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Monday, May 30, 2011

Mindless Autopen on Autopilot: President Obama and the Mindless Patriot Act

Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice

Autopen on Autopilot

President Obama and the Patriot Act

One of the more bizarre milestones of the modern era was reached last Thursday when President Obama “signed” a four year extension to certain provisons within the Patriot Act with his autopen. If you’re like me this was strange enough to pique curiosity. I couldn’t even picture a politician like Obama having an autopen. Sure, I could see a device like this being used by a guy like Schwarzenegger, there’s high tech precedent in his dorky B movie past, and probably real value in having one to sign lots of future “Happy Birthday, son (or daughter)” cards. But, come on… our president really signed a bill into law with an autopen?

Yes, in fact, he did. And I had never even heard of this item. I like to think I keep up on the latest technology, but well, maybe I fell behind in this case. They say these autopens were even used by Thomas Jefferson–but not to sign laws! These devices reproduce an exact replica of the signature in question.

Celebrities and sport figures are said to use autopens quite regularly to provide autographs. I am a little startled that Obama didn’t simply have his food taster be required to learn to reproduce his exact signature, but perhaps that wasn’t feasible. Sometimes I get medieval custom confused with White House protocol.

I found out that Obama is the first president to actually sign a bill into law through the use of the autopen. How strange that so called “sunset provisions”, or pieces of the Act set to expire without further careful consideration, were signed in this manner. You know- the kind of careful and deliberate consideration evidenced by having a robot sign your name. I guess sometimes it’s just more important to check out the Divine Right recipients in England and visit the happy expecting couple in France than it is to grapple with controversy at home such as this. And it’s always good to remain abroad during national disasters like Joplin because it shows the little people that life goes on, right? Sets the correct example.

Even so, is it possible to exhibit any less concern for a caustic bill such as the Patriot Act than getting out an autopen? There’s a little worry, to say the least, about this bill only slightly longer (and only slightly more readable) than Atlas Shrugged.

Here’s what the ACLU thinks about the Patriot Act:

The result is unchecked government power to rifle through individuals’ financial records, medical histories, Internet usage, bookstore purchases, library usage, travel patterns, or any other activity that leaves a record.

And that’s pretty much just a small taste. I won’t belabor the obvious. The three main provisions recently extended via robot hand, include continued roving wiretaps, business record searches and “lone wolf” surveillance. All are fraught with the potential to do a whole lot of evil and not just to evildoers.

President Obama, please at least pretend like you consider that perhaps a rushed giveaway to Law Enforcement agencies during a time of mass panic might be worth looking at with a calm glance years later. Hell, just the fact that the thing has a name more fitting for a one of the more expensive fireworks you can purchase in a tent during the 4th of July- NEW PATRIOT ACT with twelve special effect shells, all with jumbo bursts…. even better than The Vengeful Texan! – Well, shouldn’t that be enough to question this monstrosity?

But of course I rail about this when I know the answer. Certainly there was never a plan to truly look into the concerns raised by so many scholars, by the ACLU, by the lucid of the nation. It is next to impossible to gain back what you lose when laws like this are enacted. Those who had questions at the time of its implementation (only a little over a month after 9/11) were pretty much assured that they would be blamed for any attacks should they not vote the thing in. It is no excuse, but it does explain quite a lot.

This may not seem like an important topic, that of the autopen, but I think the willful and disgraceful behavior regarding this bill presents the act for what it is: the ultimate in rubber-stamping. The Patriot Act required consideration at the sunset of bill provisions, even the loons who set it up seemed to intend this, but this consideration was not given.

There are some questioning the validity of an autopen signing, but this issue was already explored by the Justice Department in 2005, in case just such an instance arose. They decided the word “sign” does not necessarily mean an active signature by the president himself. That must have come from the person who fed another guy “it depends on what the meaning of the word is is”. Who are these deranged language contortionists?

The actual act of rubber-stamping this bill really doesn’t matter much since our president seems to be something of an autopen himself. I’m simply lost in the symbolism.

And if you question my assertion that there is no manner that more completely exhibits your utter disdain and disengagement from the topic at hand than the use of the autopen, I leave you with this:

Former US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, used an autopen for letters of condolence to families of the US military dead.

Kathleen Wallace Peine welcomes reader response. She can be reached at: kathypeine@gmail.com. Read other articles by Kathleen.

This article was posted on Monday, May 30th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Espionage/"Intelligence", Human Rights, Obama, Security.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Obama Administration Does Not Want Lawmakers, Citizens to Debate National Security





May 27, 2011 at 12:35:02

Obama Administration Does Not Want Lawmakers, Citizens to Debate National Security

By Kevin Gosztola (about the author)

Three provisions of the PATRIOT Act set to expire were extended yesterday as Senate leaders effectively shut off debate and worked to block attempts to amend the Patriot Act to include privacy protections. The reauthorized provisions went to the House for approval and, after passing through Congress, the legislation was flown to US President Barack Obama in France so he could sign the reauthorization.

The extended provisions were, according to the ACLU, the John Doe roving wiretap provision, Section 215 or the "library records" provision and the never before used "lone wolf" provision - all lack proper privacy safeguards.

The continued granting of overly broad powers was accompanied by passage in the House of a National Defense programs bill that included language granting the Executive Branch the authority to wage worldwide war.

A handful of lawmakers in the House and Senate attempted to make amendments or block the passage of measures that would allow powers granted to the state to greatly expand. A trans-partisan group of House representatives introduced an amendment that would have struck down the worldwide war provision. Senator Rand Paul, Senator Mark Udall and Senator Ron Wyden each made valiant attempts to have a comprehensive debate on the provisions before granting reauthorization but the Obama Administration discouraged debate.

Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake and Mike Riggs of Reason.com reported Sen. Harry Reid and others in Congress were using Obama Administration fearmongering and talking points to prevent provisions from expiration. Debate (and in effect democracy) was being obstructed because the White House was asserting, "The FBI would be able to continue using orders it had already obtained, but it would not be able to apply for new ones if further tips and leads came in about a possible terrorist operation"no one could predict what the consequences of a temporary lapse might be."

The fearmongering induced the following reaction from Sen. Paul:

"There have been people who [have] implied in print that if I hold the PATRIOT Act up and they attack us tonight, that I'm responsible for the attack.

There [have] been people who have implied that if some terrorist gets a gun, that I'm somehow responsible. It's -- it's sort of the analogy of saying that because I believe that you should get a warrant before you go into a potential or alleged murderer's house that somehow I'm in favor of murder.

The diligent work of bloggers closely following national security issues in the United States unearthed the fraudulence of such bullying. Had the provisions not been extended, a "grandfather clause" would have permitted their continued use in investigations that were already taking place.

Paul was eventually allowed by Reid to fully engage in the legislative process and bring two of his amendments to a vote. In his statement on why he thought it important to amend the Patriot Act, he deconstructed myths surrounding the Act, calling into question whether the government should have a right to sift through millions of gun records without asking if you are suspect; whether the government should be able to monitor what books citizens read; whether the government should have access to banking records without a warrant; whether it is good security to treat everyone as a potential terror suspect; whether the Patriot Act has truly given the government tools that have led to the capture of terrorists; whether violating the Fourth Amendment should be permissible; whether we as Americans believe in the rule of law; and whether these issues should be open to debate.

Udall, in t reauthorization in just a few days. Trust me, we have time and should take that time for a full debate."">his statement on the extension, stated, "Many Americans have been demanding reforms to these provisions for years. We've known for months - years, in fact - that this was on our to-do list this Congress. We've been passing short-term extensions in order to give us time to consider a comprehensive overhaul"Yet we're now being pushed to approve a four-year straight reauthorization in just a few days. Trust me, we have time and should take that time for a full debate."

While the extension of provisions merits scrutiny, the squelching of democratic debate demands just as much scrutiny if not more. As Paul said in his statement on the floor, it is incredibly important to have debates on the floor, and "that's why there is a certain amount of disappointment to having arrived in Washington and to see the fear of debate of the constitution and that we really need to be debating these things."

