This Can't Be Happening!

After spending much of her 94-years as a civil rights activist this Washington, DC resident is understandably supportive of the Barack Obama presidency because she like many African-Americans never thought she’d ever see a black man sitting in that Oval Office seat designated for the most powerful person on earth.

This 94-year-old bristles at the extraordinary amount of criticisms unleashed against Obama telling a niece that she’d like to take a sharp sword and stick Obama critics “in the butt!”

Many blacks are touchy about criticisms directed toward Obama, feeling – with factual basis – that Obama receives unfair criticisms, particularly from right-wing conservatives.

For example Michelle Bachmann, the extremist Republican congresswoman with presidential aspirations, blasted Obama blaming him for historic high levels of black unemployment, a rate consistently double that of whites during this so-called Great Recession which actually is a full-blown depression for minorities and many whites.

Of course Bachmann’s partisan slam was silent on small yet salient facts like Obama inheriting the jobs killing recession from his Republican Oval Office predecessor who Bachmann blindly supported.

And, Bachmann’s blast blithely dismissed the fact that she and her Republican confederates on Capitol Hill have persistently opposed efforts by congressional progressives to pass jobs creating initiatives that would significantly increase employment among all jobless Americans, including blacks.

Blacks have been disproportionately punished in the US depression, and stimulus programs have helped mostly whites

One thing you can say about the financial industry. It has no sense of loyalty.

Back in 2008, most of the biggest contributors to presidential candidate Barack Obama were financial companies. According to the campaign fund tracking website Open Secrets, after the $1.65 million donated by a political action committee (PAC) for the University of California, the next biggest contributor was a PAC for the giant bank, Goldman Sachs, whose employees ponied up a reported $1 million. Right up there among the top contributors to the Obama campaign that year were two other of the nation’s top banks too: JP Morgan Chase, whose employee PAC gave $809,000, and Citigroup, which gave $737,000. Two more big banks, UBS and Morgan Stanley, as well as General Electric, which less than a year later bought a bank to enable itself to benefit from the government’s largesse in doling out billions of “rescue” dollars under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), were among Obama’s top 20 campaign donors, handing over $533,000, $512,000 and 530,000 respectively to support his election.

Obama, after winning the presidency, repaid all that campaign largesse, appointing bank industry lackeys and executives to top positions. He made Timothy Geithner, who as head of the New York Federal Reserve branch during the Bush administration, had ignored the scandalous derivatives scandals that brought on the financial crash, his Treasury Secretary, and Lawrence Summers, who as Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, had pushed for the deregulation of derivatives, and for allowing banks to merge with investment banks, and who during the Bush years earned millions as a consultant to the hedge fund industry and from speaking fees provided by Wall Street banks, got the post of head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors. Meanwhile, GE’s chairman and CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, who famously exported thousands of GE jobs abroad, was given the post of White House Jobs “Czar.”

Given the ease with which the Obama administration allowed the financial industry to subvert the Congressional legislation designed to reform the banking industry in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008-9, and the White House decision not to prosecute a single bank executive for the wholesale destruction of the US and global economy, one might think that Wall Street would have rewarded Obama with more money for his re-election campaign. Instead the industry, seeing even more advantage in having a Republican in the White House, and particularly one of its own — venture capitalist and multi-millionaire Mitt Romney, has switched its support over to his opponent.

Wall Street has dumped Obama this time around, despite his four years of favors to the industry

Sometimes it takes a small tragedy to call attention to expose a much bigger one.

The small tragedy happened when Nicholas Ivie, a US Border Patrol agent, was shot dead on a dark night in rough terrain along the border with Mexico in Arizona, a state that has been obsessing about illegal border crossers coming into the US from Mexico seeking jobs.

The story, as reported by FBI and Cochise County Sheriff’s Office investigators, as well as the border patrol union’s president, is that Ivie was with one set of border patrol agents responding to a motion sensor that had been triggered — perhaps by a person or an animal — and ended up getting shot by a second border patrol team that had also been dispatched to investigate, but that had approached the location from another direction.

