December 23, 2010

Homeland Security Video Messages Debut at Wal-Mart

Reposted from Tiresias Speaks:

 

In the airport, Americans are now faced with the choice of allowing the Transportation Security Administration to molest them and their families or view their naked bodies if they want to travel. On the internet, the private sector is happily carrying out state censorship with PayPal, Mastercard, Amazon, and other companies doing everything in their power to shut down the whistle blowers’ website Wikileaks. Now, in the latest of a string of policies purportedly helping to keep the American people safe, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced a new partnership with the retail giant Wal-Mart as part of its “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign.


Over 230 Wal-Mart stores across the nation began airing DHS video messages at select checkout stations on Monday, with a total of 588 Wal-Mart stores in 27 states planning to roll out the program in the coming weeks. The message thanks Wal-Mart for its participation in the program and implores shoppers to report any suspicious activity to a Wal-Mart manager or the proper authorities immediately.

“Homeland security starts with hometown security, and each of us plays a critical role in keeping our country and communities safe,” said Secretary Napolitano, “I applaud Wal-Mart for joining the ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ campaign. This partnership will help millions of shoppers across the nation identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to law enforcement authorities.”

Wal-Mart is not the only company the DHS is partnering with. The DHS’ partners already include the Mall of America, the American Hotel and Lodging Association, Amtrak, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, sports and general aviation industries, and this could only be the beginning.

According to the DHS website, “the Department will continue to expand the “‘If You See Something, Say Something” campaign nationally with public education materials and outreach tools designed to help America’s businesses, communities and citizens remain vigilant and play an active role in keeping the country safe.”

Some applaud the new program as an easy and relatively unobtrusive way for the government to encourage Americans to stay alert while others find that it sends a cold chill running down their spine. In fact, it is difficult for some to think about these sort of ambiguous “security” messages being broadcast so widely without being reminded of George Orwell’s 1984. To them, the irrational culture of fear and submission these sorts of messages perpetuate is more dangerous than terrorism itself.

After all, the TSA has never stopped a single attempted terrorist attack, but it has greatly infringed on the liberties of regular Americans. The information leaked by Wikileaks has never resulted in the known death of even a single person, but it has prompted a governmental backlash and sent senators scrambling to draft new legislation to restrict freedom of information on the web. So, what are the DHS’ video messages actually going to accomplish? Are they really going to save any American lives?

Or, are they simply going to further inundate the American public with the irrational fear behind the idea that safety must come at the price of freedom?

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December 11, 2010

The Tea Party

The Tea Party – how the Republicans are using them, and what the Left can learn from the experience.

Tea Party supporters pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag

The American conservative movement known as the Tea Party has caused quite a stir since its first protests against government bailouts in 2009.

They have held hundreds of rallies across the country, attracting massive attendances while garnering the scorn and admiration of all the major news networks. While some have labelled them as dangerous extremists, others have celebrated their populism.

Undoubtedly, the Tea Party has elements of a true grassroots movement. However, there have been many legitimate accusations that the movement is astro-turf – meaning that their events have been covertly organized and funded by wealthy special interests.

Who are the Tea Partiers?

As of April, 18% of the American public said they identified with the Tea Party.

Of those who did, most were wealthier individuals: over 30% made a family income of over $75,000 a year, while a whopping 12% of Tea Partiers’ families made over $250,000 (in contrast, only 1% of the wider American public share that privilege according to the U.S. census bureau).

Additionally, supporters of the Tea Party are predominantly older, white, and male. (75% are 45 years of age or older, 89% are white, and 59% were male).

According to an April CBS poll of Tea Party supporters, proponents primarily wanted to reduce the scope and size of the federal government. Largely, this is because of an opposition to the economic legislation the Obama administration has enacted, as well as a host of misconceptions and prejudices (the belief, for example, that Obama has raised taxes for most Americans, or that “too big a deal” has been made of the plight of blacks in the U.S.).

This anger towards the Obama administration, stoked by right-wing media, has been mobilized by organizers from FreedomWorks – a right-wing community organizing campaign used to get out the vote for Republican Politicians.

How the Republicans are using them:

80% of the Tea Party movement believe that there is at least “some,” or “a lot” of difference between their movement and the Republican Party – and yet the Republican Party (with significant aid from FreedomWorks, who spent more than $10 million on mobilizing Tea Partiers to support Republican candidates) has managed to harness their vote, and ride it on a wave of victory to Washington.

For the most part, in fact, Tea Party politicians are Republicans – only in a few states (Nevada and Florida) are there registered Tea Parties running candidates. Where there were registered Tea Party candidates running, moreover, they were largely doing so as spoilers, and not because they believed they could win.

Out of 10 Senate Candidates backed by the Tea Party this mid-term election, for example, the five who were elected to office are members of the Republican Party.

Of the 130 politicians backed by the Tea Party for seats in the U.S. House,  again, all 40 of the winning candidates were Republicans.