Not allowing debate was determined prior to the votes. As bloggers like Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald highlighted, the idea was "to pass the extension with as little debate as possible to avoid a protracted and familiar argument over the expanded power the law gives to the government."

Congress should not be a body that inhibits debate. Authorizing power to government that so clearly threatens civil liberties such as rights to privacy (and in many cases First Amendment rights) should not be scrutinized, despite the fact that there exists clear evidence of government abuses of power under the Patriot Act.

Paul sharply noted that chilling debate is something those in the Legislative Branch of government have done multiple times. On the issue of war in Libya, there was no debate. An invasion was launched without asking Congress for permission (a move, that over sixty days later, now clearly violates the War Powers Act).

We now have a war in which there has been no congressional debate and no congressional vote. But you know what they argue? They say it is just a little war. But you know what? It is a big principle.


It is the principle that we as a country elect people. It is a principle that we are restrained by the Constitution, that you are protected by the constitution, and if I ask the young men and women here today to go to war and say we're going to go to war, that there darn well should be a debate in this body.

The worldwide war authorization to grant the president additional war powers that would further expand the imperial presidency also received little to no debate in the House. Read the text of Section 1034 (the "forever war" provision) and decide whether not debating this provision should be acceptable:

Congress affirms that--
(1) the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces and that those entities continue to pose a threat to the United States and its citizens, both domestically and abroad;
(2) the President has the authority to use all necessary and appropriate force during the current armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note);
(3) the current armed conflict includes nations, organization, and persons who--
(A) are part of, or are substantially supporting, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or
(B) have engaged in hostilities or have directly supported hostilities in aid of a nation, organization, or person described in subparagraph (A); and
(4) the President's authority pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note) includes the authority to detain belligerents, including persons described in paragraph (3), until the termination of hostilities.

The Obama Administration indicated, prior to the vote, that it objected to this provision that would expand war powers:

The Administration strongly objects to section 1034 [the worldwide war provision] which, in purporting to affirm the conflict, would effectively recharacterize its scope and would risk creating confusion regarding applicable standards. At a minimum, this is an issue that merits more extensive consideration before possible inclusion..."

Nonetheless, there was only about twenty minutes of debate on the section of the defense bill.

In the midst of obstruction of debate by Senate leaders like Reid, four senators earned the "promise" of a hearing on the "secret and expansive Justice Department interpretation of the information collection the Patriot Act allows."

Note what is allowed and not allowed: Scrutiny during the time when scrutiny could influence the nature of provisions or legislation is inconvenient and a nuisance. Such scrutiny must be limited by preventing amendments and restricting the time allowed for floor discussion. But, in the aftermath, if senators would like to provide oversight and share with agencies or departments criticism or ideas for improvement, that is allowable. As long as there is no binding legislation to force the agencies or departments to respond to criticism and adjust operations, lawmakers may have a dialogue. (However, as this deals with national security, the public will not be privy to what goes on in such hearings. They will have to trust unquestioning lawmakers who are typically averse to scrutinizing the national security establishment.)

The collusion between the White House and Congress to curb debate becomes further troubling as one considers how it allows for the militarization and securitization of society without any accountability for the players involved in the expansion.

Thirty-five articles of impeachment for former President George W. Bush by Rep. Dennis Kucinich were introduced in Congress in June 2008. When Attorney General Eric Holder took over the Department of Justice, concerned citizens, advocacy organizations and a few lawmakers urged accountability for crimes and misdemeanors committed by former Bush Administration officials. But, Americans were told that they needed to look forward and not backward.

Thus, there has been no expenditure of government resources to address and investigate: the creation of propaganda to manufacture a false case for war in Iraq; the misleading of the American people to make them believe Iraq was an imminent threat and possessed weapons of mass destruction; invading Iraq absent a declaration of war; providing immunity from prosecution for criminal contractors in Iraq; detaining indefinitely and without charge US citizens and foreign captives; secretly authorizing and encouraging torture; kidnapping people and taking them to "black' prison sites in nations known to practice torture; directing telecommunications companies to create illegal and unconstitutional databases of private telephone data from citizens and spying on Americans without a court-ordered warrant in violation of the law and Fourth Amendment.

Thus, a crisis of impunity gives way to widespread lawless conduct by power.

Impunity allows security to employ tools of repression that typically society had found to be off-limits because of certain rights society presumed should be preserved and protected. This new brand of security becomes normalized. As those keeping citizens "more safer" have more freedom, the people become less and less free.


Kevin Gosztola is a multimedia editor for OpEdNews.com and a writer for WLCentral.org. He is currently serving as an intern for The Nation Magazine. And, he follows all things related to WikiLeaks, media, activism, the unfolding revolutions in the (more...)

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.

Friday, May 27, 2011

Let's Fight the Obama Administration's Crusade to Jail Another Journalist

AlterNet.org

MEDIA
We need to stand up for NYT reporter James Risen and against the sleazy, Bush-like tactics of the Obamacrats and the burgeoning national security state.

May 26, 2011 |



German theologian Martin Niemoller was a staunch anti-Communist who supported Hitler's rise to power -- at first. He later became disillusioned, however, and led a group of German clergymen opposed to Hitler. In 1937 Niemoller was arrested for the crime of "not being enthusiastic enough about the Nazi movement" and later was sent to concentration camps. Rescued in 1945 by the Allies, he became a leading post-war voice of reconciliation for the German people.


Niemoller is most famous for his well-known and frequently quoted statement detailing the dangers of political apathy in the face of repression. Although it described the inactivity of Germans following the Hitler's rise to power and his violent purging of group after group of German citizens, his statement lives on as a universal description of the dangers of not standing up against tyranny.

The text of the Niemoller's statement is usually presented as follows:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

I was reminded of Niemoller recently when federal prosecutors issued a subpoena intended to force New York Times reporter James Risen, the author of a book on the Central Intelligence Agency, to testify at the criminal trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer. Sterling was charged as part of a wide-ranging Obama administration crackdown on officials accused of disclosing restricted information to journalists.

Now the Obama Justice Department is threatening to jail a journalist as well -- unless Risen tells them if Sterling or someone else leaked information about the CIA's efforts to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program.

The subpoena, as Charlie Savage reported recently in the Times, "tells Mr. Risen that 'you are commanded' to appear at federal district court in Alexandria, Va., on Sept. 12 to testify in the case. A federal district judge, Leonie M. Brinkema, quashed a similar subpoena to Mr. Risen last year, when prosecutors were trying to persuade a grand jury to indict Mr. Sterling."

Risen rightly says he will ask the judge to quash the new subpoena as well, stating forthrightly, "I will always protect my sources," and rightly that, "this is a fight about the First Amendment and the freedom of the press."

It's bad enough that ever since President Obama took office, he has repeatedly gone after whistleblowers like Sterling with a cold vengeance, charging more people in cases involving leaking information than "all previous presidents combined," as Savage noted.

But Obama administration officials are no longer content just with targeting whistleblowers like Sterling, former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake, (who goes on trial soon on charges of providing classified information to The Baltimore Sun) and of course Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accused - and already pronounced guilty by the president -- of passing classified documents to Wikileaks.org. Now they are coming for the journalists as well - just as Bush Administration officials did before them. And if Risen's subpoena is not quashed and he still refuses to testify, he risks being held in contempt and imprisoned, just as Times reporter Judy Miller was for 85 days for her refusal to testify in connection with the Valerie Place Wilson leak in 2005.

Obama's prosecutors argue that the First Amendment doesn't give Risen any right to avoid testifying about his confidential sources in a criminal proceeding, and that the Pulitzer Prize winner should be compelled to provide information to a jury "like any other citizen."

