President Obama’s speech yesterday, presenting his vision of a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy, included welcome rhetoric about the importance of constitutional principles, including Due Process and rights to dissent. It may represent the high watermark for civil liberties since his inauguration five years ago.

It is disappointing, given his thoughtful words, that he ignored so many inconvenient truths. From extrajudicial assassination to free speech and freedom of the press, from the need to address root causes of terrorism to partnership with American Muslims, the president promoted important principles but papered over reality.

The reaction by Republican senators was even worse. Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) foolishly suggested that “The president’s speech today will be viewed by terrorists as a victory,” and suggested doubling down on many of the same failed Bush-era policies from which President Obama finally signaled long overdue independence yesterday.

Due Process: Gitmo

The president forcefully spoke about the need to close Guantánamo Bay, and also lifted his moratorium on releasing Yemeni detainees whom the government has cleared for release, despite the clamor among conservative lawmakers who prefer to indefinitely detain anyone accused of terror without trial.

Yet the president’s words reflected important principles that his own administration has routinely violated. Col. Morris D. Davis, the former chief military prosecutor at Guantánamo who resigned his position to challenge torture (and serves on the BORDC advisory board), agreed that “It’s great rhetoric. But now is the reality going to live up to the rhetoric?”

The president criticized restrictions on resettling detainees cleared for release imposed by Congress early in his administration. But he has the authority to resettle those detainees through a separate process, if he were willing to certify the release of particular individuals—which he has avoided in order to avoid the political risk.

Due Process: Drone strikes

President Obama also pledged more congressional oversight of drone strikes, responding to sustained controversy and reiterating a promise from his State of the Union address in January that he has yet to fill.
Noting the 2014 drawdown of US troops in Afghanistan, he also suggested the diminishing need for force protection. That, in turn, could lead to a reduction in “signature strikes,” untethered attacks in which the CIA essentially kills at random based on nothing more than suspicious activity and inflames anti-US sentiment. If nothing else, the president explained a preference to shift drone strikes from the unaccountable and secret CIA to the (also secret, though at least somewhat accountable) Pentagon.

Most importantly, the president acknowledged for the first time in public that civilian casualties—which he predictably downplayed—run the risk of creating new enemies.

On the one hand, he claimed that drone strikes are less lethal, and less prone to civilian casualties, than conventional warfare.

On the other hand, according to an independent study, only 5% of deaths from drone strikes were actually senior terror leaders, suggesting that what the press conveniently calls “targeted killings” are in fact essentially random. Signature strikes, in particular, reveal the rose tint in the president glasses: these are the antithesis of targeted killings, but rather knee-jerk assassinations based on mere suspicion. The CIA often doesn’t even know who it kills, let alone whether they are actually involved in terrorism.

Perhaps most revealing were the president’s comments about assassinating US citizens without trial. This particular subject sparked widespread controversy earlier this year, when Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) mounted a filibuster specifically to force the administration to resign the authority to kill Americans at home using drones.

Now, as then, the response is rhetorically welcome but substantively empty. Just as Attorney General Eric Holder’s letter to Sen. Paul made promises that ultimately appear implausible in light of the actual facts, President Obama’s assurances that drone strikes are closely targeted belies the competing fact that four US citizens have died in drone strikes, while only one was reportedly targeted. If the CIA has killed four times the number of US citizens than it has intended, how can we maintain the pretense that drone strikes avoid collateral casualties?

At root is a surprising willingness to redefine Due Process to exclude a right to judicial review. A canard—that the executive branch can provide Due Process without judicial review—pervades the drone program. But that view makes a mockery of over 800 years of legal precedent establishing the need for judges to check and balance executive detention orders. For a constitutional law professor to advance so revolutionary claim should disturb any observer, regardless of political perspective.

The First Amendment: freedom of the press

President Obama also reiterated his recent call for a reporter shield law to enable the press to do its job without interference from prosecutors. This suggestion lends itself to criticism on the grounds of both hypocrisy and insufficiency.

A reporter shield law is important, but the president’s speech ignored both his own administration’s attacks on the press (which he needed no legislation to have curtailed), as well as its vindictive, predatory, and authoritarian crackdown on government whistleblowers (like Thomas Drake, or Bradley Manning, or John Kiriakou) who have resigned their careers to inform the public about government abuses.

