This latest move by the administration follows a pattern replicated countless times by Obama since assuming the presidency in January: denounce the lawless behavior of his Oval Office predecessor while continuing, even expanding, the reach of unaccountable security agencies that subvert constitutional guarantees barring “unreasonable searches and seizures.” EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston wrote:

In a Court filing late Friday night, the Obama Administration attempted to dress up in new clothes its embrace of one of the worst Bush Administration positions–that courts cannot be allowed to review the National Security Agency’s massive, well-documented program of warrantless surveillance. In doing so it demonstrated that it will not willingly set limits on its own power and reinforced the need for Congress to step in and reform the so-called ’state secrets’ privilege. (Kevin Bankston, “As Congress Considers State Secrets Reform, Obama Admin Tries to Shut Down Yet Another Warrantless Wiretapping Lawsuit,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, November 2, 2009)

In June, Judge Walker dismissed EFF’s landmark Hepting v. AT&T lawsuit, when he ruled that the telecoms enjoyed immunity from liability after the Democratic-controlled Congress rammed through the despicable FISA Amendments Act (FAA) in July 2008.

That law, passed in response to citizen challenges to the state and their corporate partners in crime, granted the Attorney General exclusive power to require dismissal of the lawsuits “if the government secretly certifies to the court that the surveillance did not occur, was legal, or was authorized by the president,” the civil liberties’ watchdog group wrote in June.

In essence, it is not the co-equal and independent federal Judiciary that determines whether or not a crime has been committed that flaunts constitutional norms but rather, an unchallengeable assertion by an imperial Executive Branch.

As Antifascist Calling has averred many times, this craven capitulation by Congress to the Executive locks in place the statutory machinery for a presidential dictatorship, one where power is wielded with neither transparency nor accountability.

EFF’s Jewel v. NSA civil suit, brought on behalf of AT&T customers to halt the firm’s ongoing collaboration with the government’s illegal surveillance continues–for the moment.

In April however, taking a page from the Bush/Cheney playbook, the Obama administration argued that this lawsuit too, must be dismissed, claiming that should the litigation go forward it would require government disclosure of “privileged state secrets.”

Antifascist Calling reported at the time that the Obama administration has argued that under provisions of the disgraceful USA PATRIOT Act, the state is “immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act.”

Claiming “sovereign immunity” in practice, this means that under DoJ’s ludicrous interpretation of the Orwellian PATRIOT Act, the government can never be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statute. As Salon pointed out:

In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad “state secrets” privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and–even if what they’re doing is blatantly illegal and they know it’s illegal–you are barred from suing them unless they “willfully disclose” to the public what they have learned. (Glenn Greenwald, “New and worse secrecy and immunity claims from the Obama DOJ,” Salon, April 6, 2009)

The “change” regime’s cynical maneuver to have Shubert kicked to the curb is all the more remarkable considering that the Justice Department announced a month earlier that the administration will “impose new limits on the government assertion of the state secrets privilege used to block lawsuits for national security reasons,” The New York Times reported.

“Under the new policy,” investigative journalist Charlie Savage wrote, “if an agency like the National Security Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to block evidence or a lawsuit on state secrets grounds, it would present an evidentiary memorandum describing its reasons to the assistant attorney general for the division handling the lawsuit in question.”

According to the Times, “if that official recommended approving the request” it would be sent on to a high-level committee comprised of DoJ officials who would be charged “whether the disclosure of information would risk ’significant harm’ to national security.”

Under the new guidelines, Justice Department officials are supposed to reject the request to deploy the state secrets privilege to quash lawsuits if the Executive Branch’s motivation for doing so would “conceal violations of the law, inefficiency or administrative error” or to “prevent embarrassment.”

While Holder has claimed DoJ’s so-called “high-level committee” has reviewed the relevant material and concluded that disclosure would risk “significant harm” to “national security” if the case went forward, security analyst Steven Aftergood wrote in Secrecy News that “one aspect of the new policy that he did not address was the question of referral of the alleged misconduct to an agency inspector general for investigation.”

This is supposed to occur whenever “invocation of the privilege would preclude adjudication of particular claims,” as it certainly does in the Shubert litigation, particularly when the “case raises credible allegations of government wrongdoing.”

However as Aftergood avers, “somewhat artfully” (although this writer prefers a stronger phrase to describe the Attorney General’s actions) “the government denies that any such collection occurred ‘under the Terrorist Surveillance Program,’ implicitly allowing for the possibility that it may have occurred under some other framework.”

What that “other framework” is hasn’t been specified; however, in all probability it relates to other NSA above top secret Special Access Programs which haven’t come to light.

Whatever the secret state is continuing to do under Obama, a recent piece in InformationWeek provides striking details that it is massive.

The publication reports that the NSA “will soon break ground on a data center in Utah that’s budgeted to cost $1.5 billion.”

According to InformationWeek, the new facility will “provide intelligence and warnings related to cybersecurity threats, cybersecurity support to defense and civilian agency networks, and technical assistance to the Department of Homeland Security.”

The new data center will be located at Camp Williams, a National Guard training facility 26 miles from Salt Lake City in the conservative state of Utah. While providing few details on how NSA will use the 1.5 million square foot center, Glenn Gaffney, a deputy director of intelligence with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), claims that NSA will “protect civil liberties.”

“We will accomplish this in full compliance with the U.S. Constitution and federal law and while observing strict guidelines that protect the privacy and civil liberties of the American people,” Gaffney said.

As with other pronouncements by intelligence officials, Gaffney’s statement should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.

The New York Times revealed in April and June that the ultra-spooky agency “intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year.”

Indeed, a former NSA analyst told investigative journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau that he was “trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants.”

We do know that NSA’s STELLAR WIND and PINWALE intercept programs are giant data mining vacuum cleaners that sift emails, faxes, and text messages of millions of people in the United States. These programs are not, as the Bush and now, the Obama regime mendaciously claim, primarily “targeting al-Qaeda.”

As Cryptohippie points out in their analysis of current global surveillance trends, “an electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine.”

Answering those who claim they have “nothing to hide,” Cryptohippie argues that “state use of electronic technologies to record, organize, search and distribute forensic evidence” is primarily for use “against its citizens.”

Indeed, the information gathered by the secret state and stored in huge data warehouses scattered across the country “is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial,” and “it is gathered universally and silently, and only later organized for use in prosecutions.”

In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping… are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it–the evidence is already in their database. (Cryptohippie, The Electronic Police State: 2008 National Rankings, no date)

How does this “quiet, pristine” system operate? As AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed in a sworn affidavit that described how the company physically split and copied the traffic that flowed into its offices, NSA was virtually duplicating, sifting and storing the entire Internet. Klein wrote in his self-published book:

What screams out at you when examining this physical arrangement is that the NSA was vacuuming up everything flowing in the Internet stream: e-mail, web browsing, Voice-Over-Internet phone calls, pictures, streaming video, you name it. The splitter has no intelligence at all, it just makes a blind copy. There could not possibly be a legal warrant for this, since according to the 4th Amendment warrants have to be specific, “particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” …

This was a massive blind copying of the communications of millions of people, foreign and domestic, randomly mixed together. From a legal standpoint, it does not matter what they claim to throw away later in the their secret rooms, the violation has already occurred at the splitter. (Mark Klein, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine… And Fighting It, Charleston, South Carolina: BookSurge, 2009, pp. 38-39.)

Klein’s revelations were confirmed by former NSA analyst and whistleblower Russell Tice, who told MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann in January that the NSA “had access to all Americans’ communications” and spied “24/7″ on domestic political activist groups and “U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists.”

In demanding that the independent federal judiciary toss these cases, the Obama administration is asserting a broad interpretation of Executive Branch privileges that caused much outrage and hand-wringing by congressional Democrats–when they were out of power.

Under the “change” regime however, what were once viewed by Democrats and their supporters as prime examples of Bushist lawlessness and contempt for constitutional safeguards, are now deemed vital state secrets that “protect” the American people, even as the capitalist state wages an endless “War on Terror” to seize other people’s resources for geostrategic advantage over the competition. As Glenn Greenwald wrote:

That was the principal authoritarian instrument used by Bush/Cheney to shield itself from judicial accountability, and it is now the instrument used by the Obama DOJ to do the same. Initially, consider this: if Obama’s argument is true–that national security would be severely damaged from any disclosures about the government’s surveillance activities, even when criminal–doesn’t that mean that the Bush administration and its right-wing followers were correct all along when they insisted that The New York Times had damaged American national security by revealing the existence of the illegal NSA program? Isn’t that the logical conclusion from Obama’s claim that no court can adjudicate the legality of the program without making us Unsafe? (Glenn Greenwald, “Obama’s latest use of ’secrecy’ to shield presidential lawbreaking,” Salon, November 1, 2009)

Democrat or Republican, “liberal” or “conservative:” what matters most for all factions in Washington is the defense and preservation of the class privileges of the capitalist elite.

Criminality on such a scale requires that the armed fist of the state is mobilized and ever-vigilant; ready at the nonce to crush anyone who would challenge the prerogatives of our masters.

Some might say I sound like a demagogue. When you are used to insipid soundbytes and P.C.-fluff, the truth starts sounding like demagoguery. The fact of the matter is that the truth is extraordinarily painful in this country ruled by a peculiar Victorian fetish of the marketplace. Nowhere in the civilized world could one imagine civic leaders fear mongering the populace about the evils of “socialized medicine” without getting laughed out of the country. Unfortunately, these goons of capitalist oppression seem to have been collectively laughed out of the civilized world and into Land of the Free.

Nonetheless, the problem is not this visceral minority. The problem lies in those that pretend to befriend progress: that grand, archaic organ of political oppression called the Democratic Party. This increasingly irrelevant union of crooks, hucksters and swindlers has betrayed the American people beyond recognition. Their failure to enact meaningful health care reform must be the last straw.

From the beginning of the current “health reform” debacle, the game was rigged. Immediately, the only meaningful reform, “single payer,” was taken off the table, and progressives were told to rally behind a “strong public option” by Democratic front groups like Moveon.org and Health Care for America Now (HCAN). These two NGO’s organized numerous “rallies” in order to command a feeble subservience to the Democratic leadership ahead of their caving to corporate interests on the issue.

Meanwhile, single-payer activists were placed in the precarious position of having to advocate against the meaningless and amorphous “strong public option” and the tea-baggers all at once. In a country so dominated by trivial soundbytes, you have to be either “for or against” everything: no shades of gray, no third way. Unfortunately, many progressives got caught in the trap and started rallying behind a bill (Obama’s Health Care Bill HR 3200) that no one knew anything about. This clever catch all was meant to accomplish exactly that: institute no meaningful reform while tricking a significant portion of progressives into thinking that we were now seeing “The change we can believe in.”

Nonetheless, single-payer activists were thrown a couple bones. One was a promise of a vote on the “Weiner Amendment” on the house floor. This amendment would have replaced the current bill with HR 676: the single-payer bill. The other, more meaningful bone was the “Kucinich Amendment,” which would have lifted loopholes that prevent individual states from enacting single-payer legislation. This approach seemed more tactically sound than expecting much of an up-down vote on single-payer on the house floor. The Canadian health system was enacted province-by-province, and it seemed reasonable to expect the same here: the more “enlightened” states lead the way, attract a significant spike in businesses fleeing other states so as to cut health expenses, and gradually the states fall like dominoes.

Kucinich told a crowd in Aurora, IL this summer to focus on his amendment. He informed us that the Single-Payer vote (Weiner Amendment) was a smoke screen doomed to failure because of the lack of adequate time to organize sufficiently for the vote.

I then attended several organizing meetings and stressed the need to emphasize the Kucinich Amendment as the most tactically prescient step forward for single-payer activists. I suggested that people not bite the Weiner amendment bait. As a veteran of the NGO industrial complex, I saw the Weiner Amendment for what it was: a chance for progressive Democrats and single-payer NGO’s to claim victory (just by bringing the issue to a vote), and to thus muster some fund-raising. I could picture the fund-raising letter: “Dear Single-Payer Activist, today we scored a major victory in the House of Representatives by bringing Single Payer Health Care to a vote for the first time. But there remains a lot of work to be done in order to win the vote in the future. Please help us in this mission by donating today.”

Unfortunately, many activists bit the bait. Action alert after action alert instructed people to call their reps and urge them on the Weiner Amendment.

In the end, both the Kucinich and Weiner amendments were removed from consideration by house leadership this past week. Meanwhile, Democratic cheerleaders have been trumpeting the success at instituting a “public option” in both the House and Senate versions of the health reform bill. The proposed public option will cover about 3% of the population, while roughly 33% of Americans are un- or under-insured. Many progressive democrats inform me that this is the best we can realistically do given the conservative dynamics of the American populace. I don’t understand what American populace they are talking about. As someone who goes out to the bungalow belt of Chicago to knock on doors practically everyday, I can say with full confidence that only an insignificant wacko minority is repelled by the thought of “Medicare for all.” Perhaps we can figure out a way to leave those few people out when we finally do institute a single-payer system.

Progressive leaders have fallen to the right of the American people. Americans crave and need meaningful health care reform in line with the remainder of the civilized world. They crave and need leadership in Washington that stands for the interests of their constituents: leaders that aren’t fearful of lifting their heads above the fray, pounding their fists on the podium and declaring “It is time we shut this racket down. Let us throw the insurance companies into the dustbin of history once and for all, and end this domestic terrorism that kills 45,000 Americans a year!”

Unfortunately, to get to this point, we are going to have to purge the Congress of almost every last one of its members, and stop thinking that the Democrats or the NGO industrial complex will ever bring Americans their cherished Medicare-for-all.

The leadership of the Democratic Party is on the verge of passing health insurance reform. The centerpiece of the “reform” is requiring Americans to buy overpriced insurance from private corporations. But, it is evident that many in the Democratic voting base see the insurance industry as the problem – not the solution – and are getting angry about a new law that will force people to buy from corporations they don’t trust.

Just a few weeks ago the Mobilization for Health Care for All was announced. The Mobilization focuses on the denial of doctor-recommended care by the insurance industry. Sit-ins were planned at health insurance companies with demands that insurance corporations stop the denials. The Mobilization sought 100 people willing to sit-in at insurance corporations and risk arrest as people sat in at lunch counters two generations ago.

The response has been explosive, nearly 800 have signed up to risk arrest and thousands have signed up to join the protests. In the last 20 days 78 people have been arrested protesting the real death panels – the private insurance industry – who according to a California study deny doctor recommended care 20% of the time.

The Mobilization hoped to have “patients not profits sit-ins” in three cities last week, and instead it had them in nine cities. On the next Mobilization day, October 28th, there is likely to be twice as many cities protesting the insurance industry – just as Congress considers forcing Americans to buy insurance. This may be developing into the largest campaign of non-violent civil resistance since the Civil Rights era.

Many of the protesters supported Obama and were active in Democratic campaigns. Does the Democratic Party think that people willing to risk arrest against the corruption of the insurance industry will support Democratic candidates with time, money and votes who force them to buy insurance from these corporations?

These are protests the Democratic Party should not ignore. At the Washington, DC mobilization one woman, Linda from Annapolis, spoke to president Obama, said she had helped him get elected in part because he promised real change in health care. She still wants him to come through but reminded him – “we elected you, we can un-elect you.” Linda reflects the view of many Democratic Party activists who are angry at the pro-insurance bill being pushed by Congressional leaders.

As people come to understand the reform bill, which began as health “care” reform but devolved into health “insurance” reform, the anger will grow – not just from the right, but from the Democratic voting base who voted for the hope of real reform, not more of the corporate-dominated Washington, DC non-solutions to problems Americans face every day.

Indeed, Americans of all stripes will be angry. At the Washington, DC mobilization police allowed the sit-in to occur, despite it being illegal, and refused to arrest the participants. We later found out that the police had to make wage concessions to keep their health care. And, when I was arrested protesting the Senate Finance Committee hearing dominated by the insurance industry, one officer told me about his mother who had lost her job, was too young for Medicare and could not afford COBRA payments. The abuse of insurance affects all Americans and they will not be happy being forced to feed corporate gluttonous greed.

Why will Americans hate this “reform?”

First, this unnecessarily complex plan will not achieve any of the goals originally set. It will not cover all Americans, indeed tens of millions will be left without insurance ten years after it is enacted. And, it will not control costs as the insurance industry has said that their already too expensive premiums will increase by 111% in the next decade under “reform.”

Second, few Americans will benefit from the plan. In fact, the greatest beneficiary will be the insurance industry and other health care profiteers. Every ten million people forced to buy insurance by the government will give the industry $100 billion in new revenue – at current insurance rates. With 50 million uninsured that is potentially hundreds of billions in new revenue. In other words, the corporations that are the root of the problem will get rich off of the income of working Americans. This at a time when American salaries are stagnating, debts are high, costs are going up and there is constant fear of unemployment and bankruptcy. Further, those who have insurance but do not like their insurance plans will not be given any choice under the “reform.” They will be stuck with their current, overpriced insurance with rising premiums, co-pays and out of pocket expenses. This is a recipe for populist rebellion, but it does not stop there.