Citizens as well as journalists need to stand up for Risen and against the sleazy, Bush-like tactics of the Obamacrats and the burgeoning national security state. Otherwise, if you don't speak out when they come, first for the whistleblowers, and then for the journalists, when they come for you, there will be no one left to speak out…

Filmmaker and journalist Rory O'Connor is the author of "Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio" (AlterNet Books, 2008). O'Connor also writes the Media Is A Plural blog.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Obama's Orwellian Turn: Whistle-Blowing=Treason

CommonDreams.org


Candidate Obama championed transparency; President Obama has used the 1917 Espionage Act to preside over "the most draconian crackdown on leaks in our history," prosecuting more national security leak cases than all previous Administrations combined. The New Yorker's Jane Mayer looks at the case of Thomas Drake, a GOP National Security Agency whistleblower who faces 35 years in prison for allegedly leaking information to a reporter about NSA waste and bureaucracy. To Jack Balkin, a Yale law professor, the increase in post 9/11 leak prosecutions represents "the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state.” To Drake, the turn toward secrecy is "Orwellian."

"This was a violation of everything I knew and believed as an American. We were making the Nixon Administration look like pikers.”

Drake on Democracy Now:



Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Obama, the Man of the Sheeple



May 18, 2011 at 20:55:31

Obama Myth making / Designed For Sheeple

By Allen L Roland (about the author)

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JFrJBlsh034/TdP0AONDYkI/AAAAAAAAAe8/sXdVJOidsJk/s1600/Obama%2Bgloating.jpg

President Barack Obama's refusal to release photos and DNA of his supposed assassination of a questionably alive Bin Laden spanks of his trademark lack of transparency except when it is politically expedient ~ but it is also step three in Myth making as Obama kicks off his re-election campaign which is designed for the sheeple .

The Obama hyped Bin Laden assassination myth is riddled with so many inaccuracies that it 's being openly mocked on the internet such as in this supposedly secret footage released from the Osama raid Video: 30 seconds

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/1101.html

Myth making is relatively simple when your target audience is sheeple who are more than willing to accept the administration's deceits and fabrications ~ for to do otherwise would personally be deeply humiliating. Here is the typical myth making four step process;

Step One is create the event ~ without verification except the leader's word ( Think 9/11 official story )

Step Two is destroy the evidence ~ relying once again on the leader's word ( Think 9/11 trade center scrap steel crime scene evidence being sent to Taiwan and South Korea )

Step Three is celebrating the great victory ~ although still unconfirmed by anyone except the leader and his minions ( Think GW Bush's Mission accomplished in Iraq )

Step Four is completely disqualifying the target ~ to justify the leaders illegal actions ( Think Saddam and weapons of Mass Destruction, think Bin Laden with supposedly found pornography video tapes as well as never proven involvement with 9/11 )

But the Bin Laden raid story continues to rapidly unravel as many eye witnesses question the official Obama report. Here's the latest ~ according to Gordon Duff, Senior editor of Veteran's Today: Bin Laden Raid Operation Was Not Successful - Eye Witness Claims : A Pakistan news agency reports that the bin Laden raid on Abbottabad was aborted because of a helicopter crash which killed several passengers, believed to be Pashtu speaking Americans. See story ~

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/05/16/unconfirmed-american-deaths-helicopter-crash-bin-laden-capture-aborted/

The term Sheeple is often used to denote persons who voluntarily acquiesce to a perceived authority figure's suggestion without critical analysis or sufficient research to understand the ramifications of that decision. By doing so, Sheeple undermine their own individuality and may willingly give up their rights . The implication of the term is that people fallaciously appeal to authority and believe or do what they are told by perceived authority figures who they view as trustworthy. The term is generally used in a political, social, and sometimes spiritual sense.

I

In other words, It's taking the blue pill of eternal unquestioned government allegiance or bondage and submitting to authority versus the red pill of critical thinking, individuality and searching for the truth. Morpheus explains it all to Neo in the Matrix ~ " Neo , Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. " The Matrix (1999) Four minute video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te6qG4yn-Ps

Are you a sheeple ? Let's find out !

Have you heard about the Sheeple Quiz? Although most of my readers will easily beat it, it's a fun quiz to find out how smart (or gullible) your friends really are. So let 'em take the Sheeple Quiz! And then you'll know whether they're independent thinkers or just zombie-minded sheeple like the rest of the flock .

Here's the quiz. Choose "A" or "B" as the answer for each question, then check your score below.

The Sheeple Quiz

#1) The purpose of the mainstream media is to:

A) Keep you informed.
B) Feed you misinformation while keeping you distracted from the real issues our world is facing.

#2) Social Security is:

A) A financial safety net that makes sure people have a retirement income.
B) A government-run Ponzi scheme that requires more and more people to keep paying in just to stay afloat and will ultimately collapse into total bankruptcy.

#3) The fluoride dripped into municipal water supplies is:

A) A naturally-occurring mineral.
B) An industrial chemical waste byproduct.

#4) When you donate money to find the cure for cancer, that money goes:

A) To fund research programs that assess actual cancer cures for the purpose of freely sharing them with the public.
B) To fund mammogram campaigns that actually irradiate women's breasts, causing the very cancers that earn huge profits for the cancer treatment industry.

#5) The national debt is:

A) Under control and will be paid off in a few years.
B) Out of control and will spiral into a runaway debt collapse.

#6) GMOs will:

A) Feed the world and prevent starvation.
B) Threaten the future of life on our planet through genetic contamination and widespread crop failures.

#7) The FDA protects:

A) The people from dangerous medicines.
B) The financial interests of the drug companies.

#8) The EPA's real agenda is to:

A) Protect the environment.
B) Protect the financial interests of the chemical companies whose toxic products destroy the environment.

#9) The Federal Reserve functions to:

A) Stabilize the economy and keep America strong.
B) Loot the economy and control America's economy for the interests of the few.

#10) The purpose of TSA checkpoints at airports is to:

A) Keep air passengers safe and secure.
B) Indoctrinate Americans into surrendering to police state invasions of their privacy.

#11) The practical function of the U.S. Supreme Court is to:

A) Protect the constitutional rights of the citizens.
B) Legitimize federal tyranny over the People by ignoring the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.

#12) Vaccines are based on:

A) Gold standard science that conclusively proves their safety and effectiveness.
B) Quackery and fraud combined with a persistent medical mythology that utterly lacks a factual basis.

#13) Herbs and superfoods:

A) Are medically useless and cannot treat, prevent or cure any disease.
B) Contain powerful plant-based medicines that can help reverse and prevent disease.

#14) In Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq, America:

A) Led a humanitarian effort to save innocent people from tyranny.
B) Waged an illegal imperialist war to occupy foreign nations and control their oil.

#15) The U.S. Bill of Rights

A) Grants you rights and freedoms.
B) Merely acknowledges the rights and freedoms you already possess.

Score your Sheeple Quiz

To score your Sheeple Quiz, simply count the number of times you answered "A" to the questions above.

If you answered "A" 10 times or more...

You are a total news-watching, gullible fairytale swallowing Sheeple! Be sure to keep taking those medications and watching more network news. Don't bother thinking for yourself because you seem to be incapable of accomplishing that. You've already swallowed the Blue pill.

If you answered "A" fewer than 10 times...

You are sadly Sheeple-minded but there is hope for your rescue. Learn more about the world around you and train yourself to think critically so you can depart from the herd mentality.

If you answered "A" fewer than 5 times...

You are an unusually intelligent free-minded thinker who questions the world around you and doesn't buy into the usual propaganda. You still got suckered on a few items, so there's more yet to learn. But you're on the right track!

If you answered "A" exactly zero times... you swallowed the Red pill.

You are the complete opposite of a Sheeple. You're independent minded, well informed and probably a regular reader of mine . Stay on track and question events in the world around you. Keep reading the alternative press and voice your intelligent views to others willing to listen. ( But don't waste your time on those who aren't .) Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/032415_sheeple_quiz.html#ixzz1MYfg4b8A

Here's a group of non-sheeple students making life rightfully miserable for Condoleezza Rice at Stanford University recently! 2 minute video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uVDytkDReY&feature=player_embedded

In other words, take the red pill!

