The Political Difference Between 7 and 23

Trey Smith

The White House, and most headline writers around the country, are crowing that the November jobless rate of 7.0%, reported Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is the lowest since 2009 when President Obama took office, when it was 7.3% and rising.

But is this number really something worth cheering?

Not if you look behind it.

That 7.0% number is the BLS’s so-called U3 figure, which is the percentage of the labor force currently unemployed, and it is significantly lower than the figure for November 2012, which was 7.8%. But U3, known as the “official unemployment rate,” doesn’t really count everyone who is unemployed. It doesn’t include, for example, anyone who has even one hour a week of work, or who has not had a job for more than six months, or who in despair has given up looking.

A better number to look at, in terms of getting a true picture of the health of society and the economy, is the BLS’s U6 number, which also counts as unemployed those who are “marginally attached to the labor force,” meaning discouraged people who are not working and have given up looking for work, but who told BLS interviewers that they have looked within the past year and would take a job if one were available. U6 also counts as unemployed those who are currently working part-time for “economic reasons,” meaning that they want full-time work but cannot find it.

The U6 measure of unemployment for November is 13.2%, and while that too is down from 14.4% in November 2012, it is historically very high. Furthermore, as the analytical website ShadowStats points out, even U6 doesn’t tell the whole story. The BLS U6 figure, as ShadowStats’ John Williams notes, doesn’t count long-term discouraged workers -- people who have given up trying to find work because they cannot find a job. This group was “defined out of existence” by the BLS during the Clinton presidency in 1994. You can understand why that was done: adding these people to the total gives a current unemployment rate of a whopping 23% -- a number that, unlike the U3 and even U6, has been continuing to rise since the start of the so-called Great Recession in late 2008, even through the last four years of “economic recovery.”
~ from BLS 7% Jobless Rate for November is Nothing to Cheer About by Dave Lindorff ~

In the past, I have shared with you numerous snippets from Paul Craig Roberts who, like Lindorff above, draws attention to the work of John Williams at ShadowStats. It is not that Williams is some sort of magician or soothsayer; he merely takes the time to pore through the government's own data. Sadly, the mainstream media doesn't follow suit!

Because the mainstream media either is patently lazy OR they simply are in bed with the governmental elites, they continue to trumpet figures that don't do much justice to the situation.

Let's be honest here. Pretending that only 1 in 14 workers is unemployed is a far cry from admitting that it's really more like 1 in 4. But doctoring statistics has become the norm in this political climate. Bush did it and the Democrats decried it. Now Obama does it and the Democrats are silent.

Is Diplomacy More Important Than Constitutional Rights?

Trey Smith

People in Europe are growing increasingly incensed that the US is “hoovering up” their communications, storing them, and picking through them with mega computers that hunt for key words. But people in the US are growing increasingly angry that the NSA is doing the same thing here at home.

And just as this outrageous international electronic eavesdropping is destroying America’s image abroad and threatening long-held alliances, it is destroying American democracy, and public faith in the Bill of Rights, right here at home.

Not that Alexander and Clapper care. They don’t answer to the American people. They work for the US government, and the government these days -- the president, the Congress and the Supreme Court -- is clearly not “of, by and for” the people. It is of, by and for the corporations and the elite, and that oligarchic power elite, having stolen the country blind over the past several decades, is getting worried that the public is starting to wake up to, and grow restive about it.

The ruling elite wants an all-seeing NSA to keep the public in check, and to enable it to spot, and then to crush, any outbreak of rebellion, as was done so effectively to the Occupy Movement in the autumn of 2011.

It’s probably fair to say that the crushing of Occupy was the first battle of the second American revolution. Looking back someday, it will also probably be recognized as the trial run of the NSA security net.
~ from The Big Question the National Security State Isn’t Asking by Dave Lindorff ~

As Lindorff points out in this column, our higher ups admit that spying on allies might not be such a good thing, but they don't seem to have the same qualms about spying on Americans! So, it won't be all that surprising if NSA reforms end up protecting those in Europe more so than citizens in the US.

What I find the most amazing about these revelations about wide scale "intelligence gathering" is that, for the most part, the politicians and power brokers who support it are the very same people who present themselves as staunch defenders of the US Constitution. We should remember that Obama is a constitutional scholar and many of those on the right rabidly defend the part of the constitution that deals with "the right to bear arms." But when it comes to the part of the constitution that deals with "unreasonable search and seizure," these same defenders go mute!

Worried About a Tad Bit of Overexposure

Trey Smith

A revealing page-one article in [Thursday's] New York Times (“Tap on Merkel Provides Peek a Vast Spy Net”) reports on how the NSA’s global spying program, dating back at least to early in the Bush/Cheney administration, was vacuuming up the phone conversations (and no doubt later the internet communications) of not just leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but opposition leader Merkel before her party took power in Germany.

As the Times puts it, the phone monitoring, which actually dates back to the Cold War Era before 1990, “is hardly limited to the 35 leaders of countries like Germany, and also includes their top aides and the heads of opposing parties.”

That’s pretty far-reaching, and the paper says that it has learned, primarily courtesy of revelations from the documents released by fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, that the spying went even beyond that, to target up-and-coming potential leaders of so-called “friendly states.”

But the Times buys without question the explanation offered by professional liar James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence and ultimate head of the embattled National Security Agency, that the NSA’s spying on leaders and potential was and is and has been, first of all, well known to presidents, and secondly that its purpose was simply to see “if what they’re saying gels with what’s actually going on, as well as how other countries’ policies “impact us across a whole range of issues.”

That’s pretty broad. The first explanation is really a euphemistic way of saying the NSA wants to see if American’s purported friends and allies are lying. The second is a euphemistic way of saying that the US is spying to gain inside information about its allies’ political goals and strategies, and probably their negotiating positions on things like trade treaties, international regulations, etc.

What the Times does not ask in its entire report on this spying program on leaders and potential leaders is whether there could be another motive for this extraordinary spying campaign on leaders: blackmail.

How else to explain the remarkably tepid response from the leaders who are the victims of this spying by the NSA on their private communications? How else to explain Europe’s unwillingness to grant sanctuary to Snowden, who after all has allowed them to know about the perfidy of the US? How else to explain Europe’s supine acquiescence to the US in its criminal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, and its unquestioning support of Israel?

Nor does the Times ask the next obvious question, which is: If the NSA is spying on foreign leaders so widely and thoroughly, actually recording the conversations, not just the numbers being called, and submitting the recordings to keyword searches, isn’t it likely doing the same thing to leaders in the US? And if it is possible to imagine that the NSA is enabling the blackmailing of foreign leaders, isn’t it equally possible that the same thing is going on domestically?

Following that line of thinking, we should next ponder who would be doing the blackmailing? There has been some suggestion from the White House that the president “didn’t know” about the spying on Merkel and other leaders. Clapper and NSA Director Keith Alexander have denied that the president was kept in the dark about its spying on leaders of friendly nations, but both men are known to be liars regarding the NSA’s actions. Clapper indeed was forced to admit that he lied to Congress -- and right there we have prima facie evidence that the NSA has been blackmailing members of Congress, or at least that the members of Congress think they are vulnerable to blackmail. This is because despite Clapper’s outrageous offense of lying to the Congress about his agency’s massive spying program, not one member of either Senate or House, or of the two Congressional Intelligence Committees, has called for a contempt resolution against him.


