might think the overriding issue of our time is the Republican War on Women. Forget the ever-increasing income disparity in this country. Forget the wars. Forget drone strikes and targeted assassinations and the attack on civil liberties. Forget the Great Fraudclosure Scandal. Forget wage stagnation and underemployment. Because, ladies, the Republicans are after your uteri! So while you're shaking with fright and indignation, reach into your designer bags for your checkbooks and help your corporate Democrats hold on to their seats. Somebody should be profiting off this ginned-up controversy, so it might as well be Harry Reid and Friends.


First, they came for your birth control pills. Next, they wanted to rape you with ultrasound probes. Then, they put Rush Limbaugh on the air to talk dirty about you and force you into making porn videos. Now, it's time for you and your money to join Congressional Democrats in the One Million Strong for Women "grassroots" movement. (forget about the Occupiers -- they make the maligned Wall Streeters feel queasy, so the Dems are just trying to ignore their increasing influence).


If the Republicans can conjure up a new phony culture war out of thin air, the Democrats are more than willing to play along by filling the victim role. They want you to feel aggrieved right along with them. Heaven forbid they should actually speak truth to power and call out war crimes past and present, and the real plutocratic agenda of the Republicans, who don't care one whit about birth control, or virtue. The GOPers pretend that government is trying to impose its socialist will to hurt the freedoms of the private insurers and the "job creators". That the mainstream media are actually taking this latest fakery at face value, and treating this ridiculous War on Female Health with any seriousness is pretty amazing. Roe v. Wade is not going to be overturned tomorrow or next week or next year. Planned Parenthood will continue prescribing free birth control and mammograms to women who need them for the forseeable future. Rush Limbaugh only has a platform reaching far beyond his stupid radio show because the "left-leaning" cable shows give him one. His misogynistic rants make the corporate Democrats and the corporate talking heads who love them look good. He helps fill the vacuum, helps hide the inconvenient truth that the DNC has no proactive platform of its own. What is it that they stand for again? Seems to me that not so long ago, they were the party of labor unions, universal health care, a progressive tax system, world peace, and the eradication of poverty. 


N.Y. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand posted a diary on the Daily Kos yesterday, announcing a "One Million Strong for Women" initiative. The piece started out reasonably enough; she even acknowledged that the manufactured war on women is steering the conversation away from the war on the middle class. The opening hook:

In recent weeks, I've said repeatedly that I was dumb-founded (sic) that in 2012 we are actually debating whether women should have access to contraception. I had no idea I’d be even more dumb-founded (sic) today, when, instead of coming together to fix our economy and strengthen the middle class, the Senate is considering a measure so extreme that it would allow any employer -– religious or secular –- to deny their employees coverage of any preventive service, including contraception, mammograms—anything the employer deems unfit to be covered. Let me say this once and for all: the power to decide whether to use contraception or any other preventive care service should be up to each individual woman, not her boss.

Yeah! But then, we are directed to the Million link. It turns out this so-called grassroots effort is not made up of women. It is made up for women (the helpless creatures) by politicians. There is no million-woman march on Washington planned. This has nothing to do with "activism" at all. It is a campaign fund-raising gimmick, planted as a news story on a liberal website, designed solely to get you to donate cash (a million strong dollars?)  to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, headed by Gillibrand's fellow New Yorker Chuck Schumer. (Chuck, as you may remember from a previous post, is just fine with NYPD thugs spying on Muslim women and children). Here's a thought, Kirsten: why not suggest that people make a donation direct to Planned Parenthood or a free clinic serving the indigent? 


MoveOn.org, the Democratic veal pen organization, also wasted no time sending out fund-raising emails. They want me to contribute $15 toward a Democratic campaign TV ad to stop the GOP's "Let Women Die!" agenda. Keep the fear alive, let the lifestyle liberal cash flow. MoveOn, by the way, is simply a SuperPac organization disguised as an independent activist group. It has so much money in the bank that the New York Times has actually categorized it as a corporate member of the One Percent!


