Fuck Obama

[Luther Blissett]

^^^
Yeah, I'm kinda speechless. I think it musta been a couple years ago when I was blowed-away by how similiar events in the US looked like pre-war Germany. US gov is so far into their own delusional fantasies and militant-reactionary excesses that perpetuate an irrational culture of self-indulgent predatory manipulation & exploitation that it seems insanely driven to 'accidently' precipitate an orgiastic dance of death & destruction. It doesn't look like ANY responsible sober adult is actually driving the bus anymore ...
Yet crowds eagerly throng to get on it, they don't even know the stated destination. Odds are 30 to one against arriving, ever ...
So whose nutz here?

And yet it will never arrive in any recognizable form. We can worry about so many things, from the fate of Leah-Lynne Plante to the suppression and arrest of journalists attempting to cover Occupy Wall Street to Ice Free Summer 2015 to methane to the Pacific plastic gyre to Oak Creek nazis to UFOs to Willard to the bloop to the Sandusky-donor-Savitz pedophile ring to jellyfish to Abdulrahman to the 8th billionth person and yet we can all still be surprised, shocked, and saddened by the next bit of news no matter how informed we are. We all "knew" that it was a tacit administration position to murder with impunity overseas rather than to capture, out of political convenience, but now we hear someone say it and it still makes us sick.

Is it ever going to get "better"? What would that take, short of the blinders? I'm sure we all know some magically delusional humble braggers; many of us probably see ourselves as "fighting for them" which is in many cases true. We see a lot of transcendent individuals drop the fight in favor of an idyllic pasture in the Pacific Northwest but what disaster isn't awaiting them? Will they make it to a peaceful death?

Many of us have to grieve in our lives and yet analysis and dissent is still our hobby.

[ninakat]

Ralph Nader: Obama’s a ‘War Criminal’
By Patrick Gavin

September 26, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - It’s no surprise that Ralph Nader isn’t a fan of former President George W. Bush. After all, the longtime activist ran against him in both 2000 and 2004. But Nader’s even less a fan of President Barack Obama, if only because he thinks Obama was capable of so much more.

On issues related to the military and foreign policy, Obama’s worse than Bush, “in the sense that he’s more aggressive, more illegal worldwide,” Nader told POLITICO, going so far as to call Obama a “war criminal.”

“He’s gone beyond George W. Bush in drones, for example. He thinks the world is his plate, that national sovereignties mean nothing, drones can go anywhere. They can kill anybody that he suspects and every Tuesday he makes the call on who lives and who dies, supposed suspects in places like Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that is a war crime and he ought to be held to account.”

Nader called Obama “below average because he raised expectation levels. What expectation level did George W. Bush raise?… He’s below average because he’s above average in his intellect and his knowledge of legality, which is violating with abandon.”

“I don’t know whether George W. Bush ever read the Constitution,” said Nader. “This man taught the Constitution, and this is what we got.”

Nader gave Obama this much: He’s the lesser of two evils when compared to GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. But he said Obama is “the more effective evil because he brings credibility, he brings the democratic heritage to it, he has legitimized the lawless war-mongering and militarism abroad of George W. Bush.”

When asked to highlight some positives about Obama’s presidency, Nader said, “I like the way he’s emphasized renewable energy, even though he still supports nuclear and fossil fuels, as if they’re all the same, all of the above. But he does speak more about renewables than any president perhaps since Jimmy Carter.” (Nader will be speaking at the Green Festival in Washington, D.C., later this month.)

And: “He wanted to have a public works program, he really did want to have a jobs program and the Republicans crushed it and that would have created a lot of jobs that couldn’t be exported to China.”

Nader doesn’t let Republicans off easy, either, calling them “the worst Republican Party in history.”

“We’re dealing with a real sick, decaying Democratic Party that can’t defend the country against the cruelest, most ignorant, most anti-worker, most war-mongering, most Wall Street–indentured Republican Party in its history, since the 1850s.”

As for Romney, Nader said “he’s not the old Romney, governor of Massachusetts. He’s had a character and personality makeover. He’s just bought into the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, represented by Paul Ryan, and I don’t think he’s going to be able to shake that. He’s basically a corporation running for president masquerading as a human being.”

For the first time in a long time, Nader is not running for president this year. From the way he puts it, he may be through with such campaigns.

“I’ve run several times and we’ve documented the two-party tyranny, which means they’re very adept at excluding, with a whole variety of ways, third parties.”

It’s not, however, because he’s been billed by some as a political spoiler.

“That’s a politically bigoted words, as if we’re second-class citizens,” said Nader. “Since we’re all trying to get votes from one another, either we’re all spoilers of one another or none of us are spoilers.”

Patrick Gavin pgavin@politico.com

This article was originally posted at Politico

[Project Willow]

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/new-justice-department-documents-show-huge-increase

09/27/2012
Government Surveillance
New Justice Department Documents Show Huge Increase in Warrantless Electronic Surveillance
By Naomi Gilens, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 1:32pm



Justice Department documents released today by the ACLU reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans’ electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.