How can that be? Members of Congress routinely cite or threaten to cite sports figures for contempt of Congress for lying to senators or representatives about their steroid use, and yet when the head of the nation’s spying organization network lies about an unprecedentedly huge spying operation, they just let it pass?

There has to be a reason for such cowardice in the face of such an institutional insult.
~ from Is NSA Spying Really About Blackmail? by Dave Lindorff ~

Leave it to a journalist like Dave Lindorff to ask some of the obvious question unasked by the mainstream media. Come to think of it, I raised similar questions about members of Congress awhile back too!

It shouldn't take a brainiac to figure out that something is going on that either we aren't being told about or the mainstream media is not looking into. While it is readily apparent that certain elements within the US government want to have a leg up in every negotiation -- insider information -- it should also be readily apparent that this kind of information provides the perfect scenario for blackmail and, concurrently, intimidation.

This is a point I have raised on more than one occasion. If the NSA is hoovering up information willy nilly, it stands to reason that some of that information pertains to members of the elite. Not only do US spy agencies have the capability to figure out who you and I text or skype with, but they must also know what members of Congress are discussing with staff and amongst themselves PLUS they must know what Wall Street is up to at any given moment.

For all we know, the NSA may be spying on the US Supreme Court! What's next? Might they also be tapping into the thoughts of God?

The Weight

Trey Smith

I no longer recognize my country.

Back in 1997, after two years living in China, and five more living in Hong Kong, during which time, as a correspondent for Business Week magazine, I slipped in and out of China regularly as a journalist to report on developments there, I got a good dose of life in a totalitarian society. When I alit from the plane in Philadelphia where my family and I were about to start a new chapter of our lives, I remember feeling like a big weight had been lifted off my chest.

The sense of freedom was palpable.

Almost immediately, though I got an inkling that something was amiss. An art teacher in Upper Dublin, the suburban town where we had bought a house, had just been arrested, charged with theft of $400 in school art supplies. Of course, my initial reaction was, “Great school district we’re in, if the teachers are stealing from the school!”

The teacher, Lou Ann Merkle, who had been arrested and finger-printed pending arraignment, was fired and was facing trial on a felony charge of stealing public property. But in a few weeks, as I followed the story in the local weekly paper, it became clear that there had really been no theft (she was taking old supplies which were being replaced with new ones, intending to bring them to a local community center used by low-income children who went there for day care and after-school care. Moreover, when stopped by the principal and told to return the supplies, she grudgingly complied. She was arrested anyway later). I learned over subsequent weeks of news reports that Merkle actually was being hounded by an obsessive power-tripping school administration simply for being an “activist” and outspoken teacher. A school board hearing I attended was packed in December of that year with over a hundred angry parents and former students of Merkle’s demanding that the board drop its case against her. It did not, but a county judge had the good sense to do exactly that, ruling that “no crime occurred here.” (Merkle, who got her job back with back pay, later sued the school district and won a significant judgment against it.)

This was one small example of government tyranny run amok but since then I have seen it become the norm in a United States where people are now being arrested for almost everything -- kids jailed without trial for shoplifting, hitchhikers jailed for arguing, correctly, with cops that it is not illegal for them to thumb for a ride, non-white youths in many cities stopped and frisked for “walking while black or Hispanic” and then getting busted on trumped up charges (resisting arrest, assaulting an officer, disturbing the peace, etc.) when the cops find no guns or drugs on them, protesters beaten and gassed and jailed for simply trying to exercise their First Amendment rights.

But that is just the surface.
~ from The Police State of America by Dave Lindorff ~

Americans are now shouldering a tremendous weight. Not only are far too many of us struggling to get by from month-to-month, but all of us now carry the weight of knowing we are being watched, listened too, scrutinized, analyzed and targeted. While we cannot know for certain if each of us is being spied on constantly, we know enough now to be sure that we are being spied on frequently.

One of the grave problems with persistent surveillance is that it overburdens the collective consciousness of a society. Energy that might have been used for innovation and creativity is lost to worry and anxiety. This is as true for those who act as if government spying is no big deal as it is for those civil libertarians who are consumed by the topic. If a person assumes that they are being watched most of the time, then they will think and behave differently than they would otherwise.

Mass domestic surveillance is like a cancer. It grows insidiously and, if not kept in check, it will overwhelm ANY society. In time, people will take it for granted and, if this comes to be, the fabric of the American ideal may be forever lost.

Which Team Is Which?

Trey Smith

I just had two discussions with neighbors in my suburb of Philadelphia that offer both a hope that the Republican-run House may block President Obama’s war on Syria, and a warning that liberal Democrats could hand him the narrow majority he needs to claim Congressional backing for his war.

The first conversation was with a neighbor whose family is fundamentalist Christian. Each national or statewide election, they enthusiastically back, including with roadside signs on their property, the Republican candidate, including McCain/Palin and Romney/Ryan.

We are friends with this family. The parents are very much do-it-yourselfers, home-schooling their three kids with the help of a religious-based home-schooling association in the area that helps organize some group activities, cutting their own firewood, raising chickens, etc. The kids are all very smart and open-minded, though both boys are attending religious colleges. But while we all get along well and like each other, we never talk politics.

That is, until yesterday, when the mother and I got onto the issue of the looming war on Syria. “This is terrible,” she said. “I thought at least that Obama was against this kind of thing. Didn’t he say he thought the war on Iraq was wrong? What’s going on?”

She wants to know what the US has to do with a civil war in Syria, and how bombing and killing Syrians is going to make anything any better in that country, or this one. And she said she thinks there are more important things to spend money on in the US, noting the terrible condition of education in neighboring Philadelphia, where class size in elementary schools is now 37, “with no teachers’ aides,” and where the school district is bankrupt.

I found myself thinking this woman sounded like me, and we parted casting shared aspersions on both political parties, which we agreed are not responding to the public’s views.

Then it was lunch with a several liberal friends. We very quickly found ourselves discussing what looks to be the next in this country’s unending string of wars, which have been a national constant at least since Pearl Harbor--and for all of our lives.

I was expecting to have a four-man rant about the insanity of a bombing attack on Syria, but was stunned when one of the men at the table, a sweet retired guy who I’m sure wouldn’t harm a fly, and who spent his life in the health care field, said, “I hope we go in and bomb Syria, and I hope we ‘take out’ Assad and his wife.”

Shocked, I asked, “What about his kids?”

He said, “Kids too. Kill ‘em all!”

A second guy, also a mellow fellow who has been very opposed to the wars, wasn’t quite so bloodthirsty in his sentiments, but said he was for bombing Syria too. “We can’t allow a country to use poison gas,” he said.

When I pointed out that it is not at all clear that President Bashar al-Assad’s government and military was responsible for the gas attack in Damascus, and that the administration’s case for blaming Assad and for going to war is full of lies, half-truths and conjecture, with no verifiable facts to support it, he scoffed. After all the government’s lies about Iraq, and lies about Afghanistan, and after a more than a decade of two wars that accomplished nothing except to destroy two countries with a combined population of almost 50 million people, he refused to believe that we are being lied to yet again.

“We have to do something,” he said plaintively, clearly either unaware or unwilling to acknowledge that there’s something obscene about a nation that poisoned millions of Vietnamese with the defoliant Agent Orange, that has strewn depleted uranium all across the cities of Iraq, that uses child-shredding anti-personnel weapons all the time and sells them on the global arms market, refusing to sign onto a global ban, and that continues to use napalm, a prohibited weapon, by simply changing an ingredient so it can claim it is something else, trying to claim it has the moral authority to punish another nation for allegedly using poison gas.

