Manning’s Dad: Seeming Stoicism, Denial and, Tragically, Lotsa Conditional Love

Manning’s father appeared briefly on Frontline clips on the NewsHour tonight. My heart went out to him, but even more to Manning after only a few minutes of taking in “Daddy.”

How sad that Bradley’s daddy can’t see and celebrate the heroic champion his son actually and, okay, allegedly is. I am sure there is some degree of awe within his father over the great lengths Bradley has gone and is still willing to go to stand up to a ferociously toxic and violent patriarchal authority -- the entire evil military industrial security complex.

Dad assuredly gave Manning a lot of experience and practice in fighting blind and formidable authority I’d venture. Funny, how psychologically wounded children sometimes end up having the greatest courage and spirit as adults, as well as honor. Maybe, too, that fateful and sustained experience with a parent such as the one I seemed to be witnessing tonight gives them the hunger or will to try, though there is a horror in the futility, to work out such a primal relationship of crazymaking and identity-sabotaging “conditional” as opposed to “unconditional” love with other authorities later in life.

The poor parent can’t accept him- or herself so projects the rejection onto the child, usually the child that most reminds him or her of himself or herself as a vulnerable youth. And the child, to fully break into authenticity -- in order to fully recover from toxic conditional love -- has to learn the excruciating lesson of letting go of what he or she actually never had. Scott Peck believes most of us mortals can’t fathom it. It is far too heartbreaking. Parents who were incapable of accepting our real selves.

Sure the father has pride in his son, as far as he can let himself recognize the dimensions of this nightmare scenario for Bradley. The father's courage in taking on the corporate media to help his son's case. So many within the media have vilified Bradley so relentlessly, neocon and neolib-lovers alike. Even going on a more respectable show like Frontline took tremendous courage for Mr. Manning. I respect him for that and see that Bradley doesn’t get his courage “from the ground.” His dad must have role-modeled that for him, too, and the father deserves credit. As for the father, he also is now vulnerable to having arm-chair, self-helpy types like amateur blogger me analyze him after only two or three minutes of tv time.

The father maintained tonight his son is innocent. That his son assuredly didn’t commit the crime. He also maintained his son seems fine through all this. Does Bradley act fine in front of his father? I bet he does as best as he can, though given the reports from both his friend and his lawyer, even how hard he probably is trying at this point, if the father sees “fineness” he is profoundly limited, or if he is lying about his son’s “fineness” he is honoring his own destructive need for “impression management”.

Bradley is probably giving the father as best he can of what he feels the father can handle and needs. A performance trying to win him the tragic crumbs of more conditional acceptance. One strives to get what one can from a parent, not realizing the long-term challenge to self-identity and inner peace it creates.

This remarkably dramatic scenario does offer his father an opportunity to open up to and experience real, unconditional love, if only he could and would approach it. I personally doubt he is capable of it. It is a challenge for any and all of us. The father needs to let go of his denial of the present reality as a first step.

Wonder if they will explore young Manning being gay with the father on the upcoming Frontline. Try to break his father’s stoicism with that challenge. More reality tv on the back of an American torture victim, tortured by American authorities? A new depth for reality corporate tv. I think of the real life Serpico when considering Manning’s massive challenge. I think of heroic movie characters like "Cool Hand Luke" or the Tim Robbins’ character in Shawshank. Jack Nicholson’s in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

What did Newman ultimately say in his movie, mocking the earlier words of the sadistic prison warden? “What we have here is a failure to communicate!” Memorable understatement from a classic movie. Communicate? How girly. The military apparently doesn’t seriously believe in communication. Trickle down authoritarian sadism seems to be the M.O.

The father must have tremendous guilt, I am sure. The father admitted it was he who “twisted his son’s arm” to enter the military and get him some STRUCTURE. Of course. Bradley obviously needed and deserved something else, along with, I’d venture, thousands of other young people, but father assumed he knew best. The are massive numbers of other parents out there -- the parents’ over-trust in and authoritarian-following of the patriarchal military and government, especially at the hands of their present, profoundly for the most part amoral leadership.

These parents made serious and fateful assumptions.

How many parents like Manning’s dad have sent their children into military hell? How many can not admit to what they helped enable to happen to their young adult children? Granted some of those children leaped in on their own, embracing media romanticized war mythology.

As for the STRUCTURE his father willed for him. Well, yes, it has given young Manning that. Ritualized humiliation I have heard it referred to as. The shackles. The sensory deprivation. The enforced nudity a/k/a sustained sexual abuse. The solitary confinement, sure road to psychosis. The anti-depressant, or whatever they are, potential addiction.

Fierce psychological and physical torture PUNISHMENT before he is even tried. This is the new American way? American justice a sham. Torturing the essence and spirit of American law. Twisting it with Orwellian illegitimate technicalities. “Prevention of injury” bullshit. And a whole lot more.

All this has given us the “gift” to face reality via Manning’s struggle. Its undisputable illumination of what lengths our government and military will go and how downright cowardly and evil they can be when resisted. Manning’s case is also a shocking tip of the proverbial iceberg, given the high numbers of homicides, suicides and sexual abuse going on and minimized by our military and political authorities. Cover-up the clear priority of the establishment, rather than solving the gravest of problems.

This military and government need to crush the mind, soul and body of a 23-year old American patriot. It is heartbreaking and mind-numbing.

America, one big old super dysfunctional family and the patriarchal military and political parents have reached Caligula/Medea proportions as caretakers of the nation’s youth. Hell, of all of us.

Well, one lone positive thus far. At least the Mannings don’t have to contend with Dr. Phil.

Yet.

(I know, I know. I should talk.)

NY's Political Crime Wave: Green's Hawkins Says Start Leg. Sessions With Lie Detector Test Not Pledge of Allegiance!

[email from Howie Hawkins, 3-10-11]

Green Party Decries Crime Wave at State Capitol -- Call for Lawmakers to Submit to Lie Detector Tests to Root Out Corruption

The Green Party of New York said today that state Democratic and Republican Parties have become an organized crime family at the State Capitol.

"Rather than starting the legislation session with the pledge of allegiance, state legislators and the Governor should submit to a lie detector test as to whether or not they have solicited any bribes or kickbacks that day. The indictment rate of state legislators exceeds that of the mafia, but instead of hearing lawmakers demand investigations and reforms to clean up the corruption, they make poor people get fingerprinted to get a few crumbs," said Howie Hawkins, the recent Green Party candidate for Governor.

Hawkins noted that with today's criminal indictment of SENATOR CARL KRUGER, three of the four so-called Amigos who threw the State Senate into chaos over the last year have been criminally indicted. ASSEMBLY MEMBER BOYLAND was also indicted today.

Kruger is the second corruption case involving State Senators in the last three months, following former SENATOR LEIBELL who pled guilty to corruption.

Hawkins said the skyrocketing rate of criminal indictments and convictions of state lawmakers was just the tip of the iceberg. "Lawmakers like convicted felon SENATOR BRUNO rival Wall Street in their embrace of greed. They believe that their position entitles them to enrich themselves and their friends at taxpayer expense. As Grandpa Al Lewis always helpfully spelled out for the media, campaign contributions are really just legalized B-R-I-B-E-S. We need an independent organized crime task force to root out the corruption in our political system. We need public campaign financing so that the rich and Wall Street can't just buy politicians. And we need to clean up the legally and ethically challenged U.S. Supreme Court," added Hawkins, a co-chair of the state Green Party.

"How can the public possibly trust state lawmakers at this point? We have an organized crime family basically running the state legislature while making decisions about a $130 billion budget that cuts the welfare grant and slashes funding for schools and human services in order to pay for tax cuts to the rich and a $14 billion rebate to Wall Street speculators. When state lawmakers are not running extortion schemes they are out raising campaign contributions in exchange for kickbacks to special interests. When Cuomo and other legislative leaders push for a $5 billion tax cut for the richest New Yorkers, are they doing it because they believe it is the best for the state or because they are rewarding campaign contributors?" asked Peter LaVenia, the other party co-chair.

In addition to the more than a dozen state legislators who have been indicted and convicted in recent years, former STATE COMPTROLLER HEVESI plead guilty to corruption involving the state pension fund, GOVERNOR SPITZER resigned over his involvement with prostitution and money laundering, and GOVERNOR PATERSON has paid fines and is being criminally investigated related to lying under oath over demanding free tickets to a Yankee game.

The Greens noted that the political corruption in New York State extended to the minor parties that live off of the two major parties. THE INDEPENDENCE PARTY is facing a number of criminal investigations in NYS, as well as their role with billionaire Mayor Bloomberg and the so-called theft of $1.1 million by JOHN HAGGERTY during the recent Mayoral campaign. A judge in that case yesterday declined to lift an order freezing the funds of the New York State Independence Party. Prosecutors have accused the party of helping to cover up the theft of the funds by Haggerty.

The Faux-Humanitarian, Oil Slick, Garden Path to Another War

End of the American Dream reports that a Rasmussen poll found that 67% of Americans do not want war with Libya. 17% of them do.

HAH! As if that matters to anyone in power.

Yeah, I know Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Barack Obama keep protesting they really don't want to go to war with Libya. Can’t you hear the reluctance in their voices these days? Look at their grave faces advising restraint! Especially Robert Gates'.