The documents, handed over by the government only after months of litigation, are the attorney general’s 2010 and 2011 reports on the use of “pen register” and “trap and trace” surveillance powers. The reports show a dramatic increase in the use of these surveillance tools, which are used to gather information about telephone, email, and other Internet communications. The revelations underscore the importance of regulating and overseeing the government’s surveillance power. (Our original Freedom of Information Act request and our legal complaint are online.)

Pen register and trap and trace devices are powerfully invasive surveillance tools that were, twenty years ago, physical devices that attached to telephone lines in order to covertly record the incoming and outgoing numbers dialed. Today, no special equipment is required to record this information, as interception capabilities are built into phone companies’ call-routing hardware.

Pen register and trap and trace devices now generally refer to the surveillance of information about—rather than the contents of—communications. Pen registers capture outgoing data, while trap and trace devices capture incoming data. This still includes the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing telephone calls and the time, date, and length of those calls. But the government now also uses this authority to intercept the “to” and “from” addresses of email messages, records about instant message conversations, non-content data associated with social networking identities, and at least some information about the websites that you visit (it isn't entirely clear where the government draws the line between the content of a communication and information about a communication when it comes to the addresses of websites).

Electronic Surveillance Is Sharply on the Rise

The reports that we received document an enormous increase in the Justice Department’s use of pen register and trap and trace surveillance. As the chart below shows, between 2009 and 2011 the combined number of original orders for pen registers and trap and trace devices used to spy on phones increased by 60%, from 23,535 in 2009 to 37,616 in 2011.

During that same time period, the number of people whose telephones were the subject of pen register and trap and trace surveillance more than tripled. In fact, more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade.

During the past two years, there has also been an increase in the number of pen register and trap and trace orders targeting email and network communications data. While this type of Internet surveillance tool remains relatively rare, its use is increasing exponentially. The number of authorizations the Justice Department received to use these devices on individuals’ email and network data increased 361% between 2009 and 2011.

The sharp increase in the use of pen register and trap and trace orders is the latest example of the skyrocketing spying on Americans’ electronic communications. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that cellphone carriers received 1.3 million demands for subscriber information in 2011 alone. And an ACLU public records project revealed that police departments around the country large and small engage in cell phone location tracking.

Legal Standards For Pen Register And Trap And Trace Orders Are Too Low

Because these surveillance powers are not used to capture telephone conversations or the bodies of emails, they are classified as “non-content” surveillance tools, as opposed to tools that collect “content,” like wiretaps. This means that the legal standard that law enforcement agencies must meet before using pen registers is lower than it is for wiretaps and other content-collecting technology. Specifically, in order to wiretap an American’s phone, the government must convince a judge that it has sufficient probable cause and that the wiretap is essential to an investigation. But for a pen register, the government need only submit certification to a court stating that it seeks information relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation. As long as it completes this simple procedural requirement, the government may proceed with pen register or trap and trace surveillance, without any judge considering the merits of the request. As one court noted, the judicial role is purely “ministerial in nature.”

The content/non-content distinction from which these starkly different legal requirements arise is based on an erroneous factual premise, specifically that individuals lack a privacy interest in non-content information. This premise is false. Non-content information can still be extremely invasive, revealing who you communicate with in real time and painting a vivid picture of the private details of your life. If reviewing your social networking contacts is sufficient to determine your sexuality, as found in an MIT study a few years ago, think what law enforcement agents could learn about you by having real-time access to whom you email, text, and call. But the low legal standard currently applied to pen register and trap and trace devices allows the government to use these powerful surveillance tools with very little oversight in place to safeguard Americans’ privacy.

Failure to Share These Reports with the Public Frustrates Democratic Oversight

In order to maintain a basic measure of accountability, Congress requires that the attorney general submit annual reports to Congress on the Justice Department’s use of these devices, documenting:
The period of interceptions authorized by each order and the number and duration of any extensions of each order
The specific offenses for which each order was granted
The total number of investigations that involved orders
The total number of facilities (like phones) affected
The district applying for and the person authorizing each order.

As my colleague Chris Soghoian has noted, however, the Justice Department has routinely failed to submit the required reports. In fact, the Justice Department repeatedly failed to submit annual reports to Congress between 2000 and 2008 (submitting them instead as “document dumps” covering four years’ worth of surveillance in 2005 and 2009). The department’s repeated failure to follow the law led the Electronic Privacy Information Center to write a letter of complaint to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) in 2009.

Unfortunately, even when the Justice Department does turn over the reports, they have disappeared “into a congressional void,” as Professor Paul Schwartz has put it, instead of being released to the public. The reports for 1999-2003 were obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation through a FOIA request. Chris Soghoian obtained the 2004-2009 reports through the same process.

When no reports surfaced in 2010 and 2011, the ACLU filed a FOIA request to obtain them. After our request received no response, we filed suit to enforce it.

Although the Justice Department has in the past repeatedly failed to submit the annual reports to Congress, it appears that it has now cleaned up its act. Both the 2010 and 2011 reports were submitted to Congress in compliance with the reporting requirement. Unfortunately, Congress has done nothing at all to inform the public about the federal government's use of these invasive surveillance powers. Rather than publishing the reports online, they appear to have filed them away in an office somewhere on Capitol Hill.

