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.

Don’t Turn Your Back on Hillary Clinton or How Ray McGovern Evoked Hypocrisy in Real Time

71-year old peace advocate Ray McGovern, wearing a Veterans for Peace T-shirt, stood in the audience with his back toward Hillary Clinton as she gave a speech at Washington University on February 15th. McGovern’s stance, what he calls “silent witness”, was a protest of Mrs. Clinton’s support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was not long before McGovern was assaulted and dragged out of the audience by two security men. “So this is America!” McGovern declared. “This is America!”

Mrs. Clinton may not have missed a beat in her speech but apparently missed the enormous irony of the moment. She was speaking in praise of the nobility and effectiveness of peaceful protest and the wrongness of aggressive governmental repression in the Middle East, all while Mr. McGovern was being roughed up before her and the audience’s eyes.

Mr. McGovern as quoted by Rob Kall:

"When Clinton started talking about how people beat up and arrested people in Iran, it gave some poetic justice, a great irony, to my standing there and what happened to me then, when she's talking about what happened in other countries and there I am being handled in a vicious way...God knows what would happen next. ..."

[snip]

"They grabbed me and the shock wore off. There was a real struggle. I shouted, 'This is America.' Then I said, 'Who are you?' This is a mystery to me. Who were they? The guy in the suit was the one who did the damage. He was brutal."

"They took me outside, put two sets of iron handcuffs that pierced my wrists. The bleeding went all over my pants. One guy said, "I pricked my finger" like it was his blood."

"I was bleeding in the car so I said 'I think you need to put some gauze on me.' They handed me to the DC police and they told I was being charged with disorderly conduct. I was booked, fingerprinted, mug shot taken. They put me in a little cell -- must be the same size as Bradley Manning's-- about six by four feet."

"It was about three hours that they held me until they let me out. I had to take a cab to the hospital where they x-rayed me, treated me and dressed my wounds. Then the doctors told me that since this was an assault on me, I had to inform the police about who had assaulted me. A little humor helped then."

Ray McGovern is a person of conscience who clearly has been walking the walk as well as talking the talk for peace for a long time. His 27-year experience in the CIA gives him a special savvy to the scope of horror of our military industrial security complex.

Ray McGovern’s issues with Clinton as quoted by Robert Parry:

"Hillary is the driving force, together with a few others, behind the war in Afghanistan. She's one of the big hawks in Iran. When I look at her and her husband that they don't know the first thing about war. I do and so do my fellow Veterans for Peace.

“I have to make clear that we Veterans for Peace think that her policies are an abomination to the nation, that they are at cross purposes to the country and not everybody should applaud and give her the idea that she's doing the right thing."

[snip]

"When people die because we have hypocrites at the top of our government, that compels me to make a statement in whatever way I can. It was not the theme of her speech that I was protesting. It was her war policies.”

The United States has trampled on the legitimate civil rights of its citizens of conscience protesting these wars (including the use of its high-tech spying) by justifying itself under the “the war on terror” cause Robert Parry asserts. That handy dandy catch-all for institutionalized evil, for the erosion of the bill of rights.

But US hypocritical, repressive behavior didn’t start there. Parry:

Over prior decades – indeed centuries – the U.S. government routinely has trampled on the rights of people in America and around the world, often crushing popular uprisings with the most brutal force.

Just last week, the United States wallowed in maudlin celebrations of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which included sending weapons and money to help slaughter peasants, students and workers in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.

[See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ronald Reagan, Enabler of Atrocities.”]

Yet, Clinton whitewashed this bloody history as if the U.S. government has always been the great defender of people power resisting injustice.

“It is our values that cause these actions [in places like Egypt and Iran] to inspire or outrage us, our sense of human dignity, the rights that flow from it, and the principles that ground it,” Clinton said, without a word about America’s mixed record on these “values.”

Just minutes after McGovern had been dragged from the room and handcuffed, Clinton hailed the need for respecting different points of view and giving them space for their expression.

America’s people of conscience and ripening people of conscience need to fasten their seatbelts. The hypocrites at the top, slick-talking Secretary of State Clinton, President Obama, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, et al., talk the talk of freedom to polite applause while at the same time authorizing gratuitous, corporate-profiteering violence. They deserve all our backs in protest. These power players seem determined to provide those willing and ready to walk the walk of peace advocacy a brutal and bumpy, anti-free speech, anti-democracy ride.