Only the third member of this group of friends, a retired Philadelphia teacher, agreed with me that an attack on Syria was nuts and will just lead to another disaster and another destroyed country.
~ from Anti-War Conservatives and War-Monger Liberals by Dave Lindorff ~

Some astute readers surely will note that some of the anti-war conservatives have taken that position solely because it is the opposite of Obama's position. I am confident that is the case for many, but I am also confident that several conservatives are anti-war for other reasons. What really gets me are the war-monger liberals. What is liberal about choosing war over diplomacy?

As I have pointed out many times before, this situation serves to underscore how the Obama presidency has destroyed the foundations of the Democratic Party. On issue after issue, Democrats are advocating and defending what once were Republican positions only a generation ago. It is weird to think that Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan are to the left of today's Democratic Party! If one of them sprang back to life to run in the 2016 Democratic Presidential Primary, he would lose for not being conservative enough.

That is truly mind blowing.

Why Fear Terrorists When There Are Banjo Players Running Amok

Trey Smith

What follows below is a snippet from a disturbing report out of Philadelphia with video footage of what transpired. It is appalling, to say the least! (See if you can spot THE moment the person being manhandled a) resists arrest and b) assaults a federal officer.)

The US has yet to launch President Obama’s latest war crime of massively bombing Syria (a country that does not threaten this nation) and already federal police thugs, in this case National Parks Service Rangers, have violently arrested an Iraq War Veteran who was peacefully playing her banjo in the shade on Independence Mall in Philadelphia following an anti-war protest and march.

Emily Yates, an activist with the group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), and a professional folksinger and banjo player, can be seen in this video [below], peacefully standing plucking her instrument when she is ordered to move by a group of Park Rangers. When she asks them (politely) why she has to move off of federal park property that is open to the public, she is not given any explanation. Then at one point, she is grabbed from behind roughly without warning and slammed, bent over, across the wooden top of a park bench, with several large rangers pinning her down, and with her hands wrenched behind her back, as they try to place metal cuffs on her wrists.

As she struggles to breathe with all that pressure on her forcibly bent-over form, a senior officer can be heard telling her to “relax” and to “stop resisting” -- though with three men piled on top of her, it is clear she is not resisting..

Yates was held in a federal lockup for two days before an arraignment on Monday, at which she was charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and, most seriously, “assaulting a federal officer.” The latter charge, absurd when matched up against the video of the arrest, is a felony carrying a heavy jail sentence.

One is reminded of those black jokes about police ramming arrested persons head first into the sides of patrol cars and then charging them with damaging public property, or punching handcuffed victims in the face and then charging them with banging their heads into the officer’s fist. It is impossible to view the above video and see any evidence of “assault.” Nor could Yates have been assaulting the larger scrum of rangers who were all over her prone body later when she can be seen being held on the ground, screaming for help, as angry spectators shouted from the sidelines for the rangers to let her go, to “stop strangling her” and to call for a medic.

Yates’ attorney, Larry Krassner, offered TCBH! a statement on the case saying: “Emily is a six-year military veteran who served honorably for two tours in Iraq. She has PTSD. She was arrested and injured by federal officers for no good reason. The US government owes its veterans better treatment than this, even when they happen to be opposed to further war in Syria.”

I would add it owes its citizens, veterans or not, better treatment than this too, especially in this particular location, of all places.

Independence Mall is a three-block piece of property run by the National Park Service in Philadelphia. A favored spot for tourists from all over the nation and the world, with the restored Independence Hall at one end, where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were written and where the Bill of Rights was passed into law, protecting freedom of speech and assembly, and the Constitution Center at the other end, where the US Constitution and its guarantees of freedom are celebrated, it is also a favored locale for protest actions, such as the protest and march against a US attack on Syria, which took place just before Yates’ arrest.

The brutal assault on this peaceful folksinger offers a stark view of the reality of America’s burgeoning police state, set as it was against the image of the building where America’s founding documents offered the hope for such a different kind of state.
~ from Park Rangers Brutally Arrest Iraq War Vet at Anti-Syria Bombing Demo by Dave Lindorff ~

BO Must Read This Blog!

Trey Smith

Back on Friday, I asked if Barack Obama was going to follow Britain's lead by allowing Congress to vote on whether or not the US should attack Syria. Up until that point, all signs pointed toward the President making a unilateral decision without any Congressional input. But just when it seemed like Obama was going to push the proverbial button, he blinked and said he would allow Congress to weigh in on the matter. To say the least, it is something of a perplexing about-face.

Dave Lindorff writes that overall opposition by the American public -- not simply my blog post on the matter -- caused Obama to have second thoughts.

Behind these flowery words is a hard reality: the president of the United States has been compelled to back down. Public opposition in the US and abroad to yet another war of choice launched against another middle eastern nation that poses no threat to this country has brought the American war machine, at least for the moment, to a screeching halt. In Europe and elsewhere, public pressure has forced leaders to back away from their initial reflexive support for a US strike on Syria. And according to Charles Blow of the New York Times, 50% of Americans oppose any US military action against Syria, with only 28% saying that an attack on Syria would be in America’s interest. Blow says this is the highest level of public opposition to war in three decades of US warmaking.

It is a time for celebrating the power of the people, but it is not a time for resting. The lobbying of members of Congress by the administration and the various interests that are pushing for war will be intense over the coming week or so. Public pressure on members of Congress to oppose any attack will have to be even more relentless and intense.

This madness can be stopped. We can see that now. But it can only be stopped if we keep the pressure on every member of Congress.

As much as I would like to pat ourselves on the back, I am still left with the question: Why did public opinion impact this singular issue?

Back during the health care debate, overwhelming majorities favored some type of universal health care and yet Obama pulled the plug on the watered down Public Option. Large numbers of Americans opposed almost all of the corporate bailouts as well as the "settlement" with mortgage financiers in regards to the illegal foreclosure of homes. In these cases, widespread public opposition didn't register at all with the president and his advisers.

So, why did public opposition -- an opposition that did not include massive protests and demonstrations -- supposedly turn the tide in this case?

Not unexpectedly, the astute Glenn Greenwald provides the answer.

It's a potent sign of how low the American political bar is set that gratitude is expressed because a US president says he will ask Congress to vote before he starts bombing another country that is not attacking or threatening the US. That the US will not become involved in foreign wars of choice without the consent of the American people through their representatives Congress is a central mandate of the US Constitution, not some enlightened, progressive innovation of the 21st century. George Bush, of course, sought Congressional approval for the war in Iraq (though he did so only once it was clear that Congress would grant it: I vividly remember watching then-Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joe Biden practically begging the Bush White House to "allow" Congress to vote on the attack while promising in advance that they would approve for it).

But what makes the celebratory reaction to yesterday's announcement particularly odd is that the Congressional vote which Obama said he would seek appears, in his mind, to have no binding force at all. There is no reason to believe that a Congressional rejection of the war's authorization would constrain Obama in any way, other than perhaps politically. To the contrary, there is substantial evidence for the proposition that the White House sees the vote as purely advisory, i.e., meaningless.

Recall how - in one of most overlooked bad acts of the Obama administration - the House of Representatives actually voted, overwhelmingly, against authorizing the US war in Libya, and yet Obama simply ignored the vote and proceeded to prosecute the war anyway (just as Clinton did when the House rejected the authorization he wanted to bomb Kosovo, though, at least there, Congress later voted to allocate funds for the bombing campaign). Why would the White House view the President's power to wage war in Libya as unconstrainable by Congress, yet view his power to wage war in Syria as dependent upon Congressional authorization?