Allen L Roland

http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/obama-myth-making-designed-for-sheeple.html

Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
ARE YOU A SHEEPLE ?

Click here to see the most recent messages sent to congressional reps and local newspapers

http://www.allenroland.com

Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website more...)

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, Blackness and the Left

AlterNet.org

Has Obama failed to live up to his campaign promises, or were we so blinded by our own hopes in him that we didn't see the centrist signs? Could he have been more aggressively progressive as president, or has he been hobbled by the political reality? All these questions are bandied back and forth with heat and frequency among progressives off all stripes. And this week, a prominent disagreement between two respected black academics and pundits has brought the debate back into the spotlight with a focus on Obama's relationship to black America.

Last night on the Ed Show, Cornel West responded to comments he himself made about President Obama in an intense interview with Chris Hedges of Truthdig. West's was a vigorous critique from the left that included West's own unfiltered thoughts about Obama's relationship to his black identity, the American black community, the working class and the progressive ideals that West believed Obama held.

West's words included the thoughts that Obama has become "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it." West also made the point that Obama's "establishment" appointments of many Clinton-era, centrist advisors, was a deep disappointment to him:

"...I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.”

Obviously, mixed in with his stringent policy critique from a radical progressive perspective was some very loaded language about race. West also relayed some very personal anecdotes of his feeling snubbed by Obama, and it's these latter two aspects of West's words which have begun to cause a firestorm.

After West appeared on Schultz's show, Melissa Harris-Perry came on to discuss her own rebuttal of West's argument in the Nation, explaining that while taking the President's policy positions to task is valid and important, West is forgetting what it really means to be president: "As tenured professors Cornel West and I are not meaningfully accountable, no matter what our love, commitment, or self-delusions tell us. President Obama, as an elected official, can, in fact, be voted out of his job. We can’t. That is a difference that matters."

She also said that "West’s sense of betrayal is clearly more personal than ideological." Perry also brought the personal into her response to her former colleague at Princeton, discussing West's salary and his friendship with media figure Tavis Smiley, who has corporate ties.

Watch both Harris-Perry and West's appearances on the Ed Show below, and read further after the video for a roundup of links that show how this controversy is lighting up the blogosphere and leading to some thoughtful analyses and reflections on race, language, and politics.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here are some links for further reading:

The original Chris Hedges piece, "Why Cornel West Went Ballistic."

Melissa Harris-Perry's response,"Cornel West vs. Barack Obama."

Adam Serwer writes about how words such as West's, combined with racially loaded GOP attacks, demonstrate the predicament Obama is in as a person of biracial ancestry. The president is subject to nasty racism from one side, like birtherism, and then told he's not being black enough by the other:

For mixed people, blackness is not accepted as a fact of existence but something negotiable, a question of membership to which those whom are Truly Black may grant you access.

At the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that he wishes Cornel West had stuck to specific policy-based arguments:

Was there something more Obama should have done to get a public option? Should he not have traded the Bush tax cuts for extending unemployment benefits? Did Obama settle too quickly on a small stimulus package? Was he wrong to allow the GOP to shut down planned parenthood in DC? Is the strategy of increased drone attacks in Pakistan inhumane? Was the financial reform bill he signed ultimately too weak?

I think all of this is fair game... I think calling someone a "black mascot" or a "black puppet" because they don't agree with you is much less so.

Dr. Boyce Watkins, however, says that criticizing West is besides the point, because West did us a service by bringing up tough and urgent social issues:

Spinning, twisting and reshaping the conversation means nothing when black unemployment continues to rise, mass incarceration decimates our people and our children are not being educated

... Whether one agrees with Cornel West or not, he must ultimately be given credit for guiding the conversation back to poor, black and brown people.

Earlier this spring, Coates made a salient point, certainly relevant to this controversy, about a previous back-and-forth between West and Sharpton: he wrote that that one thing Obama's election has helped make clear to a sometimes slow-to-grasp nuances media is that American black opinion--unshockingly like American opinion itself--is diverse, multifaceted and far from monolithic. Therefore, TV networks and newspapers no longer can look to a single spokesman or woman to represent black America's views--and that, at least, is progress.

By Sarah Seltzer | Sourced from 358

Posted at May 18, 2011, 10:36 am

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Waiting For Obama... in The Fields of Oz




May 17, 2011 at 09:14:14

Waiting For Obama... in The Fields of Oz

By Rob Kall (about the author)

After Obama was elected, many liberals, Democrats and progressives found themselves in the same situation as Dorothy, the lion, tinman and straw man when they wandered onto the poppy field of Oz, soporifically cursed by the wicked witch of the west, even with the gleaming Emerald City in plain sight.


Dorothy, beginning to fall into a cursed sleep

Remember the scene?

They stopped being activists, stopped working for a better world.

Some stopped earlier, when the 2006 elections gave the Nancy Pelosi a majority in the house.

By now, it's clear that even with control of the house, senate and Whitehouse, it wasn't enough.

It's clear that the elections don't matter very much. The bills that WERE passed are now at risk of being overturned, sabotaged by weak or sell-out, fox-in-the-henhouse type appointees, or failure to fund.

We live in a time when it is a naive fantasy to believe that our elected officials are going to advocate for us or even be accountable to us. Even when a majority of us stand for a particular issue, WE don't provide the money that wins their campaigns. Corporations and PACs and the wealthy do. So our politicians lie to us and fail to protect and advocate for our interests.

That means WE have to assume the worst and not depend upon our legislators and certainly not Obama. WE have to find other means for getting our needs addressed, whether those needs include government spending priorities, social and environmental justice or pursuit of corporatist crimes and abuses.

There ARE other means. We have to learn about existing ones, explore, develop and support evolving, emerging and new ones. We absolutely cannot solely depend upon those we have elected, even if they are the "good guys." They've failed us too many times.

So I ask you. Are you, like Dorothy, and her travelling partners in OZ, in those soporific fields, doing nothing, waiting for Obama, or have you awakened to the reality that he will not deliver what you truly desire. The best he'll do is hold back the barbarians a little bit, and take some edges off the worst existing or threatening abuses and violations of justice and fairness.

It took the good witch to cause snow to fall on the poppy field for Dorothy and Toto and the lion to wake up. We're facing a pretty cold political winter now. It's time for all those still waiting for Obama to wake up.


To reach the threshold of our progressive dreams, we must face the reality that Obama and our legislators have been shapeshifters who are unable, even if they say they are willing, to do what needs to be done. I am so convinced of this that I've come to believe that the strongest progressives IN congress might do more good outside of congress.

I'm not saying we shouldn't continue to work to elect non-toxic or less toxic candidates, but we MUST do a helll of a lot more than that. It is delusion to believe that simply electing Democrats will be sufficient.

Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and site architect of OpEdNews.com, Host of the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), President of Futurehealth, Inc, more...)

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.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Obama's Religion Problem: White House Funnels Money to Discriminatory Religious Groups

AlterNet.org


NEWS & POLITICS
Taxpayer dollars are continuing to be dispensed to religious groups via a secretive and controversial government office.

Photo Credit: Official White House Photo/Pete Souza
This article originally appeared in Conscience magazine, published by Catholics for Choice.

After President Barack Obama gave a congratulatory shout-out to Joshua DuBois, director of his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (OFBNP), at the National Prayer Breakfast in February, Georgetown University religion scholar Jacques Berlinerblau wondered in the pages of the Washington Post "what exactly that office is doing -- a never-ending source of confusion, and even awe, among reporters, policy analysts and professors in Washington, DC."

Berlinerblau compared the OFBNP to the Kremlin -- apparently because of its ironclad hold on information about its activities, which are frequently reduced to cheery blog posts on the White House website extolling the virtues of faith-based provision of social services to people in need, but rarely addressing the thornier controversies that plague its mission.

