U.S. bill to allow Saudis to be sued meets resistance

The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act introduced in the U.S. Senate would allow the possibility of lawsuits against any foreign nations found to be involved in funding a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

The text of the act explicitly mentioned the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The bill appears to target Saudi Arabia in particular, a feature that has angered the Saudis. Saudi Foreign Minister, Adel Jubeir is said to have told the U.S. administration that if the bill was passed, Saudi Arabia would immediately sell $750 billion in US treasuries. This could cause interest rates to spike, damaging the US dollar and the U.S.economy.

Almost immediately, the White House was threatening to veto the bill and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina a co-sponsor of the bi-partisan bill put a hold on the bill saying that it could come back to bite us. The president arrived in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday April 20 for a meeting with King Salman and officials.

The State Department and the White House warned that U.S. citizens abroad could face retaliatory lawsuits.The bill has brought Democratic Senator, Chuck Schumer, into conflict with the Obama administration. Schumer said: "If Saudi Arabia participated in terrorism, of course they should be able to be sued. This bill would allow a suit to go forward and victims of terrorism to go to court to determine if the Saudi government participated in terrorist acts. If the Saudis did, they should pay a price."Josh Earnest, the White House spokesperson, claimed the bill would jeopardize "international sovereignty" and would put the U.S. at risk should other countries adopt a similar law. He said it was difficult to imagine a scenario in which President Obama would sign the bill. The bill would prevent Saudi Arabia and other countries from invoking their sovereign immunity in federal courts.

The House is awaiting Senate action before it goes ahead with its own bill introduced by Peter King, a New York Republican. Paul Callan, a CNN legal analyst pointed out that the law could result in countries retaliating against U.S. drone attacks. Callan said: "Which is why for almost 200 years, international law has recognized this concept of sovereign immunity that countries shouldn't really allow individual courts to sue other countries. It shall be worked down as a matter of foreign relations."While Saudi Arabia has not been implicated in the 9/11 attacks, there have long been suspicions that the Saudi royal family were involved. These suspicions have even been increased by the failure so far for the Obama administration to release 28 pages of an investigation into foreign involvement in the attacks.

There is no similar resistance to allowing a suit against Iran to go forward for a terror attack on marine barracks in Beirut. The US Supreme court ruled that Iran must pay nearly $2 billion from frozen assets to more than 1,000 Americans. The ruling relates to a 1983 bombing of U.S. Marine barracks that killed 241 Marines, as well as other attacks. In 2012 Congress passed a law that directed assets of Iran's Markazi bank be turned over to the families who were suing. Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and the Obama administration as well supported the families in this case.

Turkey attacks the Islamic State but also Kurds in northern Iraq

Washington has long urged Turkey to intervene against the Islamic State in Syria. After a suicide bombing that killed 32 people in Turkey, Turkish planes have targeted IS locations in Syria for two consecutive days now.

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If the Turks had simply bombed IS positions the US would no doubt have been quite pleased but Turkish planes also targeted shelters and storage sites belonging to the Kurdistan Worker's Party in seven different locations in northern Iraq. While the US has yet to make a statement on the Iraq attacks the PKK has said that conditions for peace talks with the Turkish government are no longer in place. Turkey had embarked on peace talks with the PKK in 2012, and the PKK had declared a cease fire in 2013. The Kurds in northern Iraq including the PKK units have been instrumental in defending the area against the Islamic State and even retaking some territory. In attacking the PKK, Turkey is attacking an ally in the fight against the Islamic State as far as the US is concerned. Turkey is very concerned about Kurdish gains both in Iraq and in Syria. It worries that an independent Kurdistan might be formed in northern Syria and that the Kurdish area of Iraq also becomes independent. There would be pressure within Turkey to join these other Kurdish areas.

In recent elections in Turkey the Kurds gained considerable ground politically. While there is conflict between the PKK and less radical Kurdish groups, an attack on the PKK may actually help promote a unified position against President Erdogan. Turkish actions may result in many more attacks by the Islamic State and perhaps also attacks by the PKK within Turkey. While bombing Islamic State positions helps in the battle against IS, bombing the PKK in iraq does exactly the opposite.

Washington may have agreed not to object to Turkish bombing of the PKK in return for Turkey joining the war against the Islamic State. However, Turkey made another important concession to the US. For months, the Obama administration has been negotiating an agreement to use bombers and drones to operate from air bases at Incirlik and Diyarbakir. An administration official said that the deal was sealed by a phone call between Turkish president Recep Erdogan and US president Obama. No official announcement has yet been made but, John Kirby, a State Department spokesperson, said simply that the US and Turkey had "decided to further deepen our cooperation in the fight against ISIL". Fadi Hakura, a Turkey analyst in London said: "The use of the Turkish air base is extremely important. Before, the U.S. had to traverse 1,000 miles to target IS in Syria. Now it will be much less, so naturally the air campaign will be far more intense and far more effective."

Turkey is in the process of clamping down on IS suspects and PKK militants. Erdogan will use increased attacks in Turkey to impose even more draconian anti-terror measures. He may very well tar any significant opposition to his rule as related to terror threats as has been done In Egypt and elsewhere. President Assad of Syria has made no statement about the Turkish bombings inside Syria.

US Senators considering secret court to rule on additions to kill list

The idea is that a secret court would consider evidence that a suspect should be on a targeted killing list and hence could be attacked by a drone. The court would issue what might be called a "death warrant".

The secret drone court would be modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court that was created in 1978. This court approves national security surveillance on US soil. Earlier these decisions had been the prerogative of the president. The court has almost never rejected requests for surveillance warrants although at times they have modified them. The court has also complained at times that evidence presented to the court was not well verified. George Bush carried out surveillance without bothering to go to the court on a number of occasions..

The suggestion of such a court is obviously an attempt to establish some type of legal legitimacy for the drone program by providing judicial oversight that could then be touted as due process. As of now, the due process is simply the operation of the hidden group that advises the president on who should be added to the kill list. The president makes the ultimate decision. Usually, due process is understood as the accused being charged and brought before a court with legal representation, where he or she can know the charges and the evidence against him or her and have his lawyer question that evidence. Such a model does not fit with the prevalent view of the US administration which considers the globe a battlefield between the US and Al Qaeda. Suspected terrorists are not criminals accused of a crime but unprivileged combatants in a battle. Given this conceptualisation of the status of the suspected terrorist due process, as understood in charges against cirminals, does not really enter into the situation. The stark contradiction between the legal framework of the war on terror and normal legal processes should be emphasized more.

People are rightly horrified at the idea that the President,in effect, becomes judge, jury, and executioner. The processes by which the decision to kill are made have no input from the accused and involve no formal charges, simply an assessment that the suspect is an imminent threat to the US, where "imminent" could mean as little as that the person is thought to be planning attacks against the US or its forces. No one from outside the closed system is allowed input into the process.