This is unacceptable. Congress introduced the pen register reporting requirement in order to impose some transparency on the government’s use of a powerful surveillance tool. For democracy to function, citizens must have access to information that they need to make informed decisions—information such as how and to what extent the government is spying on their private communications. Our representatives in Congress know this, and created the reporting requirement exactly for this reason.

It shouldn’t take a FOIA lawsuit by the ACLU to force the disclosure of these valuable reports. There is nothing stopping Congress from releasing these reports, and doing so routinely. They could easily be posted online, as the ACLU has done today.

Even though we now have the reports, much remains unknown about how the government is using these surveillance tools. Because the existing reporting requirements apply only to surveillance performed by the Department of Justice, we have no idea of how or to what extent these surveillance powers are being used by other law enforcement agencies, such as the Secret Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or state and local police. As a result, the reports likely reveal only a small portion of the use of this surveillance power.

Congress Should Pass a Law Improving the Reporting Requirements

One member of Congress is attempting to overhaul our deeply flawed electronic surveillance laws. In August, Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill to amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 to reflect advances in technology that have taken place since the law was passed over twenty-five years ago. One portion of Rep. Nadler’s bill addresses all of the major problems with the current reporting requirements for pen register and trap and trace surveillance. His bill would expand the reporting requirement to apply to all federal agencies, as well as state and local law enforcement. The bill would also shift the responsibility of compiling the reports from the attorney general to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, which already completes the reporting requirements for the government’s use of wiretaps, and proactively posts those reports on its website each year.

Congressman Nadler's bill is an opportunity to apply meaningful oversight to the government’s rapidly increasing use of a highly invasive surveillance power. These reforms are critical to protect our privacy and maintain an open and transparent government.

[ninakat]

Someone had to post it.

October 16, 2012
A Negative Dialectic
Obama and His Silent Base
by NORMAN POLLACK

During the Great Depression, America was a different nation. We were drawn togther as a people, even or especially in extreme hardship. Class was a salient term, one to build on, not an object of ridicule subject to obfuscation. We accepted responsibility for one another, solidified in a view of social obligation centered on government as the people’s instrument for achieving the public interest. We were not stampeded and frightened away, either by a cultural atmosphere of heightened individualism or organized campaigns by corporations and right-wing ideologues for privatization and trickle-down economics. The refrain, “Brother, can you spare a dime?”, in the early days of gathering conviction and will, emphasized the first word–brother. Had I been of age (I was born in 1933–and did not think of myself as a radical until 14-15, with the Cold War and the campaign of Henry Wallace in ’48), I would have been proud to be an American during the New Deal, where public values, public institutions, and public works as the means for job creation and to address underconsumption came to the foreground.

Leadership matters. Through his speeches, his fireside chats, his example in fighting polio (he would never again walk unaided, heavy braces, leaning on his son’s arm, giving the illusion of walking), his warmth, unflappable demeanor, and, yes, charm, Franklin Roosevelt established a bond with his supporters which mutually strengthened both. A positive dialectic: the interplay of political nourishment, strengthening resolve for each leading the other forward, so that FDR–a conservative at heart, but conservative in ways not understood today–could venture far afield from conventional economics and, partly in response, partly nudging him still further, his supporters, a large majority of the American people, could and did lift their own horizons, did indeed perhaps for the first time in American history grasp the full meaning, without apology, of entitlement as a basic human right.

This dialectic, or interplay, fortifying the conviction, dignity, and resolve of both, was based on the foundation of societal reconstruction: tangible achievement in what today we call infrastructure, but even more, in the realm of the human spirit, not as an ethereal concept, because food on the table also mattered. To be sure, the outer limits of the New Deal remained capitalistic (i.e., to save capitalism), and there should be no illusion about NRA (National Recovery Administration), which, under Hugh Johnson, promoted the concentration of industry. Nonetheless, the other side of the ledger, much of which was quasi-socialist in nature, or when not, still affirming the primacy of human over property rights, was a veritable alphabet soup of ingenuity and creativity (pragmatism, not as later usage would have it, to forestall basic change, but to uncover further needs and solutions).

WPA, PWA, CCC, these three alone suffice to constitute a silent revolution when measured against three centuries of American political culture. Even poets’ workshops, leaf-raking, federal theater projects, bring tears to my eyes because of the nourishment they gave to those who participated and those whom they reached. America was affirming itself and its people. Odets: “Awake and Sing.” There was of course more: the Wagner Act, Social Security, banking and securities legislation, the fundamentals of a social capitalism only partially realized and perhaps an oxymoron in the world to follow. This was not Roosevelt’s doing alone, as though creating a new society from whole cloth, but depended as much if not more on a people responding to the opportunity he provided for self-organization (as in the Wagner Act) and pressuring him leftward because they were mobilizing for concerted action after decades of repression or indifference. FDR removed the cobwebs; the dialectic was consummated in the people’s own assertion of rights for a decent competence, presented to receptive ears. When the “economic royalists” of the period made known their hatred of him, he responded, “..and I welcome their hate.”