Beneath its do-gooder exterior, the White House has taken few steps that have allayed the concerns of both advocates of church-state separation concerned about the OFBNP's constitutionality and advocates of transparency and accountability. Meanwhile, as taxpayer dollars continue to be dispensed to faith-based organizations, it is still unclear how an executive order Obama signed in November 2010, which set out new requirements intended to reduce some constitutional concerns, will actually be implemented.

Obama first launched the OFBNP in February 2009, shortly after taking office. At the time, he mostly kept policies from the Bush administration in place, including maintaining the arrangement of having a faith-based office in the White House, as well as offices in twelve federal agencies. Religious contractors and grantees would continue to receive federal funding under the "level playing field," a Bush-era term meaning that faith-based organizations would not be at a disadvantage relative to secular organizations in applying for federal funds. In one major change, Obama created an advisory council, to be made up of religious and community service leaders, to develop recommendations on how to improve the functioning of the office and increase partnerships between the government and faith-based groups in addressing societal problems.

Obama's first appointments to the council caused waves: conservatives complained about members it considered too liberal, and liberals complained about conservative members -- a circumstance emblematic of how candidate Obama's robust defense of constitutional principles had yielded to political considerations. The council members served one-year terms, and Obama appointed 10 new members in January 2011, leaving 15 slots still vacant. Unlike the first round, Obama did not publicly lay out an agenda that the advisory council would undertake, but DuBois, through a White House spokesperson, said he would once the full council is appointed.

Over the two-year life of Obama's OFBNP, however, the most controversial aspects of the Bush initiative have remained in place. Although Obama had promised in a July 2008 campaign speech that he would rid the OFBNP of two of its most pressing constitutional problems -- allowing faith-based organizations receiving federal dollars to discriminate in hiring, and allowing federal money to be dispersed directly into houses of worship -- he has done neither. Indeed, many of the evangelical leaders whose approval Obama sought during his run for the White House opposed those reforms, making their feelings known to campaign staff shortly after his stump speech.

In the two years since the OFBNP launch, church-state separation and civil liberties advocates, acting individually and through the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination (CARD) have repeatedly pushed Obama to stop funding organizations with discriminatory hiring practices, as well as ending the practice known as direct funding, which permits taxpayer money to flow directly to houses of worship, rather than requiring them to establish a separate nonprofit entity. Instead, on the hiring discrimination issue, Obama said the Department of Justice (DOJ) would review instances of alleged discrimination on a "case-by-case basis," and has merely encouraged recipients to set up separate nonprofits.

Using federal dollars to hire applicants chosen according to discriminatory practices is "a blatant violation of fairness and religious liberty, and the president knows this," said Sean Faircloth, executive director of the Secular Coalition for America, also a CARD member. In addition, "If religious organizations wish to help their community with US taxpayer dollars, we believe it's only right that they be required to create a separate, non-religious entity for that purpose -- one that would be open to government oversight…. Churches and other religious groups are free to do what they want with their own money, but once they receive federal funds, they should be required to operate by the same laws as any other charity."

When Obama appointed the 25-member OFBNP advisory council in 2009 to make suggestions for improving the functionality and constitutionality of the office, he explicitly took the hiring issue off the council's to-do list. Harry Knox, formerly the head of religious outreach for the LGBT rights group the Human Rights Campaign and now pastor to Resurrection Metropolitan Community Church in Houston, Texas, served on the first advisory council. "It was frustrating to me that we were specifically told not to deal with the issue of co-religionist hiring," he said, using the term frequently employed by advocates for permitting employment discrimination. "The reason given to us informally was that that issue had been passed to the Department of Justice. And the Department of Justice has not done anything about it in two years. That seems to me to be too long."

Others doubt that the DOJ will act. "I don't think there's anything going on at DOJ to seriously address this issue," said Rob Boston, senior policy analyst for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AU). "It's the equivalent of kids asking to go to Disney World and the parents saying, 'We'll see.'"

Without the touchy hiring issue on its agenda, the advisory council was as signed other questions to study and offer recommendations on. Obama asked a council task force on reform to address constitutional issues surrounding the OFBNP. Other issues -- including promoting responsible fatherhood, interfaith cooperation, international religious freedom, environment and climate change, global poverty, economic recovery and domestic poverty -- were assigned to other task forces. The council submitted its recommendations to Obama last spring.

When asked about how the White House has implemented the recommendations of the task forces, DuBois pointed to two blog posts at the White House website, one which described how faith-based groups could help the poor better access government benefits, and another that largely described meetings to further engage faith communities in the topics addressed by the task forces.

To date, though, the most substantive action Obama has taken has been the November 2010 executive order, based in part on the recommendations of a reform task force that was divided on many issues and could not reach consensus. In one example, the group could not come to an agreement on the question of whether an organization receiving federal dollars would have to cover up religious iconography in its building when dispensing social services. Ultimately, Obama said in the executive order, it did not.

Still, the executive order contained some bright points. It "addressed some of the issues of concern, at least on paper," said Frederica Kramer, an independent social policy consult ant who has studied the implementation of faith-based policies since the Bush era. Among other things, the order prohibits organizations receiving federal grants from discriminating against or proselytizing the people it serves; requires the grantees to offer secular or other religious alternatives; and requires that "explicitly religious activities" must take place at a separate time and location from the federally funded services.

The executive order requires a working group to submit a report, which will include model regulations to be adopted by the agencies, to the White House within 120 days of November 17, 2010. The order further requires the Department of Justice to issue guidance to agencies on implementation.

While this scenario plays out -- and while federal dollars continue to be used by faith-based organizations without oversight -- Kramer added, "We don't know what it looks like in reality."

The order's requirements are difficult to monitor and enforce, particularly in rural areas or smaller towns, where alternative services may not be available, or because people seeking social services are often vulnerable and may not feel empowered to question an organization's practices.

"Certainly, it's better than no regulation," said Boston, but "I don't think there's any serious effort to provide much oversight with these grants. It would take an army of inspectors -- it's just not plausible," especially in light of current budgetary constraints. Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, who served on the council and the reform task force, said the executive order "involved months of discussions through all of the faith-based offices in all of the [agencies] … They really spent a lot of time about what was practical, what was not practical, how it would happen." He added that the order is aimed at moving "the entire government into universal application of standards, which have been very random from department to department." Saperstein maintained that the agencies are "much better positioned to monitor" and that the grantees are also required under the order to monitor themselves and "be held accountable."

But Kramer, who is working on a book assessing the delivery of social services through faith-based initiatives, has doubts. "The punchline is -- how do you know?" she said, referring to questions that social service providers are actually offering the secular alternative or complying with the prohibition on proselytization. "There's nothing about evaluation or understanding how this is really administered," she added. "A working group looking at guidelines and regulations is different from implementation."

The White House, however, stands behind the order. "The important reforms put forth in President Obama's executive order on faith-based and neighborhood partnerships are well on the way to being completed," DuBois said in a statement. "An interagency working group of General Counsels from multiple federal agencies has been formed to implement the executive order, and the group has met several times to move towards implementation."

Still, though, the White House couldn't answer how that implementation will take place. Through a spokes person, DuBois said that each agency would have its own process, and that this process was independent from the OFBNP.

At the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), as one example, the Administration on Children and Families (ACF) administers the Healthy Marriage Initiative, which includes grant recipients with explicitly faith-based -- and often sectarian Christian -- mission statements and approaches. According to the Initiative's website, one Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, grant recipient, Skillful Couples Vibrant Marriages, provides services "that transform families into ones that are spiritually alive: each person has a growing, personal relationship with Jesus Christ that impacts every aspect of their lives."

When asked about how the ACF is complying, or will comply with the executive order, a representative from HHS replied by e-mail, "As part of the executive order issued by the president, a working group was established to ensure uniform implementation across the federal government. There are representatives from HHS participating in the working group that are evaluating existing agency regulations, guidance documents and policies that have implications for faith-based and other neighborhood organizations. The next step, following the executive order and the establishment of the working group, will be recommendations to the president and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) by the working group. After the recommendations, OMB, in coordination with the Department of Justice, will issue guidance to federal agencies."

