This Can't Be Happening!

Critics of President Obama’s proposed Authorization for Use of Military Force AUMF) against ISIS have been focused upon its deliberately obfuscatory and ambiguous language, which they rightly note would make it essentially a carte blanche from Congress allowing the president to go to war almost anywhere some would-be terrorist or terrorist copycat could be found who claims affinity with ISIS.

The critics have also complained that even if Congress were to reject his AUMF request, the president would continue his acts of war against the likes of ISIS, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan, claiming he is acting under the aegis of the 2001 AUMF Congress passed to allow the Bush/Cheney invasion of Afghanistan.

It is for that reason that some critics of the latest AUMF are calling for repeal of the 2001 AUMF before the new AUMF can even be considered.

But these critics are ignoring the real reason that the 2001 AUMF must be repealed, which is that in declaring the “War on Terror” against Al Qaeda and “those who were behind the 9-11 attacks” as well as those alleged to have aided or sheltered them, and in declaring that the whole globe was the battlefield in this supposed “war,” including the United States, the 2001 AUMF became a justification for the federal courts and the US Supreme Court to essentially declare the president a dictator.

The legal “theory” cobbled together by the Bush/Cheney White House attorney-for-hire John Yoo and accepted by the Supreme Court majority is that during time of war, and particularly in a war zone, the Constitution makes the American president a “unitary executive” who has within his power not just executive, but also legislative and judicial authority to act on his own without restraint. This is the specious argument that has allowed President Obama, and President Bush before him, to override the Constitutional guarantee of a right to a fair trial by ones peers, and to simply decide whether to torture captives or whether an American should be killed in a drone strike for allegedly being a terrorist or terror supporter. It is the argument that allows the president to decide that it’s okay to torture someone, in violation of US and international law. It’s okay for the NSA and other federal agencies to spy on Americans under this unitary executive theory, too.
Commander-in-Chief and war president Obama, America's endless war, and White House attorney John Yoo, advocate of presidential dictatorship
 

Although Pennsylvania’s new Governor Tom Wolf, who last November unseated Republican incumbent Tom Corbett, cited more than 315 million solid reasons to back his surprise order putting an immediate moratorium on executions in Pennsylvania, law enforcement organizations in the state still castigated his action, calling it an outrageous assault on a criminal justice system that they contend works well.

When Wolf announced his imposition of a moratorium on executions due to a disturbing history of abuses and errors in death penalty prosecutions in the state with the fifth largest death row in the country, he cited a damning statistic overlooked in most news media accounts of his recent action.

Operating the death penalty in Pennsylvania over the course of the past thirty-plus-years has cost the state’s taxpayers between $315-to-$600-million, Wolf noted in a memorandum his office released that detailed why he halted executions.

The Pennsylvania “has received very little, if any, benefit from this massive expenditure,” Gov. Wolf said. An exact cost figure for death penalty prosecutions in Pennsylvania remains elusive because state legislators and top officials in its court system have to date resisted compiling specific such figures.

The enormous expenses associated with the death penalty, from trial through appeals to execution, is a reason why many other states that have halted executions. Death penalty prosecutions cost three times as much or more than non-capital murder prosecutions, repeated studies nationwide have documented.

Pennsylvania's at least temporarily stilled death chamber, and Gov. Tom Wolf, who issued a moratorium on all executions
 

If you want to get a good understanding of how thoroughly corrupted and sold-out our government in Washington is, you need only look at the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the latest in a series of trade “deals” that is heading towards passage right now, and that, like its predecessors, NAFTA and CAFTA, as well as the World Trade Organization, will be sucking jobs out of the US for years.

The key point to notice about TPP, as with earlier trade deals, is that it is being negotiated in secret. The reason for this is that there are so many outrages in it which undermine US sovereignty and democratic control, and so many things in the deal that benefit multinational corporations at the expense of the American worker and the broader American public that there would be almost universal outrage if they were known.

What really demonstrates the collapse of US democracy is that even though the Republican Party claims to loath and distrust President Obama, their majorities in both House and Senate have voted to give him “fast-track” authority to negotiate the TPP. That means they want this man whom they claim to completely distrust to negotiate the whole TPP treaty, and then to present it to them as an unalterable take-it-or-leave it deal, with no amendments or changes allowed.

Why are they doing this? Because the Republicans and Democrats in Congress, like the president, want to pass this bill without letting the public find out what’s in it. And the members of Congress of both parties, who have been flooded with campaign contributions (really bribes) and other perks by corporate America to ensure that TPP is passed without discussion.

