WHOWHATWHY | ORIGINALINVESTIGATIONS

What Obama Is Up Against

By Russ Baker

The first anniversary of Barack Obama’s historic election found many of his supporters already grousing. Fair enough: Obama has been more vigorous in some areas than others. But one essential question goes unasked: How much can any president accomplish against the wishes of recalcitrant power centers within his own government?

We Americans harbor a quaint belief that a new president takes charge of a government that eagerly awaits his next command. Like an orchestra conductor or perhaps a football coach, he can inspire or bludgeon and get what he wants. But that’s not how things work at the top, especially where “national security” is concerned. The Pentagon and CIA are powerful and independent fiefdoms characterized by entrenched agendas and constant intrigue. They are full of lifers, who see an elected president largely as an annoyance, and have ways of dealing with those who won’t come to heel.

Compound that with the Bush-Cheney administration’s aggressive seeding of its staunch loyalists throughout the bureaucracy, and you have a pretty tough situation. Obama, then, has to contend not only with the big donors and corporate lobbies. His biggest problem resides right inside his “team.”

The internal battles between American presidents and their national security establishments are not much reported. But if it is an invisible game, it is also a devious and even deadly one. Our civilian leaders end up mirroring the chronically nervous chiefs of state of the fragile democracies to our south.

Those who do not kowtow to the spies and generals have had a bumpy ride. FDR and Truman both faced insubordination. Dwight Eisenhower, who had served as chief of staff of the US Army, left the White House warning darkly about the “military industrial complex.” (He of all presidents had reasons to know.) John Kennedy was repeatedly countermanded and double-crossed by his own supposed subordinates. The Joint Chiefs baited him; Allen Dulles despised him (more so after JFK fired him over the Bay of Pigs fiasco), and Henry Cabot Lodge, his ambassador to South Vietnam, deliberately undermined Kennedy’s agenda. Kennedy called the trigger-happy generals “mad” and spoke angrily to aides of “scattering the CIA to the wind.” The evidence is growing that he suffered the consequences.

In the 1950s, the late Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, a high-ranking Pentagon official, was assigned by CIA Director Allen Dulles to help place Dulles’s officers under military cover throughout the federal government. As a result, Dulles not only knew what was happening before the president did, but had essentially infiltrated every corner of the president’s domain. One Nixon-era Republican Party official told me that in the early 1970s, there were intelligence officers everywhere, including the White House. Nixon was unaware of the true background of many of his trusted aides, particularly those who helped drive him from office. Remember Alexander Butterfield, the so-called “military liaison,” who told Congress about the White House taping system? Years later, Butterfield admitted to CIA connections.

In December 1971, Nixon learned of a military spy ring, the so-called Moorer-Radford operation, that was piping White House documents back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Chiefs were wary of secret negotiations the president and Henry Kissinger were conducting with America’s enemies, including North Vietnam, China and the USSR, and decided to keep tabs on this intrusion upon their domain. Jimmy Carter came into office as revelations of CIA abuses made headlines. He tried to dismantle the agency’s dirty tricks office, but wound up instead a victim of it — and a one-term president.

Those who avoided problems — Johnson, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Jr. — were chief executives that made no problems for the Pentagon and intelligence chiefs. All embraced military and covert operations, expanded wars or launched their own. The agile Bill Clinton was a special case — no babe in the woods, he focused on domestic gains and pretty much steered clear of the hornets’ nest.

As for the Bushes, their ascension represented a seizure of power by the national security state itself. Their family had profited from arms manufacturing for decades. The patriarch, Prescott Bush, monitored US assassination plots against foreign leaders as a senator; and records indicate that the elder George Bush had been a secret agency operative for decades before he became CIA director — and then, 12 years later, president.

Obama seems to understand his narrow range of movement, and to be carefully picking his fights. He retained many of Bush’s top military brass, and even Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who himself had served as a CIA director for Bush’s father. He has trod very carefully with the spy agency and has declined to aggressively investigate Bush administration wrongdoing on torture and wiretapping. Obama’s campaign rhetoric about disengaging from Iraq seems a long time ago, and the war in Afghanistan is taking on the hues of permanency.

The old boys’ network is very much in place, and it is hard at work to force Obama’s hand, a la Vietnam. Witness the leaking of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s supposedly “confidential report” calling for escalation in Afghanistan. The leak was, not surprisingly, to the reliable Bob Woodward. The reporter was himself in Naval Intelligence shortly before he went to work at the Washington Post, where he soon built a career around leaks from the military and spy establishment. The White House was furious at the McChrystal release. But what could it do? Presidents come and go, and the security folks have ways to hasten the latter.

Covert alliances and payments to corrupt foreign allies continue, making creative diplomacy more difficult. In late October came a front-page story that the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, suspected of being a major figure in that country’s opium trade, has been on the CIA’s payroll for eight years. Anyone who finds this shocking should go back and read about the CIA and the drug trade in Southeast Asia.

Throughout its six-decade history, the CIA has resisted accountability, with even some of its own nonspook directors kept in the dark about the agency’s most troubling activities. As for the public’s elected representatives, Nancy Pelosi is the most recent in a long line of legislators to accuse the CIA of deliberately misleading Congressional overseers.

None of this is likely to change soon, and not without a huge fight. Half a century after Ike’s famous admonition, conflict and intrigue remain the engine of our economy, and everyone from private equity firms to missile makers to car and truck manufacturers count on that to continue. The homeland security industry, the most recent head to grow on this hydra, is now seeking permanency.

So Barack Obama is boxed in. But so are the American people, and so, really, is democracy itself. Bringing this inconvenient truth out in the open is the essential first step toward taking back control of our government — and our future. For all the reasons laid out here, Obama will need help. He may, in the rote formulation, hold “the most powerful office in the world.” However, the extent to which he controls the government he heads, is another matter.

Former Intel Chief: Stop the Drone Strikes Obama

Published on Friday, July 29, 2011 by Politico.com

Former Intel Chief: Stop the Drone Strikes

Dennis Blair rips Obama White House

by Josh Gerstein

ASPEN, Colo.—Former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair unloaded on the White House Thursday evening, strongly criticizing the administration’s reliance on U.S.-directed drone strikes and saying officials have failed to implement the lessons of Sept. 11 by backing away from efforts to integrate the intelligence community.

'Pull back on unilateral actions by the United States,' Blair urged Thursday. (AP Photo) Blair, who was essentially fired by President Barack Obama last year, said the administration should curtail U.S.-led drone strikes on suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia because the missiles fired from unmanned aircraft are fueling anti-American sentiment and undercutting reform efforts in those countries.

“Pull back on unilateral actions by the United States, except in extraordinary circumstances,” Blair urged during an onstage, hourlong interview with CBS’s Lesley Stahl at the Aspen Security Forum. “I think we need to change — in those three countries — in a dramatic way.”

“We’re alienating the countries concerned, because we’re treating countries just as places where we go attack groups that threaten us. We are threatening the prospects for long-term reform raised by the Arab Spring … which would make these countries capable and willing allies who could in fact knock that threat down to a nuisance level,” Blair said.

Blair said drone strikes in Pakistan have hampered Al Qaeda and other militant groups there but they will never succeed in reducing them to a mere nuisance.

“I think that they can sustain their level of resistance to an air-only campaign long enough to continue to pose this threat,” the ex-DNI said. “I just see us with that strategy walking out on a thinner and thinner ledge and if even we get to the far extent of it, we are not going to lower the fundamental threat to the U.S. any lower than we have it now.”