The Center for American Progress, the think tank with close ties to the White House, sent out a two-fer email blast the other day, telling me that the Republicans want to put my boss in my bedroom, and by the way... the Stock Market always does better with a Democrat in office!


Schumer and Gillibrand have been lukewarm at best in voicing support of OWS. Schumer was even careful to say that protesters should not be "getting in the way of everyday New Yorkers on their way to work." Translation: OWS is out of the everyday mainstream, which is made up of his financial sector sugar daddies. 


Republicans are geniuses at setting up fake cultural issues to distract people from the fact that they are staging a not-so-silent coup against the 99%. Democrats are geniuses at being weak reactives who wring their hands every time a crazy new attack pops up -- and then they beg for money to keep the lunatics at bay. They think they can get away with moving to the right wing themselves by simply throwing out a liberal lifestyle-issue crumb every once in awhile.


In fact, they are probably extremely grateful to the Republicans for giving them a big excuse to disingenuously play defense,  deflecting attention away from the fact that Democrats no longer represent working class and poor people. They are every bit as corrupt as their GOP counterparts. They're in it for the money.


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Be Very Afraid and Support Your Local Politicians

DHS vs OWS

From Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone comes confirmation of what we already took for granted: the Department of Homeland Security has kept a close watch on Occupy Wall Street. Hastings just got hold of a secret five-page DHS report culled from the five million newly-released WikiLeaks documents.

Three things are screaming out:

1). Homeland Security was created to guard against terrorism. Why is it even interested in a peaceful domestic protest movement?

2). Homeland Security is a Huffington Post copycat. It got all the info for its report from Internet news items, and simply republished them in aggregate form, links and all. I picture a 20-something, low-level DHS hack/wannabe blogger sitting in a cubicle, trolling the Web in a frenzy of copying and pasting. He/she/they even went to the Daily Kos to get a copy of a protest march route! Among other sources were Reuters, CNN, The Huffington Post(!), major metropolitan newspapers and TV outlets. There is no indication in the report that actual DHS personnel ever visited the camps.

3). This report was in the possession of Stratfor, the Austin, TX company that was the subject of a mass email hacking by the Anonymous hacktivist group. What is the relationship between DHS and a private intelligence firm whose clients are multinational corporations?  The Surveillance State is beholden to the Corporate State, it appears. Or they're in cahoots. Or they are really one big entity, each faction feeding off the other. Isn't there a word for that?

As Hastings notes, the DHS report is fairly innocuous on the surface, although slanted toward concerns about the safety of the target of the protests -- the financial services industry -- and the "potential for violence". There is no smoking gun, no direct evidence in writing of a conspiracy to destroy the movement. But it ever so subtly hints that law enforcement should be on guard against the mobs in the camps and in the streets. There is just the hint of a dog-whistle within its five pages. There is a whiff of an "us against them" mentality. The last paragraph reads:

The growing support for the OWS movement has expanded the protests’ impact and increased the potential for violence. While the peaceful nature of the protests has served so far to mitigate their impact, larger numbers and support from groups such as Anonymous substantially increase the risk for potential incidents and enhance the potential security risk to critical infrastructure (CI). The continued expansion of these protests also places an increasingly heavy burden on law enforcement and movement organizers to control protesters. As the primary target of the demonstrations, financial services stands the sector most impacted by the OWS protests. Due to the location of the protests in major metropolitan areas, heightened and continuous situational awareness for security personnel across all CI sectors is encouraged.

In retrospect, it should be noted that the DHS report was written in October, at the very beginning of the Occupy movement. It was not until the following month that coordinated police crackdowns on the camps got underway, reportedly in the wake of a conference call among the mayors and DHS. This must have come after the Terror State urged the mayors to become paranoid and "situationally aware."