I would like to see how McGovern's case evolves. What happens if you press charges against an assault by a security detail of Secretary of State Clinton when they have, at the same time, pressed charges against you? Do we have Ray McGovern's back, so to speak, on this? There is a letter/petition now circulating asking Secretary Clinton to offer Mr. McGovern an apology and a release from the charges against him, as well as to revoke her anti-whistleblower stances against Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.

Worth a signoff!

It includes these statements:

“Please put actions to your words by providing Ray McGovern, a 27 year veteran of the CIA who conducted daily security briefings of Presidents Reagan and H.W.Bush , with an apology. Also, please take action to have his charges dropped, as he should not be criminally prosecuted for exercising his freedom of speech.

In addition, please take the following actions to show you are serious about freedom of speech:

1. Contact Secretary of State Gates and ask that Pfc Bradley Manning be released from his pre-trial punishment – 8 months in solitary confinement – for allegedly providing the media with information about war crimes committed in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other crimes committed in U.S. foreign policy. Ask that the charges be dropped for this patriotic act which if true were an effort to improve U.S. foreign policy by making us live within the law and become a law-abiding nation.

2. Contact Attorney General Holder and ask that the investigation into Julian Assange and WikiLeaks be stopped. Assange, the editor in chief of WikiLeaks, is a journalist who has published many important documents in the last four years that have highlighted the abuse of nations and transnational corporations. The U.S. should not be stretching laws in order to punish a journalist exercising freedom of press and allowing Americans to know the truth of U.S. foreign policy.”

Critical Arab-US Moment Betrayed: Obama & Cong. Won’t Do Right Thing Re Jewish Settlements; Fear 2012 AIPAC Election Punishment

So, let’s get this straight. The United States officially -- at least rhetorically -- disapproves of illegal Jewish settlement expansion. Yet to do ANYTHING to support this position would mean substantial political blowback from AIPAC.

We all know to what degree the President and Congress will sell out the welfare of human beings, its own citizens, and, hell, the rest of the world’s, to protect their own jobs and power no matter what the depth of the sell out.

Even with the incredible wave of Arab individualism flooding forth now you would think the American President and Congress would be astute and responsible enough to give a reach out. I mean Cash for Clunkers and a hypocritical Cairo speech were Obama’s golden moments. That speech, in spite of its hypocrisy, probably planted some seeds of empowering hope and may even be in part responsible for the profound Arab movement right now.

WHAT AN OPPORTUNITY for the United States to endorse the spirit of democracy, even though democracy has left the building in terms of the United States, now run by a plutocracy, but still, the Arab world is fighting for the real deal democracy it assumes America still has.

What a shame that according to MJ Rosenberg the US intends to veto Thursday, today, a United Nations Security Council resolution, sponsored by 122 nations, condemning Israeli settlement expansion.

Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg told the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee: "We have made very clear that we do not think the Security Council is the right place to engage on these issues."

The UN Security Council is not the right place? What bullshit.

Rosenberg:

First is the obvious. Opposition to Israeli settlements is perhaps the only issue on which the entire Arab and Muslim world is united. Iraqis and Afghanis, Syrians and Egyptians, Indonesians and Pakistanis don't agree on much, but they do agree on that. They also agree that the US policy on settlements demonstrates flagrant disregard for human rights in the Muslim world (at least when Israel is the human rights violator).

Accordingly, a US decision to support the condemnation of settlements would send a clear message to the Arab and Muslim world that we understand what is happening in the Middle East and that we share at least some of its peoples' concerns.

The settlement issue should be an easy one for the United States. Our official policy is the same as that of the Arab world. We oppose settlements. We consider them illegal.  We have repeatedly demanded that the Israelis stop expanding them (although the Israeli government repeatedly ignores us). The administration feels so strongly about settlements that it recently offered Israel an extra $3.5bn in US aid to freeze settlements for 90 days.

It is impossible, then, for the United States to pretend that we do not agree with the resolution (especially when its language was carefully drafted to comport with the administration's official position). So why will we veto a resolution that expresses our own views?

Steinberg says that "We do not think the Security Council is the right place to engage on these issues."

