Putin’s legendary role in rescuing Russia from the economic abyss in the 1990s, staring down the oligarchs, reasserting state control over Russian resource wealth, and repositioning Russia as an independent player in Eurasia (not to mention in America’s backyard) — these signal accomplishments assure him a place in history books. He and Dmitri Medvedev are considered the most popular leaders in the past century according to a recent VTsIOM opinion poll (Leonid Brezhnev comes next, followed by Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yelstin the least popular). He will very likely pass the 50 per cent mark in presidential elections 4 March, despite all the protests during the past two months calling for “Russia without Putin”. So why is he back in the ring?

It appears he was caught by surprise when the anti-Putin campaign exploded in November, fuelled by his decision to run again and the exposure of not a little fraud in the parliamentary elections in December. For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opposition was able to unite and stage impressive rallies, one after another. Despite the chilling Russian winter, they keep coming — this week saw four gathering around Moscow, totalling 130,000.

The opposition poster children even include Putin’s minister of finance Alexei Kudrin. Presidential hopefuls are Communist leader Gennadi Zyuganov (backed for the first time by the independent left forces), nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, A Just Russia’s Sergey Mironov and the oligarch playboy Mikhail Prokhorov — none of whom stand a chance of defeating Putin. This time there are 25 televised debates which began 6 February among the contenders, who are sparring with each other and “Putin’s representative”.

Is this quixotic march back to the Kremlin heights a case of egomania? Or is it a noble attempt to both cast in stone Russia as the Eurasian counterweight to an increasingly aggressive US/NATO, and shaking up the domestic political scene to make sure it will not slump into apathy when he himself passes the torch? And if things go wrong, is this Russia’s very own White Revolution, long feared by the Russian elite, and long covetted by Western intriguers?

Russian politics has always confounded Western observers, and continues to do so. Putin is famously imperious and gets away with it. He taunted the opposition by saying he thought the original demonstrations were part of an anti-AIDS campaign, that the white ribbons were condoms. But he nonetheless sanctioned the largest political opposition rallies in the past 20 years.

US democracy-promotion NGOs such as the National Endowment for Democracy — a key player in Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution — are active in Russia’s opposition, but Putin is clearly gambling that Russians can see past US efforts to manipulate them. Besides, the winners in the Duma elections were the Communists and nationalists, with pro-Western liberals placing a distant fourth — hardly the results NEDers would have wanted.

He is also famously willing to tell US politicians they wear no clothes — the latest, last week in Siberia: “Sometimes I get the impression the US doesn’t need allies, it needs vassals.” Russian foreign policy is now firmly anti-NATO, both with respect to the West’s misguided missile system and its eagerness to turn Syria into a killing field. Rumours that a Russian Iran-for-Syria deal with the West have proved empty. There are even hints that Iran may still get its defensive S-300 missiles from Russia in exchange for Russian access to the downed US drone. Iran claims to have four already and recently announced they have developed their own domestic version.

Pro-Putin rallies are almost as large as the opposition’s, with an official count of 140,000 attendees at the festive gathering Saturday. The Putinistas even bill theirs as the Anti-Orange rally. “We say no to the destruction of Russia. We say no to Orange arrogance. We say no to the American government…let’s take out the Orange trash,” political analyst Sergei Kurginyan exhorted at Moscow’s Poklonnaya Gora war memorial park. Putin thanked organisers, commenting modestly, “I share their views.”

The real reason for Putin’s return is due to the failure during his first two terms of his “sovereign democracy” to limit corruption in post-Soviet Russia. Instead of producing a modernising authoritarianism along the lines of post-war South Korea, Putin’s rule deepened corruption — the bane of late Soviet and early post-Soviet society. Instead of trading political freedom for effective governance, he clipped Russians’ civil and political rights without delivering on this vital promise. Neither did he end collusion between the state and the oligarchs. That was the handle that bad boy Alexei Navalni used to catalyse the opposition around his slogan that United Russia is the “party of swindlers and thieves”.

This was the scene in the 2000s in Ukraine, where it was possible for the NEDers to undermine the much weaker Ukrainian state and install the Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko in 2004. However, instead of addressing the problems that led to the Orange Revolution, Putin focussed on foreign threats to Russian political stability rather than paying attention to domestic factors, creating patriotic youth organisations such as Nashi (Ours) and the 4 November Day of Unity holiday – the latter quickly hijacked by Russia’s nationalists.

But Russian fears of Western interference are hardly naïve. Russia was sucked into the horrendous WWI by the British empire, suffered devastating invasions in 1919 and 1941, and another half century of the West’s Cold War against it. Further dismemberment of the Russian Federation is indeed a Western goal, which would benefit no one but a tiny comprador elite, Western multinationals and the Pentagon.

Putin’s statist sovereign democracy – with transparent elections – might not be such a bad alternative to what passes for democracy in much of the West. His new Eurasian Union could help spread a more responsible political governance across the continent. It may not be what the NED has in mind, but it would be welcomed by all the “stan” citizens, not to mention China’s beleaguered Uighurs. This “EU” is  striving not towards disintegration and weakness, but towards integration and mutual security, without any need for US/NATO bases and slick NED propaganda. The union will surely eventually include the mother of colour revolutions, Ukraine, where citizens still yearn for open borders with Russia and closer economic integration. The days of dreaming about the other EU’s Elysian Fields are over. The hard, cold reality today has bleached the colour revolutions, making white the appropriate colour for Russia’s version of political change.

Of course, the big problem — corruption — is what will make or break Putin’s third term as president. At the Russia 2012 Investment Forum in Moscow last week, Putin outlined plans to move Russia up to 20th spot from its current 120th in the World Bank index of investment attractiveness, by reducing bureaucracy and the associated bribery. “These measures are not enough. I believe that society must actively participate in the establishment of an anti-corruption agenda,” he vowed. Reforming the legal system and expanding the reach of democracy will be key to fighting corruption, not just via presidential decrees, but through empowering elected officials and voters. He confirmed this in his fourth major pre-election address this week by promising to provide better government services by decentralizing power from the federal level to municipalities and relying on the Internet.

So far things look good. For the first time since 1995 there will be a hotly contested transparently monitored presidential election, with the distinct possibility of a runoff (unless the new US Ambassador Michael McFaul keeps inviting NED darlings to Spaso House). The sort-of presidential debates, large-scale opposition rallies and the new independent League of Voters intending to ensure clean elections are a fine precedent, making sure that this time and in the future there will be an opportunity for genuine debate about Russia’s future.

Despite all attempts to forestall Russia’s colour revolution, it has begun — Russian-style — with no state collapse, but with a new articulate electorate, wise to both Kremlin politologists and Western NGOlogists. Its final destination is impossible for anyone to predict at this point.

Corporations are people, my friend.

— Mitt Romney at Iowa State Fair

Corporations are obviously not people. But Romney is accurate in the sense that corporations have hijacked most of the rights of people while evading the responsibilities. An important part of the social justice agenda is democratizing corporations. This means we must radically change the laws so people can be in charge of corporations. We must strip them of corporate personhood and cut them down to size so democracy can work. People are taking action so democracy can regulate the size, scope and actions of corporations.

One of the most basic roles of society is to protect the people from harm. The massive size of many international corporations makes democratic control over them nearly impossible.

Corporate crime is widespread. The New York Times, ProPublica and others have revealed Wall Street giants like JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have been charged with fraud many times only to get off by paying hundreds of millions. Professors at University of Virginia have documented hundreds of corporations which have been found guilty or pled guilty in federal courts.

Corporate abuse is even more widespread. For example, Corporate Accountability International named six to its Corporate Hall of Shame, including: Koch Industries for spending over $50 million to fund climate change denial; Monsanto for mass producing cancer causing chemicals; Chevron for dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon; Exxon Mobil for being the worst polluter; Blackwater (now Xe) for killing unarmed Iraqi civilians and hiring paramilitaries; and Halliburton, the nation’s leading war profiteer.

Making corporations responsible to democracy of the people is challenging considering Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest corporation, does more business itself annually than all but two dozen of the two hundred plus countries in the world. Without dramatic changes, how can we expect people in small or even big countries to force corporations like Wal-Mart, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP, Toyota or Chevron to live by the same rules all the people have to?

Justice demands we make sure corporations do not harm people. Democracy must require that they operate for the common good.

In order to cut corporations down to size, the people must strip corporations of the special artificial legal protections they have created for themselves.

The story of how corporations took the full rights of legal persons in one of the great perverse tragedies in legal history. Corporations have worked the courts mercilessly since 1819 to take a wide variety of constitutional rights that were designed to cover only people. For example, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868 to make sure all citizens, particularly freed slaves and people of color, had full rights. There was no mention of protecting corporations. But corporations jumped on this opportunity resulting in a questionable Supreme Court decision that granted them legal personhood. At roughly the same time, the Supreme Court approved “separate but equal” racial segregation. Thus in thirty years, African Americans lost their legal personhood, while corporations acquired theirs.

Corporations now claim: 1st amendment free speech rights to advertise and influence elections: 4th amendment search and seizure rights to resist subpoenas and challenges to their criminal actions; 5th amendment rights to due process; 14th amendment rights to due process where corporations took the rights of former slaves and used them for corporate protection; plus rights under the Commerce and Contracts clauses of the constitution.

The most recent corporate judicial takeover of constitutional rights is the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission. The court ruled that corporations are protected by the First Amendment so they can use their money to influence elections.

Because of the bad Supreme Court decisions, it takes a constitutional amendment by the people to change the laws back. An amendment requires two-thirds of both houses of Congress to agree, then three-quarters of the states must vote to ratify. This will take real work. But despite the growing size and unrestricted power of corporations, people are fighting back.

Dozens of groups are working to reverse Citizens United and restore limits on corporate election advocacy. In January 2011, groups delivered petitions signed by over 750,000 people calling on Congress to amend the Constitution and reverse the decision. More than 350 local events were held in late January 2012 to challenge the Citizens United decision.

Groups challenging this injustice include Code Pink, Common Cause, Free Speech for People, Moveon.org, Move to Amend, National Lawyers Guild, POCLAD, Public Citizen, People for American Way, The Center for Media and Democracy, and Women’s League for Peace and Freedom.

Many groups are asking for a broad constitutional amendment that makes it clear that corporations are not people and should not be given any constitutional rights. Representatives Ted Deutsch of Florida, Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont have sponsored bills in Congress to start the process for a constitutional amendment to make it clear that corporations are not people, are not entitled to the rights of people, and cannot contribute to political campaigns.

There are also many energetic actions at the state level. People for the American Way list organizational efforts in nearly all 50 states to end corporate influence in elections or amend the constitution.

Massive corporations now rule the earth. But they are recent arrivals which can, and should, be dispatched. It is time for people to again take control. The legal fiction of corporate personhood and the constitutional rights taken by corporations must cease. Join the efforts to cut them down to size and restore the right of the people to govern.

Notes:

The variance in reported numbers (verified declarations) is due to some candidates making more questionable statements than others but, to be fair, some have had the opportunity to present a larger number of claims as a result of having remained in the primary longer and/or have had a greater number of questions put to them at the debates due to possessing higher poll figures, i.e. Romney and Perry’s triple digits.  (Of the latter, candidates with high poll numbers are granted more questions during the debates.)  Any statement made by a candidate that has not been given a designation by Politifact can either be considered to be factual and/or of little overall consequence or, in Politifact’s terms.

In deciding which statements to check, we ask ourselves these questions:

• Is the statement rooted in a fact that is verifiable? We don’t check opinions, and we recognize that in the world of speechmaking and political rhetoric, there is license for hyperbole.
• Is the statement leaving a particular impression that may be misleading?
• Is the statement significant? We avoid minor “gotchas”’ on claims that obviously represent a slip of the tongue.
• Is the statement likely to be passed on and repeated by others?
• Would a typical person hear or read the statement and wonder: Is that true?¹

How accuracy was calculated

The accuracy rate was calculated by adding the number of “True,” “Mostly True” and “Half True” (thus issuing benefit of the doubt since it is not listed as “Half False”) statements in contrast to the sum of those deemed to be “Mostly False,” “False,” and “Pants on Fire.”  The two grosses were then separately divided by the total number of statements, thereby deriving  the representative percentage of true and false claims.  I did not round up; i.e., the reason why some percentages total 99%.