That is rich. Not since Tom Sawyer feigned so much pleasure in whitewashing the fence has such a perfect con been executed. Oh, wait. There were Gates’ assurances on the NewsHour that the military budget had been seriously slashed. Oh, all right. Then there was anything Obama promised pre-election. Anyway ...

“HOLD ON THERE!” argues the American corporate media. “Aren’t you listening? Clinton, Gates, Obama, McCain, Lieberman, Kerry (et tu, John?), et al. -- neocons and neolibs one and all -- can’t help themselves. They clearly care so much about the Libyan people. How can all these hyper-humanitarians turn their backs on even one person suffering and dying?"

HAH! (I can’t even dignify that with further comment it is so stunningly untrue.)

EOAD goes on:

Of course nobody in the mainstream media seems to be bringing up the fact that the United States has stood idly by and watched millions and millions of Africans be slaughtered in bloody civil wars and genocides over the past couple of decades.

For decades the U.S. has looked upon the suffering of millions of Africans with indifference but now they are trying to convince us that it is a "moral imperative" that we intervene in the civil war in Libya.

It is funny how things can change when oil is at stake.  Libya is the biggest producer of oil in Africa and that makes it a very important nation to the global elite.

Even Obama-loving Guardian writer Michael Tomasky gets this one, this seduction down the proverbial garden path to war. Tomasky respectfully quotes from Mike Lind in Salon who has brilliantly compared a no fly zone over Libya action to a “gateway drug”.

The implication [of McCain, Lieberman, Kerry et al.] is that the enforcement of "no-fly zones," by the U.S. alone or with NATO allies, would be a moderate, reasonable measure short of war, like a trade embargo. In reality, declaring and enforcing a no-fly zone in Libya would be a radical act of war. It would require the U.S. not only to shoot down Libyan military aircraft but also to bomb Libya in order to destroy anti-aircraft defenses. Under any legal theory, bombing a foreign government's territory and blasting its air force out of the sky is war.

Could America's war in Libya remain limited? The hawks glibly promise that the U.S. could limit its participation in the Libyan civil war to airstrikes, leaving the fighting to Libyan rebels.

These assurances by the hawks are ominously familiar.

Tomasky:

Lind then traces us back through the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, arguing that each of these turned into wars of larger scale than intended (Afghanistan and Iraq were supposed to be quick and easy, remember?). Then he pounds the hammer right on the nail. Can't you just see these phases playing themselves out:

The lesson of these three wars is that the rhetoric of lift-and-strike is a gateway drug that leads to all-out American military invasion and occupation. Once the U.S. has committed itself to using limited military force to depose a foreign regime, the pressure to "stay the course" becomes irresistible. If lift-and-strike were to fail in Libya, the same neocon hawks who promised that it would succeed would not apologize for their mistake. Instead, they would up the ante. They would call for escalating American involvement further, because America's prestige would now be on the line. They would denounce any alternative as a cowardly policy of "cut and run." And as soon as any American soldiers died in Libya, the hawks would claim that we would be betraying their memory, unless we conquered Libya and occupied it for years or decades until it became a functioning, pro-American democracy.

Say it with me, now. The definition of insanity. "Doing the same thing over and over and ..."

Now NY Guv Cuomo Declares War on Brain-Damaged Babies (I kid you not!)

Some politicians kiss babies to posture their likability and trustworthiness.

Other politicians, like NY’s new Governor Andrew Cuomo, will rob them, infant victims of medical malpractice, of necessary, minimal, long-term medical coverage.

Cuomo wants to put a $250,000 lifetime cap on medical compensation for brain injury to a child caused by medical malpractice. This may sound like a lot of money, but in the course of a lifetime, medical bills being what they are and what they will undoubtedly climb to, it is very likely far from adequate.

But now is the time to screw anyone and anything for profit or political expediency. This is how things are in Obamaworld, continuation of Bushworld. Profits over people. Profits over helpless little people -- very little people. Obama has made it safe and stylish for the Democrats to be as much outright bastards as the Republicans. Obama has his catfood commission. Cuomo has his “Medicaid Redesign Team” including some strong-willed, well compensated industry lobbyists. Familiar playbook?

How low can these corporate pimped ones go? It seems bottomless.

The mythology of “tort reform” is useful to Cuomo to court the conservative supporters, especially the authoritarian following, low-informed ones. “Tort reform” is the red herring that well-compensated lobbyists use to distract from the real extortion by the medical industry going on. The call declares that medical malpractice victims and their families are really the evil victimizers. Yes, of course fraud happens. But it is minuscule compared to the medical/insurance industry’s profiteering racket presently being perpetrated on the US citizenry.

Remember how the medical industry lobbyists were the actual writers of most of Obamacare? No room at the table for anyone seriously pro-citizen. But thereafter, the Republicans insisted Obamacare still was not kind enough to the medical industry, which shows how anti-citizen our political elite actually is on both sides of the aisle, as well as in the red or blue Governors’ mansions, which is becoming more and more obvious across the country.

New York is a blue state? Not any more. Or blue as in depressed. Emotionally and financially blue, I guess, except those golden top percenters raking in phenomenal profits.

We indeed live in extraordinary and merciless times.

The faux-outrage about tort reform uses the schadenfreude tendencies of low-informed, authoritarian following and stressed citizens who want to withhold medical compensation from their fellow humans.

This is what Ralph Nader has to say about tort reform and the insurance industry in an article entitled, “Selling Out Injured Babies’ Rights.”

Governor Cuomo needs to review the facts on medical malpractice. First he should know that supporters of tort "deform" invoke one myth after another: a litigation explosion, juries automatically ruling in favor of plaintiffs and routinely awarding punitive damages, an economy shattered by these awards. Each of these notions is demonstrably false. Only a tiny percentage of persons injured bring lawsuits, and an even tinier percentage of those who do receive large verdicts. Limiting victims' rights is an anti-democratic solution to a trumped-up problem.

Second, a driving force behind this dishonest campaign is the insurance industry. Whenever, over the years, insurers face low interest rates and declining stock investments, they start the drumbeat against justice for victims. They’ve made a particular cause against liabilities for medical malpractice. Instead of demanding disciplinary action against incompetent physicians, urging medical associations to police their own ranks, the insurance industry lobbies state and federal legislatures to curtail victims' rights and remedies in courts of law. At the insurance industry’s behest, their physician policyholders have joined the call.

Why do physicians allow themselves to be tools of insurance companies that gouge them especially when they are not among the incompetent few who account for most malpractice claims (five percent of doctors are involved in roughly 50 percent of malpractice payouts)? One answer is that insurance companies frighten physicians with false data suggesting that malpractice suits run amok. A persuasive case can be made that there are far too few malpractice suits. The 1999 Institute of Medicine study estimated that gross malpractice in hospitals alone takes up to 98,000 American lives a year and causes hundreds of thousands of serious injuries. Yet various studies show that roughly 90% of people harmed by medical malpractice do not even file suit.

If you total the entire amount of premiums physicians pay in a year for their malpractice insurance and divide it evenly by all the physicians practicing in the United States, the average annual premium is less than $10,000 per doctor. Very manageable. So why are some doctors paying $50,000 or $100,000 a year to their malpractice insurers? Because the profit hungry companies have learned to over-classify their risk pools, thereby charging exorbitant amounts to specific specialists like obstetricians and orthopedic surgeons. In addition, because insurers fail to surcharge the few incompetent physicians in these specialties, the competent specialists pay for more than they should.

Additionally cruel concerning this NY Governor was the assumption by many that Andrew would exhibit at least some of his father’s, Governor Mario Cuomo’s, empathy for the underdog. Not going to be the case, clearly. Andrew didn’t even bother pretending during his campaign. (Seems like assuming a political son will mirror the sensibility of a political father is a hard to learn lesson in this country.) We get the father’s last name, but not his values.

Also, besides his dad’s positive name recognition, Andrew Cuomo had the advantage of confronting a Republican opponent, Carl Paladino, who sounded more and more extreme ... all right, insane ... with every sound bite as the election season went on. Andrew Cuomo’s victory was a relative cakewalk.

So Andrew Cuomo, instead of safeguarding the crying needs of an economically terrorized citizenry, is picking up on the Republican/Blue Dog austerity drum beat. Even the seemingly omnipresent David Koch, according to a recent email from NY Green Party’s Howie Hawkins, contributed $50,000 to Cuomo’s campaign. Christine Quinn, Speaker of the NY City Council, in a recent local tv interview made it clear pigs would fly before Andrew Cuomo would consider raising taxes on the rich (my words, not hers, btw, but she was VERY definite). We have to find other resources to reduce the deficit because of Cuomo's strong stance on that she declared. According to Howie Hawkins, $5 billion could have been subtracted from the $9 billion NY State deficit if the recent tax breaks hadn’t recently been bestowed to the very wealthy.

Still, why such a “draconian” (Nader’s term) measure for this Governor? Brain-injured babies? Come on!!!!!

Ralph Nader explains that Cuomo is simply being chillingly pragmatic.

