The Obama Nosedive
As with the Bush administration, whose approval numbers went from the stratosphere after 9-11 into the shitter by the time it’s authority expired, the Obama administration has ridden the rhetorical wave of hope-and-change that secured the presidency and smashed into the reef of historical unpredictability. The administration has accomplished this descent largely through serial betrayals of the very people who put Obama in the White House. While the Republican Party founders on the splitting between Tea-Partiers and corporate flaks, as well as between libertarians and Christian dispensationalists – strengthening Obama’s chances in the next General Election – Obama’s betrayal of peace activists, labor unions, civil libertarians, Hispano-Latinas, environmentalists, African Americans, and the liberal-left is leaving him vulnerable to a primary challenge that might split the Democratic Party.
In itself, probably a good thing. Another step closer to the recognition of the ultimate futility of the electoral politics of retrenchment.
I voted for Barack Obama. Not, however, out of any enchantment with his bloviated rhetoric or empty suggestions of promises. I went on record as voting for him for two reasons: (1) He was under attack for his blackness by the white nationalists in both parties, and (2) without his election, the disillusionment now under way among Democratic voters, many out of plain, often justified, fear of Republicans, would not have happened.
Let’s review the betrayals of Barack Obama’s voters by his administration, and not the idiotic claims of the Right that he is a socialist, et al.
Peace activists who supported Obama out of a peace perspective have themselves to blame for embracing expediency. And self-delusion. When we pointed out that Obama was another war candidate, I actually read arguments from peace advocates stating their belief that Obama was doing what was necessary to get elected, and that he was secretly nursing a plan to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. There is a weird and persistent tendency to believe – in the teeth of historical evidence to the contrary – that an office-holder has more freedom than a candidate.
I was with fellow Christian peace activists at the Bartimaeus Institute the day Obama was inaugurated. Many of them were elderly folk like myself, even older, and many were veterans of the Civil Rights movement. They shed tears of hope, not for Obama or his rhetoric, but because there was some visible evidence that what they had risked and suffered had broken down some social barriers. But some of us noted, with a certin fatigue, the touchstones of belligerent machismo and warlike nationalism in his inaugural address.
Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred… For us, they fought and died in places Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh… Our founding fathers faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations… As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages… In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood.
We also noted more weasel-worded suggestions of promise.
We’ll begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people and forge a hard- earned peace in Afghanistan.
And so he was everything to everybody.
On Friday, three days after Obama became the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States, those armed forces – with his full knowledge and consent – attacked a group of people in Pakistan, using unmanned predator drones. Though it was not clear here how many were civilians it is pretty certain that some were; and at least 20 human beings were killed (I do not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants when our government occupies other nations.). When you use bombs, you accept in advance that you will kill the “innocent.”
His escalation of the war from Iraq and Afghainstan into Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia had begun. Barack Obama’s hands have been bathed in blood ever since.
He retained Bush’s Secretary of Defense. He hired torture commander Stanley McChrystal to oversee the Afghanistan escalation. He amplifed the CIA’s secret war in Pakistan. He sent tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan. He refused to prosecute war crimes. He used his power to conceal photogrpahic evidence of those crimes.
Not only has he erased the self-delusions of peace activists, the war in Afghanistan has now gone on loger than any war in US history. That benchmark was passed as the much-ballyhooed campaign for Kandahar is disintegrating before multiple and successful Taliban attacks, and former US-puppet Hamid Karzai is making overtures to Iran. So Obama is also now seeing his support from warlike Democrats and independents dissolve in confusion and dismay. He told them that this was the “right war.” And it is being lost. Quickly.
In that same week, he was confronted with a related dilemma when Israeli Navy thugs boarded the Gaza relief flotilla in international waters, killing, wounding, and brutlaizing scores of activists. Domestically, the Israeli propoganda machine has been wildly successful – not just now, but for decades – in convincing Ameircan voters that Israel is a victim in the region, under seige by Muslim savages. The Israeli political machine in the US has been equally successful at intimidating and buying off federal-level politicians.
This success is the petard that Obama is now being hoisted on; because the slightest criticism of Israel is now broadly perceived as a betrayal of an important ally (and against Biblical prophecy for many dispensationalist evangelicals). At the same time, the worst casualties were aboard the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish boat with many Turkish passengers, including all the known dead (there are still missing, thoughsome sepculate they were Mossad). Turkey is a key regional actor and US ally, as well as a member-state of the US-dominated military alliance NATO, under whose auspices the occupation of Afghanistan is being conducted.
Turkey is now seen outside the US as the good guy; and the good guy can no longer be counted upon to support US belligerence toward Iran, carefully and patiently crafted by anotehr warlike Democrat, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Arab and Muslim resentment against US support for and identification with Israel has been fanned back into a popular bonfire, threatening regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who are seen by much of their own populations as collaborators with, even sycophants of, the United States… and thereby, Israel.
Obama now faces Isareli pressure via an indoctrinated US voting base, a profoundly weakened position in the Great Game around the oil patch, a tactical defeat in Afghanistan (and probably Iraq, which will eventually and inevitably move into the Iran camp), and increasing diplomatic isolation in its machinations with other world powers.
If that weren’t enough shit to hit the proverbial fan, there is always the Deepwater Horizon undersea oil gusher that is poisoning the Gulf of Mexico and on deck to wreck the coastal economy of the US Gulf Coast. Obamna’s response, as the single greatest recipient of BP camapign cash in the US, has been tepid, and in the case of BP itself, downright obsequious.
