Author: Dave LIndorff

It’s amazing to watch how shallow and self-censoring our corporate media can be. Take the remarkable interchange between President Donald Trump and Fox right-wing talkshow host Bill O’Reilly. In an interview that aired before the Super Bowl, Trump had responded to O’Reilly’s question about how he could respect Russian President Putin, whom O’Reilly called “a killer,” by saying, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think — our country’s so innocent? You think our country’s so innocent?”

Most news organizations reporting on this included the response of Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to Trump’s comment, in which the Senate Majority Leader said, “Putin’s a former KGB agent. He’s a thug. “

Left unsaid was the fact that this country also once had a former intelligence agency “thug” as its president: George H.W. Bush. Bush was named CIA director in 1976 by then President Gerald Ford, and during one-year tenure as head of the Agency, he reportedly worked assiduously to protect it from post-Watergate investigations and reforms of its past dirty behavior by shipping agency operatives abroad and out of reach of investigators. Furthermore, as investigative reporter Russ Baker, author of a book on Bush called Family of Secrets, reports, Bush’s connection to the CIA, kept secret for years, stretches way back to the days of its precursor agency, the OSS, and lasts at least through 1963 and the Kennedy assassination.

CIA Director/thug and later President George H.W. Bush, and KGB officer/thug and later Russian President Vladimir Putin: Both killers?
 

It was during Bush’s tenure as CIA director that agents of Chile’s intelligence service, the DINA, planted a bomb in the car of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier, then living and working in exile in Washington, DC. The bomb killed Letelier and an American assistant, Ronnie Moffet. DINA was very closely coordinated with the CIA, which had orchestrated the 1973 military coup that overthrew the elected Socialist government and murdered Chilean President Salvador Allende, for whom Letelier had worked, later becoming a chief critic of the subsequent military dictatorship. At a minimum, Bush’s CIA appears to have known about the plot to kill Letelier, and he subsequently worked to cover up any links to either DINA or the CIA. Bush’s CIA also helped coordinate a continent-side Murder Inc. project against leftists in Latin America called Operation Condor.

In any event one could even more properly refer to President Obama as a thug, courtesy not of any nefarious background as a former CIA operative, but in his role as murderer-in-chief with his Tuesday morning “kill list” sessions, where he would decide whom to target next for a drone attack. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, during his eight years in office, President Obama ordered 563 strikes at specific alleged terrorist targets. While it is unclear how many of those actual targets were successfully killed (many are known to have escaped), the BIJ claims that by its count between 384 and 807 civilians, including children, were also killed in the attacks. Other sources say the number of those “collateral damage” killings is actually considerably higher.

We can all agree that President Donald Trump is a disaster for the country.

He has been proving this pretty much every day since his inauguration.

But Democrats and progressive activists need to do more than decry Trump’s horrific actions, from his ban on immigrants, including refugees, from seven majority-Muslim countries, to his murder of an eight-year-old American girl in a Special Forces raid in Yemen, his order to the US Army Corps of Engineers to approve a permit for the completion of a pipeline upstream of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, or his nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch, a Antonin Scalia clone, to fill the late Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court.

Blocking or at least opposing bad executive orders, laws and nominations is of course important, but in a situation where the Republican Party is in solid control of both houses of Congress, it is also futile, and thus only symbolic.

Democrats have been on a losing streak almost from the moment President Obama was inaugurated and began his program of appeasement and compromise. They lost control of Congress in 2010, and lost the White House last November, because they were not offering American voters a real progressive alternative. For decades now, the party and its elected officials in Washington have been DINOs (Democrats in Name Only). Corporatists as much as their Republican opponents, they have been posing as something different by playing to their base with things like support for gay marriage, support for the unenforceable and purely aspirational Paris Climate Agreement, and support for…um, well, it’s actually a pretty short list when you think about what Democrats have been for lately that really rates as progressive.

Recall that when President Obama came into office, with a solid Democratic majority in both houses of congress, he had won with a campaign in which he had vowed to restore open constitutional government, to make it easier for unions to organize, to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to kickstart the recession-mired economy with a burst of major deficit spending. He did none of that, and the Democratic Congress did none of it for him either. Obama and the Democrats paid for their lack of decisive progressive action by losing Congress two years later and it’s been downhill ever since.