The short answer: political expediency. Credible observers say Governor Cuomo needs to give the health insurance industry a financial benefit in exchange for the health insurance industry not economically punishing hospitals workers. And to top it off with a touch that would make Machiavelli proud, the Governor placed this initiative in his budget proposal. This means that for the New York State Assembly and Senate to vote against this draconian measure used to seal a political deal, the legislators would have to vote down the entire state budget.

It is shameful that the Governor would use his creativity and intellect to help the health industry at the expense of helpless babies who are victims of medical malpractice.

Many in the health care and insurance industry seem to regard the civil justice system as a nuisance that threatens to destroy our economy and way of life. In reality, America’s civil justice system plays an indispensable role. When the rights of injured consumers are vindicated in court, our society benefits in countless ways: compensating victims and their families for shattering losses (with the cost borne by the wrongdoers rather than taxpayers); preventing future injuries by deterring dangerous health care and other practices, spurring safety innovation; and educating the public to risks associated with certain products and services. These legal rights provide society with its moral and ethical fiber by defining appropriate norms of conduct.

Do you really have to destroy the welfare of brain-injured babies to raise money for struggling hospital workers? One more time robbing citizen, tiny citizen, Peter, to pay struggling citizen Paul. So Obama-like. God forbid, let's not ask for a penny from the corporate pirates, the amorally profiteering elite of America, that caused the economic crisis and then was rewarded for it.

And once again, concerning judicial recourse, another destructive whack at civil liberties in America.

Cuomo, another political, morally compass-less gamesman. Well, Andy Cuomo knows who can seriously butter his political bread. Not us. He will let the rest of us eat the proverbial “cake,” I guess.

NY Governor Andrew Cuomo. In the billionaires’ corner, not the babies’.

Green Party Hawkins: NY Guv Cuomo's Jaw-Dropping War on Poor, Working & Middle Class Families vs. Green New Deal

[email from office of Howie Hawkins, NY Green Party]

Green Party Calls for State Lawmakers to Reject Cuomo's Austerity Budget -- A Green New Deal would invest in jobs, education, fair taxes

Green Party of NY State leaders today called Gov. Andrew Cuomo's budget an attack on working and middle class New Yorkers that should be rejected by state lawmakers.

"Cuomo's budget is not about shared sacrifice. The people are forced to sacrifice. The richest 3% get more tax breaks. Cuomo is just recycling failed conservative policies of spending cuts and layoffs and tax cuts for the rich. It's for Wall Street and it will deepen the economic hardships on Main Street. Cuomo's budget is another version of the attacks on working families and unions that have given rise to massive protests in Wisconsin. We need similar protests here," said Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for governor in 2010.

The Greens said that rather than merely extending the so-called millionaires' tax, the state should further raise taxes on the wealthy to fully cover the projected deficit. The wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers now receive 35% of the income, up from 10% in 1980. It is tax cuts for the rich, not spending on schools and state workers, that caused the fiscal crisis, along with the recession, which income inequality makes worse. The last time the rich had so much of the total income in 1927, the lack of purchasing power by the working and middle classes plunged the nation into the Great Depression.

The Greens pointed out that both major parties were ignoring the Great Recession and unemployment crisis. The Greens said they would halt the annual rebate of $14 billion to Wall Street speculators and invest the stock transfer tax into a WPA-style jobs program to directly create 500,000 publicly-funded jobs paying $14 to $17 an hour.

The Greens also called for at least a 50% cut in the federal military budget in order to free up funds for jobs and other domestic needs. Taxpayers in State of New York will pay $49.6 billion for the proposed Department of Defense Budget for FY2012. NY has paid $113 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan .

The Greens said the budget deficit was a revenue problem, not a spending problem.

"The state's deficit was created by the $20 billion annual tax cuts for the wealthy enacted by state lawmakers since the mid-90s, combined with a Great Recession created by the financial misdeeds and greed of Wall Street and the real estate sector. Rather than holding Wall Street accountable for solving the mess they created, look at where Cuomo proposes to make cuts: reducing school aid by $1.5 billion, slashing Medicaid by $2.85 billion, $200 million from the MTA, nearly 10 percent of SUNY and CUNY's operating budget, specifically cutting back tuition assistance to low-income New Yorkers. Aid to towns and cities would fall by 2% - or nearly $32 million, and it's already 75% below what's required by law," stated Peter LaVenia, state party co-chair.

"Cuomo is giving wealthy New Yorkers a $5 billion tax cut by allowing the temporary income tax increases to expire. With the richest 1% getting 35% of New York 's income, how is this fair? The rich just got a massive tax break from Obama and Congress by extending the Bush tax cuts. We should recapture some of that tax giveaway to resolve the state's fiscal problems that the rich created.

"Why is the governor cutting aid to the homeless and welfare grant programs in the middle of a recession? Is he really that cruel or does he just not care?"

"We also notice Gov. Cuomo has decided to cut state operations funding for the Department of Environmental Conservation by $74 million. No restorations were made to the Environmental Protection Fund (EPF) after the 40% cut last year, on top of $500 million swept from the dedicated fund since 2001. With massive climate change in the offing, how can we afford to continue slashing the EPF?"

"The budget plan says nothing about ending the drug war - the single biggest drain on our prison system. Cuomo's plan will devastate communities around New York and shatter the dreams of many New York children who cannot otherwise afford to attend college. How are the choices made in this budget anything but a war on the poor?," asked LaVenia "Nobel laureate economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, amongst others, have written endlessly on how we cannot cut our way out of a recession," said Hawkins.

"The Green Party believes our budget goals must be focused on restoring full employment, high quality of life for New Yorkers, and crafting a democratically run economy.

The Green Party has better solutions for the proposed budget deficit:

1. Stop Rebating the stock transfer tax. Still on the books, the tax would raise nearly $15 billion yearly for New York . Wall Street created this mess, and Wall St. should clean it up.

2. Single-Payer Universal Health Care. Instead of slashing Medicaid funding and increasing the number of uninsured and underinsured New Yorkers (an estimated 2.6 million), let us follow Vermont's lead and institute a single-payer health care system which will cover all New Yorkers equitably and release counties from the single biggest drain on their budgets, the Medicaid cost. A recent state funded study concluded a single payer system would reduce health care costs in NY by $28 billion by 2019 compared to the recently enacted insurance mandate.

3. Restore the progressive pre-1980 income tax structure: The wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers receive 35% of all state income, up from 10% in 1980; in NYC they have 44% and pay only 33% of the taxes. The rest of us have gotten worse off. Restoring the tax structure would fill state coffers with an additional $8-$10 billion a year, and allow us to rebuild main streets across New York . Plus, it would give 95% of New Yorkers a tax break!

4. A Green New Deal for Full Employment: Instead of cutting employment, invest in public and cooperative businesses designed to stay in communities around the state and address the needs of the locality. New York lead the way in the 1930s and served as a model for FDR's New Deal. Massive public investment to sustainably re-develop local economies, especially upstate, will create a healthy tax structure and quality of life for all New Yorkers. Making businesses publicly or cooperatively owned means they will have an incentive to focus on community needs. Full employment via public investment will help rebuild communities and spark further economic growth.

According to Prof. Phil Harvey of Rutgers , a WPA style jobs program to create 500,000 jobs would cost about $14.3 billion - equal to the size of the rebate of the stock transfer tax. Wages would pay in the mid-teens per hour. Jobs would be tailored to meet the unmet needs of the community, such as child care, construction work (e.g., the rehabilitation of abandoned or sub-standard housing), conservation measures (e.g., caulking windows and doors in private dwellings), the construction of new affordable housing units, and parks improvements. The program also could expand and improve the quality of public services in areas such as health care, child care, education, recreation, elder care, and cultural enrichment.

5. State Bank: Create a state bank akin to North Dakota 's - which has remained in the black throughout the financial crisis - and have it help New Yorkers and towns hurt by the credit crunch. A public bank would provide the capital to revitalize low-income neighborhoods and towns hurt by financial mis-dealings.

6. Carbon Tax - Start collecting a carbon tax from polluters, and use the money to invest in renewable solar and wind technology. Some of the money should be rebated to consumers to offset the regressive nature of the energy tax.

7. Legalize and Tax Marijuana - We could make New York a leader in a new cash crop, bring in more than 60 millions of dollars in revenue. More importantly, we would stop filling our prisons with nonviolent offenders that are overwhelmingly people of color. Hundreds of millions of dollars would also be saved by adopting the proposals of the Correctional Association to close unneeded prisons and expand work release.

The Sustained Crucifixion of Bradley Manning

The placement of human beings in solitary confinement is not a measure of their depravity. It is a measure of our own. Lynn Parramore

Bradley Manning is being tortured for our sins.

For the sins of us American citizens, many of us of limited courage, conscience and/or consciousness.

He is also being tortured -- the torturous “killing of the messenger” -- for the appalling and vast sins of the amoral rulers of this country, who are responsible for gratuitous (although they don’t consider them gratuitous if there are corporate profits involved) massive deaths and massive suffering of human beings around the globe.

The powers that be who abandoned honor and morality long ago. The ones who think that might not only makes “right” but also should protect them from any millisecond of “embarrassment” or “unease” on being called on their corrupt cronyism, narcissism, violence, venality, and so often grotesque incompetence.