Again, he finds himself on the horns of a domestic-international dilemma.
BP is the biggest company in the United Kingdom; and the UK is the most reliable lapdog for US interests on the world stage. Drops in BP stock are already threatening many British pension funds.
The problem with the oil gusher is that it can’t be concealed by the strangeness and distance of the wars, nor can it be obfuscated for long by national secrets. It’s washing up directly onto the coast called by some, the Redneck Riviera, where Obama’s none too popular anyway; and where the locals make a seasonal living from the sea. Add to that the animal-lovers, usually loyal Democrats, who are seeing daily images of animal suffering. The oil-soaked Pelican has become almost a national icon. Environmentalists, some of Obama’s most reliable shock troops for the campaign, are in a state of shock as the oil belches by the millions of gallons week after week, and Obama does nothing. Any suggestion of actually shutting down BP or seizing some of its considerable assets will quickly make enemies of all corporat donbors to future campaigns, and fuel the preposterous claims that Obama is a socialist (if only).
It’s not that Obama couldn’t do anything. Alex Cockburn, writing in Counterpunch, noted:
When the U.S. government wheels out the heavy artillery and starts suing BP for damages, the numbers start flying past the $40 billion mark pretty fast as you tot up Clean Water Act violations, plus fines for bird and fish kills, compensation for workers, expenses incurred by state and local authorities …. On and on. Then throw in criminal charges for willful conspiracy and maybe even the Chinese will think twice about taking over this target of public and private litigation, in cases that will stretch out for a couple of decades, at a bare minimum. More than 200 lawsuits have already been filed.We’ve got two to three decades of litigation to look forward to.
The problem with such justified measures is that they trigger dominant class solidarity, and the trainloads of cash to future campaigns, often more or less equally divided between the two corporate parties, can shift into anti-incumbent coffers at the drop of a hat.
Little to fear on that count. Obama’s adminstration moved almost immediately to restrict airspace from non government and non-BP aircraft over the enlarging spill site; and the US Coastr Guard has been dispatched to keep independent observers from entering many areas with watercraft, as BP collects (and likely destroys) animal carcasses that need to be enumerated in order to guage the true environmental impact.
Unlike the war, the Wall Street bailouts, and his commitment to increasing executive branch power, which are slow hemhorrages of popularity, the BP oil disaster has caused Obama’s approval ratings to spill like a ruptured aorta… or like the Deepwater Horizon itself. Meanwhile, officals in the UK are calling Obama a “bully” for finally making a few strong statements about the catastophe, a “bully.”
North of Louisiana, meanwhile, is my home-state, Arkansas. Here is where Obama managed to alienate not only a key constituency, but one with plenty of money for future campaigns. The labor unions.
In the latest Democratic Primaries, Arkansas’ Lieutenant Governor, and pro-labor candidate Bill Halter challenged incumbent conservative (anti-union) Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln for the Democratic nomination. Obama not only actively supported Lincoln – who was crucial for his insurance-company-friendly health-care bill to pass this year – against the AFL-CIO’s pick (Halter), he had Bill Clinton go to Arkansas to attack Halter, and attack the labor unions. Clinton is already a lightning rod in unions for his unstinting support of so-called free-trade agreements (as is Obama).
Can Obama do without union support in 2012? Sure. The fact is, the unions – with very low density anyway – will fall back into lockstep with the Democratic Party. But rank-and-file support may not. This adds another straw to the laden camel’s back.
What else could go wrong for Obama, one might think, but there are still quite a few points on the list. He might hope the next shoe wouldn’t drop until a losing and senseless war was off the radar, until the oil slick qujits growing into the Atlantic, until the Hlater-Lincoln fallout blows away, until he can twist the Turkish arm to fall back into line… but on June 7th, 14-year-old Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereca was playing on the Mexican side of the border at Juarez, when a US Border Patrol agent on the US side shot and killed him.
Just two weeks earlier, 32-year-old Anastacio Hernández-Rojas was killed by a combination of beating and stun-gun by Border Patrol agents in San Diego.
Obama’s response? He has ordered an additional 1,200 National Guard to the border as part of his escalating militarization of the US-Mexico border.
These are not stories widely read by Anglos in the US. But they are read, spoken of, and criticized by Hispano-Latinas across the US. In 2008, Obama received 67 percent of the Hispano-Latina vote in the US. On June 9, Gallup released a poll showing an 11-point drop in Obama’s popularity among Hispano-Latinas.
Again, a dilemma for Obama. As Hispano-Latina support wanes for Obama, along with the aforementioned sectors, Obama risks losing wide support in the Southwest from Latin@s, and margin-of-victory support in other states, even as many non-Latin@ Democrats have joined the US middle-class xenophobia against “illegals.” He is increasingly damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t.
One of the prinicple justifications for the militarization of the border has been the “war on drugs.” This is a key issue for libertarians – both ideological and ethical libertarians – as well as African Americans who have suffered terribly at the hands of the criminal justice system’s enforcement of anti-drug laws.
Marijuana decriminalization advocates with NORML recently pointed out:
The total amount of marijuana seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration nearly doubled from 1,539 metric tons in fiscal 2008 to 2,980 metric tons last year.
The numbers were disclosed as part of the DEA’s budget request for fiscal 2011.