The plan does not create affordable health care. Families earning $90,000 will find themselves paying 20% of their income on health insurance. And, the subsidies for poor and working Americans will be insufficient. The leading source of increased poverty is America’s working poor. How can these working families afford to buy insurance – even if they are forced to by the government – when they cannot even put food on the table? Americans will ask – why are struggling workers being forced to pay the $10 million salaries of insurance executives?

By the time most of this plan takes effect in 2013, the year after the next presidential election, insurance premiums will have increased by 20% to 25%. During the election year, Americans will be looking toward 2013 and seeing increased insurance costs and realizing they will be forced to buy overpriced insurance at the threat of increased taxes. Because of the lack of cost controls and the increased insurance requirements, e.g., like requiring acceptance of people with pre-existing conditions and putting no limits on lifetime benefits, the insurance industry will be increasing rates even more quickly. The failure of “reform” will become evident before it takes effect.

The increased costs of health insurance will affect all businesses small and large. In a “recovery” that is already not producing jobs, these costs will ensure a jobless recovery. The failure to create jobs will be a rallying cry against the Obama economic and health care plans. Democrats should be concerned because Americans traditionally vote based on their wallet more than any other issue.

In fact, bottom line business people and others who can do the math, realize that the U.S. spends double per person than dozens of better rated health care systems in Europe and Asia. If the U.S. merely adopted any of these plans (almost all variations on single payer) we would save $4,000 per person EVERY YEAR. That is a savings of $1.2 trillion every year – a huge recurring stimulus with savings flowing to businesses and others who pay some or all of their health insurance. Quickly thereafter goods made domestically would be competitive again, companies would have faith in a better future and hire employees again, and America would break the stranglehold of corporate-government. None of this will happen under the Democratic “reform” because the waste, fraud and abuse of the insurance industry will continue.

During the next four years the Republicans will use the Democratic “reform” as a political punching bag. The plans to cut Medicare by hundreds of billions of dollars based on increased efficiency will frighten senior citizens. The bureaucracy being put in place by the “reform” will be evident to all. The complexity of the law will include federal rules on what employer-based insurance plans are “qualified.” All Americans will see new income tax forms for the individual mandate and to determine income eligibility for insurance subsidies. The new federal insurance bureaucracy will be ridiculed by the Republicans.

Labor unions will see good health insurance coverage they fought years to get for their members disappearing as taxes on their plans go into effect. These high taxes are likely to cause employers to cut back on the derisively labeled “Cadillac” plans, which are really the kinds of health coverage all Americans should have. The result: more people will be uninsured by employers and forced to buy health insurance on their own, or more working Americans will find themselves joining the large pool of tens of millions of Americans who are underinsured. Reform will make the problems worse for these Americans.

The problem of insurance companies denying care recommended by a doctor is likely to get worse under “reform.” A recent study in California found that insurance company denials can occur in up to 40% of cases with some insurance companies. Congress could fix the problem by giving consumers the power to sue insurance companies for denial of care. But, despite lobbying by consumer advocates, they refused to do so. The industry has few ways to control costs so experts predict that there will be increases in denial of care. “There are going to be a lot of denials,” said insurance industry analyst Robert Laszewski, a former health insurance executive, told the Los Angeles Times. Denial of care is the issue the Mobilization for Health Care is protesting.

During the four years it takes to put the “reform” into place, more than 100,000 Americans will die each year from preventable illness. That is the current rate of annual preventable deaths, something the U.S. leads all developed nations in, and it will not slow when Obama signs the pro-insurance reform bill. Will the Congress close its eyes and watch 400,000 Americans die during Obama’s first term? Or, will it do the obvious and open up Medicare to all during this period of transition? The Democrats paymasters in the insurance industry will urge them to quietly let Americans die so people do not experience that Medicare, America’s single payer system, works.

And, those who were shut out of the process of developing real health care reform – the majority of Americans who favor a single payer, improved “Medicare for All,” national health system – will keep organizing. The Mobilization for Health Care for All, will be one of example of many. Those shut out will fight back and keep pointing out how simple and efficient the reform could have been. How the Democrats could have reduced bureaucracy instead of increased it, helped the economy rather than hurt it and made sure every dollar went to health care rather than 31% of spending going to insurance industry profits and the bureaucracy the insurance industry creates. The already popular single payer system, which Obama himself used to support, will become even more popular. The control of the Democratic Party by big business interests will become evermore evident and “reform” will be understood as a multi-hundred billon dollar corporate giveaway.

The Democrats, like generals so often do, are fighting the last war. The Clinton experienced taught them that failure to pass health care reform cost them elections. The Obama administration experience will teach them that passing legislation that is only good for the insurance industry will cost them elections and could cost Obama a second term. A bad bill will be worse than no bill, will be the new lesson.

Americans voted for Obama who said in 2005 that the country would get single payer when the Democrats won back the House, Senate and Presidency. They even prefer the Obama of the presidential campaign who promised health care for all and opposed insurance mandates. They want the Obama they supported to return and put their interests ahead of insurance company profits.

Simply expanding and improving Medicare so it covers all Americans is the only way to avert this populist revolt. Will the Democratic leadership recognize this and change course or will they steer themselves into a disaster in order to satisfy their big donors in the insurance industry? There is a single payer bill, HR 676, in the House that will be voted on when Rep. Weiner introduces it on the House Floor. Let’s hope for the sake of all Americans that the Democratic Party leadership wakes up and puts the necessities of the American people before the profits of their donors. They still have time.

Federal District Court Judge Jeffrey White denied a motion by the Obama administration that the court issue a 30-day stay to “release records relating to telecom lobbying over last year’s debate over immunity for corporate participation in government spying,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported.

The Justice Department had argued that the Bush, and now, the Obama administration’s Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and Congress were exempt from releasing lobbying records under the Freedom of Information Act, since consultations amongst said grifters were protected as “intra-agency” records.

One might add, since the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, a well-funded surveillance-industrial-complex fueled by giant defense firms and the telecommunications industry have, as investigative journalist Tim Shorrock reported back in 2005 “fielded armies of lobbyists to keep the money flowing.”

White’s denial of a motion for a stay followed a startling admission by Department of Justice (DoJ) attorneys that America’s telecommunication firms are actually “an arm of the government–at least when it comes to secret spying,” Wired reported October 8. The government had argued that:

“The communications between the agencies and telecommunications companies regarding the immunity provisions of the proposed legislation have been regarded as intra-agency because the government and the companies have a common interest in the defense of the pending litigation and the communications regarding the immunity provisions concerned that common interest.”

U.S. District Court Judge Jeffery White disagreed and ruled on September 24 that the feds had to release the names of the telecom employees that contacted the Justice Department and the White House to lobby for a get-out-of-court-free card. (Ryan Singel, “Telephone Company Is Arm of Government, Feds Admit in Spy Suit,” Wired, October 8, 2009)

EFF had sued the state in order to discover what role telecom lobbyists played in persuading Congress to grant the nation’s telecommunications’ giants retroactive immunity for their role in illegal spying as part of the Bush, and now, Obama regime’s Presidential Spying Program.

If congressional grifters who have reaped serious campaign contributions from deep-pocket telecoms had not granted companies such as AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and other carriers retroactive immunity, potential privacy breaches and claims from EFF’s Hepting vs. AT&T, and dozens of other lawsuits, could have potentially cost the firms billions in damages.

A federal district court judge dismissed Hepting in June, ruling that the companies had immunity from liability under provisions of the despicable FISA Amendments Act (FAA).

In dismissing the state’s motion for a stay in the telecom lobbying records case, EFF senior staff attorney Kurt Opsahl wrote,

On October 8, the day before the documents were due, the DOJ and ODNI filed an emergency motion asking the Court of Appeals for a 30-day stay while the agencies continue to contemplate an appeal. Around noon on October 9, the Ninth Circuit denied their emergency motion, telling the government it had to file for a motion for a stay pending appeal in the district court first.

Later that afternoon, the government filed again in the federal district court, but once again did not seek a stay pending an actual appeal. Instead, for the third time, the government insisted it could delay the release of telecom lobbying records while it considered the pros and cons of appealing. Briefing was complete by noon today, and Judge White denied the third attempt at delay this afternoon. (Kurt Opsahl, “Federal Court Denies Government Attempt to Delay Release of Telecom Records. Again.,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, News Update, October 13, 2009)

Judge White noted that the Obama administration’s cynical “directive on transparency in government” applied to “the warrantless wiretapping program” and insisted that the “public interest lies in favor of disclosure” of pertinent lobbying records.

The ruling is all the more remarkable when one considers that Judge White was appointed to the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, the most civil liberties’ friendly court in the nation, by none other than world class war criminal and corrupter-in-chief, George W. Bush.

Corrupting Congress, Subverting the Bill of Rights

Last year, Antifascist Calling reported that the congressional watchdog group, MAPLight, published a list of campaign contributions to congressional Democrats who had changed their votes on FAA’s crucial retroactive immunity provision.

Significantly, then congressman and current White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, pulled-in some $28,000, “blue dog” Democrat Steny Hoyer “earned” $29,000 while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, hardly a slouch when it comes to contributions from her “constituents”–grifting capitalists–raked-in $24,500 from the telecoms.

Analyzing the “change of heart” by congressional Democrats between between the March 14, 2008 vote which rejected retroactive immunity and the June 20, 2008 vote approving it, MAPLight researchers discovered that “Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint gave PAC contributions averaging: “$8,359 to each Democrat who changed their position to support immunity for Telcos (94 Dems)” and “$4,987 to each Democrat who remained opposed to immunity for Telcos (116 Dems).”

According to MAPLight: “88 percent of the Dems who changed to supporting immunity (83 Dems of the 94) received PAC contributions from Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint during the last three years (Jan. 2005-Mar. 2008).” The group reported that after the June 20 vote, “Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint gave PAC contributions averaging (for all House members): “$9,659 to each member of the House voting “YES” (105-Dem, 188-Rep)” and “$4,810 to each member of the House voting “NO” (128-Dem, 1-Rep).”

Daniel Newman, MAPLight’s Executive Director said at the time: “Campaign contributions bias our legislative system. Simply put, candidates who take positions contrary to industry interests are unlikely to receive industry funds and thus have fewer resources for their election campaigns than those whose votes favor industry interests.”

Proving once again, that ours’ is the best Congress money can buy.

White House Planning “Limited Hangout”

The saga over the release of secret state documents continues to rage out of public sight, even as the corporate media “reports” for endless hours on the (media manufactured) tale of the Colorado “balloon boy.”

So corrupt and degenerated has our political culture become that a simple Google search reveals that as of October 17 there are some 15,000,000 search results available for the term “balloon boy” while only 520,000 hits for the term “EFF warrantless wiretapping.”

As Project Censored notes, modern censorship is defined “as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets. On a daily basis, censorship refers to the intentional non-inclusion of a news story–or piece of a news story–based on anything other than a desire to tell the truth. Such manipulation can take the form of political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals), economic pressure (from advertisers and funders), and legal pressure (the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and institutions).”

Clearly, the series of lawsuits by EFF and other civil liberties’ watchdogs challenging the secret state’s pervasive surveillance of the American people is a case study of “intentional non-inclusion” by corporate media.

Nevertheless, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported October 15, that the Director of National Intelligence and DoJ attorneys “filed yet another emergency motion with the Ninth Circuit, asking for a stay of the deadline to release telecom immunity lobbying documents, less than 24 hours before the documents are due to be released to the public.”

According to the government’s motion, the Executive Branch has refused to disclose the names of telecom lobbyists and company representatives because, get this, “the agencies … invoked Exemption 6 [to the Freedom of Information Act] which protects information about individuals whose disclosure ‘would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy’.” It doesn’t get any cheekier than that even by cynical Washington standards!

DoJ attorneys once again, have resurrected that old chestnut–national security–to conceal the identities of telecom shills and the politicians who do their bidding, claiming that “disclosure of such information would assist our adversaries in drawing inferences about whether certain telecommunications companies may or may not have assisted the government in intelligence-gathering activities.”

In other words, the public’s right to know how our rights are being systematically violated–and who profits–is, by inference, another “tool” that will allow al-Qaeda to kidnap your kids, impose sharia law and detonate a nuke in Wichita!

Indeed, the secret state’s new motion avers that “disclosure of the identities of those individuals and entities that may have assisted, or in the future may assist, the government with intelligence activities could impede the government’s ability to gather intelligence information.”

Meanwhile, Politico reported that the Obama administration “may be on the verge of a major concession in a long-running legal battle over records about so-called telecom immunity.”

A leaked email to the publication, probably by a friendly source inside the White House, reveals that the administration is preparing for “the possible release of some details of the Bush Administration’s lobbying for legislation giving telecommunications companies immunity from lawsuits over their involvement in warrantless domestic wiretapping.” (emphasis added)

However, the devil as they say, is in those closely-guarded details. Politico reports that the administration will continue its legal battle “to keep secret the identities of the companies involved in the program.” In other words having lost in the court’s, the administration will move into damage control mode by disclosing a few insignificant “facts” as it camouflages the scope of these illegal programs and continues to conceal the identities of telecom lobbyists and their congressional partners in crime from public scrutiny.

This is nothing less than an updated version of a classic Washington “limited hangout.” The Obama administration’s Justice Department, similar to President Nixon’s sacrificial offering of close advisers to congressional investigators at the height of the Watergate scandal, will leverage these paltry “facts” into an opportunity to appear “transparent,” even as it continues to obfuscate, delay and deny; thus continuing the cover-up.

House legal counsel Irv Nathan informed relevant congressional committees that the White House Counsel’s Office agreed to “provide lawmakers and their staffs with copies of the records being prepared for release in connection with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by an internet-focused civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.”

Politico reported that “the move could also be a litigating tactic to surrender some of the less sensitive information in the case in order to bolster the government’s credibility for a determined attempt to protect the most sensitive data: the names of the companies which were seeking immunity.”

According to Nathan, the Justice Department plans “to renew its motion for a stay in the Court of Appeals limited to a very small number of documents, not including the communications with Congress.”

Among the details leaked to Politico, Nathan wrote House leaders: “We understand that there are few, if any, communications from Members that are in the materials. … We have been previously advised that there is nothing very disturbing or embarrassing in these particular communications, but a generalized worry about the precedent this sets for future inter-branch communications.” (emphasis added)

Unfortunately, neither Mr. Nathan nor Politico have revealed what might prove “very disturbing or embarrassing” to members of Congress in the documents the Obama administration plans to withhold.

If past lobbying practices are a signpost for the present, one can hazard an informed guess and conclude that Congress and their Executive Branch counterparts have much to hide.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics OpenSecrets.org database, lobbying by the Telecom Service & Equipment sector, the Telephone Utilities sector and the Computer/Internet sector amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars paid out to congressional grifters between 1998-2009.

Indeed, the “big four” firms caught-up in the warrantless wiretapping scandal have showered Congress with millions in payouts. According to OpenSecrets.org, AT&T contributed some $8,191,618; Verizon Communications showered some $6,830,000; Qualcomm Inc. handed over $3,080,000; Qwest Communications $1,829,542 and Sprint/Nextel coughed-up some $1,306,000 to “our” representatives. By any standard, this is serious money by powerful constituencies not to be trifled with.

Like their Republican colleagues across the aisle, the Democrats have operated a revolving door between powerful corporations, financial institutions and secret state agencies, under the guise of bringing entrepreneurial expertise into government and “security” for our nation’s citizens.

They do neither.

Something as trivial as the rights of the American people to speak their minds, protest endless imperialist wars of aggression, the looting of the economy and the degradation of the environment for profit will however, continue to come under the lens of an out-of-control national security state committed to facilitating the greasing of various palms well into the future.

The United States has a new opportunity to change direction in Afghanistan… We believe that this time, with the leadership of President Obama … women and girls will not be left on the periphery, but placed in the central focus of our new policy.
– Feminist Majority press release¹

As an historian and teacher of women’s rights, a former feminist organizer, and one who considers herself leftist/progressive, I can only be horrified at an American foreign policy which is unleashing horrible violence on the men, women and children of Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. And since the policy is being carried out by Democratic President Barack Obama and his Democratic majority party, I can only be horrified at him, Nobel Peace Prize winner(!) or not, and at them. You think? Well apparently there are many who identify themselves as feminist and progressive who do not agree.

Take the Feminist Majority, for example. Here is a group dedicated, according to their website, to “women’s equality, reproductive health and non-violence.” [Emphasis mine.] They were founded by veteran feminist leader Eleanor Smeal in 1986, to represent the then 56% of American women who said they were feminists. They publish Ms. magazine, and campaign for women’s health and education, global women’s equality, women’s leadership, and gender balance in politics. Ah. How do you get gender balance in politics? Apparently by being absorbed into the Democratic party to the point where your web page sings odes of praise to the magnificence of President Obama and Vice Present Biden, and of course Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—herself not exactly a shining example of promoting “non-violence.”