They are making an example of Manning for all potential whistleblowers. To make any people of conscience think twice before calling out war criminal behaviors perpetrated by the United States. Obama, still skating on image, was our chance to turn around the fascism of the Bush regime. Instead Obama, or “Obagman” as he was bitterly referred to by some commenter the other day and I find no argument, has done all he can to lock in fascism and oligarchical oppression in the United States forever. The new American way. The new world order. A race to the bottom. Institutionalized evil.

I write blogs pretty quickly and emotionally (obviously), motivated by a wave of righteous indignation often triggered by reading one or more skilled and informed commentators. But writing about the plight of Bradley Manning brings up a special sense of despair and futility within me, literal feelings of nausea, from my incredulity over so many still blind to the incredible injustice and cruelty involved. The reality that Obama et al. are so bloody and obnoxiously shameless. Evil.

Facing down evil sickens. It is the reason so many retreat into denial and prefer finding the comfort of the illusion of American justice on Law & Order, etc., or obsess about celebrity lives rather than the fast eroding security of their own and God forbid, their fellow countrymen’s and women’s or, also God forbid, of the extended, global “family of man and woman.”

When I found out about the secret, merciless, black ops torture program under the Bush regime I was appalled and sickened. When Obama came on board I was impatient for him to publicly acknowledge the horror of it all, and to make the perpetrators accountable. I even started wearing a black arm band trusting I would be able to remove it as soon as Obama “did the right thing.” Followed the U.S. Constitution. Honored the Articles of the Geneva Conventions. HAH!

Instead I entered a new dimension of nauseating horror. Obama was morally compass-less. Soulless. Let me say it. It is chilling to surrender to the reality that someone with so much power to do good, won’t. Will do all he can to build the impression he is doing good or at least the impression he “wants to do good,” but in the spin-dizzying name of bipartisanship he must “pragmatically” enable evil.

Come on, how can Obama not be “good,” enabled by Oprah and so much of the corporate media? He is an African American and does not deserve the racism coming at him from the right, so that automatically rallies many to his side. He is well educated and talks the talk of American idealism so well. He has a great big amiable smile and a good sense of humor, which slips up occasionally when he makes jokes about drones, etc. but again, how many really take issue? He has PERSONALITY. And in A.D.D., consumer and, more and more, economically terrorized America, who seriously has the time to separate personality from character? Well, not until it is way too late.

Obama is not trustworthy when it comes to decency and constitutionality. He will oblige these precepts short-term or on the surface, if it is politically convenient, making those praying for his “potential” emotionally seasick as he confuses and confounds yet again. Sadly, he and his entourage are addicted to their own power and co-addicted to the power of others. But, what the hey, why should he be any different from our Congress and Pentagon leaders and the leaders we thought we could trust that came before him? Ugly America has been going strong for a long time, but as I said in one of my earliest blogs, Obama seems to have brought his sled to the slippery slope of fascism. The Republicans have to make up complaints about Obama, because the reality is Obama has the same ultimate goals as the most conservative of them.

The Bradley Manning torture does not only illustrate to the relatively small number of Americans who really grasp its meaning -- are willing to and have the stomach for it -- how Obama is willing to shred the U.S. Constitution, one of many examples in Manning’s case, the eighth amendment which forbids “cruel and unusual punishment.” What at first numbs me with despair but then enrages me finally is the Bradley Manning torture is so “in-your-face,” America. I mean, was “24” that good a show to make America shelve its long-time humanitarian stance against the use of torture? It was the beloved, paper-tiger Ronald Reagan, even, who at first embraced the idea of making it official, “NO EXCEPTIONS for the use of torture by America”!!! WTF happened?

Now, if you interfere with the corrupt will of the American ruling elite you will be subject to mind-breaking, physically harmful and degrading torture, on display for all.

The latest word on the merciless and intense degradation of Bradley Manning enrages me further. A new sadistic and sexualized dimension of his torture. Forcing his total nudity for 7 hours of his sleep time along with the morning inspection at his cell door. Okay, Corporal Manning, we are now throwing the death penalty at you and hand over your underwear, so you REALLY EXPERIENCE your full vulnerability to the anti-democratic powers that are running America. It’s got that dark, ugly, frat-boy-male-cult kinda imagination of cruelty but on steroids, don’t you think?

Here is an account from Medea Benjamin and Mike Davis about Manning’s present treatment:

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has decided to make Manning's pre-trial existence as torturous as possible, holding him in solitary confinement 23 hours a day since his arrest 10 months ago – treatment that the group Psychologists for Social Responsibility notes is, “at the very least, a form of cruel, unusual and inhumane treatment in violation of U.S. law.”

Sustained solitary confinement and sensory deprivation short term erodes one sense of well being, long term leads to psychosis, doesn’t it? Of course, they claim to be giving him anti-depressants to combat the stress they are doing all they can to induce. WTF???

Benjamin and Davis go on:

In addition to the horror of long-term solitary confinement, Manning is barred from exercising in his cell and is denied bed sheets and a pillow. And every five minutes, he must respond in the affirmative when asked by a guard if he's “okay.”

Glenn Greenwald revealed at some point that the one hour of exercise Manning is allowed (And why can he not exercise within his own cell for God’s sake? Are they afraid of allotting him the benefits of endorphins?) is to walk in circles while shackled. If he stops at all he is immediately returned to his cell.

Benjamin and Davis:

And it gets worse. On his blog, Manning's military lawyer, Lt. Col. David Coombs, reveals that his client is now being stripped of his clothing at night, left naked under careful surveillance for seven hours. When the 5:00 am wake-up call comes, he's then “forced to stand naked at the front of the cell.”

If you point out that the emperor has no clothes, it seems the empire will make sure you have none either.

Officials at the Quantico Marine Base where Manning is being held claim the move is “not punitive” but rather a “precautionary measure” intended to prevent him from harming himself. Do they really think Manning is going to strangle himself with his underwear – and that he could do so while under 24-hour surveillance?

“Is this Quantico or Abu Ghraib?” asked Rep. Dennis Kucinich in a press release. Good question, congressman. Like the men imprisoned in former President Bush's Iraqi torture chamber, Manning is being abused and humiliated despite having not so much as been tried in a military tribunal, much less convicted of an actual crime.

This from Ryan Gallagher in the Guardian:

Earlier this week, the soldier accused of leaking thousands of confidential documents to WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, was handed an additional 22 charges as part of his ongoing court martial process. The 23-year-old, who has been in solitary confinement for more than seven months, stands accused of computer fraud, theft of public records and willfully communicating classified information to a person not entitled to receive it.

He now also finds himself faced with a rare charge known as "aiding the enemy" – a capital offence for which he could face the death penalty.

The revelation will no doubt have come as a blow to Manning, although given his ongoing treatment it is likely he already feared the worst. Made to endure strict conditions under a prevention of injury order against the advice of military psychiatrists, he is treated like no other prisoner at the 250-capacity Quantico Brig detention facility in Virginia. Despite that he is yet to be convicted of any crime, for the past 218 consecutive days he has been made to live in a cell 6ft wide and 12ft long, without contact with any other detainees. He is not allowed to exercise or have personal effects in his cell, and for the one hour each day he is allowed free from his windowless cell he is taken to an empty room where he is allowed to walk, but not run.

One of the few people to have visited Manning, David House, spoke yesterday of how he had witnessed his friend go from a "bright-eyed intelligent young man" to someone who at times has appeared "catatonic" with "very high difficulty carrying on day to day conversation". House drew similarities with the case of Bobby Dellelo, an American prisoner who developed psychosis after a lengthy period in solitary confinement conditions similar to Manning's. "For me this has been like watching a really good friend succumb to an illness or something," he said. "I think that Bradley Manning is being punished this way because the US government wants him to crack ahead of his trial."

While there has been widespread and well publicised condemnation of issues surrounding Manning's detainment, his conditions have failed to improve. In fact, things may have got worse, not better, for the Oklahoma-born soldier who is incidentally entitled to UK citizenship through his Welsh mother. Just two days ago, for instance, only 24 hours after having been told he now faces a capital charge, Manning was made to strip naked in his cell for no apparent reason. According to David Coombs, Manning's lawyer, the soldier was then left without clothes for seven hours. When the wake-up call sounded for the detainees at 5am, in an act of forced humiliation, Manning was made to stand naked at the front of his cell.

The incident, described as "inexcusable and without justification" by Coombs, is symbolic of the entire twisted saga: a gross injustice on a nauseating scale. We must bear in mind, of course, that Manning allegedly leaked military files because he, according to unverified internet chat logs, saw wrongdoing and had no other course of action because his superiors told him they "didn't want to hear any of it". He did not want to be complicit in war crimes, and felt that by leaking the files he could prompt "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms".

Gallagher points out the number of recent sound bites Obama and US government leaders are indulging in condemning human rights abuses and repression across the Middle East. When it comes to a citizen of conscience in America? Not so much. Not at all. In fact, bring on the sadism, the institutionalized malice. Solitary confinement, sensory deprivation not enough. Now they up the ante with sexual abuse.