Long ago (actually not) and far away, as measured in the steadily rightward shift of America itself, a chief casualty of this development has been the Democratic party, which at each step became an accomplice in what I might term the fascisization of the society at large, including the body politic. America is not fascist…yet, but as both a structural and a social process the trend line seems to me clear. Fascism does not require the concentration camp, persecution, torture–although their threat and potential remain present always, ready to be invoked and remaining discretely under the surface. Rather, fascism can be apprehended through a number of indices: e.g., extreme wealth concentration; the partnership of business and government, itself to promote monopoly capital, prevent union organization and labor militancy, and create a strong State predicated on military power and trade supremacy; and a compliant (and complacent) populace which is deferential to power and wealth, tied in ideological knots through false consciousness, and intellectually broken down through media, propaganda, and signals from above.

Enter, therefore, the Obama administration, a mirror image of FDR and the New Deal in reverse. We expect reactionary ideology and politics from Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II, but surely not the Democrats, first Clinton, and now, more spectacularly, Obama. Clinton does not concern me here; he is probably the most overrated Democrat ever. He has repositioned the American economy–more systematically than his Republican predecessors–on the axis of deregulation, so thoroughly as to cripple any possibility of effective regulation of business and banking in the public interest and, with destroying Glass-Steagall, to pave the way for the financial debacle of 2007. Clinton gave market fundamentalism a folksy vibe, while the administration, from Robert Rubin down, provided corporate America a bountiful feast and shifted the direction of the economic system to finance, widening its reach, at manufacturing’s expense, to international channels and in the concoction of exotic, highly profitable, investment vehicles. Here the dialectic between leader and followers turns decidedly negative. With each movement and maneuver away from the people, the people applauded more; Clinton basked in their adulation, nerving him to still greater efforts on behalf of the business community, from trade pacts to personal tributes.

One cannot understand Obama without Clinton–as, not merely background, but a straight line projection, in which Obama took over much of the Clinton team and all of the free-market ideology focused specifically as the starting point on deregulation. This was not known to Obama’s base, his fervent supporters in the 2008 campaign (for whom I was one–one who participated in the civil-rights struggle in the late 50s and through the 60s, now elated at the election of a black president who talked the language of social justice). I was from practically Day One quickly disabused–with the appointment of Geithner and Summers. As the rhetoric soared, the policies plummeted. Few saw this happening as it occurred, and his base remains in a state of profound denial, giving false consciousness an exponential boost that neither Marx nor Marcuse could perhaps imagine. The Nobel Prize for Peace for waging war. The New START treaty on nuclear weapons reduction for actually ordering a new round of weapons development under the euphemism of modernization. A constitutional law teaching position, for perhaps the greatest setback to civil liberties since the Palmer Raids: the list is long, such as surveillance, made possible through advanced technology, as in the National Security Administration usage; reliance on the state-secrets doctrine to hide potential war crimes and place government completely out of reach as the National Security State; denial of the right of habeas corpus to detainees, and relatedly, the despicable doctrine of indefinite detention; employment of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers, thereby stifling dissent and criticism where and when they are most needed; and, under civil liberties, I would insist on including the drone attacks, in which the targets for assassination (personally authorized by Obama) are hardly given the right of counsel, a fair trial, or even proper identification. How his base can condone the drone, making them complicit in its hideous use, speaks volumes about the moral bankruptcy of modern liberalism.

Cornel West is wrong, I think. Obama is not the “black mascot of Wall Street,” but something far worse–not a symbolic figure to bring the Street good luck, but a heart-and-soul activist, or what we once called “a true believer,” who consciously tailors policies to the interests of upper economic groups–frequently through omission, the absence of genuine banking regulation, as well as commission, as in favoritism to the oil companies, nuclear power industry, defense contractors (already an unmistakable record of assistance to key sectors sufficient to validate capitalism as so top heavy that the tipping point to fascism is within reach or has been reached). This active strengthening of capitalism has its clear military and international-economic components. We are verily a Garrison State. Obama’s foreign policy would make another National Security Democrat’s mouth water: Dean Acheson. Obama is the next in a long line of Democrats anxious to burnish anticommunist credentials, under whatever name the current enemy may be labeled, a party mistakenly thinking itself and viewed by others as to the Left and for that reason wanting to prove to the world its superpatriotism, manifested largely in military prowess and huge defense budgets. Naval power, as in the Mediterranean and the South China Sea, is “in,” as is support of dictators (Honduras) and opposition to popular governments (Venezuela) in seeking to remain dominant in Latin America. Most Important, Obama is positioning foreign policy, his Pacific-first strategy, with respect to the encirclement and/or containment of China.

To all of the foregoing, his base is silent as the tomb. In contrast to the New Deal, there is very little opposition in the street. The Flint Sit-down strike of 1937 might as well have been at the time of the Roman Empire. The ACLU, despite its good intentions, has not taken on Obama and DOJ. The Occupy Movement in what seems to me its nebulous posture has not confronted Obama directly and by name. In other words, the negative dialectic is alive and well, each Obama betrayal met by like passivity in the base, thus giving him reason to think he can get away with more. At the moment, he might be right.