Now they’ve lost the White House too.

The 1967 March on the Pentagon and the 1963 Civil Rights March in Washington both were movements that forced the Democratic Party to change
 

Unless that party wakes up and realizes that it needs a wholesale makeover, in the form of a return to its progressively assertive New Deal roots, it will lose the Congressional elections in 2018, and it will lose the presidential race in 2020, along with even more state governorships and statehouses (currently 32 of the 50 states are wholly in Republican hands).

People have said that third parties have no chance in the US, but the Democratic Party seems hell-bent on proving them wrong by becoming a “third party” on its own, but in a one-party system with the Republicans being the last major party standing. At the rate things are going, we could end up with the next presidential election featuring a Republican nominee, whether Trump or someone else, debating himself because the Democratic nominee won’t make the 15% polling cut-off to be eligible to participate!

With the signing of an executive order Wednesday, President Trump has begun to make good on his campaign promise to build a “big beautiful wall” along the as yet unwalled parts of the border with Mexico. But this epic project, which could cost as much as $25 billion according to some reports, is being put in the wrong location and, in any case, will be a complete waste of money anyhow in terms of deterring illegal immigration.

As the Manchus famously proved in the case of China’s laughably ineffective Great Wall, a wall, while perhaps a great tourist attraction, is only as strong as the people behind it. After multiple successful raids across the wall, a Manchu army poured through a fortified gate, not by breaking it down but by convincing and bribing a rebel Ming warlord to open it for them so they could march on Beijing and finish off the Ming dynasty, establishing the Qing dynasty that lasted until the early 20th Century).

China’s Great Wall is a tourist must see, but was a dud a keeping invaders out. Conquering Manchus bribed their way in through a fortified gate
 

Already, some 580 miles of the 2000-mile border between Mexico and the US is fenced off, either with actual walls of various types from razor-wire-topped fences to fancier iron-grated structures, or by “virtual walls” of motion sensors and cameras. But despite these fences, desperate immigrants still cross at about the pre-fence rate, either by tunneling, climbing or making a dash and hoping not to get caught before they can reach some urban center and melt into the crowd. There’s no reason to suspect that completing the wall across the whole of what used to be proudly called one of the world’s longest unguarded borders, would stop the flow of people seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Some will attempt to climb it risking death or serious injury. Others will burrow under it. Most, or course, as now, will just come to the US legally on visitor visas and then just stay on, working, building a life, and hoping not to get caught and deported.

Leonard Peltier, Native American political prisoner for 40 years and counting
 

UPDATE: To his eternal shame, a gutless President Obama, who himself has cold-bloodedly murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent men, women and children in drone Hellfire missile attacks he has personally ordered, allegedly to kill targeted “terrorists,” refused calls to grant clemency to Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who has been jailed for 40 years on two life sentences, not for killing anyone, but for being on the scene (an “abetter” in legal parlance) when two FBI agents were shot dead during a ’75 shootout on the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. Although a lead US attorney and prosecutor in that case, James Reynolds, appealed to the president saying that justice called for clemency in Peltier’s case since he’d never been shown to have been involved in those shootings, and since, even if he had, abetters to such crimes have rarely served as much time as Peltier has already), Obama sat on his hands, and left office today abandoning Peltier to die in prison. What a legacy of cowardice he leaves behind in the smoking wreckage of his two terms!
 

If, as reported in the Washington Post, President Obama decided to grant clemency to military whistleblower Chelsea Manning because he felt that the 35-year sentence handed down by a military judge was “nuts,” then what does he think of the life sentence that Native American activist Leonard Peltier is serving?

Washington, DC — Standing before a sea of humanity — people of all ages and races, stretching out from the Lincoln Monument back as far as the Capitol building– a sea vaster than any demonstration in the history of the nation’s capital, the unkempt white-haired senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, a self-described independent socialist maverick who decided to take his oath of office on the steps where Martin Luther King once spoke, instead of the traditional spot at the Capitol building, called out to the American people to join him in “taking back our country from the smug, self-satisfied rich and the corporations that have been pretending to be persons!”

“We are engaged in a struggle to undo decades of government policies that were designed to benefit the one percent,” said the man who has upended centuries of two-party duopoly by winning the presidency in a landslide on the Green Party ticket in a sweep that handed control of both House and Senate to a Democratic Party that was at the same time relegated to a humiliating third place finish in the presidential race.