To recap: The guy who called the war on drugs “an utter failure” and supported marijuana decriminalization when he was running for the Senate, and who promised to call off the DEA’s medical marijuana raids when he was running for president, has sought an increase in funding for that utter failure, ridiculed the very notion of marijuana decriminalization, presided over a doubling in marijuana seizures, nominated a hard-line Bush administration holdover to head the DEA, and continued to let the DEA raid medical marijuana dispensaries and grow operations without regard to whether they are following state law, despite a written Justice Department policy to the contrary.
This is not the Bush administration; It is Barack Obama’s.
Shave off another few votes.
Who else can he flip on? Well, how about gay people in the military?
In 2008, 68 percent of self-described gay voters supported Barack Obama. The one policy over which he has direct and immediate control is the military’s notorious don’t-ask-don’t-tell, under which gay soldiers are to this day being procesuted and thrown out of the armed services.
The policy has to be repealed by Congress to end it; but as Commander-in-Chief, Barack Obama has the authority and right to suspend its enforcement. When he was campaigning, he campaigned on a promise to end the policy. Now he is waffling through a “review process” between the Pentagon, that almost universally wants to policy kept in place, and a cringing Congress. This “process” is scheduled to last for at least a year, even as troops are still being separated for their sexual orientation. While professional lobbying groups have hailed this as a giant step forward, many individuals who are themselves gay or who support the rights of sexal minorities are ever more disillusioned about Barack Obama.
Again, his dilemma in the real world. If he does end the policy, either by suspension or repeal, he will lose support from many military members, steeped in the homophobic culture of the actually-existing armed forces. He also risks losing the support of a number of homophobic Black churches.
If he doesn’t end the policy, he will be a betrayer. It is estimated that one out of ten people may be gay. Most elections are won or lost on far less. Matthew Yglesias writes about the recent dismissal of two gay officers:
The game being played here is easy enough to understand. Obama’s decision on a variety of fronts has been guided by a clear desire to avoid some of the early missteps made by Bill Clinton. And conventional accounts of Clinton’s early presidency put the way he got into an early dispute with the military brass over treatment of gay and lesbian servicemembers high on the list of missteps to be avoided.
But while the political logic behind the administration’s thinking is understandable enough, the moral logic is contemptible (emphasis added). The dismissal of gay and lesbian soldiers was unjust when undertaken by administrations that believed in the policy. But disagreement about policy is inevitable in a democracy and sometimes injustice reigns. What we have today, however, is an absurdity—an administration that clearly does not believe in the policy, that is on record as opposing the policy, that campaigned explicitly on changing the policy, and that nevertheless declines to change the policy.
Tsao and Choi are being dismissed, in other words, not because the president of the United States feels they should be discriminated against, which would be bad enough. Instead, they’re being dismissed because the president doesn’t feel like doing anything about it.
There was a great deal of hope at the beginning of Obama’s tenure, when he made a sweeping gesture on behalf of human rights and against the Bush depredations against civil liberties. And he has been adept at downplaying thse areas where he has simply continued Bush policies – in my view, because no executive is going to surrender an iota of executive power. He has also been adept as giving his core the right talking points on his minimal reforms of Bush doctrine as evidence that there are differences between Republicans and Democrats. This latter is not simply manipulative – which it is – it is unfortunately also true. There are differences… which is why electoral pressure remains important to most people in any society that is not in a state of rebellion. US society is not in a state of rebellion, of any kind.
Leaving the two-party duopoly, and its whole incredibly influential game, is frightening for a very good reason. It is, in the most Kierkegaardian sense, a leap of faith.
We may learn that that will look like sooner than we decide en masse to flip the whole paradigm.
That’s the wild prognostication I’m entertaining as I jot this all down… The tea-party may split the Republican Party, Obama’s timid, corporate leadership method and his bloviatarian speaking style have conspired to put him into a volatile world situation – already in a tailspin after the Reagan-Clinton-Bush years – that is drowing his presidency, and deepening the faultlines in the Democratic Party. What may be left is one, de facto, weakened corporate technocrat party, reassembling itself from threats perceived in both directions. If hard times bite harder, then this one weakened establishment center will be forced to embrace the most reactionary formations out of plain pragmatism.
The reactionary core of the teaparty phenomenon, it must be noted, is white and suburban… self-described “middle class.” Within this movement there is a lot of plain silliness, like portly white men dressing up in camouflage to re-enact Red Dawn on weekends, shooting their assault rifles, and drinking in the warm glow of mimetic pathology and racial humor. There are also some very dangerous people in this movement, just as there are on the left, who are possessed by adventurism… by the adolescent fantasy of going to war.
A recent teapartier ad on tv showed a modern malcontent sitting at the table with Revolutionary War leaders, ranting about “tyranny” and “gather my armies.” This appeal to the victim-status of white people, and of middle-class people, and its association with the National Myth of vinicated US victimhood, ought to tell us something about the epistemologic challenges ahead for any future opposition to the state, to capitalism, to patriarchy, to racial supremacies, and to the violence that underwrites them all.
This post was written mostly last week, so a fair amount of water’s gone under the bridge on the BP and Gaza issues. Que sera. We’ve been very busy and out of touch. So I’m gonna let this one lay, as is, and let others chew on it if they like.
Stan:
The next topic that will bit Obamain the ass, imo, will be the Wall Street bailout. It happened a long time ago, but the last shoe hasn’t dropped economically. That’s onther splitter in each party.