Norman Pollack is a Harvard Ph.D. and the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University.

[JackRiddler]

"Fuck Obama" shouldn't mean "Sustain the System." When the new Nixon comes in, will you get how it really works then? It all functions to strengthen the right and make their agenda the only agenda.

[Lottie McLotsaluck]

I think Dr. Pollack underestimates how many of us out there feel betrayed.
I could be wrong, of course, excellent article though.
I was so happy I cried the night Obama won, because if nothing else, I thought it represented a huge repudiation of the Bush 43 era.
I didn't know I was voting to continue the Bush administration.
Sad
I think the biggest argument to vote for him again is the Supreme Court appointee argument, because at least this is concrete wrt the kind of people Romney will appoint as opposed to Obama.
I feel much of the rest belongs in the realm of theory, including the Romney will start WW3 argument.
Obama has proved himself a quite capable imperialist and many nations are finally, I mean finally, showing they are tired of taking our shit. Obama will pull out the big guns as fast as Romney will.
We are so fucked and I just can't go the lesser evil route anymore.

[compared2what?]

I think Dr. Pollack underestimates how many of us out there feel betrayed.
I could be wrong, of course, excellent article though.
I was so happy I cried the night Obama won, because if nothing else, I thought it represented a huge repudiation of the Bush 43 era.
I didn't know I was voting to continue the Bush administration.
Sad
I think the biggest argument to vote for him again is the Supreme Court appointee argument, because at least this is concrete wrt the kind of people Romney will appoint as opposed to Obama.
I feel much of the rest belongs in the realm of theory, including the Romney will start WW3 argument.

WW3?

I doubt it. He'll be significantly more aggressive with Iran and significantly more permissive with Israeli aggression against both it and Palestine. And that's pretty damn non-theoretical, since he owes as much to his backers. But as far as I know, beyond that, there aren't any guarantees.
.

Oba8ma has proved himself a quite capable imperialist and many nations are finally, I mean finally, showing they are tired of taking our shit. Obama will pull out the big guns as fast as Romney will.

We probably don't have enough big guns left for either candidate to be very likely to pull them out. But as already noted, if Romney gets in, he'll either bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran or support Israel while they do it. And. apart from that, there are no guarantees.

We are so fucked and I just can't go the lesser evil route anymore.

That's the spirit. .

[Lottie McLotsaluck]

C2w- just being honest about the 'we are fucked' part. I must have some small bit of hope though since I am still among the living (unless this is really hell which would explain a lot-maybe why I feel I am at a never ending 'Ice Capades' show).
And 'hope' didn't get me much last time 'round.
"We came. We Saw. He died" Hilary's sociopathy disturbs me every bit as much as Dubya's did. I think even more since I knew not to expect anything from Dubya.
I am not sniping at you btw (or anyone else on the forum); just trying to explain why I think this whole charade should be ignored this year.

ps agree that Romney would be more pro Israel, anti-Iran aggressive. I also think Obama could make up for that in other areas of the world.

edited twice for incomplete thoughts-should go to bed.

[Hammer of Los]

...

The I ain't gonna vote for Obama camp do make a lot of good points.

I agree Hilary is kinda disturbing.

She got that mad look in 'er eye.

Plus I keep thinkin' of those pics of Obama all buddy buddy with Poppy.

I think just about everybody is part of some conspiracy or another without them knowing about it.

Likely more than one.

If you see what I mean.

AD's tag line.

I guess we are all part of God's conspiracy.

Like it or not.

...

[Spiro C. Thiery]

I think Dr. Pollack underestimates how many of us out there feel betrayed.
I could be wrong, of course, excellent article though.
I was so happy I cried the night Obama won, because if nothing else, I thought it represented a huge repudiation of the Bush 43 era.
I didn't know I was voting to continue the Bush administration.
Sad
I think the biggest argument to vote for him again is the Supreme Court appointee argument, because at least this is concrete wrt the kind of people Romney will appoint as opposed to Obama.
I feel much of the rest belongs in the realm of theory, including the Romney will start WW3 argument.
Obama has proved himself a quite capable imperialist and many nations are finally, I mean finally, showing they are tired of taking our shit. Obama will pull out the big guns as fast as Romney will.
We are so fucked and I just can't go the lesser evil route anymore.

I hear ya. I would only add that I don't believe the SCotUS argument holds much water anymore. The whole three tier system of government has proven itself to be little more than a maddog & unicorn show, perhaps more like a shadow play of Rocks, Scissors, Paper.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

Re. Mitt

WW3?
I doubt it. He'll be significantly more aggressive with Iran and significantly more permissive with Israeli aggression against both it and Palestine. And that's pretty damn non-theoretical, since he owes as much to his backers. But as far as I know, beyond that, there aren't any guarantees.

The extent to which there would be semantic differences is arguable, but those are the only meaningful differences, in my opinion. As far as Difference in Deed is concerned, Obomba vs. Bombney is just another contest and outcome this globe will have to endure and/or not.