The First Amendment: rights to dissent, assembly, and speech

President Obama also recognized that the ham-fisted security measures for which he and his predecessor are both known run the risk of “alter[ing] our country in troubling ways,” before pledging a “proud commitment to civil liberties for all who call America home.”

As a seeming illustration, he allowed an extended (and quite thoughtful) interruption from the audience, noting that the opportunity for a citizen to challenge her president reflects the vitality of liberty in America.

But his rhetorical respect for dissent stands in sharp contrast with the actual actions of federal agencies. Recent investigations have documented a vicious crackdown on dissent executed by the FBI, in partnership with police agencies around the country, to violently suppress the Occupy and peace movements.

At the same time, the IRS was discriminatorily auditing conservative groups, as well as transpartisan constitutionalist groups, including the organization I lead, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee.

Letting a heckler interrupt a speech is no substitute for respecting the public’s rights to assembly, speech, and the press. Words are welcome, but they are far from enough.

Praising American Muslims while abusing us

President Obama’s comments regarding American Muslims were also welcome, but again, ignored the harsh reality on the ground.

He reiterated that the US is not at war with Islam, praised the support of American Muslims for US counterterrorism operations, and indeed, play a key role in winning the battle for hearts & minds abroad. He even reminded listeners that terrorism in America has been instigated by anti-government Christians more often than by Muslims.

Yet during the president’s tenure, the FBI has infiltrated mosques around the country, lied to communities—and courts—about it, recorded sexual encounters to enable blackmail, and bribed unsophisticated Muslims of all races into government-initiated plots in order to inflate both its own institutional reputation and the threat of domestic terrorism (while conspicuously ignoring real plots, like the Boston marathon bombings).

Restoring First Amendment rights—for the press, dissidents, and religious minorities—will require wide-ranging changes at the FBI that few in Washington have discussed.

Real counter-terrorism

Perhaps most remarkably, the president explained that “Force alone cannot make us safe,” before noting the overwhelming and untenable costs of war, and the greater opportunity to achieve lasting security by winning not just battlefields, but also hearts & minds.

But the president—like his predecessor—has long ignored many of those opportunities. On the one hand, he explained how building roads, schools, and hospitals can undermine terrorist recruitment, in sharp contrast to the torture and drone strikes that encourage it.

But giving weapons to dictators, protecting American textile manufactures through discriminatory tariffs, enabling terror networks to fund themselves through the black market opportunities created by the failed war on drugs, and destabilizing global food markets by encouraging domestic agricultural overproduction through corporate subsidies, all play an enormous roles in enabling terrorism. Yet none of these subjects are even discussed in these terms in Washington.

If his rhetoric matched reality, the president’s speech would have been world historical, repudiating a decade of lawlessness and restoring the best in America. And it was excellent, even if occasionally duplicitous. The question now is whether it was anything more than words, and whether the Administration will convert the president’s welcome rhetoric into long overdue action.

That, in turn, depends in part on whether Congress grows more assertive in asserting its checks & balances on executive power. Fortunately, we can each encourage that result.

“During Wednesday’s debate on the Farm Bill, the Senate unanimously agreed to ban certain ex-convicts from receiving food assistance for life. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) claimed his amendment would prevent “murderers, rapists, and pedophiles”from ever receiving food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Under this amendment, anyone convicted for a violent crime or sexual assault will be shut out of the program for life, even if they served their time or committed the crime long ago. Their families will also suffer, as their share of SNAP benefits will exclude the convicted family member.

Saturday Morning Market accepts Food Stamps EBT

As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, these sentences have historically been handed down to more minorities than white offenders:

Given incarceration patterns in the United States, the amendment would have a skewed racial impact. Poor elderly African Americans convicted of a single crime decades ago by segregated Southern juries would be among those hit. The amendment essentially says that rehabilitation doesn’t matter and violates basic norms of criminal justice.”

 

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/05/23/2053351/senator-uses-farm-bill-to-ban-some-ex-convicts-from-food-stamps-for-life/

 

Criminalizing poverty. This coming from a patron of D.C. madame. And the amendment passes unanimously. What is wrong with these people?