The melding with the Democrats has now led to the Feminist Majority becoming an advocate for Obama “ending terrorism” in Afghanistan, with, of course, a focus on human (and women’s) rights. And the Feminist Majority, along with NOW (National Organization for Women) is also campaigning for “Afghan women and girls” by supporting the passage of Senator Barbara Boxer’s Afghan Women Empowerment Act, S229, on their websites. The bill, now in committee (foreign relations), cites the lack of rights women have had under the Taliban, and then says “Despite efforts by the U.S. government … to improve [their] lives,” Afghan women apparently still “lack access” to most of life’s necessary resources.²

It’s all very well to want to empower and improve life for and make a central focus of Afghan women. But supporting the government’s war efforts, through support of the Democratic party’s huge expansion of the Afghan war, should not be part of it. As Tom Hayden wrote last July, Afghan women will not be liberated by an “invading, bombing, imprisoning American army.” The Taliban will not change its anti-feminist fundamentalism because of that army—and the U.S.-backed Kabul government has recently passed a law insisting women obey their husbands “in sexual matters.”³ So much for empowerment. Supporting that government, and expanding that war, means supporting the Democrats’ increased funding for U.S. troops. And that is going to mean more death, destruction and chaos for said Afghan women and girls.

Becoming enmeshed in the campaigns of the Democratic Party is a huge mistake. About 20 years ago, I wrote a book called Iron-Jawed Angels⁴ which details the dramatic campaign of the radically feminist National Woman’s Party of the early 20th century. Controversially, they modeled their political drive after the British suffragists who insisted on working against the party in power which was doing nothing for its issue: women’s suffrage. Similarly, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton eventually concluded in their earlier women’s rights campaign, that being identified with a particular political party, instead of with feminist issues, would only hurt and dilute their cause. Susan B. Anthony said in 1878 that “women should stand shoulder to shoulder against every party not fully and unequivocally committed to Equal Rights for Women.”⁵ Equal rights for women will not be advanced by women being subjected to bombs and occupation.

Throughout American history “third party” issue-oriented parties on the right and left, have been absorbed into the powerful vortex of the two-party system. The most extreme example would be when the farmer and labor-led Populist party, amidst much resistance by its members, succumbed to William Jennings Bryan and was sucked into the Democratic Party—which then went down to defeat at the hands of the Republicans in 1896, arguably the time when Big Business took control of our politics for good.

I experienced party takeover of feminism personally at the commemoration of the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Conference, held in 1998. Most of the speakers were (female) Democratic party operatives. During one of the speeches celebrating the wonderful feminist accomplishments of the Democratic party, I foolishly made some sort of joke to the woman standing next to me about the irony of President Clinton and feminism in light of Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, etc. She was not only indignant but also somehow totally not understanding how I could utter such disloyal perfidy. The disgraceful blind loyalty of Gloria Steinem, NOW’s Patricia Ireland and Eleanor Smeal, et. al. ad nauseam, with Clinton and against any of those pesky women who were allegedly victims of Clinton’s very nonfeminist attentions, was unbelievable to me.⁶ But these famous feminists had all very much become Democratic party insiders. Sexual harassment? Charges of rape/assault? Why believe (all of) these unreliable women? Bill Clinton was their man. Feminist equaled Democratic Party: end of story.

As long as feminists—or “progressives”—cannot imagine an American political world which is not divided into Democrat and Republican, and now there really is no difference between the completely corporate-run two parties, their issues will be totally subsumed by the parties’ only function, which is to stay in power and maintain their own gravy train, while sustaining the money behemoth which runs America.

One important function of this corporate-run political system is to maintain and expand the American empire—for corporate gain, yes, but also for pure nationalistic greed and glory. Our reasons for being in Afghanistan do not seem to be topped by working for “human rights.” “Zoya,” an Afghan woman who is an activist with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, argues that Afghan women do suffer from the Taliban, but also from U.S. and NATO bombs; in fact the latter kill many more civilians than either Taliban or “terrorists.” She says American troops must withdraw immediately, because their presence only hurts any chance for a needed radical change in the political system in Afghanistan.⁷

So if you say you are a feminist who wants human rights in Afghanistan, it’s time to step back from the thrill of being an insider in Washington; it’s time to step back and think about if maintaining empire, sustaining occupation, and killing thousands of civilians is really what your “human rights” campaign is all about.

1. Feminist Majority website, “Feminists Announce New Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls,” March 27, 2009.
2. Feminist Majority website, “Take Action Now to Help Afghan Women,” and National Organization for Women website, “Afghan Women and Girls Need Our Help.”
3. Hayden, Tom, “Pentagon Enlists Feminists for War Aims,” Huffington Post, July 18, 2009.
4. Ford, Linda, Iron-Jawed Angels: The Suffrage Militancy of the National Woman’s Party, 1912-1920, University Press of America, Lanham, MD, 1991.
5. National Woman’s Party Papers, Congressional Union pamphlet, 1915, Reel 22.
6. Mink, Gwendolyn, Hostile Environment: The Political Betrayal of Sexually Harassed Women, Chapter 4, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2000.
7. “Voices from Afghanistan: Afghan Women’s Activist Zoya Speaks Out on Eight Years of Occupation,” Democracy Now, October 9, 2007.

Does President Obama remember how the Democrats regained the majority in the House and Senate? Does he remember how he bested Hillary Clinton in the primaries? Here’s a reminder.

Republicans dominated politics for the first eight years of the 21st Century. When President Bush attacked Iraq and pulled the U.S. into a war quagmire resulting in mass deaths of civilians and soldiers as well as bleeding of the U.S. treasury, the peace movement reacted. They highlighted the failures of the war, the lies that got America in to Iraq and the death, destruction and economic catastrophe the war was bringing. Peace activists demonstrated in Congress, sat-in the offices of elected officials and protested whenever Bush administration officials testified in Congress.

The public began to hear the full story – the weapons of mass destruction were a lie, there was no link between Saddam and Osama, the casualties of war were increasing, the cost of war was escalating, the largest mercenary force in history was violating laws. Opinion rapidly turned against the war. The result, in 2006, the voters threw out the Republicans and gave the Democrats solid control of both Houses of Congress.

In 2008, the front runner, then-Senator Hillary Clinton, was running a campaign for the presidency that seemed unstoppable. The media and politicians treated her election as an inevitable fait accompli. But, Clinton had voted for the Iraq invasion and this did not sit well with the American public, especially with anti-war Democrats – the base of the Democratic Party. The media anointed then-Senator Barack Obama as the “peace” candidate because of a speech he gave opposing the war before being elected to the U.S. senate. Aware of the mood of the voters he began his speeches with the promise: “I will end the war in Iraq.” Anti-war Democrats were enough to carry him through the primary and into the presidency.

In both cases, voters opposed to war were critical to determining the outcome.

But now, the Obama administration is ignoring those voters. The day after the protests at the White House it was reported in Talking Points Memo that the administration said: “White House officials say Obama is not focusing on antiwar protesters — neither the more than 60 who were arrested yesterday at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue nor the handful outside the White House gates today — or on a MoveOn email petition circulating asking him for a clear military exit strategy.”

The peace movement is noting that the president is ignoring their calls to end the war. Even worse for the president, this time we are starting as the majority. Polls show that more than 70% of Democrats oppose the Afghanistan war and sending more troops to the region as do a majority of Americans.

Obama is forgetting how he and the Democrats came to power. Who does Obama think provides much of the person-power for their elections? Or, the small grass roots donations? What do Obama and the Democrats think will happen if the peace movement stays home in 2010?

And, to make matters worse, he is repeating the mistake made in the health care debate. The president has been unable to excite grass roots support for reform because he and Congressional leaders took the most popular option, a single payer national health program, off the table. They would not consider the approach most Americans preferred. Instead, the Democrats have pushed a scheme that will enrich the health insurance industry – corporations that Americans hate and see as corrupt – by forcing Americans to buy their overpriced insurance.

So, what is his administration doing when it comes to Afghanistan? Making the same mistake. They are considering all options except the one Americans want. They have taken off the option list getting out of Afghanistan. Secretary Gates said this week “We are not leaving Afghanistan. This discussion is about next steps forward.” And, the president’s press secretary Robert Gibbs said: “I don’t think we have the option to leave. That’s quite clear.”

At a time when the Republicans are energizing their base by challenging President Obama, the Democrats are turning off their base whether on health care, bailing out Wall Street or now on the Afghanistan war. Do the Democrats really have the hubris to think they can turn their base off and stay in office? If they do, they are likely to learn a very painful lesson in 2010 and 2012.

From the wholesale use of informants and provocateurs to stifle political dissent, to Wi-Fi hacking and viral computer spyware to follow our every move, the FBI has turned massive data-mining of personal information into a growth industry. In the process they are building the surveillance state long been dreamed of by American securocrats.

A chilling new report by investigative journalist Ryan Singel provides startling details of how the FBI’s National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) is quietly morphing into the Total Information Awareness (TIA) system of convicted Iran-Contra felon, Admiral John M. Poindexter. According to documents obtained by Wired:

A fast-growing FBI data-mining system billed as a tool for hunting terrorists is being used in hacker and domestic criminal investigations, and now contains tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases, including car-rental companies, large hotel chains and at least one national department store. (Ryan Singel, “FBI’s Data-Mining System Sifts Airline, Hotel, Car-Rental Records,” Wired, September 23, 2009)

Among the latest revelations of out-of-control secret state spookery, Wired disclosed that personal details on customers have been provided to the Bureau by the Wyndham Worldwide hotel chain “which includes Ramada Inn, Days Inn, Super 8, Howard Johnson and Hawthorn Suites.” Additional records were obtained from the Avis rental car company and Sears department stores.

Singel reports that the Bureau is planning a massive expansion of NSAC, one that would enlarge the scope, and mission, of the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force (FTTTF) and the file-crunching, privacy-killing Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW).

“Among the items on its wish list,” Singel writes, “is the database of the Airlines Reporting Corporation–a company that runs a backend system for travel agencies and airlines.” If federal snoops should obtain ARC’s data-sets, the FBI would have unlimited access to “billions of American’s itineraries, as well as the information they give to travel agencies, such as date of birth, credit card numbers, names of friends and family, e-mail addresses, meal preferences and health information.”

The publication reports that the system “is both a meta-search engine–querying many data sources at once–and a tool that performs pattern and link analysis.” Internal FBI documents reveal that despite growing criticism of the alleged “science” of data-mining, including a stinging 2008 report by the prestigious National Research Council, for all intents and purposes the Bureau will transform NSAC into a low-key version of Adm. Poindexter’s Information Awareness Office. An internal FBI document provides a preview of the direction NSAC will take.

According to the General Accounting Office (GAO) May 2004 report on federal data mining efforts, the GAO defined data mining as “the application of database technology–to uncover hidden patterns and subtle relationships in data and to infer rules that allow for the prediction of future results” (GAO-05-866, Data Mining p. 4). There are a number of security and privacy issues that government and private industry must address when contemplating the use of technology and data in these ways. While the current activities and efforts of the IDW and FTTTF programs do not provide NSB [National Security Branch] users with the full level of data mining services as defined above it is the intention of the NSAC to pursue and refine these capabilities where permitted by statute and policy. The implementation and responsible utilization of these services will advance the FBI’s ability to address national security threats in a timely fashion, uncover previously unknown patterns and trends and empower agents and analysts to better “hunt between the cases” to find those persons, places or things of investigative and intelligence interest. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Fiscal Year (FY) 2008, Internal Planning & Budget Review, Program Narrative for Enhancements/Increases,” p. 5, emphasis added)

Unsurprisingly, in their quest for increased funding FBI officials failed to mention that the 2004 GAO report raised significant and troubling questions glossed over by securocrats. To wit, GAO investigators averred:

Privacy concerns about mined or analyzed personal data also include concerns about the quality and accuracy of the mined data; the use of the data for other than the original purpose for which the data were collected without the consent of the individual; the protection of the data against unauthorized access, modification, or disclosure; and the right of individuals to know about the collection of personal information, how to access that information, and how to request a correction of inaccurate information. (General Accounting Office, Data Mining: Federal Efforts Cover a Wide Range of Uses, GAO-04-548, May 2004)

Despite these concerns, an FBI budget document released to Wired baldly states:

The NSAC will provide subject-based “link analysis” through utilization of the FBI’s collection data sets, combined with public records on predicated subjects. Link analysis uses these data sets to find links between subjects, suspects, and addresses or other pieces of relevant information, and other persons, places, and things. This technique is currently being used on a limited basis by the FBI; the NSAC will provide improved processes and greater access to this technique to all NSB components. The NSAC will also pursue “pattern analysis” as part of its service to the NSB. “Pattern analysis” queries take a predictive model or pattern of behavior and search for that pattern in data sets. The FBI’s efforts to define predictive models and patterns of behavior should improve efforts to identify “sleeper cells.” Information produced through data exploitation will be processed by analysts who are experts in the use of this information and used to produce products that comply with requirements for the proper handling of the information. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, “National Security Branch Analytical Capabilities,” November 12, 2008)

Four years after the GAO report cited the potential for abuse inherent in such techniques, The National Research Council’s exhaustive study criticized the alleged ability of data-miners to discover hidden “patterns” and “trends” among disparate data-sets “precisely because so little is known about what patterns indicate terrorist activity; as a result, they are likely to generate huge numbers of false leads.”

False leads that may very well land an innocent person on a terrorist watch-list or as a subject of a wide-ranging and unwarranted national security investigation. But as with all things relating to “counterterrorism,” the guilt or innocence of the average citizen is a trifling matter while moves to “empower agents” to “find those persons, places or things of investigative and intelligence interest,” is the paramount goal. “Justice” under such a system becomes another preemptive “tool” subject to the whims of our political masters.

The use of federal dollars for such a dubious and questionable enterprise has already had real-world consequences for political activists. Just ask RNC Welcoming Committee activists currently under indictment in Minnesota for their role in organizing legal protests against the far-right Republican National Convention last year in St. Paul.

As Antifascist Calling revealed earlier this year, one private security outfit, the now-defunct Highway Watch which worked closely with the FBI, used “social network theory” and “link analysis,” and cited the group’s legal political organizing, including “increased membership via the internet” and “public appearances at various locations across the US,” as a significant factor that rendered the group a “legitimate” target for heightened surveillance and COINTELPRO-style disruption.

Singel also disclosed that NSAC shared data “with the Pentagon’s controversial Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, a secretive domestic-spying unit which collected data on peace groups, including the Quakers, until it was shut down in 2008. But the FBI told lawmakers it would be careful in its interactions with that group.”

As journalists and congressional investigators subsequently revealed however, CIFA’s dark heart–the office’s mammoth databases–were off-loaded to other secret state security agencies, including the FBI.

CIFA: Closed Down or Farmed Out?

When CIFA ran aground after a series of media disclosures beginning in 2004, some critics believed that was the end of that. “From the beginning of its existence,” investigative journalist Tim Shorrock revealed in Spies For Hire, “CIFA had extensive authority to conduct domestic counterintelligence.”

Indeed, one CIFA official “was the deputy director of the FBI’s multiagency Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force,” Shorrock wrote, “and other CIFA officials were assigned to more than one hundred regional Joint Terrorism Task Forces where they served with other personnel from the Pentagon, as well as the FBI, state and local police, and the Department of Homeland Security.”

Several investigative reports in Antifascist Calling have documented the close interconnections among Pentagon spy agencies, the FBI, DHS, private contractors, local and state police in what have come to be known as fusion centers, which rely heavily on extensive data-mining operations.

Their role as clearinghouses for domestic intelligence will expand even further under President Obama’s purported “change” administration.

Federal Computer Week revealed September 30, that DHS “is establishing a new office to coordinate its intelligence-sharing efforts in state and local intelligence fusion centers.”

According to the publication, a “new Joint Fusion Center Program Management Office will be part of DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis, [DHS Secretary Janet] Napolitano told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Napolitano said she strongly supports the centers.”

Though little reported by the corporate media, domestic spying had become big business with some very powerful constituencies.

Take CIFA, for example. Ostensibly a Defense Department agency, the secretive office which once had a multi-billion dollar budget at its disposal, was a veritable cash cow for enterprising security grifters. Much has been made of the corrupt contracts forged by disgraced Pentagon contractor Mitchell Wade and his MZM corporation, caught up in the “Duke” Cunningham scandal that landed the San Diego Republican congressman an eight-year federal prison term in 2006. Untouched however, by the outcry over domestic Pentagon spying were top-flight defense and security firms who lent their considerable resources–at a steep price–to the office.

Among the corporations who contracted out analysts and operatives to CIFA were heavy hitters such as Lockheed Martin, Carlyle Group subsidiary U.S. Investigations Services, Analex, Inc., an intelligence contractor owned by the U.K.’s QinetiQ, ManTech International, the Harris Corporation, SRA International, as well as General Dynamics, CACI International and the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). All told, these corporations reap tens of billions of dollars annually in federal largesse.

As Shorrock revealed, by 2006 CIFA “had four hundred full-time employees and eight hundred to nine hundred contractors working for it.” Many were military intelligence and security analysts who jumped ship to land lucrative six-figure contracts in the burgeoning homeland security market, as the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks revealed in July when they published a massive 1525-page file on just one fusion center.

Information illegally obtained on American citizens by CIFA came to reside in the office’s Threat And Local Observation Notice (TALON) system and a related database known as CORNERSTONE.