17 June 2010, 1:10 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
I’m not sure I get what the specific part of the wild prognostication is. I think the greatest likelihood is that Dem’s will suffer a net loss in the mid-terms. Also I would give a high probability to an Obama loss in 2012. I can’t say it’s a high probability, but I would give some chance to Obama somehow not making it through the nomination process, or at least not without significant battle damage. I think 2012 will go to whatever Republican can talk crazier than Sarah Palin. I don’t think we’ve seen hir “on stage”, yet, much as Obama was largely unknown before 2007 (for a presidential candidate).
I’ve also speculated that we could see the rise of “Chomsky’s anti-Christ” from outside the typical political pathway. Is this what you mean? A Perot-like, game-changing candidate who propels past the major parties?
I’ll put money on Jesse Ventura if I get long odds and payment in the form of “get out of FEMA camp free” cards
From here to the rev, I’d be surprised if we see a candidate who can win in two election cycles. Eventually, they won’t even be able to hold office four years before facing removal, which will force the hand of tyranny. I don’t think this will be a long process.
18 June 2010, 1:54 pmHenry:
Excellent video interviews at Max Keiser with David DeGraw on “financial terrorism.” Outrageous.
http://maxkeiser.com/watch/on-the-edge/episode-58-12-june-2010-guest-david-degraw/
18 June 2010, 3:02 pmHenry:
Report at Ampedstatus–the Af-Pak war:
http://ampedstatus.com/af-pak-war5.pdf
18 June 2010, 4:02 pmHenry:
Videos: Wall Street Economic Death Squad – 2 parts
http://ampedstatus.com/wall-street-economic-death-squad-video
http://ampedstatus.com/the-greatest-theft-in-history-wall-street-economic-death-squad-part-ii-video
18 June 2010, 4:42 pmPaul:
There are two Obamas. The Obama of the campaign and the one currently living in the White House. On the campaign trail Obama said and did all the right things. But that guy left awhile back. President Obama tries and fails to stand on the shifting sands of both sides of many issues. One week he is calling our man in Kabul, Karzi, corrupt and rotten and apologizing the next week. He is coming across as weak and ineffectual. This is the last thing we need to slow our slide into the security state.
18 June 2010, 5:11 pmStan:
@ Marcilla, this was an unfinished dig. A three-year-old and a seven-year-old captured me for a week, and by the time I got back, there had already been several developments on the referent issues.
Ventura certainly got the not-gonna-take-it-anymore vote when he won his governor’s seat… significantly from boyz with a kind of macho libertarian streak. That’s actually a pretty big demographic.
The whole libertarian enterprise has become signficant, inside and outside the teaparty, but with lots of permutations. My own evolution at this point has me thinking of myself as an ethical libertarian, as opposed to an ideological one (which usually sanctifies ‘property’).
I raised the isue of Ron Paul back during the last election cycle, as an antiwar candidate, which he was, and as someone who opposes (1) drug prohibition, (2) ag-subsidies, (3) warrantless wiretaps, (4) illegal detentions, and (5) compulsory education. I don’t agree with his position on criminalizing abortion, and I’m four-square in opposition to his sanctification of private property and refusal to recognize any commons. On (5), I’m way outside the mainstream, and especially the “progressive” left, but what can I say?
My question then as now is why so many people can make trade-offs in the acceptance of Democrats (like Obama), and can’t see their way clear to trade-off for someone like Paul… who is perhaps the least dangerous legislator from the state of Texas. The Democrats have been leading the trend to privatization for some time now. Anyway…
These are the conundra of electoral politics, as well as policy fights, the sticky web of the establishment.
As you point out, there are a number of wild cards that will emerge as waning confidence in the system leads to shorter terms for at least two branches of government. In many respects, it may also paralyze government… which can be good, bad, or indifferent depending on the specifics of a situation.
You already know my dark obsessions about the US ‘middle class’ (teapartiers are NOT Bubbas, they are suburbanites!). There will be windows of opportunity to influence how people adapt to these changes; and those windows will close as quickly as they open. Then the adaptations will become hegemonic and warlike. Remember the Crusades and Hitler fascism were both attempts to redirect and unite restive populations out of social chaos.
I fear the liberal-left as well as the rev-left have habits of mind and practice that are self-maginalizing (like making idols of ‘programs’), which leaves things open for more syncretic, and often more unpredictable outcomes. Building on common ground – outside the electroal/policy arena – strikes me as a way, at least, to accentuate the positives. Far better than declaring people enemies, and digging the trenches.
Obama’s decline, as you suggest, is not based on some character defect of Barack Obama, but on the political misfortune of being part of the establishment at a point when that establishment is moving further inside a period of manifold crisis. He’s only among the first casualties. No doubt his status as first black prez is exacerbating things (by remotivating the cultural vestiges of white supremacy that have always been part of the American fabric), just as Dubya’s 9-11 was an exacerbator, raising him out of his delegitimacy after sketchy elections to a height from which his fall in history will make him infamous. These puncutations become more, not less significant as the deep, secular trends – peak energy, climate destabilization, the chasm of fictional value, soil-forest-oceanic destructions, and changes in the human semiosphere – all work together to rewrite the boundaries of the possible.
Since I started composing this, Obama has had some success at wringing money out of BP, and Clinton has suggested that the US Dept of Justice will sue Arizona for their profiling law. We’ll see how far any of this goes. As with the coup in Honduras, where they simultaneously denounced the coup then legitimated the outcome, they are trying to have their cake and eat it, too.
Time will tell.