What reportedly happened is that Ivie opened fire on the other team, and when they returned fire, thinking they were under attack by armed smugglers, Ivie was killed. The incident is being called a case of “friendly fire,” a term that is used by the military for cases where US troops kill one of their own by accident in a firefight.

But the incident is more than just an accident. It highlights the sorry state that the gun-obsessed and war-crazed US has reached when it comes to the issue of immigration.

Unasked is the question: Why would a border agent investigating possible illegal border crossing take the first shot at someone he suspected of trying to sneak into the country?

Many of us in this nation of immigrants are descendants of people who sneaked, lied or cheated in order to get into this country. If Agent Ivie and the US Border Patrol had been around when our forebears tried to get their chance at the so-called “American Dream,” our forebears would have been slain, and we wouldn’t be around today.

US Marines training in Arizona for border patrol duty along the Mexico border. Assault rifles to kill immigrants?

An investigative arm of the Pentagon has termed Wikileaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange, currently holed up and claiming asylum in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London for fear he will be deported to Sweden and thence to the US, and his organization, both “enemies” of the United States.

The Age newspaper in Melbourne Australia is reporting that documents obtained through the US Freedom of Information Act from the Pentagon disclose that an investigation by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, a counter-intelligence unit, of a military cyber systems analyst based in Britain who had reportedly expressed support for Wikileaks and had attended a demonstration in support of Assange, refers to the analyst as having been “communicating with the enemy, D-104.” The D-104 classification refers to an article of the US Uniform Military Code of Military Justice which prohibits military personnel from “communicating, corresponding or holding intercourse with the enemy.”

This is pretty dangerous language, referring to an Australian citizen who many consider to be no more than a working journalist who has been receiving information leaked by whistleblowers and disseminating that information to the public. As David Cole, a civil liberties attorney in the US associated with the Center for Constitutional Rights, notes, “The US military is not at war with Wikileaks or with Julian Assange.”

Certainly if a member of the US military were to go to a news organization like the New York Times — or the Melbourne Age for that matter — and leak some kind of damaging secret information exposing US military war crimes, it is hard to believe that the military would call that “communicating with the enemy” (though reportedly the Bush/Cheney administration considered, but then dropped the idea of bringing espionage charges against Times reporter James Risen for publishing in his book secret information about the government’s bungled effort to pass faulty A-bomb fuse technology to the Iranians). In any case, a military leaker could easily be charged under the military code with offenses like revealing national security secrets or some other serious charge, which would not involve charging any media organization that received the information.

The decision by the Pentagon to instead use the D-104 code to classify Assange as an “enemy” in this context is dangerous because since 9-11-2001, the US government, with the general consent of the courts, has been treating “enemies” of the state in some very frightening extra-judicial ways. Enemies of the US these days can be summarily arrested and carted away to black-site prisons or to a place like Guantanamo without even a requirement that any notice be given to friends or relatives. They can be locked up indefinitely and denied access to a lawyer. They can even be subjected to what is euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation,” which most people, and which international law, call torture, as was done to Private Bradley Manning, charged with providing hundreds of thousands of pages of secret documents to Wikileaks.

Here's the page from the Pentagon file that labels Assange and Wikileaks as "enemies" of the US

President Obama was was painful to watch at the debate on Wednesday night.

Time after time, he allowed Mitt Romney to make fraudulent statements or empty statements without slapping the Republican presidential candidate down.

When Romney talked about the allegedly great job he did in Massachusetts on education or on healthcare, Obama needed only to say, “That begs the question, governor, of why you’re polling about 31% in your home state.”

When Romney said he was running because Americans “are hurting,” as he did several times through the event, oozing fake compassion, Obama had only to say, “What are you talking about? You told your contributors that 47% of Americans are ‘victims’ whom you don’t care about and who ‘don’t take responsibility’ for themselves. That’s caring?”

Actually, there were myriad occasions Obama could have chosen to introduce the point about Romney’s admission, on tape, to a group of wealthy donors, about how he felt that 47% of the country were victims who didn’t take responsibility for themselves. Obama never even mentioned that number, though it has been part of his standard stump speech since Mother Jones magazine released the secretly recorded videotape.