In 2007, the National Security Archive published Pentagon documents outlining U.S. Northern Command’s (USNORTHCOM) extensive surveillance activities that targeted legal political protests organized by antiwar activists. In April 2007, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Lt. General James Clapper, “reviewed the results of the TALON program” and concluded “he did not believe they merit continuing the program as currently constituted.”

Despite revelations that CIFA and USNORTHCOM had illegally conducted prohibited activities in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the military from carrying out domestic law enforcement, not a single operative or program manager was brought to book. According to The National Security Archive:

In June 2007, the Department of Defense Inspector General released the results of his review of the TALON reporting program. Its findings included the observation that CIFA and the Northern Command “legally gathered and maintained U.S. person information on individuals or organizations involved in domestic protests and demonstrations against DOD”–information gathered for law enforcement and force protection purposes as permitted by Defense Department directive (5200.27) on the “Acquisition of Information Concerning Persons and Organizations Not Affiliated with the Department of Defense.” However, CIFA did not comply with the 90-day retention review policy specified by that directive and the CORNERSTONE database did not have the capability to identify TALON reports with U.S. person information, to identify reports requiring a 90-day retention review, or allow analysts to edit or delete the TALON reports.

In August the Defense Department announced that it would shut down the CORNERSTONE database on September 17, with information subsequently collected on potential terror or security threats to Defense Department facilities or personnel being sent to an FBI data base known as GUARDIAN. A department spokesman said the database was being terminated because “the analytical value had declined,” not due to public criticism, and that the Pentagon was hoping to establish a new system–not necessarily a database–to “streamline” threat reporting, according to a statement released by the Department’s public affairs office. (Jeffrey Richelson, “The Pentagon’s Counterspies: The Counterintelligence Field Activity,” The National Security Archive, September 17, 2007)

Last year Antifascist Calling reported that when CIFA was shut down, that organization’s TALON database was off-loaded to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center and the FBI’s GUARDIAN database that resides in the Bureau’s Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW).

The IDW is a massive repository for data-mining. As I reported in May, citing the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s revelations, the IDW possesses something on the order of 1.5 billion searchable files. In comparison, the entire Library of Congress contains 138 million unique documents.

EFF has called the IDW “the FBI’s single largest repository of operational and intelligence information.”

In 2005, FBI Section Chief Michael Morehart said that “IDW is a centralized, web-enabled, closed system repository for intelligence and investigative data.” Unidentified FBI agents have described it as “one-stop shopping” for FBI agents and an “uber-Google.” According to the Bureau, “[t]he IDW system provides data storage, database management, search, information presentation, and security services.”

As the Wired investigation reveals, NSAC intends to expand these data-mining capabilities. Currently, NSAC employs “103 full-time employees and contractors, and the FBI was seeking budget approval for another 71 employees, plus more than $8 million for outside contractors to help analyze its growing pool of private and public data.” Long-term, according to a planning document, the FBI “wants to expand the center to 439 people.”

While John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program may have disappeared along with the Bush administration, it’s toxic heart lives on in the National Security Branch Analysis Center.

TIA, IDW, NSAC: What’s in an Acronym? Plenty!

When the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) stood up the Information Awareness Office in 2002, the office’s stated mission was to gather as much information on American citizens as possible and store it in a centralized, meta-database for perusal by secret state agencies.

Information included in the massive data-sets by IAO included internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases and travel itineraries, rental car records, medical histories, educational transcripts, driver’s licenses, social security numbers, utility bills, tax returns, indeed any searchable record imaginable.

As Wired reported, these are the data-sets that NSAC plans to exploit.

When Congress killed the DARPA program in 2004, most critics believed that was the end of the Pentagon’s leap back into domestic intelligence. However, as we have since learned, the data-mining portion of the program was farmed out to a host of state agencies, including the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the FBI.

Needless to say, private sector involvement–and lucrative contracts–for TIA projects included usual suspects such as Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, The Analysis Group and SAIC, as well as a number of low-key firms such as 21st Century Technologies, Inc., Evolving Logic, Global InfoTech, Inc., and the Orwellian-sounding Fund For Peace.

These firms, and many more, are current NSAC contractors; to all intents and purposes TIA now resides deep inside the Bureau’s Investigative Data Warehouse and NSAC’s Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force.

While the FBI claims that unlike TIA, NSAC is not “open-ended” and that a “mission is usually begun with a list of names or personal identifiers that have arisen during a threat assessment, preliminary or full investigation,” Wired reports that “the FBI’s pre-crime intentions are much wider that the bureau acknowledged.”

This will inevitably change–and not for the better–as NSAC expands its brief and secures an ever-growing mountain of data at an exponential rate. In this endeavor, they will be aided by the U.S. Senate.

With three provisions of the draconian Patriot Act set to expire at years’ end, the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VI) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a member of the committee and chairwoman of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, stripped-away privacy protections to proposed legislation that would extend the provisions.

Caving-in to pressure from the FBI which claims that protecting Americans’ privacy rights from out-of-control spooks would jeopardize “ongoing” terror investigations, Leahy gutted the safeguards he had espoused just last week!

Claiming that his own proposal might hinder open-ended “terror” investigations Leahy said at the hearing, “I’m trying to introduce balances on both sides.” The original amendment would have curtailed Bureau fishing expeditions and would have required an actual connection of investigated parties to terrorism or foreign espionage.

Leahy was referring to Section 215 of the Patriot Act that allows the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to authorize broad warrants for nearly any type of record, including those held by banks, libraries, internet service providers, credit card companies, even doctors of “persons of interest.”

An amendment offered by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) to repeal the Leahy-Feinstein amendment was defeated in committee by a 4-15 vote. As the Senator from the FBI, Feinstein said that the Bureau did not support Durbin’s amendment. “It would end several classified and critical investigations,” she said. Or perhaps Durbin’s amendment would have lowered the boom on a host of illegal programs across the 16-agency U.S. “Intelligence Community.”

As Antifascist Calling reported in July, a 38-page declassified report by inspectors general of the CIA, NSA, Department of Justice, Department of Defense and the Office of National Intelligence collectively called the acknowledged “Terrorist Surveillance Program” and cross-agency top secret “Other Intelligence Activities” the “President’s Surveillance Program,” PSP.

The IG’s report failed to disclose what these programs actually did, and probably still do today under the Obama administration. Shrouded beneath impenetrable layers of secrecy and deceit, these undisclosed programs lie at the dark heart of the state’s war against the American people.

The Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) described FBI participation in the PSP as that of a passive “recipient of intelligence collected under the program” and efforts by the Bureau “to improve cooperation with the NSA to enhance the usefulness of PSP-derived information to FBI agents.”

The OIG goes on to state that “further details about these topics are classified and therefore cannot be discussed here.” As The New York Times revealed earlier this year in April and June, the NSA’s STELLAR WIND and PINWALE internet and email text intercept programs are giant data-mining meta-databases that sift emails, faxes, and text messages of millions of people in the United States.

Far from being mere passive spectators, the FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse continues to be a major recipient of NSA’s STELLAR WIND and PINWALE programs. As Marc Ambinder reported in The Atlantic PINWALE is “an unclassified proprietary term used to refer to advanced data-mining software that the government uses. Contractors who do SIGINT mining work often include a familiarity with Pinwale as a prerequisite for certain jobs.”

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s report on the IDW revealed, the FBI closely worked with SAIC, Convera and Chiliad to develop the project. Indeed, as EFF discovered “The FBI set up an Information Sharing Policy Group (ISPG), chaired by the Executive Assistant Directors of Administration and Intelligence, to review requests to ingest additional datasets into the IDW, in response to Congressional ‘privacy concerns that may arise from FBI engaging in ‘data mining.’ In February 2005, the Counterterrorism Division asked for 8 more data sources.” The names of the data sources were redacted in three of the eight datasets reviewed by EFF while three came from the Department of Homeland Security.

All of which begs the question: what is the FBI hiding behind it’s reorganization of the FTTTF and IDW into the National Security Branch Analysis Center? What role does the National Security Agency and private contractors play in standing-up NSAC? And why, as EFF disclosed, is the Bureau fearful of including Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) that might raise “congressional consciousness levels and expectations” in the context of Bureau “national security systems”?

Indeed, as the American Civil Liberties Union stated, “once again, the FBI has been found to be using invasive ‘counterterrorism’ tools to collect personal information about innocent Americans,” and it “appears that the FBI has continued its habit of gathering bulk amounts of personal information with little or no oversight.”

Not that congressional grifters and their corporate cronies, who have much to gain from billions of federal dollars pumped into these intrusive programs, actually care to explore what becomes of data illegally collected on innocent Americans by NSAC.

The civil liberties watchdog concludes they have “long suspected that the congressional dissent over and public demise of the Pentagon’s TIA program would result in a concealed and more invasive version of the program.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Somewhere near Washington Admiral Poindexter is leaning back in his chair, filling his pipe and smiling…

That’s the startling finding of a new study — Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults –- that appears in the current issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

The 44,000 dead a year estimate is about two-and-a-half times higher than an estimate from the Institute of Medicine in 2002.

The Harvard-based researchers found that uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts, up from a 25 percent excess death rate found in 1993.

“The uninsured have a higher risk of death when compared to the privately insured, even after taking into account socioeconomics, health behaviors and baseline health,” said lead author Dr. Andrew Wilper. “We doctors have many new ways to prevent deaths from hypertension, diabetes and heart disease — but only if patients can get into our offices and afford their medications.”

“Historically, every other developed nation has achieved universal health care through some form of nonprofit national health insurance,” said study co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor of medicine at Harvard and a primary care physician in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Our failure to do so means that all Americans pay higher health care costs, and 45,000 pay with their lives.”

“Even the most liberal version of the House bill would leave 17 million people uninsured,” Woolhandler said. “The whittled down version that Senator Max Baucus is proposing would leave 25 million uninsured. That translates into about 25,000 deaths annually from lack of health insurance. Absent the $400 billion in savings you could get from a single payer system, universal coverage is unaffordable. Politicians in Washington are protecting insurance industry profits while sacrificing American lives.”

The study, which analyzed data from national surveys carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), assessed death rates after taking education, income and many other factors including smoking, drinking and obesity into account.

It estimated that lack of health insurance causes 44,789 excess deaths annually.

Previous estimates from the Institute of Medicine and others had put that figure near 18,000.

The methods used in the Harvard were similar to those employed by the Institute of Medicine in 2002, which in turn were based on a pioneering 1993 study of health insurance and mortality.

Deaths associated with lack of health insurance now exceed those caused by many common killers such as kidney disease.

An increase in the number of uninsured and an eroding medical safety net for the disadvantaged likely explain the substantial increase in the number of deaths associated with lack of insurance.

The uninsured are more likely to go without needed care.

Another factor contributing to the widening gap in the risk of death between those who have insurance and those who don’t is the improved quality of care for those who can get it.

The research, carried out at the Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School, analyzed U.S. adults under age 65 who participated in the annual National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) between 1986 and 1994.

Respondents first answered detailed questions about their socioeconomic status and health and were then examined by physicians.

The CDC tracked study participants to see who died by 2000.

The study found a 40 percent increased risk of death among the uninsured. As expected, death rates were also higher for males (37 percent increase), current or former smokers (102 percent and 42 percent increases), people who said that their health was fair or poor (126 percent increase), and those that examining physicians said were in fair or poor health (222 percent increase).

“The Institute of Medicine, using older studies, estimated that one American dies every 30 minutes from lack of health insurance,” said study co-author Dr. David Himmelstein. “Even this grim figure is an underestimate – now one dies every 12 minutes.”

The authors broke down the 44,840 deaths by state.

California leads the nation with 5,302 deaths due to lack of health insurance per year.

Texas follows closely behind with 4,675 deaths due to lack of health insurance per year.

Texas also had the highest rate (in 2005) of uninsured citizens — 29.7 percent.

Despite assurances to the contrary in Washington and a major policy speech in London, one need not quibble with the obvious fact that the situation is deteriorating beyond repair in Afghanistan. Although international media is more concerned with what that means politically for United States President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, little attention is given to the browbeaten and war-weary people of that country.

One should know that public support for the war has greatly diminished, when conservative commentators like The Washington Post columnist George Will write: “US forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy. America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, air strikes and small, potent Special Forces units.”

Okay, so his narrative is still ultimately violent, but the fact remains that the war mood is changing. After all, Will’s September 1 article was entitled, “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.”

Dan Senor and Peter Wehner responded with a peculiar diatribe in the New York Times, accusing Will of allowing his party allegiance to influence his views on the war. The two authors, senior fellows at major US think tanks, offered a bloody rationale wrapped in deceptive wording. They argued that historically Democrats opposed Republican wars and Republicans have done the same, and that must change. It was implied that pretty much every major war in recent decades was a war that served US national security interests; therefore, “Republicans should resist the reflex that all opposition parties have, which is to oppose the stands of a president of the other party because he is a member of the other party.” In other words, yes to war, whether by Democrats or Republicans.

The intellectual wrangling, of course, is not happening in a vacuum; it almost never does. Indeed, there is much politicking going on; intense deliberation in Washington, political debates in London; defensive French statements, and more. It seems that the war in Afghanistan is reaching a decisive point, militarily in Afghanistan itself, and politically in major Western capitals.

But why the sudden hoopla over Afghanistan? For after all, the bloody war has been grinding on for eight long years.

The Taliban and various groups opposing the Kabul government and their Western benefactors are gaining ground, not just in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan. Daring Taliban attacks are now taking place in the north as well, long seen as peaceful, thus requiring little attention. On August 26, a roadside bomb hit the car of the chief of the provincial Justice Department in the northern Kunduz province, killing him, and sending shock waves through Kabul. The bloody message was meant to echo as a political one: no one is safe, nowhere is safe. Another attack was reported in the province of Laghman, in the east, where 22 people, mostly civilians were killed. Among the dead were four Afghan officials including the deputy chief of the National Directorate of Security, Abdullah Laghmani. The irony is too obvious to state.

In Washington, London and Paris politicians wish us to believe that they are not unnerved by all of this. They exaggerated the significance of the recent Afghani elections, attempting to once again underscore that the “crucial” elections placed Afghanistan on a crossroads. Crossroads? What does that even mean, in any practical terms? George Will, although selective in his logic, was honest enough to mention that President Hamid Karzai’s “vice-presidential running mate is a drug trafficker.” Even US officials admit that the government they’ve created following the war is corrupt, to say the least.

Richard Holbrooke, among other foreign envoys “responsible for Afghanistan”, told reporters in Paris on September 2 that US officials have no preference among the candidates, nor are they particularly interested in runoff elections, but they wished to see a government that appoints “more efficient, less corrupt ministers”. It behooves those “responsible for Afghanistan” to remember that inefficiency and corruption were the outcome of the very policies they have so eagerly adopted in the country. No sympathy for Karzai here, but it’s unfair to point the finger at a feeble leader whenever a Western strategy fumbles, as it has repeatedly.

Speaking of strategies, what is the plan ahead? French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner promised that foreign troops will stay put in Afghanistan unless the country’s security was ensured, reported Xinhua. In practical terms, this means never, for how could security ever visit that region as long as the strategy is hostage to two equally destructive narratives — the Senor/Wehner troop surges vs Will’s “offshore” strategy?

Hubris aside, Washington and London are facing some difficult political and military decisions ahead. Top officials in both capitals are using grim and somber language. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, responding to a call by the top US general in Afghanistan for a fresh approach to the conflict, is considering yet another troop increase as part of Obama’s new Afghan strategy.

The sense of urgency was invited by the detailed report of the newly appointed General Stanley McChrystal, who maintains that “success” was still possible, but a change of strategy is needed. The report resulted in intense deliberation in Washington, highlighted by grim press conferences involving the Pentagon’s heavyweights, including Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, over what to do about “Obama’s war.”

Speaking at the Pentagon, Gates equivocated: “I don’t believe that the war is slipping through the administration’s fingers. I absolutely do not think it is time to get out of Afghanistan (but there remains) limited time for us to show that this approach is working.”

The details of the new Obama strategy are still not very clear, but the commitment to the war is still unquestionable, as expressed in a “major” September 4th speech by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. “When the security of our country is at stake we cannot walk away,” said Brown, according to the BBC.

As Brown was solemnly speaking about British security, NATO air strikes on a pair of fuel tankers killed up to 90 people, according to Afghan authorities.

Indeed, the situation in Afghanistan requires a fresh approach, although not the one George Will had in mind.

Perhaps Dan Froomkin is right, here was “a turning point for Obama.” And yet I ask, “Turning from what to what? Risking what political capital for what genuine improvements”? Wanting to be the last president to face health care reform is a good line, but where were new rhetorical levers, new, powerful “frames” for the “passing the bill” stage – stirring, memorable catch phrases that both neutralize rightwing noise and shift public opinion? Please list any I missed last night.

Too much remains ungrounded, aside from Froomkin’s critical reminder, “any explanation of what [Obama’s] been up to in his backroom deals with health industry titans . . . until he addresses this issue full-on, the man continues to have a not inconsiderable credibility problem.” Where was one breakthrough idea, one blatant ice-breaker, far more compelling than vague medical “exchanges,” echoing discredited co-op notions? Thus, I can’t see what others assert – a home run, grand slam game-changer. Let’s call it a ground rule double by a gifted speechmaker doing what he does well: corral the community and begin organizing.