The question remains -- how long is this all going to take? Meanwhile, all these organizations are providing services without the regulations in place.

What's more, while the executive order requires agencies to post a list of entities that "receive federal financial assistance for provision of social service programs," it doesn't require them to designate which recipients are faith-based groups. As a result, the taxpayer money flowing to religious groups remains, as it was during the Bush administration, difficult to track. There is, for example, still no single place to track which federal grants went to religious organizations. "I think it would be next to impossible for a member of the public to begin tracking" such grants, said AU's Boston.

An analysis of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act spending by the political journalism organization Politico last year found that $140 million went to faith-based groups -- all before Obama acted to implement reforms to the office -- including replacing an HVAC system in a church and replacing windows in a Catholic school. Robert Tuttle, a professor of law and religion at The George Washington University and an expert on faith-based initiatives, told Politico that Obama's OFBNP was "almost entirely identical" to the Bush policy.

In the end, says Kramer, there's no conclusive evidence that religiously based programs deliver services, such as substance abuse treatment, as well as or better than secular ones. And that's why, she maintains, evaluation of the programs, an element missing from the executive order, is so important.

If religiously-based programs "have something powerful that they do in an intervention, we need to know about it, because it needs to be replicable," she said. "You need to know what the methodology is, and whether it can be applied in a secular way.… We can't fund Jesus Christ."

Sarah Posner is associate editor of Religion Dispatches and author of God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters. Read her blog or follow her on Twitter.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Obama's War Against All Humanity

Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice


War on Humanity Declared

Following up on the murder of Osama Bin Laden, the Obama administration today announced the formation of a joint Military/Domestic Police Force (MDPF) to carry out a War on Humanity. Recognizing that the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the War on Poverty, the War on Crime, and the War on Illegal Immigration were all dismal failures, the Obama brain trust decided that by consolidating all of these campaigns into one simple war, encompassing all of humanity, the corporations that profited and built their empires upon these rationalizations could justify endless oppression, imprisonment, deportation, torture and accumulation of the wealth of the entire nation under one rubric.

By setting aside any pretense of necessity, the consolidated MDPF could freely arrest any and all civilians who did not immediately turn over all of their wealth and possessions to the corporate billionaires who run the MDPF. Any opposition to the formation of the MDPF, or any irresponsible discussion of taxing the rich could be directly dealt with through use of drones, renditions, Navy SEALs or other appropriate actions.

Because the consolidated MDPF would have world-wide jurisdiction, there would no longer be any need for Congress to waste its time on meaningless treaties with other nations, compliance with an antiquated system involving independent state autonomy, or adherence to a Constitution that had lost any semblance of vitality and effectiveness for the last five administrations.

The MDPF immediately created an Office of Public Propaganda (OPP), setting forth numerous explanations for their actions and activities. Terms such as enhanced interrogation, enemy combatant, communications management units, corporate personhood and a variety of euphemisms would be endorsed, so that the American people, who had long since lost the capacity to read or think critically, would feel comfortable with the actions of the parenting organization.

Anyone who believed they had been wronged by the MDPF could immediately file a request with the MDPF Military Tribunal (MDPF-MT) for relief. Because the Tribunal was entirely familiar with the internal workings of the MDPF, it would be in the best position to make any decisions regarding justice and truth. Costly appeals would be unnecessary, given the internal integrity of the MDPF-MT decision-makers. The Tribunal did not state what the punishment would be for filing what they considered to be a frivolous appeal.

It was determined that General Betray-Us was the ideal man to head the MDPF, and he would do so with the brilliant independent support of the civilian community, as represented by Hillary Clinton. Their understudies, in case of national emergency, would be retired General McChrystal, and ace war correspondent, Lara Logan. Both couples were photogenic, popular, and more frightening than 5000 Osama Bin Ladens.

The OPP announced that news of the War on Humanity was met with a chorus of cheers and chants: Osama, Obama, We’re Gonna Get Your Momma!! There was no reported opposition to the MDPF that this reporter was able to find.

Luke Hiken is an attorney who has engaged in the practice of criminal, immigration, and appellate law. Read other articles by Luke, or visit Luke's website.

This article was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Capitalism, Corporate Globalization, Empire, Satire, Terrorism (state and retail).

Monday, May 9, 2011

5 Toxic Right-Wing Lies Obama Must Strike Down from His 'Bully Pulpit'

AlterNet.org

NEWS & POLITICS

5 Toxic Right-Wing Lies Obama Must Strike Down from His 'Bully Pulpit'


In the absence of a progressive voice in the White House, the radical Right continues to dominate the political noise, forcing its policy narratives into policy decisions.

It was Teddy Roosevelt who with characteristic aplomb dubbed the presidency a “bully pulpit.” T.R. used the nation’s highest office as the perfect platform to rally the American people around a vigorous and, in his case, often controversial agenda. With Obama, we have, for the most part, an empty pulpit. During the campaign, Obama identified himself as a “progressive.” During his presidency, however, we have witnessed an ongoing failure to rally his base and the American people around a progressive agenda. In the absence of a progressive voice resonating from the White House, the radical Right continues to dominate the political noise, forcing its policy narratives into the media and policy decisions. Even as the nation is galvanized by the union-busting tactics of state Republicans in Wisconsin and elsewhere, perplexed by the bombing of Libya, and the growing prospect of the dismantling of our public sector the President seems content to triangulate between the two parties and mostly hole up in the White House poring over poll numbers with his small cadre of Wall Street-centric advisors.

Let’s be clear: the Republicans have been as cynical, malevolent, obstructionist, and downright zany during this administration as anything I have seen in the twenty-five years I have been a D.C. denizen. This includes the overtly racist “birther” attacks now hopefully finally put to rest. But as T.R., who was also routinely libeled, knew, it is not the job of the president to accept roadblocks from his enemies in Congress and then quietly whisper “uncle.” It is his job and that of his surrogates to aggressively go out to the public with a principled message and progressive narratives and to marshal the millions who support them to contact Congress and change their obstructionist and misguided ways.

This has been the signature failure of the Obama administration. Instead of standing on principle, Obama’s modus operandi has been to accede before the battle has really been joined. We have seen this repeatedly in the major issues of his presidency: the emasculation of the so-called “stimulus package”; the abandonment of the health care public option; acceding to the Bush tax cuts; failure to push for effective global warming legislation; surrendering to the hawks on the Afghan war; failure to stand up for the rights to public trial for those detained in Guantanamo; and now complicity in irresponsible and unnecessary cutting of critical government services.

Of course, politics is the art of the possible and leading is often about compromising. This we know. But there is a critical difference between compromising on strategies versus compromising and even abandoning basic progressive principles and narratives as Obama has done. The immediate result is that the administration compromised badly or was outright defeated. Obama has not become a clever compromiser but rather a recidivist capitulator. But the longer-term damage of the president failing to step into the pulpit of the presidency has been the failure to counter the Right’s reactionary narratives with progressive narratives. This resulted in a disastrous failure to mobilize the base in 2010 and offered no encouragement for independents to join with progressives. Not surprisingly half of the Democrats and the vast majority of youthful voters did not even show up at the polls in 2010. The House majority was lost and if it were not for the buffoonery of several Tea Party Senate candidates, the Senate would have been lost as well.

So what were some of the progressive narratives that have not even been articulated by Obama, and therefore left reactionary policy narratives to win the day? Every frustrated progressive will have his choices. Here are my top five:

1. Reactionary Narrative: Government is the problem. It is bad, even evil, and should be eliminated or privatized as much as possible

Countering Progressive Narrative: Government is good and a major part of the solution to our economic and social problems — large, robust local, state and federal government services are critical to our individual and national well-being

To be true to their “anti-big government” message, Tea Party rallies should have been festooned with signs such as “Fire the Fireman,” “No More Police,” “Bite the Postman,” “We Support Fewer Teachers and Overcrowded Classrooms,” “Collapse our Bridges — No More Infrastructure,” “We’ll Pave and Build Our Own Roads,” “Citizens for Salmonella,” “Unsafe Drugs for Everyone,” “Americans for a Weak Defense,” “Senior Citizens Against Medicaid and Medicare.” These signswere missing, of course, and instead we have the endless brow furrowing over “big government” in both parties as the discussion remains conveniently abstract.