Where else could you find a government body that would willingly — no enthusiastically — surrender its power to investigate, debate and amend a major bill or, in this case, treaty? Especially a government body that is run by one party that is surrendering its power to the leader of the supposed opposing party — a man who is openly loathed and distrusted by them?

What this demonstrates is that the whole government in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, is owned now by corporate America. What corporate America wants is what this thoroughly corrupted government gives it.

So what are they giving away in TPP? Well, the main thing is that the TPP cedes to an unelected supra-national body of government bureaucrats the right to decide in secret tribunals whether some law in a member country — say the US — unfairly restricts trade. And if that secret tribunal concludes that the law does restrict trade or interferes with some multinational company’s ability to make obscene profits doing something that the country in question has democratically decided it shouldn’t be able to do, the nation’s law is ruled to be invalid.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): dismantling US democracy one law at a time
 

Finally some good news for a change!

At a packed session of the Philadelphia City Council Thursday morning, council members voted 14-2 to approve a bill mandating that most companies with 10 or more employees in this city of 1.5 million allow their workers to earn up to five days’ paid sick leave for themselves or to care for a sick or injured person at home.

The bill, sponsored by Councilman Bill Greenlee, who introduced and won passage for it two times before in 2011 and 2013, only to have it vetoed by Mayor Michael Nutter, this year had the votes to override any veto. Recognizing this, Nutter this year announced ahead of the vote that he would sign it.

The mayor explained his change in position saying that in prior years local businesses were hurting from the recession, but claimed that they could afford it now, though most Philadelphians and Philadelphia businesses would question his assertion that the city’s economy has recovered. More likely, Nutter, who is not eligible to seek another term as mayor and has to be thinking about some other elected post, saw the writing on the wall and didn’t want to cast yet another veto — this time in vain — against a popular bill, particularly among people who vote Democratic. (Polls show 70 percent of Philadelphians support paid sick leave.)

Passage of the law makes Philadelphia the 17th city in the US to mandate paid sick leave, and it is the second largest city in the country after New York City to do so. (Other cities that have passed such a law include San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC.)

Kathy Black, a long-time labor activist in Philadelphia and former head of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), was one of the leaders in the fight for paid sick leave in Philadelphia. She attributes this year’s resounding — and veto-proof — victory to the dogged efforts of labor activists and other grassroots organizations, and to a “changing political climate” with 12 cities and two states recently passing such laws creating an “unstoppable momentum.” She also credits Philadelphia’s successful campaign to host the 2016 Democratic National Convention. “Democrats couldn’t really hold their convention in a city that was repeatedly defeating this bill,” she said with a sly smile.

After passage of the bill, supporters of the measure broke out in a rousing chant of “This is what democracy looks like!” as they filed out of the ornate chamber to celebrate their victory.

Labor activists cheer as Philly City Council passes paid sick-leave bill 14-2. Later, bill sponsor Councilman Bill Greenlee watches Mayor Michael Nutter sign a bill he twice vetoed earlier.
 

The Nobel Peace Laureate President Barack Obama, the guy who once campaigned claiming one US war — the one against Iraq — was a “bad” one, and the other — against Afghanistan — was a “good” one, turns out to be a man who, once anointed commander-in-chief, can’t seem to find a war he doesn’t consider to be a “good” idea.

Obama turned out, on taking office, to have a hard time saying good-bye to the occupation of Iraq, only leaving when he was forced out by an Iraqi government that refused to continue giving US forces legal immunity for killing Iraqi civilians. In Afghanistan, he decided to copy the same “surge” — a massive increase in targeted assassinations and violence — that he had once condemned in Iraq. Then he stepped up drone-launched rocket attacks and bombings in seven other countries.

More recently he has begun an air war against Syria (okay, he says it’s against the so-called Islamic State, but the whole world, with the exception of a lot of ill-informed US citizens, knows it’s ultimately against the Syrian government), and now his Secretary of Defense (sic) Ashton Carter and his Secretary of State John Kerry are pushing for sending heavy arms and, inevitably, US “advisors” to Ukraine to escalate US involvement in the civil war there. What makes that latest war particularly dangerous is that all the while, Peace Laureate Obama makes it clear that the “enemy” is Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian military.

Never mind that it is the US that originally orchestrated and encouraged the fascist coup that overthrew the elected government of Ukraine, setting in motion a huge pogrom against ethnic Russians in the east of that country and provoking the current armed conflict, and never mind that Russian concern about the Ukraine stems from a decades long history of the US pushing NATO ever closer to Russia’s western border, with Ukraine kind of the last straw.