Myth Major Reform Can Be Bi-Partisan

Did I miss, amongst so much Obama clarity, a reasonable explanation of real engines to resolve the number one issue for all those with health insurance: how to restrain booming costs? Obama still sounds like the non-partisan centrist president acting like health reform (think Medicare) can not be partisan; it’s empty symbolism to invoke nominal band-aids (like McCain’s backwater notion on catastrophic coverage). Further, will half the country who no longer trusts Obama’s word believe his pledge against increasing the deficit at all? Why believe Medicare won’t somehow be impacted? I don’t believe any official, honest or not, can know major consequences, intended or not, in five years. Frankly, Obama hasn’t kept huge campaign pledges made less than a year ago, so it’s pointless to make pointless guarantees.

More specifically, evoking George Lakoff’s paradigms,

1) where were any new, powerful “frames” to allow liberal or progressive voters to press their spineless Democratic representatives? Single-payer was already lost, now we must likely forego a strong public option – off the table and not put back on last night. I especially resented millions of rational, caring progressives being mechanically equated, as if a fringe, with blockading idiots on “the right.” That was insulting – since WE helped elect this smart, non-ideologue while extremists called him terrorist, unAmerican, and worse.

2) further, what Obama arguments in fact countered rightwing fictions (government takeover, even death panels)? It’s not enough to call opponents liars, or deny misrepresentation; you must explain how essential “panels” will work and how to avoid abuse. Obama should have explained every big system needs oversight by medical experts – not bureaucrats. You can’t use public money for every imaginable surgery or test. The issue is not whether there are panels, which exist now (a point Obama missed), but how they work. On all extremist hot buttons, I heard little other than a warmed over, refined Obama politics as usual.

3) what about the president’s endless courtesy to incorrigible Republicans who aren’t listening? Is this a winning strategy? Is a lack of GOP support the reason no bill has passed the House? Hardly. Why not target Blue Dog Democrats with more of what Obama did towards the end, declaring a national moral imperative? Why not say to all, “Join us, or like GOP dinosaurs against Medicare, get cemented on the wrong side of history?” When does Obama learn to frame fights in Democratic Party terms, in language that answers and berates all obstacles to reform, wingnuts or not, today and tomorrow and in 2010?

Master Campaigner not yet Masterful Icon

Distressingly, I have yet to observe Obama’s mastery of the larger political narrative, especially sensitive to moderate public opinion vulnerable to rightwing smears. Few expected the president to make a case for revolutionary, even comprehensive health reform, but what about providing compelling, defining terms that show why Democrats are trustworthy and Republicans are out of the mainstream, even deranged and mean-spirited? This is not a hard case to make, and if Democrats expect to dominate after 2010, they better learn to come together, in sync with coherent leadership. They also need stronger, memorable, persuasive frames and headlines.

The big issue remains, “Who are the Democrats, what is the party’s character, and what is the bottom line for this ‘reform’ president? Are they a team with focus – or just a divided multitude under the misleading tent?” When does leadership start twisting Blue Dog arms in earnest? Neither the president’s speech, nor the absent reports today from either House Blue Dogs or conservative Democratic senators indicate any changed votes. Where’s the follow through and momentum in any PR success? If not, that means a watered down, diluted, perhaps ultimately ineffective health reform bill. Wouldn’t that epitomize much ado about next to nothing?

Two years ago, at Socialism 2007 in Chicago, I spoke about an “invisible government,” a term used by Edward Bernays, one of the founders of modern propaganda. It was Bernays who, in the 1920s, invented “public relations” as a euphemism for propaganda. Deploying the ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry for American women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation; he called cigarettes “torches of freedom.”

The invisible government that Bernays had in mind brought together the power of all media — PR, the press, broadcasting, advertising. It was the power of form: of branding and image-making over substance and truth — and I would like to talk today about this invisible government’s most recent achievement: the rise of Barack Obama and the silencing of the left.

First, I would like to go back some 40 years to a sultry day in Vietnam.

I was a young war correspondent who had just arrived in a village called Tuylon. My assignment was to write about a company of US Marines who had been sent to this village to win hearts and minds.

“My orders”, said the Marine sergeant, “are to sell the American Way of Liberty as stated in the Pacification Handbook. This is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks as stated on page 86.” Page 86 was headed WHAM: Winning Hearts and Minds. The marine unit was a Combined Action Company which, explained the sergeant, “means that we attack these folks on Mondays and win their hearts and minds on Tuesdays”. He was joking, though not quite.

The sergeant, who didn’t speak Vietnamese, had arrived in the village, stood up in a jeep and said through a bullhorn: “Come on out everybody, we got rice and candy and toothbrushes to give you!…”

There was silence.

“Now listen, either you gooks come on out, or we’re going to come right in there and get you!”

The people of Tuylon finally came out, and stood in line to receive packets of Uncle Ben’s Miracle Rice, Hershey bars, party balloons and several thousand toothbrushes. Three portable, battery-operated, yellow flush lavatories were held back for the arrival of the colonel.

And when the colonel arrived that evening, the district chief was summoned, and the yellow flush lavatories were unveiled. The colonel cleared his throat and produced a handwritten speech.

“Mr. District Chief and all you nice people,” he said, “what these gifts represent is more than the sum of their parts. They carry the spirit of America. Ladies and gentlemen, there’s no place on earth like America. It’s the land where miracles happen. It’s a guiding light for me, and for you. In America, you see, we count ourselves as real lucky having the greatest democracy the world has ever known, and we want you nice people to share in our good fortune.”

Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, even John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” got a mention. All that was missing was the Star Spangled Banner playing in the background.

Of course, the villagers had no idea what the colonel was talking about. When the Marines clapped, they clapped. When the colonel waved, the children waved. As he departed, the colonel shook the sergeant’s hand and said: “You’ve got plenty of hearts and minds here. Carry on, Sergeant?”

“Yessir.”

In Vietnam, I witnessed many spectacles like that. I had grown up in faraway Australia on a steady cinematic diet of John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Walt Disney, the Three Stooges and Ronald Reagan. The American Way of Liberty they portrayed might well have been lifted from the WHAM handbook.

I learned that the United States had won World War Two on its own and now led the “free world” as the “chosen” society. It was only much later when I read Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion that I understood something of the power of emotions attached to false ideas and bad history.

Historians call this “exceptionalism” — the notion that the United States has a divine right to bring what it calls liberty to the rest of humanity. Of course, this is a very old refrain; the French and British created and celebrated their own “civilizing mission” while imposing colonial regimes that denied basic civil liberties.

However, the power of the American message is different. Whereas the Europeans were proud imperialists, Americans are trained to deny their imperialism. As Mexico was conquered and the Marines sent to rule Nicaragua, American textbooks referred to an “age of innocence.” American motives were well meaning, moral, exceptional, as the colonel said. There was no ideology, they said; and this is still the received wisdom. Indeed, Americanism is an ideology that is unique because its main element is its denial that it is an ideology. It is both conservative and liberal, both right and left. All else is heresy.

Barack Obama is the embodiment of this “ism”. Since Obama was elected, leading liberals have talked about America returning to its true status as a “nation of moral ideals” — the words of Paul Krugman in the New York Times. In the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote that, “spiritually advanced people regard the new president as ‘a Lightworker’ . . . who can help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”

Tell that to an Afghan child whose family has been blown away by Obama’s bombs, or a Pakistani child whose family are among the 700 civilians killed by Obama’s drones. Or Tell it to a child in the carnage of Gaza caused by American smart weapons which, disclosed Seymour Hersh, were resupplied to Israel for use in the slaughter “only after the Obama team let it be known it would not object.” The man who stayed silent on Gaza is the man who now condemns Iran.

Obama’s is the myth that is America’s last taboo. His most consistent theme was never change; it was power. The United States, he said, “leads the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good . . . We must lead by building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” And there is this remarkable statement: “At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that a we stood and fought for the freedom sought by billions of people beyond their borders.” At the National Archives on May 21, he said: “From Europe to the Pacific, we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law.”

Since 1945, “by deed and by example,” the United States has overthrown fifty governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements, and supported tyrannies and set up torture chambers from Egypt to Guatemala. Countless men, women and children have been bombed to death. Bombing is apple pie. And yet, here is the 44th President of the United States, having stacked his government with warmongers and corporate fraudsters and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, teasing us while promising more of the same.

Here is the House of Representatives, controlled by Obama’s Democrats, voting to approve $16 billion for three wars and a coming presidential military budget which, in 2009, will exceed any year since the end of World War Two, including the spending peaks of the Korean and Vietnam wars. And here is a peace movement, not all of it but much of it, prepared to look the other way and believe or hope that Obama will restore, as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times, the “nation of moral ideals.”

Not long ago, I visited the American Museum of History in the celebrated Smithsonian Institute in Washington. One of the most popular exhibitions was called The Price of Freedom: Americans at War. It was holiday time and lines of happy people, including many children, shuffled through a Santa’s grotto of war and conquest, where messages about their nation’s “great mission” were lit up. These included tributes to the quote “exceptional Americans [who] saved a million lives” in Vietnam where they were quote “determined to stop communist expansion.” In Iraq, other brave Americans quote “employed air strikes of unprecedented precision.”

What was shocking was not so much the revisionism of two of the epic crimes of modern times but the sheer routine scale of omission.

Like all US presidents, Bush and Obama have much in common. The wars of both presidents, and the wars of Clinton and Reagan, Carter and Ford, Nixon and Kennedy, are justified by the enduring myth of exceptional America — a myth the late Harold Pinter described as “a brilliant, witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist, partly because it is so extraordinary to see an African-American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the 21st century, and race — together with gender and even class — can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what matters, above race and gender, is the class one serves.

George Bush’s inner circle — from the State Department to the Supreme Court — was perhaps the most multi racial in presidential history. It was PC par excellence. Think Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. It was also the most reactionary.

To many, Obama’s very presence in the White House reaffirms the moral nation. He is a marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein or Benetton, he is a brand that promises something special — something exciting, almost risqué, as if he might be a radical, as if he might enact change. He makes people feel good. He’s postmodern man with no political baggage.

In his book, Dreams From My Father, Obama refers to the job he took after he graduated from Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as “a consulting house to multinational corporations.” For some reason, he does not say who his employer was or what he did there. The employer was Business International Corporation, which has a long history of providing cover for the CIA with covert action, and infiltrating unions and the left. I know this because it was especially active in my own country, Australia.

Obama does not say what he did at Business International; and there may be nothing sinister, but it seems worthy of enquiry, and debate, surely, as a clue to whom the man is.

During his brief period in the Senate, Obama voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He voted for the Patriot Act. He refused to support a bill for single-payer health care. He supported the death penalty. As a presidential candidate, he received more corporate backing than John McCain. He promised to close Guantanamo as a priority and has not. Instead, he has excused the perpetrators of torture, reinstated the infamous military commissions, kept the Bush gulag intact and opposed habeus corpus.

Daniel Ellsberg was right when he said that, under Bush, a military coup had taken place in the United States, giving the Pentagon unprecedented powers. These powers have been reinforced by the presence of Robert Gates, a Bush family crony and George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, and by all the Bush Pentagon officials and generals who have kept their jobs under Obama.

In Colombia, Obama is planning to spend $46 million on a new military base that will support a regime backed by death squads and further the tragic history of Washington’s intervention in Latin America.

In a pseudo event staged in Prague, Obama promised a world without nuclear weapons to a global audience mostly unaware that America is building new tactical nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war. Like George Bush, he used the absurdity of Europe threatened by Iran to justify building a missile system aimed at Russia and China.

In a pseudo event at the Annapolis Naval Academy, decked with flags and uniforms, Obama lied that the troops were coming home. The head of the army, General George Casey, says America will be in Iraq for up to a decade; other generals say fifteen years. Units will be relabeled as trainers; mercenaries will take their place. That is how the Vietnam War endured past the American “withdrawal”.

Chris Hedges, author of Empire of Illusion puts it well. “President Obama,” he wrote, “does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they can make you feel.” And so you are kept in “a perpetual state of childishness.” He calls this “junk politics.”

The tragedy is that Brand Obama appears to have crippled or absorbed the antiwar movement, the peace movement. Out of 256 Democrats in Congress, thirty are willing to stand against Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s war party. On June 16, they voted for $106 billion for more war.

In Washington, the Out of Iraq Caucus is out of action. Its members can’t even come up with a form of words of why they are silent. On March 21, a demonstration at the Pentagon by the once mighty United for Peace and Justice drew only a few thousand. The outgoing president of UPJ, Leslie Cagan, says her people aren’t turning up because, “it’s enough for many of them that Obama has a plan to end the war and that things are moving in the right direction.” And where is the mighty MoveOn these days? Where is its campaign against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what exactly was said when, in February, MoveOn’s executive director, Jason Ruben, met President Obama?

Yes, a lot of good people mobilized for Obama. But what did they demand of him — apart from the amorphous “change”? That isn’t activism.

Activism doesn’t give up. Activism is not about identity politics. Activism doesn’t wait to be told. Activism doesn’t rely on the opiate of hope. Woody Allen once said, “I felt a lot better when I gave up hope.” Real activism has little time for identity politics, a distraction that confuses and suckers good people everywhere.

I write for the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, or rather I used to write for it. In February, I sent the foreign editor an article that raised questions about Obama as a progressive force. The article was rejected. Why? I asked. “For the moment,” wrote the editor, “we prefer to maintain a more ‘positive’ approach to the novelty presented by Obama . . . we will take on specific issues . . . but we would not like to say that he will make no difference.”

In other words, an American president drafted to promote the most rapacious system in history is ordained and depoliticized by the left. What is remarkable about this state of affairs is that the so-called radical left has never been more aware, more conscious, of the iniquities of power. The Green Movement, for example, has raised the consciousness of millions of people, so that almost every child knows something about global warming; and yet there is a resistance within the green movement to the notion of power as a military project. Similar observations can be made of the gay and feminist movements; as for the labor movement, is it still breathing?

One of my favorite quotations is from Milan Kundera: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” We should never forget that the primary goal of great power is to distract and limit our natural desire for social justice and equity and real democracy. Long ago, Bernays’s invisible government of propaganda elevated big business from its unpopular status as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic driving force. The American Way of Life began as an advertising slogan. The modern image of Santa Claus was an invention of Coca Cola.

Today, we are presented with an extraordinary opportunity, thanks to the crash of Wall Street and the revelation, for ordinary people, that the free market has nothing to do with freedom. The opportunity is to recognize a stirring in America that is unfamiliar to many on the left, but is related to a great popular movement growing all over the world.

In Latin America, less than 20 years ago, there was the usual despair, the usual divisions of poverty and freedom, the usual thugs in uniforms running unspeakable regimes. There is now a people’s movement based on the revival of indigenous cultures and languages, and a history of popular and revolutionary struggle less affected by ideological distortions than anywhere else.

The recent, amazing achievements in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay represent a struggle for community and political rights that is truly historic, with implications for all of us. These successes are expressed perversely in the overthrow of the government of Honduras, for the smaller the country the greater the threat that the contagion of emancipation will follow.

Across the world, social movements and grassroots organizations have emerged to fight free market dogma. They have educated governments in the south that food for export is a problem rather than a solution to global poverty. They have politicized ordinary people to stand up for their rights, as in the Philippines and South Africa. An authentic globalization is growing as never before, and this is exciting.

Consider the remarkable boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaign — BDS for short — aimed at Israel, that is sweeping the world. Israeli ships have been turned away from South Africa and western Australia. A French company has been forced to abandon plans to built a railway connecting Jerusalem with illegal Israeli settlements. Israeli sporting bodies find themselves isolated. Universities have begun to sever ties with Israel, and students are active for the first time in a generation. Thanks to them, Israel’s South Africa moment is approaching, for this is, partly, how apartheid was defeated.

In the 1950s, we never expected the great wind of the 1960s to blow. Feel the breeze today. In the last eight months millions of angry emails, sent by ordinary Americans, have flooded Washington. This has not happened before. People are outraged as their lives are attacked; they bear no resemblance to the massive mass presented by the media.

Look at the polls that are seldom reported. More than two thirds of Americans say the government should care for those who cannot care for themselves; 64 percent would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for everyone; 59 percent are favorable towards unions; 70 percent want nuclear disarmament; 72 percent want the US completely out of Iraq; and so on.

For too long, ordinary Americans have been cast in stereotypes that are contemptuous. That is why the progressive attitudes of ordinary people are seldom reported in the media. They are not ignorant. They are subversive. They are informed. And they are “anti-American”.

I once asked a friend, the great American war correspondent and humanitarian Martha Gellhorn, to explain “anti-American” to me. “I’ll tell you what ‘anti-American’ is,” she said. “It’s what governments and their vested interested call those who honor America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in all of humanity. There are millions of these anti-Americans in the United States. They are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who judge their government in moral terms, though they would call it common decency. They are not vain. They are the people with a wakeful conscience, the best of America’s citizens. They can be counted on. They were in the south with the Civil Rights movement, ending slavery. They were in the streets, demanding an end to the wars in Asia. Sure, they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional.”