This vagueness is important for the Tea Party and their big corporatefunders because the entire “big government is evil” narrative is incoherent once it is actually thought through. Everyone wants and needs robust and effective government services. However, in the 1980s the Reagan spinmeisters cleverly linked “big government” to “welfare moms” slurping vodka and driving Cadillacs, which had the advantage of being both apocryphal and racist. Over the last three decades “big government” has been artfully equated with helping the poor, immigrants, and other “undesirable” communities. This clever narrative about “big government” remains a rallying cry for the Right because large corporations use this mantra as a convenient cover to work against regulations that might protect the American people or the environment but cut into their profits. Additionally, the more the Right can cripple government through spending cuts the more they can show how it’s not working.

Meanwhile, it is indisputable that the two great crises in the Obama presidency, the financial meltdown and the gulf disaster, were both a direct result oftoo little government, too little regulation of corporations acting badly (actually criminally). So how is it conceivable that within just a few months of the Obama presidency “big government” suddenly became the culprit for our current economic malaise, rather than the failure of our government to reign in corporate influence and corruption that actually did cause it? Well in part it’s the empty pulpit problem. Perhaps in fear of the “big government” label, Obama simply has not forcefully reminded the American people that big government services are critical to each and every one of us, as are the public servants who perform them. Those first responders on 9/11, our teachers, firemen, police, health professionals, and those protecting our environment and ensuring our food and drugs are safe, are heroes not villains. They are the “care economy” that represents over 30 percent of our entire economy; they devote themselves to our collective welfare without the lure of profits and wealth.

Instead of standing up for government, for the care economy, and even expanding government programs to create an FDR-like jobs corps, Obama has frozen wages for public workers, defended the firing of teachers, and been mysteriously quiet during the recent Republican union busting jihad in the Midwest. Even worse, he has openly avowed his admiration for Reagan and his belief in limited government interference with the “invisible hand” of the free market.

It was jolting on the night of the 2011 budget compromise to hear Obama proudly proclaimed that we have made “the largest annual spending cut in our history.” Should we celebrate a 33 billion dollar “compromise” on the budget where the administration joins with the Republicans to further dismantle our public sector and public services. Certainly the President’s 2012 budget is far more humane than the Draconian, not to say loopy, Republican version It still is based on trillions in budget cuts and augers further compromises in the coming years with the Republicans as Medicare, Social Security, and the entire public safety sector is eroded. So we have a fundamental failure of the President to articulate the counter-narrative to the “evil big government” mantra. As a result instead of balancing the budget by taxing the richest among us, chopping corporate welfare to the oil companies and so many others, taxing currently untaxed major Wall Street transactions and massively reducing our defense budget including getting out of Afghanistan and other foreign adventures, the burden again falls on the beleagured middle class and the poor.

2. Reactionary Narrative: Quality health care is a commodity available to those who can afford it.

Countering Progressive Narrative: Quality health care is a basic human right.

In 1944 as part of his “Second Bill of Rights” State of the Union Address FDR declared that “the right to adequate health care” for all Americans was critical for our progress as a nation. Unfortunately he died before being able to realize this goal. When Obama decided, rightly or wrongly, to prioritize health care he should have started with this basic progressive narrative. He should have rallied the millions of women, men, and children with no health insurance to declare that quality health care is a basic right and urged his base to relentlessly pressure Congress. The White House should have been working overtime to make sure the stories of the uninsured working people of this country were in the media — front and center to the American people.

Working under this principle of health care as a “right” Obama should have taken the legislative lead with a call to extend Medicare to every citizen, and compromised from that position of principled strength. Instead Obama articulated no basic narrative or principle in the health care fight; there was no call-out to millions to rally behind a shared belief in this critical area of social justice. In lieu of this kind of real leadership he made a quick behind-closed-doors deal with the pharmaceutical companies and then left the entire legislative “sausage making” to five different Congressional committees, many of them dominated by representatives and senators whose votes had long been paid for by “big pharma” and the insurance companies. What’s worse, Obama in his haste for some kind of compromise prematurely threw the public option under the bus, alienating his base and significantly weakening the bill. The bill that emerged continued to support the reactionary paradigm of treating health care as a commodity albeit making buying this commodity mandatory. Its passage caused pharmaceutical and insurance stock to rise.

With the base discouraged and no progressive organizing having been done, the nascent Tea Party was able to seize the public space to violently attack the already weak bill and bizarrely label its supporters as “socialists.” During this late summer of tumult the White House remained inexplicably mum. Finally under unrelenting Tea Party pressure the White House decided to abandon even this weak bill, but Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership realized the very viability of the presidency was at stake and artfully passed the bill even though it was far weaker than the House version. The counter-narrative of health care as a “right” was never even given a chance by the Obama administration.

3. Reactionary Narrative: Free market competition is the basis for our economic life — the benefits of the winners will trickle down to the losers.

Counter Progressive Narrative: The free market is a dangerous fiction (as is trickle-down economics) — not everything is a market commodity and even then those commodity markets have always been regulated. The question is how and for whom to regulate markets so as to create the most equitable distribution of wealth.

Here’s an economics quiz. Who said the following: “From our first days as a nation, we have put our faith in free markets and free enterprise as the engine of America's wealth and prosperity. More than citizens of any other country, we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government..” Ronald Reagan, Milton Freidman? Newt Gingrich? Nope. That’s Barack Obama just a couple of weeks ago in his much awaited speech refuting the Paul Ryan Republican budget. This was reminiscent of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner explaining the Obama approach to dealing with the recession; “We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best topreserve that system.” Well they sure did.

To be fair Obama’s recent budget speech did give some kudos to limited government control of the market. However, when economists look back at the Obama presidency I suspect what will puzzle them most is how free market fundamentalism still somehow survived to dominate our public policy yet again. This despite one of the most dramatic economic collapses in our history itself caused by badly regulated markets. What shows Obama’s market fundamentalist tendency most clearly is the Administration’s bended knee to Wall Street. Currently the financial sector (even excluding real estate) accounts for more than 40 percent of corporate profits in the United States and around 25-30 percent of our GNP. So to an alarming extent the United States is becoming a “casino” economy. In fact today more than $680 trillion is invested in various derivative investment “bets” worldwide. That’s ten times the entire world’s gross national product! Instead of warning about the growing power of this metastasizing, dangerous, and massively destabilizing financial “complex” (as Eisenhower did about the “military industrial complex”) Obama sees Wall Street as a manifestation of his belief in free markets (albeit with a glaze of regulation) and yet ironically believes that massive government investment in this sector will “trickle down” to the rest of the economy. Well it hasn’t happened and it won’t happen. The federal funding to Wall Street will be used by those receiving it to invest in yet more exotic financial products and bets; if the bubble bursts again at the old Wall Street casino they can count on the government again to provide “house” money so they can keep on playing.

Obama should have embraced the progressive narrative that free markets cannot and have not protected workers, our environment, or even the stability of our financial systems. Over the last two centuries the purported “free market” oppressed generations of workers, utilized child labor, caused exponential destruction of natural resources, and created huge booms and busts in the financial system. This is because the free market was based in the fiction that labor, land and its resources, and money were actually commodities subject to the laws of supply and demand. Well labor is really human beings, not a commodity. Land and many resources are not commodities that can be endlessly produced but rather non-renewable natural “capital” that we destroy at our peril. And money is an exchange medium that is not a commodity and that should not be subject to the ups and downs, inflations and depressions, of investment betting.