“The election is over,” President Sanders declared. “But the American people’s fight is just beginning! I call on all those who voted for my opponents, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, to join with the 75 million who elected me in taking back this country from the special interests, from the wealthy for whom nothing is ever enough, from the corporations that see themselves as global enterprises, not as part of the fabric of this nation and its society, and from those who would trample on the weak in order to raise themselves a notch above the rest.”

Imagine a Bernie Sanders presidential inauguration on Jan. 20
 

Sanders went on to announce a list of priority measures he intends to present to the new Congress on this, his first day in office, the first being a bill to establish a new Department of Peace, whose secretary, he said, would henceforth sit in on all discussions of foreign affairs in order to “insure that peaceful options for resolving differences will always be put on the table.” Other measures going to Congress on day one of Sanders‘ presidency, he said, would include:

* Establishment of a commission, headed up by his nominee for Secretary of Health and Welfare Jill Stein, charged with drawing up, over the next six months, a plan for replacing the costly and complex Affordable Care Act with an expanded and enhanced Medicare program that would cover all Americans, not just the elderly. The new president, a long-time advocate of a national single-payer health care system similar to Canada’s, said his plan would cost less than health care does now because it would do away with the need for Medicaid for the poor, with the need for employer-funded insurance plans and their huge premiums, and with the Veterans administration hospital system, since everyone would be receiving Medicare. He promised that such a system would allow the federal government to bargain for lower prices for all health care and medicines. “We are declaring that as of today, health care in America is a right of citizenship, and we are saying if every other developed country in the world can deliver affordable healthcare to all its citizens, then so can America!” said the new president to thunderous applause.

* Establishment of a $15/hr federal minimum wage, linked to the consumer price index, to become effective as soon as a bill reaches his desk, and a “card-check” measure giving unions the right to demand recognition by an employer after simply turning in to the National Labor Relations Board cards signed by a majority of workers, without having to go through a lengthy and endlessly delayed formal election process. Sanders said that bill would also make labor law violations by employers subject to triple damages, similar to insider trading violations, instead of simply requiring payment of back wages. Said Sanders, “A person who works full-time at a job should be able to earn enough to support a family. It’s that simple.” He added, “Companies should not be subsidizing their payroll costs by forcing their workers to rely on taxpayer-funded assistance programs like welfare and food stamps! No more!”

It felt like I had stumbled into some weird kind of time warp yesterday morning as I was making coffee and listening to NPR’s “Morning Edition.” There was Cokie Roberts being interviewed about the current mass media obsession — the alleged hacking of the Democratic National Committee server by Russia, and President-elect Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the evidence-free claims of the Democratic political appointees heading the nation’s intel agencies that the the hack “definitely” happened.

Cokie bemoaned Trump’s dissing of the intel agencies and also his stated desire to develop friendly relations with Russia, saying, “This country has had a consistent policy for 70 years towards the Soviet Union and Russia, and Trump is trying to undo that.”

Think about that for a moment. On one level, the long-time NPR commentator is right: US policy towards the government in Moscow has been remarkably consistent — and hostile — for 70 years, albeit with a few brief periods of at least relative friendliness, as during the early and mid 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But that gets to the other point: There was, recall, a fundamental change that happened in 1989-90, when the Communist state founded in the Russian Revolution of 1917 collapsed, and the Soviet Union splintered into Russia and a bunch of smaller countries — former Soviets in the old empire — including Byelorussia, Ukraine, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and a bunch of stans in Central Asia.

The real question is, once the USSR ceased to exist and Russia, a rump country that, while geographically the largest in the world, is less than half the size of the US in population, found itself struggling to restructure it’s centralized state-owned economy into a modern capitalist one, shouldn’t the US have changed it’s “consistent policy” of hostility towards what remained of the old Soviet Union — particularly as Russia was no longer communist?

Instead of actively helping Russia recover, the US urged on President Boris Yeltsin a destructive “economic shock therapy” program of balanced budgets, open borders for imports and investment and, most importantly, a sell-off of state assets that quickly enabled corrupt former commissars to transform themselves into insanely wealthy new capitalist oligarchs.