From the political perspective, the problem, as I see it, is that the incumbent will be able to carry out the policies of the empire with opposition solely from the marginalized left--a less populated spectrum than the Tea Party and all other closet racists combined, if you ask me. The only definable opposition on foreign and monetary policy this president currently faces is from those marginalized. Everything else is just blown smoke and crazy mirrors.

Were Bombney to take the seat of PotUS, everybody from the Blue Dogs, though KOS and the DLC, to the most left liberal caucus in Congress would--as if magically and suddenly--unite in opposition. But, of course, the inside the beltway opposition would be rhetoric, for the inheritors of Bombin' Joe Biden's legacy would vote with whatever the new Prez wanted (whenever they had the choice, because the current Prez would be handing him some pretty powerful precedent for unilateral decision-making, as his predecessor did him).

The way I see the lesser of evil argument: those who would have you vote for the Obomba believe that his policies benefit a greater few to Rombney's lesser few. But I have yet to see an comprehensive argument laying out just how this administration's tax or trade policies benefit the proverbial middle-class. On the contrary.

As far as "the spirit" goes:
It's how you live, not how you vote or don't. Treat others with respect, and/or love; spread the word that America is only exceptional insofar as how it has mastered the democratic shell game with only two shells, but that the evil out there--lesser or otherwise--is any and everything that takes part in issuing suffering and death upon the masses (whether you are an immediate recipient or not). Act accordingly. Boycott the machinery!

[JackRiddler]

From the political perspective, the problem, as I see it, is that the incumbent will be able to carry out the policies of the empire with opposition solely from the marginalized left--a less populated spectrum than the Tea Party and all other closet racists combined, if you ask me.

Allow me to understand. You're saying that "Tea Party and all other closet racists" will be opposition to the policies of empire?

Were Bombney to take the seat of PotUS, everybody from the Blue Dogs, though KOS and the DLC, to the most left liberal caucus in Congress would--as if magically and suddenly--unite in opposition.

1) I doubt it. It's not what happened last time until 2003 and the war guaranteed. Blue Dogs? No way. They'll climb right up the Republican's ass and vote the full program in the spirit of movin' on and being bipartisan. Anyway, no one on that list matters. The impact on social movements will be discouragement and demobilization.

2) And what if this did happen? Fuck-all of a difference. The ascendant neocons would have their way, just like last time they were in.

3) The conditions for movements and street action are better under D-admins. That's not my wishful theory cribbed from Trotsky, but an empirical view of how it's gone in the last 50 years.

.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

From the political perspective, the problem, as I see it, is that the incumbent will be able to carry out the policies of the empire with opposition solely from the marginalized left--a less populated spectrum than the Tea Party and all other closet racists combined, if you ask me.

Allow me to understand. You're saying that "Tea Party and all other closet racists" will be opposition to the policies of empire?

No, I am saying that the sole opposition to empire is a group more marginalized (leftists and anarchists) than than the presently most visible opposition to the current administration of that empire (TPers and closet racists). In other words, the anti-imperialist, anti-war, anti-oligarchy has no voice within the current set-up, while whatever latest right-wing boogeyman that comes down the pike continues to serve as reason enough to vote for the established theoretically alternative.

Were Bombney to take the seat of PotUS, everybody from the Blue Dogs, though KOS and the DLC, to the most left liberal caucus in Congress would--as if magically and suddenly--unite in opposition.

1) I doubt it. It's not what happened last time until 2003 and the war guaranteed. Blue Dogs? No way. They'll climb right up the Republican's ass and vote the full program in the spirit of movin' on and being bipartisan. Anyway, no one on that list matters. The impact on social movements will be discouragement and demobilization.

To be clear, I mean "magically" ironically. The opposition from the politicians would be strictly rhetorical. Those who elect them are not being sold out, they are selling themselves out. But if the president were to lose this election--which, let's be honest, is not going to happen--those who voted for him, and insisted on ignoring the eerie continuity between the last two administrations, would suddenly be opposed to some of the crap they'd been choosing to ignore.

2) And what if this did happen? Fuck-all of a difference. The ascendant neocons would have their way, just like last time they were in.

The current crop, whatever one wants to call them, are having their way just fine.

3) The conditions for movements and street action are better under D-admins. That's not my wishful theory cribbed from Trotsky, but an empirical view of how it's gone in the last 50 years.

Any empirical view must take into account the here and now as much as things like the '68 DNC vs. Kent State as it relates to conditions on the street (and while I don't find it ludicrous that Trotsky entertained notions about Hoover vs. Roosevelt, he was most certainly dead before the Second World War powers divided up the spoils after promptly dissolving their alliance).
Since the "fall of Communism", the strengthening of executive privilege has proceeded unabated by party, president, prime minister, or chancellor. This is a trend not limited to the executive branch, but also involving party centralization, less accountability for law enforcement and the military, free reign for profiteers, less autonomy for the working class and more autonomy for the financial class.