Why not? It is the Security Council that passed all the major international resolutions (with US support) governing Israel's role in the occupied territories since the first one, UN Resolution 242 in 1967.

So, voting for the resolution would serve US interests in the Middle East, but not serve Israel's interests as Israel sees it, so the President and Congress will ignore the welfare of its own people, the welfare of the Arab world and this golden opportunity to right a wrong it hypocritically maintains it recognizes but won’t support, because of their own narcissistic political ambitions.

The Washington Bubble is immune to the potential of world harmony. Imperial cronyism continues to prevail. The kleptocrats are calling the shots. Would that Obama had one molecule of Martin Luther King-ness, but that ship has sailed, hasn’t it? As for Congress, they are raping the American taxpayers for their corporate pimps. Why would they, too, give a serious damn about the world’s welfare?

National Green Party: Congrats to Egypt and What About Mubarak’s US $70 Billion Stash? (C’mon, Asset-Freezing Time!)

WASHINGTON, DC -- The Green Party of the United States congratulated the Egyptian people and called President Hosni Mubarak's resignation a huge step towards democracy, human rights, and stability for their country.

"The Egyptian revolution is a victory for the people of Egypt, and also the victory for an idea -- the idea that violent regimes can be overthrown through nonviolent means," said Romi Elnagar, member of the Green Party of Louisiana and wife and mother of Egyptian-Americans. "While police and rampaging pro-Mubarak thugs killed 350 and injured thousands more, the protesters themselves remained overwhelmingly peaceful."

US Greens hoped for an end to the 30-year-old 'emergency decree' and for a broad-based transitional government that embraced opposition parties, to begin the work of dismantling the brutally oppressive Mubarak regime. The next step will take place when the military relinquishes power and Egyptians establish a civil government with a constitution, free and fair elections, democratic institutions, and the means to solve problems like unemployment and poverty.

Greens also urged the Obama Administration to cooperate in an investigation of the alleged $70 billion that Mr. Mubarak's accumulated during his corrupt regime and to freeze any of his assets that are held in the US.

"We call on the US government to avoid meddling and respect the right of Egyptians to rule themselves. Aid for Egypt must be for humanitarian purposes, not military, and without strings attached. If the Obama Administration tries to press the new Egypt into subordination, to satisfy the US's strategic military and economic interests in the region, we will betray the Egyptian people and their right to democratic sovereignty," said Laura Wells, 2010 Green Party candidate for Governor of California.

US Greens noted that much of the conflict in the Middle East and resentment of the US by Egyptians and other populations in the region centers around the unresolved Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

"Since making its 1979 'cold peace' with Israel, the Egyptian government has supported Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, most recently complying with the siege of Gaza, in return for billions in aid from the US. We look to the formation of a democratic Egypt which adheres to international law and reflects its citizens' long-standing opposition to Israel's oppression of Palestinians," said Dr. Justine McCabe, co-chair of the Green Party's International Committee.

(via email from Howie Hawkins, NY)

National White House Call-in Day to Support Bradley Manning, Thurs., Feb. 3-WH switchboard: 202-456-1414 (WH comments -456-1111)

From the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Call the White House Thursday to voice your support for accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower US Army PFC Bradley Manning, specifically that his human rights be respected by the Quantico, Virginia, brig authorities. Bradley has been held in solitary confinement-like conditions for over eight months, and his trial is still months away. This American citizen-soldier has been convicted of no crime, yet continues to endure inhumane conditions of pre-trial confinement like no other inmate at the Quantico brig. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs recently stated that the White House was not paying attention to Bradley Manning’s extreme confinement conditions, or the fact that recent pre-approved visitors of Bradley’s have been detained and interrogated by military police in order to block their scheduled visit. It is critical that we educate the White House of this ongoing injustice!