In America a dollar today is worth much less than a dollar in 1980. Americans marvel at how much cheaper things used to be in the past, when Coca-Cola and movies only cost five cents.

In Japan the story is quite different. For long periods in the past two decades, nominal prices have in fact declined.

These facts reflect a conscious decision made by the authorities of both countries. The United States, like most of the world, has accepted and even encouraged a slight degree of inflation. The belief is that this will encourage spending, providing a continuous boost to the economy.

Japan – for better or worse, probably for worse – has done things differently. It has not encouraged inflation; prices have stayed the same or even decreased in nominal terms. This reflects the strong power of the often elderly Japanese saver, who doesn’t want her savings to lose value. Today Japan’s new government is undertaking a bold course by forcing the Central Bank to print as much money as possible until inflation hits 2%.

These different policies have created different attitudes towards saving in both countries. In the United States saving is often associated with the stock market. Americans ought to invest their money in the stock market for retirement because “the stock market will always go up.” Japan’s stock market has done poorly over the past few decades, however. As of this writing, the Nikkei 225 is at 14,937.56 – far below its high of 38,957.44 in 1989. A Japanese saver who invested all his earnings in stocks during the 1980s would have lost a lot of money. Instead, Japanese households keep their earnings in cash. This graphic, from the Wall Street Journal, shows this:

Cash is a much safer way of saving in Japan than in the United States; it doesn’t lose as much value over time, unlike here.

There is much to be said about the Japanese way of saving. The American method is complicated. Investing in stocks requires lots of tough decisions: how much money to put in, how conservatively to invest it, which mutual fund or plan is best, how to diversify, etc. There are lots of big words which the typical person might not understand. The whole process often takes a considerable amount of time and effort. The poor often lack this.

In a sense, then, the American system of saving exacerbates income inequality. Wealthy Americans save in stocks and bonds and are shielded from inflation. Poor American save in cash and bear the brunt of the blow. Is it a coincidence that Japan is much more equal than America?

For all its disadvantages, however, the American system is probably better than the Japanese system. It is Japan which is trying to create inflation and make itself more like America, not the other way around. What is more, Shinzo Abe’s government is wildly popular for doing so.

Still, few policymakers consider how a system of saving based on the stock market, due to inflationary pressures encouraged by the government, widens income inequality. Perhaps the overall economic advantages still outweigh the disadvantages. But more people ought to pay attention to the disadvantages.

–inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

by Beverly Bell, Alexis Erkert, and Deepa Panchang

May 23, 2013

Over the past few weeks in this article series, we’ve heard firsthand from Haitian garment workers about low wages, sexual abuse, labor rights violations, and work-related injuries they suffered in sweatshops.

Meanwhile, the world has watched the death toll in last month’s factory collapse in Bangladesh creep to above 1,100. Global activists have joined the calls of protesting workers, ramping up pressure on clothing retailers against the regular mistreatment and deaths of workers. Slowly, the public is realizing that exploitation within the garment assembly industry is not the exception, it’s the rule. Today, we take a deep dive into the economics of this sector in Haiti to look at how it has come to be, and at what alternative pathways might look like.

Haiti Presidential Palace

In discussions among foreigners about working conditions and wages in the assembly industry, we often hear, “But Haitians need jobs. Wouldn’t things be worse without them?”

The question creates a false choice between no job and a grinding, exploitative job. Looking at the factors that led to low factory wages in the first place helps expose the myth. Western governments and their international financial institution (IFI) partners have played an active role in creating the dearth of options that exists for Haitian workers. For example, trade policies from the 1980s onward caused the decimation of the Haitian agricultural sector. Out-of-work farmers fled on masse to cities, and many had no better option but a factory job. Foreign policies imposed on the Haitian government have also contributed to a near-complete lack of public services and a weak, dependent domestic economy, which ramp up desperation; desperation, in turn, forced workers to accept the low wages.

The offshore assembly model creates a race to the bottom. In it, businesses circle the globe seeking the lowest cost of production – which involves the lowest health and safety standards and suppressed union organizing. As factories move to the next country, they create dirt-poor workers.