As he elaborated on his views on drone strikes Thursday, Blair conceded that giving the Pakistanis veto over such operations would complicate U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan, but he said it would be wise to do, nonetheless.

“That would make our job in Afghanistan more difficult for a while, but it would make it a lot easier over the long term,” he argued.

The former DNI also said he wasn’t suggesting that the U.S. should never act unilaterally, as it did in May when a joint U.S. military-CIA operation killed Osama bin Laden in a raid that took place on Pakistani soil without the prior knowledge of the government there.

“That was a gotta do,” Blair said.

Blair also urged a markedly new approach to the U.S. relationship with Pakistan, which has been particularly strained in recent months.

“We should offer the Pakistanis to put two hands on the trigger,” Blair said, while adding that the U.S. should again press Islamabad to send troops into ungoverned areas along the border with Afghanistan. “Pakistan with American assistance could bring peace to the valleys and it would benefit both of us. … That is the only way that we are going to get that witches brew of terrorist groups in the northwest part of Pakistan under control.”

Under questioning by Stahl, Blair also confirmed some of the disagreements that led to his ouster as DNI in May 2010. He said the White House’s decision to side with the CIA over him in several turf battles left his authority diminished.

“They sided with the CIA in ways that were public enough that it undercut my position. That’s true,” Blair said. He called the outcome “bad for the country” because it limited efforts to combine forces from across the intelligence community in a centrally directed way.

“When this administration came in, there just weren’t many people on the president’s staff or the president himself who had been through the consequences of a stove-piped intelligence community. They saw that the sharing that went on seemed to be OK — for them. They didn’t see the opportunity cost of not pushing it. They were happy with what they saw and wanted to stick with it,” Blair said.

He brushed aside Stahl’s queries about reports that his exit was due in part to a lack of personal chemistry with Obama. “I try to keep the personalities out of it,” the former DNI said.

However, he said the intelligence system Obama has opted for will deliver “an attenuated, least common denominator response to important questions instead of the prioritized, directed response that I think the country needs.”

Asked how Obama would balance the personalities of new Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, new CIA Director David Petraeus and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Blair said: “The White House will probably continue to do what they did, which is — we’d like to ask a number of people to get their opinion and we’ll coordinate it in the White House.”

“My experience is the White House is not a very good place to coordinate intelligence much less to integrate it,” Blair added, to a sudden smattering of applause from the audience consisting largely of former intelligence personnel, retired military officers and business people involved in the counterterrorism fight.

A White House spokesman declined to comment on Blair’s remarks.

Obama administration officials and even some of Blair’s allies have said that he picked unwise battles with the CIA and its then-Director Leon Panetta, a veteran Washington operator. He had barely met Obama before being selected for the job and reportedly didn’t mesh well with National Security Council officials.

However, Obama’s decisions to undercut Blair’s authority seriously complicated the White House’s search for a replacement. Several high-profile figures reportedly rejected the job before Obama nominated the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, retired Lieut. Gen. James Clapper, to the post.

Blair has generally kept a low-profile since he was dismissed last year. The retired admiral made a couple of public appearances in May — doing an interview with Charlie Rose and testifying before a Senate committee. In neither case was he as critical of the administration as he was Thursday.

© 2011 Politico

Where is Our Crisis President? Solving or Creating Crises?

Published on Thursday, July 28, 2011 by The American Prospect

Where is Our Crisis President?

by Robert Kuttner

Like most American spectators watching this slow-motion train wreck of a budget disaster, I have assumed that at the last minute the damsel would be pulled off the track of the oncoming train. Somehow, the Republicans would appreciate the stakes, a compromise (albeit on sickeningly Republican terms) would be reached, and the nation would be spared the catastrophe of default—a gratuitous deepening of an already dire economic mess.

Now I am not so sure. In the last 48 hours, the Republicans have dug in even more, and Democrats are drawing the line at the Reid plan (which is already far too Republican).

For those who think that a default won’t happen because it is in nobody’s interest, think back on World War I. It was in nobody’s interest. Yet it destroyed Europe’s common civilization and ushered in nearly a century of economic instability and war. World War I occurred because both sides dug in and assumed the other would have to blink first. But that was a miscalculation. Instead of a last-minute deal, we got four years of trench warfare, economic ruin, and millions of wasted lives. Oops.

This is where we are headed. As I have written elsewhere, the only thing that will spare us now is for President Obama to invoke the 14th Amendment. I’ve written this so many times—for the Prospect, for Huffington Post, and last night at the invitation of Politico that it almost feels like I’m recycling myself.

Mike Tomasky, our former executive editor, has a good piece in Daily Beast/Newsweek today making the same argument but questions whether Obama has the nerve to do it—the usual question with our president.

And Representative James Clyburn, the third ranking Democrat in the House, has been fairly pleading with his president to take the 14th. There will be a press conference today, at 14th Street and Constitution Avenue (get it?) by Democratic House members, led by Clyburn and urging this course.

This may sound churlish at such a moment, but in addition to blaming the recklessness of today’s Republican party, the man who deserves substantial blame for this impending economic doomsday is Barack Obama. For two and a half years, he has been all but training the Republicans, Pavlov fashion, to keep rejecting compromise. He has done this by rewarding them with a treat every time they up the ante or move the goal posts.

Obama’s job, as a crisis president, was to define the nature of the economic disaster and the way out of it, to move public opinion in his direction, and then to make it very costly for Republicans to resist. That’s what the great crisis presidents have done.

Instead, his manner—conciliation at all costs—in addition to costing the Democrats a midterm blowout, has only produced a more radical and intransigent Republican Party. Even this week, his manner at his address to the nation was earnest, professorial, even pleading. So if the Republicans, like Europe’s leaders of 1914, miscalculate and create disaster, the responsibility will partly be theirs but also partly our overly eager-to-please president.

The 14th Amendment option gives him a belated chance to recoup—to spare catastrophe, to demonstrate nerve and leadership. What do you say, Mr. President?

© 2011 The American Prospect

Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine, as well as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the think tank Demos. He was a longtime columnist for Business Week, and continues to write columns in the Boston Globe and Huffington Post. He is the author of A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama's Promise, Wall Street's Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future, Obama's Challenge, and other books.

SOS: Same Old Lack of Change You Can Believe In

American politics

Democracy in America

Barack Obama's re-election campaign

Lack of change you can believe in

“IT BEGINS”, concludes the video launching Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, “with us.” That is, it begins with ordinary, hard-working, upstanding citizens getting together to speak out for what they believe in. And what is that, exactly? A woman in Arizona (Gladys, a caption helpfully informs us) talks vaguely about finding a job, owning a house and putting kids through college. Aside from these unobjectionable goals, however, there is no hint as to what Mr Obama stands for or how he intends to achieve it.

In one sense, that should come as no surprise: one of the strengths (and weaknesses) of Mr Obama’s first presidential campaign was a series of uplifting but fuzzy slogans such as “Change you can believe in”, which allowed him to be all things to all people. But for good or for ill, it is harder to peddle “that hope-y, change-y stuff”, as Sarah Palin memorably put it, now that voters have more of the measure of Mr Obama as a leader. Moreover, you would think the media, having been excoriated in right-wing circles for fawning on Mr Obama the first time around, would be determined not to let such waffle pass unchallenged.

Yet the only aspect of Mr Obama’s new campaign that seems to interest the pundits is whether it will be the first to cost $1 billion, exceeding his record-breaking outlay of $750m last time around. The announcement of his candidacy, after all, seems timed to come as close as possible to the beginning of the second quarter, a new fund-raising period under federal election law, without falling on April Fools Day. And the main purpose of Mr Obama’s campaign website seems to be soliciting donations. (For information about Mr Obama’s policies and accomplishments, the website advises, visit www.whitehouse.gov.)