Of the major candidates; i.e., ones who remained in the primary race for more than three debates (Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Huntsman, Paul, Perry, Romney, and Santorum), Bachmann has the lowest degree of accuracy (who also has the largest percentage of blatantly false statements) while Romney and Paul have the highest (Huntsman having made the lowest percentage of blatantly false statements).*

• “Blatantly false” equating to Politifact’s “Pants on Fire” designation or, in website’s terms, “[A] statement [which] is not accurate and [my emphasis] makes a ridiculous claim.”  More on how Politifact gauges veracity can be found here.

An explanation (and supporting research) by Politifact as to the motive/decision for every rating (or “ruling”) can be found via a hyperlink under each “Truth-o-Meter” gauge.  For example:

The Findings

1. Bill Adair, “Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter”, Tampa Bay Times, February 21, 2011

The bit gets lots of laughs, but here in White’s home state, it’s less and less funny—because we’ve been pretty stupid of late.

If that comes as news to you, let me bring you up to speed.

A little while back we re-elected a governor who refused to take part in a single debate. It was a preposterous antic that the majority of Texans stupidly overlooked. And stupid is the right word. Only a stupid electorate couldn’t have recognized the ploy for what it was: sheer shenanigans.

If you’re running for mayor of Lajitas and you’re a goat, you can get away with skipping campaign debates. But if you’re not a goat and you’re running for state governor, you can’t refuse to debate your opponents. It’s like calling yourself a cowboy but refusing to ride a horse.

At best, it was simply political calculation; at worst, it was cowardly chicanery. In either case, we were complicit.

We stupidly re-elected a stuffed haircut whose campaign highlight was gunning down an unarmed coyote. And if that wasn’t bad enough, his idiotic re-election success emboldened him to run for the highest office in the land.

Unfortunately for us and Governor Perry, you can’t win a presidential primary without participating in a debate. That dog may hunt in Texas, but it won’t hunt in other states where folks are a little brighter.

The 2012 Republican Primary was chockfull of ill-informed, asinine hopefuls, including Michelle Bachman, Rick Santorum and Herman Cain. But even in a field littered with that level of imbecilic company, our governor won the kewpie doll for top oaf.

It’s really no small accomplishment if you think about it.

Perry repeatedly distinguished himself as the candidate that was all hat, no cattle. He called Social Security a Ponzi Scheme.  He forgot one of the three federal agencies he claimed he’d cut if he was elected. He rambled incoherently about taxes and 16th century Founding Fathers and hugged a bottle of New Hampshire pancake syrup as if it was little Baby Jesus. He committed gaffe after gaffe and became the doltish darling of late night television comedy skits.

He made a fool of himself and us. But his muddled Republican Primary showing inescapably says more about us than him. We allowed him to serve a 4th term without subjecting him to a proper vetting process.

Honestly speaking, the most pathetic part of Perry’s flameout on a national stage isn’t that he made Texas look bad. It’s that—truth be told—he was truly and genuinely representative of Texans in general.

There’s no use in trying to run from it. If thinking was our strong suit, we wouldn’t be letting the natural gas industry turn North Texas land into a hazardous industrial “fracking” experiment that threatens existing and future water supplies. And if debating was something that came natural to us, we wouldn’t have stood dimly by while the Texas State Board of Education watered down our textbooks to foster a narrow-minded, conservative version of history.

The bad news is, we’ve been out to lunch. The lights were on, but very few folks were home.

The good news is, with all due respect to Ron White, “stupid” doesn’t have to be forever.

As famous, onscreen simpleton Forrest Gump once put it, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

If we stop acting stupidly, voting stupidly and/or standing stupidly by while ulteriorly-motived shysters whisk ludicrous bills-of-goods past us, make political footballs out of our differences and pull the dead coyote wool over our eyes in terms of what it means to be a real Texan, then we can step off the geo-political short-bus and take our place among smart states with real vision. Of the future and for the future.

A recall of Texas’ dumbest son would probably be too much to ask. But we definitely need a change of intelligentsia in the next governor’s race.

Come election night I would be overjoyed to see Obama lose and equally overjoyed to see the Republican candidate, whoever it is, also lose.  I cannot see how either Romney or Gingrich or even Ron Paul could possibly offer what is truly needed to fix the root causes of all the dysfunction, corruption and despair with the US political and government system.  And Obama?  Nothing but slickness instead of results.

Here is a central, common deficiency: No major presidential candidate has come out with strong support for any of the constitutional amendments critically needed to truly reform our system.  More than ever, after so much failed government, a whole lot of Americans are ready to support amendments that would, for example, mandate term limits for members of Congress, remove all private money from federal elections, require a balanced federal budget, and revitalize the constitutional requirement for Congress explicitly declaring war.

With one or two billion dollars spent on campaigning for this presidential election cycle the real winners will be all the media companies and army of campaign advisors and consultants getting all that money.  With the media and pundits focusing on the election the public has been robbed of real in depth news coverage of countless issues and situations worldwide that we should be far better informed about, especially to better understand exactly what public policies we should want from the president and Congress.  The mainstream media that treats the presidential campaigns like sporting events has become as superficial as the presidential candidates.

There is only one scenario that could make me enormously interested in the presidential election outcome.  With relatively little media attention to it, few Americans know about the Americans Elect national effort that will place a presidential candidate on every state ballot.  The candidates for president and vice president will result from a lengthy process conducted on the Internet involving millions of Americans that have signed up to be part of that process.  True, those two candidates that cannot have backgrounds from the same political party, but they may turn out to be somewhat familiar to us because of their past political efforts, though neither will be the same as those on the Democratic and Republican tickets.  For a fair analysis of this innovative process read what John Heilemann has said in New York Magazine.

Considering the widespread and deserved disgust among Americans with both major parties, there is a decent chance that people like me will be strongly motivated to vote for the Americans Elect alternative ticket.  It definitely will be a vote against both major parties.  If millions of Americans make this choice, then I will be overjoyed and so should you.  Why?  Because it may be the most important historic event that could motivate actions to get us genuine reforms of our political and government system.  The Americans Elect ticket does not have to win, just show the Democrats and Republicans how much they are both being rejected.

For this scenario to occur, however, people must stop thinking about the “spoiler” fear that both major parties promote.  Democrats want people to fear that a vote for the Americans Elect ticket will cause the Republican ticket to win, and vice versa.  In truth, by voting for the Americans Elect ticket we the people have the most important electoral choice to fix our broken system.  Think of it as an electoral revolution.  The imperative is to stick with your fundamental belief that in the end it really does not matter whether the Republican or Democratic presidential candidate wins, principally because elite rich and corporate interests will still prevail.  This means that the vast majority of Americans will continue to get screwed: The top one percent will still own and control our nation under either a Republican or Democratic president.  Keep remembering that both major party candidates have lied repeatedly, will keep lying, and will never implement whatever they have promised they will do to reform the system.

My best advice to you now: Stop wasting your time on following all the nonsense about the Republican primaries and later about the main campaign from both major party candidates.  Don’t let yourself be manipulated.  Instead, sign up at Americans Elect and join the 2.4 million Americans who have already joined the process to give Americans a true alternative to both major parties.  Note that 80 percent of people have said they are ready to support an alternative presidential ticket this year.  Will they put their votes where their words are?

At some point it will become necessary to mount a national demand that the Americans Elect candidates be allowed to participate in the pre-election national televised debates and also to demand that the mainstream media give equal time and attention to them.  If we are to convert our current delusional democracy into a genuine one, then the most patriotic and courageous thing to do is to support the Americans Elect effort.

Bush Pick Hailed as “Pragmatic Master Stroke”

Outraged Biden Joins Tea Party, Threatens To Sue

Obama Lauds Bush Vow To “Follow the Cheney Tradition” as VP

Washington, January 27 — Barack Obama today named George W. Bush of Crawford, Texas as his running mate, the first ex-president selected to run for Vice President on a major party ticket. The president announced his historic step before an ebullient crowd of Blackwater mercenaries on the White House lawn. ”There’s an electricity in the air, an excitement, a sense of new possibilities and of pride,” Obama told a section of cheering snipers moments after disclosing the stunning development.

Calling for an end to partisan bitterness, Obama introduced Bush as “an exciting choice” and “clearly the best” for healing a divided nation. Bush thanked the president for continuing the family dynasty, and offered to formally adopt him into the Bush clan if he thought it would “help carry the South.”

Obama said the decision to choose the former president was a ”difficult” one, but explained: ”GW has excelled in being bailed out, and this country certainly needs more of that!” He added that GW’s political return was ”really the fulfillment of a classic American tradition: to fail continually at everything and emerge triumphant anyway.”

Harvard Lawyer Obama Cites Constitution

”History speaks to us today,” Obama told the Blackwater throng. ”Our founders said in the Constitution, ‘We the people’ – not just the identity politics focus groups, but all of us.”

”Our message,” the president went on, ”is that America is a country of diversity where the spirit of conciliation overcomes all philosophical differences. As President Bush has said many times: ‘ politics stops at the water’s edge.’”

Bush, who was anointed president in 2000, has received the endorsements for the Vice Presidency of numerous Democratic Party organizations, including, On Our Knees, Inertia Unlimited, and Strength Through Servility.

Increase in Pragmatic Energy Seen

”He loves Israel, he’s charismatic, he believes in God,” enthused one adviser to Obama. ”We have broken the barrier. He will energize, not just southerners, but a lot of Republicans, which will make the Democratic Party more inclusive.”

Another adviser to Obama said that although Bush had engendered “unfortunate” bad publicity around foreign policy issues, he nevertheless would bring “new chemistry, new passion, and new understanding” to the ticket, especially of an often overlooked minority group: the rich. “People never seem to realize that as wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, the wealthy become a smaller and smaller minority group,” said Obama campaign manager Marshall Cash.

In the last three weeks Obama interviewed seven prospective candidates and made it plain that he was seriously considering a break in precedent and selecting a candidate who “reflects our values,” rather than just another identity politics token.

Ranking aides to Obama indicated last week that Bush had outdistanced Biden in his personal interview with Obama, as well as in his press comments afterward. Some aides said Biden had proved somewhat disappointing, a comment that angered the outgoing vice-president, who is threatening to sue.

Factors in Choice Listed

What apparently swayed Obama, Democratic officials said, was Bush’s experience in ramming through deeply unpopular policies, his considerable support among Blue Dog Democrats, and perhaps most important, his appeal to blue-collar superpatriots, coupled with his traditional “tough love” views, which seem to coincide with the president’s.

Bush had emerged in recent weeks as the strong favorite among pragmatic liberals, typified by the vastly influential NAACR, the National Association for the Advancement of Crackpot Realism. But Democratic advisers to Obama said the decision in favor of Bush was based heavily on the notion that his political strength would enhance Obama’s support among the super-rich and religious fanatics. “They vote,” explained Obama at the announcement ceremony.

At the conclusion of the day’s historic event, Obama and Bush clasped hands high overhead in the classic victory stance and called for world peace through the obliteration of Iran.

I penned a piece just the other day voicing my frustration with the newly formed Justice Party and the presidential candidacy of Rocky Anderson. I never had any misgivings about the platform of that party which,  if you take the time to research, covers all the hot spots — reform of Citizen’s United, restoration of basic Constitutional rights, curbing the MIC… In short, it’s a wish list for populists, or even those simply aware that we are on a path towards nothing but misery. Solutions are offered that would appear to benefit a large cross section of our citizens. But I deemed it useless and not worth the vote.

I’ve had some unsettled feelings about the entire issue and what role feels right in regard to these elections. But mind you, these thoughts are tempered with residual cowbell– you see, the Roadrunners’ game I just attended was celebrating cowbell night. The fervent pleas for more cowbell were indeed met with more cowbell, and that is ringing in my head as I write this, so be patient with meandering thoughts.

Back to the topic at hand.

My concern arose when the party seemed to be averse to grass roots volunteerism — the hint that it was more of a “just hand over some money” entity alarmed me. My other worry was more comical perhaps.  An e-mailer for the campaign included a quote from Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, perhaps the closest thing to kryptonite in my world. Admittedly it borders on lunacy. It’s as if someone took the entire contents of my mind, found the synapse sparking spots that react to negative stimuli, and built a man to activate each and every one of those brain areas. And that man is Thomas Friedman.