More to the point, his aides are making clear that Obama does not view the vote as binding, as Time reports:

To make matters more complicated, Obama's aides made clear that the President's search for affirmation from Congress would not be binding. He might still attack Syria even if Congress issues a rejection.

It's certainly preferable to have the president seek Congressional approval than not seek it before involving the US in yet another Middle East war of choice, but that's only true if the vote is deemed to be something more than an empty, symbolic ritual. To declare ahead of time that the debate the President has invited and the Congressional vote he sought are nothing more than non-binding gestures - they will matter only if the outcome is what the President wants it to be - is to display a fairly strong contempt for both democracy and the Constitution.

From the Armchair

Trey Smith

There was an old 1978 Saturday Night Live skit that hit dangerously close to the truth about how modern US society deals with those it fears. Steve Martin, playing a 12th century judge, Theodoric of York, is confronted with the case of a woman, Lorraine Newman, charged with being a witch. With the townsfolk calling for her to be burned at the stake for “consorting with the devil,” he says the only way to determine her guilt or innocence is to put her in the “trough of justice” -- a deep vat of water into which her bound body will be cast. Theodoric advises the woman that she has “nothing to fear” since if she is guilty her body will float, rejected by the waters of justice, but if she’s innocent she will sink. When her body sinks, leaving just a few rising bubbles which indicate she has drowned, Theodoric announces: “Ah! Not guilty!” Leaving her in the tank, he then moves on to the next case.

The trial of Pvt. Bradley manning has far too much in common with this skit to be funny. Manning, a young man of principle who said he had decided to release hundreds of thousands of documents exposing the true brutal nature of the US war on Iraq and the so-called war on terror, as well as the self-serving crudeness and imperial corruption of US global diplomacy, stood accused in a military court of hugely inflated “crimes,” including causing death and injury of American troops, aiding the enemy, harming America, and treason. The judge, Col. Denise Lind, proved to be an even a more ludicrous mockery of justice than Martin’s Theodoric of York. Blatantly promised a big promotion by the Obama Pentagon as an inducement to assure her reaching a guilty verdict against Manning, she assured that the trial was conducted largely in secret, and denied all efforts by the defense to have Manning freed based on the year he spent being tortured and held without charge by his military captors in what was a transparent effort to get him to cut a deal blaming his document release on the organization Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange.

In the end, Manning was tossed into the trough of justice and found duly guilty of all but the most specious and overblown charge of “aiding the enemy,” and was left to face a possible 90 years in jail which, for a 26-year-old man, would be a life sentence.

At that point, Manning had two choices. He could stand his ground, insist as he had through the course of the trial and earlier in his on-line chats, that his actions had been motived by the noble goal of exposing the crimes of the military and the government, and take the consequences, or he could lie, claim that he had been deluded, mentally ill, and the victim of parental abuse, and plead for the mercy of the court. Understandably, given the way the authorities had stomped on him for the past several years, Manning chose the second alternative and made a fawning and pathetic apology for all his actions, and begged for mercy. Rather than sink to the bottom of the trough of justice, he allowed his body to float, in hopes that he would not be burned at the stake.

It remains to be seen whether the judge or a higher authority will respond to his abject submission to the government’s will by giving him a lighter sentence, or whether he will nonetheless be symbolically burned at the stake by being locked away in Leavenworth for the rest of his life. Either alternative is possible.
~ from Salem on the Potomac by Dave Lindorff ~

Back in the 90s, I was a staff member of Oregon PeaceWorks. We had an young intern -- she later became a staff member too -- who I sort of mentored. I say "sort of" because I learned a lot more about about dedication and courage from her than she learned from me!

She went down to Fort Benning, Georgia two years in a row to protest against the School of the Americas. The first year she crossed the line unto military property and received a letter from the government that said, if she did it again within a year or two, she would face imprisonment. Undeterred, she crossed the line the very next year and was summarily arrested.

Though initially released on bail and allowed to come home, she had to fly back for court. She was looking at the strong possibility of 6 months at a federal penitentiary. My 18 year old friend -- who had never lived on her own -- was staring at the possibility of her first experience away from home being spent in a jail cell.

When it came time for her to address the judge, she could have thrown herself on the mercy of the court and said that she had felt pressured by the group to violate the order against her. But that is NOT what Chani did. She delivered an eloquent speech about the human rights abuses that have been borne by the School of the Americas all throughout its history. She said that, as a person of conscience, she willfully defied the order against her and she wasn't about to plead for mercy. She spoke out for the thousands of people brutalized by the students of the School of the Americas -- people who had neither standing nor a voice.

Not surprisingly, she was sentenced to 6 months.

How I wish Bradley Manning had made the same kind of statement! But I am not here to criticize him. It's easy for me to say he should have said this or that. I'm not facing life in prison! Who knows what any of us would do in his circumstances. I might like to think -- owing to my unique personality -- that I would have delivered a scathing critique on the federal government's immoral and unethical behavior, but I understand that is nothing more than fanciful thinking.

The Numbers Keep Growing

Trey Smith

Just for the sake of argument, let's suspend our disbelief for a moment and pretend (I know it's a stretch) that the Obama administration and the apologists for the nation's spy apparatus in Congress, Democratic and Republican, are telling us the gods' honest truth.

They have, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, "amped up" their defense of the NSA's massive spying program, claiming that not two, but 50 terrorist plots have been foiled thanks to their metadata mining and their intrusive monitoring of our phone and email conversations and website browsing activity.

Think what that means: for years now, the Jihadists have known that the US spy apparatus is ubiquitous, and that it is able to track all their communications. Of course they knew this, because they would have seen all these plots being foiled (the real ones, not the many ones that were created by FBI or CIA provocateurs and plants), and, not being stupid, they would have put it together and realized that the plots that depended upon a lot of phone calls and internet communications were getting busted up, while ones that were handled either solo, or that were developed by careful word-of-mouth communication and courier were managing to succeed.

But we poor schmucks, the American people, have been left in ignorance, imagining that our carefully crafted and painstakingly memorized six or eight-digit passwords, including at least one letter and one number (or if we're really good, some symbol or other), were doing the job of keeping our online lives private and that our unlisted numbers, or our decision not to list an address with the phone company, were keeping our telephonic communications secure.

Ho ho! Were we fooled!

But really (stepping back into the real world again now), are we going to believe this nonsense about 50 NSA-foiled plots?
~ from Cranking Up the Washington Lie Machine by Dave Lindorff ~

Do I believe that the various top secret NSA programs revealed by Edward Snowden have thwarted at least 50 terrorist plots? Hell no! I base this conclusion on one fact: Team Obama is very self-serving and, had they foiled all these plots, they would have leaked details about them all along the way.

For all his administration's war on federal whistleblowers, the administration itself is very leaky. Every time they "strike a blow against terrorism," they are quick to get the word out. They want us to know that Obama is one tough dude and not somebody these bad guys can mess with.

It defies credulity to think that, during the last presidential election, Team Obama would have sat on a slew of juicy leaks and not used them to show that their man was tougher on terrorism than Romney. If numerous plots had been foiled, Obama's minions would have gone to every friendly reporter to spill the tantalizing details. They would have appeared on every mainstream political talk show to tout the president's creds.