All this makes for an ironic contrast with the Republican presidential field. Most of the coverage of the many potential and few declared Republican candidates focuses on their beliefs, or professed ones, or the discrepancies between the two. How do they play with the tea-party movement? What are they saying about the deficit, or Libya, or global warming? How have their stances evolved as their presidential ambitions have grown? What is their path to the nomination, in the sense of appealing to certain constituencies with targeted rhetoric or policies? There is some talk of money and staffing, to be sure, but ideological positioning seems to count for more than organisational rigour in the media’s reckoning.

Mr Obama, of course, is better known to the electorate, and also seems unlikely to face a primary challenge, with all the ideological pandering that entails. But it still would be nice to hear a little bit more about what his priorities are in the light of the economic and political headwinds he has encountered over the past few years. By the same token, it would be interesting to know whether any of the mooted Republican candidates is capable of mounting, or paying for, a campaign of the same sophistication and scale as Mr Obama’s. At the moment, at any rate, it’s not clear whether he knows why he is running or whether they know how to beat him.

Obama Follows the GOP Road Map and GPS System

Published on Friday, July 22, 2011 by In These Times

With GOP Roadmap in Hand, Where Will Obama and Dems Wind Up?

by Roger Bybee

Some pundits imagine that President Obama has thoroughly out-foxed the Republicans on the debt-ceiling debate, arguing that he could safely push for “the biggest deal possible”—including concessions on Social Security and Medicare—because Republicanas are too divided to grasp the deal they'd be getting.

Meanwhile, pundits say, Obama is impressing “independent” voters with his willingness to "compromise."

"Democrats have accepted one Republican/corporate premise after another, with potentially devastating implications for the people who worked so hard to elect them." (photo: Patrick Gage)

But Obama and many key Democrats have adopted crucial elements of the Republican/corporate frame on the economy. Whether or not Republicans are able to make these framing concessions pay off now in the debt-ceiling talks, the Democrats’ constituents will suffer in the long haul.

Democrats have accepted one Republican/corporate premise after another, with potentially devastating implications for the people who worked so hard to elect them:

1) Government debt—not the moral debt that the nation owes to working people out of work or under-employed for year after year—is the nation’s leading priority. The notion that reducing unemployment would significantly lower the deficit has been ruled out of bounds, because it would involve spending more government money.

2) Taxes on millionaires and billionaires cannot be raised immediately, because it would discourage these “job creators” from investing in the U.S. economy and speeding up the recovery. As the New York Times reported,

Mr. Obama used his news conference to counter Republicans’ attacks suggesting that he wanted immediate tax increases. With the economy still weak and unemployment high, he said, tax increases should not take effect before 2013…”

3) Social Security must be “trimmed” –in Obama’s term—because it will start encountering problems in 2037.

4 ) Medicare must be seriously cut back because of fast-rising costs.

5) High U.S. corporate taxes make American uncompetitive, and loopholes must be eliminated while overall rates are lowered.

If they accept all these ideas, how does the Democratic Party look any different to voters than the GOP? How can the voters count on Democrats to stand up for them when the chips are down?

This unwillingness to take clear moral stands has led to a dangerous blurring of the Democrats’ identity in the public mind. In 2006, pollsters and political analysts John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira analyzed Democracy Corps polling data and concluded: "A majority of Americans do not believe progressives or Democrats stand for anything."

The Obama administration—with its close identification with Wall Street leaders—has only exacerbated the problem rather than offering the much hoped-for alternative of government dedicated to serving the people most in need.

THE NEW PRIORITIES

The set of priorities now embraced by the Obama team is unrecognizable by anyone who witnessed his 2008 campaign, as reflected in the president's praise for the “Gang of Six,” a bipartisan group of conservatives who managed to persuade the usually liberal Sen. Dick Durbin to sign on. While many members of the Democrats’ Progressive Cacusus have been unsually quiet, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been outspoken on the direction promoted by the Gang and Obama:

While all of the details from the so-called Gang of Six proposals are not yet clear, what is apparent is that the plan would result in devastating cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and many other programs that are of vital importance to working families in this country.

Meanwhile, tax rates would be lowered for the wealthiest people and the largest, most profitable corporations. This is an approach that should be rejected by the American people.

At a time when the rich are becoming richer and corporate profits are soaring, at least half of any deficit-reduction package must come from upper-income people and profitable corporations. We must also take a hard look at military spending, which has tripled since 1997.

Specifically, these are the Republican/corporate priorities now being pursued to varying degrees by Obama, the Gang of Six and some other Democrats:

1) BOOST BUSINESS CONFIDENCE: With a new stress on reassuring corporate CEOs that their investments are welcomed in the United States, we witness the Obama economic team making frantic efforts to build “business confidence” by reducing the deficit—even if it means slashing public-sector jobs and deepening the recession.

Further, the Obama administration is now promoting free trade agreements with South Korea , Colombia and Panama. These agreements blatantly contradict the campaign-trail rhetoric of Obama in 2008 that allowed him to carry the nation’s industrial belt from upstate New York to Wisconsin.

2) CUT SOCIAL SECURITY: There is an urgent need to strengthen Social Security, as few Americans have been able to save for their retirements given real-wage declkines since 1973 and nore recent, pervasive wage-cutting.

Instead, America is headed on a path of cutting Social Security although it is now fiscally sound and not due to enounter any problems until 2037, argues economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Political Reserceh. When it comes to Socail Security, Obama has rapidly jettisoned his egalitarian words and latched on to reactionary solutions:

When President Obama preaches equality of sacrifice, it is the elderly and the poor who are supposed to do most of the sacrificing. His plan to change the annual cost-of-living adjustment formula for Social Security would reduce benefits for someone in their seventies by 3 percent, in their eighties by 6 percent and in their nineties by 9 percent.

These are huge cuts. The Republicans are screaming bloody murder because President Obama wants to raise the top tax rate by 4.6 percentage points. Imagine that he proposed raising taxes on the wealthy by twice as much. That is effectively what he is proposing for people in their nineties who are entirely dependent on Social Security.

And he is proposing to impose this tax on seniors who had nothing to do with the crisis, while leaving Wall Street untouched. A modest tax on financial speculation could raise more than $150 billion a year or $1.5 trillion over the course of a decade.

3) CUT MEDICARE: America' s roll of the uninsured is growing rapidly as premiums soar, employers dump coverage and insurers rack up record profits. At a moment like this, when many millions of workers in their 50s and 60s are being displaced with little chance of bying insurance in the private marketplace, it makes enormous sense to cover these folks by lowering the Medicare age and allowing them to pay for coverage through Medicare.

Instead, we are seeing a push by the Gang of Six—with Obama apparently concurring—to raise the Medicaid eligibility age to 67. This will mean millions of people floating around without insurance, unable to see a doctor and finally being forced to use emergency rooms when their conditions become sufficiently grave.

While I’m not surprised to see the current crew of Republican zealots thinking this is just the most excellent idea, it is hard to envison even Blue Dog Democrats wagging their tails about this approach.

5) CUT CORPORATE TAXES: Barack Obam’s Jobs and Competitivnesss Council is headed up by GE CEO Jefrrey Immelt, so we should perhaps not be surprised by Obama and Democrats like Kent Conrad incessantly repeating the myth that U.S. corporate taxes are too high. We should seek to eliminate loopholes and lower rates overall, runs the dominant line in Washington, D.C., even among Democrats.