 One more sordid chapter in the History of American Government Overreach. One more smidgen of proof that we are under the control of an oligarchy. One more small step toward complete oppression, one giant leap backward for civil rights. Happy Leap Day, everybody! 

NYPD Guards at Zuccotti Park (post-eviction)

Update: Hastings was on The Young Turks last night to talk about the leaked DHS report. Watch him here.

When Islamophobes Attack

It's the latest episode of Shoot the Messenger. The enterprising AP reporters who revealed to the world that the New York City Police Department has been illegally spying on Muslim Americans for years are now being castigated by both smarmy politicians and their own fellow journalists for making the power elites and their hired army look bad. There's a whole new descriptive meant to marginalize people who insist on taking their constitutional rights seriously -- "extreme civil libertarians."

Far from evoking government and media outrage, the revelations -- which include the new shocker that the White House itself has funneled "drug war" money to the NYPD spying apparatus -- have generally inspired reactions ranging from disbelief and denial, thence to a spirited defense of state abuse of power. and finally to the demonization of those who dare to tear away the fabric of government secrecy. Erstwhile "liberals" seem to be generally okay with paramilitary thugs grossly overstepping their Constitutional bounds and geographical jurisdiction to conduct surveillance on an entire group based entirely on its religious beliefs. The hate speech of Islamophobes is no longer all that shocking. Politicians who last year were merely non-committal about the building of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan are now daring to be blatant.

Chief among them is one of the most powerful Democratic leaders in the country: Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. He has mounted a vigorous defense of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and his spy program. Chuck is being championed in the pages of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post as a defender of freedom. It is fine, Schumer says, to single out Muslims for a sweeping surveillance program, as long as you don't single them out on the basis of their religion. Yes. He really did say that. Here are his exact words:

“There is nothing wrong with the NYPD collecting and assessing publicly available information from New York, New Jersey, the other 48 states or around the world in the effort to prevent another terror attack like 9/11. In fact, it is widely understood that the NYPD’s actions have kept us safer. Looking at public information and following leads is perfectly acceptable as long as any one group, in its entirety, is not targeted based only on its religious or ethnic affiliation.”

Schumer's blanket statement that the NYPD spy program "has made us safer" is going unchallenged by the mainstream media. The New York Daily News has published an editorial lauding Schumer and blasting anybody daring to tar and feather the NYPD. The News takes great umbrage, not at state-sponsored civil rights violations, but at the Peabody-award winning Associated Press.

Finally (gushed the News editorial) after weeks of innuendo, half-truths and distortions that have depicted the NYPD as spying on the city’s Muslim communities, an elected official has spoken the truth....There’s no there there, said Sen. Chuck Schumer of reports that the department’s Intelligence Division invasively monitored New Yorkers based on their religious beliefs.....

Excavated endlessly by The Associated Press in a series built on the false premise that to gather preventive information is to violate rights, the division’s work has amounted, for the most part, to checking out facts that are in the public record....

Schumer perceptively divined that which should have been obvious to all of the city’s elected leaders: Checking out information in the public domain tramples on no one’s rights or privacy.
More important, the NYPD needs to have the facts on hand in order to know where to go and to whom to speak in the event that the CIA passes on a tip that a suspected terrorist from, say, Pakistan is somewhere in the city.
Referring to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, Schumer said: “I don’t think he has a bigoted bone in his body.”

And here is what the rabidly anti-Muslim Post is saying about Chuck the Hero:

Sen. Chuck Schumer stood tall for the NYPD this week as it took a politically motivated pummeling for gathering intelligence in New Jersey on potential Islamist extremist threats.
That took guts.
Bravo, Chuck.

Yes, it takes a courageous politician to defend the police practice of spying on elementary school children across the river in Newark, NJ, and targeting innocent Americans who suspiciously munch on fried chicken in an ethnic restaurant. But Schumer by no means stands alone. NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who recently sold out to the Obama Administration in the fraudclosure scandal, sees no reason to investigate civil rights scandals either.  Attorney General Eric Holder is certainly not about to rock the boat. After all, when it became known that the CIA was illegally spying on American citizens in tandem with the NYPD, he sat on his hands. Homeland Security, the CIA, the NYPD, the Dept. of Justice, Goldman Sachs.... these are interchangeable terms. They are all part of the same team.