The situation is little changed if a secret court were to be involved. The evidence presented would be from those who want a suspect declared a legitimate target. No one is present to argue against that evidence except the judge. The court would end up being for the most part a rubber stamp for administrations requests. If there was some resistance or if the process seemed to slow and cumbersome, the administration would probably simply go ahead on its own, as happened with the FISA court under Bush. However, in politics perception is probably at least 80% of reality so the court idea could come to fruition.

Robert M Chesney a law professor at the University of Texas said:“We’ve gone from people scoffing at this to it becoming a fit subject for polite conversation." Chesney said court approval for adding names to a kill list is not beyond the realm of political possibility, at least for US citizens. Chesney noted further:“People in Washington need to wake up and realize the legal foundations are crumbling by the day,”

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California and chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, promised to review proposals to establish a secret court. She was supported by Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine. King said:“Having the executive being the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner all in one is very contrary to the traditions and the laws of this country." His remarks suggest the conventional idea of due process, which is never going to have a place with respect to terror suspects unless the war conceptualisation is changed to a view of the terrorist as a criminal.

Brennan disclosed that the Obama administration had actually held talks internally about the feasibility of such a court. Brennan said:“I think it’s certainly worthy of discussion. What’s that appropriate balance between the executive, legislative and judicial branch responsibilities in this area?”

If such a court were to be formed its jurisdiction would likely be limited to approving names for a kill list rather than approving drone strikes. Many believe though that extending the court's review to foreign suspects would infringe on the role of the president as commander in chief. Senator King felt that the court would be constitutional only if limited to ruling on names of American suspects to be placed on the kill list. Apparently, there is concern about judicial oversight only if US citizens are involved.

Of course all this does nothing to dampen concerns about civilian deaths in the strikes, how decisions are made on targeting foreign suspects, or about public disclosure about the strike rules and procedures. As William Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University put it:“In terms of the politics and the optics, aren’t you in the same position that you are now? It’s still secret. The target wouldn’t be represented. It’s a mechanism that wouldn’t satisfy critics or advance the due process cause much.”

Hina Shamsi of the ACLU's national security project said that the drone court would actually represent a step backward. A better approach would be extradition and criminal prosecution of suspected terrorists. However this misses the point. This is conceptually a war. In a war you do not charge your opponent with a crime. If you apprehend an opponent he or she is held in effect as a prisoner until hostilities end. Of course in the war on terror, hostilities never end and so the logical extension of that is indefinite confinement without charge as happens in Guantanamo, for the most part.

Shamsi continues: “I strongly agree that judicial review is crucial. But judicial review in a new secret court is both unnecessary and un-American.”But FISA does exactly the same type of thing and has been in place since 1978. In the war on terror, secrecy is as American as apple pie.

UN to investigate legality of drone strikes and civilian casualties

The UN will launch a formal investigation into the legality of drone strikes and also of the casualties that result from them.

The announcement came as there is a report that the latest US drone strike in Yemen is claimed to have mistakenly killed two children. Ben Emmerson, the UN's special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism said at a press conference in London that he will lead a group of international specialists who will examine drone attacks in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan by the CIA and Pentagon. However, the group will also examine drone use by UK and US forces in Afghanistan, as well as Israel's use of drones against Palestinians.

The senior UK lawyer will work with international criminal lawyers, a senior Pakistani judge, and a leading UK forensic pathologist as well as other experts. A serving judge-advocate with the US military will be "assisting the inquiry in his personal capacity." More about the members of the team can be found at the end of this article.

Emmerson told reporters at the new conference:

’Those states using this technology and those on whose territory it is used are under an international law obligation to establish effective independent and impartial investigations into any drone attack in which it is plausibly alleged that civilian casualties were sustained.’

Neither the US nor others have carried out such investigations so the UN is doing so as a last resort. The UK Minister of Defence is already said to be co-operating with the investigation. The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice has indicated that Washington "has not ruled out full co-operation". We shall see. The US has refused so far even to admit officially that any such program exists.

Back in May 2010, Philip Alston had already presented to the UN a detailed report on the legal questions of targeted killing. Most of the recommendations he suggests have not been carried out by the Obama administration nor anyone else.

The UN Human Rights Council is taking action after a number of nations including, Russia, China, and Pakistan requested action be taken on covert drone strikes. Emmerson said:

‘It’s a response to the fact that there’s international concern rising exponentially, surrounding the issue of remote targeted killings through the use of unmanned vehicles.’

The group is expected to make recommendations to the UN general assembly this fall. The team will also recommend further UN action should it be justified by the findings of the inquiry. Of course nothing will get through the UN security council unless the US approves it, so there will not be any teeth in what the UN says or does. If there are any UN resolutions condemning the attacks, they will come from the General Council. Many countries ignores those resolutions since they are interpreted as advisory and consdiered non-binding, whenever they demand something a country does not want to do.

A particular area the inquiry may examine is the alleged practice of the CIA of deliberately targeting rescuers and even funeral goers in Pakistan strikes, a practice revealed in an investigation by the Bureau for the SundayTimes. In October 2012, Emmerson said:

‘The Bureau has alleged that since President Obama took office at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims and more than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. Christof Heyns [UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killing] … has described such attacks, if they prove to have happened, as war crimes. I would endorse that view.’

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) praised the inquiry and requested that the US cooperate with and aid the invetigators. A spokesperson noted:

‘Whether it does or not will show whether it holds itself to the same obligation to co-operate with UN human rights investigations that it urges on other countries”

The Obama administration has rejected requests from the ACLU for information on its targeted killing programs or the basis for the legality of its drone attacks. The ACLU made a Freedom of Information Act request two years ago on January 13, 2010. Two years later having gone to court as well, the group still has not been able to get the information.

The Obama administration will have to decide whether to cooperate with the UN investigation. Perhaps it will in order to try and influence the investigation but on the other hand it may decide just to take a hard line as it has so far all along about releasing any information except what could be used for propaganda purposes.

Drone Strikes: Government lawyers hold that even existence or non-existence of strikes should not be revealed

The U.S.government which itself has now admitted, defended, and praised the drone program has asked a federal court to reject ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) demands that the government release information on drone attacks. U.S. government lawyers filed a brief that says in part:“Whether or not the CIA has the authority to be, or is in fact, directly involved in targeted lethal operations remains classified"

Logically it would seem that to refuse either to affirm or deny the existence of the program is ludicrous given that there is a constant flow of information about the attacks. The situation is so ludicrous that even the ludicrous main stream press has on the whole given up on reporting suspected U.S. drone strikes by simply describing them as U.S. or CIA drone strikes. But being illogical has a rational purpose and that is to keep information about the drone strikes from the populace while leaking out any information that might be found politically positive. Much of the leaked information may be misinformation as well since the populace cannot gain access to genuine information since it is classified.