Recommended points to make:

• US Army PFC Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower being held at the Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, is an American citizen who is innocent until proven otherwise. Yet, he has been subjected to continuous illegal pre-trial punishment since his arrest in May 2010. Based on these abuses alone, Manning should be freed pending court martial.
• Military pre-trial confinement is supposed to be about ensuring a soldier’s presence at court martial, yet for eight months now Manning has been subjected to extreme pre-trial punishment through the arbitrary use of rarely applied regulations–specifically the “maximum security classification” and the “prevention of injury” order. If he is not freed pending court martial, then at the very least, Manning’s human rights need to be respected, and the illegal pre-trial punishment must end.
• The arbitrary restrictions placed on Manning, and no other inmates at Quantico, mean that: Manning is allowed no meaningful physical exercise, he is allowed no social interaction with other inmates, he is kept in his cell at least 23 hours per day, and he is not allowed out of his cell without restraints.
• If the charges against him are true, then Manning is a patriot acting to advance an informed democracy. There is no allegation that Manning did anything but share truthful information with the American public regarding the realities of our nation’s ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with absolutely no benefit to himself, in order to spark public debate regarding foreign policy.

Remember to tell your friends about our call to action, spread it on Facebook, Twitter and via email.

The Bradley Manning Support Network: www.bradleymanning.org
Sign-up and join us: www.standwithbrad.org
Voters for Peace: http://votersforpeace.us/press/index.php?itemid=4663

Read more: http://www.bradleymanning.org/16081/national-white-house-call-in-day-to-support-bradley-manning/#ixzz1CvBHceNC
Again, Thursday, February 3rd, 2011, ?White House switchboard: 202-456-1414?(or White House comments: 202-456-1111)

Can Kucinich Drive A Stake Through the Zombie Heart of the Fed? (Part 1-Return to Jekyll Island)

Stop talking about Kucinich and the olive pit. Forget about the ride on Air Force One.

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 AND PAY ATTENTION. The Bank Mafia of America has captured the minds, hearts and souls of almost all of our amoral leadership in the administration and Congress who have to a grotesque degree stopped watchdogging our rights and needs for a stunning amount of time now.

Abandon all hope that Obama or the legacy Democratic Party will rally to save Americans from economic terrorism. In fact, trust that they will rally to enable the economic terrorists.

We’ve got Dennis Kucinich. We’ve got Ron Paul. We’ve got the Green Party. We’ve got those citizens finally rising above the media-inflaming Blue v. Red, divide-up-and-conquer hype that is earnestly trying to distract America from its economic raping, from facing down the real enemy of Americans, the oligarchs.

I made up a riddle the other day. What’s the difference between a Republican and a Democratic politician? Answer: Whether the knife goes into your front or your back.

Kucinich’s bill, H.R. 2424, resonates Green Party values. It would bring sanity and wholesome, citizen-nurturing solvency to America. It requires our massive support and attention right now.

Ralph Nader asked the bottom line ultra-sensible question about the insurance industry capture of America during Obama’s, Congress’s and the media’s magnificent health care betrayal kabuki last year. Why are the “vendors” allowed to create the terms of American healthcare, terms that have destroyed, are destroying and will continue to destroy the well-being of most Americans?

Banks should also be providing a very much humbler role as “vendors” but are another cabal of profit-over-people monsters impacting more and more people with, again, let’s call it what it is, ECONOMIC TERRORISM.

At a Manhattan Greens forum last Wednesday, guest speaker Sue Peters laid out the incredible and enraging history of how a tiny but obscenely wealthy crew of the bankster mafia in America in 1910 managed to successfully capture the monetary system of America right under the clueless noses of the public.

Consider this quote shared by Ms. Peters:

"Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce...when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate." — James A. Garfield

According to Ms. Peters and some further revelations from Wikipedia, in November 1910, 7 men, a senator (majority leader of the Senate, Nelson Aldrich) and the assistant Secretary of the Treasury Dept. (A. Piatt Andrew) along with 5 of the countries’ leading financiers who represented 1/4 of the world’s wealth arrived at the “Jekyll Island Club” on Jekyll Island off of Georgia ("jackal" would be more appropriate in hindsight) to discuss the American banking system and monetary policy. This meeting would draw up the blueprint for the Federal Reserve System. The creation of a U.S. central bank. Senator Aldrich’s participation guaranteed that parts of the draft would be DIRECTLY incorporated into the 1913 Federal Reserve Act.

Wikipedia, btw, also reveals that Ben Bernanke stayed on Jekyll Island last year for two days in November, the same month of the original plotting, to commemorate the 100th year anniversary of that fateful meeting.