Despite this, governments, the UN, and the IFIs tout the garment assembly industry as a path to development in global South countries. The UN places the expansion of free trade zones (groupings of export-producing factories that enjoy tax exemptions and fewer safety, health, and environment regulations) toward the center of its development road map for Haiti. A 2009 report it commissioned argued that Haiti’s duty-free, quota-free preferential access to the American market, combined with low labor costs and a lack of protectionist policies, makes the country “the world’s safest production location for garments.” Weeks after the earthquake, that paper’s author, Oxford University economics professor Paul Collier, likened the catastrophic moment to 19^th Century development of the US West, with its “investment booms, financed by enthusiastic outsiders. The earthquake could usher in such a boom in Haiti.”

Apparently sharing this view, four months after the earthquake the US Congress extended US trade preferences for assembled garments to Haiti in a law that was portrayed as a relief measure. Also since the earthquake, the US and other global players came up with $224 million to subsidize the development of a new free trade zone in northern Haiti, Caracol. Developers, who displaced 366 farmers from arable farmland for the project, promised more than 20,000 jobs. In actuality, fewer than 1,500 people are employed in the park; and after paying for transportation and meals, workers reportedly end each day with an average of US $1.36. More free-trade zones are in the offing.

For all the funding and attention the sector has received, the 24 factories currently making garments for export to the US employ very few people: 25,924, or approximately 0.5% of the working-age population. No matter the numbers, the industry’s contribution to the national economy is false development, said economist Camille Chalmers with the Platform to Advocate Alternative Development in Haiti. “Almost all of the primary materials used in manufacturing come from outside. When they say that Haiti exports hundreds of millions of dollars in products, a lot of that goes to [foreign companies to] pay for the inputs like cloth and equipment. Once assembled, the goods aren’t consumed in Haiti but are shipped abroad. The government doesn’t even benefit from taxes or tariffs. Haiti’s only role is as a stopover in the production process, where cheap labor keeps profit margins high.”

Haiti does need work opportunities, as any cash-desperate person there will tell you. But not at any price or under any conditions. Former factory worker Ghislene Deloné said, “It can’t be based on the exploitation of people. We need to be treated like human beings.” And Camille Chalmers said, “When we speak of employment, we have to talk about the quality of employment. [This sector] doesn’t create work that can develop our human resources or reduce poverty. These comparative advantages just reproduce misery.”

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Terracide and the Terrarists 
Destroying the Planet for Record Profits 
By Tom Engelhardt

We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide.  And one for the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide.  But we don’t have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity had known it until, historically speaking, late last night.  A possibility might be “terracide” from the Latin word for earth.  It has the right ring, given its similarity to the commonplace danger word of our era: terrorist.

The truth is, whatever we call them, it’s time to talk bluntly about the terrarists of our world.  Yes, I know, 9/11 was horrific.  Almost 3,000 dead, massive towers down, apocalyptic scenes.  And yes, when it comes to terror attacks, the Boston Marathon bombings weren’t pretty either.  But in both cases, those who committed the acts paid for or will pay for their crimes.

Global Warming

In the case of the terrarists — and here I’m referring in particular to the men who run what may be the most profitable corporations on the planet, giant energy companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Shell – you’re the one who’s going to pay, especially your children and grandchildren. You can take one thing for granted: not a single terrarist will ever go to jail, and yet they certainly knew what they were doing.

It wasn’t that complicated. In recent years, the companies they run have been extracting fossil fuels from the Earth in ever more frenetic and ingenious ways. The burning of those fossil fuels, in turn, has put record amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Only this month, the CO2 level reached 400 parts per million for the first time in human history. A consensus of scientists has long concluded that the process was warming the world and that, if the average planetary temperature rose more than two degrees Celsius, all sorts of dangers could ensue, including seas rising high enough to inundate coastal cities, increasingly intense heat waves, droughts, floods, ever more extreme storm systems, and so on.

How to Make Staggering Amounts of Money and Do In the Planet

None of this was exactly a mystery. It’s in the scientific literature. NASA scientist James Hansen first publicized the reality of global warming to Congress in 1988. It took a while — thanks in part to the terrarists — but the news of what was happening increasingly made it into the mainstream. Anybody could learn about it.