A certain populism is once again growing in America and which has a proud, if forgotten past. In the nineteenth century, an authentic grassroots Americanism was expressed in populism’s achievements: women’s suffrage, the campaign for an eight-hour day, graduated income tax and public ownership of railways and communications, and breaking the power of corporate lobbyists.

The American populists were far from perfect; at times they would keep bad company, but they spoke from the ground up, not from the top down. They were betrayed by leaders who urged them to compromise and merge with the Democratic Party. Does that sound familiar?

What Obama and the bankers and the generals, and the IMF and the CIA and CNN fear is ordinary people coming together and acting together. It is a fear as old as democracy: a fear that suddenly people convert their anger to action and are guided by the truth. “At a time of universal deceit,” wrote George Orwell, “telling the truth a revolutionary act.”

* Watch a video of Pilger’s address.

While promising to restore the “rule of law,” “protect civil liberties” while “keeping America safe,” in practice, congressional Democrats like well-coiffed Republican clones across the aisle, are crafting legislation that would do Dick Cheney proud!

As the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773) wends its way through Congress, civil liberties’ advocates are decrying provisions that would hand the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet.

CNET reported August 28, that the latest iteration of the bill “would allow the president to ‘declare a cybersecurity emergency’ relating to ‘non-governmental’ computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat.”

Drafted by Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME), “best friends forever” of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the telecommunications industry, they were key enablers of Bush-era warrantless wiretapping and privacy-killing data mining programs that continue apace under Obama.

As The New York Times revealed in June, a former NSA analyst described a secret database “code-named Pinwale, that archived foreign and domestic e-mail messages.” The former analyst “described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.”

Antifascist Calling has noted on more than one occasion, that with “cyberterrorism” morphing into al-Qaeda 2.0, administration policies designed to increase the scope of national security state surveillance of private communications will soon eclipse the intrusiveness of Bushist programs.

As Cindy Cohn, the Legal Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wrote earlier this month, commenting on this summer’s public relations blitz by former NSA boss Michael Hayden and Office of Legal Counsel torture-enabler John Yoo’s defense of the so-called Presidential Surveillance Program,

While the details are unknown, credible evidence indicates that billions of everyday communications of ordinary Americans are swept up by government computers and run through a process that includes both data-mining and review of content, to try to figure out whether any of us were involved in illegal or terrorist-related activity. That means that even the most personal and private of our electronic communications–between doctors and patients, between husbands and wives, or between children and parents–are subject to review by computer algorithms programmed by government bureaucrats or by the bureaucrats themselves. (Cindy Cohn, “Lawless Surveillance, Warrantless Rationales,” American Constitution Society, August 17, 2009)

Both Rockefeller and Snowe are representative of the state’s “bipartisan consensus” when it comes to increasing the power of the intelligence and security apparatus and were instrumental in ramming through retroactive immunity for telecoms who illegally spy on the American people. If last year’s “debate” over the grotesque FISA Amendments Act (FAA) is an indication of how things will go after Congress’ summer recess, despite hand-wringing by congressional “liberals,” S.773 seems destined for passage. CNET revealed:

When Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national cybersecurity. “We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs–from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records,” Rockefeller said. (Declan McCullagh, “Bill Would Give President Emergency Control of Internet,” CNET News, August 28, 2009)

But as we witness practically on a daily basis, hysterical demands for “protection” from various “dark actors” inevitably invokes an aggressive response from militarized state security apparatchiks and their private partners.

As Antifascist Calling reported in July (see: “Behind the Cyberattacks on America and South Korea. ‘Rogue’ Hacker, Black Op or Both?”), when North Korea was accused of launching a widespread computer attack on U.S. government, South Korean and financial web sites, right-wing terrorism and security specialists perched at Stratfor and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)–without a shred of evidence–linked the cyber blitz to a flurry of missile tests and the underground detonation of a nuclear device by North Korea.

Adding to the noise, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee went so far as to urge President Obama to respond–by launching a cyberattack against the bankrupt Stalinist regime.

Despite provocative rhetoric and false charges that might have led to war with disastrous consequences for the people of East Asia, as it turned out an unknown sociopath used an updated version of the MyDoom e-mail worm to deploy a botnet in the attack. As Computerworld reported, the botnet “does not use typical antivirus evasion techniques and does not appear to have been written by a professional malware writer.” Hardly a clarion call for bombing Dear Leader and countless thousands of Koreans to smithereens!

In this context, the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 goes much further than protecting “critical infrastructure” from over-hyped cyberattacks.

Among other measures, Section 18, “Cybersecurity Responsibilities and Authority,” hands the Executive Branch, specifically The President, the power to “declare a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic to and from any compromised Federal Government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network.” This does not simply apply to federal networks, but may very well extend to the private communications (”critical infrastructure information system or network”) of citizens who might organize against some egregious act by the state, say a nuclear strike against a nation deemed responsible for launching a cyberattack against the United States, as suggested in May by the head of U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) General Kevin Chilton.

As I reported in June (see: “Cyber Command Launched. U.S. Strategic Command to Oversee Offensive Military Operations”), the military’s newly-launched U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) is a “subordinate unified command” overseen by STRATCOM. Would “message force multipliers” embedded in the media or Pentagon public diplomacy specialists carrying out psychological operations (PSYOPS) here in the heimat, become the sole conduit for critical news and information during said “national emergency”?

Additionally, under Section 18’s authority The President “shall designate an agency to be responsible for coordinating the response and restoration of any Federal Government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network affected by a cybersecurity emergency declaration under paragraph (2).” What agency might Senator Rockefeller have in mind for “coordinating the response”? As Antifascist Calling revealed in April (see: “Pentagon’s Cyber Command to Be Based at NSA’s Fort Meade”), CYBERCOM will be based at NSA headquarters and led by Lt. General Keith Alexander, the current NSA director who will oversee Pentagon efforts to coordinate both defensive and offensive cyber operations.

How might an out-of-control Executive Branch seize the initiative during an alleged “national emergency”? Paragraph 6 spells this out in no uncertain terms: “The President may order the disconnection of any Federal Government or United States critical infrastructure information systems or networks in the interest of national security.”

The draconian bill has drawn a sharp rebuke from both civil libertarians and the telecommunications industry. Larry Clinton, the president of the Internet Security Alliance (ISA) told CNET: “It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill.”

And Wayne Crews, the director of technology studies at the rightist Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) told Federal Computer Week: “From American telecommunications to the power grid, virtually anything networked to some other computer is potentially fair game to [President Barack] Obama to exercise ‘emergency powers’.”

True enough as far as it goes, these “free market” cheerleaders are extremely solicitous however, when it comes to government defense and security contracts that benefit their clients; so long as the public is spared the burden of exercising effective control as cold cash greases the sweaty palm of the market’s “invisible hand”!

As Antifascist Calling revealed in June (see: “Obama’s Cybersecurity Plan: Bring on the Contractors!”), the ISA is no ordinary lobby shop. According to a self-promotional blurb on their web site, ISA “was created to provide a forum for information sharing” and “represents corporate security interests before legislators and regulators.”

Amongst ISA sponsors one finds AIG (yes, that AIG!) Verizon, Raytheon, VeriSign, the National Association of Manufacturers, Nortel, Northrop Grumman, Tata, and Mellon. State partners include the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Congress, and the Department of Commerce.

Indeed ISA and CEI, are firm believers in the mantra that “the diversity of the internet places its security inescapably in the hands of the private sector,” and that “regulation for consumer protection” that rely on “government mandates” to “address cyber infrastructure issues” will be “ineffective and counter-productive both from a national security and economic perspective.” CEI and ISA’s solution? Let’s have another gulp of that tasty “market incentives” kool-aid!

In other words, hand over the cash in the form of taxpayer largess and we’ll happily (and profitably!) continue to violate the rights of the American people by monitoring their Internet communications and surveilling their every move through nifty apps hardwired into wireless devices as the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed in a new report on locational privacy.

Unfortunately, Clinton, Crews and their well-heeled partners seem to have forgotten an elementary lesson of history: a national security state such as ours will invariably unwind its tentacles into every corner of life unless challenged by a countervailing force–a pissed-off, mobilized citizenry.

Now that national security “change” chickens are coming home to roost, both CEI and ISA seem incredulous: you mean us? How’s that for irony!

Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with EFF told CNET that changes to the original version of the bill do not address pressing privacy concerns.

Tien told the publication: “The language has changed but it doesn’t contain any real additional limits. It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version)…The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There’s no provision for any administrative process or review. That’s where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it.”

McCullagh avers: “Translation: If your company is deemed ‘critical,’ a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.”

And there you have it, a “cybersecurity” blacklist to accompany a potential state takeover of the Internet during a “national emergency.” What will they think of next!

I for one am not at all upset that Obama has sold out the Left. Hell, he’s a Democrat. What person in their right mind would think that he wouldn’t be beholden to corporate interests first and foremost? Oh, 99% of Democrats, maybe. That’s why lesser evilism is the prevailing electoral philosophy in America. Yet some say that he was/is different. He’s smart. He’s a decent family man. He showed us hope. Well, he showed us hope like Reagan showed us that it was ‘morning in America’. In reality it was “Mourning” in America.

 In Baltimore during the last mayoral administration the slogan seen all over the city was the word, “Believe” in white letters on a black background. Like “Hope,” it was an empty slogan. “Hope” or “Believe” tell us that we’re on the bottom and we can only move in one direction.

Let’s pretend that the magic crystal ball does predict a one term president. What could he do (without being impeached) that would really make a difference?

He could scrap his health care plan completely, start all over, and go with Single Payer, which is supported by nearly 2/3 of all Americans. Hey, Michael Douglas in The American President scrapped his gun control bill in the end for a real working plan. People seemed to cheer him on for that ‘bold’ move, as bold a move could ever be made in Hollywood! Have a full fledged campaign, like it was an election, equating the pharmaceutical company and the health insurance industry to the likes of Al Qaeda. Who would dare to take Big Pharma’s and the insurance companies’ side? Learn from the right on how to mobilize your base. President Obama, the first community organizer, seemed to have forgotten how to do it once the election was over. Or maybe that he had no intention of disrupting the profiteering of the largest legal extortion racket in America: the health insurance industry.

On other issues, give up on the weasel-like pronouncements that the US opposes the expansion of the settlements in occupied Palestine. Come out and say that all the settlements are illegal and ought to be dismantled, according to international law. If AIPAC hasn’t hired the Aryan Nation by this time to take him out then continue to campaign for the full restitution of rights and the Right of Return for all Palestinians forced into exile by the formation of the State of Israel.

End the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan immediately. The war in Iraq has already ended in 2003 when they captured (and later on hanged Hussein), and when Obama was still a State Senator of Illinois. Bring the invading armies home.

Full fledged house cleaning of the military, weeding out right wing neo-Nazis, Christian zealots, etc., who are using their military training for a white, Christian jihad here in the states. That should include high ranking officers, as well as the soldier in the field.

Reverse our age old policy of exploiting Latin America and welcome Chavez, Morales, and others as equal partners. Bring back CITGO gas stations, as we seem to be losing them to BP all over Baltimore. End the embargo on Cuba with the stroke of a pen.

Expand Secret Service protection and then grant a full pardon and restitution to Leonard Peltier. Watch out for pissed off FBI agents! Show the world that political prisoners in the US is part of our history but stops now. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now pressed President Clinton back in 2000 for a pardon but was rebuffed. Ah, President Clinton. The best Republican president the Democrats ever had!

Nationalize the utility industry, including water. Nothing that affects the lives of all Americans should ever be in private hands and for profit.

Demand of his Attorney General Eric Holder to hold full investigations on every known war crime committed; including those of Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43 and even himself, as he has already committed war crimes with illegal detention, rendition, torture (yes, it still continues at Gitmo), etc. Show the American public that no one really is above the law.

The irony in all of this is that many on the left hoped that some of this would happen with an Obama administration. Too bad many have been punked by him: The ones who thought he was anti-war even though he ran on expanding it in Afghanistan and not ending the occupation of Iraq. Running against the health insurance industry but then giving them sweetheart deals to curry their support for a health care plan that omits the one plan supported by a vast majority (Single Payer). Showing signs of recognizing that Palestinians have been treated unfairly and then turning a blind eye as Israel engaged in a brutal invasion of Gaza.

It’s no fun being punked. Maybe we would have had a gradual Medicare system for all, like Ralph Nader suggests, if McCain had won. Congress would have been so enraged that such a health care system probably would have sailed through Congress forcing McCain to threaten to veto the only reasonable health care reform possible. With either candidate, though, the empire would continue unabated.

But if there were to be real change, real hope, than maybe a president not afraid of losing the next election would be so bold as to actually do what’s right.

Wait a minute. I am talking about Democrats and Republicans, aren’t I? Oh, never mind.

The right-wing won this contest without even participating in it. Sure there was one woman with a “Freedom Isn’t Free Shirt,” but there were certainly none of the antics that have come to typify other town-halls. Not even one “Death Panel” sign. How then did the right-wing win? Representative Joseph Crowley (D.), the organizer of the event, insured this by closing off all the spaces for public discussion. Instead of a town-hall, where constituents ask questions or make speeches publicly from the floor, Crowley was only willing to meet people one-on-one in “private” meetings. Barricades on both sides of the Metropolitan Oval Park sectioned off the crowd. A slew of private security guards and NYPD officers enforced the distance. The right-wing tactics had worked. Crowley was too scared to hold an open meeting.

Before I left for the meeting I did a quick search to see who I was dealing with. Crowley has certainly dipped into the health industry pot for campaign funding. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that he received $5,000 contributions from Pfizer, Abbott Technologies (a pharmaceutical company) and the private health insurance company Blue Cross/Blue Shield. No surprise then that Crowley has avoided the single-payer bill in the House (HR 676) and has provided only tepid support for the public option in the House Bill. The literature he distributed makes no mention of a public option. It contains only vague claims about increased regulation and cost reduction.

Now to my story. For the last two years I have been organizing in support of single-payer health care. With more than 45 million people without insurance, millions more underinsured and nearly 20,000 deaths from treatable conditions, the health care system is clearly broken. The responsible party is the private health insurance industry. Single-payer, or the National Health Insurance Act, would make private health insurance companies illegal and establish the Federal Government as the single-payer. As a result, every person in the country would be guaranteed access to health care regardless of their ability to pay.

As an organizer, this has been a complicated campaign. Everyone knows the health care system is a wreck. Yet few understand how this failed system continues to perpetuate itself through advertising, monopolizing market-share and campaign contributions. The language of reform has also served to confuse. The House health care bill and President Barack Obama continually talk about a “public-option” and “universal health care.” Many, including a person ahead of me on line, conflate these terms with single-payer. There is, in fact, no relation between them. The public-option plan is pitched as operating in “competition” with private plans through a health insurance exchange– a schemed dreamed up by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. There is nothing universal about the public-option. It is just another maneuver to defend an inefficient and exploitative private health insurance industry.

While on line, I met a blogger, Eve NYC, from the Daily KOS who offered to video tape my talk with Crowley. She knew that my confronting the senator with his campaign contributions might be the high point of the otherwise vanilla one-on-one meetings. I told Crowley’s assistants that I wanted my session with the Senator taped by Eve. They refused, claiming that the press was not allowed to enter, that the public park was an extension of Rep. Crowley’s office. I argued that this was ridiculous, that it was a public park and that I, and the journalist, had 1st Amendment rights that could not be suspended by his edict. I was immediately descended upon by a team of aides and security guards. I demanded to see Crowley directly and was eventually allowed to enter.

Crowley and I engaged in a borderline juvenile back-and-forth where he claimed his folding chair in the park was his office. I went with the obvious – water fountains, dog-walkers, tweeting birds, benches – it was a public park. And he was a public official who should be accustomed, if not willing, to be video taped. What did he have to hide? After a few heated words of outrage, I was surrounded by security and decided to head off to the mini-stardom which awaited me back on the line.

My conflict with Crowley demonstrates that single-payer activists and even democratic socialists have roles to play in the Town Hall meetings. We should first make sure that they are really democratic; that public officials are not hiding behind barricades, but are forced to face the public. We also have an important educational role to play – patiently explaining the universal benefits offered by single-payer healthcare. Finally, we should expose both Democrats and Republicans for what many of them really are – paid spokespeople for pharmaceutical companies and private health insurers. The website, OpenSecrets.org, offers all the resources you need. Educate, agitate and organize. Timeless injunctions that will serve you well at any town hall meeting, or even, at a town hall charade.

A call: “Tell me what Democracy looks like?”

And an answer: “This is what Democracy looks like!”

We were angry. And, history has shown, we were right to be. By that point the train of abuses had already been long and bitter. The lies about WMDs had long been thoroughly debunked—as we said they would be. And the country we’d claimed we were saving, we were clearly hellbent on destroying. The torture scandals were coming out. The Halliburton scandals were coming out. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people were already dead, killed in our beloved country’s name and the mission that had supposedly been accomplished a year earlier had already devolved into full-blown quagmire—as we said it would. As Cheney also once said it would, before setting out to create just that.