No one is surprised any more by hearing recent past Obama quotes of hypocrisy but Gallagher offers one more from some time in 2008, "Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal." Was that before or after he became President? It doesn’t matter. Say anything is the M.O. for Obama in morality-free-accountability-free (except if you are a whistleblower for justice)-Obamaworld. As for the military culture, which reveals rampant rapes and other sexual abuses, suicides, homicides, graft, aiding and abetting of the REAL enemy (extortion money to the Taliban, etc.), enabling of misogyny, coverups, minimizations and denials. Way to go, Barack. Clinton. Gates. Congress. Pentagon.

The main offense, Manning faces the death penalty for GOD’s sake, is really in “embarrassing” a corrupt US regime and a corrupt past one with horrifying truths. Such truths have been said to have to a degree inspired the current unrest in the Middle East. Ironically, Wikileaks disclosures are being taken very seriously and appreciatively outside of the United States, while Americans are easily distracted from their content with the Obama regime’s and an obliging media’s demonizations of Manning and Assange.

Bradley Manning has allegedly supplied evidence that American foreign policy rulers are war criminals. Supplied a detailed account of the vast scope and nature of this war criminality. In his young life, Manning enlisted to serve his country at the risk of losing his life, and now, apparently, has risked his life to communicate the criminality of the military culture he had entrusted his life to.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and other criminal foreign policy colluders still easily receive massive rewards in book and speaking deals. Ironically, at the same time they dare not travel abroad, because even though they are protected by fellow war criminals in this country and the mass denial of many of the citizenry, thanks to the craven corporate media, authorities among the international community have no problem recognizing their enormous guilt in defying international and moral law.

The war criminals in charge presently, including and especially Obama, and the corporate press have demonized Manning as a criminal. He broke the military code of discipline and confidentiality. The fact that he did it to uphold the U.S. Constitution and reveal gross war criminality and corruption is ignored in Obama’s accountability-free world for real perpetrators. There is the glaring double standard dooming whistleblowers. There is always the “war on terror” post 9/11 blank check Obama and his regime, as the Bush regime, cash in on to shove aside citizen protections of due process for arbitrarily deemed “extenuating, extrajudicial” circumstances. Bald, bold and shameless they are. Disclosing criminal behavior in a non-criminal world would not be a crime. Ray McGovern in a recent blog declared that if this were a “just world,” Bradley Manning would be offered the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead he is facing a death sentence.

Where is the accountability for such atrocities as U.S. death squads, black site torture, indefinite detentions, drone incineration attacks on innocent civilians, the use of white phosphorous and depleted uranium weapons?

Alexander Cockburn writes:

The WikiLeaks documents show that the picture of the international business of the United States offered by the major U.S. media to the public is an infantile misrepresentation of reality. The efforts being made by Attorney General Eric Holder to bolster secrecy and espionage laws show that the U.S. government, led currently by a man who pledged "transparency," wants the American people to remain in blissful ignorance of what its government is actually doing.

The alleged leaker of the WikiLeaks files, Army Private Bradley Manning, currently being held in solitary confinement in sadistic conditions, should be vigorously applauded and defended for exposing such crimes as the murder of civilians in Baghdad by U.S. Apache helicopters. The WikiLeaks Afghan-related files are a damning, vivid series of snapshots of a disastrous and criminal enterprise.

In these same files, there is a compelling series of secret documents about the death squad operated by the U.S. military known as Task Force 373, an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, which has been hunting down targets for death or detention without trial. From WikiLeaks we learn that more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritized effects list.

Julian Assange and his colleagues should similarly be honored and defended.

They have acted in the best traditions of the journalistic vocation.

Daniel Ellsberg released evidence of war criminality with the Pentagon Papers in 1971. It wasn’t until after 50,000 US troops lost their lives and between 2 and 3 million Vietnamese were killed that that war was ended and there was a public acknowledgment by many in the power elite, the press and the citizenry that it had been a tragic misadventure. Nixon wasn’t fond of Ellsberg, you can bet your life, but Ellsberg was not subjected to torture and the threat of death for blowing his serious whistle, was he?

Ellsberg sees Manning as having served the same role as himself. But the United States has become so fascistic that there is no remote structure in Obamaworld, as in Bushworld, for legal accountability of illegal and amoral abuse of power within this government. The corporate media is so cravenly obsequious to a criminal ruling class.

Chris Floyd always lays out the grim truth:

As you went about the business of being human, this inhuman thing has come. It has come in your name, wrapped in your flag, claiming your security as its raison d'etre.

And in the guise of a young, hip, educated progressive, it has just now declared that anyone who reveals any hidden evil committed by the fascist state is subject to prosecution for a capital crime. That's right. It has revealed that you -- you American citizen, you patriot, you believer in goodness and justice and genuine democracy -- you can be killed by the government if you tell the truth.

This is what the administration of President Barack Obama has demonstrated -- indeed, has proudly proclaimed -- in its treatment of the young man it is avowedly, openly torturing for telling the truth about American war crimes, Bradley Manning. There can be no mistaking the meaning, implications and import of Barack Obama's actions. Corporal Bradley Manning has been charged with leaking "classified material," including a video posted on WikiLeaks that showed American forces gleefully shooting up Iraqi civilians with helicopter gunships. Manning is also alleged to have obtained thousands of other files detailing crimes, corruption, cover-ups, lies and deceit by American forces and American diplomats around the world. Although American officials have repeatedly said that none of leaks attributed to Manning and to WikiLeaks have caused any bodily harm to any agent of American imperial power around the world, Manning is being accused of "threatening national security" and "aiding the enemy."

Then Floyd asks a very compelling question:

And who, pray tell, is the "enemy" being aided by the expression of truth? On Thursday, the Pentagon very helpfully spelled it out to the New York Times:

The charge sheet did not explain who “the enemy” was, leading some to speculate that it was a reference to WikiLeaks. On Thursday, however, the military said that it instead referred to any hostile forces that could benefit from learning about classified military tactics and procedures.

If that is not fascism, there has never been such a thing on the face of the earth.

To be sure, American officials say that they will seek only life imprisonment for Manning -- who they are now subjecting to hours of forced nakedness in front of video cameras. But the military judge who will oversee Manning's court martial is entirely free to disregard the prosecutor's stated intention and impose the full penalty for aiding the "enemy."

But again, who is the "enemy"? You are the enemy -- if you speak a truth that the government does not want you to reveal. (Of course, if you are an approved and coddled courtier, an eager, scurrying scribe like Bob Woodward, for example, you can reveal all the most secret "classified material" that you like, as long as it comes from savvy insiders "authorized" to praise their bosses and make their rivals look bad.) If you speak this unwanted truth, the government, the president -- the cool, savvy, modern, hip, educated progressive president -- can throw you in jail, subject you to torture, deprive you of sleep, and finally strip you naked in front of cameras to break you down and humiliate you in their efforts to dehumanize you, to grind you down into a piece of meat.

To follow up on Floyd’s question of who actually is the enemy, since Manning allegedly released the video and war logs to inform the citizenry, are we the unspoken “enemy” being abetted according to these war mongers? Seems so. Fred Branfman writes:

Both the Wikileaks Iraqi and Afghan War Logs, in short, have revealed that the entire U.S. Executive is a "vast lying machine", as journalist David Halberstam described the U.S. military in his affadavit for the CBS vs. Westmoreland trial. It must be understood that “truth” vs. “lies” is not even an operational category within the Executive Branch or military.

The purpose of communicating with the public is not to provide them with truthful information but rather to advance “the mission”. People who communicate with the public obtain their jobs and are promoted on the basis of their ability to mislead, deceive, “spin” and lie. There is no recorded case where Executive Branch officials have been rewarded for telling the truth to the American people, and many where they have been punished or lost their jobs for doing so. And nothing so epitomizes the degradation of democracy in America that the fact the public expects Executive Branch officials to lie to them, and that mass media journalists even betray their profession by defending Executive secrecy and excoriating those who reveal their lies like Julian Assange.

Assume the ostrich stance, America, or face down horror. We not only must fear the hard-knuckle knocking of the FBI or whomever on our doors but maybe the newest drones the size of insects bearing down on us. And multi-dimensional torture onto serious people of conscience. The new American normal. If you disclose criminality, in this case MASSIVE criminality, by breaking the code of confidentiality of the criminals since the criminals are so shamelessly and thoroughly in charge they then can torture you, threaten with the death penalty or a life time of incarceration, HELLISH incarceration.

The military industrial security complex killing machine is sucking up as of this Fall $719 billion of tax dollars which is crippling the welfare of US citizens, reducing jobs, preventing repairs of infrastructure, as well as enabling massive death and destruction to innocent people abroad as well as our own young soldiers all for corporate agendas.

For average Americans to hear that their country is corrupt, their amiable president is corrupt, their military is corrupt is repelling. The larger the scope of atrocity the thicker the walls of the bubble of denial. After 8 years of Bush, the cruelty of an Obama who offered change and continued on, spinning appearance, is heart and mind-numbing. Gaslighting. Crazymaking. Cruel. Dividing up and conquering the Democratic community. “Confuse” means “fused” “with”.

Remember when you were in your early twenties? There was a magnificent courage back then as one's identity broke forth into authentic adulthood. A vast potential then for soaring grandiosity as well as a cavernous vacuum for shame and self doubt. Bradley Manning is the tender age of 23. He enlisted in the army to serve his country. Out of idealism, courage and a spirit of adventure? He discovered the horror of mass indecency and illegality and he leaked the evidence. Massive evidence of the American lying war machine. Of a perverted military culture. He risked his welfare for truth.