When the AP first started publishing its series of articles on the illegal police spy operation last fall, NJ Rep. Rush Holt asked Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate. Holder ignored the request.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations have renewed calls for an investigation in light of possible White House involvement, however oblique, in the spy program. The Obama Administration says there is no oversight of how the money it provided to the police department is used, and is refusing to comment on the controversy.

Not since FDR authorized the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II has ethnic profiling of citizens been undertaken with such monumental overreach. What's next? A Diaspora? Concentration camps? The government compiled data on and spied on Japanese-Americans for years prior to their mass arrests. World War Two ended, but the global War on Terror will continue into the foreseeable future. Will some future president end up apologizing one day for this latest miscarriage of justice as Ronald Reagan did forty years after the second world war?

With Democrats like Chuck fomenting fear and hatred, cheerleading a new American Inquisition, who needs crazoid right wing Republicans? Our elected officials are falling all over themselves trying to establish their Torquemada bona fides.

Update: Watch a video with Glenn Greenwald on the ACLU site, here.

Conductor Chuck, Keeping Fear Alive

Going Postal on the Poor

Leave it to Congress to exceed even its own abysmal level of clueless incompetence. In general, our lawmakers have not raised too much of a stink about the mass closures beginning in May of post offices and mail distribution centers, and the loss of thousands of postal service jobs. That severely poor rural areas are being unfairly targeted in the cutting frenzy has raised nary an eyebrow. I can't seem to recall any bill pending in the Bubble Dome that would put an end to Congressional franking privileges (free postage for official mailing to constituents) in order to stem the hemorrhage of money from the cash-strapped USPS.


But that has changed.  It is suddenly occurring to the political class that, due to closures and cutbacks, the delivery of mail-in ballots may be delayed in this November's general election. They have therefore decided that postal budget cuts constitute a crisis of epic proportions.  People may be unable to vote them back into office because they can't get to a post office! Delivery of ballots to absentee voters may be slowed by days, even weeks!  The closing of the distribution centers will mean an end to next-day delivery of first class mail. So something must be done -- pronto!


Some politicians are calling for delaying the closures until after Election Day. Millions of voters cast their ballots by mail every year, and in Washington and Oregon, voting is done only through the mail. Voting by mail is always more popular during a presidential election year. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is worried that ballots from rural areas in his state won't get to and from their destinations in time: "Not knowing how long it will take to process those ballots could disproportionately affect rural voters, he said.“Closing these facilities carries many unintended consequences. It is not a risk worth taking.”


What Wyden didn't say is that those rural areas will end up suffering from a lot more than disenfranchisement once the small-town post offices are shuttered for good. One of the main excuses the government has for annihilating mail service as we know it is that the Internet has killed snail mail. Tell that to the rural poor, who are often deprived of decent broadband coverage in their remote habitats. Mitt Romney is not the only tone-deaf member of the ruling class elite. He and his plutocratic cadre just assume that everybody has a computer, a Cadillac and a career, money to burn and gas to burn to drive to the nearest unclosed post office, maybe 50 miles away.


According a recent report published by Reuters, nearly 80 percent of the 3,830 post offices under consideration for closure are in sparsely populated rural areas, where poverty rates are higher than the national average -- and where one third have no Internet service. And unbelievably, the USPS did not even take economic impact on communities into consideration in deciding which facilities to close. The decision was based purely on profitability or the lack thereof. From Reuters:

About 2.9 million people live in the rural communities where the post office that may close is either the only one or one of two post offices serving their zip code area. For many rural residents, that would translate into longer drives to mail packages, pay bills or buy stamps.
The Postal Service chose post offices for possible closure based primarily on revenue. Two-thirds of the 3,830 post offices slated for closure earned less than $27,500 in annual sales, postal data show. Nearly 90 percent of these post offices are located in rural areas, where shrinking populations and dwindling businesses mean the post offices simply cost more to operate than they earn.