However, as Edmund L. Andrews documents,

By most measures, the corporate tax burden is lower in the United States than it is in the European Union or in Japan or most other industrialized countries…

Those who see the American corporate tax as oppressive point to a striking fact: the standard corporate tax rate of 35 percent is now higher than that of most other industrialized countries. The average top rate is 25.8 percent in the European Union, where most nations have cut rates to attract investment.

But official tax rates are not the same as actual tax burdens. What American companies lose in high tax rates they more than make up in higher tax breaks.

What is the final outcome when top Democrats accept these myths and fail to see the vast suffering among the jobless, the uninsured, the impoverished elederly?

Instead of coming up with progressive solutions that expand ordinary people's economic rights and extend democracy, Democrats go along with a slightly less onerous version of the Republican program. That is what we are seeing right now.

That is no formula for maintaining an enthusiastic, fired-up base. And it isn't a formula for winning the presidential election in 2012, no matter how vile the Republican candidate is.

© 2011 In These Times

Barack Obama said Social Security and other federal checks may not go out on Aug. 3

PolitiFact

politifact.com/truth-o-meter/

The Truth-O-Meter Says: Half True

Social Security and other federal checks may not go out on Aug. 3 if the debt ceiling is not increased.

Barack Obama on Tuesday, July 12th, 2011 in an interview with CBS News

Barack Obama said Social Security and other federal checks may not go out on Aug. 3 if the debt ceiling is not increased

In an interview with CBS News, President Barack Obama raised the possibility that the federal government might not be able to send out Social Security checks if a debt ceiling deal is not reached. We checked his claim.

President Barack Obama and Congress are in intense discussions on raising the debt ceiling -- the legal limit on how much money the government can borrow. But the negotiations aren't going so well, leaving observers -- and some participants -- to consider whether there are Plan B's, Plan C's and Plan D's if the negotiators can't reach an agreement in time.

After hitting the debt ceiling earlier this year, the U.S. Treasury Department juggled accounts as a temporary measure that bought time for further negotiations. But officials now expect the debt limit to be reached on Aug. 2, 2011.

While most if not all federal accounts are affected in some way by the debt limit debate, the most urgent items for many ordinary Americans are direct transfer payments, most notably Social Security and veterans' benefits.

Obama was asked about this in a July 12, 2011, interview with CBS News anchor Scott Pelley. Here's their exchange:

Pelley: "Can you tell the folks at home that, no matter what happens, the Social Security checks are going to go out on August the 3rd? There are about $20 billion worth of Social Security checks that have to go out the day after the government is supposedly going to go into default."

Obama: "Well, this is not just a matter of Social Security checks. These are veterans' checks, these are folks on disability and their checks. There are about 70 million checks that go out each month."

Pelley: "Can you guarantee, as president, that those checks will go out on August the 3rd?"

Obama: "I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue, because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it."

We heard from a lot of readers who wanted us to check whether that statement was factually accurate or if Obama was using scare tactics.

Back in February, we examined a similar statement by Obama -- that if there's a government shutdown, "people don't get their Social Security checks." We rated that Barely True.

Social Security is a mandatory program supported by a trust fund, so Social Security benefits don't have to be formally approved by Congress every year. However, Social Security Administration employees are paid through appropriated funds. The real question about a government shutdown was whether those employees would be kept from going to work and if so, whether the checks would sit idle rather than arriving in mailboxes nationwide. The rules that cover government shutdowns provide some leeway for federal workers to carry out core Social Security functions. This flexibility allowed checks to go out during a 1995 shutdown, even as less-urgent agency functions lagged.

However, the two scenarios -- a government shutdown caused by the absence of funding approved by Congress and a debt ceiling impasse that prevents new borrowing -- are different. So the consequences of one do not necessarily match the consequences of the other.

The Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress, put it this way: "Failing to raise the debt ceiling would not bring the government to a screeching halt the way that not passing appropriations bills would. Employees would not be sent home, and checks would continue to be issued. If the Treasury was low on cash, however, there could be delays in honoring checks and disruptions in the normal flow of government services."

This is because the government receives both cash, including tax revenue, and bills at irregular intervals. So it doesn't always have enough cash on hand to pay all its debts at any given moment. (Families and businesses will recognize this as the always-dreaded "cash flow problem.")

The Treasury Department has argued that failure to raise the debt limit actually would have more dramatic consequences than a government shutdown. "If Congress fails to increase the debt limit, the government would have to stop, limit, or delay payments on a broad range of legal obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, military salaries, interest on the national debt, tax refunds, and many other commitments," the department said in a statement.

How broad would the impact be? The Bipartisan Policy Center -- a Washington, D.C.-based think tank with a board that includes former politicians from both parties -- conducted an analysis of what the government's fiscal situation would be if a deal on the debt ceiling is not reached.

When the center analyzed the government's inflows and outflows for the rest of August 2011, it found $172.4 billion in cash coming in, to offset required payments of $306.7 billion. That works out to a deficit of $134.3 billion.

With that amount of income to work with, the government -- if it could prioritize payments, and we'll say more on that later -- could pay the monthly costs of Medicare and Medicaid ($50 billion), Social Security ($49.2 billion), Pentagon vendors ($31.7 billion), interest on the debt ($29 billion), and unemployment benefits ($12.8 billion). Those categories total $172.7 billion.

But doing so would mean delaying other payments -- for instance, Pell grants and other educational programs ($20.2 billion), salaries and benefits for federal employees ($14.2 billion), welfare and food programs ($9.3 billion), health and human services grants ($8.1 billion), housing assistance ($6.7 billion), and many other programs, including military active duty pay ($2.9 billion), veterans affairs program ($2.9 billion), Department of Justice funding that includes the FBI and federal courts ($1.4 billion) and IRS refunds ($3.9 billion).

If the government could prioritize payments to creditors it deemed most important -- bondholders, say, or Social Security beneficiaries -- it could be a viable stopgap, at least for the favored creditors. But does the government have the power to prioritize whom it pays?

The answer is somewhat in dispute. Here's how CRS describes it:

"Some have argued that prioritization of payments can be used by Treasury to avoid a default on federal obligations by paying interest on outstanding debt before other obligations," CRS wrote in a study published earlier this year. "Treasury officials have maintained that the department lacks formal legal authority to establish priorities to pay obligations, asserting, in effect, that each law obligating funds and authorizing expenditures stands on an equal footing. In other words, Treasury would have to make payments on obligations as they come due."

But CRS added that this view contrasts with one expressed by the Government Accountability Office in 1985 (when the office, the auditing arm of Congress, was known as the General Accounting Office). The GAO found "no requirement" that Treasury pay its bills in a first-in, first-out fashion. "Treasury is free to liquidate obligations in any order it finds will best serve the interests of the United States," the GAO concluded.

Even if the government has the authority to prioritize payments such as Social Security checks, doing so would still entail some downsides, and some of these might be considered politically or practically untenable.

Doing so merely kicks certain payments down the road, where they may accrue additional interest charges, worsening an already difficult fiscal climate. "A backlog of unpaid bills would continue to grow until the government collects more revenues or other sources of cash than its outlays," CRS wrote. "In some cases, delaying federal payments incurs interest penalties under some statutes such as the Prompt Payment Act, which directs the government to pay interest penalties to contractors if it does not pay them by the required payment date, and the Internal Revenue Code, which requires the government to pay interest penalties if tax refunds are delayed beyond a certain date."