While Russians struggled to survive through a period of rampant inflation, economic collapse and epic corruption, the US, instead of lending a helping hand as it had to the collapsed countries of Europe and after World War II (including our former bitter enemies, Germany and also Japan in Asia,), Washington under the Clinton administration began a program of aggressively and threateningly expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (a Cold War relic of an outdated containment policy which should have, like the Warsaw Pact, been mercifully disbanded), forcing an economically strapped Russia to respond by still spending precious resources on restoring its hollowed out military.

The widespread belief among liberal Dems that Trump is a Putin puppet resembles the Republican's 'birther' mania about Obama
 

Yes, there has been a 70-year consistent policy of hostility towards Russia, not to mention unremitting anti-Russian propaganda in the US, as Roberts says, but that’s because foreign policy in the US has been in the grip of a Republican-Democrat bi-partisan consensus that argues that the US must work to maintain absolute military superiority over all real and potential rivals, forever. And that consensus views Russia as a major potential threat to that superiority.

That’s why we have a military budget of $600 billion, nearly three times as much China ($215 billion, much of that for domestic control purposes), another country that poses no threat to the US, and as all the rest of the world spends, while Russia’s budget is just 11 percent of that amount at $66 billion, ranking it behind third-ranked Saudi Arabia ($87 billion).

The Russian hacking hysteria in the US media, and among parts of the public — especially liberal Democrats — is becoming increasingly embarrassing.

Over and over we have been told that the government, whether in the form of the departing President Obama or unidentified “intelligence sources” cited in news reports, or statements by private security contractors with their vested interest in trying to show how vulnerable America’s (and the Democratic Party’s!) servers are, that they have solid evidence that the Russians hacked DNC emails and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, only for it to turn out to be more of the same innuendos, circumstantial “evidence,” suspicions, and inevitably ridiculous and embarrassing errors (like the Washington Post’s breathless and false story that the Russians had hacked the Vermont power grid and could shut off the heat during a cold snap).

The latest example is yesterday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, which featured the Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., who is the boss of the CIA, the NSA and the rest of the whole vast US intelligence apparatus. Clapper told the committee that he stands “more resolutely” than ever behind the CIA’s initial assessment of Oct. 7 that Russian leaders at the “senior-most levels” had orchestrated a campaign of interference in the presidential election.

Clapper testified ominously about a vast campaign of interference which he claimed involved everything from hacking the DNC to spreading disinformation and what he called “fake news.” He said, “Whatever crack, fissure, they could find in our tapestry…they would exploit.” Why, he said in outrage, their state-owned English-language television station RT-TV (available in about 15% of American home cable packages) even “disparaged our system, our alleged hypocrisy about human rights.”

Gee, how evil can an empire be? (And worse yet, Clapper disclosed that the NSA had recorded Russian officials cheering and laughing when they realized Trump had defeated Clinton! My god! We should retalliate!)

Seriously, if an American citizen is ignorant enough not to at least be skeptical about a report about American politics that is being aired by a news organization called Russia TV, we’re in serious trouble. But I guess that’s another issue for another day. And as for that annoying glee heard in the Kremlin election night, can’t we assume there was the same glee in the White House when Boris Yeltsin narrowly defeated Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov in a run-off to win a second term as Russian president? So gloating counts as election interference now?

National Security Director James Clapper: Would you trust this man to house sit your home (or fix your computer)?
 

In a stunning conclusion to a year-and-a-half legal drama, a federal judge in Scranton, on late Tuesday ordered the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to quit stalling and to begin treating prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal with the latest available and highly effective anti-viral drugs for curing him of a raging and life-threatening case of Hepatitis C.

Abu-Jamal, back in early 2015, fell into a diabetic coma, the result of an undiagnosed case of active Hepatitis C which he contracted sometime during his 36 years as a prisoner in the Pennsylvania prison system.