Now he is being tortured, intensely and sadistically. A warning for the people of conscience of America. A litmus test for the morality or lack thereof of our President and our nation. A titillation for the authoritarian-following jingoists. Oh, and an additional bonus for homophobic war criminals and friends of war criminals and a hyper-masculine zero-tolerance (for peace mongering) military culture of trickle down sadism: the young man happens to be gay.

As the crucifixion continues and intensifies in its cruelty.

***

Below are some upcoming protests against the war and pro-Bradley Manning:

Announcement from World Can’t Wait:

Rally at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia to support accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Army Pfc. Bradley Manning on March 20th! Supporters will gather for a 2pm rally at the town of Triangle (intersection of Main St. and Route 1), then march to the gates of the Quantico Marine Corps Base. ... Buses from Washington DC have been chartered for this event (departing Union Station at 12:30pm)–reserve your seats today for only $10 RT.

National Protest to stop the wars in Washington, DC: Saturday, March 19th, in Washington DC, noon rally at Lafayette Park and march on the White House to “Resist the War Machine!” Contact dcevents@worldcantwait.net or call 866-973-4463 for more information.

Manhattan Green Sheet - February 2011

Info/Commentary of The Manhattan Greens (www.manhattangreens.org/manhattangreensheet.blogspot.com)
email: ManhattanGreens@gmail.com

GREEN ANNOUNCEMENTS FOR FEBRUARY

Dear Women Greens,

We need to be part of the centennial of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The fire occurred on the late afternoon of March 25, 1911. The Triangle factory was located on the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of what was then the Asch Building at 23-29 Washington Place. It is now called the Brown Building of Science and is located at the north corner of Washington Square East. The fire truck ladders in that day only reached the 6th floor. Over 146 workers, most of them women, either died in the fire or jumped to their deaths.

On Saturday, March 12, there will be a memorial requiem at the Church of the Incarnation (Catholic), at 35 St. & Madison Avenue, from 8-10 pm. On the day of the centennial, there will be a TSFFM dinner whose proceeds endow scholarships for the children of injured workers. The journal for that dinner has an ad deadline of March 9th; I have requested the rates for full, half and quarter ads for it. Please advise if you would like to: [a] contribute toward an ad for the 3/25 dinner, which text would say simply, "The women of the NYC Green Party remember" and if so, how much, and/or [b] attend the 3/12 requiem; and/or contribute toward a bouquet to be placed at the memorial site saying "The women of the Green Party remember."

-- CLAUDIA FLANAGAN

April 9, 2011 National Antiwar Demonstrations in NYC and SF, sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee of NYC (contact mailto: acpollack2@gmail.com or call 518-227-6947. Bring U.S. Troops Home Now! End the sanctions/stop war. End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine! Release trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to foreclosures, single-payer healthcare for all, conversion to sustainable, planet- saving energy systems, public transportation and reparations to victims of U.S. terror. End FBI raids, persecution, torture, drones, death squads, invasion of privacy.

FROM THE DESK OF HOWIE HAWKINS HOW IS GOV. CUOMO HANDLING NY’S $9 BILLION DEFICIT? 1) Slash Jobs, 2) Starve Children, 3) $5 Billion Tax Break for Rich

Hunger Action Alert - Save the Welfare Grant, Stop Full Family Sanctions - Cuomo's proposed state budget cuts funding for a variety of anti-poverty/human service programs to help solve the state's $9 billion deficit, while proposing to spend $5 billion annually to pay for more tax cuts for the wealthiest NYers. We need the Assembly to say NO to these tax cuts. We want to target Assembly member Michele Titus (518-455-5668), the new chair of the Assembly Social Services Committee, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (518 455-3791) We also want to contact Sen. Dean Skelos, the Senate Majority leader. (518) 455-3171.

Message: Please help low-income New Yorkers. Say no to any delay in the welfare grant hike and to full family sanctions. Don't give a huge tax cut to the rich by ending the personal income tax surcharge. We want money for jobs for low-income New Yorkers.

You could also add a message re funding for emergency food. Service levels as the state food pantries and soup kitchens have increased 60% in the last three years. We are also asking for $100 million for jobs for welfare participants. 2 years ago we got $70 million. This year the Governor is proposing zero funding.

Background: Welfare grant hike. The Gov. wants to delay the final year of a promised annual ten percent increase in the basic welfare grant for three years. Full Family Sanctions. The Gov. wants to impose full family sanctions for welfare participants. Now, if an adult is penalized for failing to comply with a welfare rule, only the adult loses their benefits but any children continue to receive assistance. Cuomo wants to deny benefits to children as well. Taxes. 2 yrs ago lawmakers agreed to raise top personal income tax rate for richest by 1 to 2%. $5 billion! Keep it going! Cuomo says no! Jobs. Cuomo proposing no funds Career Pathways & Summer Youth Employment.

THOUGHTS ON TEACHER LAYOFFS, UNION-BUSTING AND CHARTER SCHOOL EXPLOITATION

“Parents and education advocates have long known and their kids have long suffered from the way in which the mayor treats the New York City public schools as his personal fiefdom, to do with whatever he wants, regardless of what research shows and how parents and educators feel. Finally, New Yorkers as a whole are realizing the potential damage resulting from his autocratic behavior. (Leonie Haimson, Huffpo)

If the state budget is cut by $1 billion, we will lose 15,265 teachers or 20% of the workforce mostly thru layoffs & 6,166 additional teaching positions eliminated (21,000 teachers! There are a total of 75,000 teachers in Manhattan). (Fredric Dicker, NY Post)

Mr. Mulgrew, president of UFT, argued that if the state maintained a tax on people earning more than $200,000 a year, set to expire this would contribute $5 billion to be used for the deficit and prevent the kids and teachers from getting so profoundly hurt by massive budget cuts. (Michael Howard Saul)

“This upward class mobility is what the current reforms are targeting. By replacing public schools with charters, reformers aim to destroy the opportunities provided by the teaching profession. By de-professionalizing and devaluing teachers in working-class schools, reformers are creating an entry for profit-seeking educational entrepreneurs that will divert public funds to private coffers. Predominantly white, suburban teachers will have their privileges preserved, while urban teachers will be demoted to private employees, serving at the whim of private corporations and overpaid executives. For the rich, this is a win-win situation: lower taxes, higher profits and they even get to keep their own kids' schools. As usual, the people who will pay the price are the poor communities that depend on schools and the teaching profession for some degree of protection from the ravages of neoliberal reform.” (Christopher Lawrence, truthout)

Ten Key Values of the Green Party

As ratified at the Green Party Convention in Denver, CO; June 2000. 1. GRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY; 2. SOCIAL JUSTICE AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY; 3. ECOLOGICAL WISDOM; 4. NON-VIOLENCE; 5. DECENTRALIZATION; 6. COMMUNITY-BASED ECONOMICS AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE; 7. FEMINISM AND GENDER EQUITY; 8. RESPECT FOR DIVERSITY; 9. PERSONAL AND GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY; 10. FUTURE FOCUS AND SUSTAINABILITY

DENNIS KUCINICH’S H.R. 2424 BILL

Dennis Kucinich has positioned himself to plunge a stake through the zombie heart of the arch enemy of American well being, The Federal Reserve Bank. WE HAVE GOT TO HELP HIM. Kucinich’s bill, H.R. 2424, resonates Green Party values. Robert Malin writes:

“As the nation struggles with long-term unemployment at rates not seen in generations, contracted credit and the hoarding of public dollars by the banks, Congressman Kucinich (D-OH) today [12/22/10] introduced a dramatic new proposal to establish fiscal integrity, reassert Congressional sovereignty and regain control of monetary policy from private banks. The National Emergency Employment Defense Act of 2010 would allow the federal government to directly fund badly-needed infrastructure repairs and fund education systems nationwide by spending money into circulation without increasing the national debt. The bill would end the current practice of fractional reserve lending, whereby the economy depends upon private financial institutions to lend money into circulation.”

“Congressman Kucinich stated, “The staggeringly bad employment and economic numbers represent a massive problem which cries out for bold action. Rather than crossing our fingers and hoping that banks will finally lend some of the billions of public dollars they haven’t thus far seen fit to lend, we can take action. My bill would replace the Federal Reserve System’s dependence on private banks to create credit. In its place, a Monetary Authority under the Treasury Department would directly inject liquidity into the economy by purchasing much needed public infrastructure repair. Today, we have idle capital, millions of able-bodied but unemployed workers, unused equipment, and record low interest rates. These conditions are the best possible time to make a long-term investment in ou nation’s infrastructure. My bill would do exactly that.””

Freeze & Starve, Citizens! Monster $719 Billion Military Budget from Political Soft on Terror Paranoia & Violent Imperialism

Sherwood Ross in an article entitled “US Endless-War Budget Rolls On” cites the Chalmers Johnson observation that the Pentagon is “close to being beyond civilian control.” I think it is time to remove the word “close” from that chilling conclusion. Ross certainly makes the case, as he parallels the insanely burgeoning and politically uncontested military budget to the horrifying economic quicksand into which the majority of citizens are sinking:

While the number of Americans suffering in poverty increased to 36 million – and as more families lose their homes and lines lengthen at soup kitchens – President Obama has dollars galore to build 67 new warships at a cost of nearly $25 billion, according to a new analysis of his budget by the National Priorities Project of Northampton, Massachusetts.