Since this did not happen, it points to the notion that they are pulling these growing numbers out their asses in order to justify programs that they can't really justify.

How a Conspiracy Theory Is Rightly Born

Trey Smith

Anyone who was a fan of the old ABC TV series “The Untouchables” or of the later series, also on ABC, called “The FBI,” would know something is terribly fishy about the FBI slaying of Ibragim Todashev.

According to the FBI, Todashev, who was an acquaintance, or friend, of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, was shot and killed by an FBI agent who was interviewing the young man, at his home, at midnight, allegedly because Todashev had suddenly attacked him, causing the agent to feel threatened.

There are many contradictions in this official story, including multiple explanations for how it happened, that variously had Todashev threatening the agent with a sword, a knife, a chair, a pipe, a metal pole and a broomstick. But one thing that stands out is that the agent was alone with Todashev, who was suspected of having been an participant, with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in an as yet unsolved September 11, 2011 slaying of three suspected young drug dealers in Waltham, Mass. who were also friends of the Tsarnaev brothers.

The critical word here is “alone.”

Watchers of those FBI programs know that FBI agents always work in pairs. This is not just Hollywood. It’s FBI policy.

Indeed, when my father was informed back in 1969, by a colleague at the University of Connecticut School of Engineering where he was a professor, that the FBI was investigating me for my anti-war activities, the colleague, an arch-conservative backer of the US war in Vietnam, said that “two FBI agents” had come to his office to inquire about my activities (he had been outraged that the agents had come to him and not to my father for information about his son!).

It was also a pair of FBI agents who came, unannounced, to my dorm room at Wesleyan University a year earlier, when a group of us students had been hiding my roommate’s older brother, a Marine who had deserted from the service on a visit home from Vietnam whom we later helped escape to Canada and ultimately Sweden. In fact, so common were the visits by agents to anti-war activists that we on the left back in those days used to laugh that the FBI guys always looked like Jehovah’s witnesses when they’d knock on your door on a visit, traveling in pairs and wearing their neatly pressed suits.

Jokes aside, though, there is a reason that FBI agents work in pairs. It’s not that they can’t handle themselves in a confrontation, though that no doubt is part of it. It’s that lying to a federal law enforcement agent is a felony -- one that is very easy to prosecute and win conviction on and that has long proved useful for locking people up when conviction for a bigger crime might be difficult -- but it is necessary to have a witness to make such a case. Two FBI agents means that there is always a witness to such lying -- one that a jury will be inclined to believe.

So how did it come to pass that when Todashev made his alleged lunge -- armed with knife, sword, chair, pipe, broomstick or whatever -- at the FBI agent in question, that agent was alone in the apartment with him?

We’re asked to believe that the other agent (two actually, as there were reportedly three of them involved in a five-hour interrogation at the house earlier that night), and several Massachusetts state cops who were also along in Orlando, Florida for the questioning of Todashev, had inexplicably just “left the room” for some reason.

This “explanation” for the two-man fight strains credulity to the breaking point. The FBI also claims that Todashev had already “confessed,” or was “about to confess” to having been involved in the triple murder of the drug dealers, though that alleged confession was, also incredibly, not recorded. Todashev was being questioned too, reportedly, about his links to the Tsarnaev brothers, and was thought to know about their alleged plans for marathon mayhem, so presumably keeping him alive to testify would have been very important to the pending federal case against the surviving younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

I would submit that it is simply not believable that such a suspect would not have been carefully guarded, carefully searched for weapons, and carefully secured in some fashion -- most likely with handcuffs, before being questioned. I would also submit that there is no way that one lone agent would have been left alone with him under any circumstances, and not just for security reasons, but because Todashev was supposedly being interrogated, and there had to be a witness to his answers besides just the agent doing the questioning.
~ from Is the FBI now in the Execution Business? by Dave Lindorff ~

I have shared this lengthy snippet simply because Lindorff makes a slew of pertinent points. The most important of these is that the varying explanations for what happened that night strain credulity. As I wrote in an earlier post, it boggles the mind that authorities would have allowed the now deceased man ANY opportunity to brandish a weapon. Who in their right mind interrogates someone supposedly thought to be involved in a triple murder and a bombing WITHOUT first patting down the suspect and removing anything that could be utilized as a weapon from the immediate vicinity?

Incidents like these explain how a conspiracy theory is rightly born. When official explanations don't make a lick of sense, inquiring minds go searching for explanations that DO make sense. From my standpoint, this looks like some sort of hit job. If you told the average person about the incident, but you failed to mention that the interrogators were G men, I bet a lot of people would guess that you were describing a mafia hit!

Chances are that we will never know what actually took place in Todashev's home that night...unless someone leaks it. The federal government has done itself no favors by seemingly changing their story at will. It is because the government's version of the events keeps changing that it is quite natural to be suspicious of their true motives. If you ask your 5 year old how mom's favorite vase was broken and said 5 year old provides changing and often conflicting accounts of how it happened, you get to the point in which you don't believe anything the 5 year old has to say in relation to the event.

Legit Questions

Trey Smith

I’m not a conspiracy-minded person, but something definitely stinks about this whole Boston Marathon bombing story.

From what we’re reading about the case, the FBI had for at least two and possibly as many as five years been investigating Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old older brother killed during a shootout between police and the two brothers, Tamerlan and 19-year-old Dzhokhar. They had interviewed Tamerlan in his home, warned him they were watching what he ate, what he looked at on his computer, etc. They knew he had gone to Russia, Dagestan and Chechnya.

Then there’s the money thing. We’re told that Tamerlan had dropped out of community college because of money problems, right? Community college? That costs almost nothing to attend. That’s the whole point of community colleges: everyone can afford them. And he was reportedly only going part-time! But then, the two brothers are driving around in a Mercedes and wearing fancy clothes?

We’re talking about two brothers, both graduates of public school, with a father who was ill and living in Dagestan, who had worked as a curbside mechanic while in the US, and a mother who had a in-home beauty salon business, and these lads somehow were stylish dressers and drove around in an expensive car -- expensive to buy even used, and terribly expensive to maintain, too.

Where did all that money come from? We don’t know. Tamerlan was reportedly working at things like delivering pizza during that period This while living with his wife and caring at home for their young daughter, now three. Tamerlan’s artist wife was said to be supporting the struggling family by working “60-80 hours a week” as a home health care aide, one of the lowest-paying jobs you can find, often paying less than minimum wage.

Why is all this troubling? Because time and time again, when purported terrorist plots are “disrupted” and alleged terrorists are arrested, it turns out they are inept dupes who have been led into their “plots” by FBI provocateurs.

So was this horrific Boston Marathon bombing yet another in this long string of FBI sting operations that perhaps went wrong? Or worse, was this, as both the Tsarnaev parents, now divorced and living separately in Dagestan, are suggesting, actually a “false flag” set-up by US intelligence agencies?

There are other curiosities about this whole affair. It has been widely reported, even in the mainstream local media (at least early on), that there was an unusual amount of police presence at both the start and finish of the marathon this year -- activity that included police drug-sniffing dogs and also -- get this! -- private security personnel, reportedly from Craft International, wearing the same kind of black clothing and black backpacks as were seen being worn by the Tsarnaev brothers! What’s that about? The similarity of what the Tsarnaev brothers were wearing to what the Craft mercs were wearing are incredible, right down to the black caps with the white logo on the front (Tamerlan's Bridgestone logo wasn't a skull, but from a distance could have passed for the same thing).
~ from Something's Rotten in Boston by Dave Lindorff ~

In all candor, within a day or two of the bombings in Boston, both my wife and I admitted to each other that privately each of us had wondered, Is this a wag the dog scenario? It's really terrible to admit that, but our government has proven time and time again that it is not to be trusted. I'm not simply referring to George Bush and WMDs either.