But I've rambled enough. To make amends, back to the point of the thread, I guess...vvv

[Spiro C. Thiery]

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102806/The-Big-Chill.aspx

The Big Chill
The Obama administration is operating amid unprecedented secrecy—while attacking journalists trying to tell the public what they need to know.
By Dan Froomkin

Beginning with this issue, Nieman Reports is now the home for Nieman Watchdog Project articles examining the successes and failures of watchdog journalism. Here, Dan Froomkin probes the challenges facing national security reporters at a time when the nature of combat is quietly undergoing a revolution.

It's a particularly challenging time for American national security reporting, with the press and public increasingly in the dark about important defense, intelligence and counterterrorism issues.

The post-post-9/11 period finds the U.S. aggressively experimenting with two new highly disruptive forms of combat—drone strikes and cyberattacks—for which our leaders appear to be making up the rules, in secret, as they go along.

Troubling legal and moral issues left behind by the previous administration remain unresolved. Far from reversing the Bush-Cheney executive power grab, President Barack Obama is taking it to new extremes by unilaterally approving indefinite detention of foreign prisoners and covert targeted killings of terror suspects, even when they are American citizens.

There is little to none of the judicial and legislative oversight Obama had promised, so the executive branch's most controversial methods of violence and control remain solely in the hands of the president—possibly about to be passed along to a leader with less restraint.
More than a decade after it started, we still have no clue how much the government is listening in on us or reading our e-mail, despite the obvious Fourth Amendment issues.

And the government's response to this unprecedented secrecy is a war on leaks.

No Help From High Places
After past periods of executive excess, the Fourth Estate was certainly more robust and arguably more persistent, but it also found natural allies in the other branches of government—particularly Congress. By contrast, over the summer of 2012, the publication of a minimal amount of new information regarding drones, cyberwarfare and targeted killings incited bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill—not to conduct hearings into what had been revealed, but to demand criminal investigations into the leaking.

That's how Congress has been ever since the terrorist attacks 11 years ago. "We never got our post 9/11 Church Committee," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists's Project on Government Secrecy, referring to a special investigative Senate committee that held hearings on widespread intelligence abuses after the Watergate scandal. "What we've got instead is the intelligence oversight committee drafting legislation to penalize leaks."

In the interim, the White House has been plenty busy using the draconian Espionage Act of 1917 to pursue leakers. Despite his talk about openness, Obama has taken the unprecedented step of filing espionage charges against six officials accused of leaking information to journalists—more than all previous administrations combined.

And James R. Clapper, Jr., the director of national intelligence, recently directed that employees under his command be hooked up to lie detectors and questioned about their contacts with journalists and about unauthorized leaks to the media.

Whatever restraint existed inside the executive branch seems to have been overwhelmed by a national security apparatus that has swollen to enormous proportions since 9/11. "There has been no similar strengthening of bureaucracy protecting civil liberties and transparency," noted New Yorker writer Jane Mayer. "When the national security community is militating for leak investigations, there is much less pushback than pre-9/11."

Abramson's Concern
Mainstream media leaders are critical of the government's aggressive posture, which they see as threatening First Amendment rights. At the annual conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors in June, New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson made the case that the very leaks that seemed to inflame officials the most were also the most essential.

"Cyberwarfare is a new battlefield, where there are no agreements regulating the use of malware viruses," she said. "So doesn't the public need the information to evaluate this new kind of battle, especially when it's waged in its name? Furthermore, when the existence of drone and cyber attacks are widely known but officially classified, informed public discussion of critical questions is really stifled."

There are in fact so many obvious, unanswered questions about both of these new weapons of warfare, most notably: What happens when other people use them on us, saying we set the precedent for their use? In the case of drones, does their use require a declaration of war or at least an authorization of the use of force? And how many civilians are they killing?

Abramson warned that "the chilling effect of leak prosecutions threatens to rob the public of vital information," as sources fear legal retribution and reporters fear being subpoenaed and possibly even prosecuted themselves.

"Several reporters who have covered national security in Washington for decades tell me that the environment has never been tougher or information harder to dislodge," Abramson said. "One Times reporter told me the environment in Washington has never been more hostile to reporting."

The Drake Effect
One of the Obama administration's early attempts to prosecute whistleblowers for espionage ended in defeat and disgrace. Prosecutors had filed 10 felony charges against Thomas Drake, a National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower who allegedly provided classified information about mismanagement at the NSA to a Baltimore Sun reporter. But days before the trial was to start, the government dropped the charges and settled for Drake pleading guilty to a misdemeanor. The judge called Drake's four-year persecution by the government "unconscionable" and said that it goes against "the very root of what this country was founded on against general warrants of the British."

But Aftergood said the Drake case had a profound effect on the intelligence community nonetheless. "I think there's a new level of paranoia within government about unauthorized contacts with the press," he said. "In every significant sense, the government won, because it demonstrated the price of nonconformity."

Drake agreed. "It was very clear that they wanted to send the most chilling of messages, and that chilling message has been received," he said. Among former colleagues, Drake said, "there are those who will not talk to reporters—and we're not even talking leaking, we're just talking talking."