But here’s where it gets slightly more difficult. It’s hard to stay riled about an entity/campaign that treats your misgivings with honest answers. Rocky’s press officer promptly contacted me to express the very real issue that it is a brand new party, fraught with initial difficulties, like any would have. Those involved early on that seemed to adhere to a more self serving plan evidently are not with the campaign any longer. The desire is there for grass roots volunteer work, not just contributions.

And perhaps even more unsettling to my world view was a point Rocky Anderson made — he also took the time to write and address the concerns I voiced and even admitted to being “the guilty party” who opted for the Friedman quote. He stated that, yes, they are indeed short on money. They have limited themselves to only taking $100 per donor and, of course, no corporate money. That doesn’t put you in a very fiscally sound place so they truly do need to ask for money. It’s a far cry asking for a $100 dollars compared to being the kind of candidate who whores for Freddie Mac as a “historian”. It was wrong of me to blend any of that. I projected the misdeeds of others.

Sure, they are politicos and you expect them to say the right things, but in this age of bratty elitism, to have concerns addressed is still refreshing. I live in the state that had its governor harass a teenage girl for twittering “heblowsalot” in regard to the governor. Her school was contacted by the governor’s office and really…..he does blow a lot. She was right. That attempted aristocratic message control even against silly teens is what I expect from the political class, not honest admissions of problems and decent plans to fix them. I’ll admit it, that threw me off my stride.

I had to ask myself why would I be so quick to discard this party when I agree with pretty damn near everything they espouse. I suppose it comes from that nihilist pull that only comes after disappointment upon disappointment in regard to these political types. I’m pleased to say that I wasn’t taken in by Obama last time, but watching so many succumb to that perverted hope and change he so slickly marketed—well, the fear is there that the same thing could be in action. Hence, an overly protective but not very socially responsible reaction on my part. Give me one slight issue and I’ll discard the very idea of hope before it gets a chance to disappoint me. Hell, quote Thomas Friedman and I’ll run for the fire exit screaming!

I didn’t vote in the last election, but a moment of something like shame washed over me when my daughter asked where my “I Voted” sticker was. She saw them on her teachers at school that day. I felt ashamed, but how do you tell a child that you couldn’t bring yourself to chose either of those men? It’s a sad place to have no faith in any of it and it’s nothing I wanted to explain to a little girl.

I still don’t know the efficacy in participating in all of this. But one thing I do know is that there’s no harm in these ideas of decency being circulated. I was always ready with support for OWS, relishing the palpable change, the discarding of docility. OWS began a discourse on right versus wrong instead of left versus right, and that truly was a novelty.  So much has been contrived “culture wars” these last couple decades. It’s a leap of trust to think anyone involved in politics could bring us, as citizens, anything but harm, but at this point I’m already jaded.  If I get disappointed, I’m just back in the same place that I was — no real harm.

But if having these issues discussed by a third party opens minds….I guess I should admit that this is only positive. Others will have to look in their souls and decide what they think. Obviously, I’ve got some volatility in regard to the issue, but hearing out this campaign, I’m left with the uncomfortable realization that not only is Thomas Friedman a jackass, but so am I!

I’m not a Ron Paul supporter, but I have enjoyed the anti-imperial war message he has thrust into the Republican debates. You have to wonder what the ideas of outliers can spark in others. And there’s no creepy undercurrent with Anderson. Maybe some logistical issues in utilizing volunteer help, but that’s a pretty small sin, isn’t it?

Now the Thomas Friedman thing. I suppose I should just write a screed about him and get it over with, and not hit the Justice Party in the crossfire. But, really, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work by Belén Fernández took that task and created pure art with it. I couldn’t improve on that worthy read. But in a moment of clarity, I can understand that the message that a third party could have serious impact on national discourse could hit a soft spot in a third party candidate, and that might induce one to quote him. Rocky Anderson made it clear that his interest was in that third party issue, not any kind of fawning support of Friedman’s other more destructive input.

The world is full of authoritarians who will never admit to being wrong or even consider such things. I’m sure that’s a more solid and comfortable world view, but I was born a Permissatarian, and I’m wrong a lot. I shouldn’t have discounted this candidacy for the trivial. I’m not a true believer by any means. I do think anyone who came too close to upsetting the balance might be in some serious trouble, but an eroding of the business as usual mentality….that I could see happening. Who knows where that might go? I truly believe there will be no discernible difference in a Romney or Obama administration. So the spoiler issue is moot to me. I have decided to listen and consider the good of this.

I started that last piece with a snippit of a song from that band The New Pornographers, but perhaps this was the passage more apt:

What’s the weight of the world worth to you, kid
Go write down what you see
And see how far it can go
What’s the weight of the world worth to your side
Here is where you got lost
And here is how you got by

I got by being cynical and quick to dismiss. That’s how. But who knows? Maybe I will have that “I Voted” sticker on this year. Stranger things have happened. But the best thing for others to do would be to check out this issue on their own. Go to the Justice Party site and consider.

But hoo boy, Rocky Anderson — don’t even think of sending me an email with a quote from David Brooks!

I promised you. And here’s the party it turned into.

So sing the New Pornographers, and so sounds in my head, as I consider the third party option that dangled brightly for but a moment. I’m talking about the Justice Party and their candidate for president, Rocky Anderson.

Yes, the Justice Party was a bit of a hokey name to go with, providing mental images of superheroes in tights, but clearing that away, the word justice is pretty beautiful if ever realized. What I was able to glean from their talking points, the party and Anderson, that is, cover most of the issues so necessary to mention  – the never-ending wars, the civil liberty shredding, the lack of decency and fairness….Even a political atheist like me started to become intrigued a bit. Anderson’s presentation at a Daughters of the American Revolution meeting even made me reconsider my thoughts on those old birds.

I had come to a point that I considered voting to be of absolutely no use, however. Our corporate state choices held only insult for me — the impression that your voice mattered — a psychological opting into the system, and I didn’t want any of that.

But…..here’s this individual saying such lovely things. I took the bait. Who doesn’t have a shred of wanting to believe left in them?

I contacted the group advancing this candidate, offering grassroots support in my area. Basically offering whatever they might need — someone to get signatures, bake brownies, hold informative campfire sessions with smores….whatever. (Well, I lie a little. I toned down the crazy and just made a blanket offer that certainly had all the hallmarks of sanity. I did nothing to scare them away). Mind you, I offered this from a spot in the nation not known for swaying in any direction other than red in major elections. And this is a candidate that I am quite sure you could ask the first 100 people you come across about and they would not know of him. So I think offering up your services and your mind should count for something in such a small enterprise.

But in much the same way that the big campaigns work, all that I was met with was a blanket request for donations. Nice. That’s not been done before! I know this campaign pledges to refuse corporate money (although in honesty, I don’t think this would be an issue….it’s like a husband pledging to refuse any and all sexual advances from Angelina Jolie and Monica Belluci if they propositioned him at the same time — not gonna happen).

It’s still a bit of a put-off when you’ve offered up something real, but the cold cash is the request that you receive. Ah well, the perfect is the enemy of the good and all that, right? I continued to listen and consider because the only other option is completely sitting out. I thought I was comfortable with that, but a nagging childish desire to believe in someone still lurked, as jaded as I pretend to be.

But then there was this. The Justice Party actually quoted Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum in a recent blanket fund-raising email—shared quotes from the book “That Used to be Us”. Yes, the quotes were largely benign, indicating a third party could have an effect on national policy, but good grief, this from a book that also blabs “China’s educational successes, industrial might, and technological prowess remind us of the ways in which “that used to be us.”  Really? Because I don’t recall hearing that there were anti-suicide nets on our factories in your days of yore like at China’s infamous Foxconn. How far back is Friedman and friend yoring? To slavery days? Sending a request for funds and my vote along with a Friedman quote—are you completely batshit insane? I’m guessing those inclined to vote for such an entity might have the same visceral reaction. Are you even trying to achieve anything?

I’ll admit I have an especially strong allergy to Friedman. I once worked in an especially beautiful corner of the world, the White Mountain Apache Reservation. I had a position for a time at the local high school. The principle had evidently just completed reading “The World is Flat” by Friedman, and felt obliged to carry over that filth to the young Apaches. In a staff meeting he proclaimed that these kids needed to know that they would be competing with places like India and should be prepared for such. Now, I had an entirely different take on it. These kids lived in a beautiful spot, lush with plenty of rain, lots of fish and game, and also a few benefits like an okay to operate gambling institutions, pretty much a license to print money.

But they allowed charlatans like the principal to convince them that all needed to be done in the flat world model. Bring in experts, let them run your businesses (and make off with lots of the money) and then cry about the kids not fitting into the modern world. Is it any wonder suicide and meth use on the res was hideous? Trying to fit your beautiful world into the mechanistic squalor of Friedman’s ideology — that’s a recipe for disaster if not dementia. The days of cultural genocide continue unabated, I guess. And one could say I’m deluded, that, yes, the principal was correct about the competition, but that’s a race to the bottom in that flat world model.

But I stray;  it’s just background for some of my venom towards the likes of Friedman — and what passes for an intellectual these days — a guy with a sugar momma heiress to give him entry to a world of obliging publishers and unquestioned media support and pitching misery to boot.

So, Justice Party….did you think that one through? Or is the campaign just like what many suspect several of the Republican campaigns to be? Something of an attempt at increasing name recognition for a further book deal? I’m actually pretty disgusted that you didn’t consider that your potential supporters like me wouldn’t care to see a Friedman and Mandelbaum (the guy Foreign Policy magazine calls good “for teaching America to be a hegemon on the cheap”) quote being given within your request for my money.

In summary, third party cruel tease….what the hell were you thinking?

If the perfect is the enemy of the good, surely the stupid is the enemy of the possible.

Back to reality, back to the realization that voting in this rigged circus will not solve the problem.

I pledge in the year 2012 to link the fight against war to the fight for justice and to do so without exception.  With equal vigor I pledge to fight for justice with total disregard for the fight against war whenever it suits me.  I pledge to follow the MoveOn segment of the Occupy Wall Street movement in so doing.  I pledge that this will be the cornerstone of my approach, to be known henceforth as Van Jones Logic.

I pledge to exclude potential allies who do not share my notions of justice from the antiwar movement.  After all the antiwar movement belongs to progressives.  I pledge to keep at bay libertarians, paleoconservatives and, above all, the average American Jane and Joe, with an unscalable Chinese Wall of political correctness.  Let’s keep out the riff-raff.  For this I pledge to look for leadership to “Progressive” Democrats of America, UFPJ, Peace Action and Juan Cole.

I pledge neither to sponsor nor to join any large antiwar marches or demonstrations this election year. For if there are antiwar marches, it is a sure sign that there are wars.   I pledge, if forced into such marches of folly in order to preserve my credibility or my donor base, to censor any mention of Obama.   I pledge to treat impeachment as a taboo subject.

I pledge until November 7, 2012 to keep far from my consciousness the unspeakable suffering being visited on the darker peoples of the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia by my president with his sanctions and bombs.  These sufferings are as nothing compared to the purity of my movement and the hollow promises of Obama for better social programs.

I pledge to avoid like the plague any consideration of Ron Paul.  I pledge to  tear him down with bogus charges of racism based on guilt by association.  I fully recognize that Ron Paul is especially dangerous, because every day he converts more to the antiwar cause and thereby threatens a breach in the wall that keeps antiwar barbarians out of the movement we own.  I thought libertarians respected property rights.  If pressed, I may whisper a word or two of praise for Ron Paul but never a full throated endorsement – and never, ever anything good without walling it off with airtight condemnation.   I pledge most of all never to aid Ron Paul by money or action.  After all, what would my friends say?

I pledge never to think tactically when it comes to Ron Paul, as many progressives do with their favorite candidates, forgiving piddling shortcomings – like voting for DoD funding.

I pledge to work with others to keep a serious challenge to Obama from emerging in the Democratic primaries.  I recognize that this work is largely done with the passing of the New Hampshire primary and Iowa Caucuses; and I find myself on occasion smiling with satisfaction at this feat.  I pledge to remain vigilant nonetheless.  If our man, Obama, becomes even more embarrassing to the antiwar movement, I pledge to support a candidate from the moribund Green Party or some other entity cobbled together quickly, with no extensive organization and no hope of winning.   If we cannot bring ourselves to vote for Obama, let’s get out there and waste our votes.