Do you remember the BP oil disaster? BP and the Obama White House seemed to be working together to create a massive disinformation campaign. They consistently low-balled the amount of oil gushing out of the fractured well and they kept telling us that the dispersant used was nothing to worry about. We later learned -- through the hard work of investigative journalists -- that, not only was this not true, they knew it was untrue! But they kept repeating it, nonetheless.

And so, any time there is a national "situation" these days and the government makes certain pronouncements, I tend to be a bit skeptical. I'm not suggesting that this is definitely the case in this instance, but one has to wonder. The big question I ask myself is: What does the federal government have to gain if the particulars of this bombing aren't what they say they are?

To add to the questions, Lindorff posted a follow-up the next day.

I have already written lengthy piece yesterday about the increasing number of bizarre aspects to the Tsarnaev brothers’ alleged bombing of the Boston Marathon, including questions about where the elder Tsarnaev brother, Tarmelan, who was delivering pizzas, and whose wife was slaving away at a low-paid home health aid job, got the money to buy his fancy clothes and Mercedes Benz, why the Marathon finish line area was crawling with black-jacketed mercenaries from the Craft International Security rent-a-soldier agency, and how the police and federal agencies and National Guard managed to lock down a city of a million in a few hours’ time without any advance planning.

Now a clever guy with an outfit calling itself Underground World News has found video footage showing the younger, surviving brother, Dzhokhar, rushing from the scene of the bombing. This video clearly shows him still wearing his backpack -- the one he supposedly left behind to explode in the crowd.

Furthermore, the same video shows images, already widely circulated, of the exploded backpack, with a unique white square on its top -- a design that is clearly visible on the top of a black backpack being worn by one of two Craft mercs -- the very dark-skinned person who, ironically, was initially controversially identified in some mainstream media as a suspected bomber.

Then the real shocker: Another image, also widely circulated, shows that same Craft mercenary character running from the bomb explosion without his backpack!

I looked at the video in question and it wasn't clear to me at all that Dzhokhar was still wearing his backpack after the explosion, but I do think it's clear that the private security person was not. Is that a significant fact? I don't know. What I do know is that several people have raised some serious questions about the government's account of what took place. That doesn't mean that the government's account is wrong, but it does lead a person to wonder.

Reap What We Sow

Trey Smith

A country that goes around blowing up children in Afghanistan by the score, as happened last week in Kundar Province, Afghanistan, that claims for itself the right to kill anyone, anywhere, if the president or his designees in the Pentagon and the CIA decide that person is a threat or an annoyance (and that is willing to kill lots of innocent bystanders, including women and kids, to do it), a country that encourages its police to act like an occupying military force in their jurisdictions, breaking into homes in SWAT gear at dawn, pointing assault rifles in people’s faces, arresting people on trumped-up charges, such a country and its people at some point must realize that such behavior invites a violent response.

This time, it was apparently crudely made IEDs that killed three and tore the limbs from other people innocently participating in or watching a road race. Note, though, that we had never even heard of IEDs until Bush’s and Cheney’s criminal invasion of Iraq. Next time, it could just as easily be a home-made remotely piloted drone aircraft carrying a load of TNT or some other deadly explosive.

The point is you reap what you sow. Violence begets violence.

So America, the most violent country in the world today, lurches from one act of mayhem to another. It really matters little whether the slaughter is caused by a wack-job armed with a few high-capacity-clip automatic pistols or a foreign or domestic terrorist armed with a couple of crude IEDs. The victims are just as dead or maimed either way.

We cannot hope to escape this kind of thing if we go on as we are going. (emphasis added)
~ from A Violent Act Again in a Violent Nation by Dave Lindorff ~

You reap what you sow is a universal adage. So, why doesn't America learn this basic lesson? Why must we repeat the same mistakes over and over and over again?

Throw Away the Key

Trey Smith

Willie James Sauls is unlikely to see the outside of a prison. Last fall a court in the state of Texas sentenced this 37-year-old man to 45 years in jail. His crime: he snatched the purse from an old woman.

In Norway, meanwhile, a court sentenced Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing racist who slaughtered 77 people, mostly teenagers, and injured several hundred, to 21 years in prison, with an option for that detention to be extended by five-year increments if he is determined to be still dangerous. Otherwise, the 32-year-old, if considered rehabilitated, could be released at the age of 53.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, Germany was rocked by killings committed by a radical left group called the Red Army Faction. Its members killed over 30 people, including the nation's attorney general and leading industrialists. Eventually its leaders were caught and convicted, but by 2007, almost a decade after the Red Army Faction had announced its own dissolution, those still in prison were pardoned by the country’s president.

It is beyond inconceivable to imagine a US president, governor or even a judge, releasing a prisoner from a US jail who had committed the kind of offenses committed by either Breivik or members of Germany’s Red Army Faction. It is, for that matter, hard to imagine any political leader in the US pardoning even purse-snatcher Willie James Sauls.

This is, after all, a country that just recently hounded a 26-year-old internet activist, Aaron Swartz, into committing suicide, after a federal prosecutor threatened him with 35 years in jail -- this for the heinous crime of stealing income from a company that was collecting revenue for making available academic papers for which the authors get not a penny (in a protest action he had publicly hacked an MIT server and downloaded hundreds of academic papers which the private contractor was charging for!). This is a country that routinely convicts the wrong people and locks them up for decades and doesn't even apologize if they manage to eventually prove their innocence and win release. It's a country that is holding people as "terrorists" at Guantanamo, without trial, for over a decade, knowing they never did anything wrong, simply because it doesn't have the courage to admit its errors.

Right-wing Americans love to call the US a “nanny state,” claiming that the federal government is always trying to pass laws regulating people’s lives. What the US really is, though, is a “puni-state” -- a nation that thrives on vengeance and retribution, and that rejects the whole notion of rehabilitation or character change (even while euphemistically calling its prisons "corrections" facilities).

How else to explain the prosecutorial passion for charging absurdly youthful offenders as adults?
~ from The United Police States of America by Dave Lindorff ~

While I have been encouraged by the growing numbers of Americans who self-identify as atheists or agnostics, there is no question in my mind that fundamentalist Christianity still has a strong grip on our society. Fundamentalists place a great deal of emphasis on the Old Testament (OT) and the OT reads like a blueprint for retribution and vengeance. The god of the OT isn't one to try to talk out problems; defy him and ZAP!

Of course, the emphasis on retributive justice cannot be laid solely at the feet of Christianity. Muslim nations often are just as severe, if not more so. It seems to be a problem of religion, in general. And it's not just religion in a sterile vacuum. It also goes hand-in-hand with economics.

As we certainly see in this nation, the explosion of prisons is big money. There is a small gaggle of corporations that are robbing public treasuries blind by encouraging lawmakers to lock up ever more people. So, it should not be surprising that the big wigs in the prison-industrial complex like to wrap their looting into the fabric of fundamentalist Christianity. They exhort the faithful to support retributive justice -- and the faithful lap it up like thirsty dogs -- while laughing all the way to the bank and back again.