19 June 2010, 7:35 amStan:
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19 June 2010, 9:22 amDennis:
He was vetted for the job by the capital-intensive political process in this country and the job is running what Karl Marx called as “the executive
19 June 2010, 9:36 amcommittee for administering the affairs of the whole bourgeois class,” the
modern state.
Stan:
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19 June 2010, 9:38 amStan:
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19 June 2010, 10:37 amStan:
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This was a Democrat. I am fearful for Latin@s in this country.
19 June 2010, 11:21 amCharles Norris-Brown:
Stan:
Once again, right on. I have followed your work ever since you wrote about the potential for fascism after 9/11. You are a breath of fresh air among too many in this country that just refuse to cross that bridge from seeing the American as the true savior in spite of our faults to that side where the true colors of the underbelly of this country stand out. That is a hard place to visit — not because we don’t want to but because it takes a major effort to stand away, dress ourselves down to the basics, and analyze. In 1967, I promised myself to try to figure out what is wrong with my society. I was drafted in 1968 and eventually went to Sweden (I was a fellow student with Alf Hornborg by the way). PhD in 1984. I returned in 1992 with the promise to people of the Third World Network to find out how America ticks. Eventually, I studied the right-wing, etc. Although our points of departure are different, we are seeing the same underbelly. Obama: “touchstones of belligerent machismo and warlike nationalism” (quoting you) — his speech to the Nobel Peace Prize was better than anything Goebbels could have come up with on the necessity to allow the uniqueness of American values to “guide the world” — herein that underbelly: God has made America and since we are God’s chosen we must be right. I could go on. I would love to invite you to Burlington, VT if you could provide some contact info.
Charles
STAN: Very kind, Charles, and the Hornborg connection is interesting. I live out of the country now, so VT is a stretch, though my last trip there was great. Thanks again.
20 June 2010, 5:44 amStan:
New samplings from news-n-views. References to Obama’s “Waterloo” and his “new Gulf war,” as well as his plummeting popularity abroad after the Mavi Marmara attack.
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20 June 2010, 9:25 amStan:
Examples of the immigrant-bashing that Obama has to navigate.
21 June 2010, 6:01 amStan:
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21 June 2010, 11:07 amStan:
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21 June 2010, 5:50 pmStan:
Obama has always been intimidated by the military-security-intelligence establishment. He should be. They are a power unto themselves; and the Republicans have long embraced them as political partisans. Now he is confronted with the impression of not-being-in-charge if he doesn’t fire the criminal McChrystal, and the alternative of firing him, which puts him at odds with a public well-trained in its sycophancy before uniforms with shiny ribbons.
Check.
Moreover, McChrystal has pretty much supervised the downward tactical spiral of the war in Afghanistan. He may recognize the inevitability of the end. If he does, then he can get himself fired, let the new guy take the consequences, and claim later on that he was winning until Obama got rid of him. People won’t know any better, because Obama has been part of the PR apparatus claiming that all is well in Afghanistan.
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The nomination of this viscious war criminal was a huge mistake; and now Obama is again reaping the political whirlwind.
If that weren’t enough, today a federal judge declared the offshore drilling moratorium null and void. The administration is appealing, so we’ll soon see if the nation’s court puts its stamp on the power of corporations to kill oceans.
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Here is how it works.
Obama says he will appeal, but don’t look for help from the Supremes. They just criminalized any support whatsoever for Gaza and other places populated by Palestinians.
Speaking of which… the embarrassment that won’t die.
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22 June 2010, 4:59 pmCurt:
I support the Supreme Court decision banning all aid to terrorists groups. The problem is that such a decision is being implemented by a dishonest government. In the future if an honest government were in power they could turn a blind eye to certain types of aid and see if such aid was actually having positive effects. If it is they could continue to turn a blind eye in that direction but if it is not then they have the law clearly on their side to bring the perpetrators to a trial. Then a jury of citizens hearing from both sides of the issue could make a determination keeping in mind that I favor jury nullification but with the caveat that it would take 2 jurors to achieve jury nullification.
23 June 2010, 3:30 amOne easy defense strategy would be to poke holes in the government claim that an organization is in fact a terrorist group. The government should not be able to say that a group is a terrorist group because it has been labeled a terrorist group by the US government or any other government. Whether or not an organization is a terrorist group must be a determination for the jury to make and the standard should be beyond a reasonable doubt.
Stan:
Interesting. The McChrystal-Karzai axis against Obama.
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23 June 2010, 6:27 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
@Stan – IDk if you’ve said this, but seems you are laying out the case for McChrystal to dump Afghanistan like toxic debt through “insubordination” and then — are you thinking we could see him in 2012 running on a platform of “he didn’t like me telling him like it is, so he fired me… but I stand up for what I believe in, it’s just who I am… and if only I had been listened to, we wouldn’t be getting humiliated over seas right now… my hands were tied by the administration… just give me a chance, and a free hand to do the things I need to do, and I’ll whip America back into shape – military, economy, and restore our good name!”
@Curt – if I understand you correctly, are you describing an honest gov’t as one that “could turn a blind eye to certain” violations of the law?
23 June 2010, 8:45 am(Boer) Tom:
@Curt
23 June 2010, 12:36 pmThe law decides which organisations are automatically de jure terrorist organisations – any other organisation must specifically be convicted of an act of terror, at least in Canada. On a practical political level, one should probably point out that some organisations are both de jure and de facto terrorist organisations (e.g. AQ), some are not de jure but are de facto (most western governments), some are de jure but not de facto (Hezballah?), and some are neither, e.g. rotary club? This belongs on the street, as any judge who accepts this will either be targeted by the state, or precipitate a crisis that may lead to e.g. a coup.