Millions around the country and ten of millions around the world had already been protesting, marching, signing petitions, demanding their fair voice in the public arena of ideas and steadily been ignored. We’d been branded traitors for telling the truth. So when the Republican National Convention came around in the August of ’04, once again tens of thousands, some said hundreds of thousands, took to the streets to tell our leaders, “We object.”

Tell you what Democrcy looks like? That is what Democracy looks like. And today, as I look back on the groundswell of passion, inventiveness, mobility, and anger at that time, I never would have imagined I would see anything like it, albiet on a lilliputian scale, by the right-wing of our country and never over anything as shallow as the selfish impulse to refuse to aid our fellow man. Nor would I have ever expected to see such love of hatred, such glee in condemnation, such lust of violence or such openly treasonous behavior from the same people who used to scream death threats at me because I wore a peace sign.

Fast forward five years and as the astroturf grows long on the “healthcare rebellion” of the fall of 2009, this past Monday I took my wife and daughter to see Obama and what we saw were ugly Arizonans instead. Whipped up by the fake grassroots efforts of Dick Armey and his junta of goons, enflamed by a propagandist media machine so toxic it makes Radio Rwanda seem tame, a thousand or so anti-healthcare reform activists surrounded the three thousand person pro-healthcare reform rally, taunting us with hatespeak for over four hours.

Quite impressive. The igonrance was astounding and so was the danger level.

I personally do believe that health care should be a universally provided service, like police care, or fire care. And so when the temperature rose into the low 100s by mid-morning, I carried water to both sides of the street because when it’s that hot, water is healthcare, preventive healthcare. Unlike the Republican leadership currently disgracing Arizona’s reputation the way Bush once did to our country’s, I also believe education should be a universally provided service.

And so, though I disagree with your message very much, I’m willing to give you some schooling.

First and foremost, “because you’re stupid, that’s why!” is never going to be regarded as a cogent argument in any debate. Spending three hours designing an elaborate sign that wittily insults Democrats, but which you cannot defend when politely asked about is no way to sway people. Simply chanting “Read the Bill” also does not qualify as an in-depth explication. And since it implies that the all the chanters actually did themselves read each and every page of every version of the several bills out there. It makes them look pretty silly in the hundred degree weather to be standing there with so many of their pants so obviously on fire.

And to angry people on both sides … Shut up. For those on the left side of the street, shouting with vengeful glee, “WE are the Majority!” does not guarantee the other guys are wrong. Remember? The majority once thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, though we told ‘em and told ‘em no. They also once thought Saddam did 9/11 and that George Bush was a good man. Being in the majority doesn’t mean you are right; it just means you can be swayed.

And you guys on the right? Please. These same people advocating violence and hatred to solve problems today are the folks who hated the 60s protesters for acting up during Vietnam. The folks carrying guns to the rally this past Monday are the same people who a year ago were calling for the extremination of Bill Ayers because he’d tried to use violence to stop America’s other great shameful war. And all Monday’s group wanted was to not pay taxes, especially if it was going to help the sick.

Is that the image you want for yourself? Probably not. Christians steer clear of this healthcare debate: not wanting to take care of the sick and the poor is guaranteed to make you look like a hypocrite.

Next, distance yourself from the angry nutjobs. It discredits your whole movement. I want to immediately acknowledge as I walked both sides of the street, still wearing my peace signs, I talked to several clearly passionate but also clearly spoken people who made the effort to communicate fairly and I learned once again that there is a lot of common ground between the left and the right when it comes to the problems we see in this country. Imagine what all we could accomplish together if you weren’t so intently busy calling us all those names they keeps telling you to call us.

If you really want people to think of you as good Americans, then when those nutjobs come around whipping up your anger to the point you want to hit somebody, tell them to go away. They are making you all look nuts. And, who knows but that they could be agents of the current COINTELPRO operation. You guys remember Operation COINTELPRO?

Started in the 60s, COINTELPRO was/is an effort to discredit and demonize anti-war/political opposition groups by infiltrating them with folks who would incite violence, embarrass, disrupt, divide or disorganize the group. Operation COINTELPRO and its subsequent generations have been implicated in protester misbehavior and violence in every anti-war movement since then and in the WTO mayhem in Seattle, as well the protests at both the 2004 & 2008 RNCs. Besides, do you really want to be associated with the ugliest of those images? Is that actually your impression of the American way?

If you really think the guy with the diapered donkey hung in effigy yelling demeaning epithets face to face with an opposing crowd of two thousand actually make your cause look noble, better check the old think machine because it’s obviously malfunctioning.

Also, and I’m sure you already know this, carrying weapons to a healthcare rally is clearly not about healthcare or freedom, it’s about threatening. We know it, you know it. Pretending it’s about your right to have a gun in Arizona only makes you look like a liar. It’s about being so scary your opponents are silenced: it’s a message—if you annoy me too much I’ll shoot you. No, it’s not about self-defense when you’re the one doing the bullying. It’s called assault with a deadly weapon. After all, it is an assault rifle. And no, no stampeding herd of deer were likely to attack us that morning in downtown Phoenix thus require the twenty shot clip and backup pistol on your hip, so you can’t call it hunting either. We know what you wish you were hunting and in America that’s not called patriotism, it’s called murder.

If your message is good, you won’t need to act badly to convince others of it. Speaking of which, the whole Hitler thing would really be comic if it weren’t so pathetic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did it too; but we were comparing Bush to Hitler for taking millions of lives, not saving millions of lives. Get a new slogan, that horse won’t run.

And lastly, you people who claim you hate socialism, better face it, a government at all, any type, is a socialist enterprise. Everyone of us protesters there that morning, both the pros and conned, all rode on roads built on the public dime, were protected by military and police forces paid for with taxes, and enjoy parks, schools, standard weights and measures, sewage systems and a host of other luxuries of the supposed developed nations. If you choose to live in society, you are part of the socialism.

The Preamble to the Constitution establishes the goals for the new government it was designed to create. The media and the GOP leadership as well have been quite willing to forget that insuring domestic tranquility and promoting the general welfare are both among our highest goals and both clearly socialist. For that matter, “For the People, Of the People, By the People” is the epitomy of socialism. And if you aren’t willing to work for those goals, then who is the real anti-patriot?

I searched all over the newspapers and TV transcripts and no one asked the President what is probably the most important question of what passes for debate on the issue of health care reform: $80 billion of WHAT?

On June 22, President Obama said he’d reached agreement with big drug companies to cut the price of medicine by $80 billion. He extended his gratitude to Big Pharma for the deal that would, “reduce the punishing inflation in health care costs.”

Hey, in my neighborhood, people think $80 billion is a lot of money. But is it?

I checked out the government’s health stats (at HHS.gov), put fresh batteries in my calculator and toted up US spending on prescription drugs projected by the government for the next ten years. It added up to $3.6 trillion.

In other words, Obama’s big deal with Big Pharma saves $80 billion out of a total $3.6 trillion. That’s 2%.

Hey thanks, Barack! You really stuck it to the big boys. You saved America from these drug lords robbing us blind. Two percent. Cool!

For perspective: Imagine you are in a Wal-Mart and there’s a sign over a flat screen TV, “BIG SAVINGS!” So, you break every promise you made never to buy from that union-busting big box — and snatch up the $500 television. And when you’re caught by your spouse, you say, “But, honey, look at the deal I got! It was TWO-PERCENT OFF! I saved us $10!”

But 2% is better than nothing, I suppose. Or is it?

The Big Pharma kingpins did not actually agree to cut their prices. Their promise with Obama is something a little oilier: they apparently promised that, over ten years, they will reduce the amount at which they would otherwise raise drug prices. Got that? In other words, the Obama deal locks in a doubling of drug costs, projected to rise over the period of “savings” from a quarter trillion dollars a year to half a trillion dollars a year. Minus that 2%.

We’ll still get the shaft from Big Pharma, but Obama will have circumcised the increase.

And what did Obama give up in return for $80 billion? Chief drug lobbyist Billy Tauzin crowed that Obama agreed to dump his campaign pledge to bargain down prices for Medicare purchases. Furthermore, Obama’s promise that we could buy cheap drugs from Canada simply went pffft!

What did that cost us? The New England Journal of Medicine notes that 13 European nations successfully regulate the price of drugs, reducing the average cost of name-brand prescription medicines by 35% to 55%. Obama gave that up for his 2%.

The Veterans Administration is able to push down the price it pays for patent medicine by 40% through bargaining power. George Bush stopped Medicare from bargaining for similar discounts, an insane ban that Obama said he’d overturn. But, once within Tauzin’s hypnotic gaze, Obama agreed to lock in Bush’s crazy and costly no-bargaining ban for the next decade.

What else went down in Obama’s drug deal? To find out, I called C-SPAN to get a copy of the videotape of the meeting with the drug companies. I was surprised to find they didn’t have such a tape despite the President’s campaign promise, right there on CNN in January 2008, “These negotiations will be on C-SPAN.”

This puzzled me. When Dick Cheney was caught having secret meetings with oil companies to discuss Bush’s Energy Bill, we denounced the hugger-muggers as a case of foxes in the henhouse.

Cheney’s secret meetings with lobbyists and industry bigshots were creepy and nasty and evil.

But the Obama crew’s secret meetings with lobbyists and industry bigshots were, the President assures us, in the public interest.

We know Cheney’s secret confabs were shady and corrupt because Cheney scowled out the side of his mouth.

Obama grins in your face.

See the difference?

The difference is 2%.

   Give ‘em the old hocus pocus
   Bead and feather ‘em
   How can they see with sequins in their eyes?

   What if your hinges all are rusting?
   What if, in fact, you’re just disgusting?

   Razzle dazzle ‘em
   And they’ll never catch wise!

   Give ‘em the old flim flam flummox
   Fool and fracture ‘em

   How can they hear the truth above the roar?

   Back since the days of old Methuselah
   Everyone loves the big bambooz-a-ler

   When you’re in trouble, go into your dance
   Though you are stiffer than a girder
   They’ll let you get away with murder

   Long as you keep ‘em way off balance
   How can they spot you’ve got no talent
   Razzle Dazzle ‘em
   And they’ll make you a star!

(From the film Chicago)

On Friday, July 31 Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman, honorary members of the “Blue Dog” Democrat Party caucus, agreed to allow the single-payer healthcare bill (HB 676) to go to a floor vote before the end of the year. Pelosi said earlier this year that “single-payer is off the table.” For some reason when Pelosi and Waxman make this kind of commitment I hear the voice of Jon Lovitz in the background saying “Yeah! That’s the ticket! Why of course, we’ll let them have a vote on the single-payer bill, yeah, that’s the ticket!”

A young woman friend explained me that when some creep says to her “hey babe how about giving me your number” while she is out having a drink with her friends she gives him the telephone number of “The Rejection Hotline.” The creep goes away and does not understand until the next day when he “gets the message” on the Rejection Hotline. Then it’s too late.

While it is clear that President Obama is bucking for the coveted title of “Most Incompetent President”, desperately trying to edge out James Buchanan, the Congressional Democrats have long since held the title of “Most Incompetent Legislators”. With only brief rises to competence during the 1930s and 1960s the Democrats have abandoned any pretense of actually representing the people who voted for them.

Why then suddenly are Pelosi and Waxman giving the “liberal” Democrats a vote on single-payer health care? Waxman is the dandruff-eating pimple-nibbler who cut the outrageous deal with Obama and the Blue Dog Democrats which ensured that health care reform legislation would be unsustainable, and would consequently put off meaningful reform for another 20 years. When over 70% of Americans and over 59% of American physicians want single-payer health care, why would the corporate owned Democrats risk the passage of the single-payer healthcare bill?

The move came about somewhat as a fluke. New York Congressman Anthony Weiner threw a curveball. He introduced an amendment that would have created Medicare for the entire nation into the Energy and Commerce Committee healthcare markup session. That blew Waxman away! Nevertheless, Weiner was so surprised when Waxman said he would allow a vote on single-payer healthcare, he made Waxman repeat the statement making sure that it was clear and on the record. I guess we can see how much Representative Weiner trusts Pelosi and Waxman! They are the moral equivalent of a pair of leeches.

BY THEIR VOTE SHALL YE KNOW THEM

Largely the vote is seen as symbolic but at least for the first time, the concept of universal single-payer healthcare: government-funded, privately delivered health care will be given public exposure to the nation. Furthermore, when the bill comes to a vote, members of Congress will be forced to declare a position. When the bill fails, as is expected, Democrat rank-and-file should understand that the “Blue Dog” Democrats are, in essence, Republicans. Just as the Republicans had their think tank “Project for a New American Century” the Democrats have their “Progressive Policy Institute” which is anything but progressive. It is in fact the think tank of the so-called moderate or Blue Dog Democrats and is right in sync with PNAC.

It’s important to understand this reality because the Democrat Party’s talking point disseminators, the Democrats’ version of Rush Limbaugh, as well as the average Democrat voter, appear bewildered that health care reform has taken so long given that the Democrats have an overwhelming majority in both houses. But of course there is simply not an overwhelming majority of “Democrats” in the House or the Senate.

The Blue Dog Democrats are in effect Republicans. There are about 52 of them in the House and a handful of “unofficial members” in the Senate. While the House Blue Dogs actually have a caucus and a website,the best guess as to whom the Senate members are includes: Evan Bayh of Indiana, Tom Carper of Delaware, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Mark Begich of Alaska, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Bill Nelson of Florida, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Mark Udall of Colorado, and Mark Warner of Virginia.

If President Obama had any concept of what it means to be a Chief Executive he would have brought pressure to bear on the Blue Dogs through the power of the bully pulpit as soon as he took office. He should have made it clear that any Democrat who opposes single-payer will face a challenger in the next primary. He should have kicked Pelosi and Reid in their collective butt to discipline House and Senate members to fall behind the House and Senate versions of the single-payer legislation. He should have done that for the Employee Free Choice Act as well. Just as the Employee Free Choice Act has been gutted, if Obamacare passes — that means any form of a public option which still allows the existence of private insurance companies — meaningful healthcare reform will be put off for another 20 years.

A MOMENT OF COURAGE

Up until this point the “Liberal” Democrats — the single-payer advocates — the antiwar Democrats — have essentially behaved like sniveling cowards having nothing to say as the various versions of a “public option” wash away the hope for meaningful health care reform. Usually when people like the liberal Democrats call the Suicide Hotline they are advised, “Go ahead; do it.”

To their credit however the liberal Democrats reacted swiftly when the conservative Democrats — 52 Blue Dog members of the House — said that they might block the healthcare bill from moving forward through the Energy and Commerce Committee. The liberals issued a letter bitterly attacking Waxman’s deal saying:

We regard the agreement reached by Chairman Waxman and several Blue Dog members of the Committee as fundamentally unacceptable. This agreement is not a step forward toward a good healthcare bill, but is a large step backwards.

Representative Lynn Woolsey of California said at a news conference “we have compromised, and we can compromise no more.”

NO HEALTH CARE PLAN IS BETTER THAN OBAMACARE

Just one day before Pelosi and Waxman agreed to permit the vote on single-payer healthcare, advocates of single-payer health held a press conference at the National Press Club. They unanimously urged Congress to defeat “Obamacare” which is defined as a weak or no public option plan which is bound to break the bank and not cover tens of millions of Americans; pretty much what we have in the United States currently. Dr. David Schneider — Obama’s personal physician for 22 years — said at this conference that he opposed Obama’s plan because it’s “a bad program that will set health reform back….It will give people a sense that something has been done — and it hasn’t been done…It’s a bad bill….No bill [at all would be] better than this bill….It will make things more complicated than ever.”

Sidney Wolfe, from Public Citizen said of the various “public option” plans that they are “false promises. It’s incumbent upon us to oppose something that cannot work.”

Jim Ferlo, a state Senator from Pittsburgh said he would “rather wait to get a single payer plan than any half baked Obama plan… [Obamacare is] just not going to work. It’s not sustainable. Any time you see Harry and Louise in paid commercials in the millions financed by big Pharma — now backing the Obama plan, and spending millions of dollars in daily commercials in favor of Obama’s plan — I say hold onto to your wallets. Something’s wrong.”

Dr. Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program said the Obama legislation “will not address the fundamental problems we are facing. It will not control costs.” Katie Robbins of Healthcare Now said her group would not support it even with the Kucinich amendment which would allow states to enact single-payer healthcare legislation.

Seeing liberal Democrats stand up on their hind legs is incredibly refreshing. It is as though we went back 500 years and heard Martin Luther say to the Church of Rome, “Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders” (Here I stand, I can do no differently). A dangerous position for someone to take back in those days when people who challenged authority were often given the choice of cold chop or a hot steak! Perhaps it is even more startlingly reminiscent of Milton’s account of Lucifer when he looked into the face of God and said “non serviam” (”I will not serve”). Everyone remembers what happened to good old Lucifer however!

THE BLUE DOGS

The reason the Blue Dogs have been able to swing so much weight is because they issue ultimatums — “if you don’t do things our way, we will throw your crummy healthcare plan in the shredder.”

If the Blue Dogs had written Patrick Henry’s speech it might have sounded something like “give me liberty or give me a reasonable facsimile thereof.” Instead of saying “I am Spartacus” we probably would have heard Blue Dog Roman slaves say “I am Spartacus…er…but only figuratively… I mean…er… HE is Spartacus.” A Blue Dog Benjamin Franklin might have been heard saying “those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve a little peace and quiet.”