The ACLU together with the New York Times has requested documents that explain the legal basis for the raids and killing of U.S. citizens. The U.S. government wants a summary judgment to dismiss the lawsuits. The government brief warns:“Even to describe the numbers and details of most of these documents would reveal information that could damage the government’s counter terrorism efforts,” The ACLU's Jamee Jafeer countered:“Senior officials have discussed it, both on the record and off. They have taken credit for its putative successes, professed it to be legal and dismissed concerns about civilian casualties,”

While the government brief said that it realized that there was public concern about the details it had to take into consideration the need to keep information classified. If there is so much concern about releasing classified information about the program why are top officials such as Obama, Brennan, and Panetta constantly releasing information?

The UN has also been asking the same sorts of questions as the ACLU and has even suggested that some attacks may involve war crimes. However, the Obama administration has been accountable in the only way it knows how by selectively setting out purported data about the strikes that is meant to serve their own interest. For more see this article.

CIA given go ahead to increase drone attacks in Pakistan

In response to Pakistani demands that drone attacks cease and in spite of the fact that Pakistan has made stopping them a condition of reopening supply routes, Obama has obviously given the go ahead not just to resume attacks to increase their frequency.The move is just one aspect of what is becoming more and more open criticism and impatience with Pakistan. The U.S. has not made any attempt to meet another demand of Pakistan an apology for the killing of 24 Pakistani troops in an incident on the border with Afghanistan last November. This was the original event that caused Pakistan to close the transit routes.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta spoke of the U.S. reaching the limits of its patience. Perhaps Pakistan is also already at the point where it has reached the limits of its patience and has no intention of reopening the supply routes. The Pakistanis have their own priorities and plans. No doubt some of the contingency plans involve insurgent linked groups. This is hardly a novel tactic. The U.S. used the same tactics in supporting Islamic radicals against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

But Pakistan is supposed to immediately act upon whatever the U.S. considers its own interests in spite of the fact that Pakistan has already suffered many losses through fighting terrorism and also subjected the tribal areas to terrible devastation and the displacement of thousands of people.

Panetta made it clear that drone strikes will continue. Panetta said:"It is difficult to achieve peace in Afghanistan as long as there is safe haven for terrorists in Pakistan," If the drone strikes are so successful how can there be safe havens in Pakistan?

The pace of attacks in increasing. Since the Chicago conference alone on May 20 21 there have been eight attacks. In the 5 and a half months before the conference the CIA logged only 14 strikes in Pakistan.

Javed Qazi a retired Pakistani intelligence head said:"They are trying to send a message: 'If you don't come around, we will continue with our plan, the way we want to do it,'" He continued this is "superpower arrogance being shown to a smaller state.... But this will only increase the feeling among Pakistanis that the Americans are bent on having their way through force and not negotiation."

Panetta levelled charges against Pakistan while speaking in India. To do this shows absolute arrogance and is apt to make Pakistan even more paranoid about developing close U.S. India ties. That Pakistan now seeks closer ties with China and better relations even with Iran should hardly come as a surprise. Panetta confirmed that the U.S. is not just targeting the remnants of Al Qaeda but any group it thinks may be attacking the U.S. in Afghanistan.

The Zardari government will soon face elections. Apparently the U.S. does not care that the result may be the defeat of the Zardari government and the election of a far more anti-American government. For more see this article.

Wall Street still supports Obama

 An article in the Daily Beast is titled "Why Wall Street Is Grudgingly Supporting Obama." Many rich bankers and financiers do not at all like the rhetoric coming from Obama but by the same token many are still writing checks for his re-election campaign.
   The Democratic campaign is raking in more dough than ever 42 million in the fourth quarter of last year. Nevertheless many bankers and investors who helped bankroll Obama's resounding victory are unhappy campers. Obama has been pushing for higher taxes on the rich in contrast to the Republicans. However leftists will point out that Obama bailed out banks that were called too big to fail and did not attempt to break them up.
    On the other hand many on Wall Street are far from supporting fervent evangelical Christians who might turn the Republican Party in a very right wing social conservative direction. The religion of Wall Street is profits. But many on Wall Street dislike Obama rhetoric about income inequality. The last thing the capitalist establishment wants is a campaign based upon some concept of class war.
  Last campaign employees of Goldman Sachs donated more to the Obama campaign than any other company. During the spring and summer of 2007 Obama raised 7.7 from the financial sector while Romney took in only 5.1 million. This time Romney is registering a nearly 8 million dollar take while Obama is reduced to 4.2 million. But as the example shows both parties are funded by big finance. Obama's stock has just plunged because of his nasty rhetoric.

U.S. sell arms to allies in Asia and Middle East

    In an article by John Bennet in The Hill defense analyst Loren Thompson claims that Obama's arms sale programs is a striking departure from Democratic practice. Rather than sending more troops to the Middle East and Asia the Obama administration is providing allies with advanced weapons and military equipment.
   The moves are regarded by analysts as attempts to counter the influence of China and Iran. Thompson said: “The President and his [advisers] apparently have decided that well-armed allies are the next best thing to U.S. “boots on the ground” when it comes to advancing America’s global security interests,”
   To counter Iran the U.S. government has provided Saudi Arabia with 85 Boeing-made fighter jets as well as munitions. These jets however are not as advanced as those that the U.S. has provided to Israel. Such sales also are part of a plan to ensure that the U.S. military-industrial complex is well fed and also provides a type of military Keynesian stimulus program.  The fact that Saudi Arabia is a reactionary authoritarian monarchy is neither here nor there.
    The U.S. is also selling upgrading kits for Taiwan's U.S. planes. F35 sales have already been made both to Japan and Australia. There are rumors that South Korea will buy U.S. fighters as well. Altogether 250 U.S. made advanced warplanes will be shipped into the Asia-Pacific region. The arms sales to allies will make it easier to draw down U.S. forces in some regions.
  Thompson remarks: “When a president sustains high rates of military spending, takes out the world’s most wanted terrorist, and sells the latest military technology to friends around the globe,, “it’s difficult for his political opponents to explain how they could have been any harder on America’s enemies.” I find it difficult to see exactly how all of this is a striking departure from Democratic practice. The Republicans can still complain if Obama cuts military spending at all. They can complain about his withdrawal from Iraq. Alternatively, they will concentrate upon domestic policy and slow economic growth, issues that are probably more significant to most Americans than foreign policy.

Obama sets up Commission that may cut Social Security

This article is an eye opener. It reveals the business connections of those appointed by Obama to examine social security and make recommendations. All but one have many business connections and are hawks as far as changing Social Security is concerned. The process will no doubt be as an anonymous official says:

an anonymous official told the Times that spending cuts would start with earmarks in order to earn goodwill with the public, and then move on to more "popular entitlement programs."

This is from alternet.

Obama Stacks the Deck

The seasoned networks of money and influence behind the commission's(National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform) apparent immortality, including "Washington's leading think tanks, the prestige media, tax-exempt foundations, skillful propagandists posing as economic experts and a self-righteous billionaire spending his fortune to save the nation from the elderly," have been outlined by noted economic journalist William Greider, among others. What's received comparatively little attention so far, however, is the composition of Obama's picks for the commission, what interests they represent, and what that reveals about the White House’s own strategy.