It is not so much an upset, then, that so many Tea Party backed candidates won seats in the last midterm election. The vast majority of the politicians who have been elected are, for all intents and purposes, fairly typical Republicans.

It was really more a case of the Republicans taking advantage of the Tea Party than it was of the Tea Party taking advantage of the Republicans. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contrast between anti-elitist rhetoric in the Tea Party and the reality of a wealthy minority bankrolling the electoral operations of the movement.

Author Zach Carter of The Media Consortium notes,

“The Tea Party likes to wrap itself in ‘grassroots’ contempt for wealthy elites, but the 12 leading Tea Party Senate candidates have accepted over $4.6 million in campaign contributions from Wall Street for the upcoming election.”

Of the Tea Party politicians poised to take their seats in the nation’s capitol, perhaps the most blatantly opportunistic is Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey.

Hardly the rebel upstart media pundits would like to paint him as, Toomey is as Wall Street as they come.

Formerly a derivatives trader at Morgan Grenfell, a British financial firm, Toomey helped pioneer some of the riskiest new financial instruments that contributed to the 2008 economic catastrophe.

Robert Hunter of DerivativesStrategy.com celebrated Toomey’s first election, in fact, remarking: “now the derivatives industry can claim representation by one of its own.”

The financial industry, for their part, has been more than willing to support “one of their own,” donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaign.

Top amongst them has been the Elliot Management Corporation, a major Wall Street hedge fund and derivatives trader owned by conservative capitalist Paul Singer.

What the left can learn:

For all the heated campaign rhetoric amongst politicians on the left and right, there are striking similarities between the tactics of the Tea Party movement and more established progressive organizations (such as the AFL-CIO). Both are essentially trying to change the direction of one of the nation’s two political parties – one trying to push the Democrats, the other trying to push the Republicans – and both rely heavily on streamlining a sort of “professional activism,” where volunteers are quickly plugged into massive, coordinated canvassing and phone banking projects to get out the vote.

The Tea Party’s co-optation by the Republican Party is useful to us on the left because it demonstrates that for people who have fundamental disagreements with the established order – whether they be right-wing libertarians or anarchists – there are certain political strategies conducive to changing the system, and certain strategies which will never work (namely, direct action or electoralism).

Herein lies the good news: although the media has hyped up the “Tea Party upsets” in the last midterm election, we can proceed with great confidence that it will meet with the same failures which have plagued progressive organizations such as the AFL-CIO – namely, that candidates who are elected to public office will cave to the pressures of well monied interests and uphold the status quo.

Far from being the beginning of a serious right-wing movement capable of reforming the U.S. Government in its own image, the Tea Party could more aptly be described simply as a failed libertarian electoral campaign, who influenced the policy of the federal government in 2010 only insofar as their participation in the elections could be used by the Republicans.

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November 16, 2010

Wall Street Already Finding Loopholes in Financial Reform Legislation

Continuing in the tradition of watered down, pro-corporate legislation that the Obama administration is becoming infamous for, new reports are surfacing that banks and financial institutions may continue to get away with the same risky trading and investment practices that landed us in a recession.

Like the watered down health care reforms,  or the pathetic Credit Card Act, the recent Dodd-Frank financial regulations signed into law by Obama are quickly showing themselves to be more or less useless for American workers.

The Volcker Rules:

The Volcker Rules, intended to accompany the 2010 Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, comprise a list of restrictions on large financial institutions intended to help prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial collapse.

Only a handful of Paul Volker’s recommendations, however, were incorporated into the final legislation.

Of the rules that were finally adopted, one in particular prohibits banks from making proprietary trades – meaning  using the bank’s own assets for speculative investments. This would stop banks from taking customer deposits, turning around, and using them to invest in risky financial instruments, such as the short-term trading of asset backed securities.

Proprietary trading was singled out as a major policy concern following the financial crisis because it is considered by many economists, including five former Secretaries of the Treasury, to have been one of the leading contributors to the 2008 economic crash. Proponents of the ban argue that by allowing banks and financial institutions to engage in proprietary trading, we were providing bankers with the means to continue funding absurd loans and risky investments.

Mortgage backed securities (MBS), in particular, are considered to have financed much of the risky lending which led to the collapse.

Creating a bubble:

The concept behind MBS’s was straightforward: instead of selling single mortgages on their own, which isn’t very attractive to large financial institutions, banks would stick hundreds and thousands of mortgages together into a single package. These large securities would offer investors much higher profits, and also make mortgages easier to finance.

By combining so many mortgages, the risk normally associated with a home loan became greatly reduced – with a mortgage backed security, even if one of the mortgages failed, there were still five hundred others producing a return.

This, in turn, encouraged the sale of many more mortgages, which drove the value of homes absurdly high. Consequently, the financial windfall created by the surge in home sails was used by banks to go out and finance more sales of homes. Of course, as with all boom periods in a capitalist economy, there has to be a limit – a roof that the prices of commodities must eventually hit.