Even if payments to bondholders were prioritized, the bond market may still be spooked by the delays in other federal payments, risking harm to the nation's creditworthiness. "If the federal government were to prioritize payments on debt obligations above other obligations, it is not clear whether financial markets would find this distinction to be significant when deciding whether and how to invest in federal government Treasury securities," CRS wrote. CRS added, "if creditors lost this confidence, the federal government’s interest costs would likely increase substantially, and there would likely be broader disruptions to financial markets."

Delaying certain payments, even while making others, could ripple through the economy and drag down already weak economic growth. "Removing a portion of government spending from the economy would leave behind significant economic effects and would have an effect on" gross domestic product, CRS wrote.

There are also some specific technical challenges for shifting funding into and out of the Social Security Trust Fund, which our friends at the Washington Post Fact-Checker column looked into here.

Most of the experts we interviewed agreed that the federal government, if push came to shove, could probably find a way to prioritize Social Security or other payments, though none expressed absolute certainty. However, most of the experts also acknowledged practical challenges of using such tactics.

While he thinks the GAO's green light for payment prioritization carries significant weight, Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute added that "with so much being borrowed, it is hard simply to pick on a few programs" to continue in the face of a debt ceiling impasse.

Ronald M. Levin, a professor at the Washington University School of Law said, "I interpret the president to be saying, 'Stopping Social Security checks would be hugely costly, but other curtailments would also be hugely costly. ... Something will have to give, and I cannot responsibly guarantee that it won’t be Social Security.' That is not quite what he said, but to my mind it’s close."

Where does this leave us? The critics likely have a point when they say Obama is playing up the risk to the most sympathetic potential victims -- Social Security recipients, 23 percent of whom live in households that depend on the retirement system for 90 percent or more of their income. While it's not a certainty that the Obama administration could prioritize cutting checks to seniors, there's a reasonable shot that the administration could do it.

On the other hand, doing so would likely cause a lot of collateral damage to other American creditors, federal workers, students, Pentagon vendors and countless others -- and could also hamper the broader economy at a particularly sensitive time. The president is probably justified in saying that the possibility of an un-raised debt ceiling jeopardizes Social Security checks -- after all, it hasn't happened before, so no one knows for sure. But we also think the president probably has tools at his disposal to avoid the worst-case scenario for seniors that he expresses concern about. Acknowledging that there are a lot of uncertainties, we rate his statement Half True.

Obama's big debt ceiling cave

Thursday, Jul 21, 2011 15:22 ET

Obama's big debt ceiling cave

Democrats are upset at reports of a deal with $3 trillion in cuts, and no new revenues

By Andrew Leonard

APSpeaker of the House, John Boehner; President Barack Obama

How often do you get to see a front page breaking news New York Times story shot down before it's even published? At 12:38 EDT on Thursday, the Times tweeted a news alert: "Obama and Boehner Close to Major Budget Deal, Congressional Leaders Are Told." But in an indication of just how overheated the debt ceiling news cycle is right now, before the Times managed to publish its own story on the news, both Speaker of the House John Boehner (via tweet) and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney (via press briefing) declared that there was no deal.

It's probably smarter to trust the Times than the public statements of elected officials. Boehner still has to give lip service to the "Cut-Cap-and-Balance" bill passed by the House on Wednesday -- the Senate's vote is scheduled for Saturday, and it's unlikely that any real deal will get announced before then. As for the White House, if the details leaking out describing the contours of the current state of play are accurate, then Obama also has reason for reticence. Numerous media outlets are reporting that the White House is offering $3 trillion in spending cuts -- with no revenue increases at all.

Neither grand, nor a bargain. If the reports are true, then Republicans have won the game of debt ceiling chicken.

From The Hill:

Democrats were told Wednesday night that Obama is prepared to cut a deal with Boehner that would include spending cuts and concrete entitlement reforms, according to two senior Democratic aides.

The aides said the deal would only include the promise of tax reform next year. This would represent a major concession, the aides said, since it would not include any concrete revenue increases as part of the deal.

At the Huffington Post, Sam Stein offers a possible interpretation of what the "promise of tax reform" might mean:

The White House has laid out an alternative suggestion during past negotiations: Lawmakers would be required to find $800 billion in additional revenues over the next decade. If they could not find an agreement, then the Bush-era tax cuts for the high-end earners will expire.

The promise of tax hikes later in return for spending cuts now is dodgy in the extreme. Having achieved overwhelming success during this round, what leverage would Obama have to enforce the new revenue requirements in the future, aside from another huge political fight over the Bush tax cuts during the heat of a presidential campaign. And even in this scenario, the White House is still retreating from its earlier insistence on $1 trillion in revenue increases in exchange for spending cuts.

Bottom line: The White House continues to compromise, while Republicans stand firm. And why not? It keeps working!

The National Review reports that Senate leaders briefed by White House Budget Director Jack Lew are unhappy and it's not hard to understand why. (Hat tip: Jon Chait.)

Senate Democrats just wrapped up a meeting with OMB Director Jack Lew in the Capitol and they are not pleased.... Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) told reporters that a call came in from the White House during the meeting to announce a "potential agreement" with House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio).

Reid appeared to confirm reports that the proposed deal would not raise significant revenue, at least in the near term, and indicated that he didn't think this would be acceptable to Democrats in congress. "The president always talked about balance, there had to be some fairness in this," he said, grimly. "This can't be all cuts. There has to be balance, there has to revenue and cuts."

I'm not in the habit of agreeing very often with the National Review, but its analysis stings with some ugly truth:

So, provided the reports are generally true, is Obama really willing to sell all Congressional Democrats down the river (apart from the moderates facing reelection in 2012) just to win another term? I think the answer is self-evident.

Ouch.

UPDATE: And another White House denial. A tweet from White House Communications Director David Pfeiffer:

RT @pfeiffer44: Anyone reporting a $3T deal w/o revenues is incorrect. POTUS believes we need a balanced approach that includes revenues.

• Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More: Andrew Leonard

Barack Obama is Gutting the Core Principles of the Democratic Party

Published on Thursday, July 21, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

Barack Obama is Gutting the Core Principles of the Democratic Party

The president's attacks on America's social safety net are destroying the soul of the Democratic party's platform

by Glenn Greenwald

In 2005, American liberals achieved one of their most significant political victories of the last decade. It occurred with the resounding rejection of George W Bush's campaign to privatize social security.

Barack Obama. The President, writes Greenwald, "In many crucial areas, has done more to subvert and weaken the left's political agenda than a GOP president could have dreamed of achieving. So potent, so overarching, are tribal loyalties in American politics that partisans will support, or at least tolerate, any and all policies their party's leader endorses – even if those policies are ones they long claimed to loathe." (Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

Bush's scheme would have gutted the crux of that entitlement programme by converting it from what it has been since the 1940s – a universal guarantor of minimally decent living conditions for America's elderly – into a Wall Street casino and bonanza.

Progressive activists and bloggers relentlessly attacked both the plan and underlying premises (the myth that social security faces a "crisis"), spawning nationwide opposition. Only a few months after he unveiled his scheme to great fanfare, Bush was forced to sheepishly withdraw it, a defeat he described as his biggest failure.

That victory established an important political fact. While there are very few unifying principles for the Democratic party, one (arguably the primary one) is a steadfast defence of basic entitlement programs for the poor and elderly – social security, Medicare and Medicaid – from the wealthy, corporatised factions that have long targeted them for cuts.

But in 2009, clear signs emerged that President Obama was eager to achieve what his right-predecessor could not: cut social security. Before he was even inaugurated, Obama echoed the right's manipulative rhetorical tactic: that (along with Medicare) the programme was in crisis and producing "red ink as far as the eye can see." President-elect Obama thus vowed that these crown jewels of his party since the New Deal would be, as Politico reported, a "central part" of his efforts to reduce the deficit.