I pledge in the year 2012 to hold fast to wishful thinking – Obama is our man. I pledge to remind one and all that Obama is keeping secret his loyalty to the progressive cause to avoid criticism by Republicans.   And he is proving damned good at it.  I pledge to believe that combat troops left Iraq because Obama wanted it, not because Bush signed an agreement to do so (and to ignore the fact that Obama wanted to stay but Maliki refused).  I pledge to believe that those troops returned to the US (and ignore the fact that most of them were transferred to other countries). I pledge to believe that the NDAA is the Republican McCain’s idea (and ignore the fact that is was Obama’s baby according to Carl Levin). In general, I pledge to ignore reality, and to believe in the virtual world presented to me by the progressive authorities and gatekeepers.  It will be as easy as doing my yoga or meditation.  And besides Obama is sure to change course in his second term.

In sum, I pledge to ignore Obama’s Patriot act, his numerous wars, his bloated military budget, his deficit, his service to Wall Street and to the insurance industry.  This is his dazzling plan to protect us from Republicans by tricking them into thinking that he is their man, so they will vote for him – our man!  It is nothing less than brilliant.

Inevitably, after peeling past the pre-programmed slogans Ron Paulistas bring with them, you will discover a person – generally white and overwhelmingly male – looking for some alternative to mainstream politics. Ever susceptible to slick marketing campaigns thanks to a solid diet of American television, these zealots have bought it hook line and sinker in a typical conspiratorial fashion. The lynchpin is the Federal Reserve, a seemingly mysterious institution, which in the world of Ron Paul politics stands in as a more acceptable substitute for the variety of other conspiracy theories floating through far-right America including the Bilderbergs, the rich as secret lizard people and the Masons.

Yet, the idea that Ron Paul offers a kind of alternative to mainstream politics falls apart quite easily upon inspection. There are three primary reasons for this – two relate to Paul himself and the other is a function of mainstream politics more generally. In the end, it is more accurate to say that Ron Paul is mainstream politics unmasked, a raw version of what both Democrats and Republicans desire to become if left to their own devices.

Key to this is seeing Ron Paul economics for what they are. Forget the Fed. Leave aside all the slogans about “living within our means” and “punishing generations with debt” for a moment. Ron Paul is the most pro-corporate politician in the Presidential race. His economic policies would further unleash multinational corporations and the 1% who own them onto American society – with absolutely no restraints. Paul is virulently anti-union in part because unions give workers a collective identity in order to regulate worksites. He opposes government regulation on employers since he connects their activity to his notion of “liberty.” And he has repeatedly associated taxation, even taxation of the corporate world, as an affront to freedom.

Taken together, Ron Paul’s notion of economic liberty is an only slightly disguised version of the hyper-neoliberal ideas that have been circulating since the 1980s. What is different now is that the circulation is taking place in the aftermath of an economic crisis that has unmasked the bankruptcy of the very idea Paul is promoting – capitalist economics. Although Paul presents his economic proposals as alternative non-mainstream notions, they fit perfectly inside the rise of the multinational corporations and the deep enrichment of the 1%. Albert Einstein offered the best bit of advice on how to deal with folks like Ron Paul when he said “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Giving corporate America a free hand to rampage through our economy, our communities and our environment is more of the same.

Ron Paul supporters mix this pro-corporate economic package with a fairly typical set of reactionary social policies. He has opposed any legislation in support of gay marriage on the Federal level and was neutral on the “don’t ask don’t tell” seeing the problem as less one of discrimination and more of “seeing people as part of groups.” Paul’s positions on race are even murkier due to his frequent open associations with white supremacists and the general acceptance of his ideas amongst this repugnant community. But his most explicit reactionary position is reserved for gender, more specifically the issue of sexual harassment. Here, Paul claims that anything less than penetration does not qualify as sexual harassment – words don’t matter. Females who file sexual harassment suits are, according to Paul, oppressing others. They should, instead, just exercise their right to choose a different job. Misogynist victim blaming at its worst.

The final reason that Ron Paul is not an alternative is the very reason that links him to mainstream politics. Just like Obama, Romney and Gingrich, he offers no concrete plans to address the problems that most affect people’s everyday lives. He doesn’t have a serious plan for housing. He would, just as his counterparts, continue the failed capitalist housing policies, probably adding some rhetorical flair about the liberty and freedom built into the feelings of anxiety most Americans feel when it comes to housing. His education policy is similarly irresponsible. Paul chooses to devolve education decisions onto state and local government while giving private enterprises a strong hand in further commodifying education in America. And on health care, his policies are merely a pumped up version of the pro-market policies of his Democratic and Republican counterparts.

Although Paul’s foreign policy position is trumpeted as being far off from his Republican counterparts, it contains many mainstream elements. Paul himself is always quick to indicate that his “non-interventionist” position does not mean that he wishes to radically transform the US military. He constantly issues the call for a “strong national defense” which translates into a well-funded military. As he stated directly in a recent interview, “My Plan to Restore America does not cut one penny of defense.”

Unfortunately, Liberals and even some Greens have taken the anti-war bait and Ron Paul has been able to make coalitions with otherwise ideological opponents such as Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader. This has given Paul some cred among anti-war types while creating confusion between having a position against military intervention and being anti-militarist.

While the “Ron Paul as alternative” charade rolls along, candidates carrying ideas clearly outside of the mainstream struggle to carve out some media attention. One is from my own organization, the Socialist Party USA – Stewart Alexander. Alexander is running campaign for President on a platform filled with radical ideas that would address many of the problems raised by the 2008 economic crisis. He has some new medicine for an old illness.

On economics, the Alexander/Mendoza campaign recognizes the destructive role of the 1%. Creating a progressive tax structure that captures the wealth at the top of society, designing a banking system that works like a highly regulated public utility and addressing the unemployment crisis by viewing a job as a human right means transforming an economic system that has failed the 99%. Similar proposals to open the education to all, to preserve our precious natural resources and to fund a worker owned and managed cooperative sector are clearly different than the re-hashed blather being served up by mainstream politicians.

Economic democracy is also connected to personal freedom. The Alexander/Mendoza campaign is one of the few that recognizes just how corporate power prevents Americans from fully exercising their civil rights. Corporations are not people and people need a voice – a voice that will be unchained as a result of electoral reform, the breaking up of media monopolies and the campaign’s support of people’s right to self-determination whether it be through marriage, adoption or alternative family structures.

Finally, Stewart Alexander is offering a radically different approach to the military. He is a passionate anti-militarist. Both he and his running mate, the ex-Marine, Alex Mendoza know the wasteful destruction that the US military has created. The pair call for a closing of all foreign bases, an end to security state measures and, unlike Ron Paul, an immediate 50% reduction in the military budget. They understand that anti-militarism is about more than opposing intervention – it is about re-thinking how our country relates to the rest of the world.

So, as the Presidential campaign heats up, it is important to see past the media spin – especially when the spinning is done in order to create false alternatives. The Obama campaign will certainly begin its own campaign to present their candidate as offering solutions beyond the mainstream. Such claims will be every bit as shallow as the notion that Ron Paul offers some new set of ideas worthy of the mantle of being alternative. There are some alternatives out there and their voices need to be heard. One of them will be running red, on the ticket of the Socialist Party USA and carrying with him the hope of moving past the miserable future created for us by capitalism.

In recent years, particularly since the onset of the Great Recession, it has become clear to many Americans that their country is composed of two different societies with clashing interests — a very small minority in possession of great wealth and power, and everyone else, with some getting by and many falling by the wayside.

As a consequence, large numbers of people now perceive to one degree or another that big money not only manipulates most elections but influences a great many of the politicians and bureaucrats who craft legislation and execute the policies of the U.S. government. Awareness is spreading that crony capitalism —the corporations, banks and Wall Street — controls the economic system which shapes the political system where decisions are made.

But the beat goes on, of course, until mass consciousness transforms into mass action.

In domestic politics, 2012 opened with the Republican Party’s three-ring circus in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the initial contests  to select a presidential nominee. On display is the most bizarre collection of clowns in recent political history. At this stage the battle is between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, who is still favored for now. The struggle within the GOP between ultra right and ultra right “lite” will be determined soon, signaling the start of the best election money can buy.

Which ever party wins in November — and we think President Barack Obama will be reelected — the contest is not between right and left but between right/far right and center right. No matter what the result, progressive change will not be the product. The best outcome might simply be keeping the crazies at bay.

In international affairs, the year opened with U.S. cannon shots aimed just above the heads of America’s multifarious enemies, identified as being mainly in Asia and the Middle East, warning them not to mess with Uncle Sam, as though they were about to.

As the shots reverberated, the American people were told:

Good morning, everybody. The United States of America is the greatest force for freedom and security that the world has ever known. And in no small measure, that’s because we’ve built the best-trained, best-led, best-equipped military in history — and as Commander-in-Chief, I’m going to keep it that way….

These “reassuring” hyper-nationalist words from the Commander-In-Chief were expressed January 5 during a visit to the Pentagon to explain Washington’s dangerous new war policy. A secondary purpose of the plan is to facilitate Pentagon spending cuts in the next decade, but future allocations will not drop one penny below George W. Bush’s bloated war budgets.

Abruptly, the U.S. is supposed to be confronted with a “threat” from China, necessitating that the Pentagon surround that country with even more of its far superior  weaponry, more troops, battle fleets heading in closer proximity, surveillance aircraft, space weapons and long range nuclear missiles.

All this is part of Obama’s recent “pivot” to Asia, as though we ever left, the main goal being to weaken China within its own natural sphere of interest in order to secure Washington’s need to remain global top dog. China is no military threat to the U.S. today or in the future, given the Pentagon’s two-decade head start in all the technologies of conflict, and the fact that America’s war budget is, and will remain, many times that of China.

In addition, there seems to be an imminent “threat” to our way of life from Iran, as well as the continuing “threat” to U.S. democracy from some poor tribes in Afghanistan.

Actually, according to “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” the document explaining the new war plan, the U.S. faces additional “threats” throughout the world, specifically including (aside from those mentioned): Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and  “elsewhere” (our guess is Africa, where Obama’s already inserting troops). Primary regions to worry about, says the Pentagon plan, are South Asia, Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Northeast Asia, Eurasia, Southeast and East Asia, plus future, unforeseen demands.

Despite all these “threats,” which are largely invented to justify war spending and keep the American people supportive of the militarism that now pervades our society, Obama twice mentioned in his speech the “tide of war” is receding. But if that is true, why station 40,000 troops in countries around Iraq after withdrawal? Why deploy attack-ready bombers and Navy aircraft carriers near Iran? Why keep nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and make demands on Kabul to allow thousands more to remain indefinitely after the planned “withdrawal” in 2014?

The U.S.-Israeli crusade against Iran may result in an attack this year. The New York Times reported January 12 on an “accelerating covert campaign against Iran consisting of assassinations and bombings. The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim January 11 when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour.”

On January 14, Iran charged the U.S. and Israel were behind the scientist’s murder. That same day the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House was worried that Israel will attack Iran before the U.S. gives a go-ahead. But four days later the Times reported Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared “any decision on a possible pre-emptive military strike on Iranian targets was ‘very far off.’” Stay tuned, the year’s just started.

The American people are supposed to be safer this new year because President Obama just signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act allocating $662 billion in military spending in 2012 (plus an equal amount for other “national security” purposes in other budgets).

Civil liberties groups criticize the Pentagon bill because it also authorizes an “indefinite detention” clause that is one more step toward a police state. Obama’s civil liberties record is worse than that of his predecessor because he retained Bush’s excesses and added his own.

A few days after Obama’s bragging about the “best-trained” military, the Pentagon and the secretaries of defense and state were forced to publicly apologize in the wake of an international uproar over circulation of a video showing four U.S. Marines jovially urinating on the corpses of Taliban suspects. A couple of days later a U.S. military legal officer recommended that PFC Bradley Manning face a court martial for transferring documents including evidence of U.S. war crimes to the whistle blowing website WikiLeaks. And so it goes, day by day into 2012.

Washington maintains that the Great Recession ended in June 2009 and the economy is on the mend. Stock prices are up, corporate profits are zooming, and the wealthy are exhausting the nation’s supply of money bags.

The corporations, banks and Wall St. have been abundantly helped through the tough times by the Obama Administration, but little help has trickled down to average working families. Recession conditions will continue in 2012 for much of the “bottom” 80% of the U.S. population, including high unemployment, more foreclosures, and stagnant wages. Half the families in our Land of Opportunity are low income or poor.