And hit it we did. When the housing bubble finally burst, the value of millions of homes across the country plummeted. Banks and financial institutions lost billions. Lending ceased, and millions of people lost their homes and jobs.

The reforms failure:

Banks such as Goldman Sachs, JP organ Chase, and Morgan Stanley are poised to take advantage of the new regulations by using gaping loopholes left in the legislation.

Although the language of the new rules stipulate that these banks can no longer make short-term trades of securities for their own account, it turns out there is nothing in the legislation which prohibits them from trading the same securities (what they call ”principal investments”) on a longer term basis.

Whats more, even the prohibition of trading short-term securities may be avoidable.

Author Michael Lewis notes,

The Dodd-Frank bill bans proprietary trading… and then appears to make it clear what that means (Page 565: “The term ‘proprietary trading’ means the act of a [big Wall Street bank] investing as a principal in securities, commodities, derivatives, hedge funds, private equity firms, or such other financial products or entities as the comptroller general may determine”).

“The big invitation for abuse,” Lewis continues, “lies in the phrase ‘as a principal.’”

It is likely, in fact, that many firms will simply skirt the issue of being a principal investor or not by always claiming that their proprietary investments were done at the request of a client.

Former Lehman Brothers corporate bond salesman Robert Wosnitzer notes that during the process of researching the history of proprietary trading, “[One] trader I interviewed said that from here on out, if he wants to take a proprietary position in a credit, he will argue that he bought the position because a customer wanted to sell the position, and he was providing liquidity…”

“There are a hundred different ways to claim to be acting as an agent for a customer,” says Bloomberg’s Micheal Lewis. “This ambiguity is no doubt one reason the financial reform bill passed in the first place. Even its clearest prohibitions are couched in language inviting Wall Street to evade them.”

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November 8, 2010

Private Prison Industry Behind Arizona’s New Immigration Law

Reposted from Tiresias Speaks.

Arizona seized the international spotlight last April when Governor Jan Brewer signed immigration Bill 1070 into law. The new law requires police officers to arrest any person they stop who cannot immediately prove that they entered the country legally.

Immigrant communities, their sympathizers, and civil liberties advocates have violently condemned the bill as a blatant endorsement of racial profiling that does nothing to address the root causes of illegal immigration.

Anti-immigration advocates, meanwhile, have lauded the bill as being a positive step towards halting the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States and securing the nation’s border.

The full implementation of the law has been temporarily halted by court order as U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton waits to hear further arguments regarding the bill. In all of the considerable controversy surrounding this bill, however, one question seems to have fallen by the wayside: just whose idea was this bill anyways?

Like anything else in politics, all you have to do is follow the money. Ever since Governor Brewer signed the bill into law much of the country has been left holding their breath as they wait to see what will come of it- but perhaps no one is more blue in the face than those who stand to make additional millions from the law.

As it turns out, the bill was written in December of 2010 by representatives of the private prison industry at a meeting of a secretive group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in Washington, DC.

ALEC is composed of several representatives of powerful business interests including ExxonMobil, tobacco company Reynolds American Inc., the NRA, and most importantly in this case, the Corrections Corporation of America — the largest private prison company in the United States.

The private prison industry has been successfully trying to keep people locked up for profit for years. The industry has done everything from lobbying for stricter drug laws too arguing for the expanded privatization of state and federal penitentiaries. In fact, thanks in large part to their success, the United States now boasts the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

The Corrections Corporation of America and other private prison companies have long known that locking up illegal immigrants is one of the most promising sectors for continued growth in the private prison industry. The implementation of the new Arizona law will likely send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison- generating hundred of millions of dollars worth of additional profits for the private prison industry- and possibly pave the way for other states to pass similar measures.

Arizona State Senator and ALEC member Russell Pearce maintains that the bill was his own idea, but we now know that the bill was written almost word for word with the help of the Corrections Corporation of America in Washington, DC’s Grand Hyatt Hotel. In the privacy of a hotel conference room, members of ALEC designed the bill, debated the language, and finally voted unanimously to approve the model piece of legislation.

Of the unusual 36 State senators who rushed to co-sponsor the bill back in Arizona, at least 2/3 of them are reported to have attended the ALEC meeting in December, and thirty of them received donations over the following six months from prison lobbyists or prison companies.

Once the bill got onto governor Jan Brewer’s desk it was a sure thing- she is a strong supporter of private prisons and both her spokesman Paul Senseman and her campaign manager Chuck Coughlin are former lobbyists for private prison companies.

It is important to realize that none of this is illegal or even especially unusual. Legislation is regularly drafted with the help of organizations like ALEC and then passed into law by representatives who are receiving money from the same business interests who wrote the bill.

It is well-known that keeping black and brown people in chains has been big business in the United States for hundreds of years. It appears that Arizona’s new immigration law is simply the latest niche for the exorbitantly wealthy few who benefit the most from keeping minorities in cages.