Yet, according to Wikipedia, “The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined” and it operates 11 super carriers as part of a 286-active ship fleet with 3,700 aircraft able to radiate power on all continents. This is but one example from the Pentagon's Department of Wretched Excess.

[snip]

So, in fiscal year 2012, which begins next Oct. 1, the Pentagon will just have to struggle along with $719 billion while the president calls for a five-year freeze on “non-security” discretionary spending such as, in the words of former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, “programs the poor and working class depend on – assistance with home heating, community services, college loans, and the like.”

[snip]

Obama will get a lot of help from the Republican Party, which, of course, will not rein in spending for unjust wars but in a fit of what AFL-CIO's Manny Herrmann calls “budget insanity” plans to chop up Head Start, Pell Grants, food and job safety inspections, eliminate “hundreds of thousands of middle-class jobs,” cut investment in infrastructure, and even cut the money needed “to send out Social Security checks.”

Herrmann might have added Obama also seeks to slash nearly half the federal funds to help low-income families heat their homes.

[snip]

Example: The New Haven Independent reported Feb. 21 that Mayor John DeStafano is calling for belt-tightening by city workers to bridge a $5.5 million gap in this year's budget and a $22 million gap next year.

Protesters responded by standing in front of City Hall with signs noting that Congress is taking $84 million from the pockets of New Haven residents this year to fight the Iraq-Afghan wars. This scenario is being repeated by cities and states everywhere.

Ross reminds us of those fateful words of Martin Luther King:

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Anyone with half a conscience knows that we are, indeed, tragically close to spiritual death as a nation. Anyone with half a brain knows that there is a logical disconnect in America with the growing economic horror being faced by the vast majority of its citizenry and the insane uncontested billions feeding what Ross calls the "Great American War Machine.”

Many have tried to put the massive amount of what is always called a “bloated military budget” into context. Despite the insulting recent kabuki posturing of Defense Secretary Gates on The NewsHour declaring a willingness to make significant defense cuts, “insane” is the only word for the escalation of military spending.

Ross supplies these context-enabling passages:

As the War Resisters League pointed out two years ago, U.S. military spending, plus funds for U.S. nuclear bombs, “is equal to the military spending of the next 15 countries combined.” (And of those 15 countries, 12 are considered U.S. allies, so where's the threat?)

[snip]

“As it is, we're pumping ... money into sustaining a fighting force that's orders of magnitude larger than anything retained by any other country,” observed Ezra Klein of The Washington Post on Feb. 14.

[snip]

The Times added, “The bill for the military is way too high, above cold-war peak levels, when this country had a superpower adversary. There's a point where the next military spending dollar does not make our society more secure, and it's a point we long ago passed.”

[snip]

While U.S. officials constantly advertise Iran as a menace, it is a fact that the Great American War Machine outspends Iran on military by a ratio of 72 to one. Ditto for that other global threat, North Korea.

[snip]

Early in the second Bush administration, Michael Chossudovsky, Canadian economist and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization, wrote about the $320-billion then being lavished on the Pentagon: “There is no rationale for this level of military spending other than a clear intent for the United States to be the New World Empire, dominating the globe economically and militarily, including the militarization of space.”

He noted that the U.S. not only possessed laser-guided weapons with the capability of striking anywhere in the planet but under its High Altitude Auroral Rsearch Program (HAARP) had “the ability to destabilize entire national economies through climatic manipulations, without the knowledge of the enemy, and without engaging military personnel and equipment as in a conventional war.”

[snip]

As William Hartung of the New America Foundation pointed out in “Foreign Policy in Focus” last year, “any real savings in U.S. military spending would need to be accompanied by a reduction in U.S. 'global reach' – in the hundreds of major military facilities it controls in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.”

Yet, he said, “U.S. overseas-basing arrangements have been on the rise, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan themselves but in bordering nations.”
Today, there are approximately 800 U.S. military bases overseas plus an estimated 1,000 stateside. For several years now, the Pentagon has been spending more money for war each year than all state governments combined spend for the health, education, welfare, and safety of 308 million Americans – and Obama is continuing this course.

The Obama administration, US Congress and military industrial security complex -- matrix -- seem sociopathically driven to, on the one hand, convince the hapless struggling citizenry that they are "securing" them against supposed outside boogeyman specters for the sake of winning elections, while on the other hand establishing a new world order of American imperialist world domination “over said Americans’ dead bodies”, or at least, significantly weakened, disenfranchised, demoralized and impoverished ones!

We’ve got to stop the insanity! We've got to reduce the insane gullibility of the authoritarian following citizens who incredibly are not connecting the dots re their own ever-worsening plight. We've got to replace our sell-out politicians with real representative, humane statespeople.

Green’s Hawkins: NY Gov. Cuomo Solves $9 Billion Deficit: 1) Slash Jobs, 2) Starve Children, 3) $5 Billion Tax Breaks for Rich

Hunger Action Alert - Save the Welfare Grant, Stop Full Family Sanctions

Gov. Cuomo's proposed state budget cuts funding for a variety of anti-poverty and human service programs to help solve the state's $9 billion deficit, while proposing to spend $5 billion annually to pay for more tax cuts for the wealthiest New Yorkers. Lawmakers are telling us that they haven't heard much protest about the cuts to human services.

We need the Assembly to say no to these cuts. We want to target Assembly member Michele Titus (518-455-5668), the new chair of the Assembly Social Services Committee, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (518 455-3791) We also want to contact Sen. Dean Skelos, the Senate Majority leader. (518) 455-3171

Message:

Please help low-income New Yorkers. Say no to any delay in the welfare grant hike and to full family sanctions. Don't give a huge tax cut to the rich by ending the personal income tax surcharge. We want money for jobs for low-income New Yorkers.

You could also add a message re funding for emergency food. The Governor proposed keeping HPNAP at $29.7 million. Advocates are seeking $33.6 million. Service levels as the state food pantries and soup kitchens have increased 60% in the last three years.

We are also asking for $100 million for jobs for welfare participants. 2 years ago we got $70 million. This year the Governor is proposing zero funding.

Background:

Welfare grant hike. The Governor wants to delay for at least a year the final year of a promised annual ten percent increase in the basic welfare grant for three years. Even with the increase, households would be far below the federal poverty line. The state claims it would save $29 million; however, the state literally has more than a billion dollars surplus from the federal welfare block grant that is supposed to be used to help welfare participants but mainly gets used for fiscal relief to the counties. The increase would be a dollar a day for a family of three.

Full Family Sanctions. The Governor wants to impose full family sanctions for welfare participants. This is something that Governor Pataki used to propose each year and we would defeat. Right now, if an adult is penalized for (allegedly) failing to comply with a welfare rule (e.g., misses an appointment or a work assignment), only the adult loses their benefits but any children continue to receive assistance. Cuomo wants to deny benefits to children as well. Their excuse is that by also punishing children, adults will feel more pressure to comply with rules. However, in many cases the sanctions are incorrect (e.g., HRA /DSS faulty record keeping)/ And there is no evidence that full family sanctions changes anything other increasing poverty for children. This would only save $7 million annually.

Taxes. Two years ago to help the state resolve its budget deficit, lawmakers agreed to raise the top personal income tax rate for the richest New Yorkers by 1 to 2%. If this "surcharge" is ended, it would reduce taxes for the wealthy by $5 billion - and increase the state's deficit. Public opinion polls show that the vast majority of voters in NYS, including the wealthy, agree that we should keep the tax surcharge. Without the surcharge, someone making $40,000 pays the same tax rate as millionaires.

There are lots of other ways the state could solve its $9 billion deficit
without slashing services. It can close corporate tax loopholes or it could stop rebating $14 billion to Wall Street speculators from the stock transfer tax. Make Wall Street bail out Main Street rather than cutting human services, education and health care.

Jobs. We need more jobs in NYS, especially for welfare participants. Two years ago the state used $70 million in special welfare funds from the federal government to fund $70 million for a variety of jobs programs (e.g., transitional, wage subsidy, green) to help welfare participants. Gov. Cuomo is proposing no fund for these programs, no funds for Career Pathways and no funds for Summer Youth Employment - yet he wants to give the local districts $960 million in federal welfare dollars that they largely use to divert funds into non-welfare programs. We need jobs.


Remember, Lobby Day is March 1st. For more info, dunleamark@aol.com

[via email from Howie Hawkins]

Shameless Obama Savages Poor & Working Classes With A Reagan Budget -- More Nightmarish Consistency c/o Inside Man for Oligarchs

I want to share the optimism lifting so many for the Egyptians and of the Egyptians, but I keep picturing the euphoria of millions of Americans after the Obama election and I want to warn the Egyptians to stay vigilant and wary of charismatic, say-anything inside men for the oligarchs. Can the Egyptians possibly begin to institute the kind of democracy we Americans seem to have lost?