Obama was a pushover at the debate, but it was by design

The internet is full of videos exposing police officers’ use of excessive physical force when trying to apprehend or detain “potential criminals”. Every year in fact there seems to be an increase in YouTube video uploads, video views, and news stories depicting this type of injustice.

Much of this increase is due to the rising number of security cameras, which allow us to witness events that otherwise may have never been publicized at all, and to the widespread use of cellphones, which almost all have video capability.

All these videocams mean police now face added transparency and accountability (where before we only had “internal” accountability… which typically has meant a slap on the wrist).

As it so happens, I work with a security camera company called 2MCCTV, so I thought it fitting to increase awareness of police brutality by showcasing videos that happened to be captured from security cameras (not from our own cameras from around the country). There would be too many to choose from if we included other countries –especially were I to include China, South Africa, Brazil, etc., as they house some of the most brutal police forces on the planet. The secondary reason for limiting this to American footage is because I think many people mistakenly still believe that the US is the one place where police brutality is not an issue, or at least not prevalent.

We all saw the brutality of NY Police against Occupy protesters, but police brutality is an everyday affair in the US

The recent outrage in Pennsylvania over the scheduled October 3 execution of a man who killed two men who had sexually abused him during his childhood has tarnished the reformer image of Philadelphia DA Seth Williams, exposing him as just another prosecutor willing to trample justice to preserve a death penalty.

When Seth Williams successfully campaigned to become Philadelphia’s top prosecutor a few years ago he used a catchy phrase: “A New Day/A New DA.”

But based on Williams’ recent posturing and positions taken by him, evidence indicates this new DA continues operating in the same old way as his predecessors.

Instead of running his office in accordance with that ‘New Day’ many expected, DA Williams is defending death penalty cases that are stained by prosecutorial misconduct and is pursuing factually bogus charges against victims of police brutality, including one involving a blind man charged with attacking the police who beat him.

The most pronounced example of Williams’ old wine/new bottle stance is his vigorous –and intellectually dishonest — public relations campaign backing the execution of child-sex abuse victim-turned-murderer Terrance Williams.

A week before the scheduled execution (which was halted by a Philadelphia judge just days before it took place), DA Williams wrote an op-ed article in the Philadelphia Inquirer in which the DA denounced death row inmate Williams for never mentioning his sexual abuse during trial. But putting aside the obvious point that a sex abuse victim might not dare to report such a violation, in his op-ed the DA himself declined to report that prosecutors during that trial had withheld evidence of that very sexual abuse, in the form of police reports about it, from the defense, the court and the jury, in order to enhance the the chances of winning a sentence of death.

The DA’s failure to mention that the prosecution had withheld important mitigating evidence is journalistic misconduct of the same nature as the prosecutorial misconduct he was hiding from readers.
The Philadelphia DA’s Office took a spanking later when, during the same week, a Philadelphia city court judge set aside the death penalty on Terrance Williams and Pennsylvania’s Board of Pardons, which had earlier met and denied Williams’ request for clemency, reconvened a clemency hearing in his case.

Terrance Williams was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on October 3 for killing one of his abusers. His death warrant had been signed in September by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, a Republican former state attorney general who ignored an avalanche of clemency pleas including pleas from former prosecutors, judges, clergy, jurors who convicted Williams and even the wife of one of Williams’ victims, who had informed prosecutors at the time of the trial that her husband had indeed earlier sexually abused his killer.

Standing behind cops and prosecutors, right or wrong, is Philly's new DA, Seth Williams (r)

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There is a simple answer to the refusal of the Two Party-Controlled Presidential Debate Commission’s refusal to include third party candidates in its three debates: An alternative televised debate that would include the third party candidates, and that would air right after the corrupt and largely meaningless debate between Obama and Romney ends.