Some Americans Just Are Not That Important

Trey Smith

You want to know WHY I am such a critic of my own government? Read the following column (pasted here in its entirety) by Dave Lindorff and you'll get a clue. And remember, as the President likes to say, we're not at war with Islam! Yeah, right.

The American media are full of glowing reports and praise for President Obama for “brokering” a detente between Israel and Turkey, two former allies who have been at loggerheads since May 31, 2010 when heavily armed Israeli Defense Force fighters boarded the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish-flagged vessel seeking to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza with non-military supplies, and killed nine unarmed peace flotilla activists.

In the deal arranged by the American president, Israel’s hot-head prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had ordered the raid, apologized “to the Turkish people” for “any mistakes that might have led to the loss of life or injury.”

It was a lame excuse for murder, but it appears that Turkey’s government was ready to bury the hatchet and, as a client state of the US, was also under some pressure from this country too.

It is interesting and indicative of the continuing power of the pro-Israel lobby in the US, that President Obama did not, as part of this brokered deal, bother to demand that Netanyahu include an apology, weak or otherwise, to the American people for the killing of an American national. For one of the nine people slaughtered by the IDF in that raid, a 19-year-old young man named Furkan Dogan, was an American citizen -- a son of Turkish parents, but born and raised to adulthood in the U.S.

Dogan’s death has never been protested or even investigated or questioned by the US government -- an astonishing abrogation of this government’s oft-repeated promise to protect American lives. Indeed, in his first debate in the series of three presidential campaign debates with Republican Mitt Romney last fall, President Obama said, in his first answer to a question from the moderator, that his number on responsibility was to protect Americans.

Not young Furkan Dogan, though.

As we reported here in ThisCantBeHappening!, the unarmed Dogan, who was filming the IDF boarding of the Mavi Marmara, was beaten and kicked viciously on the deck by two IDF thugs, who then fired at him with their shotguns at point blank range.

As we also reported, the Turkish Council of Forensic Medicine conducted an official autopsy which concluded that Dogan had been killed by two shots to the face fired at close range -- this as he lay already gravely wounded on the deck of the ship, having been already shot in the back, leg and foot.

This report, which was conveyed directly to the US Embassy in Ankara in July, 2010, was sat on, covered up and ignored, and went unreported. Turkey later relayed the autopsy report directly to the White House, and finally, when that to elicited no response, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan mentioned it specifically himself during a state visit to Obama. The Turkish leader later expressed his surprise to reporters following his meeting with the president that the US had not protested the killing of one of its citizens. As he told reporters, ‘I asked President Obama whether the reason he showed no interest in one of his nationals being killed was because [the victim] was [ethnically] Turkish. He didn’t reply.’”

What a freaking outrage!

The idea that this president cannot demand even a mild apology from an Israeli prime minister for the brutal slaughter of an unarmed US citizen, even as he is brokering such an apology for the killing of nine Turkish citizens, is beyond appalling.

Equally, or perhaps even more appalling, is the complete failure of the US corporate media to mention this failure, even as they note that one of the nine killed was a “Turkish-American.”

Actually, he was more than that. He was an American, pure and simple. An American born in America, and you don’t get more American than that.

I guess if you think you have the right to kill US citizens without a trial, as Obama does, you probably figure you don’t have to demand apologies from foreign leaders who order their deaths, too.

The victims are just US citizens after all. No big deal.

~ Obama Doesn’t Seek Israeli Apology American Youth's Killing by Dave Lindorff ~

What Was Richard Nixon Thinking?

Trey Smith

Thanks to the courageous action of Private Bradley Manning, the young soldier who has been held for over two years by the US military on trumped-up charges including espionage and aiding the enemy, we now have solid evidence that the country’s two leading news organizations, the Washington Post and the New York Times, are not interesting in serious reporting critical of the government.

Manning, in admitting at his military court martial hearing recently that he was in fact the source of hundreds of thousands of damning and embarrassing documents and cables exposing the perfidy and even war crimes of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan which were turned over to Wikileaks, also stated that he had first attempted to provide those documents -- which included the secret video of an attack helicopter massacring civilians, including two Reuters journalists, and those who tried to rescue the victims -- to the Post and the Times.

Both supposed “news” organizations failed to pursue his offer, and did not run those stories of US criminality until the documents had been released by Wikileaks.
~ from Rejecting the Offer of Evidence of US War Crimes by Dave Lindorff ~

Richard Nixon (the infamous 37th President of these United States) did not like the "liberal press," particularly the Times and the Post. He thought both newspapers were out to get him. What the man from Whittier College didn't seem to understand is the job of the press is to investigate and report on information important to the American people. Since Nixon was the nation's leader, what he said and did was fair game. It certainly wasn't the fault of journalists that Nixon's administration was rotten to the core!

But something has happened to the "liberal press" that Nixon so reviled. For one thing, they aren't so liberal anymore. Today they exist on the left side of a very narrow corridor. But the other thing that has happened would have angered Nixon to no end, if he was still alive. They no longer seem that interested in digging below the surface of anything. Nixon would lament that this new tack didn't happen a few decades sooner!

If these two news organizations behaved then as they do now, there would have been no Watergate Scandal. Nixon would have finished out his second term -- instead of resigning -- and his legacy would be altogether different today. Instead of being the butt of jokes, Nixon would be remembered in the same breath with Ronald Reagan.

So, here we have the two newspapers that spearheaded the investigation into Watergate and yet, in the current day, took a pass on information that incriminated numerous government officials and military personnel on war crimes. That right there should tell you how far the "liberal press" has fallen in its duty to be the eyes and ears of the public.

More Math Lessons

Trey Smith

All the sturm and drang in Washington over the March 1 deadline for a budget deal is an act. Two acts really.

The Republicans are pretending that if we don’t have budget cuts this year, the whole US economy will collapse because of the nation’s enormous indebtedness.

The Democrats are pretending that if no deal is reached, and automatic across-the-board cuts of 8% for the Pentagon and 5% for other programs will not only put the nation’s defense at risk and cause widespread suffering, but that it will derail the nation’s fragile economic “recovery.”

Both claims are, to put it gently, bullshit.

To put it in perspective, remember we’re talking about $86 billion dollars in spending for this current year.

That’s in a federal budget of $3.5 trillion, and a national economy of $16 trillion. A little math is in order. One trillion dollars is $1000 billion dollars. So $86 billion dollars represents just 2.46% of the federal budget. And it represents just 0.5% of GDP.

To put that in context another way, in December Congress, with little discussion or fanfare, allowed federal funding for emergency unemployment benefits to expire. That sucked $30 billion out of the economy this year, taking it all from people who are jobless and desperate. At the same time, it ended the temporary 2% cut in the FICA payroll tax for Social Security. That sucked another $115 billon out of all workers’ pockets. So a total of $145 billion was removed from the economy without any concern at all being expressed about the impact that hit would have on the economy, and we’re talking about an amount that’s nearly twice as much as the cut from so-called sequestration.

We could also talk about the over $400 billion in stimulus spending that the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress pumped into the economy in 2009. It clearly was an amount far too small to kickstart the economy out of the depression it had by then fallen into. Now if $400 billion was too small to accomplish much in 2009, how bad is taking out $85 billion in 2013?

Answer: it’s not such a big deal.
~ from Much Ado about Nothing in Budget Debate by Dave Lindorff ~

You know, I often hear our elected officials grouse about the fact that, compared to a slew of other western industrial nations, our students tend to test poorly in science and mathematics. They say that, without better math skills, it makes it hard for America to compete in the global economy.