Obama has hit a new low with the present budget. I keep thinking I am beyond astonishment at him, but alas, he keeps on delivering the hits, farther and farther below the belt.

Glen Ford, who, incidentally, coined the "inside man for oligarchs" reference to Obama, reminds us of the time when Obama stunned so many of us progressives by heralding Reagan as a great president. That was surely a big tip off that he was not what he was being packaged as by the political progressives, but not really progressives, more accurately, soul-less, pragmatic gamesmen and gameswomen enthralled to their shadow corporate overlords hawking him to win an election. I don’t know if I am getting more traditionally religious or not. I find myself praying there is a ferocious hell for all those who played and benefited from the biggest con perpetrated on a citizenry, the faux-answer to the Bush Insanity, Barack Obama. After the trauma of Bush, we deserved a break, not a Trojan Horse shamelessly ready to continue and worsen human suffering both home and abroad.

Ford writes of the new budget:

The First Black President just gave birth to an unmistakably Republican budget – and everybody knows who that ugly baby’s daddy is. For the past two years, Barack Obama has been making out quite publicly with George Bush’s corporate friends. But that shouldn’t be a scandal; after all, Obama has always told everyone in range of his voice that his main goal in life is to forge a grand consensus with the GOP, a bipartisan understanding between the Right and the Center Right.

The result is an Obama budget that is all sliced up, like the loser in a knife fight – only, Obama and his corporate executives-on-loan at the White House did all the cutting, themselves. Obama is showing such extraordinary talent for obliterating poor and working class programs across the board, he’s making Republicans look redundant and obsolete.

From community block grants to Section 8 housing vouchers to child care to Pell Grants to home heating oil for the poor, Obama has preemptively savaged all that decent people hold dear in the social safety net, and is in enthusiastic, principled agreement with the Republicans that the big cuts are still to come, in Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.

Ford reflects back on the craven selling of Obama as man of the people:

As we at Black Agenda Report and honest analysts like Paul Street pointed out all along, Obama has always been a dangerous, corporate creature. But like the frog that allows the scorpion to hitch a ride on his back across the swollen river, Black and progressive misleaders act shocked and hurt when Obama stings them with his deadly budget halfway through his term. But the frog should have known the nature of a scorpion. Obama’s corporate character was no secret to anyone except those who wished not to know.

Despite being dazzled by Obama's skin color and charm, there is still a consensus among Black Americans on issues of social justice. With his draconian cuts, President Obama is violating that consensus so sharply, it cannot be papered over for the sake of racial pride.

I hope Mr. Ford is right. There is nothing as ferocious as the denial invested in someone who so breathtakingly betrays. With a heartbreak so massive, some will will themselves to rationalize and justify seemingly forever.

Laura Flanders writes of the preposterous degree of abundance for the super-rich in our recent past, escalated not reduced thanks to the Obama administration:

In 2009, as million of workers lost their jobs, on Wall Street at the thirty-eight biggest firms, investors and executives earned $140 billion -- the highest sum ever.

James Madison famously wrote that the new American republic was to be "a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people," not aristocratic privilege or hereditary right. Yet in 2010 undisclosed private donors and multinational corporations funneled millions of dollars into our media, saturating the airwaves and skewing the election.

As all this has been shaping up, as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson point out, government in our era not only failed to push back on the tide rising at the top but "put its thumb on the scale, hard... on the side of those who had more weight."

The thumb on the scale, all right. More than a thumb, I dare say.

Where is the accountability? Where is the justice? Where are our laws of protection? Gone to greed and graft most every one.

Matt Taibbi always has a dramatic, realistic take of our situation as citizens, if you have the stomach to face down the scope of the corruption and non-accountability in Obamaworld. He paints a full and tragic picture in his latest Rolling Stone article "Why Isn't Wall Street In Jail?":

Here's how regulation of Wall Street is supposed to work. To begin with, there's a semigigantic list of public and quasi-public agencies ostensibly keeping their eyes on the economy, a dense alphabet soup of banking, insurance, S&L, securities and commodities regulators like the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), as well as supposedly "self-regulating organizations" like the New York Stock Exchange. All of these outfits, by law, can at least begin the process of catching and investigating financial criminals, though none of them has prosecutorial power.

The major federal agency on the Wall Street beat is the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC watches for violations like insider trading, and also deals with so-called "disclosure violations" — i.e., making sure that all the financial information that publicly traded companies are required to make public actually jibes with reality. But the SEC doesn't have prosecutorial power either, so in practice, when it looks like someone needs to go to jail, they refer the case to the Justice Department. And since the vast majority of crimes in the financial services industry take place in Lower Manhattan, cases referred by the SEC often end up in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. Thus, the two top cops on Wall Street are generally considered to be that U.S. attorney — a job that has been held by thunderous prosecutorial personae like Robert Morgenthau and Rudy Giuliani — and the SEC's director of enforcement.

The relationship between the SEC and the DOJ is necessarily close, even symbiotic. Since financial crime-fighting requires a high degree of financial expertise — and since the typical drug-and-terrorism-obsessed FBI agent can't balance his own checkbook, let alone tell a synthetic CDO from a credit default swap — the Justice Department ends up leaning heavily on the SEC's army of 1,100 number-crunching investigators to make their cases. In theory, it's a well-oiled, tag-team affair: Billionaire Wall Street Asshole commits fraud, the NYSE catches on and tips off the SEC, the SEC works the case and delivers it to Justice, and Justice perp-walks the Asshole out of Nobu, into a Crown Victoria and off to 36 months of push-ups, license-plate making and Salisbury steak.

That's the way it's supposed to work. But a veritable mountain of evidence indicates that when it comes to Wall Street, the justice system not only sucks at punishing financial criminals, it has actually evolved into a highly effective mechanism for protecting financial criminals. This institutional reality has absolutely nothing to do with politics or ideology — it takes place no matter who's in office or which party's in power.

[snip]

JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. "If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims."

To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth — people who simply get their companies to pay their fines for them. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."

But that hasn't happened. Because the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up.

Criminal Justice is simply "in bed" with Wall Street. Taibbi:

Criminal justice, as it pertains to the Goldmans and Morgan Stanleys of the world, is not adversarial combat, with cops and crooks duking it out in interrogation rooms and courthouses. Instead, it's a cocktail party between friends and colleagues who from month to month and year to year are constantly switching sides and trading hats. At the Hilton conference, regulators and banker-lawyers rubbed elbows during a series of speeches and panel discussions, away from the rabble. "They were chummier in that environment," says Aguirre, who plunked down $2,200 to attend the conference.

The revolving door of opportunities to government employees in the private sphere guarantees non-accountability. Taibbi:

"It wasn't just one rotation of the revolving door," says Aguirre. "It just kept spinning. Every single person had rotated in and out of government and private service."

The Revolving Door isn't just a footnote in financial law enforcement; over the past decade, more than a dozen high-ranking SEC officials have gone on to lucrative jobs at Wall Street banks or white-shoe law firms, where partnerships are worth millions. That makes SEC officials like Paul Berger and Linda Thomsen the equivalent of college basketball stars waiting for their first NBA contract. Are you really going to give up a shot at the Knicks or the Lakers just to find out whether a Wall Street big shot like John Mack was guilty of insider trading? "You take one of these jobs," says Turner, the former chief accountant for the SEC, "and you're fit for life."

[snip]

But even beyond that, the system is skewed by the irrepressible pull of riches and power. If talent rises in the SEC or the Justice Department, it sooner or later jumps ship for those fat NBA contracts. Or, conversely, graduates of the big corporate firms take sabbaticals from their rich lifestyles to slum it in government service for a year or two. Many of those appointments are inevitably hand-picked by lifelong stooges for Wall Street like Chuck Schumer, who has accepted $14.6 million in campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other major players in the finance industry, along with their corporate lawyers.

As for Obama, Taibbi lays out the nauseating details of his legacy of non-accountability and Taibbi's guarantee that this swamp will never get drained under Obama's watch, which most likely will continue thanks to the surreal level of payola coming back to him for 2012:

As for President Obama, what is there to be said? Goldman Sachs was his number-one private campaign contributor. He put a Citigroup executive in charge of his economic transition team, and he just named an executive of JP Morgan Chase, the proud owner of $7.7 million in Chase stock, his new chief of staff. "The betrayal that this represents by Obama to everybody is just — we're not ready to believe it," says Budde, a classmate of the president from their Columbia days. "He's really fucking us over like that? Really? That's really a JP Morgan guy, really?"

Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement. On the contrary: In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers — of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would "demean the seriousness" of the offenses.

So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait — let's not even make them say they're sorry. That's too mean; let's just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don't make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don't ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What's next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?

Taibbi attempts to explain why most Americans can not grasp the depth and scope of financial crimes:

The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don't feel real; you don't see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They're crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let's steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy. They're attacking the very definition of property — which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone's claims of ownership equally. When that definition becomes tenuous or conditional — when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice — this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality.

As for Obama? I thought Bush was the worst President. But Obama ... there seems something extra unforgivable about him. At the same time, I think I could even feel sorry for someone who has been willing to sell out so profoundly, in a way, if he didn’t have such enormous power to keep on worsening people’s lives and such powerful enablers like Oprah distributing his koolaid.