As with so many of the other gratuitous cost-cutting measures in the current federal budget, the post office cuts seem designed specifically to punish poor people in the name of austerity. If you don't do your fair share in this mercenary society, you just are not going to get President Obama's fair shot. Your worth as an American citizen seems to be  based solely on your monetary productivity. And Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe seems to know exactly what he is doing, because he refused to honor a Freedom of Information request from Reuters about revenue from each individual post office on the chopping block. The targeting of the indigent is no accident. And the savings from these arbitrary closings are so miniscule as to be meaningless. Statistics show that Donahoe's proposed closings would save only $295 million a year, or four-tenths of one percent of the USPS's annual operating expenses.

"That's a drop in the bucket," said William Henderson, who served as Postmaster General from 1998 to 2001. Then he corrected himself: "That's not even a drop in the bucket. The bucket won't ripple."

Do read the whole Reuters article. It is a real eye-opener; an all-too-rare example of enterprise journalism in this era of media stenography. It just adds even more evidence to the charge that Donahoe is another political front man of the privatization of America. He is doing his fair share to give corporations a fair shot at shaking us all down in their endless quest of making a buck. To hell with people who don't have enough money to make a difference, or to make him and his boss care.

NYU Professor Steve Hudkins says that Donohue seems to be frantically rushing to get rid of post office jobs and buildings before advisory studies and public input are even collected and collated. (Hudkins runs his Save the Post Office website purely as a public service. He neither works for the postal service nor has he any relatives who are postal employees. He just likes his small-town post office!):

The Postal Service isn’t waiting to hear what the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) has to say about the Network Rationalization plan.  The PRC’s Advisory Opinion is due out in late summer, probably August or September, but the Postal Service plans to get started on the consolidations as early as May. 
It’s disconcerting that the Postal Service is in such a rush to begin closing the plants, especially considering that it has only itself to blame for when the Advisory Opinion will be ready.  The Postal Service could have submitted the Request for an Opinion four months earlier....
It’s not clear why the Postal Service is now in such a hurry and why it wants to close so many plants in such a short time.  It’s a sure formula for chaos in the mail system, and delays in delivering the mail will be inevitable, probably much worse than the change in service standards for First-Class mail that's already part of the plan.
Perhaps the Postal Service wants to increase pressure on Congress to pass legislation, perhaps management really believes its own hype about how dire the situation is, or perhaps they just want to amp up the sense of emergency to help further their agenda.
Whatever the reason, the Postal Service is basically thumbing its nose at the PRC and saying it doesn’t really care what the Advisory Opinion says.  Many of the plants will be closed before the Opinion even comes out.

Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio wants Donahue fired, and he also doesn't understand why the President is not more involved in defending the USPS against (mainly) Republican assault.  

"They think somehow the private sector will take over," DeFazio said. "Tell me who in the private sector is going to deliver a letter for 45 cents to a small rural community 40 miles from the nearest, or 100 miles from the nearest, sorting facility? That's not going to happen. These people will be deprived of any meaningful service."
DeFazio said generally that reduced mail service would be an "incredible blow" to the U.S. economy and would affect several companies and consumers who rely on the current level of service.
"I guess we'll become the first developed nation on earth without a postal service, just like we're the only developed industrial nation on earth without universal healthcare," DeFazio said. "We're the best."

Obama's proposed 2013 budget calls for ending Saturday mail service to save money, but he has been mum on the plant closings, layoffs and shuttering of post offices in poor rural areas. What a huge surprise. How many photo-ops and campaign events has he held in poor rural areas? If you can't afford the gas to drive to one of his populist harangues in a monied burb, you're out of luck.



Abandoned Post Office in South Georgia