Convicted and sentenced to death back in 1982 for the 1981 murder of a white police officer at what was a highly controversial trial fraught with perjured prosecution testimony, withheld evidence and under the control of a clearly biased judge, Abu-Jamal, at the time a prominent Philadelphia journalist, in 2001 had his death sentence overturned on constitutional grounds and was instead given a sentence of life in prison without parole. But prison authorities, aided by the state’s judicial and law-enforcement establishment, have continued to torment him and harm him in any way possible, for example keeping him in solitary on death row for several years of appeals after a federal judge had already tossed out his death sentence, and even then keeping him in solitary as long as possible before finally transferring him to the general prison population after his death sentence was finally confirmed by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

When it became clear that Abu-Jamal was seriously ill with Hepatitis C — an epidemic in prisons across America and in the Pennsylvania prison system where at least 7000 prisoners are known to have active cases of the deadly disease — efforts by his supporters, family and legal team to get him treatment began immediately. But these efforts have been stymied at every turn by a prison bureaucracy loathe to offer medication that reportedly can cost $80,000 or more for one full course of treatment. (Of course, unmentioned is the reality that the cost of Abu-Jamal’s two hospitalizations for the serious conditions caused by non-treatment of the disease have already cost taxpayers $170,000, as will also be the case for other infected inmates who are left untreated).

Bret Grote, legal director of the Abolition Law Center, a Pittsburgh-based Pennsylvania prison advocacy organization, says that the preliminary injunction issued by Federal District Judge Robert Mariani, the first such order nationwide demanding state-of-the-art anti-viral treatment for a prison inmate with Hep-C, while subject to almost certain appeal by the state DOC, stands as a powerful condemnation of the “Nazi-like” medical neglect of state inmates suffering with Hepatitis C, if not stayed during any subsequent appeal, could lead to treatment beginning soon for one of the world’s most prominent prisoners.

Mumia Abu-Jamal as he looked before and after his untreated Hep-C caused diabetic crisis, during which he lost over 50 lbs.
 

The first assault of the new Trump administration and Republican Congress upon Social Security has been launched. It comes in the form of release of a new report by the Congressional Budget Office, which of course these days is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Congressional Caucus.

Using some financial sleight-of-hand, this CBO report pushes forward by two years the date at which its ideologically driven experts claim Social Security benefits will exhaust the Trust Fund, and since the Social Security program is required to be self-financing, the date at which, barring adjustments by Congress in the program’s funding and/or benefit payment levels, promised benefits would have to be cut by what the CBO claims will have to be 31%.

Such a cut would clearly be a staggering blow to the finances and livelihoods of nation’s retirees, dependents and the disabled.

This end-of-the-year CBO report is at odds with a report issued earlier this year by the Trustees of the Social Security Administration, which projected that the Trust Fund, barring any changes in taxes or benefit payments, would be tapped out in 2033, and that at that point benefits, barring some fixes in Social Security financing, would have to be cut by an also horrific but far lower 21% (with the remaining 79% of benefit payments being covered by current employee FICA taxes being paid into the system).

How did the projection on Social Security move from a cut in benefit payments of by just over a fifth being required in 17 years to a cut by almost a third being required in just 15 years?

Well, the CBO decided, in its wisdom, that the estimates of economic trends being used by the SSA’s Trustees — a group about evenly divided between Republican and Democratic appointees, with Democrats having a slight edge — were too optimistic.

Specifically, for example, the CBO gnomes are projecting that the interest rate on 10-year Treasury notes will only be at 1.7% in 2026, rising to just 2.3% in 2046. Since the Trust Fund — composed of FICA taxes paid by workers — is invested by law entirely in these 10-year notes, that’s a pretty low rate of return to be projecting. In contrast, the Trustees, in their 2016 report earlier this year, projected 10-year rates in 2016 of 2.4%, rising to 2.7% in 2031. For the record, the 10-year rate today is 2.51%, well above even the Trustee’s projection, and almost a percentage point higher than the latest CBO figure for the year.

The CBO is also projecting a slower rate of wage growth than did SSA Trustees, and thus is predicting a lower amount of FICA tax payments into the fund, as well as a further decline in labor participation rates and productivity growth, and other factors that all point to reduced contributions to the Trust Fund going forward.

Retired CIA Sr. Analyst Ray McGovern, who used to give presidents back to Ronald Reagan the CIA’s daily briefing, and who later co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), talks with host Dave Lindorff about the CIA’s claim –which he calls “a crock” — that the Russians and Vladimir Putin were behind the release of Democratic National Committee and Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta’s emails, in an effort to throw the election to Donald Trump.

Listen to a full podcast of the interview on the Progressive Radio News program ‘This Can’t Be Happening!”

Retired CIA Sr. Analyst Ray McGovern, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)