The Blue Dogs are fiscal conservatives. They support pro-gun legislation, free trade, bankruptcy and tort reform, have anti-abortion voting records, oppose amnesty for economic refugees (called “illegal immigrants” by the mainstream media as well as the Blue Dogs), and they oppose welfare and entitlements. These positions would constitute an excellent platform upon which to build a party. But of course there already is a party with such a platform. It is called the Republican Party.

THE TYRANNY OF THE DUOPOLY

If the 85 House Democrats who pledged their support for HR 676 (John Conyer’s single-payer healthcare bill) remain firm and declare they will not support Obamacare or any other health care Reform Act than HR 676 and drew a “line in the sand”, then at least they would get a hell of a lot of press and the bill might actually stand a chance of passing. Unfortunately none of them have said “no” to Obamacare. Their moment of defiance was short-lived and mostly rhetorical.

Alarmingly, when the “liberal” Democrats acquiesce so easily to the Republicans even within their own party we find ourselves living in what Michael Parenti calls one “the worst forms of tyranny”. This is not one of those tyrannies “we rail against” but one of those insidious types of tyranny “that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.” It is the tyranny of the duopoly.

To live as if our choices make any real difference in the long run may be the act of a fool, but to live as if they do not, that is the act of a coward.

– Albert Camus

Near the beginning of the film, we meet Angel Dillard, a statuesque wife, mother, songwriter, singer, farmer, and pro-life advocate. Dillard is a Christian woman raised to be a critical thinker, which led her to the Republican Party.

Dillard and her family attend the Baptist church services of senior pastor Terry Fox — an avowedly anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-ACLU, and anti-Islam minister. It would be contradictory to describe this individual as pro-life given that he applauds the pro-death penalty. Fox’s strident pulpit causes a split in the church, and Fox finds himself a new parish in a fledgling amusement park.

A contrasting character is the 73-year-old crusty, straight-talking, liberal and artist provocateur M.T. Liggett. Said Liggett, “Gay marriage!? Who gives a shit? It’s none of my business. Abortion; it’s the same thing …”

Two camps are clearly delineated. Liggett respects individual autonomy — that no group has the right to impose its standards of behavior on another group. On the other hand is the view expressed by Brittany Barden, a volunteer campaigner with the Republic Party, that the United States is “meant to be a Christian nation; that is what the founding fathers intended.”

Bob Lippoldt, a substitute teacher and pro-life advocate, frames the liberals as “anti-Christian.”

Yet, Julie Burkhart, a pro-choice advocate, said, “I believe in what Jesus had to say … but I’m not a Christian.”

The pro-life versus pro-choice battleground occupies a chunk of the film, including the six-week so-called Summer of Mercy when pro-choice advocates targeted abortion clinics. This morphed into a well-organized and successful political movement. The long-time Kansan Democratic representative (1977-1994) Dan Glickman was the electoral target of the pro-lifers, and he was defeated.

When Glickman voted for NAFTA, he alienated many workers. Glickman noted that he had fared worst in blue-collar Democratic districts.

Bespectacled Dale Swenson, a former Boeing worker described a schism in the Democratic Party between “working class Democrats” and “Democrats of the leisure class.”

Swenson reasoned, “There’s nothing left within the Democratic Party for me to vote for if they are going to keep targeting the working class. If I’m in the crosshairs of the Democratic Party, then I’m not any worse off in the Republican Party.”

Donn Teske is a cigar-chomping, struggling farmer, farmer union president, and father. He detests the Bush administration but distances himself from the Democratic Party. He calls himself a Populist without a party.

Teske laments the current dog-eat-dog competition among farmers: “I’ve had friends who said, ‘I can’t wait until he goes broke so I can get my hands on it [the farm].’”

The separation between the two camps is wide. Dawn Barden, Brittany’s mother, deplores secular universities for having an alleged prejudice against Christian students. Dawn Barden claims that 80 percent of Christians leave the faith after studying at a secular college. Unexplored is why. Is not the testing of faith and its affirmation part of being a Christian? Was not Abraham tested? Was not Job tested? Is steadfastness to the faith not at the root of being a Christian?

Frank Thomas explores the radical Kansan political roots. The now defunct Populist Party had its origin in Kansas. Thomas refers to the socialist colonies of the nineteenth century as “My Kansas.” He calls for Liberalism to return to its roots. The question unanswered is: who will represent these roots?

Who are the liberals today? Thomas did not call for the development or strengthening of a “third party” movement. Instead of a future vision of progressivism, the film eulogizes the passage of worker parties in Kansas.

Frank wrote in his book, “For us it is the Democrats that are the party of the workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized. Understanding this, we think, is basic; it is part of the ABCs of adulthood.”¹ Implied was that by voting for Democrats the economic interests of regular Kansans would be served. Confining our analysis to recent decades, however, shows that the Clinton presidency and the Obama presidency have not protected the average Americans’s economic interests.

I wondered how Frank could get it so wrong — especially after how he recognized and depicted the economically self-defeating habit of middle America to vote for Republicans? Frank knows that the Democrats abandoned much of their base.

The film depicts the Democrats as a house divided. Fox’s church was a house divided. Jesus’s – and subsequently Lincoln’s – admonition about division is undiscussed, but it hangs heavy in the film.

Thomas points out that many in the working class voted for Bush in 2004 and at the top of their agenda were moral issues – but Bush’s agenda was economic, as in tax reform (to benefit the wealthy).

The film ends with the electoral defeat of the Republicans in 2008. God had not blessed the Republicans and neither did God bless the theme park venture nor the investments of Fox and many parishioners.

The Democrats are, for the time being, resurgent. Recently, however, Obama and the Democrats compromised on their committment to workers on the Employee Free Choice Act.

For this writer, the Democrats are a part of the corporate political duopoly that serves capitalist interests that exploits the workers, the poor, the weak, and the victimized. Understanding this, I submit, is basic.

The film explored the Kansan historical flirtations with populism and socialism. It did not delve deeply into Democratic politics like the book. What’s the Matter with Kansas? explores what drives middle-class Kansans and why they vote as they do. It is an illuminating film insofar as the political duopoly goes. Notably absent from the film was discussion of prospects for a credible “third” party movement on the political scene.

What’s the Matter with Kansas? will have its world premiere at Film Society of Lincoln Center on 6 August, at which point the DVD will also be released.

1. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Metropolitan Books, 2004):1.

EFCA had been the centerpiece of organized labor’s designs on the new Democratic president and Congress. The legislation was set to easily pass in the House of Representatives, and would certainly have garnered a majority of votes in the Senate, although not necessarily enough votes to defeat a filibuster.

The three key planks of the legislation were:

• A “card check” provision that would have allowed workers to form a union by a simple majority signing union cards. Card check is necessary because current labor law essentially forces workers to organize a union twice–once by signing cards and a second time in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election, often held months or even years later–all in the face of massive (and often illegal) employer intimidation.
• Binding arbitration on companies that refuse to sign an initial union contract. This measure is necessary because companies often refuse to bargain with newly formed unions, delaying negotiations until they can try to get the union decertified.
• Increased fines on companies that violate workers’ rights to organize. This is important because companies routinely break the law by firing union organizers to kill off organizing drives. While such employers may eventually have to pay fines for such actions, they view it as a worthwhile investment in what anti-labor lawyers call “union avoidance.”

Such legislation, even in its original form, wouldn’t have been a panacea to reverse labor’s decline. But it would have been an important tool for unions to organize the unorganized, and give workers confidence that federal law was on their side.

Now, however, a “compromise” in the Senate has jettisoned the card check provision–the most important part of the proposed legislation–from EFCA.

There are several suspects in connection to the murder of card check–and all of them are guilty, to one degree or another.

The first group in the lineup is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and corporate lobbyists, and their massive, multimillion-dollar K Street smear campaign. The next group includes, of course, congressional Republicans.

But with Senate Democrats now holding a 60-seat “filibuster proof” majority, EFCA’s killers needed the collusion of “moderate” and conservative Democratic senators–including Dianne Feinstein of California and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, the home state of anti-union behemoth Wal-Mart. Both reneged on earlier support for EFCA.
Behind this gang was a wider group of accessories–including other congressional Democrats and the White House, which failed to muster even a modest lobbying effort for EFCA.

Lastly, EFCA’s enemies needed a labor movement that pulled its punches to give Corporate America the political space it needed to finish off the pro-union legislation. Unfortunately, organized labor obliged.

How did things go so wrong?

First of all, labor misread the dynamics of the Democratic Party and its commitment to pass genuine pro-labor reform. While the Democrats put forward EFCA in the first place, they are at the end of the day a pro-corporate party. So predictably, they wavered on the legislation. The Senate hemmed and hawed for months, and the legislation remained in limbo.

Instead of disciplining conservative Democrats into supporting EFCA, the party leadership started the process of compromising on the content of the legislation. Ultimately, six Democratic Senators–Tom Harkin (Iowa), Arlen Specter (Pa.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Thomas Carper (Del.), Mark Pryor (Ark.) and Charles Schumer (N.Y.)–met behind closed doors and came up with the “compromise” that removed card check.

As the Atlantic Monthly put it:

“The failure of card check, now known as “majority signup,” speaks as much to the political priorities of the Obama administration as it does the power of moderate Democrats, most of whom opposed card check for fear of alienating employers in their mostly non-union districts.
“As of a few months ago, labor strategists could accurately claim as many as 58 votes in the Senate, just two shy of the magic 60 needed to avoid a filibuster. But even as President Obama and Vice President Biden dutifully praised card check in speeches, the White House did not put any political muscle into passing it, and they very clearly indicated to Congressional leaders that its passage was less important than health care, its economic stimulus efforts, its financial industry regulation proposals… “

The loss of “card check” is a major blow. However, if the remaining version were passed, it would still be an improvement over current law.
The “compromise” EFCA would include a reduced period for union elections–from three months to 10 days after union cards are filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The new EFCA would retain binding arbitration on first union contracts and increased fines on companies that violate workers’ rights.

It may also include something called “injunctive relief,” which would force employers to immediately reinstate workers if the NLRB believed they had been fired for union activity. Another possible amendment would provide greater access to worksites for union organizers.
However, since Democrats already gave away card check without a fight, there is little reason to believe they will mount a vigorous defense of the compromised EFCA when the Republicans move in to destroy what remains.

Meanwhile, Corporate America shows no sign of scaling back its multimillion-dollar war against EFCA, continuing a take-no-prisoners approach to defeat the proposal to force binding arbitration on employers.

Tellingly, opponents are now calling the compromise EFCA “card-check Lite.” The Chamber of Commerce’s Randel Johnson told reporters that his organization will “remain adamantly opposed to the bill, regardless of whether card check provisions remain in or out…the arbitration provisions are completely unacceptable to us.”

Labor’s response, by contrast, has been that of a deer caught in the headlights. The end of card check was announced just days after President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden met with 11 AFL-CIO and Change to Win union leaders to assure them that the White House remained committed to EFCA.

At the time, Communications Workers of America President Larry Cohen told reporters, “We believe [Obama's] commitment to [EFCA] is as strong now as it ever was…He said he will work with us to get this done.” Yet while the White House was promising action, the details of the killer “compromise” were being ironed out on Capitol Hill.

But labor leaders should not have been surprised. Several of them appear to have–at the very least–telegraphed their willingness to dump card check. According to the Chicago Tribune, “A Democratic official familiar with compromise talks on [the] bill…said union leaders are willing to drop the politically volatile card check plan to win over wavering Senate Democrats.”

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern, while publicly claiming absolute victory on EFCA was assured, were reportedly involved in ongoing “negotiations” on jettisoning card check.

Nevertheless, the official AFL-CIO blog had a “see no evil” take on the defeat: “Despite speculative news reports today, momentum for real labor law reform is still going strong, and we can still be optimistic that a bill will be signed into law this year giving workers–not their bosses–the choice about how to form a union.”

Stern echoed those sentiments–but went even farther in letting Congress off the hook:

As we have said from day one, majority signup is the best way for workers to have the right to choose a voice at their workplace. The Employee Free Choice Act is going through the usual legislative process, and we expect a vote on a majority signup provision in the final bill or by amendment in both houses of Congress. With Congress focusing on health reform legislation this summer, a vote on the EFCA is not expected until the fall at the earliest.

Stern also bears responsibility for the labor infighting that has made the fight for EFCA that much harder. Besides ordering the undemocratic takeover of the SEIU’s big West Coast health care local, Stern’s union has also absorbed a breakaway faction of the UNITE HERE union and launched raids on workplaces already organized by that union.

But many other labor leaders share the blame for the card check fiasco. Instead of harnessing the anger of union members to fight for what’s left of EFCA, some labor leaders appear to be lowering expectations. According to the New York Times:

One top union official, who insisted on anonymity because lawmakers and labor leaders have agreed not to discuss the status of the bill, said, “Even if card check is jettisoned to political realities, I don’t think people should be despondent over that because labor law reform can take different shapes.”

AFL-CIO spokesperson Eddie Vale also put a positive spin on the setback. “As Schoolhouse Rock taught us, this is the normal process of how a bill becomes a law,” he said, in a reference to the old educational cartoon for kids. “We are very optimistic about passing the strongest labor law reform since the Wagner Act,” a reference to the 1935 federal law that guaranteed workers the right to organize.
Vale’s optimism is almost certainly misplaced. And by focusing on the formal way “a bill becomes law,” labor leaders missed the real way pro-worker and pro-labor reforms like the Wagner Act were won–through struggle and grassroots mobilization.

In the case of EFCA, this would have meant protests, organizing drives, strikes and activating at least a fraction of the millions of union members in order to put pressure on ever-wavering Democrats.
A number of left-wing labor activists have argued for months that labor’s largely legislative strategy was putting the battle for EFCA at risk. While important local actions have been organized–most recently, a march of some 1,500 workers in Arkansas–they have been too few and far between to put enough pressure on the Senate and White House.

“Privately, union hands and progressives are sniping at what they view as a poorly handled legislative strategy,” wrote Sam Stein for the Huffington Post. “When Senate Democrats began airing their concerns with the bill, there was little pushback from the grassroots community. Instead, talk of compromise began almost immediately.”

This was true from the start–when unions pulled field organizers after the 2008 election rather than keep them in place to organize for EFCA, as originally planned.

It is time–once again–for organized labor to take stock of its serious and deteriorating situation. With wages declining and jobs continuing to melt away, unions are going to be necessary for millions to maintain their livelihoods–and even their lives. But to organize those workers we need a fighting labor movement, not one that compromises away its goals without any real battle at all, as it did with EFCA.

Union members and progressives are right to “snipe” about the failed strategy on EFCA. But criticism isn’t enough. We need to mobilize the union rank and file and unorganized workers to chart a new–and militant–course for organized labor based on class struggle and solidarity.

That’s how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually.

A few times since last fall, the Obama team has floated rising numbers for how many additional U.S. soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan. Now, deployment of 21,000 more is a done deal, with a new total cap of 68,000 U.S. troops in that country.

But “escalation” isn’t mere jargon. And it doesn’t just refer to what’s happening outside the United States.

“Escalation” is a word for a methodical process of acclimating people at home to the idea of more military intervention abroad — nothing too sudden, just a step-by-step process of turning even more war into media wallpaper — nothing too abrupt or jarring, while thousands more soldiers and billions more dollars funnel into what Martin Luther King Jr. called a “demonic suction tube,” complete with massive violence, mayhem, terror and killing on a grander scale than ever.

As war policies unfold, the news accounts and dominant media discourse rarely disrupt the trajectory of events. From high places, the authorized extent of candor is a matter of timing.

Lots of recent spin from Washington has promoted the assumption that President Obama wants to stick with the current limit on deployments to Afghanistan. Soon after pushing supplemental war funds through Congress, he’s hardly eager to proclaim that 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan may not be enough after all.

But no amount of spin can change the fact that the U.S. military situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate. It would be astonishing if plans for add-on deployments weren’t already far along at the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, the White House is reenacting a macabre ritual — a repetition compulsion of the warfare state — carefully timing and titrating each dose of public information to ease the process of escalation. The basic technique is far from new.

In the spring and early summer of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson decided to send 100,000 additional U.S. troops to Vietnam, more than doubling the number there. But at a July 28 news conference, he announced that he’d decided to send an additional 50,000 soldiers.

Why did President Johnson say 50,000 instead of 100,000? Because he was heeding the advice from something called a “Special National Security Estimate” — a secret document, issued days earlier about the already-approved new deployment, urging that “in order to mitigate somewhat the crisis atmosphere that would result from this major U.S. action . . . announcements about it be made piecemeal with no more high-level emphasis than necessary.”

Forty-four years later, something similar is underway with deployments of U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on July 7 that no limit has been set. Speaking to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he sounded an open-ended note: “There is not a ceiling on troop levels in Afghanistan.”

Mullen’s comment was scarcely reported in U.S. media outlets. It has become old news without ever being news in the first place.

The war planners in Washington are bound to proceed carefully on the home front. News of further escalation will come “piecemeal” — “with no more high-level emphasis than necessary.”