Curt:
Yes, I have been saying for years that the law is a GUIDE not a GOD. Did you ever see the movie, Les Mesirables?
23 June 2010, 1:13 pmIs it possible that a major point of that movie is what happens when you treat the law as a God? Did the movie make that point well? Perhaps it depends on which version of the movie that you saw?
District Attorneys have limited resources. That they have to prioritize what law breakers they most want to put out of business is in no way shape or form dishonest. The same is true of law enforcement agencies. And every so often the voters get a chance to weigh and say whether or not they think that the leadership of these institutions are doing an acceptable job. Can turning a blind eye have drawbacks. Of course it can.
The institutions of law and order could decide that they do not have the resources to combat marijuana farming in their jurisdiction annoying the hell out of neighboring jurisdictions. But legislatures have exactly the same power to annoy people of a jurisdiction or neighboring jurisdiction.
Juries also have an important role to play in the criminal justice system. They should be given the power to judge to the law as well as whether or not a person broke the law or to say that in general this is a sound law but no legislature could have ever foreseen these circumstances and therefore we find the defendant innocent. But since the defense is getting some pretty strong help in keeping people out of jail I think to balance things off if a defendant is going to go for a jury nullification strategy the jury should be polled if there is a hung jury and if the jury is unanimous that the defendant did what he or she is charged with but some jury members refuse to convict because they think that a law is unjust or that these particular circumstances do not warrant a conviction the defense must get more than one juror on their side. I have not really made up my mind what the best number is other than more than four should not be necessary.
Well I have to go now my daughter is kicking me off of the computer. I would be glad to talk more about this later.
Marcilla Elizabeth Smith:
Thank you for clearing that up, Curt.
First, let me say that it seems like an extraordinary amount of energy put into the technical refining for possible reforming of a thoroughly inhumane system. IOW, why try so hard to shine a turd?
IIRC, Les Miserables centered on the struggles around the time of the French Revolution. At the time, the revolutionaries were calling for a republic, which would be the rule of law over the whimsy of the ruling class. I don’t mean to be unkind, but this is pretty much the opposite of your point, as far as I can tell. Maybe the book does a better job of conveying the idea? As our government is by charter a republican form of government, the law is supposed to be absolute, even if amendable. The recentness of the TEA Party and similar movements notwithstanding, the US has been drifting from the rule of law pretty much since day 1.
What you describe in terms of DA’s and LEO’s sounds like selective enforcement, which is also against the law as written although seems to be pretty standard practice.
I think jury nullification is a great thing. I’d definitely exercise it if I had the chance to serve. I have a friend who beat the cops in court via jury nullification =-)
23 June 2010, 2:38 pmCurt:
Marcilla,
How can you watch Les Mesirables and not remember that the policeman spent his whole life trying to put the lead character whose name that I forget at the moment in to prison because he one time beat a rap for theft?
Why is selective enforcement standard practice. Because it makes sense. If everyone who broke the law got punished for it there would not be anyone left to get any work done. Including the law, are there any idols that humans should worship? I think that truth and justice are perhaps the best idols for humans to sacrifice their goats to. Yet even truth and justice are still idols because we really do not know for sure what they are. They will never say here I am worship me. So they can never really be pined down.
A drawback to jury nullification is that it results in unequal justice. That will happen anyways if judges are allowed discretion in sentencing. A benefit is that it can give further information to the DAs office what the community considers unimportant by refusing to convict. If juries are instructed that they have the right to refuse to convict because they think that the law itself is unfair then after a long period of time the DAs will have a base of historical evidence to look at and say OK over the last 25 years we have brought to trial x number of people for donating to the IRA, the Tamil Tigers, FARC, Basque sepratists, Nepali Maoists, Indian Communists, and the Iranian and Cuban Governments. Our conviction rate has been. Based on that this office will continue (or will discontinue) bringing such cases to trial. What it would amount to is that if one wants to send money to Cuba it would be wise if you lived in Massachusetts and not Miami.
By the way what does IIRC mean?
24 June 2010, 8:24 amm.c.:
I think it was Humphrey Bogart who reportedly joking said during the {find a Red/ Pacifist/ Pervert/ Agnostic/ Vegetarian/ Bike Rider/ Yoga Practicer(fill-in-the-blank) paranoid fever & fear of the 1950′s} that every poor bastard who ever scratched their ass during a playing of the national anthem would be in big trouble.
24 June 2010, 11:42 amm.c.:
@Curt
24 June 2010, 11:50 amThe terms you might be looking for are Legal Entrapment & Prosecutorial Misconduct….
Curt:
I think that I have come up with some better examples for explaining how power can be balanced between majority opinion and dissident opinion in any society’s cultural wars. The issues that I have in mind are corpral punishment for children and assisted suicide.
In a future liberal Vermont the state legislature passes a law prohibting parents to spank their children for misbehavior. Some of the states most conservative pastors find this law very objectional they go so far as to have their children report them to the police for spanking them to force a trial(s). In southern Vermont one pastor is convicted but in northern Vermont the trial ends in a hung jury. That pastor spanks another one of his children when the child has misbehaved and is again arrested. Again the trail ends in a hung jury. When the pastor is arrested a third time he counter sues charging the police with malicous prosecution.
To reach this point the conservative pastor has had to stand trial twice and have his behavior judged by a jury. It has been a pain in the ass and it has cost him and his supporters alot. But they think that it has been worth it.