Early in January, the new Pew Research Center survey of 2,048 adults contained a most unusual result. It found that 66% of the people in our “classless society” believe there are “very strong or strong conflicts between the rich and the poor” in the U.S. This is big news, evidently based on growing comprehension of what are, in fact, class differences.

The top 1% now possess more than 50% of all privately held assets in the U.S. (Assets are everything you own including cash, car and house minus debts.) The top 20% possess 85% of all assets. This means the bottom 80% of the people have accumulated only 15% of the assets (including the bottom 40%, who have no assets at all because they owe more than they own).

However, there is one aspect of our system that is said to prove beyond doubt that all Americans — rich and poor alike — are actually equal in our society where it really counts. We speak of each citizen’s right to vote in the quadrennial selection of a Commander-in-Chief, known popularly as the presidential election.

President Obama has transformed his rhetoric into that of liberal populism for the duration of the campaign. He now talks about having government intervene to help reduce inequality and help build a more “equitable” society, not that it’s going to happen. He now even tut-tuts about crony capitalism.

Obama sure sounds even more progressive than when he was a “change-we-can-believe-in” candidate in 2008. This was before governing as a center-right patron of the ruling establishment for the last three years, ignoring poor, low income and minority Americans as though they didn’t exist, initiating a completely failed program for the millions who have been foreclosed, and changing little to nothing, even in his first two years when the Democrats controlled the House as well as the Senate.

Probable opponent Romney has undergone a similar opportunist transformation in the opposite direction in order to obtain the GOP nomination. He’s now campaigning as a right/far right populist this year after governing Massachusetts as a health care moderate conservative and who earlier supported abortion, and gun control, among many flip-flops. Gingrich has always been an ultra-reactionary hypocrite going back to the early 1990s in the House, and hasn’t seen the need to adopt a new persona for 2012.

The main reason we believe Obama will be reelected has nothing to do with his record as president. It is that the Republicans have gone so far to the political right, and have acted like such obstructionist buffoons in Congress, that the crucial independent vote will lean toward the center-right. The Democratic leadership hopes Gingrich becomes the candidate because he’ll campaign as a far rightist while they fear Romney may moderate some of his rhetoric. But even so, Obama’s nearly $1 billion war chest should finish him off.

Assuming Obama does return to power, we know now, as in the 2008 campaign, that a “liberal” will not be occupying the Oval Office for the next four years. The pro-99% rhetoric will stop at the second term White House door.

American politics is quite different today than when the Democratic Party adopted a center left configuration for a few years in the 1930s and 1960s. However, in terms of the gradations of political “evil,” the center right is a “lesser evil” to the right/far right, given the two conservative options for electing a president offered the American people by those who run the show, though it’s a dismal commentary on democracy.

In the present era it is certainly legitimate to worry about the direction American politics is heading domestically, coupled with a probable global future of more wars, more poverty and environmental disaster. We worry deeply about the problems that will confront our, and all, today’s children and grandchildren.

However, we retain unshakable confidence in what the masses of people can accomplish under difficult conditions when they become united, organized, disciplined and committed to the struggle for a better, equal and cooperative society, and a peaceful, environmentally sustainable world.

This option for substantive transformation beckons. It is the objective requirement of our times if we are to avoid a catastrophe down the road. A decisive turn to the left is essential and possible. It could revolutionize society and change the world to benefit all the people.

It’s best not to think about politics up there. Last time I went up, there were three black vultures preening on the serpent’s head not ten feet from where I sat. They were so quiet, it took minutes before I saw them looking at me. Makes a strong impression when you’re all alone up there.

What a great way to manifest yourself, if you’re the devil, as black vultures. Carrion birds won’t hurt you. They only eat what’s dead, like cast-off faith and trust and admiration. Nice touch, being triune, too, as father, son and who knows what, in the jokey way the devil has of parodying sacred absurdities.

This was no portentous sermon. The big one hissed and the little one screeched a bit. Demonic possession is great – no voices or intrusive thoughts, you just enjoy a brainstorm and take credit.

So, sitting there like Goodman Brown, when he calms down and thinks it through. Everybody comes here. What could all these humans have in common that’s so awful? What’s this unspeakable secret that everyone keeps?  I had one of those inspirations of horrid blasphemy: it’s rights and rule of law, universal to mankind yet utterly secret. Here in America, public life must never be defiled by universal law and rights. Law and rights show our patriotic exploits through the victims’ eyes. That takes our sacred things and makes them dirty, with all the power of the old oath, Bloody Mary.

The election was everywhere below, an inescapable miasma. It’s said to be important in America. It’s called democracy, the thing that makes us good, and it’s imaginary, just like god. How to desecrate that sacred thing? Just stop pretending. Hold our pointless choices to the standards of the outside world, with rights and rule of law. Obtrude the secrets that Americans aren’t allowed to know.

Let the sacrilege begin. To the candidates let’s apply the minimal standards of the civilized world. They fail spectacularly, bloviating in swinish contempt for the commitments America has made supreme in its own law. Most ordinary voters are less ignorant of presidential duties and commitments. Who cares which candidate is better, if none of them make the cut?

And what about the man who’s now doing the job, and wants to keep it? Job evaluation means a checklist, and none of this nonsense about character and greatness, only work rules. Does the incumbent president measure up? But perhaps it demeans the dignity of office to treat him like other any working stiff. Let’s hope so.

What happens when we vet a presidential candidate in the commonest, most fundamental ways? First, we make sure he’s not a criminal. Before they would let me play angel of mercy in Africa they took my fingerprints, to be sure that I was not the sort of person that would molest needy children or rape powerless women. Fair enough. We’ll do a background check on the incumbent. We’ll set the bar as low as we can, and look only at peremptory norms. Peremptory norms are the bedrock expectations of the civilized world, the law of intolerable, inexcusable transgressions.

Let’s begin our background check with the Convention Against Torture (CAT), supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution, signed by President Reagan and ratified October 27, 1990. CAT Article 12 requires:

Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.

On January 11, 2009, President Obama said, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” As a matter of policy, the incumbent president does not want his subordinates to “spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.” Breaking Article 12 makes Obama Torturer in Chief.

Now in America we’re encouraged to pound our chests and cheer torture of helpless captives as a badge of patriotic courage. In our generally censorious culture, we’ve been inoculated with ambivalence to view torturers as athletes with chalk in their cleats, heroically toeing the line as they pitch out of bounds. You don’t see the sort of hysteria that attaches to, say, sex offenses, where some simpleton pees out of doors or gets a crush, and he’s judicially branded for life, hounded from place to place by mobs of frantic parents. Makes you wonder what it would take to make outrage trump cruelty. Which atavistic impulse would prevail if the President of the United States were presiding over sexual torture?

Well, we’re going to find out. It seems that something adverse has turned up in the incumbent’s background check.   A compromising photo.

Rape. We don’t tolerate that. That’s why we had to bomb Serbia and Libya. Under Article 1 of the Torture Convention, official acquiescence to torture is an essential element of the crime. Executive acquiescence goes beyond obstruction of justice: it makes the president an outlaw everywhere, subject to universal-jurisdiction law with no statute of limitations. President Obama is Rapist in Chief, ensuring impunity for the rank-and-file of torture, who hold the captive women down and squeeze their breasts and fuck them. And not only women but boys.  President Obama oversees the gingerly don’t-ask-don’t-tell for soldiers whose orientation is to anal rape.

In extenuation it is said that President Obama is afraid of his subordinates. Dean Christopher Edley of U.C. Berkeley Law School recounted a meeting that ruled out prosecution for fear of a revolt by the government’s torture bureaus.

However, that cuts no ice under Torture Convention Article 2, paragraph 2:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

The US government wished this clause away in its 2006 report to the UN Committee against Torture – all’s fair in war, America maintained – but the Committee affirmed the consensus of the world that nothing can justify torture.

The Committee pointedly cited sexual humiliation as a breach of US obligations under the CAT. The world knows what our government did. The world has seen the photographic fact of that woman bent over for rape. The world has seen the photographic fact of a naked shackled captive with an object thrust up his anus.

The Committee wrote:

The State party should ensure, in accordance with the Convention, that mechanisms to obtain full redress, compensation and rehabilitation are accessible to all victims of acts of torture or abuse, including sexual violence, perpetrated by its officials.

The Committee remarked that the US is hiding from the Special Rapporteur on Torture. Our state has kept the Special Rapporteur at bay, but the Committee against Torture was not so easy to escape – we agreed to its oversight in signing the Convention Against Torture. The international experts confronted the United States with the chapter and verse of its obligations, in stark contrast with its conduct. Merely reading our commitments aloud to us paints a mortifying picture of the United States as a barbarous throwback state.

The United States of America is an enclave where jus cogens, the essential rudiment of civilization, does not apply. The United States signed the CAT with reservations that unlawfully undermine its purpose, and with meaningless declarations meant to hedge its restrictions on the state. Americans lack federal torture statutes that afford us the protections of the Convention. Our laws hem torture round with qualifiers that make much torment officially OK. We don’t enforce the laws on torture when we delegate it to servile satellite states or secret dungeons. We illegally exempt our high officials from the law.

The better to torture its victims in peace, the United States government refused to sign the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance – but the Committee pointed out that every prisoner we disappeared is a per se breach of the Torture Convention.

In breach of Article 10, America ensures that its troops and police wallow in brutish ignorance of the universal law on torture. In defiance of Article 14, America denies redress to torture victims: our state refuses torture victims’ recourse to the Committee against Torture, and drowns their appeals in bureaucratic mire at home.

America institutionalizes torture in Supermax isolation. For the public at large, in insouciant contempt of the historic horrors of electrical torture – the archetypal symbol of totalitarian crime – our state issues instruments of electrical torture to civilian police nationwide, who use them with impunity for punishment and restraint.

The US government has not yet released its fifth Periodic Report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, due November 19, 2011. It promises lively controversy on the campaign trail as the US reports to the Committee, answers its questions, and publishes the conclusions of the independent international experts.¹ Or so one would think. Surely voters will be anxious to learn if their most urgent concern has been addressed: at the outset of the Obama administration, the question voted highest on change.gov was,

Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.

Clearly the answer is no. We shall see if the electorate takes no for an answer.

President Obama is self-evidently in violation of Torture Convention Article 12. But at least he stopped the torture, right?

Ask Gulet Mohamed,  tortured in Kuwait on President Obama’s watch, with US officials on the spot to take away his rights, under threat of worse to come.

It’s only getting worse. With the knowledge and approval of the President’s federal security bureaucracy, local police departments are institutionalizing Israeli techniques for CAT-illegal torture and degradation with a nationwide program of “law enforcement education.”  The non-violent dissenters of the occupy movement have already been subjected to the signature abuses of Zionist repression: nerve damage from hours in tight restraints; the arbitrary violence of Shamir’s infamous “force, might, beatings;” use of tear gas canisters as lethal projectiles.

All right, then. Inarguably, President Obama is a criminal: hostis humani generis, enemy of all mankind. But perhaps we ought to look at the whole person. Maybe he behaves a little better with respect to aggression. After all, aggression is the highest of all high crimes, and a hanging offense, for the Nazis we caught – America hallowed the principle at Nuremberg. As UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) stated:

No consideration of whatever nature, whether political, economic, military or otherwise, may serve as a justification for aggression. A war of aggression is a crime against international peace.

Oh dear, tsk, tsk. Our little background check turns up a problem here too. President Obama waged illegal war in Afghanistan and Iraq. His continuing war in Afghanistan was not authorized by the relevant UNSC Resolution, 1368 (2001). Use of force in this case breaches Articles 46, 48 and 51 of the United Nations Charter, supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution. The now-covert war he commands in Iraq similarly flouts UNSC Resolution 1441, which authorized no use of force. The UN Secretary General termed our war on Iraq illegal.

The wars Obama started are no better. US use of force in Yemen and Somalia is undertaken without UN supervision, in direct breach of UN Charter Chapter VII. Pakistan publicly denounced the US for a ‘deliberate act of aggression’ when President Obama commanded an armed attack on defense forces inside Pakistan.