While some optimists have predicted that the 14-vote requirement guarantees gridlock, Obama may have already given Republicans the votes needed to put Social Security under the knife.

Starting at the top, the commission's two co-chairs are both veteran Social Security hawks. The Democrat is Erskine Bowles. Described by Business Week in 1998 as "Corporate America’s Friend in the White House," Bowles is president of the University of North Carolina and a venture capitalist with close ties to Wall Street. He sits on the board of Morgan Stanley and General Motors, both of which have received multi-billion dollar government bailouts since the start of the financial crisis. The finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector was by far the largest donor to Bowles in his unsuccessful Senate campaigns in 2002 and 2004, donating over $3 million. His wife, Crandall Bowles, is on the board of JPMorgan Chase, making the couple two of the biggest beneficiaries of the government's financial welfare over the past two years. Crandall Bowles also gave over $14,000 to Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Both are members of the Business Council, a prestigious association of major CEOs.

Bowles' Republican co-chair, Alan Simpson, is a former Republican senator who pushed (unsuccessfully) for a back-door benefit cut to Social Security benefits in the '90s by tampering with its cost-of-living adjustment and attacked AARP for its defense of Medicare. Simpson's former Senate aide, Chuck Blahous, is a prolific crusader against Social Security and was executive director of Bush's commission in 2001. In a warning sign for Social Security advocates, Blahous and Robert Reischauer, another policy insider who penned a memo in 2009 with fellow Brookings Institution elites calling for Obama to take "action to stem the growth of Social Security and Medicare," were recently nominated by Obama to be Social Security Trustees. (The Blahous pick he apparently owed to Senator Mitch McConnell.)

Reischauer has close ties to economic wrecking ball Robert Rubin—the Goldman Sachs chairman who became Clinton Treasury Secretary and pushed through radical deregulatory banking laws, then went to Citigroup to score $120 million for driving his company into the ground. Rubin and Reischauer knew each other at both the Harvard Corporation and the Clinton White House, where Reischauer was director of CBO. Reischauer is on the advisory board of Rubin’s Hamilton Project, and the two most recent CBO directors have come straight from Hamilton.

One of Reischauer's co-signers of the Brookings memo, Alice Rivlin, is another fox Obama has put in charge of the Social Security henhouse. Former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve under Greenspan at the peak of the tech bubble, and also a Hamilton Project board member, Rivlin will likely make another great Wall Street ally on the commission. In 2004 Rivlin co-authored (with Obama's current Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, among others) a 138-page Brookings report titled "Restoring Fiscal Sanity" advocating $47 billion in entitlement cuts, including an "increase in the retirement age under Social Security" and "more accurate inflation adjustments to Social Security benefits."

Keep in mind that she supported this plan before most of Bush's military expenditures, before the Great Recession, and before the financial bailouts. If that's not enough, Rivlin, who gave roughly $10,000 to Obama's 2008 campaign, was also on the board of Public Agenda Foundation with Peter Peterson, the private equity kingpin who has devoted literally billions to destroying Social Security during his lifetime. Public Agenda has organized research and events to refine elite strategies for pushing deficit reduction, including entitlement reform. From a recent Public Agenda forum titled Trillions of Reasons to Get Serious About Our Fiscal Future:

"Panelists agreed that the key word when talking about reducing the deficit should be 'sacrifice' and not just for the wealthy, a message to which most Americans might respond negatively."

That's three out of three votes for "sacrifice," and we haven't even gotten to Obama's other Republican pick, David Cote, who is CEO of Honeywell, a major defense contractor with millions in profits at stake in maintaining our out-of-control military budget. Cote is also a former executive at GE, another big military contractor, and director of JPMorgan Chase. Obama has named Cote, who supported the stimulus bill, as one of his favorite CEOs. He is additionally a senior adviser to KKR, the infamous leveraged buyout firm, and a member of the Business Roundtable, a powerful association of CEOs that has spent millions fighting Social Security.

Obama's fifth pick is Ann Fudge, a major campaign bundler who already spends a bit of time around tables with the American banking elite. Fudge was chairman of the board of advertising firm Young & Rubicam Brands, which includes former Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz, until 2006. She's now on the boards of Brookings and Rockefeller Foundation, both teeming with top Wall Street elites (including Prince, Parsons, Gupta, Hutchins, Johnson, Rubenstein and Wolstencroft, to name a few), as well as GE and Novartis Pharmaceuticals. With her extensive marketing experience, perhaps she'll be the one who figures out how to sell the commission's "sacrifices" to the public.

Bruce Reed, whom Bowles and Simpson recently named as the commission’s executive director, can help Fudge brainstorm slogans. Reed is CEO of the corporatist Democratic Leadership Council (previously chaired by Joe Lieberman for six years, and now by Hamilton Project advisory board member and Blue Dog Harold Ford, Jr), is very tight with Rahm Emmanuel (they wrote a book together), and coined the phrase “end welfare as we know it.” Any other social program Reed would like to end as we know it?

A foregone conclusion?

Andy Stern, president of SEIU, is Obama's only pick out of six who is sure to oppose Social Security cuts. Everyone else is likely open to slashing.

For the commission to reach an agreement, its Democrats will have to win the support of at least two Republicans, which will be nearly impossible unless spending cuts are among its proposals. That Obama’s picks are so amenable to, if not gunning for, some form of benefits cuts suggests the White House is indeed seeking such a "grand bargain" from the commission, not a stalemate. The odds are slim, especially given the commission’s history, that five of the 10 Democrats would defy the White House to kill such a bargain.

As the New York Times confirms, in establishing the group Obama has once again adopted a course favorable to his economic advisers and their Wall Street friends over the objections of his political team. How much of the usual looting this will involve remains to be seen. They seem to be proceeding carefully. Earlier, following Obama's recent spending freeze announcement, an anonymous official told the Times that spending cuts would start with earmarks in order to earn goodwill with the public, and then move on to more "popular entitlement programs."

"By helping to create a new atmosphere of fiscal discipline, it can actually also feed into debates over other components of the budget," the official said, briefing reporters on the condition of anonymity.

Which administration official might this be? Sadly, it could be just about anyone, as Obama’s economics team is dominated by Wall Street-friendly advisers, most of whom are close friends and proteges of Robert Rubin, and have been calling (pdf) for Social Security reductions for years. The March 23 Gray Lady front-pager mentions two of them, Orszag and Jason Furman, along with associate budget director Jeffrey Liebman, as likely masterminds. Both Orszag and Furman followed Rubin into Obama's inner circle from the Hamilton Project. Liebman too has a history of Social Security mischief – he was on the commission under Clinton.

If President Obama wants to get heavy handed about the deficit, he could start by putting an end to the disastrous and unpopular schemes that created it – the Bush tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the trillions of dollars funneled to Wall Street. Unfortunately, it looks like Obama has taken the bankers' bait: the only people disciplined by his fiscal retreat will be millions of senior citizens with the gall to believe that society should guarantee them a decent standard of living.