Starting with Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive Era it was understood that the free market was thus a fiction. It was also correctly seen that these contradictions were creating large scale worker unrest and even revolution, destruction of the resource base of the country, and unsustainable inflation and depressions in the financial markets. So for the last century virtually the entireregulatory system of the United States was established to protect themarket system from itself. Labor as a commodity was taken off the free market with the establishment of the Department of Labor in 1917 and the promulgation of, among other reforms, workers protection, workplace safety, social security, a minimum wage, and unemployment insurance. A flood of laws and regulation from zoning to the major environmental laws of the 1960s and ’70s were put in place to protect our resources fromthe undiluted market. The FDIC and laws restricting and controlling by whom and in what manner investments could be made were put in place to protect the financial system from the market.

The Republicans under the sway of free market fundamentalism have forgotten this entire history. They now openly seek to tear down the very protections that keep the market system they profess to believe in functioning. Instead of busting the free market, trickle-down economics myth, Obama with his free market rhetoric and Wall Street-friendly policies has opened the door to a return, after a century of dormancy, of these “zombie” economic ideas. Of Obama’s capitulation to the Bush tax cuts and embracing of free market and trickle down ideology Paul Krugman wrote, “…it’s one thing to make deals to advance your goals; it’s another to open the door to zombie ideas. When you do that, the zombies end up eating your brain — and quite possibly your economy too.” And that is just what has happened.

4. Reactionary Narrative: You counter terrorism by fighting land wars and overthrowing dictators (especially when oil is involved).

Counter Progressive Narrative: The Best Way to Fight Terrorism is through Cooperative International Police Action and Foreign Policy Changes – Not Land Wars.

It was probably the most important, lost moment in the last presidential election. On July 31, 2008 the Rand Corporation, a conservative think tank started by the U.S. Air Force, produced a new report entitledHow Terrorist Groups End — Lessons for Countering Al Qa’ida. The report studied 648 terrorist groups between 1988 and 2006 and found that military operations against such groups was by a wide margin the least effective means of success. The evidence was unmistakable: terrorist groups very rarely cease to exist as a result of winning or losing a war-type military campaign. Therefore the study concludes that the so-called “war on terrorism” simply would not be successful as it was currently being implemented and that the efforts against terrorist networks should not be characterized as a “war” at all. The study demonstrated that terrorism was best defeated by treating it as an international criminal matter not as a “war.” The report summarized, “Al Qa’ida consists of a network of individuals who need to be tracked and arrested. This requires careful involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as their cooperation with foreign police and intelligence agencies.”

Of course you don’t need to be the Rand Corporation to see that this “war on terror” narrative is anomalous to dealing with any international terrorist network. Terrorist networks almost by definition are not bound by any country and can operate anywhere from Frankfurt to Jakarta or Elizabeth, New Jersey. Invade one country and they simply go to another. Moreover they can have “cells” anywhere and communicate via the Internet. Obviously international intelligence and police work is what’s required to deal with these networks, not WWII style military operations. Case closed.

Moreover, progressives know that many of the real foundations for terror lie in misguided oil-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, including decades of support for brutal dictators and also an overweening obeisance to the Israel Lobby. Obama missed his historic opportunity to clarify this during the campaign, to “bust” the misleading “war on terror” narrative. Instead, he kept saying that Iraq was the “wrong war” and then stating with misguided enthusiasm that the “real war” was in Afghanistan. He made the same fateful error as president. He spent many months reexamining the U.S. Afghan policy, reportedly receiving counsel from all sides. But, locked into the prism and prison of the “war on terror” narrative, he decided to increase our presence there by tens of thousands of troops. A position he still forcefully adheres to.

This has doomed Obama into a Rube Goldberg type policy in Afghanistan which goes something like this: even though al-Qaida is no longer in Afghanistan we have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, and the lives of our soldiers and innocent Afghanis, to take sides in a civil war against our former allies the Taliban. And we are committed to support the dictatorial warlords and their opium industry just in case al-Qaida might someday come back to Afghanistan even though they are not there now and we have no evidence they would ever come back. Moreover this bizarre policy has left Obama in the embarrassing position of trying to defend sacrificing our soldiers and treasure to uphold the hopelessly corrupt Karzai government. It is projected that in 2011 the Afghan War will cost more than $117 billion and probably more than that in 2012. So Obama’s folly in Afghanistan means that these funds, much of which will probably end up in the bank accounts of the Karzai clan and their cronies, will not be used to create jobs, repair infrastructure, pay teachers, or clean the environment.

5. Reactionary Narrative: Global warming and other environmental problems are either vastly exaggerated or don’t really exist — and if they do exist, the solution is market and technology based.

Progressive Narrative: It’s the ecology stupid — global warming is the greatest threat to the survival of civilization. The solution to global warming and other major environmental crises is governments at all levels cooperating to change our economic and technological systems to better comport with the principles of ecology. In April 2009, Carol Browner, the White House coordinator for energy and climate policy, convened a meeting with advocates who were working on the climate change bill. The administration had a clear message. Given their polling data, the administration told advocates that they should avoid talking about climate change and focus on green jobs and energy independence instead.

Environmentalist Lee Wasserman commented on this meeting: “Had Lyndon Johnson likewise relied on polling he would have told the Rev. Martin Luther King to talk only about the expanded industry and jobs that Southerners would realize after passage of a federal civil rights act. I could imagine Dr. King’s response.” Obama has stayed true to the polling. In his 2011 State of the Union Address there was not a single mention of global warming. (I actually prefer the term climate destabilization to climate change.) It is one thing to fail to mount the pulpit and warn Americans of the dire crisis we and future generations are in, it is altogether another to order advocates to stop using the term altogether. Given his timidity about even using the term, it is not surprising that Obama also failed to push a meaningful climate destabilization bill. Advocates constantly complained that the administration was a “no show” as they attempted to get a bill passed. There has not only been complete failure to pass a climate bill but instead the environmental community is now fighting off a last ditch effort by Republicans to remove the authority of the EPA to regulate climate destabilization gases, an authority upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007. Additionally with no bully pulpit defending the science of climate destabilization, the global warming deniers have had a field day in the media and we have seen a marked increase in the number of Americans who now doubt the existence of global warming.

Climate destablization has not been Obama’s only blind spot when it comes to the progressive environmental agenda. In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama does not mention the environment once. As for policy, it was Obama’s Department of Interior that gave the final permit for Deepwater Horizon. The administration then was very slow to recognize the dimension of the disaster. What’s worse, the Obama EPA allowed for the massive use of potential toxic dispersants despite claims that they were controlling the use of these little researched and understood chemicals. Finally the administration was actively complicit in prematurely claiming an end to the harms of the spill as this stance became politically expedient due to the upcoming election.

Obama’s focus on jobs over the environment is especially harmful as the progressive narrative is that whether we like it or not our human economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of ecology. Wall Street investments and indeed the whole gamut of market economics and employment, if based on non-ecological principles, are not only not sustainable, but actively speed the exhaustion of the remaining stores of the earth’s resources. Appropriately, there has been much talk about peak oil. But we also face peak water, peak topsoil, pollinator collapse, and a myriad of other crises all exacerbated by climate destabilization. Obama’s unwillingness to take a leadership role in redefining our societal relationship to the natural world at this critical time may be his most lasting failure as a leader.

Conclusion There is no immediate panacea to the “empty pulpit” problem we now face with the Obama administration. However, as we approach the next presidential election it is important, at a minimum, for several progressive candidates to challenge the president in the primaries. Not because there is a serious chance of having these progressive candidates defeat Obama. But rather so that progressive narratives and voices so critical at this time can mount the pulpit and speak to an America that I believe is truly hungry for this vision.

Andrew Kimbrell is Executive Director of both the International Center for Technology Assessment and the Center for Food Safety. He is a regular contributor to the Huntington Post, one of the country’s leading environmental attorneys and the author of many books and articles on the environment, technology and society.