In Libya, President Obama overstepped the objectives of UNSCR 1973 (2011). The objectives are crucial because use of force is illegal when not under UN supervision. Disregarding the scope of the no-fly zone, President Obama destroyed civilian infrastructure and defensive emplacements in Sirte and elsewhere in support of one combatant faction, interfering with national self-determination in breach of UN Charter Article 2.4. In using, force President Obama aborted African Union efforts at pacific settlement of disputes, required by the supreme law of our land: the Kellogg-Briand Pact and UN Charter Chapter VI.

Illegal use of force against Iran will be laid to President Obama’s account as well. His common plan or conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, the precedent of Count 1 at Nuremberg, is deniable for now, plausibly or not, but evident in partial execution, and complete.

The last time the United States went to war with Iran, in the largest naval battle since World War II, our leaders ran afoul of the law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) called the US attack disproportionate and unjustified by necessity. We ran to the UN and cried self-defense, but the ICJ rejected that claim.  Our first war on Iran has been ruled an act of aggression. Our new war, with its unsolved murders and mysterious explosions, raises sticky issues in the evolving doctrine of state responsibility for intentionally wrongful acts. President Obama has put the poisoned chalice to his lips. We’ll see if he drinks.

So Obama’s an aggressor too. Well, perhaps he keeps his nose clean once he gets into an illegal war. Let’s apply humanitarian law. While America has run from the accountability of the Rome Statute, its provisions merely institutionalize universal-jurisdiction humanitarian law. So President Obama may get off scot-free on Rome Statute Article 8.2.c.iv, for the extra-judicial execution of Osama bin Laden when rendered hors de combat by detention. But he’s still on the hook for the equivalent crime under universal jurisdiction. The prohibitions come from the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Convention, to which our state is party. In fact, the Hague Convention relaxed American law a bit, as murder of prisoners was a capital offense under Military Order 100. In the case at hand the evidence is clear – we took that woozy mugshot of the captured invalid Osama right before we shot him. Then there’s Rome Statute Article 8.2.a.i, which criminalizes the willful killing of civilians Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki, along with 90 per cent of our Pakistani drone-war casualties.

Crime goes to the applicant’s character, you might say. With a position of trust in a criminal state, crime is a purely notional embarrassment, and easy to suppress, in America’s cult of personality – but soon legal exposure may be more than an annoyance for elder statesmen craving society’s esteem. Late last year, in ICC-02/05-01/09, the pre-trial chamber of the International Criminal Court denied immunity to heads of state.  The decision leaves plenty of wiggle room for executive lips and shysters like Gonzales and Koh, but it reflects the world’s resolve to end impunity.

For peaceful little countries, it’s great sport to shoo our criminal elder statesmen with the law. Mischievous Swiss lawmaker Dominique Baettig chased George Bush away with public recognition of torture charges. Fortunately for our diminutive warlord, planned protests afforded a face-saving security pretext for his flight from justice.  Lawyers Against the War gave it a whirl in Canada.  Naturally the charges sank without a ripple in America’s servile snowbound hinterlands, but the meticulously documented charges promise lots more fun. They’ll throw the same book at ex-president Obama. CAT Article 12 makes it his crime, too.

When his turn comes, the charges are likely to be lurid. President Obama doesn’t merely fail to investigate torture, he has his diplomats obstruct independent efforts to redress it. When Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzon took up the case of one of Spain’s own torture victims, as the law requires, the US government “fought tooth and nail” to obstruct Garzon’s investigations. To keep official torturers out of reach of the law, the Obama administration disappears charges as well as human beings, perverting justice at home and abroad.

Torturer, aggressor, war criminal. Clearly, rule of law is not Obama’s strong suit. But, as legal wizard Johnny Cochran said, let’s not rush to judgment. What has he done for me lately? That is how we’re taught to think.

Let’s stick with what we are entitled to demand, that the candidate honor the commitments and obligations essential to a sovereign state: our universal human rights. Take minimal civil and political rights, as guaranteed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR), supreme law of the land.

Patriotic brainwashing keeps that legal fact repressed deep in Americans’ subconscious. No one in America holds presidential aspirants to the standards of the civilized world. What does sometimes happen is wistful evocation of a less demanding standard, our quaint old long-gone Bill of Rights.

Still it’s easy to pile up annals of despotic overreach. Conor Friedersdorf reels off 14 outrages. Collectively they make a mockery of CCPR Articles 9, 6, 17, 19, 12, 14, 10, and 16. There are many hapless victims beyond Friedersdorf’s myopic view – Gulf States inhabitants, Occupy dissidents, debtors, and people of color – and they might add Articles 1, 7, 11, and 21 to the civil and political rights that have gone through President Obama’s shredder.

Partisan dead-enders maintain that despite the President’s high crimes and overt contempt for civil and political rights, the Democratic alternative offers certain social and material advantages. At this point it would be a waste of time to take the pathetic scraps on offer and systematically compare them to the minimal requirements of the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR).  That test reveals the piteous and terrible failure of a puffed-up corporate puppet. He shrinks shyly from state duties to respect core rights, and fails utterly to protect our human rights from corporate depredations. But in search of some indicative examples, let’s measure the pleadings of a random Democratic loyalist against the relevant human rights standards.

Achievement: “Obama has overhauled the food safety system.”

Well, that is certainly worth doing. Article 11 of the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states:

The States Parties to the present Covenant, recognizing the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, shall take, individually and through international co-operation, the measures, including specific programmes, which are needed:

(a) To improve methods of production, conservation and distribution of food by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge, by disseminating knowledge of the principles of nutrition and by developing or reforming agrarian systems in such a way as to achieve the most efficient development and utilization of natural resources.

Our ruling class won’t ratify that covenant, so technically, the President is not on the hook for his gross derelictions: lip service to government duties respecting freedom from hunger, and servile negligence that allows corporate interests to destroy fisheries and foodstocks. With America’s Gulf Coast fisheries poisoned by corporate malfeasance, the FDA underestimates the toxicity of Gulf Coast shrimp by four orders of magnitude.  The US government permits Monsanto to impose the “substantial equivalence” doctrine, muzzling scientific inquiry into food safety. To test the food that patent monopolists force-feed us, Americans have to depend on Chinese research. And in fact, the Chinese have found an insidious taint. The Obama administration is colluding with pesticide producers to forestall independent pesticide research. As the censorship continues, commercial interests exterminate bees and the plants that they pollinate worldwide.

Achievement:  “Advanced women’s rights in the work place. Ended Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in our military. Stopped defending DOMA in court. Passed the Hate Crimes bill. Appointed two pro-choice women to the Supreme Court.”

More insulting scraps of rights. At the outset of his term the president had the majority to sign and ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), codifying comprehensive rights and impelling them with an international framework of independent review. He did not. The president shares the US Government’s provincial compulsion to reinvent all wheels and agonize over bad imitations of the world-standard protections accepted everywhere else. It’s more than stubborn ignorance – it’s fear of any world consensus that our rulers can’t control.

“Expanded access to medical care and provided subsidies for people who can’t afford it. Expanded the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Fixed the preexisting conditions travesty [and rescissions] in health insurance.”

Let’s look at what our president’s job is, if he claims to head a sovereign state: CESCR Article 12:

1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

2. The steps to be taken by the States Parties to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include those necessary for:

(a) The provision for the reduction of the stillbirth-rate and of infant mortality and for the healthy development of the child;

(b) The improvement of all aspects of environmental and industrial hygiene;

(c) The prevention, treatment and control of epidemic, endemic, occupational and other diseases;

(d) The creation of conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness.

The President’s medical tinkering seems to be a feckless stab at paragraph 2(d). In the event, the President undermined the proven approach of monopsony health-care procurement and delivered a captive market to predatory corporate middlemen. Here again, we have lip service to government duties and utter failure to protect.

Achievement: “Invested in clean energy. Overhauled the credit card industry, making it much more consumer-friendly. While Dodd-Frank bill was weak in many respects, it was still an extremely worthwhile start at re-regulating the financial sector.  He created a Elizabeth Warren’s dream agency: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He’s done a lot for veterans. He got help for people whose health was injured during the clean-up after the 9/11 attacks.”

A motley ragbag that falls apart under cursory examination. Not a hint of the duties of the state. You can sell rubbish like this with a straight face if you can keep Americans ignorant of world standards. Civil law is historically more cognizant of state duties, and most other nations are attuned to evolving international norms, but Americans are educated as provincials. In terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the state has failed if you don’t know your rights. But to fanatical theocrat Gary North and his holy electoral vanguard, protecting humans from the overreaching powers of states is “giving equal time in society to the devil.” Americans’ backward ignorance is actually sacred.

What’s more, all that financial boasting invites review in light of the Convention Against Corruption (CAC), supreme law of the land.  CAC Articles 18 and 19 address trading in influence and abuse of functions. Our government has told international reviewers that existing federal law prohibits abuse of function and trading in influence. Our government admits that it has not reviewed the effectiveness of that law. So the blatant and ubiquitous sleaze of public life turns out to be a crime! But corruption is a vital institution here. The graft of contending lobbyists, that’s our sole remaining check and balance. It is all that’s left of our state. So when the sordid story of bank reform is told, President Obama may not even be able to say, with the hapless villain Richard Nixon, “I am not a crook.”

And they want me to go to the polls and vote for this. They actually expect my consent-of-the-governed seal of approval for a criminal despot who can’t even make the trains run on time, and for the failed state that horked him up. Let his party die off like the Whigs. No, I want what I’ve got coming: rights and rule of law. No party gives me that. Saying so desecrates everything that’s sacred to this purulent police state. It’s blasphemy to hold the state to any standards. That’s how you learn that every word they tell you is a filthy lie. It is Satan’s irresistible lure : Now are ye undeceived.

Come, devil, for to thee is this world given. Hail the New World Order. Blasphemy is powerful. Satan’s old and wise. He knows depraved institutions always have a sanctifying rite. Defile it – nothing happens, but the institution’s power is gone. The pedophile church has a solemn rite: you must eat cheap pulpy bread and make believe it’s flesh. The crucial rite of the United States is the election, a travesty of futile choice. You must make believe you’re choosing what you want. To profane it breaks the brittle spell. Stop taking the host, and the priests can’t rape your child. Stop casting your vote, and the troops can’t rape that terrified woman that they’re gripping by the hair.

1. N.B. Broken link: sometime after January 20, State took down this handy listing of recent torture and human rights reviews.

Obama’s commitment to de-escalation in Iraq was questionable, and his commitment to complete withdrawal nonexistent. He supported the idea of launching attacks on Pakistan and Syria. He said he wanted more troops in Afghanistan and wanted them there for a long, long time. Three times in three debates McCain proposed cutting military spending and Obama avoided the topic. Obama proposed significantly enlarging the largest military the world had ever seen. Obama refused to forswear the use of aggressive war or even first-strike nuclear attacks. He claimed that Bush and Cheney had not committed any crimes that he was aware of.

Yet, Obama gave speech after speech promising that ending the war in Iraq would be his first act in office: “I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.” What candidate Obama explained in corporate media interviews was a little different. He said repeatedly that he would begin a withdrawal his first month in office, pull out one to two brigades per month and be done in 16 months.  That did not happen.

On Afghanistan, Obama’s withdrawal promises have been made and broken during his presidency.

Plenty of pre-election promises have been discarded as well.  Candidate Obama swore he would not rewrite laws with signing statements.  He promised huge advances in transparency and openness.  He promised support for whistleblowers.  He would fix NAFTA, not duplicate it in more countries.  The Bush tax cuts would end.  A President Obama would not launch a war without Congress.  Obama Version .08 was a horrible, horrible candidate, and yet he made dozens of promises that have been tossed aside, making him now even worse — unless one chooses to accept as credible the same promises again.

None of this is to suggest that the Republicans can’t nominate someone even worse than the actual Obama.  Of course, they can and will.  The point is to recognize that focusing activist energy on elections should not come at the expense of the real work of building a movement to change this country.  Making the rational lesser-evil choice every four years and failing to focus on real work for nonviolent radical change consistently presents us four years later with two choices who are both worse than last time.  And those choices are, each time, candidates for a more powerful, more tyrannical office.