Matthew Skomarovsky is a co-founder of LittleSis.org, an involuntary facebook for powerful Americans. He is also co-director of the Public Accountability Initiative.

Obama now openly supports Iran Opposition

The problem is that this simply confirm Ahmadinejad's contention that the opposition is in league with foreign enemies of Iran. This is the last thing that the opposition needs. However this open support is probably more designed to enthuse US citizens rather than doing anything to actually help the opposition. This shows that the US is committed to promoting democracy etc.etc. It is part of what might be called the longstanding humanitarian brand imperialism that has been adopted by both main parties. Bush pushed the same rhetoric. It is used constantly in reference to Afghanistan and Karzai's manipulation of elections and corruption has caused a bit of pain at home on this score. Of course Saudi Arabia and Egypt can remain as they are without much scolding. This is from antiwar.com.

Obama Openly Embraces Iran’s Opposition
Posted By Jason Ditz

After months of not-so-secret backing of Iran’s “Green Revolution” opposition, the Obama Administration is moving away from the pretense of covert support and is now openly embracing the opposition as a central part of its strategy.

That strategy, which also includes calls for “crippling sanctions” against the nation, is aimed most directly at trying to get Iran to abandon its civilian nuclear program, and also speculatively as a path to regime change.

Not everyone is happy with this new approach to Iran’s opposition, but perhaps the most visibly upset group is the opposition itself, which is desperately trying to establish itself as a viable domestic opposition group amid government claims that it is little more than a front for the Obama Administration.

America’s funding for the groups is still officially secret, but the support is seriously undermining their standing in Iran, as the Iranian population suffers under the yoke of US-backed sanctions and hears, increasingly credibly, that the pro-democracy activists are being used by the US to undermine stability in the nation.

Tom Hayden: Exit Strategies for Afghanistan and Iraq

Hayden is a long time activist even active back in the sixties. As this article shows the antiwar movement is not all that strong and those active in the Democratic Party such as Kucinich are not getting support in large numbers. I might add that there seems to be almost zero coverage in most of the major media of the initiatives mentioned in this article. As Hayden points out Obama does not seem too concerned about pleasing the anti war movement. After all where would they go? The Republicans are even more hawkish on the war on terror and the Afghan campaign. It remains to be seen what will happen in Iraq but even if all combat troops are withdrawn there will still be 50,000 left. It remains to be see if any exit strategy as suggested i ever adopted by the Obama administration. This is from the Nation.

Exit Strategies for Afghanistan and Iraq

by TOM HAYDEN


It's been a long winter for the peace movement. Waiting for Obama has proved fruitless. The Great Recession has strengthened Wall Street and diverted attention from the wars. The debate over healthcare still won't go away and has demoralized progressive advocates. Given a chance to exit from Afghanistan when the Karzai election proved to be stolen, President Obama escalated anyway, but also promised to "begin" exiting almost before an opposition could mobilize at home.

Representative Dennis Kucinich will step into the crosswinds this week and force the House of Representatives to wake up, pay attention, and vote up or down on the Afghanistan war. The Kucinich initiative at least will reveal where Congress stands. Whether it will energize the peace movement for upcoming March protests or beyond is unpredictable.
Kucinich, interviewed along with other members of Congress by The Nation last week, is introducing a so-called privileged resolution requiring the House to hold a three-hour debate this coming Wednesday, followed by a vote on the Afghanistan war. The vote is expected to authorize the war, but passage of Kucinich's initiative would require a withdrawal in thirty days. If the president rejected such a decision, the withdrawal would be delayed until the end of 2010, nine months from now.

"It's time to force a debate," Kucinich says. "It's not enough to slow-walk the end of the war." On Friday Kucinich had seventeen co-sponsors for his measure.

The Kucinich bill is based on the 1973 War Powers Act, passed during the upsurge of Congressional opposition to the unilateral war-making of the executive branch during the Richard Nixon era. The War Powers Act, strongly opposed by Bush-era officials including Dick Cheney and John Yoo, was based on Article I, Section 8, of the federal Constitution, which, according to James Madison, "expressly vested" the power to "declare" war in Congress.

According to Gary Wills's history in Bomb Power, the War Powers legislation actually diluted Congressional authority by making declaration of war a joint exercise with the White House. Nonetheless, the symbolic threat to presidential prerogative inflamed Cheney into describing it as a Congressional usurpation. Yoo, the author of the notorious torture memos in the Bush administration, went so far as to argue that "declare" in the eighteenth century meant simply to "recognize[d] a state of affairs."

The Kucinich measure seeks to remind Congress of the peak progressive moment when, in tandem with a vast antiwar movement in the streets, Richard Nixon was forced to resign and the Vietnam War was terminated. A decade later, Congress again would play a key role in the Iran/Contra hearings during the Reagan era.

But Wednesday's vote may be a measure of how much Congress has continued to surrender its war-making prerogative to the administration. Many liberal Democrats interviewed for this article expressed discomfort or exasperation towards the Kucinich measure, claiming that it will be overwhelmingly defeated and weaken efforts this spring to introduce antiwar amendments during debate on the war budget.

In one member's view, the Kucinich proposal represents "complete and total withdrawal now," which most in Congress refuse to support. A more common complaint, voiced in a memo from Peace Action, is that "some of our allies on the Hill are concerned that the relatively low amount votes for this resolution may make us look weak."

Another member said, "You can't stop Dennis, he does this all the time, he squeezes members who aren't consulted." Another, who intends to vote for the Kucinich proposal despite having had no input, said bluntly, "A shitty vote has consequences."

Meanwhile, on Afghanistan, the Congressional Progressive Caucus is in disarray. Leadership on Afghanistan issues has been passed to Representative Mike Honda, a progressive Democrat from San Jose, who last year circulated a dramatic exit proposal that would flip US Afghan spending from 80 percent military to 80 percent civilian. Honda's staff did not return calls from The Nation requesting further information.

Progressive Caucus co-chair Lynne Woolsey is up in arms against progressive Democrats who are supporting Marcy Winograd, an antiwar citizen-candidate running against hawkish Representative Jane Harman in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. Woolsey now refuses to work with "outside groups" such as Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) who are backing Winograd's primary bid. Woolsey also opposed last year's forums on Afghanistan sponsored by Democrats including Honda and CPC co-chair Raul Grijalva. Woolsey simply says the US shouldn't be in Afghanistan, but nothing more, which leaves her isolated from peace groups and leaves her own colleagues searching for strategies.

During the Iraq war, the congressional Out of Iraq caucus represented a bloc of 70. Nothing on that scale exists for Afghanistan and Pakistan and few are paying attention to the continuing tensions in Iraq. The Out of Iraq Caucus appears dormant or dissolved, despite the growing threats to Obama's plan for a phased withdrawal of all troops from Iraq by 2012.