In their view, they have been defending the rights of parents against the intrusive power of the state which is needlessly meddling in a parents right to raise their children. It has cost those that favor the ban on spanking absolutely nothing because the states costs have been paid for out of tax revenues. Those that oppose the ban have to reach in to thier own pocket to defend the accused. So their flaunting of the values of the majority has not been one that they can exersice scott free.
Across the border in New Hampshire some Unitarian Universalist Ministers have taken it upon themselves to help thier terminally ill patents to kill themselves. The same process repeats itself. In Vermont the minority is challenging a new law. In New Hampshire the minority is challenning an old law.
By requiring that jury nullification be achieved by 2 or 3 or 4 people the society is giving reasonably sized majorities a reasonable chance to defend themselves. Now if there is only one person on the jury that wants to nullify the law that person could lie and say that he finds the defeandant inncoent becasue he is not convinced beyond a reasonalbe doubt that the defeandant actually committed the crime. But if the defeandant admitted that he had committed the crime I have to wonder if that juror could be removed for cause.
Even if he could not be, the DA would then have a very good reason to immediately retry the case.
I realize that the arguements that I am making are a two edged sword. They can be used by the legal proffesion to let US military personnel skate for crimes that they should have known better than to committ.
Then after the military personnel skate all of the drug gang criminals can use the same arguements saying I was only the orders of my leader. You Colonels and Majors accepted the Generals as your authorized leadership. You respected the Generals for this that or another reason. We too looked up to our leadership. They were leaders of gangs that were institutions in our communities just as the military was an institution in your community. You were fighting on behalf of your country. We were fighting on behalf of our hood. Sure sometimes people were killed in the crossfire is that anything that you have not been guilty of.
We only fought to defend our territory and our honor. So you accuse us of poisoning our communities with crack or meth but did you not posion yourself and the women and children of poor communties with depleted uranium which will have effects for a much longer time?
Anyways I hope that my ideas of jury reform are something that progressives, liberals, true conservatives, and libertarians can all unite behind, in addition to ending the US imperialist foriegn policy. Now I have to go chew on my dud for a while longer.
24 June 2010, 1:38 pmCurt:
stumbleupon psycology section today had an article on the just world fallacy. Afterwards there was a discussion of films in which the bad guy or bad guys win. One person mentioned Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a film in which evil wins. Well they may be ahead when the film ends but they have not won. It is important to remember that. Important. No we do not live in a just world. But to me spending your time working for anything else is shallow. You may end up wasting your time. We have a lot of it to waste. There may be only 24 hours a day but there are how many hours in history? Furthermore it is not just the destination that makes a vacation but the trip. Drive On!!!!
25 June 2010, 5:33 amDamn, I should have gone to Hollywood.
Marcilla Elizabeth Smith:
Curt, I don’t mean to ignore your points, it’s just that I don’t know that you’ve responded to the very first and core statement I’m making [I will take the time to say that IIRC = if I recall correctly]. Maybe I would get my point across better if I said your thinking comes across as overly-narrow. What I mean by this is, it seems that you see the flaws – we do not disagree about this – but I think you are constraining yourself in terms of solutions. IOW, are there really more limitations to dismantling the system than there are to incrementalism? I think we saw an example of this over healthcare. The healthcare proposal met with resistance because it was more *conservative* than mainstream USA, yet the resistance we were shown on TV was the “even more conservative” TEA Party protests.
This is why I say “don’t reform, repeal!” Why cops? Why judges? Why DA’s? As you say yourself, the capriciousness of their decisions will happen regardless. Consensus-based, non-hierarchical decision-making has been used by Anarchist groups, by religious communities (like Quakers), and likely by tribal groups going back tens of thousands of years before agricultural societies. It’s the natural human way of doing things. Anyone who doesn’t believe this should get together with 5 friends and suggest that rather than talk out where to go for lunch, that you have a secret ballot. I hope you like blank stares
25 June 2010, 8:35 amCurt:
As I mentioned before it is very hard to get your hands around the neck of justice or truth for that matter.
25 June 2010, 9:17 amBut just think if it were easy then there would be nothing left to do except the shallow activities of having fun. So when I think about it leads me to say then ultimately our existence is shallow and meaningless. Which then leads me to say to myself, so what better to do under the circumstances than to try to accomplish an impossible task. It will keep our minds off the meaningless of it all. Then if we break up this impossible task in to 7 or 8 or 9 billion little steps and give each person just one step to take who knows where it will lead.
Curt:
Marcilla,
25 June 2010, 4:47 pmOur last two posts obviously crossed in the mail.
Just a snort answer to your comment about concession based decision making. It breaks down with large, I am not sure of the word (heterogeneous, homophobic, homogenius,)groups. When you have for example one group of people who are very concerned about protecting children’s rights as they understand them and another group of people very concerned about protecting parental rights as they understand them living side by side there is going to be conflict. In many societies they take a vote and the majority wins. The losers then have to accept it, leave, or go to war. I do not know of any civil wars that started over a single issue, do you? Yet I would not be surprised if there have been some. Well do wars over who the next leader shall be count? Allowing a minority of a jury to nullify a law that they do not like is a balance of power mechanism for a society. In American society those words……Balance of Power……Balance of Power…..are believed to have magical powers.
Thinking on this lead me to question something else about our current jury system. One person can hang a jury.