Obama has not just failed to “close Guantanamo,” whether one means by that the symbolism of moving one of our smaller lawless prisons to Illinois or actually ending the practice of imprisoning people without trail worldwide.  Obama has formalized, codified, and normalized, the presidential power to imprison, rendition, torture, murder, bomb, and invade at will.  Obama Version .12 will compete with the “racist candidate” for those powers.  I put “racist” in quotes, not because the Republicans aren’t racists (although even Romney’s racism could be phony), but because were it not for racism our nation would not be doing the things it is currently doing to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, etc., etc.  Obama is about to promise us more government activism.  I can think of several countries that could do with a bit less of his style of government activism.  And one of them is ours.  Campaign promises don’t touch every detail, but when Obama’s Department of Agriculture recently approved Monsanto GE corn with Agent-Orange herbicide after receiving 45,000 negative comments and 23 positive, was that the change you could believe it?  Obama is working night and day to protect mega-banks from responsibility for mortgage fraud.  He will speak in his State of the Union about equality before the law.

Obamapologists will tell you about good intentions and Republican resistance in Congress, and yet Obama came in with a large Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, and a Democratic leadership in the Senate willing to circumvent the filibuster-everything-60-vote-requirement when and only when it chose to, and chose to do what Obama instructed.  Obama met in secret with the health insurance big whigs and insisted that the health care bill not include even a token pretense of a movement away from their control.  Now who’s getting “taken to the bank”?

By September 2009 it was clear enough, even pre-Peace Prize, where President Obama was heading.  I then wrote an article called “Bush’s Third Term.” It still accurately describes the state of the promise of Obama and of Obama’s forgotten promises.

Okay, so there’s this:

Recently the big “gotcha” question for Newt Gingrich was about his supposed request for an “open marriage” with his 12th wife. Never mind that Newton Gingrich is all that is unholy in the human race.  Lets focus on this old life detail, right?

I’d say Gingrich exemplifies venality and hot buttered graft better than the actual dictionary definitions. Well, I’m not sure hot buttered graft is in the dictionary, but you know what I mean. “But, but I’m a historian who does reenactments of all the great moments of greed and corruption from the past.” That’s what Newt sputters. “I teach living history—wanna see me do a Teapot Dome with a squirt of lime or maybe a Benedict Arnold reverse half nelson?—I ‘m that good – did I tell you I’m a historian? You know, an intellectual, read stuff. Wanna get married or give me some money, you know, for talking, either is good…..”

Really, my only issue with a Newt Gingrich open marriage would be an assurance that I, as an American, would not have to participate. Sadly, deep in the bowels of the recent NDAA I’m pretty sure that it includes the option to force us into a Newt Gingrich open marriage. Obama assures us he will never use that part of the law during his administration, and that is supposed to calm us. But it’s all just moot until you find out Newt has an open account not only at Tiffany’s, but at the Open Marriage Costume Store – sorry they weren’t very creative with their name. It’s located just behind the coat closet in the Senate-knock twice and show a congressional sized roll of abdominal blubber.  Then they will know you are one of them and give you entry. In the dark, dystopian future, Newt will have you dressed up like a Geometry teacher faster than you can say “just take me to Gitmo, please.”

The media wanted to make this a story, though, but, you know, the folks who normally love this stuff aren’t having it. They want the media to focus on the real issues like Mitt’s Mormon underwear with the little fertility symbols on his willy or whatever. It really is obvious that the people who gave us the witch trials reproduced a lot of offspring. Their descendents have exploded exponentially and they still like killing (or at least they enjoy the smarmy thrill of supporting Empire) and, of course, they still love to judge. But you get a pass on their judgment if you are one of their own. Like a crying televangelist, you are still in the fold. It’s a mathematical truism, really.  The more sanctimonious you are in this nation, the more of a pass you get when caught with any personal dirt or perceived sketchiness.

It’s all fairly amusing to watch the perpetually red faced outragees of the right stew in these issues without the slightest bit of self-reflection. They will move on quickly to argue against people who love each other, but happen to be gay, or they will denigrate Romney’s religion without noticing the idiocy of their own.

If only these incidents opened up a dialogue in their own minds about the rigidity of their world, and the unyielding pronouncements that fall upon those they view as “others”. But that sure ain’t gonna happen.

Alas, I get away from myself, again. The nonsense seems well scripted, just enough batshit crazy pepper to make Obama appear as the dignified and elder statesman (don’t look too close at the blood under his nails, though). A level of distraction in the nation, and the Wall Street Rainmaker will stay in office. Who writes this damn script?

And they caught me up in it again….Bastards!

Well, see you all at Newt’s — and don’t forget your protractor.

Watching the Republican debates is like going to a Klan rally without the sheets.

— Barry Willdorf (attorney and author)

Watching the Republican candidates describe the various methods by which they would destroy the U.S. government is certainly an illuminating exercise, regardless of which clown leads the pack. It is one thing for the Koch Brothers, Sam Walton, or others of their ilk to suggest that the government and public would be better off if corporations were not taxed at all; such a comment is obviously self-serving nonsense. Indeed, if they had their way, they would do away with any limits whatsoever on their power, wealth or authority.

Yet, for electoral candidates, who are confronted with the economic crises facing this nation and the world, who are witnessing the worst depression in 65 years, and who are faced with unparalleled unemployment and financial stagnation — for those candidates to parrot the wish-list of corporate billionaires as if their recommendations are anything but ludicrous is simply mind-boggling.

If you were to put the entire Republican Party in one room together, it would not be possible to assemble a single intelligent brain from the entire lot. Do they really believe the garbage and pap they utter in the media?

Take some examples of their proposals:

1) Stop funding education. Why teach children subjects such as literature, humanities, art or other disciplines that they will not be able to use when they graduate and go to work for slave wages at businesses and mega corporations?

2) Cut Welfare, Social Security and Medicare. These “socialistic” programs cater to laziness and constitute unwarranted charity.

3) Continue to fight imperial wars throughout the Middle East — only escalate those battles with the use of nuclear weapons. Expand U.S. hegemony throughout the world to bring democracy to the “savages” and “fools” of other nations.

4) Get rid of those pesky unions that require corporate billionaires to pay ugly, unfair expenses like the minimum wage, and prevent bosses from firing any employees they want to get rid of for any reason.

5) Deregulate the entire economy so that corporations can pillage without fear of fines or limitations concerning the destruction of the environment or the unlimited expansion of their economic empires.

6) Outlaw abortion. An unborn fetus has more rights than the woman carrying the child.

7) Oppose any form of single-payer or universal health care. Simply let the sick, old and disabled die, as an indication of God’s will.

8) Religious fanaticism is a virtue; it is patriotic and appropriate. Being Christian is a mandatory prerequisite to being “religious.”

The list of atrocities and absurdities is endless and unfathomable. An intelligent enemy of the U.S. would sit back and take whatever steps it could to ensure that Republicans win the next election. Nothing could do more to destroy this nation than to support the various proposals spewing forth from the mouths of these candidates.

What is perhaps even more tragic than that prospect, however, is the fact the Obama, and the Democrats appear to be uniting around the very programs set forth above. There is no sane party for rational Americans to support. If it were possible to find some place to flee to that would be safe from attack by the U.S. within a few short years, Americans would leave in droves.

Compared to the Republican agenda, Alice in Wonderland doesn’t seem like a child’s fable at all.

Lenin once remarked that each generation comes to socialism in its own way. It might also be said that each generation comes to oppose war and Empire in its own way. For the present generation of 20 and 30 somethings, libertarian philosophy is the vehicle to oppose war, as was evident in the New Hampshire primary. In part they chose Libertarianism, but in part Libertarianism chose them since the progressives have largely abandoned anti-interventionism, preferring instead Obama’s “humanitarian” imperialism. Many in fact are pro-war when you scratch the surface.

How different this was from 1968 when the young went “clean for Gene,” tromping around for Senator Eugene McCarthy in the snows of New Hampshire. Disgusted with inhumanity of the imperialist war on Vietnam and threatened with the draft, they took up the cause of McCarthy, the only one willing to challenge Johnson. (Not widely known is that George McGovern, somewhat to the left of McCarthy, refused, as did Bobby Kennedy, another saint for the Progressives, brother of and adviser to the president who ratcheted up that war in the early 60s.) With a close second in New Hampshire, McCarthy and his volunteers brought Johnson low and ended his war presidency. It was a reprise of the 1952 NH primary in which Estes Kefauver with his trademark coonskin cap bested Harry Truman, now lionized by the Democrats but widely reviled at the time for the war in Korea which claimed at least a million Asian and about 50,000 American souls. By 2012 the hold of the Democratic Party on the so-called Peace and Justice movement is so complete that no one dared challenge Obama.

Whose vote were the young libertarians able to deliver to their candidate, Ron Paul? That is another largely unreported story. The votes for Ron Paul came strongly not only from the under 40 set but among those earning under $50,000. In contrast Romney, a carbon copy of Obama on all major questions took the over $100,000 crowd and the older voters. “Proletariat Votes Libertarian” or “Proletariat Votes for Paul” are headlines which the progressives might find enlightening. At the least the Progressives might have joined Ron Paul’s antiwar, civil Libertarian effort, but they did not because, you see, Ron Paul unlike Obama is not a “progressive,” and the “struggle for peace and justice cannot be separated.” (I have noticed, however, that progressives these days from Occupy Wall Street to the Recall Walker effort find it quite easy to leave out questions of peace in the “struggle for justice.” MLK Jr. would be ashamed of them for that; but it is most convenient for Obama’s re-election campaign.)

As one who was on the ground in New Hampshire in the days leading up to the primary, I was intrigued by the characteristics of the volunteers themselves. It was not an elite crew; not a single Ivy Leaguer amongst them did I find – usually from state universities or colleges. Holding signs at one poll I visited was a 40 year old painter who had three or four employees, a young woman who ran a graphic designing business and another young woman, a divorced 37 year old lawyer with a 10 year old child. I would characterize this group as either working class or small businessmen and women. This is precisely the group that Progressives should be trying to organize and represent. In that regard the Progressive movement has been a dismal failure over the last three decades; and in fact has generally proved quite hostile to small businesspeople and their culture.

On a personal note going to NH this time was a dream deferred. In 1968 when others went “Clean for Gene,” I had a schedule that demanded I work every day, every other night and every other weekend. Never did I imagine that all these decades later the antiwar action would be on the Republican side. It appears that the “progressive” Left, not a genuine left or radical formation anyway, has lost a generation of activists with its subservience to Obama and its lack of spine. One begins to wonder about the entire Progressive movement. Perhaps when a genuine Left wing movement reemerges, it should give up on the very name “progressive”– or again to borrow a phrase from Lenin, “take off the soiled shirt.”

I’ll admit that I’m one of those people that enjoys reading historical accounts of depraved Roman emperors, of brain-addled czars. I really don’t know why. I’m sure it’s a sickness and maybe it will appear soon in the latest DSM9. Maybe there’s an expensive big pharma-med in production that can help.  Perhaps that’s why I allow myself to listen to the piffle that these fellows are peddling. I’ve been desensitized from reading about the sexy historic train wreck characters. The thing is, this isn’t historical, but sadly very much in the now. Hence the need for the long showers. I’m so ashamed.

We’ve progressed little when a Mitt can look at the widespread misery, that only expands by the minute, and he can simply comment that the complaints stem from jealousy. We all want to be Wall Street zombies, of course. He projects his illness on the rest of us. The Mitt has actually said this in regard to the rumblings of the many — it is all just envy. I’m not sure if he said that at the gathering the other day which necessitated the removal of a young Harvard student who looked like someone that the Mitt didn’t want there. The poor kid spent the day in jail for looking like someone. But that’s the world the Mitt lives in. You get what you want. Period. And that kid looked like somebody. That kid is just lucky he wasn’t detained indefinitely for looking like somebody. You really need to be aware of your doppelgangers and what they are up to in this high security age.

In other psychotic plutocrat news, a guy in South Florida- one John Castle, a leveraged buy-out “king” was angry that the bill after a meal was brought to his table… so he promptly broke the waiter’s finger. Of course, you never bring a king, even a leveraged buy-out one, a bill. The waiter got off easy too.

In other, trod upon worker news, one of the infamous Foxconn plants in China  had workers threatening mass suicide due to salary lies and general dehumanizing jobs recently — all necessary privations to produce X boxes cheaply.

I could go on and on.

And right now, here in the US, almost everyone who has one thing go wrong will be pushed to the side of progress, to the stench of the alley. Preferably to die there.  Fuck you, waiters of the world. We will break your fingers. We might make you homeless.  It’s all at our whimsy. We have all the cards. We will make your conditions eventually so bad that you will think death might be preferable. The world is flat in it’s misery, or we will make it so, says Thomas Friedman. Because we get what we want. Period.