Just ahead are debates over the $33 billion funding request for Obama's troop escalation, and the $159 billion for Afghanistan and Iraq contained in the proposed military budget. Despite significant opposition among Democrats to the president's escalation proposal, it is highly unlikely that the funds will be turned down now that American troops have been dispatched. Whether a vote will be taken on Representative Barbara Lee's proposal to block the $33 billion in funding is unclear at the moment. But sizeable opposition is expected to rally around exit strategy measures being jointly contemplated by Representative Jim McGovern and Sen. Russ Feingold this spring.

Despite White House opposition, McGovern was able to win support from a majority of Democrats last year for his resolution calling on the Pentagon to report an Afghanistan exit strategy by year's end. With the president having committed to an exit strategy by beginning troop withdrawals by summer 2011, McGovern's measure might gain greater traction. He told The Nation he will introduce a revised version of the exit strategy resolution in the coming weeks.

Feingold's public thinking on Afghanistan hasn't changed since December when he opposed the president's escalation, according to the Wisconsin senator's staff. Feingold previously has proposed a "flexible timetable for reducing our troop levels" and opposed the defense appropriations bill because of its inclusion of Afghanistan funding.

Feingold and McGovern are expected soon to cooperate in proposing an exit strategy that contains a timetable for troop reductions. Defining such an exit plan quickly is key to the administration's policy for Afghanistan, since the negotiated departure of US troops won't happen without one. And most observers of Afghanistan say the Taliban cannot be drawn into a peace process or political negotiations without a concrete assurance that the military occupation will end and US/NATO/USAF troops will be withdrawn or replaced by peacekeepers.

Secret talks with the Taliban have intensified since spring 2009, the respected Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid wrote recently in The New York Review of Books. Rashid is an official adviser to the US diplomatic team led by Richard Holbrooke. In a recent essay he floats a negotiating scenario which seems quasi-official and, of course, is officially deniable. His seven-point proposal includes lifting current sanctions on Taliban leaders so that talks can occur in a neutral venue, formation of a legal Taliban political party in Afghanistan and a seriously-funded "reconciliation body" to create security for returning Taliban members to Afghanistan.

Rashid's proposal implies, but does not include, a US troop withdrawal, the key condition demanded by the Taliban in exchange for starting all-party talks. It is possible that Obama's pledge to "begin" withdrawing in 2011 is an initial signal of the intention the insurgents want to hear.

In that case, the McGovern and Feingold initiatives can be crucial to moving the United States, Afghan and Taliban positions closer to a formula for reconciliation or, more likely, coexistence. The only alternative is the perpetuation of the neoconservatives' Long War scenario, at trillions of dollars in budget expenditures and/or an outbreak of civil war in Afghanistan.

Whether Congress has the backbone seems to depend on whether there is the force of public opinion to implant one. The previous experiences of Vietnam, Central America and Iraq have shaped a skeptical mood within that public, but it is not sufficiently angry yet to force the end of the war. A deepening battlefield quagmire will only cement that skepticism, but Congress has to channel the public mood into political impact.

Congress's inherent problem is its failure to collaborate with grassroots opinion in fostering public antiwar sentiment. Instead, as with the Kucinich measure, at most the members of Congress expect activists to endorse, support, leaflet, bird-dog and light up the phone lines to pressure other members to vote their way. Too often they fail to use their enormous resources to bring attention and public engagement to issues not (yet) arousing public opinion or media interest.

Tellingly, the CIA's secret war in Pakistan, which includes the escalation of drone attacks, has drawn no meaningful Congressional opposition. The likely reason is that, with the exception of reports by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, the casualties and costs of the drone war have been hidden from the American public.

The re-emergence of a coherent peace movement could help push the McGovern and Feingold measures forward, and also mount pressure for hearings on the secret war before it engulfs Pakistan. The protests planned nationwide in March will revive needed attention to Afghanistan in many local areas around the country. But on the national level, the demise of United for Peace and Justice leaves a vacuum that narrow ideological groups are unable to fill. The dispersal of protest energies towards other issues--Wall Street bailouts, healthcare, Copenhagen, marriage equality--weakens any possibility of a unified focus around Afghanistan.

Despite these organizational obstacles, the ongoing wars will inflict serious political and moral consequences. Without a greater role by the organized peace movement, large numbers of voters will become passive, or drop away, during the forthcoming Congressional elections and the next presidential one. The Obama administration has never treated the peace constituency as one worth cultivating, though the Iraq War was the critical issue difference in the primaries and general elections in 2006 and 2008. In turn, the peace constituency has never turned into a permanent, organized, well-funded lobbying force in Washington--except for the brief flare-ups like those of MoveOn in the 2004-06 cycle.

As a result, everything may depend on whether popular perception is that Obama and the Democrats have turned promises of peace into action. At the moment, such potential support is being drained into despair. Congress and Obama will have to work to bring it back.

About Tom Hayden
Tom Hayden, a former California state senator, is the author, most recently, of The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (Paradigm). more...
Copyright © 2009 The Nation

Obama and US Congress ignore Massive Surveillance Abuses

This is just one more case of the Obama administration actually following in the footsteps of the Bush administration. He is now adopting the very policies that his election was supposed to change. Everyone is so busy with the faltering economy and the failed health care bill that these aspects of the Obama regime are more or less ignored. One of these decades perhaps the left will recognize that neither of the major parties is going to do anything but co-opt them to get votes. This is from prospect.org. Big Brother is alive and well in the USA.

Obama, Congress Wink at Massive Surveillance Abuses

This week's reauthorization of the Patriot Act comes on the heels of the revelation Obama's Office of Legal Counsel granted fresh retroactive immunity for Bush-era telecommunication lawbreaking.

JULIAN SANCHEZ




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Here's how it was supposed to be. Under his administration, candidate Barack Obama explained in 2007, America would abandon the "false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide." There would be "no more National Security Letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime" because "that is not who we are, and it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists." Even after his disappointing vote for the execrable FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which expanded government surveillance power while retroactively immunizing telecoms for their role in George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping, civil libertarians held out hope that the erstwhile professor of constitutional law would begin to restore some of the checks on government surveillance power that had been demolished in the panicked aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
The serial betrayal of that hope reached its culmination last week, when a Democratic-controlled Congress quietly voted to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act without implementing a single one of the additional safeguards that had been under consideration -- among them, more stringent limits on the national security letters (NSLs) Obama had once decried. Worse yet, the vote came on the heels of the revelation, in a blistering inspector general's report, that Obama's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) had issued a secret opinion, once again granting retroactive immunity for systematic lawbreaking -- and opening the door for the FBI to ignore even the current feeble limits on its power to vacuum up sensitive telecommunications records.

NSLs have been around for decades, but their scope was radically expanded by the Patriot Act and subsequent intelligence bills. They allow investigators to obtain a wide array of financial records and telecommunications transaction data without a court order -- revealing the phone numbers, e-mail accounts, and Web addresses with which their targets have been in contact. (See this article for a full explanation of their role in post-9/11 spying law.)