To that I say: They should be darn glad that, by and large, Americans are not so proficient in things like basic arithmetic. If our skills in mathematics were on par with, say, the people in Japan, then those same leaders would have a much harder time pulling the wool over people's eyes! When our leaders spewed forth with numbers that don't add up, people would call them on it.

As it is, if a politician includes more than two or three numbers or figures in a sentence, the average American's eyes glaze over and then they yawn. I'm not so good with math, they say, so let the people in Washington worry about it. 

The problem is that the people in Washington truly aren't very good at math either!

Burning Down the House

Trey Smith

"Burn that fuckin' house down...Fucking burn this motherfucker!!"
-- Voices overheard on police radio at the scene of the cabin where Chris Dorner was trapped and burned to death

It was clear from the outset when fired LAPD cop Chris Dorner began wreaking his campaign of vengeance and terror against his former employer that the California law enforcement establishment, led by the LAPD itself, had no interest in Dorner surviving to face trial, where he could continue to rat out the racist and corrupt underbelly of the one of the country’s biggest police departments.

Dorner, as I wrote earlier, claimed he had been fired for speaking up during his three years on the force, through channels and to superior officers, about incidents he had witnessed of police brutality and of the rampant racism that permeates the department -- not just white on black, but black on Asian, Asian on Latino and Latino on white. His response to being sacked -- threatening to kill senior officers he blamed for this law enforcement distopia as well as some of their family members -- was criminally insane, but his complaints, made in a 6000-word post on Facebook, had and continue to have the ring of truth.

The LAPD response to his threats was to mobilize the whole 10,000-member department in a manhunt, complete with $1-million reward. Cops exchanged their black uniforms for military fatigues and armed up with semi-automatic weapons. Two Latino women delivering papers in Torrance were attacked from the rear of their pick-up by seven LAPD cops who, with no warning, peppered their truck with bullets, targeting the back of the driver’s head, firing at least 70 rounds and destroying the vehicle (amazingly, neither woman was killed, though one was hospitalized in serious condition). That attack, which looked like the kind of thing US soldiers and Marines routinely did to suspect vehicles in Iraq with such deadly impact, made it clear that the LAPD wanted Dorner badly, but only dead, not alive and talking.
~ from The LAPD Got their Man How They Wanted Him: Dead by Dave Lindorff ~

As I watched the live reports on CNN, it looked like I was watching war footage from Afghanistan, not a domestic police force. Even before reading Lindorff's article, I thought to myself, "They want this guy dead in the worst way."

There are some similarities (as well as dissimilarities) as to how the scene around Big Bear Lake played out in relation to the Koresh Compound in Waco, Texas several years back. In both cases, the suspect or suspects were surrounded. All the authorities needed to do was to wait them out. In both cases, however, the authorities forced the issue and a fire enveloped the structure[s]. Instead of making arrests, the authorities sent in the forensic team to carry out charred remains in body bags.

In the case of Dorner, he may have ended his own life in the raging inferno, but he was going to end up dead one way or the other. If he didn't allegedly blow his own brains out, he would have burned to death or have been shot on sight the moment he stepped outside of the burning building. You don't amass an army of trained sharpshooters with the idea of placing someone in handcuffs.

This overall situation is sad. It is sad that Dorner appeared to be the victim of rampant racism and injustice in the LAPD. It is sad that he channeled his rage into killing others in cold blood. It is sad that the police meted out to Dorner an almost vigilante form of justice. And it is sad that our domestic police forces more and more look and act like military units in theaters of war.

Freedom of the Press

Trey Smith

We are at it again. It seems that not a week goes by when our leaders don't invoke American Exceptionalism. If you haven't caught on, here is how it works: If the US does or does not do something, everything's a-okay. However, if another sovereign nation does or does not do something similar -- particular when this doing or not doing is something we happen to disagree with -- it is b-a-d as b-a-d can be.

Courtesy of Dave Lindorff, we learn of the latest example. Our leaders have decided to block Press TV (an English-language network owned by Iran) from being shown in our country.

But wait a minute! Aren't we always complaining when other countries, like the former Soviet Union, or Cuba, or North Korea, block our propaganda broadcasts, notably Radio Marti or Radio America? You bet we do. We consider that an example of limiting the free flow of information -- of denying the people of those countries access to outside information.

How does that square with what the US is doing in this case with PressTV?

It's exactly the same. Our government is not punishing Iran. It is punishing us, by shutting us out from getting Iran's side of the story.

You see, while it is vitally important for the citizens of the world to be exposed to viewpoints they may not be accustomed to, it turns out that this same right is not vitally important to Americans...or so say our leaders. No, we need to be spoon-fed only what they want us to know!

Reasons to Impeach

Trey Smith

If the Constitution is to have any relevance, and if America is to remain a free society, then there is really no alternative: there must be a bill of impeachment drawn up and submitted in the House, and there must at least be a hearing on that bill in the House Judiciary Committee.

The disclosure, by NBC, of a so-called “white paper” by the White House offering the legal justification for the executing of American citizens solely on the authority of the executive branch and the president exposes a White House so blatantly in violation of the Constitution that it simply demands such a hearing.

As Juan Cole explains clearly in an essay in Informed Comment, there are five ways that the white paper authorizing executive execution of Americans violates the Constitution. These, he explains, are:

There has to be an actual crime for there to be a punishment, and this paper authorizes execution without any crime.

If, as the letter suggests, the president’s authority to order executions without trial derives from the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by the Congress, that would constitute a so-called bill of attainder, which he explains is a declaration that a certain person or class of people (i.e. terrorists in this case) are prima facie guilty of a crime. But as he notes, the Constitution specifically outlaws bills of attainder, saying in Article 1, Section 9, “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law will be passed...”

The letter violates the separation of powers, according the president the powers of executive, legislature and judiciary.

The letter violates the Sixth Amendment in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, which guarantees everyone the right to a “speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.” Needless to say, an execution ordered by the president skips all of this.

Reliance on the AUMF for presidential executions such as that of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son means that President Obama, like President Bush before him, is claiming that the whole world (including the US) is a battlefield, and that he therefore has the absolute authority as Commander in Chief, to kill anyone, anywhere in the world, that he deems to be an enemy or a threat. But such a concept is a complete violation of international law and sovereignty as defined by the UN Charter, a solemn treaty to which the US is a signatory, making it a fundamental part of US law.

There is no way around it. This president is a grave violator of the law and of the US Constitution. Like George W. Bush before him, it is incumbent upon the Congress to establish whether his transgressions rise to the level of an impeachable offense.
~ from Who’s Going to Step Up? President Obama Must be Impeached by Dave Lindorff ~

If Bill Clinton could have Articles of Impeachment presented against him for a dalliance with an intern, don't you think that a President who wantonly violates his oath of office should be held accountable too? Clinton's actions did not jeopardize "national security" and, to my knowledge, no one died as the result of his extramarital affair. The same cannot be said for Obama's transgressions. Scores of people have died and their deaths threaten our "national security" because these extrajudicial deaths are creating scores of people who would like to do us in.

What is the point of having a constitution in the first place, if the President can unilaterally ignore it whenever he feels like it? How can a nation have the "law of the land" when the highest elected official refuses to abide by it?

George W. Bush should have been impeached, but the wimpy Congress gave him a free pass. But that's no excuse to give the current president a free pass too! If Congress doesn't act, the next president will be even more brazen...which is damn scary!