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November 1, 2010

The Fog of Election Day

We can all recall the hysteria surrounding the election of our nation’s first black president, and the optimism that abounded amongst American workers at seeing him win the election.

Barack Obama had made some of the most remarkable promises on the campaign trail that anyone in our generation had ever seen. He was going to end the Iraq war, close Guantanamo Bay prison, and go to bat for the workers by standing up for gay and immigrant rights, reforming NAFTA, and urging the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

For the past two years, American progressives have watched as their hope for a brighter future has been thrashed against the sharp rocks of our political reality.

This midterm election, Obama and the Democratic Party’s base are falling apart at the seams, because they simply can’t live up to their own rhetoric.

It’s plain as day. Even so, election day has a way of blinding some of us to the world as it exists outside of campaign advertisements.

It is just remarkable that after 4 years of failure, there are still those on the Left who can, with a straight face, tell us that there is “still hope;” that if we just give the Democrats another chance, they’ll live up to their commitments.

What, we might ask, could they possibly do in the next two years that they could not have done during the last two? They had complete control of congress (a “supermajority,” in fact) four years ago, and since 2008 they have arguably had the most liberal president since Carter. What they couldn’t accomplish then, they certainly will not be able to accomplish now.

In light of the desperate drive to get out the votes for the Democrats this year, I thought it would be appropriate to post the introduction to my book, which deals in length with the Democratic Party, and the problems we have had with it.

Bellow is a sample of that text, edited and formatted as a short political pamphlet, which this author hopes will get you to seriously think, not about our politics, so much as about  our tactics. Is the strategy of voting for the Democrats delivering satisfactory change? If it isn’t, than it may be time to consider other ways to assert our power over our lives and communities.

Meaningful Alternatives, the Democrats and Republicans:

“From compromise and things half done,
Keep me with stern and stubborn pride;
And when at last the fight is won,
God, keep me still unsatisfied.”
-  Louis Untermeyer

The great political crisis of our generation – perhaps our great spiritual crisis as well – is a crisis of futility. No matter what we do, it seems, the same problems just keep reappearing.

We serve ladle after ladle of soup to lines of hungry families. We hand out blanket after blanket to a never ending population of destitute, wretched faces. We sign petition after petition. We put up poster after poster. We go to rally after rally. We bang our heads against the wall.

Our great political crisis - the one that will be ascribed to us in any honest history book - is a crisis of meaningful alternatives. The Established Left, the wide array of NGO’s, non-profits and civil societies in the United States, united by their support for the Democratic Party, dominates half of the political landscape of the U.S., with only the Republicans and their backers seriously competing for the other half.

Roughly 65% of Americans today say they would vote with either the Democratic or Republican Parties (35% and 33.8%, respectively). (Rasmussen Reports, LLC, 2010) The rest of the country – roughly the other 35% – may identify mostly as “independent,” but are still stuck voting along partisan lines when Election Day rolls around. Those Americans voting either Republican or Democrat, moreover, do so more out of force of habit than anything else. In fact, when asked why they were voting either Republican or Democratic, registered American voters in the 2010 midterm elections overwhelmingly answered by responding simply that they “always vote Democratic,” or that they “always vote Republican.”

This contrasted greatly with the other options poll respondents were given. They could have, for example, responded by choosing “I favor the candidates agenda, policy,” “I support the Democratic/Republican Party platform,” or even “the candidate is more supportive of the lower/middle class.” (Jones, 2010)

The vast majority of Americans vote either Democrat or Republican, then, because they either have nowhere else to go, or because their principles dictate that they stay loyal to whichever party they happened to vote for last election.

The two-party system of our country is, then, truly monolithic. Our lives, like those of our parents and our parents’ parents, are lived under its long shadow. If we want to participate in the political sphere, it has to be on the terms of the party elite. There is simply nowhere else for us to go.

As much as I dislike this picture of life – the one we are given by people who insist we must forever choose between the “lesser of two evils” – I think the argument is fair; that is, if we believe that electoralism is our only option. Objective observation overwhelmingly confirms the idea that there will never be a successful third-party in the United States.

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October 28, 2010

Pot Legalization in California – Why Obama and the Democrats are Losing Their Base

By John Jacobsen

Once again, President Obama’s administration is standing in the way of pro-working class, civil rights legislation. In response, the Democratic Party’s base is dropping out from under them.

In order to offset the lost votes, Obama and the democrats are doing everything they can to get their base motivated – everything except listening to them.

Obama speaking to students at George Washington University in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2010.

President Obama has been racing across the country these past several weeks in a desperate attempt to rally the Democratic base and get out the vote, responding to large Republican gains in key senate and gubernatorial races.

Panicked Democratic Party organizers have hurriedly booked him on several tour stops across the country targeting youth, African-Americans and first time voters in an effort to recreate the wave of enthusiasm that swept Obama into the White House in 2008.

The tour, however, will likely be seen by many Americans as too little, too late.