And the world will stand, awash in confusion. But what happened? How did we come to such a devolved time? Perhaps we should have noticed when they treated international humans with such disregard. Of course, it would come home eventually. They convinced us that poverty was our fault and that those not wealthy had no worth. But, in truth, they are the filth, the ravenous undead feeding on the fresh life of others. Because they can never know satiety. And they never look to slow their own malignancy.  They just look for ways to continue feeding at the expense of the healthy and the clean.

And the Obamas of the age will make a point of pretending to care, their only contribution is less directly worded insults. Obama won’t say you are jealous that you don’t have the power to keep people from breaking your fingers. He will talk about the loveliness of intact fingers, and how the many before us have worked for intact fingers and someday the world will only have intact fingers. Then the roses will fall from the sky and the soaring melody will swell in the hearts of the listeners. And the broken fingered waiter will clap awkwardly in the crowd.

Flee from these creatures, find meaning in your local. Unravel what you can, including their lies that reside in your mind. Some influences are so toxic there is nothing to do but denounce and shun them. Don’t for one moment take them to be anything that promotes “a common welfare” or general decency. They are the carnivores who have convinced the sheep that they deserve to be eaten.

Could I possibly use any more metaphors?

Probably not. But above all, try to limit your exposure to them — because after all, there just isn’t enough water. Trust me.

[At Bain Capital] We got money from other people and we would use that to help start businesses or sometimes acquire businesses that were in trouble or not doing so well and then try and make it better or get the businesses to grow.
– Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate, former governor of Massachusetts and former venture capitalist and corporate raider (January 8, 2012)

I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.
– Mitt Romney, January 9, 2012)

They [the corporate raiders] apparently looted the companies, left people unemployed and walked off with millions of dollars,” Mr. Gingrich said. …“if somebody comes in, takes all the money out of your company and then leaves you bankrupt while they go off with millions, that’s not traditional capitalism.
– Newt Gingrich, Republican presidential candidate and former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (January 8, 2012)

I think people who don’t serve when they could and they get three or four or even five deferments –– they have no right to send our kids off to war … I’m trying to stop the wars, but at least, you know, I went when they called me up.
– Ron Paul, U.S. Congressman and Republican presidential candidate (January 7, 2012)

In current American politics, money and wars of aggression abroad seem to rule the day. When a candidate’s fortune turns sour, the natural reflex is to spend $millions in negative ads to destroy adversaries and/or to issue hawkish policy statements with the promise to start new wars abroad and even to rekindle old ones.

The motto seems to be that “If you destroy me with your negative ads; I will destroy you with mine.” This is truly amazing.

Lobbyists have always played an important role in U.S. politics, but with the floodgates of money presently wide open, their work has been considerably facilitated. Indeed, since the U.S. Supreme Court’s (5-4) January-20-2010- decision to allow unlimited amounts of money to be spent by corporations or labor unions during elections under the specious pretext that such legal organizations are “people”, money rules unimpeded in American politics. This has the more or less unanticipated consequence of raising negative campaigning to a new level, to the delight of corporate media which rake in hundreds of $millions in political advertising or propaganda. Can democracy survive such an onslaught of money? This remains to be seen.

As for the U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney, for instance, during the recent primary campaign in the state of Iowa, he was confronted with a sudden surge of popularity of one of his opponents, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Romney’s camp and its allies went to work and pumped more than $2.8 million in a TV air deluge of negative ads against candidate Gingrich, arguing that the former Speaker had “more baggage than the airlines” and spelling out a series of flaws in Gingrich’s long political career. Sure enough, Newt Gingrich soon plummeted in the polls in Iowa and even nationally. He finished a distant fourth (13.3%) in the Iowa Republican Caucus (U.S. Presidential Primary) of January 03, 2012, while Republican candidate Romney squeezed by to finish in 1st position.

In retaliation, the Gingrich’s camp has opted to turn the tables on candidate Romney for the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries and has tried to picture him as the Wall Street movie villain Gordon Gekko. Indeed, thanks to a “super PAC”, supposedly financed by casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who is reported to have poured $5 million into Mr. Romney’s campaign, it intends to pump some $3.4-million into new television ads in order to picture multi-millionaire candidate Mitt Romney as a cold-blooded capitalist raider who made his fortune on the back of workers when they were fired en masse, after Mr. Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital of Boston, gorged itself on financially stressed companies. Mr. Gingrich has even suggested personally that Mr. Romney’s company was comparable to “rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company.”

And there you have it, negative campaigning at its best!

Negative ads, whether they are based on facts or on fabrications or on outright lies, can be very effective politically because they raise doubts in the mind of undecided or hesitant voters, even though some voters may be repulsed and turned off by them and this could translate into lower voter turnout. Nevertheless, the more distracted people are, the more they tend to remember negative information better than positive one. Therefore, for those who have no scruples in relying on such tactics and who have the means to pay for them, negative campaign ads have a triple advantage: First, they are a good way to change the subject and steer the debate away from one’s own failures; secondly, they place adversaries on the defensive, forcing them to spend time and money to try to refute the attacks; and, thirdly, they dispense the attackers from clearly spelling out their own positive political agenda beyond generalities and pious slogans. Negative ads maybe a curse for democracy but they work for those unethical politicians for whom power is the only thing that they yearn for in politics.

But negative campaigning or smear campaigns cost a lot. Indeed, they have to be researched and produced and, above all, they must to be aired in the mass media, especially on television. Historically, negative campaigning has always existed. However, modern means of communication and the concentration of national wealth in relatively fewer hands have multiplied its influence. Indeed, in the modern free-for-all electronically based U.S. politics, it can be said that those with the most money and with fewer principles have a decisive, if not an insurmountable advantage in winning elections. In the U.S., and especially with the benediction of a majority of judges on the current Supreme Court, so-called “super PACs” can accept unlimited donations for purposes of supporting or attacking candidates, thus placing the political game clearly in the hands of people or corporations or labor unions with the most money. Money has thus become the principal
deciding factor in American politics.

The current campaign is a clear demonstration.

Sports writers have some kind of genetic mutation that leads them to believe they know more about sports than the average schlump who spends almost $200 a year for a newspaper subscription and as much as $500 a year for all-access all-games everywhere cable coverage. However, the reality is that even the best prognosticators—sports writers love big words when they can pronounce them—have a record about as accurate as the horoscope on the comics page.

Nevertheless, the guesses and rankings by sportswriters are usually innocuous. Readers and viewers usually forget in a couple of days who says what, and go about their own lives trying to make a mediocre paycheck stretch until the end of the month.

Joining the “guess how bright I am” journalists are some reporters who cover national political races. Instead of researching and explaining candidate positions on numerous issues, and giving readers and viewers a greater understanding of how those positions could impact their own lives, these pompous scribblers have made politics another sports contest.

The national news media, secure in their perches in New York and Washington, D.C., several months ago began chirping about who will win the Iowa caucus. For the final few days, they parachuted into Iowa to let their readers and viewers think they were toughened field reporters with as difficult a job as combat correspondents in Iraq or Afghanistan. Like hungry puppies, they stayed close to the candidates, hoping for a morsel or two, digested it, passed it out of their system as wisdom, and haughtily predicted the winner would be Mitt Romney—no, wait—it’s Michele Bachman—no, we’re calling for a surprising victory by Herman Cain—stop-the-presses, Cain petered out—Newt Gingrich is definitely going to take Iowa—Rick Perry is our prediction— we predict Ron Paul might be ahead—the race is going to be tough, but based upon our superior knowledge because we’re the national news media and we’re infallible, and from projections we picked out of our butts we believe—.

The one candidate they discounted for almost all but the last week of the Iowa primary race was Rick Santorum. Not a chance, they declared. Weak campaign. Lack of funds. No charismatic razzle-dazzle. No vital signs. Dead as a 2-by-4 about to be sawed and covered by wallboard.

Santorum, of course, came within eight votes of taking the Iowa caucus. The news media then spent the next day telling us all about that campaign, much in the same way that a bubbly TV weather girl, who a week earlier predicted bright sunny skies for a week, tells us we had snow the past three days.

The national news media jetted out of Iowa faster than a gigolo leaving a plain rich girl for a plain richer one, and descended upon New Hampshire. In the granite state, they have been repeating their performance from Iowa. They have predicted who the “real” winners and losers are. They have tried to convince us they can actually talk to us common folk, so they are grabbing whoever they find to answer in less than ten seconds, “Who do you think will win?” After the New Hampshire primary concludes, Tuesday, the media will happily discard their snow coats for windbreakers and descend into South Carolina, where they will continue to treat a presidential race as little more than a sporting contest.

There’s a difference, however. Generally, whoever wins or loses a game doesn’t have much impact upon the rest of us, so we smile at the sportswriters’ attempts to predict outcomes and pretend they can analyze the impact of a reserve left tackle’s hangnail. Those who are elected to our city councils, state legislatures, Congress, and the Presidency do have an impact upon us. And we deserve a lot better than the arrogance of the news clan reporting the contests as if they were sporting events.

[Obama] didn’t just embrace the Bush policies he kissed them on the lips and ran with them.

— Ret. United States Air Force Colonel, Morris Davis

The buck stops here!

— Harry S. Truman

The Washington Post looks like it decided to do a bit of actual journalism recently — penning an extensive and informative article on the Obama infatuation with the mass-killing aerial drone. This former constitutional scholar does not seem to feel impeded — by either the Constitution or the Bill of Rights — in his love affair with and, indeed, his use and misuse of this harbinger (and indeed harvester) of death.

Obama is at present, in fact, leading the way in the history of United States presidents in his extensive reliance on the secret killing of individuals ostensibly in the interest of securing national security goals. Attorney Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantanamo, has raised serious doubts about the entire nature of the multi-fold and various drone assassination program.

Davis finds it astounding that an American civilian organization (the CIA), would be going into a foreign country, and launching offensive military attacks; attacks that are unilaterally “justified” — by the whim, fiat or fancy — of a sitting United States president and commander-in-chief. And, in particular, the specific drone attack that successfully targeted the so-called Al-Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki; Davis says that he is unaware of any legal justification for that and calls it simply murder.

The Washington Post opines that the Obama drone program may have been eluding massive scrutiny because of the killing of so many Al-Qaeda operatives, without any risk to actual physical pilots, or genuine human military cost. They, of course, fail to mention that we are told that Al-Qaeda terrorists are the ones being murdered; which is a narrative that many have questioned. In fact, is the United States government actually killing “evildoers” and terrorists, or are they just exterminating average, ordinary, and everyday work-a-day folks? Like Vietnam, the Obama administration could probably care less — just so long as the bodies pile up!

As “Al-Qaeda” is eviscerated, the Obama regime can undoubtedly look all the more forceful, “tough”, “macho”, “resolute” and emboldened! And Obama will undeniably be facing an election versus an ultra-militarist Republican challenger, so he probably doesn’t want to be taken for a wussy! Dead innocents are just a form of collateral damage for the Obama (2012) re-election campaign! Just as bona fide progressives were for the hope and change campaign of only four short years ago!

Not only is Obama shredding and flouting the Constitution with his ardor and affection for the mass immolating drone, but in his recent signing of the National Defense Authorization Act, he’s also doing the same! The United States government is now capable of indefinitely detaining citizens, and without ever having to give them a (previously) necessary trial! In addition, Obama broke still yet another campaign promise by attaching a signing statement to that particular piece of abominable legislation!

The spindly and futile statement purports that his administration will not allow the indefinite detention of United States citizens without a speedy trial. A future Bushian administration, of course, would be unlikely to have any such qualms (of which Obama purports to lay claim to). But Obama has already extra-judicially killed American citizens without trials — not to mention serially and perennially lied on a panoply of other considerable issues — so his word is about as good as space garbage!

The hopes of the Obama campaign have turned to drones; the change of the Obama campaign has turned to a setting back of American law prior to the signing of the Magna Carta. The Obama campaign, perhaps fearing the ever invigorating, awakening, and enlivening 99%, perhaps feeling it has no alternative to being Bush II, should no longer have any credence with civil libertarians; in fact, it should no longer have any credence with any of those who hold true to the bedrock principles that are taught — growing up — to the vast majority of American youth.