The next month, his top economic adviser, the Wall Street-friendly Larry Summers, also vowed specific benefit cuts to Time magazine. He then stacked his "deficit commission" with long-time advocates of social security cuts.

Many progressives, ebullient over the election of a Democratic president, chose to ignore these preliminary signs, unwilling to believe that their own party's leader was as devoted as he claimed to attacking the social safety net. But some were more realistic. The popular liberal blogger and economist Duncan "Atrios" Black, who was one of the leaders of the campaign against Bush's privatisation scheme, vowed in response to these early reports:

The left ... will create an epic 360-degree shitstorm if Obama and the Dems decide that cutting social security benefits is a good idea.

Fast forward to 2011: it is now beyond dispute that President Obama not only favours, but is the leading force in Washington pushing for, serious benefit cuts to both social security and Medicare.

This week, even as GOP leaders offered schemes to raise the debt ceiling with no cuts, the White House expressed support for the Senate's so-called "gang of six" plan that includes substantial cuts in those programmes.

The same Democratic president who supported the transfer of $700bn to bail out Wall Street banks, who earlier this year signed an extension of Bush's massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and who has escalated America's bankruptcy-inducing posture of Endless War, is now trying to reduce the debt by cutting benefits for America's most vulnerable – at the exact time that economic insecurity and income inequality are at all-time highs.

Where is the "epic shitstorm" from the left which Black predicted? With a few exceptions – the liberal blog FiredogLake has assembled 50,000 Obama supporters vowing to withhold re-election support if he follows through, and a few other groups have begun organising as well – it's nowhere to be found.

Therein lies one of the most enduring attributes of Obama's legacy: in many crucial areas, he has done more to subvert and weaken the left's political agenda than a GOP president could have dreamed of achieving. So potent, so overarching, are tribal loyalties in American politics that partisans will support, or at least tolerate, any and all policies their party's leader endorses – even if those policies are ones they long claimed to loathe.

This dynamic has repeatedly emerged in numerous contexts. Obama has continued Bush/Cheney terrorism policies – once viciously denounced by Democrats – of indefinite detention, renditions, secret prisons by proxy, and sweeping secrecy doctrines.

He has gone further than his predecessor by waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, seizing the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process far from any battlefield, massively escalating drone attacks in multiple nations, and asserting the authority to unilaterally prosecute a war (in Libya) even in defiance of a Congressional vote against authorising the war.

And now he is devoting all of his presidential power to cutting the entitlement programmes that have been the defining hallmark of the Democratic party since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. The silence from progressive partisans is defeaning – and depressing, though sadly predictable.

The nature of American politics is that once a policy is removed from the partisan wars – once it is adopted by the leadership of both parties – it is removed from mainstream debate and fortified as bipartisan consensus. That is why false claims in the run-up to the Iraq war, endorsed by both parties, received so little mainstream journalistic scrutiny. And it's why the former Bush lawyer and right-wing ideologue Jack Goldsmith – back in May 2009 – celebrated in The New Republic the fact that Obama was doing more to strengthen Bush/Cheney terrorism policies than his former bosses could have ever achieved: by embracing the very terrorism approach he once denounced, Obama was converting it from rightwing radicalism into into the official dogma of both parties, and forcing his supporters to defend what were, until 2009, the symbols of rightwing evil.

Identically, Obama is now on the verge of injecting what until recently was the politically toxic and unattainable dream of Wall Street and the American right – attacks on the nation's social safety net – into the heart and soul of the Democratic party's platform. Those progressives who are guided more by party loyalty than actual belief will seamlessly transform from virulent opponents of such cuts into their primary defenders.

And thus will Obama succeed – yet again – in gutting not only core Democratic policies, but also the identity and power of the American Left.

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy. His next book is titled "With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful."

Obama's Debt Myopia and Little Else Agenda

Published on Monday, July 18, 2011 by the Associated Press

Debt Talks and Little Else on Washington's Agenda

by Julie Pace

WASHINGTON — The debt showdown isn't just the dominant issue in Washington this summer — it's virtually the only one getting any attention in the nation's capital.

From the White House to Congress, the negotiations over raising the U.S. debt limit have overshadowed or halted work on everything from job creation to the military conflict in Libya to education reform. (Getty images) From the White House to Congress, the negotiations over raising the U.S. debt limit have overshadowed or halted work on everything from job creation to the military conflict in Libya to education reform. And the debt debate has hamstrung President Barack Obama's ability to hit the road to campaign and raise money for his re-election bid.

The frenetic pace of Washington often means what is news one day can fade to the background the next. But rarely does a singular issue suck up so much of the oxygen for such a sustained period.

Obama hasn't traveled outside Washington in July, except for a weekend jaunt to the presidential retreat at Camp David. Lawmakers who previously met with the president only sporadically came to the White House for five straight days of talks, and will likely be back again before Aug. 2, when the Treasury Department has warned the government will default unless the debt ceiling is raised. The House and Senate both canceled weeklong breaks planned for this month so they could stay in town to work on a deal.

The president has foreshadowed even more debt talk disruptions through the rest of the summer if lawmakers don't reach a compromise.

"We are not going to let Congress go on August recess — have a one month vacation — while this problem doesn't get solved," Obama said in a television interview Thursday.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Monday that his chamber will meet every day, including weekends, until Congress sends Obama legislation to make sure the government does not default on its obligations.

With the Aug. 2 deadline looming, the all-consuming nature of the talks is a near-imperative for lawmakers and the president.

But because Obama and congressional leaders have essentially cleared their schedules to focus on the negotiations, other pressing national priorities are being overshadowed, or shelved completely until there's a debt deal.

The debate over U.S. military involvement in Libya that was so contentious just last month, for example, has garnered barely a mention from the White House or Congress in recent weeks. The issue hasn't gone away — Republicans and anti-war Democrats still question Obama's legal authority to keep the U.S. engaged in the Libya bombing campaign — but GOP lawmakers have insisted that dealing with the debt should take precedence.

The nation's persistently high unemployment rate did manage to grab the spotlight briefly last week, after a disastrous report showed that job growth had nearly stalled. But there is little, if any, progress being made on legislation that would directly lead to job creation. Even passage of three key free-trade deals that both Obama and Republicans say will support jobs in the U.S. has been stymied by the debt talks, with administration officials putting some of the blame for the delay in ratifying the agreements on the tense partisan atmosphere created by the debt ceiling debate.

And forget about the overhaul of the controversial No Child Left Behind education law the administration wanted lawmakers to finish by the time the school year starts this fall. Congress has made so little progress that the Education Department warned it's coming up with a plan B to give schools relief from the federal mandates if lawmakers fail to act.

While Obama continues to be briefed and hold private meetings on issues unrelated to the debt talks, the White House has limited Obama's public appearances during the last week almost exclusively to news conferences, statements or photo opportunities related to the negotiations.

"They've made the very realistic and practical judgment that those other things won't get attention," said Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman under former President George W. Bush.

Still, Obama said Friday that he knows the American people would rather see Washington focusing on issues that have more resonance in their daily lives.

"We've been obsessing over the last couple of weeks about raising the debt ceiling and reducing the debt and deficit," he said. "I tell you what the American people are obsessing about right now is that unemployment is still way too high and too many folks' homes are still underwater, and prices of things that they need, not just that they want, are going up a lot faster than their paychecks are if they've got a job."