According to a recent Associated Press-Knowledge Networks poll, Obama’s core base is falling apart at the seams: nearly a fourth of the constituency that voted for him in 2008 will be voting Republican this mid-term election. On top of that, only half of Americans who voted for Obama in 2008 have committed to turn out this November.

“In a reversal from 2008,” observes AP author Liz Sidoti, “[a recent AP poll] found that Obama backers who expected change in Washington – 63 percent – now think nothing ever will happen. Just 36 percent still think Obama can do it…”

The feeling is understandable. Most of Obama’s and the Democratic Party’s most notable achievements have left the American people wanting much more. Americans who believe health care legislation should have gone much further, for example, outnumber Americans who opposed the legislation by a margin of 2-1.

Of course, to recoup much of the lost youth turnout for these mid-term elections, many might wonder why the Obama administration isn’t taking a more lenient stance on the recent attempts to legalize marijuana in California. Turnout for the November elections in California this year are up significantly, largely because of the widespread support marijuana legalization has from young voters (54% of whom support it, against 34% who oppose). Endorsing the proposition could prove beneficial for many Democratic candidates.

“He’s not listening to the majority of the people who elected him,” said SaraSue Crawford of Jacksonville, Fla. in an interview with the Associated Press. “It’s like he’s ignoring his base.”

Most of Obama’s liberal base (well over half of whom support the legalization of marijuana) are probably saying the same thing about his administration’s recent stance on California’s Prop 19 – the ballot initiative which would legalize the growth and sale of weed.

The Obama Administration’s Attorney General Eric Holder, it was revealed last week, is strongly opposed to the proposition. In a letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Holder made it clear that even if California voters pass the measure, the administration’s Department of Justice will continue to aggressively prosecute possession and distribution of marijuana in California. Says Holder,

“We will vigorously enforce the [Controlled Substances Act] against those individuals and organizations that possess, manufacture or distribute marijuana for recreational use, even if such activities are permitted under state law…”

The move has outraged many of prop 19′s supporters, including the ACLU, which responded to the Obama administrations’ hard line on marijuana on Monday, arguing that the continued criminalization of marijuana wastes scarce resources during hard economic times and disproportionately affects communities of color, particularly black and Latino communities.

“The ACLU took heart from Director Kerlikowske’s acknowledgment that the ‘war on drugs’ has failed,” states the ACLU’s letter. “But instead of scaling back the rhetoric associated with that ineffective and out-of-date campaign, it appears the administration would resist California’s modest attempt to begin dismantling one of the defining injustices of our failed drug policies: that the war on drugs has become a war on minorities.”

The assertion has some powerful statistics behind it.

Of all drug users in the United States today, 70% are white, while only 14% are black and 13% Hispanic. However, when we look at incarceration rates, the numbers are nearly turned on their heads. Only 29 percent of inmates in state prisons for drug offenses were white, while a whopping 45 percent were black and 20 percent were Hispanic. Federal prisons were no more representative, with 25%, 31%, and 40% for whites, blacks and Hispanics, respectively.

In 2008 alone, California police made 78,500 arrests related to marijuana.

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October 19, 2010

US Judge Dismisses Hearing into Guantánamo “Suicides”

Reposted from the blog, Tiresias Speaks.

A US federal Judge dismissed a complaint Wednesday (9/29) brought by the families of two Guantanamo prisoners that alleged that the circumstances surrounding the men’s deaths had been covered up when they were declared suicides by the Pentagon in June of 2006.

The families of Saudi prisoner Yasser al-Zahrani and Salah al-Salami of Yemen were asking US District Judge Ellen Huvelle to reexamine the case in light of new testimony from military personnel working at Guantánamo at the time of the “suicides” that directly contradicts official accounts.

A third prisoner, Mani al-Utaybi of Saudi Arabia also died the same night, but his family has not filed a complaint.

At the time of their deaths, Al-Zahrani, 22, and Al-Salami, 33, had been held at Guantánamo without charges for four years at the US naval base. According to the Pentagon, on the night of June 9th, 2006, Al-Zahrani, Al-Salami, and Utaybi were found at approximately the same time hanging from makeshift nooses in their cells. They were then rushed to the camp’s infirmary where they were shortly pronounced dead.

The following day the commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, put the base on lockdown. He ordered almost all reporters on the base to leave and told those already en route to turn back. He officially declared that the deaths were “suicides,” and he went on to say, “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

But new first-hand accounts from soldiers on duty at the base on the night of June 9th suggest that Admiral Harris’ and the Pentagon’s version of events is false and that the men may have actually died as the result of torture at a site off base known as “Camp No.” According to the petition, this site was called Camp No because if soldiers were asked if it existed the were supposed to say no.

Army officer Joe Hickman says that he was supposed to log every vehicle that exited or entered the base. Even when Senator John McCain came to visit the base Hickman ensured that he was properly logged in and out. However, there was one windowless paddy wagon that was sometimes used to transport prisoners that he was not supposed to keep any log of. He and other soldiers say that they saw this van pick up three prisoners and drive them to Camp No on the evening of June 9th.