The third-party candidates would have a chance in such a debate to answer the same questions that were put to the two major party candidates, or to say something along the lines of, “This is the stupidest question I have ever heard, and what does it have to do with the problems facing this nation and the world?” With the help of a knowledgeable and serious moderator, they could also deal with some of the questions that the official debate” won’t even be asked, such as, “Why is the US spending as much as the rest of the world combined on its military, and what are you going to do about this?”

Besides the empty Obama-Romney 'debates,' let's have real debates among the 3rd-party candidates
 

Given how unenthusiastic the American public is with the whole presidential campaign and with the two candidates on offer by the two pro-war, pro-corporate parties, it’s likely that such an alternative debate would be watched by nearly as many people as manage to sit through 90 minutes of staged blather and campaign-vetted and scripted answers from Obama and Romney.

RT-TV would be ideally suited to stage such an alternative debate series. The cable network, owned by Russian Television, but staffed with smart US reporters and hosts and run in the US, claims to reach 50 million American viewers, all of them adults (the network does not run kiddie shows or low-wattage entertainment), It would not be that hard to organize. It would not even really be necessary for the candidates to be be brought together on one stage. They could all participate from local uplink studios or from cameras taping from their own campaign offices.

It won’t do to try such a thing on YouTube. Too many people have trouble loading streaming video, or don’t even have computers or computer savvy. It needs to be done on television, but since most people do have cable, it should be possible to reach a large proportion of households that way. Democracy Now! is going to have two of the third party candidates on its program simultaneously with the official debate, which is great (though they ought to have at least the Libertarian candidate on too), but not that many cable systems carry Democracy Now! Besides, a bunch of alternative presidential candidates sitting around a table with Amy Goodman wouldn’t create the same impression on viewers as having the candidates standing behind lecterns, looking “presidential” in the manner they have come to expect candidates to “debate.”

My suggestion is that everyone who is signing those futile petitions to the major parties and to the Debate Commission calling for them to open up the official debates — a total waste of time — change their focus and start writing to RTTV calling on the network to stage alternative debates starting Oct. 3. Here is the contact addresses (flood them!): RTTV

This has to be organized quickly, though. October 3 is less than three days away.

 
This article appeared initially on the website of PressTV
 

Netanyahu blinked.

That’s the takeaway from the goofy address (complete with Spy vs. Spy-style cartoon bomb held up to the audience) by the right-wing, Cheltenham, PA-raised, MIT-educated Israeli prime minister to the United Nations General Assembly Thursday.

Prior to that address, Netanyahu had been virtually campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, hinting repeatedly on US television interviews of a pre-election attack by Israel on Iran’s nuclear fuel-making facilities, criticizing incumbent US President Barack Obama, and demanding that Obama and the US draw a “red line” on how far Iran could go in refining nuclear fuel before it would be considered essential for the US to join Israel in destroying Iran’s military infrastructure.

It was the most blatant attempt by a foreign leader to interfere in a US election in memory, but it was a bust.

American Jews have historically supported the Democratic Party by wide margins, and despite Netanyahu’s threats and bluster, and President Obama’s smack-down — a refusal of Netanyahu’s request for a meeting during his trip to the US –that support has barely budged. In fact, a number of leading Jewish Democrats, including powerful Congressmen Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), publicly told the Israeli leader to back off and stay out of US politics. In endorsing Obama’s refusal to meet with Netanyahu, Rep. Frank said, ”The Israelis have to consider American public opinion. America’s not ready to go to war until it’s absolutely necessary.” He added, “I think it’s a mistake from Israel’s standpoint if they give the impression they’re trying to push us into going to war. I don’t think any pressure’s going to work.”

As I wrote last week, even the Jewish Daily Forward, a respected journal of Jewish news and opinion published in New York City, warned Netanyahu that he had overstepped in pushing the US to go to war, and was risking Israel’s special relationship with the US.

Analysts are now suggesting that Netanyahu has backed off or been called off, even complimenting President Obama and giving him a valentine — an endorsement before election day of sorts–saying in his UN address, “I very much appreciate the president’s position, as does everyone in my country.”

Israeli PM Netanyahu and his cartoonish effort to swing the election in the US have bombed