Anyone looking objectively at the warmaking and war-promotion of this administration would have to conclude that President Obama is one of the most bellicose Chief Executives in the history of the United States.

Our Nobel Laureate President Barack Obama
 

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler proposed Wednesday new FCC rules that would protect and preserve the Internet’s Net Neutrality.

The proposals, coming after years of debate and an intense campaign of grass-roots community organizing and activist pressure on the FCC, would treat Internet communications as a Title II service — the same FCC Title used to govern telephone communications. That change was at the center of activist movement demands since Title II services are automatically neutral under FCC rules.

(An important clarification: this does not mean you can get high-speed service for the same price as regular modem service. It means that access to data and content speed to your device must be the same. If you have a slower connection, all content would flow at that speed. Faster connection, all content flows at that faster rate.)

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler: Finally!
 

It is a stunning victory for the Internet-freedom movement which includes scores of organizations nationwide and that movement celebrated the announcement immediately.

The questions now are whether the FCC will approve the Chairman’s proposals, what the reaction might be from corporations (like Comcast) who vigorously oppose this change and what, if those corporations unleash their lobbyists, might Congress do.

At this point the answers seem to be: yes, scream and not all that much but in Washington you never know.

NOTE: I’m a member of a group of Vietnam veterans affiliated with Veterans For Peace called the Vietnam War Full Disclosure project. We would like to see a more historically accurate representation of the Vietnam War as presented by the pentagon in its 50 Year Commemoration of the war, which is scheduled to begin with the 50th anniversary of the March 1965 Marine landing at DaNang. The government wants to commemorate the war as about “the defense of our nation’s freedom,” whereas Full Disclosure sees the anniversary as an opportunity for a national dialogue. The Vietnamese did nothing to us that required an invasion and occupation; all they wanted was independence from, first, the French, then from the United States. This is not a unique struggle for us in this country. The new government in Japan is becoming more militaristic and is suddenly making an effort to quash generally accepted historical accounts concerning imperial Japan’s policies in the 1940s with the so-called “comfort women” in Korea and China. The Dutch a few years back went through a national dialogue concerning their brutal military occupation in Indonesia. As part of its mission, Full Disclosure has launched a Letter To The Wall campaign. My letter to the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial is below; it’s an effort to see my service for what it was. The letters will be gathered and placed at the Vietnam War Memorial on Memorial Day 2015. For more information, go to the Full Disclosure website.
 

Dear Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall:

You’re a wide granite gash in the earth, like the war itself, a man-made construction set within the order of nature. As I look back 49 years, I understand the war was a much more rude and shameful event than the grace of your shape in the earth might suggest. But you’re what you are and where you are to recognize sacrifice divorced of politics. Speaking to you is speaking to the dead, and like a good hospice caregiver must do, one first needs to respect the dying and the dead. Addressing you is different than addressing the flag. Your dead were all part of a massive historic enterprise; but the simple fact at the root of all religion is we die alone and the ultimate providence of those named on your surface remains an eternal mystery.

.

I was in Vietnam as a 19-year-old kid. I joined the Army and became a radio direction finder in the Army Security Agency. Once trained in DF principles and practiced in Morse code, I volunteered to go to Vietnam, as did my older brother, a lieutenant in the Army infantry. I went with a company by troop ship from Oakland; it took 17 days and the ship anchored off shore of Qui Nhon. In the morning, the entire company was loaded onto a large LCU, which chugged toward the beach. I’d watched John Wayne hit the beach at Iwo Jima, and I had no idea what to expect. They’d given us a clip of 7.62mm ammunition for the wooden stocked M14s we had been issued.

The LCU hit the beach with a long WHOOOOOSH. The high bow plate was slowly lowered, and we saw men in bathing suits sunbathing and several blue air-conditioned buses with steel grates over the windows to take us to the Qui Nhon airbase, where they would load us onto a C-130 for a flight to Pleiku. I recall two things about the trip to the airbase. One, the teeming movement of people and poverty I had never seen before. The heat was no issue, since I’d been raised in south Florida above the Keys. The other thing I recall was looking out the window and when the bus stopped for traffic noticing a young kid, maybe ten, out the window. He seemed older than his age. When he saw me, he flipped me a bird.