But lawmakers from both parties say it would be difficult to address any of those issues if they can't get control of the nation's debt and prevent a default.

"All of our guys know this is the moment to do something really meaningful for the economy and our looming debt crisis," said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner. "If this debate is blocking out the sun, it's only because the debt problem is just that large."

Lingering just below the surface of the debt debate — and sometimes bubbling above it — is the fast-approaching 2012 election. As long as Obama is stuck in Washington working on a deal, he won't be traveling to politically important battleground states to sell the public on his policies or raise campaign funds. That may be a less serious problem for Obama, who hauled in $86 million for his re-election campaign and the Democratic Party in the three months ending June 30. That was more than all his GOP rivals combined.

Those rivals, meanwhile, are steadily ramping up their campaigns and attacks on Obama, while feeling little compulsion to jump into the contentious and divisive debt debate consuming the capital.

© 2011 Associated Press

July 16, 2011 at 18:16:07

Obama's "Big Deal": Wallowing with Pigs in Search of a Grand Center-Right Coalition

By Glen Ford (about the author)

The debt-limit deadline is Obama's big chance to panic a significant part of the Democratic Party into joining in the rape of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. "When the debt-limit showdown arrives, pray for gridlock, which would at least mean there is still resistance to Republican extortion."

Cross-posted from Black Agenda Report

"Obama's Big Deal is actually the coup de grace for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society."

President Obama says he's determined to make the "big deal" with the Republicans -- not like the little, piddling deals he has been cutting all along to benefit the corporate classes, but the BIG deal, the grand consensus he believes he was born to forge with the GOP. Although it's true that it will take a whopper of a deal to outclass the bipartisan joint venture that transferred $14 trillion to Wall Street, the vast bulk of it on Obama's watch, the First Black President is nothing if not ambitious. Obama's Big Deal is actually the coup de grace for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society -- relics, like Black activism, standing in the way of a post-everything world.

Obama has been savoring the big moment since last November, when the Republicans seized control of the House and sidelined the president's main opposition: the left wing of his own party. Delusional Obamites, especially Blacks, are fond of saying their guy really wants Democrats and activists to force him to take a more progressive path -- to "make him do it." It's actually the other way around. Obama depends strategically on Republicans to "make him do it" -- to push him inexorably rightward with their brinksmanship and constant threats of gridlock. It is an intricate and intimate dance, with Obama and the GOP moving and grooving to the same music. Obama often gets so caught up, he mouths the Republicans' lyrics.

"The reason to do Social Security" -- by "do," Obama means "cut" -- "is to strengthen Social Security to make sure that those benefits are there for seniors in the out-years," says Obama, an exact echo of the apocalypse-soon Social Security scare propaganda perfected over the years by the GOP. Obama has been promising to "do" Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid since just before he was sworn into office in January, 2009, when he announced that these entitlements would be "on the table" in his administration. His deficit reduction commission last year did indeed put the programs on the operating table, with Obama's corporate surgeons tracing dotted lines around the organs to be excised under the irresistible imperatives of austerity -- the Republicans' copyrighted anthem.

"Obama depends strategically on Republicans to push him inexorably rightward with their brinksmanship and constant threats of gridlock."

Last November 3, I wrote: "The best outcome that could result from Tuesday's Democratic debacle is that the Republicans over-reach and, in their white nationalist triumphalism, make it impossible for President Obama and congressional Democrats to reach an accommodation with rampaging reaction and racism." In other words, when the debt-limit showdown arrives, pray for gridlock, which would at least mean there is still resistance to Republican extortion.

The showdown is nigh, although Obama is squeezing every Democratic arm and groin in reach to ensure that he and the Republicans are able to walk down the dusty street arm-in-arm at high noon, so that the outcome can be billed as a grand consensus, a Big Deal for Obama. This requires that he gather Democratic accomplices in the gang rape of entitlements. "So we might as well do it now," says Obama, while people are panicked by the prospect of a technical U.S. "default." "Pull off the Band-Aid, eat our peas," he commands, as if the death blow to the last vestiges of the New Deal and the Great Society is just a short, sharp pain, after which the boo-boo will heal just fine.

The real Obama is a cold, cynical bastard. He is not a wimp, but rather, has plenty of spine to face down and brow-beat the remaining defenders of the social safety net in his own Democratic Party, who have always been the most immediate dangers to his grand center-right coalition. But it must be done quickly, quickly, quickly, to capture the debt-limit panic opportunity.

"He harms poor people because he is contemptuous of them, just like his Wall Street friends and patrons."

Half or more of the Congressional Black Caucus will do whatever the White House asks of it; will sacrifice anything and everything dear to African American interests in order to preserve this particular Black family in the executive mansion for as long as possible. But many of Obama's white groupies are facing the fact that they backed a corporate Trojan Horse.

Paul Krugman, the columnist for the New York Times, should not have needed a Nobel Prize in economics to realize that Obama "basically shares the GOP's diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it," or that the president's eagerness to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid "is something Mr. Obama and those he listens to apparently want for its own sake."

In other words, this guy works for the other side because that's where his soul is -- if he has one. He advocates policies that serve corporate pigs because he's one of them. He harms poor people because he is contemptuous of them, just like his Wall Street friends and patrons. His administration is negligent or hostile to Black aspirations for the same reasons as his white business buddies, with whom he shares a worldview. He is every bit as much a war criminal as Bush, and as morally debased.

The last thing we need is to allow this guy to conclude his long-sought Big Deal with the GOP under cover of a debt-limit crisis.

www.BlackAgendaReport.com

Glen Ford is a 37-year veteran of Black radio, television, print and Internet news and commentary. He is executive editor of BlackAgendaReport.com and was co-founder of BlackCommentator.com.

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Obama’s Deregulation of GMO Crops

by Robbie Hanna Anderman
May 27, 2011

Alfalfa reaches our tables within milk, cream, butter, and meat, as it is commonly used to feed dairy cows. Credit: Creative Commons/JMR64.

Early this spring, while the world was distracted by Egypt’s uprising, President Barack Obama pushed the Secretary of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to deregulate genetically engineered alfalfa and sugar beets in the United States. The USDA came through as he directed, totally deregulating these Monsanto-patented genes in early February.

In so doing, Obama and the USDA have chosen to override and ignore decisions and injunctions made by the U.S. Supreme Court that banned planting of genetically engineered alfalfa and sugar beets without consideration of the Environmental Impact Assessments, which showed high risks to organic and conventional (chemical) farmers.

So how does this affect you and me? Neither of us remembers seeing alfalfa or sugar beets on our breakfast table or even on our Seder table. Or do we?

Sugar beets provide over 50 percent of the sugar Americans use in their coffee, cereals, and desserts. For the moment, let’s not focus on the fact that sugar beets can cross-pollinate with red beets and make our borscht genetically modified.

Alfalfa reaches our tables within milk, cream, butter, and meat, as it is used as a major animal feed in the dairy industry. It is also used to enrich soils in organic farming.

At this time, no genetically engineered crops are permitted for sale in the European Union (though WikiLeaks has revealed that the U.S. government is exerting strong pressure on the EU to allow them). Thus this new deregulation will potentially close off present markets for organic farmers’ crops.

Obama’s push for deregulation potentially also means the end of the organic meat and organic dairy industries as we presently know them. Essentially, he is choosing to favor the profits of big agribusiness over the survival of America’s family farmers, and especially America’s organic farmers.

Sugar beets provide over 50 percent of the sugar Americans use in their coffee, cereals, and desserts. Credit: Creative Commons/Dag Endresen.