When the van returned to base later it did not return the prisoners to their cells, instead it backed up to the infirmary. A medical officer told Hickman they had been sent to the infirmary, “because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised,” the petition said.

When Hickman heard the official cause of death was suicide by hanging the next day he talked with the other guards who would have had to of seen if any bodies had been transported from the cells to the infirmary, but no one had seen any bodies being moved.

The families of Al-Zahrani and Al-Salami demanded an independent autopsy, but when the bodies arrived they had already had all of their vital organs surrounding their throats removed making it impossible to 100% verify the cause of death.The medical examiners they had hired made requests for the organs to be sent from Guantánamo, but their requests were ignored.

In her ruling Wednesday, Judge Huvelle did not really address any of these issues raised in the petition. Instead, she cited a decision by a federal appeals court in Washington stating that conditions at Guantánamo should not be investigated by the courts and should remain the purview of Congress alone due to national security concerns.

In light of this ruling, it is unlikely that all of the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Al-Zahrani, Al-Salami, and al-Utaybi will ever be discovered. The Obama Administration has already made it clear that it not interested in looking backwards to investigate potential war crimes and there is no reason to think that Congress would investigate the Pentagon’s official account.

The whole incident and yesterday’s ruling in particular serve as a stark reminder of Obama’s broken promise to close Guantánamo within one year of taking office. Even if Obama does end up closing Guantánamo down, it is difficult not to wonder how much of its true history will remain forever unknown?

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October 9, 2010

2010 US Election Spending Sets New Record

Reposted from Tiresias Speaks.

There are expected to be as many as 100 competitive races for House seats as well as 37 races for governor this year and according to the Associated Press, the latest financial reports show that House and Senate candidates have already raised 1.2 billion dollars in order to win those races. This is far ahead of the pace of the past several record-setting elections and the money is pouring into the coffers of both Democratic and Republican candidates alike. Despite the rhetoric from both sides of the aisle surrounding the ailing US economy and the need for fiscal responsibility, both parties seem unwilling to spare any expense when it comes to investing in their own self-preservation. So, why even as the US economy continues to shrink is 2010 on pace to be such a record-setting year?

Of course there is the fact that there is currently an especially bitter and divisive political climate within the United States, but that is hardly so different from any other election in at least the past decade. The more likely culprit is the Supreme Court’s ruling on January 21st of this year. The court ruled 5-4 that it was unconstitutional for the government to restrict corporate campaign contributions because they qualify as protected political speech under the first amendment. That historic ruling means that it is now open season for corporations and any other special interest group to give as much money as they see fit to any political cause. This does not mean we are going to see overt massive corporate donations and open corporate endorsements of political candidates. On the contrary, we haven’t seen this because most corporations are to afraid of the backlash that this might cause. To borrow from the Associated Press’ article:

“What we will see is corporations not wanting to anger their shareholders, not wanting to anger their retail customer by getting involved in partisan elections,” said Paul Ryan, a senior lawyer at the Campaign Legal Center. “Instead they will employ strategies to obscure the fact, or hide completely the fact that they are dumping money into politics by routing their money through groups like the Chamber of Commerce.”

The best part of this arrangement for corporations is that many of these “independent” organizations like the Chamber of Commerce are not required to make their donors public. In this way corporations can keep money flowing into Democratic and Republican candidates in order to influence policy without fear of repercussion. The Federal Election Commission has not yet written any rules regarding how to apply the court’s decision, so for the time being there are none. Corporations and anyone else can effectively contribute to campaigns in secret and the sky is the limit.

It is worth making it clear that the court’s ruling does not just apply strictly to corporations. In fact, any individual or group can now give as much money as they like to political candidates, but the reality is who has enough money to give to really make a difference? The answer is millionaires, billionaires, and the corporations they own. It is impossible to trumpet the Supreme Court’s ruling as an expansion of human freedom when it is so obvious that the vast majority of Americans can hardly spare a dime. While companies continue to downsize, say they can’t afford to hire new employees, and balk about having to help pay for employee’s health care it seems that they still somehow have enough money to make 2010 a record year for campaign contributions.

Meanwhile the rest of us would only be able to scrape together the occasional twenty, fifty, or maybe even a hundred dollars to contribute to a political campaign if we wanted to – but how far would that get us compared to the millions corporations can afford to spend? Who’s going to continue to have even more pull in Washington than they have already?

The answer is as obvious as it is disheartening: electoral politics in the US are typically just going to keep benefiting the rich.

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October 6, 2010

Organizing for America and the “Enthusiasm Gap”

The 2010 election 

WASHINGTON — Democrats desperately need other Democrats – to vote. – Liz Sidoti, of the Huffington Post 

The 2010 Senate elections are barely a month away, and Democrats across the country are getting worried. 

In a new poll released last month by Public Policy Polling, Quantifying the Enthusiasm Gap, pollsters have found that in 10 key Senate and gubernatorial races across the country, Republicans are leading by wider margins. 