Forbes magazine founder Bertie Charles Forbes wrote:

Picture a party of the nation's greatest bankers stealing out of New York on a private railroad car under cover of darkness, stealthily riding hundred of miles South, embarking on a mysterious launch, sneaking onto an island deserted by all but a few servants, living there a full week under such rigid secrecy that the names of not one of them was once mentioned, lest the servants learn the identity and disclose to the world this strangest, most secret expedition in the history of American finance. I am not romancing; I am giving to the world, for the first time, the real story of how the famous Aldrich currency report, the foundation of our new currency system, was written... The utmost secrecy was enjoined upon all. The public must not glean a hint of what was to be done. Senator Aldrich notified each one to go quietly into a private car of which the railroad had received orders to draw up on an unfrequented platform. Off the party set. New York's ubiquitous reporters had been foiled... Nelson (Aldrich) had confided to Henry, Frank, Paul and Piatt that he was to keep them locked up at Jekyll Island, out of the rest of the world, until they had evolved and compiled a scientific currency system for the United States, the real birth of the present Federal Reserve System, the plan done on Jekyll Island in the conference with Paul, Frank and Henry... Warburg is the link that binds the Aldrich system and the present system together. He more than any one man has made the system possible as a working reality.

The meeting had to be clandestine since the mood of people, in fact, internationally, was anti-bank, anti-Wall Street, especially after the Panic of 1907. It was vital for the banksters to devise a highly slick program to seduce a country of citizens mandating quite the opposite of their scheme, that Congress shore up the checks and balances system in terms of the economy. Checks and balances? The banksters willed to dismantle them entirely and deliver the monetary system entirely into their unscrupulous, forever-profits-over-people control.

And so it happened. The same banker-prepared bank plan was presented to Congress by the head of the National Monetary Commission, Senator Aldrich.

This is yet another chapter beyond the Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton scenario. The power struggle between a citizens’ republic and a banking oligarchy.
Again, the public wanted sane and equitable monetary reform. What did Congress give them? Full out capture by the banksters and pretended it was reform. Sound familiar? The right to private ownership of the national treasury. Hello? Private individuals who thereafter controlled the nation’s money and credit. It was unconstitutional but, hey, look at the allergic to accountability, legality and all that is constitutional Obama administration.

Back then some very serious, resourceful, brave and noble farmer and small business populists fought hard against the travesty, but with a captured Congress and an obtuse and/or passive citizenry, what was to be done?

So the proverbial songs and dances of disinformation happened back then, similar to the ones now. They confused America and allowed Congress to totally defy the mandate of the people.

First, the pretense that the Federal Reserve Bank was to be controlled by Congress, even though the directors were to be chosen by the bankers at least indirectly under the auspices of the executive branch NOT the Congress. The “Federal Advisory Council” would then be chosen by the appointed directors of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks and these council members would remain UNKNOWN to the American people.

A second stage in the song and dance routine was to set up the pretense that the banking system was multi-branched and sole domination would not come from the New York cabal of bankers alone. Appearance vs. reality. Farmers, small businesses, their needs and the needs of other regions of the countries would not ever be a priority. The needs of the Eastern gated-community elite would always prevail. Class war it was and still is.

It is time to restore the American monetary system to its original and legitimate form. Ms. Peters reminded us that when Canada restructured their banking system for the citizenry not the profiteers, universal health care became a natural reality. Universal health care, in shameful, hold out America, is never going to happen with its present, debilitating debt-based economy.

A lot of other restorative things won’t happen here and a lot of worsening things will until the Bank Mafia is defeated and the banking industry is returned to limited and legitimate vendorship and not racketeering.

Kucinich has the answer -- THE RESCUE -- all typed up and entered into Congress. But we know what happened to Ron Paul’s efforts on this score, to disempower the Fed. If we don’t cover Kucinich’s back and DEMAND the legitimate return of the US monetary system to the control of a Congress serving the citizenry and not corporatist pirates, and that will take massive vigilance on our parts, we are dooming our country and future generations to third world serfdom to oligarchs.