Those who run the giant energy corporations knew perfectly well what was going on and could, of course, have read about it in the papers like the rest of us. And what did they do? They put their money into funding think tanks, politicians, foundations, and activists intent on emphasizing “doubts” about the science (since it couldn’t actually be refuted); they and their allies energetically promoted what came to be known as climate denialism. Then they sent their agents and lobbyists and money into the political system to ensure that their plundering ways would not be interfered with. And in the meantime, they redoubled their efforts to get ever tougher and sometimes “dirtier” energy out of the ground in ever tougher and dirtier ways.

The peak oil people hadn’t been wrong when they suggested years ago that we would soon hit a limit in oil production from which decline would follow.  The problem was that they were focused on traditional or “conventional” liquid oil reserves obtained from large reservoirs in easy-to-reach locations on land or near to shore.  Since then, the big energy companies have invested a remarkable amount of time, money, and (if I can use that word) energy in the development of techniques that would allow them to recover previously unrecoverable reserves (sometimes by processes that themselves burn striking amounts of fossil fuels): fracking, deep-water drilling, and tar-sands production, among others.

They also began to go after huge deposits of what energy expert Michael Klare calls “extreme” or “tough” energy — oil and natural gas that can only be acquired through the application of extreme force or that requires extensive chemical treatment to be usable as a fuel.  In many cases, moreover, the supplies being acquired like heavy oil and tar sands are more carbon-rich than other fuels and emit more greenhouse gases when consumed.  These companies have even begun using climate change itself — in the form of a melting Arctic — to exploit enormous and previously unreachable energy supplies.  With the imprimatur of the Obama administration, Royal Dutch Shell, for example, has been preparing to test out possible drilling techniques in the treacherous waters off Alaska.

David Koch

Amid concerns that Koch Industries could buy several major U.S. newspapers from Tribune Company, industrial billionaire David Koch was forced to step down as trustee of WNET, New York City’s largest public TV station, after the New Yorker revealed how WNET gave Koch inappropriate influence over its programming. Mr. Koch was floating a seven-figure donation over WNET’s leadership as the station aired a movie that portrayed him as a particularly greedy Manhattan resident.

Sure enough, WNET didn’t get David Koch’s hefty donation.

Last Thursday, David Koch submitted his resignation at a WNET Board of Trustees meeting, and Brad Johnson at Forecast the Facts* reports that Koch’s name was scrubbed from WNET’s website several days prior to the resignation. Koch Industries’ public relations website, KochFacts, released a preemptive response to the New Yorker article (which it has now urgently elaborated on), attempting to stifle New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer and the details of her newest piece. David Koch’s resignation as a WNET Trustee, coupled with telling quotes from WNET president Neal Shapiro and other sources, makes it clear that Koch had too much influence at the decreasingly-public TV station in New York.

The article is a fascinating culmination of two portions of the ongoing legacy of the Koch brothers: their desire to influence media, which is playing out with their company’s bid for the Tribune Company’s eight national daily newspapers, and their attempts to intimidate journalists and silence reporting they consider unfavorable.

Collapsed I-5 Skagit River Bridge, Washington State

Just after 7pm PT, a central portion of the I-5 Skagit River bridge in Washington State collapsed dumping several cars in the water. People were seen sitting on top of the cars, on top of the bridge wreckage waiting for rescue.

Live stream reporting from KIRO 7.

Live stream reporting from KOMO 4.

Continuing updates here.

Technical Details of the ‘riveted steel truss bridge’ from uglybridges.com. “Evaluation: Structurally deficient” “This website highlights the “ugly” condition of our nation’s bridges thanks to years of neglect and deferred maintenance.”

Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure.

From Peterr:

That “all of our bridges” quote ought to shame the Austerians. Right now,
money can be borrowed for pennies if governments want to do capital
projects, making repairs/replacements of bridges like these so much cheaper
than they would be when the economy is perking along. But that makes too
much sense . . .

8:51 pm PT: Fingers crossed, but no reported fatalities.

Pic

Pic

Various reports that a wide load truck hit it.