But as a detailed report released last month by the office of the inspector general (OIG) revealed, between 2003 and 2006, the FBI sought to stretch its NSL powers beyond even these ample boundaries. Investigators obtained thousands of records from telecommunications providers using a made-up process called an "exigent letter" -- which essentially promised that a proper NSL would be along shortly. Among those whose records were obtained in this way were reporters for The Washington Post and The New York Times -- in violation of both the law and internal regulations requiring that the attorney general approve such requests.

Still more incredibly, investigators sought records pertaining to more than 3,500 telephone numbers without any process at all, simply requesting records verbally or via scrawled Post-It notes. Many of those data requests were either unrelated to any authorized investigation or had to do with domestic criminal investigations -- meaning they could not legally have been made via NSLs. Despite this, the letters would routinely, and falsely, claim that an NSL or subpoena was already being sought.

When the OIG interviewed the agents responsible, it found that "no one could satisfactorily explain their actions," instead offering only "unpersuasive excuses." When supervisors attempted to implement a database to track these requests, agents revolted, refusing to use the new system "because they did not want the responsibility for inputting the data," which suggests either an extreme aversion to clerical work or an awareness that something not quite Hoyle was afoot. When information obtained by these extralegal means was later cited in warrant applications to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the applicants falsely claimed that legitimate NSLs or subpoenas had been used.

All of this, the OIG report noted, constituted a gross violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which clearly stipulates that subscriber records may only be turned over to the government pursuant to legal process. There's an exception for genuine emergencies, as when an attack is believed to be imminent, but that exception was not invoked and would have applied to only a tiny fraction of the putatively "exigent" cases.

Following standard practice, the OIG sent a draft copy of its report to the FBI for comment before publication. Understandably distressed by the watchdog's finding that analysts had broken the law repeatedly and systematically over a period of years, FBI attorneys scrambled for retroactive cover. As a heavily redacted section of the report explains, they hatched a novel theory, according to which some broad class of records was actually exempt from the requirements of the ECPA, and therefore eligible to be handed over "voluntarily" by the telecoms. Even in the freewheeling days of the Bush administration, apparently, nobody had come up with this particular rationalization for evading federal privacy statutes -- but it would still serve as a retroactive excuse if Obama's Office of Legal Counsel could be persuaded to bless the new reasoning.

Shamefully, the OLC appears to have done just that in a secret opinion issued in January, just weeks before the publication of the OIG report. While it's impossible to know the precise scope of this novel legal loophole -- sufficiently clever parsing of the statutory definition of "subscriber" or "record" might generate a good deal of wiggle room -- the OIG stressed that this freshly discovered power "has significant policy implications that need to be considered by the FBI, the Department, and the Congress." It was a page straight from the John Yoo playbook: When intelligence agencies are discovered to have broken the law, simply reinterpret the law!

Though the NSL provisions were not among those slated to expire, previous OIG reports documenting widespread abuse of NSL authority had placed them at the center of the reauthorization debate, even before this latest bombshell. The Justice Department, meanwhile, had declared its openness to "modifications" of the Patriot Act to better protect civil liberties but took no overt position on the competing proposals.

Indeed, by the time the House Judiciary Committee took up the question of reauthorization in early November, legislators of both parties were venting their frustration about the scant guidance they'd gotten from the administration.

Behind closed doors, however, the administration was anything but silent. Instead of openly opposing civil-liberties reforms that had been under consideration in the Senate, The New York Times reported in October, the Obama administration opted for a kind of political ventriloquist's routine. The Justice Department wrote a series of amendments diluting or stripping away the new protections, then laundered them through Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, who offered them up verbatim.

It's worth taking a closer look at one such reform proposal -- again, predating the latest and most damning OIG report -- to get a sense of the disconnect between the administration's public and private stances. Some legislators had wanted to require the FBI to develop "minimization procedures" for NSLs, as they do when full-blown wiretaps are employed, to ensure that information about innocents is not circulated indiscriminately and that irrelevant records are ultimately discarded. This would only bring NSLs in line with other Patriot provisions compelling production of business records, where minimization is already required, and in principle, the Justice Department is already on board with this plan: As Inspector General Glenn Fine noted in his testimony before the Senate in September, the department's NSL working group was already laboring to develop such procedures in response to the abuses documented in previous OIG reports -- but the working group had been dragging their heels for more than two years.

The task of blocking any legal requirement that the Justice Department pick up the pace fell to Rep. Dan Lungren, a Republican from California. At a House markup session in November, Lungren offered up an amendment that would strip away the minimization mandate and even argued, bizarrely, that the very concept of "minimization" was inapplicable in the NSL context. He was visibly confused when Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers, after making a point of praising Lungren's "scrupulous study" of the issue, pointed out that the Justice Department itself had publicly accepted the need for such procedures.

"This is the first I had heard that the Justice Department was either considering it or had not raised any objections to this," a visibly perplexed Lungren stammered, "because it was my understanding they felt this was an inappropriate transfer of a process that is used in the electronic surveillance arena." The talking points with which Lundgren had been supplied, it seems, had not been checked against the official assurances the department had been providing.

It seems the administration need not have troubled itself with torpedoing civil-liberties reforms one at a time. Despite the publication of the OIG's blistering January report -- which warned that the OLC's new secret opinion "creates a significant gap in FBI accountability and oversight," making it "critical for the Department and Congress to consider appropriate controls" -- even the flaccid reforms approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee appear to have fallen by the wayside for the time being. The only silver lining for civil libertarians is that the expiring Patriot provisions have only been reauthorized for one year, meaning Congress will have to take up these issues again relatively soon.

The question, given the muted public reaction to the abuses that have already been disclosed, is why we should hope legislators will be any more willing to expend political capital resisting the intelligence community's demands a year from now. The "choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide" may be a false one, but in the current political climate, it appears to be an easy one as well.

Jeffrey Sachs: Obama in Chains

As Sachs points out there are many features of the present situation in the US that make it difficult if not impossible for Obama to pass policies that are necessary to help the US recover from its present malaise. Many of these roadblocks are of Obama's own making such as his continued promises not to raise taxes. He may consider this as political necessity but then these promises will be of no avail if the economic situation gets worse and the social safety net and infracture is in tatters.


This is from project-syndicate.

Obama in Chains
Jeffrey D. Sachs



NEW YORK – It is hard for international observers of the United States to grasp the political paralysis that grips the country, and that seriously threatens America’s ability to solve its domestic problems and contribute to international problem solving. America’s governance crisis is the worst in modern history. Moreover, it is likely to worsen in the years ahead.

The difficulties that President Barack Obama is having in passing his basic program, whether in health care, climate change, or financial reform, are hard to understand at first glance. After all, he is personally popular, and his Democratic Party holds commanding majorities in both houses of Congress. Yet his agenda is stalled and the country’s ideological divisions grow deeper.

Among Democrats, Obama’s approval rating in early November was 84%, compared with just 18% among Republicans. Fifty-eight percent of Democrats thought the country was headed in the right direction, compared with 9% of Republicans. Only 18 % of Democrats supported sending 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, while 57% of Republicans supported a troop buildup. In fact, a significant majority of Democrats, 60%, favored a reduction of troops in Afghanistan, compared with just 26% of Republicans. On all of these questions, a middle ground of independents (neither Democrats nor Republicans) was more evenly divided.