Although the country is more or less split in half between Republican and Democratic party supporters when all eligible voters are asked (about 43% for both, according to the latest NBC/WSJ poll), when likely voters are polled, the Republicans take a substantial lead by roughly 9 points. 

“We have two ways of looking at the enthusiasm gap,” Public Policy Polling’s Tom Jensen said in an interview with Evan McMorris-Santoro. “Measuring whether voters are very, somewhat, or not at all excited about voting this fall, and then a step beyond that looking at how they voted for President in 2008. 

“”We’re consistently finding that very excited voters are going strongly toward the GOP while somewhat and not at all excited voters are supporting Democrats.” To readers of the Trial by Fire, this should be no surprise. Obama’s administration and the Democratic Party have made good on very little of what they promised during their campaigns, and formerly hysteric supporters of these campaigns are beginning to realize that the rhetoric of change the Democrats harp on is just that – rhetoric. 

After four years of Democratic Party control of the Congress, and nearly two years into Obama’s Presidency, the Democrats are beginning to lose their base’s support.Deputy National Director of Organizing for America, Obama’s re-mobolized campaign organization, Jeremy Bird, remains hopeful, however: 

“The past week alone has shown clear signs the enthusiasm-gap theory made popular by the chattering class is overblown. On Tuesday, President Obama kicked off the first of five “Moving America Forward” events with a rally at the University of Wisconsin in Madison ”Dwarfing a February 2008 rally on the same campus that drew a crowd of 17,000, last week’s Madison rally brought together 26,500 people…”   

He went on, 

“[The crowd] cheered as the president ticked off the progress made on behalf of young voters in the past two years… And they cheered wildly as the president asked them to canvass, to phone bank, and most importantly, to vote on Nov. 2.”Geared toward young voters, the president’s speech was part of a larger organizing effort across the country, with students at more than 200 colleges hosting “watch parties” to see a live webcast of the Madison event… [college activists also] committed to vote and planned campus organizing drives for the last few days of voter registration.”  

Despite this last-minute surge in support by university students, however, (and Obama’s repeated embarrassing reminders to the young crowd of just what elected officials were “in the house”), the polls are fairly clear: Democrats are not likely to convince enough of their base that this next round of voting will usher in anything better than the past four years. A recent GALLUP Poll confirms, where 47 percent of Republicans say they were very enthusiastic about voting, only 28 percent of Democrats said the same. Indeed, of the Democrats who are expected to turn out to vote, the prime motivation was simply out of “party loyalty,” according to GALLUP, and not to any particularly strong faith in candidates. 

It only makes sense. The Democrats have failed time and time again to put through needed reforms for American workers. 

The Dem’s have had an incredible amount of power over the past four years – a supermajority in Congress, an extremely enthusiastic base, as well as one of the most liberal Democratic presidents in memory. But for all of those electoral victories – and voters are noticing – there has been little substantial change in the quality of life for American’s; the recession just keeps rolling on. 

Regardless of whether or not it was Bush’s fault to begin with, people are looking for hope. 

Nearly 19% of American workers are underemployed this month, meaning they only work part-time but want to work full-time or are simply unemployed, according to the most recent study done by GALLUP. Meanwhile, consumer spending remains the lowest its been since the beginning of the economic meltdown, 30 million people remain uninsured and incapable of receiving quality healthcare, and nearly 43% of American workers complain that they are underpaid for what little work they can find.

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August 16, 2010

Been There, Done That

There’s a reason American workers aren’t paying much attention to the new financial regulations.

And no, it isn’t out of “apathy.”

Despite making a combined $18 billion in profits last quarter alone, major banks are still doing all that they can avoid new consumer protection legislation – and, we might add, new legislation hasn’t made it too difficult for them.

Much like the recent CARD Act, banks are quickly finding loopholes in the new legislation to recoup any of their potential losses. A new Bank of America program in Georgia, for example, is now charging customers to simply receive bank statements in the mail.

Amongst other plans in the works, banks may begin raising arbitrary “minimum balance requirements” for consumers, charging people for simply not having enough money in their accounts.

New Oversight:

Amongst the bills more popular attributes is its creation of a new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. And here is where the liberal rallying cry “more regulation!” falls apart.

The idea that government regulators are any better suited to watch out for our best interests than corporations are is baseless.

It is, in fact, not an issue of good or bad regulation, but the philosophy of government regulation itself which is absurd.

These days, we are extremely hard pressed to find where the line between politician and CEO lies; the place where being a regulator ends, and being a lobbyist starts. The fact of the matter is, no government agency in the United States today is immune from the insidious influences of the wealthy.

The newly created Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (BCFP), for example, is already set to change from a regulatory agency to yet another revolving door for wall street insiders - and, I might add, it hasn’t even officially been established yet!

Just a casual glance at the news reveals what a heated political battle is already being waged over the appointment of a new director.