The amiable Obama mouthing double-sided song and dance bipartisanship bullshit is desperately trying to keep the economy from foundational recovery as is most of Congress, beholding to the avaricious banksters. I agree with Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report. Obama is an “inside man” for the oligarchy. Some believe he is not that intentionally craven. Okay, maybe Obama with the corporatist elite is more like one of those doomed, delusional love addicts who believes it is possible to get “love from a psychopath.” Whatever. It still dooms us, doesn’t it? Chris Floyd christens Obama the “Continuer in Chief”. Absolutely! Where’s the change? Obama is the king of “shining on” the citizenry. And unbelievably too many keep showing up for another game of Lucy and the football. He talks about “puddles in heaven,” science fairs and a faster internet as the country descends into a quicksand of profound and multiple crises.

The citizenry is confused and betrayed by him and the disinformation campaigns of both legacy parties and the pimped out media continuously guaranteeing that Americans won’t recognize who the true villains are to their own demise. The pragmatic faux-progressives stridently battle fellow victims of the banksters. And then there are the fools who tilt at the non-malignant windmills of a non-existent specter of socialism. All this as soft fascism keeps on hardening in America. It would all be laughable if it weren’t so Orwellianly tragic.

The Kucinich bill could pull America out of its quicksand if we could collectively grasp it, literally and figuratively. Can we? What kind of a tipping point do we need? What kind of a “bottom” must America plunge to until it wakes up and acknowledges the enormous dysfunction of its governance. We can’t rely on a Congress to do the right thing by us on its own.

Robert Malin writes about Dennis Kucinich and his bill:

“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 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 our nation’s infrastructure. My bill would do exactly that.” 

This is was part of a Kucinich press release about the Federal Reserve Bank in May of 2009:

"The Federal Reserve has been operating in a governmental netherworld, free from scrutiny or oversight. We know the Fed has printed and loaned trillions of dollars, but we don't know where the money went. This bill will finally provide some transparency," said Kucinich."

"Traditionally the Federal Reserve has limited itself to setting the federal funds rate target (the overnight interest rate that banks charge each other) by purchasing government securities. Since August 2007, the Fed has drastically expanded its role in our economic stability by enacting programs to print and lend trillions of dollars directly into the economy."

"Despite the fact that the Fed's actions are a centerpiece of our nation's response to our economic recovery, we know almost nothing about how the Federal Reserve has addressed the crisis. It's time investors and taxpayers obtained a clear picture," added Kucinich.

The Fed has enacted several new programs to address the financial system's crisis including the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), the Mortgage Backed Securities Purchase Program, and a number of other emergency lending programs that are not subject to Congressional oversight.”

Robert Malin does an excellent job explaining Kucinich’s Bill to Restructure the Federal Reserve.

“Dennis Kucinich has prepared a bill that will return control of the monetary system to Congress as it is clearly stated in the constitution.  This presents an opportunity for Libertarians led by Ron Paul to get "Constitutionalists" on board with the Progressive Caucus to end the mismanagement of our currency by a banking monopoly, and to reinvest that money into America to repair the damage that the the "Federal Reserve" has done to the economy.  We need to move away from a debt based monetary system.”

From the bill:
 

17) The authority to create money is a sovereign power vested in the Congress under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

(18) The enactment of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 by Congress effectively delegated the sovereign power to create money, to the Federal Reserve system and private financial industry.

(19) This ceding of Constitutional power has contributed materially to a multitude of monetary and financial afflictions, including—

(A) growing and unreasonable concentration of wealth;

(B) unbridled expansion of national debt, both public and private;

(C) excessive reliance on taxation of citizens for raising public revenues;

(D) inflation of the currency;

(E) drastic increases in the cost of public infrastructure investments;

(F) record levels of unemployment and underemployment; and

(G) persistent erosion of the ability of Congress to exercise its Constitutional responsibilities to provide resources for the general welfare of all the American people.

Malin quoting Kucinich:

“Banks pyramided their value by spending money into existence, greatly inflating the value of bank holdings, inflating the value of their asset bases, enticing unknowing investors to participate in financing schemes like the bundling of subprime mortgages, and ultimately bringing undercapitalized banks and the entire financial system to the edge of ruin, creating circumstances where the taxpayers of  the United States were called upon to save the banks from their own imprudent money-issuing practices, misspending and mis-investments. The banks’ ability to create money out of nothing ultimately became the taxpayers’ liability, and raises a fundamental question about a practice of money creation which threatens the wealth of the American people.”

End of Part 1 of 2