Shortly after hearing a snippet of the chatter during a fund-raising campaign by my local NPR station in which it was asserted that NPR listeners appreciated that they were getting the full story instead of just headlines and soundbites, I heard a report about the latest developments in US-Cuba relations: Cuban President Raul Castro’s assertion that diplomatic relations would not be possible until the US returned Guantanamo Bay, site of a huge US naval base and of the 13-year-old internment and torture center for captives in the US “War on Terror,” and until the US paid Cuba reparations for the half-century embargo and blockade of Cuba.

In that report, it was stated as fact that the US base was “leased” from Cuba on a permanent basis, as a result of an “agreement” between the two governments of Cuba and the US.

John McCain, the war-loving Republican senator from Arizona, on Thursday kicked out from his Senate Armed Forces Committee hearing protesters who had been calling for the arrest of witness Henry Kissinger on charges of war crimes for his authorization, as Nixon’s national security council chief, of the 1972 carpet bombing of North Vietnam, including dikes, hospitals and schools. He called the protesters — whom he threatened to have arrested — “low-life scum.” This blowhard Senate fossil also weighed in on the Cuba issue, joking in the NPR report that Guantanamo was legally a possession of the US, and that those like Fidel and Raul Castro, would be “going to meet Karl Marx” before that base would be turned over to Cuba.

Nowhere did NPR, which claims to give “the whole story” in its reports, bother to point out that the eternal lease that Cuba signed with the US back in 1901 was signed under considerable duress by a country that had just won its independence from a grudging United States, which had initially hung onto the island after winning the 1898-9 Spanish-American War, only giving it its independence after realizing that it would have an insurrection on its hands if it didn’t (Cuban independence fighters inspired by the late José Martí had nearly succeeded in ousting their Spanish colonial overlords by the time the US sparked a war against Spain).
Cuba President Raul Castro, Sen. John McCain, prisoners at GITMO, and a view of Guantanamo Bay Naval Station
 

There is certainly exciting news from Greece today, with confirmation that the leftist coalition party Syriza has won a decisive victory, and, with the help of just one small party, the Independent Greeks Party, is assured of a parliamentary majority. That means Syriza’s dynamic marxist leader, the 40-year-old former student radical
Alexis Tsipras, will shortly become Greece’s prime minister, pledged to undo years of crippling austerity and to turn Greece back into a real democracy, instead of a scene of corporate pillage.

Leaders of Europe’s corrupt parties — both conservative and socialist or, in Britain’s case, “New Labor,” — are clearly anxious at the electoral success of a genuine leftist party in one of the countries of the European Union, particularly as there are growing leftist movements in larger countries, including Italy, Spain, France, Portugal and elsewhere. These new movements explicitly reject the tired and corrupted duopoly of conservative and socialist parties that have been taking turns running Europe as an adjunct to the US for generations.

It remains to be seen how the main governments in Europe, and particularly in Germany, try to deal with the new political reality in Greece. They and the bureaucrats and bankers in Brussels, Luxembourg, London, Paris and Bonn, are in a tricky spot: if they simply thumb their noses at Greece’s new leaders, refuse to reduce that country’s crushing debt, and force Greece to quit the Euro currency zone, they will encourage other countries — notably Spain and Italy — to consider quitting the Euro too, and the whole notion of Europe as a political/economic entity will founder. If they accommodate Syriza’s demands for a better arrangement, with debt forgiveness and aid to promote the Greek economy, they will be hit with similar demands from the much larger struggling economies of Italy and Spain, not to mention other troubled members of the EU like Portugal, Ireland Poland and other countries from the former Warsaw Pact.

The main point in all this is that Greek voters have tossed a flash-bang grenade into the prevailing neo-liberal consensus that the way to “reform” economies is to impose austerity, cutting back on social programs, hammering wages, boosting unemployment, and privatizing long-public functions like transit, education, roads and bridges and health care. Europe will probably never be the same, whichever way Greece ultimately goes.

The question is, will any of this matter in the US?
Alexis Tsipras and Greek voters celebrate Szyriza's stunning electoral victory Sunday
 

How inspiring is that!
Maybe we should go back to what we were trying to do
When we got discouraged:
Try to scratch together a living selling loosies in the street
As a man of color?
Maybe someone was building a time machine
And they should get back to that!
Teach a friend’s dog to speak for a YouTube video,
Go out in this snowstorm and not come in
Until you find two identical flakes.
Join the campaign to replace the Star Spangled Banner
With Woody’s “This Land is Your Land?”
Because it is our land, damn it.
What a guy, that Romney.
What an inspiration to us all
No matter what our lost cause.
 

  –Gary Lindorff