I think that is a tad bit excessive if we are considering the question only of whether or not the accused person actually did what he is accused of doing. It should take two jurors to say that they are not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. Perhaps if only one juror is not convinced the alternate jurors can also be polled and if they are all convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused is guilty then that one juror’s veto power would itself get vetoed.
This evening I got the idea that this method could also help solve the debate about illegal immigration in the US. I will post my thoughts on that though with the article on the new law in Arizona.
Stan:
If we keep sending these notes to this thread for another couple weeks, we could go back and list all the things that have actually happened, or that have happened unexpectedly.
Here are some recent developments.
FULL
Here is Obama’s shitbird-of-the-week prize. For re-hiring Blackwater.
FULL
Bob Herbert is always a beat ahead of his colleagues in calling things by their names. Here’s his NYT (the flagship newspaper of the US) editorial calling for abandonment of the war.
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And of course the Deepwater Horizon, a gift that keeps on giving. Our federal judiciary has cancelled the prez’s moratorium on deepwater drilling. So the race is on again to the next disaster. Hope it’s not a nuke plant (something none of us dare utter). That could be a big one.
FULL
27 June 2010, 9:30 pmStan:
Money system prepares to bite Obama (and all of us) right on our hindparts.
FULL
28 June 2010, 3:27 pmHenry:
Something is seriously wrong
The Toronto G-20 leaders’ meeting is being held this weekend (June 26-27, 2010) and one expects it will endorse the position taken at the recent G-20 annual Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting in South Korea. The communiqué released from that meeting illustrates how influential the deficit terrorists have become. At the Pittsburgh meeting of the G-20 leaders in September 2009 the communiqué talked about the sufficiency and quality of jobs. Six months later they had abandoned that call and are now preaching higher unemployment and increased poverty via austerity packages imposed on fragile communities. This is in the context of dramatic increases in global poverty rates in 2009 due to income losses associated with entrenched unemployment. Then I note that the recently released 2010 World Wealth Report shows that the world’s rich got richer during the 2009 recession. The only reasonable conclusion is that something is seriously wrong in the world we have constructed.
The G-20 reversal is symptomatic of the direction the public debate is taking in the current period as the Flat Earth Theorists gain traction in the media and the lobbying circles. The sustained campaign against the fiscal support of the ailing world economy is making it harder for governments to do what we elect them to do – use their policy tools to advance public purpose.
The increasing constraints that governments are voluntarily accepting to satisfy the demands of amorphous groups such as the “bond markets” impinge on the democratic rights of every citizen. We expect our governments will act in the best interests of the nation. Sadly they are no longer doing that because they have fallen prey of the deficit terrorists. We introduced a new term for this phenomenon – democratic repression. Please read my blog – Amazing reversals – democratic repression – for more discussion on this reversal of policy position by the G-20.
The poor are getting poorer
The stock take for 2009 is as follows. World production (GDP) contracted by around 2 per cent overall in 2009 as private spending collapsed and government stimulus efforts were of an insufficient magnitude to provide the required spending offset.
The impacts of the recession was not evenly spread across the world. Western Europe saw real output decline by 4.1 per cent while Eastern Europe endured a collapse in real GDP of 3.7 per cent. In the Asia-Pacific countries (apart from Japan) real GDP grew by 4.5 per cent driven largely by the huge fiscal stimulus provided by the Chinese government.
At the same time, in its Global Economic Prospects 2010, the World Bank estimates that the global economic crisis pushed 50 million more people into extreme poverty in 2009 and a further 64 million will be added to this pool by the end of this year.
More (plus the usual great reader’s comments):
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=10421
28 June 2010, 3:56 pmHenry:
Friday, June 25, 2010
Europe’s Fiscal Dystopia: The “New Austerity” Road to Neoserfdom
By Michael Hudson
Europe is committing fiscal suicide – and will have little trouble finding allies at this weekend’s G-20 meetings in Toronto. Despite the deepening Great Recession threatening to bring on outright depression, European Central Bank (ECB) president Jean-Claude Trichet and Prime Ministers from Britain’s David Cameron to Greece’s George Papandreou (president of the Socialist International) and Canada’s host, Conservative Premier Stephen Harper, are calling for cutbacks in public spending.
The United States is playing an ambiguous role. The Obama Administration is all for slashing Social Security and pensions, euphemized as “balancing the budget.” Wall Street is demanding “realistic” write-downs of state and local pensions in keeping with the “ability to pay” (that is, to pay without taxing real estate, finance or the upper income brackets).
More:
http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2010/06/europes-fiscal-dystopia-new-austerity.html
28 June 2010, 3:57 pmHenry:
Videos: Max Keiser (On the Edge) interviews Michael Hudson
http://maxkeiser.com/watch/on-the-edge/episode-60-25-june-2010-guest-michael-hudson/
28 June 2010, 9:20 pmHenry:
Audio: Hudson interviewed by Renegade Economist: Banks Profit Going Up and Down
http://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/RE23.06.10.mp3
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Why Europe Can’t Look After Itself
June 21, 2010
Tags: Euro, guns n butter, Latvia
Hudson’s latest interview with Bonnie Faulkner, discussing his recent venture to Latvia amidst Europe’s current troubles. Why have government’s suddenly forgotten how to finance themselves?
http://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/Hudson_2010_Latvia_KPFA_111.mp3
30 June 2010, 1:03 amStan:
This topic takes a lickin and keeps on tickin.
FULL
2 July 2010, 5:56 pmStan:
FULL
13 July 2010, 6:54 am