Part of the cause for these huge divergences in views is that America is an increasingly polarized society. Political divisions have widened between the rich and poor, among ethnic groups (non-Hispanic whites versus African Americans and Hispanics), across religious affiliations, between native-born and immigrants, and along other social fault lines. American politics has become venomous as the belief has grown, especially on the vocal far right, that government policy is a “zero-sum” struggle between different social groups and politics.

Moreover, the political process itself is broken. The Senate now operates on an informal rule that opponents will try to kill a legislative proposal through a “filibuster” – a procedural attempt to prevent the proposal from coming to a vote. To overcome a filibuster, the proposal’s supporters must muster 60 of 100 votes, rather than a simple majority. This has proven impossible on controversial policies – such as binding reductions on carbon emissions – even when a simple majority supports the legislation.

An equally deep crisis stems from the role of big money in politics. Backroom lobbying by powerful corporations now dominates policymaking negotiations, from which the public is excluded. The biggest players, including Wall Street, the automobile companies, the health-care industry, the armaments industry, and the real-estate sector, have done great damage to the US and world economy over the past decade. Many observers regard the lobbying process as a kind of legalized corruption, in which huge amounts of money change hands, often in the form of campaign financing, in return for specific policies and votes.

Finally, policy paralysis around the US federal budget may be playing the biggest role of all in America’s incipient governance crisis. The US public is rabidly opposed to paying higher taxes, yet the trend level of taxation (at around 18% of national income) is not sufficient to pay for the core functions of government. As a result, the US government now fails to provide adequately for basic public services such as modern infrastructure (fast rail, improved waste treatment, broadband), renewable energy to fight climate change, decent schools, and health-care financing for those who cannot afford it.

Powerful resistance to higher taxes, coupled with a growing list of urgent unmet needs, has led to chronic under-performance by the US government and an increasingly dangerous level of budget deficits and government debt. This year, the budget deficit stands at a peacetime record of around 10% of GNP, much higher than in other high-income countries.

Obama so far seems unable to break this fiscal logjam. To win the 2008 election, he promised that he would not raise taxes on any household with income of less than $250,000 per year. That no-tax pledge, and the public attitudes that led Obama to make it, block reasonable policies.

There is little “waste” to cut from domestic spending, and many areas where increases in public spending are needed. Higher taxes on the rich, while justified, don’t come close to solving the deficit crisis. America, in fact, needs a value-added tax, which is widely used in Europe, but Obama himself staunchly ruled out that kind of tax increase during his election campaign.

These paralyzing factors could intensify in the years ahead. The budget deficits could continue to prevent any meaningful action in areas of critical need. The divisions over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could continue to block a decisive change in policy, such as a withdrawal of forces. The desire of Republicans to defeat the Democrats could lead them to use every maneuver to block votes and slow legislative reforms.

A breakthrough will require a major change in direction. The US must leave Iraq and Afghanistan, thereby saving $150 billion per year for other purposes and reducing the tensions caused by military occupation. The US will have to raise taxes in order to pay for new spending initiatives, especially in the areas of sustainable energy, climate change, education, and relief for the poor.

To avoid further polarization and paralysis of American politics, Obama must do more to ensure that Americans understand better the urgency of the changes that he promised. Only such changes – including lobbying reforms – can restore effective governance.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
www.project-syndicate.org

The Honduran Farce courtesy Obama.

This is truly farcical. All along the precondition of any deal was that Zelaya return as president albeit with reduced powers to serve out his term. Now the Honduran congress has not even voted on the agreement while going ahead and forming a new government all on its own. A total insult to Zelaya, the OAS, and the US. The US response is to recognise the coming elections and claim that Zelaya re-instatement was not part of the agreement. In other words according to the US interpretation it was OK for Micheletti not to put the agreement to the Honduran congress and to go ahead without Zelaya. There is not a word in this article about what those who were to verify the carrying out of the accord had to say. What could they say when the accord has not even been ratified! How on earth can Micheletti carry out the terms when the Honduran congress has yet to ratify the agreement and Zelaya has refused to be involved because indeed it is a farce.

Power-sharing deal in Honduras collapses as Zelaya demands to lead• De facto regime sought to form 'unity' government
• Ousted president refuses to continue 'charade'

Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent guardian.co.uk


A power-sharing deal between the de facto government of Honduras and the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, has collapsed, reigniting the country's political crisis. Zelaya refused to join a new "unity" government on Friday after it became clear he would not be heading it. "The accord is dead," he told Radio Globo. "There is no sense in deceiving Hondurans."

The leftist leader, toppled and exiled in a coup four months ago, signed up to a US-brokered pact last week thinking it would be his ticket back to power. But opponents in the Honduran congress delayed a decision on Zelaya's reinstatement and the de facto president, Roberto Micheletti, went ahead with forming a new administration without his rival.

The accord had set a Thursday midnight deadline for the new government and left the decision over Zelaya's return to power in the hands of congress. "It's absurd what they are doing, trying to mock all of us, the people who elected me and the international community that supports me. We've decided not to continue this theatre with Mr Micheletti," Zelaya said.

He urged Hondurans to boycott a presidential election slated for 29 November in which neither he nor Micheletti are candidates – raising the spectre of a discredited poll and continued crisis.

The de facto regime appeared to be bracing for fresh street demonstrations in the capital, Tegucigalpa. Local television showed soldiers, tanks and military vehicles reinforcing positions around the Brazilian embassy where Zelaya has holed up since slipping back into the country last month.

In a televised speech Micheletti said the new caretaker administration would rule until the January swearing-in of the election winner. "We've completed the process of forming a unity government. It represents a wide spectrum despite the fact that Mr Zelaya did not send a list of representatives."

The de facto authorities have the support of many middle class and conservative Hondurans as well as the supreme court, congress and military. They mistrusted Zelaya's leftward tilt and alliance with Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez. Curfews, media curbs, teargas and mass arrests have been used to suppress protests by Zelaya's mostly poor supporters. Several have died. Foreign condemnation of the coup has been near universal, leaving the impoverished coffee exporter isolated but defiant.

European and Latin American governments said they would not recognise the looming election unless Zelaya was first reinstated. US negotiators clinched last week's agreement by apparently reinforcing that message. The Obama administration appeared to have scored a significant diplomatic victory. But since congress stymied Zelaya's reinstatement the US has said it will recognise the election regardless, which could deepen Latin American frustration that Washington has not done more to pressure the Honduran regime.

A state department spokesman said the pact did not demand Zelaya's return. "The only deadline was to form a government of national unity, which was done."

Washington's decision to recognise the new government gave the Honduran congress little incentive to bring back the ousted leader, said Michael Shifter, an analyst with the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank. He suggested there was still hope for a negotiated settlement.

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