Our democracy has to work for farmers and consumers and not just for multinational biotech corporations. It makes absolutely no sense that the economic risks to farmers are not considered before genetically engineered crops are put on the market. It is farmers who pay the costs of genetic contamination, not the biotech companies.

How else does this affect you and me? I’ll defer to Canadian geneticist David Suzuki on this.

In an interview with the True Food Foundation, Suzuki said anyone who claims genetically engineered food is perfectly safe is “either unbelievably stupid, or deliberately lying,” adding: “The reality is, we don’t know. The experiments simply haven’t been done, and now we have become the guinea pigs…. I am most definitely not in favor of release of GMOs in the food stream and given that it’s too late, I favor complete labeling of GMO products.”

In “More Science Needed on Effects of Genetically Modifying Food Crops,” a September 2009 article for the Vancouver news site Straight.com, Suzuki wrote:

Some have argued that we’ve been eating GM foods for years with few observable negative consequences but as we’ve seen with things like trans fats, it often takes a while for us to recognize the health impacts. With GM foods, concerns have been raised about possible effects on stomach bacteria and resistance to antibiotics, as well as their role in allergic reactions. We also need to understand more about their impact on other plants and animals.

And in “Experimenting With Life,” an article in Yes! magazine, he wrote:

We have learned from painful experience that anyone entering an experiment should give informed consent. That means at the very least food should be labeled if it contains GMOs so we each can make that choice.

Like Dr. Suzuki, I think it’s worthwhile to acknowledge that we are also guinea pigs in another big experiment. Ours is the first generation to ever eat food that has been intentionally sprayed with poison before being eaten. While it may be argued that we need greater quantities to “feed the world,” the truth is that we’ve lost quality, we’ve lost fertility in humans and in the soil, and our health care budgets are indicative of the effects of this path.

Maria Rodale’s book Organic Manifesto cites shocking studies that make a strong case against chemical farming, while at the same time highlighting the positive nutritional and environmental benefits of organic farming. And according to a 2009 report from the UN Environmental Program, organic farming may be the only way we can solve the growing problem of hunger in the developing countries. Yes, organic farms can feed the world, and do it sustainably.

"It is farmers who pay the costs of genetic contamination, not the biotech companies," the author writes. Credit: Creative Commons.

So why is Obama favoring Monsanto? This is the company responsible for more than fifty uncontrolled or abandoned places where hazardous waste is located (“Superfund sites” according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites). We also have Monsanto to thank for Agent Orange, PCBs, DDT, and more.

Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds already dominate the entire U.S. corn, soy, canola, and cotton crops. About 93 percent of soy, 86 percent of corn, 93 percent of cotton, and 93 percent of canola seed planted in the United States in 2010 were genetically engineered. Phil Angell, Monsanto’s director of corporate communications, explained the company’s regulatory philosophy thus: “Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is FDA’s job.”

To assure the Food and Drug Administration and USDA do not regulate genetically engineered crops, biotech has spent more than half a billion dollars lobbying Congress since 1999.

If we follow the “historical” pattern of genetically engineered corn, soy, cotton, and canola, we will likely soon see engineered alfalfa and sugar beets, with their wind- and bee-carried pollen, completely taking over the entire seed industry for those crops. This contamination would disallow farmers’ ancient practice of keeping and breeding seeds from year to year, and drive up expenses for all farmers. This is nothing new from the American government, which has historically supported policies favoring the consolidation of U.S. seed ownership in the hands of a few major corporations.

So let us remind our children that we were “slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt.” For surely having one corporation control the seeds gives it unprecedented control. The state of affairs reminds me of how Pharaoh, at Joseph’s urging, took control of the grain supplies of Egypt, causing Jacob’s family to go down into Egypt and eventually become enslaved. Not worried yet? Chew on this: it’s been said that most U.S. cities do not have three days of food supplies on their shelves.

Extremes of weather in recent years have shown us how vulnerable this situation is. Meanwhile, the National Farmers Unions in the United States and Canada have advocated support for local family farmers and the implementation of local and national programs to ensure food security and food sovereignty — programs that fail to interest corporate-controlled politicians.

The fact that the executive wing of government has chosen to override a recent major decision by the Supreme Court to stop all dissemination of genetically engineered alfalfa until the completion on an environmental assessment of its danger is certainly cause for questioning.

What’s going on here? Did Obama betray us? Did Obama, a man, a charismatic politician, betray the people who voted for him, whose spirits were raised high with the slogan “Yes, we can”?

Perhaps. Yet I am reminded that to run a presidential campaign requires a great deal of money. And since the Supreme Court Citizens United decision — supported by Clarence Thomas, a former attorney for Monsanto — to allow corporations the unlimited ability to anonymously fund political campaigns, it is becoming obvious that Obama owes something to many rich people.

U.S. corporations have gained inordinate power over all our politicians by manipulating the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment was adopted in 1868 to protect the rights of newly freed Blacks, yet by 1886 the Supreme Court had begun recognizing it as a protection of the rights of the “persons” called corporations — persons which do not breath, do not have consciences, and are mandated to make a profit for their shareholders.

Which group would you betray? Your funders or your fans?

When Obama cried, “Yes, we can!” he obviously was speaking for a different “we” than those who voted for him imagined.

Monsanto’s seeds are genetically engineered for use with the company’s chemical herbicide RoundUp. Last year we learned that weeds are growing resistant to RoundUp. Monsanto’s profits and stock prices began dropping.

A failed technology is now getting another chance to dance and prop up a failing corporation. Oddly, alfalfa (Arabic for “king of herbs”) does not need herbicides for more than 93 percent of its common applications. Farmers have been growing it for many centuries and know how to do so without herbicides. The push for genetically engineered alfafa is just a game move toward controlling the food supply.

After all, what will we eat when America’s family farmers are all driven off their farms and into our cities? We would then be dependent on corporate factory farms, whose managers are far from the soil and lack experience in dealing with the whims of nature and weather. We would also be dependent on oil and the prices of oil to supply us with imported food. WikiLeaks has just revealed dispatches from Saudi Arabia to the United States from 2007–9 stating that Peak Oil is happening now: reports of oil in the ground were exaggerated by 40 percent. Thus shipping prices, and agrichemical prices are soon to rise even further.

In the 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in 9 percent of the nation’s total income. Today, the top 1 percent take in 23.5 percent of total income. With median workers earning less than they did thirty years ago, who will be able to afford food, let alone nourishing food?

Even in the face of these dire circumstances, however, the consciousness of humans is rising. People are increasingly demanding to know where their food comes from. People are supporting organic production even in the face of recession. People are taking up gardening and shopping at farmers markets.

Obama taught us not to look for a charismatic messiah, while also teaching us those magic words, “yes, we can!” The coalitions that came together to elect Obama can be revived, as can the networks, and the social media to keep alive the connections.

The Center for Food Safety has already filed a legal brief to halt the actual dissemination of these genetically engineered seeds, and Canadian Organic Growers and several other organizations have joined in on the lawsuit. This struggle needs our support. We all eat; it goes beyond all differences. In addition to supporting the legal struggle for food safety, we can also make our voices heard by refusing to invest in big genetic engineering companies such as Monsanto and Bayer.

We can do it. We can craft food security and food sovereignty for the people of America and beyond.

Robbie Hanna Anderman co-founded Morninglory Farm in Eastern Ontario in 1969 and is blessed to live there with his family (including four grandsons) and extended family. An organic orchardist, gardener, and cook -- as well as a musician and craftsman -- he is grateful to be alive and at home on Liferaft Earth at this moment.

tags: Environmental Activism, Food/Hunger