But of the dozens of people recommended to take up the new position, one in particular stands out to Democratic party leaders: the current chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP, Elizabeth Warren.

But Democrats, looking to appoint Warren, are stuck between a rock and a hard place. As political analyst Ezra Klein correctly points out, Obama’s administration needs to demonstrate to his disillusioned base that he and his party can deliver on promises like more consumer protection. But doing so will anger our Wall Street masters of the universe, who may react to the appointment of Warren by slowing our already stagnate credit supply.

Republicans, with a different strategy but for similar reasons, are gearing up to possibly filibuster the nomination of Warren, a woman too whole-heartedly skeptical of the financial sector for their liking.

Both parties, you’ll note, are still fundamentally trying to please Wall Street, who after all does pay their bills – and even regularly writes their legislation.

“…the special interests opposing us contributed to the failure of the financial system. They’re trying to preserve the system that failed, and Congress is listening to them in some respects,” observed Ed Mierzwinski, consumer advocate for US PIRG.

It only makes sense that politicians listen to their Wall Street backers – they are not only their financial benefactors, but often their close colleagues and business partners.

Take for example the case of Micheal Paese, Goldman Sach’s top lobbyist in Washington D.C. who managed to become head staff member to House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank – the man who Time magazine pointed out “presided over the negotiations on financial reform.”

Similarly, former Goldman lobbyist Mark Patterson has weaseled his way into the Treasury Department, and is now currently serving as its chief of staff.

The revolving door, of course, goes both ways: a former adviser to Senator Chris Dodd (both the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and author of many financial regulatory reforms), Janice O’Connell, has recently been hired onto Goldman’s lobbying firm.

These close relationships prompt the Christian Science Monitor to recall that “[In] all, the finance, insurance, and real estate industries spent a record $475 million on campaign contributions to congressional candidates in the 2008 cycle and are ramping up for 2010 midterm elections.”

What, given the recent history of our country’s government, could possibly make anyone believe the BCFP will be any less subject to the pressures of Wall Street than any other office in government? Wasn’t also Wall Street able to tear down the post-depression era Glass-Steagel Act, and if so, what in these reforms will stop them from doing the same to the Dodd-Frank Bill?

New derivatives and mortgage regulations:

Perhaps just as important as, although less popular than, the creation of a new consumer protection bureau, are the new regulations governing derivatives and mortgages.

Both new sets of regulation offer positive steps forward. Derivatives, for example, will now be traded publicly, in much the same way stocks are, and new mortgage regulation prohibiting NINA sales (selling mortgages without proof of income) will offset the likelihood of another massive housing bubble.

But in regard to these regulations’ original purpose – to fix the underlying problems that led to our current economic crisis – at most we can only call these reforms band-aids.

To begin with, the housing bubble and the derivatives which helped create it were only the trigger for a much larger underlying problem.

As we discussed in a previous article, the real problem with the American economy, the real reason we were hit so hard by the recession, is that we have had to rely so heavily on consumer credit.

Since the early 1970′s, American workers have been forced to take on more and more debt as their wages have stagnated and declined. Slowly, this debt had been building up into an unwieldy and destabilizing force in our economy.

Banks and employers were willing to ignore the dangerous nature of this increasing debt problem, however, because it meant that 1. employers could continue to lower their workers’ wages and 2. banks could find new ways of making money off of desperate workers – such as making payday or NINA loans.

This arrangement, however, could only last so long.

It was convenient for banks to make more and more ridiculous loans to increasingly poor workers as the years went on, in order to keep up consumer spending in the economy – but eventually, you can guess, those absurd loans are going to catch up with us.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out (or an economist, for that matter) that if you’re loaning more and more money to people whose wages are dropping lower and lower, eventually they won’t be able to pay anything back at all. This is exactly what happened to us when we were hit with a wave of mortgage defaults and bankruptcies.

The massive amount of debt U.S. households had been forced to take on in this country over the past 40 years was a ticking time bomb. A massively overinflated housing bubble, powered by new financial innovations like collateralized debt obligations, wasn’t the problem at all. They were just the straw that broke the camels back.

Nothing, to date, has been done to remedy this issue – certainly nothing in the current financial regulation.

Conclusions:

These supposed “fixes” to the American financial system, of course, are anything but.

It fails to address systemic problems in our economy, fails to address the inevitable Wall Street fight back against the bill itself, and fails to adequately address some of the biggest concerns citizens have about the last bailout.

Many outraged workers are rightly asking whether or not the new legislation will prevent another massive bailout. The answer is a resounding “theoretically!”

As New York Times author Steven Davidoff notes,

“The bill will still allow the government to fashion ad hoc remedies in the case of a failing financial institution. It also erects a financial insolvency regime that will allow the government to punish failing financial institutions and their creditors.

“However, it appears there is enough wiggle room in the bill and elsewhere in the laws that the government will still be able to structure unique one-off solutions in any financial crisis. We just won’t know until the law is tested.”

I’m not holding my breath.

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