Ron Suskind, one of a handful of journalists who did exceptional national security reporting during the Bush era—particularly in his 2006 book "The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11"—argues that the government's strategies to prevent leaking have suddenly become much more aggressive and effective. "It's making it more difficult to get that information the public truly needs to know," he said.

The increased dependence on e-mail and the government's enhanced surveillance abilities are also a factor, Suskind said. "In the old days, you could call someone up on their kitchen phone. You were pretty much OK unless [FBI director J. Edgar] Hoover knew which line to tap. Now you have to be extra careful."

And Suskind said that the fear of getting caught is now heightened because so many intelligence officials are counting on entering the hugely lucrative world of intelligence contracting once they leave public service.

Before 9/11, the private intelligence/national security complex just "didn't have that kind of money," Suskind said. But now, it provides "the soft cushion that awaits almost every official inside government with a security clearance."

The Government View
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd rejected the media narrative of a government assault on the press. "The media obviously is an interested party—or a biased party—in these matters," he said.

"Whenever the Justice Department conducts an investigation relating to leaks of classified information to the media, it seeks to strike the proper balance between the important function of the press and law enforcement and national security imperatives," Boyd said.

But, he insisted: "When classified information is improperly disclosed to the media by a person who has no authority to disclose it, that's illegal."

Boyd also denied that whistleblowers are being targeted. "On some of the cases, it's clear that the officials that we've accused are not blowing the whistle on anything," he said.

The six people the Obama administration has charged under the Espionage Act are Drake, who was definitely a whistleblower; Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of leaking thousands of documents to the website Wikileaks; John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who spoke out about torture and is charged with allegedly disclosing the names of CIA officers and their role in interrogations to reporters; Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer charged with leaking information about a botched plot against the Iranian government to The New York Times; Stephen Kim, a former U.S. State Department foreign policy analyst charged with disclosing information about North Korea's nuclear program to a Fox News reporter; and Shamai Leibowitz, a former FBI linguist convicted in May 2010 of disclosing wiretaps of the Israeli Embassy in Washington to a blogger.

Fighting Secrecy
What's as dangerous as the dearth of "unauthorized" leaks is the prevalence of the "authorized" kind. During the Bush years in particular, highly selective leaks from the vice president's office regularly spread consequential and misleading national security information, through the conduit of devoted reporters.

After vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice related to the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative, Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at George Washington University, told the New York Times that the journalists involved were "not fearless advocates … but supplicants, willing and even eager to be manipulated."

Suskind said he thinks there need to be more reporters on the national security beat. "We are having trouble mustering the muscle, the bodies, to get the goods," he said.

And they need to be tougher. Walter Pincus, the veteran national security reporter at The Washington Post, said modern news organizations are so eager to be seen as evenhanded that crusading journalism is frowned upon. "The industry has been mau-maued," Pincus concluded. "We've been neutered."

In the Spring 2008 issue of Nieman Reports, investigative reporter Ted Gup suggested that news organizations dedicate a beat to secrecy. Now, in order to create a cycle of repeated disclosures and sustained public interest in drones and cyberwarfare, perhaps reporters should be put on that beat full time.

Suskind said there would be a payoff from major national security revelations beyond the obvious public service. "The big disclosures still drive the global news cycle," he said. And if news organizations are trying to differentiate themselves in the new media climate, well, "this is the way they get to prove their case that they're still valuable … that they're indispensable."

[Lottie McLotsaluck]

Here is a bit from an essay called Third World Wipeout that Richard Grossinger wrote around 1973. I am just going to post a small portion of it. I think at the very least it speaks to what Spiro wrote about 'how we live and treat each other': "We live in a Roman world. We retain, in archetype and urban structure, if not in coins and petroglyphs, the kin ties of Neolithic tribes, whose hierarchies bound the world in an equality no system has since restored. The proletariat is a joke beside the billions of acres of independent gatherers and smalltime farmers of the prior Earth. And our cities are now like cartoons amid the permafrost and coal-beds, the termitaries and wild birds. We are the last and most costumed guests at the Roman party. But we act like the saviors of mankind.

God knows, it is not our call to arms that exonerates us in the ledgers of a Third World creation myth; it is how humanely we do the number of being us while they do the number of being them. The liberals are still benighted enough to think we can help them by the positive power of our beliefs, or even our preference to be them, even our preference to help them before we help us. They know better. They simply want our cars and houses and mass-produced gadgets, our supermarkets and nightclubs. They don't want our piety or after-dinner globalism.

Because we do not know enough. Because we will never know enough. And our attempts to seal this period of history with the same finality with which we have pretended to seal the Franks and Huns are little more than big city bravado.

We lie in oblivion and whether what will cover us is Chinese or not will not matter. We sit in a hollow grandstand, and when it disappears it will take with it not just the mask of the falling metropolis but the shadows of our narcissistic gods.

We don't want it.
If we wanted it, we could have it. (Just like if we wanted marriage, we could have it; if we wanted utopia...)
Why R.B. Fuller says: that, or oblivon-not realizing that he as well as us are the product of a choice made long ago."