Notes to a Friend on an Open Letter to the Left

A friend who is as passionately anti-war as I am -- and has been for the same, long time -- has engaged me in a friendly disagreement regarding the war in Libya.

As part of the dialogue he has sent me Juan Cole's recent internet posting, "An Open Letter to the Left on Libya."

Most of Cole's arguments are reasonable, his assessments of the situation sound, his sincerity indisputable.  The case he makes is essentially what weighed heavily on my mind as I considered what President Obama and his advisors finally decided to do in Libya.

Cole, however, fractures his own case for a reasoned, dispassionate discussion on the left with this paragraph:

If the Left opposed intervention, it de facto acquiesced in Qaddafi’s destruction of a movement embodying the aspirations of most of Libya’s workers and poor, along with large numbers of white collar middle class people. Qaddafi would have reestablished himself, with the liberation movement squashed like a bug and the country put back under secret police rule. The implications of a resurgent, angry and wounded Mad Dog, his coffers filled with oil billions, for the democracy movements on either side of Libya, in Egypt and Tunisia, could well have been pernicious.

Neither I nor Dennis Kucinich nor many others who share our views "acquiesce in Qaddafi's destruction of a movement embodying the aspirations of most of Libya's workers and poor."  Cole's accusation is baseless and insulting.

As for the rest of the paragraph, I compliment Mr. Cole on his ability to see into the future.  Perhaps some day he will help me pick a few stocks to invest in.

My concern about President Obama's action involves the United States Constitution.  It  placed the war-making power solely in the hands of Congress.  In 1973 the Congress itself muddied the waters with a War Powers Act that  presidents have used ever since to make war whenever they damn pleased.  Obama has done this in the case of Libya.

The United Nations Security Council cannot repeal the United States Constitution or any part thereof.  Even in the muddied water of the 1973 Act , President Obama overstepped his authority on this matter.

The humanitarian objectives of the United Nations resolutions could have been met in time to prevent  "destruction of a movement" for democracy in Libya by using the armed forces of those nations that endorsed the resolutions and were able to act immediately under their own laws and constitutions.

President Obama could have joined them in support of the anti-Qaddafi forces after consulting with Congress as required in the 1973 law.

I still have questions in my own mind about the initiative for the Arab League request to the U.N. that resulted in the Libya resolutions by the Security Council.  The fact that none of the Arab League members rushed to join the combat caused me to wonder if arms were twisted -- perhaps unethically, perhaps even illegally -- in the deep diplomatic background before the UN action.  My friend points out that Qatar recently joined the affray, which still to me smacks of the quasi-legitimacy of the Bush II "coalition" in the invasion of Iraq.

But the real concern is the addition of yet another precedent to support the notion that Presidents of the United States have war-making powers.  The framers clearly did not intend that he or she should have such power.  They vested it solely and absolutely in the Congress.

If that Constitutional mandate is outdated in today's world, there is a process for amending it.  The 1973 War Powers nonsense does not fulfill that process.  A constitutional amendment, with ratification by two-thirds of the states, is what it takes. 

Obviously that hasn't happened.  Instead, the door has been wedged open a bit further for this President and subsequent ones to bomb and otherwise make war upon any head of state who disagrees with U.S. policy.  This in turn tends to prolong the endless war policy of the United States corporatocracy that I, Cole and my anti-war friend all oppose with every fiber of our being.

Correction

A post mistakenly put up on this site yesterday contained nonfactual statements and erroneous data.  It was removed instantly upon discovery of the mistake.  The unedited material concerning General Electric Corp. and United States unemployment data should not have been posted.  The operator of this blog regrets the errors. -- TW.

What to Think of Our New War in Libya?

By now Americans are so benumbed by their country's wars that they'd approve bombing Lourdes if they believed an Islamic terrorist was hiding there. Thus the polls showing public support for Obama's Libya adventure are no surprise.

Two-faced Republican criticism is no surprise either.  Typically, the Boehners  and McCains et al who were clamoring for a no-fly zone two weeks ago now assail the president for doing exactly what they once called for.  This practice has become so common among the Tea Pot party that if Republicans were Pinnochios, their collective noses would form a bridge to Mars.

It's not so simple for Democrats with the slighest leftward persuasion.  A dampened finger to the wind suggests a majority of leftish Democrats oppose the action.  A few, whose natural bent is to sympathize with pro-Democracy protesters in any dictatorship anywhere in the world, reluctantly support this particular use of force.

Obama's action, as your Pianist has noted previously, would apperar to have been legitimized by the UN Security Council's action in response to a request by the Arab League for a no-fly zone.

But now that the time has come to actually participate in the UN's so-called coalition, Arab states are conspicuously absent.  One wonders how much Arab initiative was behind the "request" to the UN, and how much arm-twisting was done by western nations, particularly the United States and France.

In short, the UN coalition is looking more and more like another Sham a la Iraq.

And then there are the pesky questions of the United States Constitution and the War Powers Act of 1973.  The latter seems to be in direct conflict with the former, which confers war-making powers absolutely and without exception upon the Congress.  The 1973 act, as a Constitutional law expert once put it to me, "gives away the farm."

Can the Congress legally cede to the executive a power the Constitution places exclusively in its hands?  The 1973 act has never been tested in court.

But even though Congress rendered itself virtually powerless to send or not send American military forces into combat, it did reserve to itself certain vestiges of control.  It would seem that Obama, in the case of Libya, has failed to meet even these minimal requirements of "consulting" and "advising."

Rep. Dennis Kucinich's recent statement that the Libya action "may be an impeachable offense"  holds legal water. In a true democracy, this would be cause for a serious action in the Congress.

But in a corporatocracy, whose oligarchs profit in direct proportion to the number and duration of our wars - legal or illegal, it matters not to them,  those in power pay no attention to the likes of Rep. Kucinich.  "Conscience of a Conservative" is an oxymoron in today's United States.

And the people, as a class, don't give a damn.  Most of them think we invented democracy in 1776 and made it the 11th Commandment of the Christian religion.  And so if what's called "news" on television informs them that the people fighting against Ghadaffi in Libya are "for democracy," then let's bomb the hell out of the bad guys on their behalf and go watch another episode of "American Idol."

Never mind the fine points of the law.  For Tea Party America, the law is a ass.

Speak Not Truth Lest Ye Be Fired (III)

Carlos Pascual, a veteran diplomat who had been U.S. ambassador to Mexico since 2009, was forced to resign recently because of leaked embassy cables that bluntly described the shortcomings of Mexico's efforts to control its drug cartels.

His criticism was absolutely true, as anyone who lives close to the border can attest.

The cables were in the trove of material passed by WikiLeaks to certain news media.

Pascual wisely pushed to retool American aid in Mexico's drug war to place greater emphasis on improving judicial institutions and civic involvement than on weaponry and violent raids.

Pascual's assessments decried Mexico's interagency rivalries and called the Mexican army "risk averse."

The truth hurt Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who complained to Dr. Kidglove on a visit to Washington. 

For added titillation, some accounts of his dismissal alluded to Pascual's recent dating relationship with the daughter of a leader of the principal rival party to Calderon's.

Spencer Bachus v. We the People

Spencer Bachus, Republican chair of the House Financial Services Committee, has been quoted as saying, "“In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”

This is but a narrower view of the entire Republican agenda, which is that government exists to serve Big Business -- financial, energy, defense, mining, whatever.

Acting upon  the quaint idea that perhaps, once in a while, government should fret just a little bit about just plain people (the real kind, not the corporate kind), Democrats in the last Congress, while giving away almost the entire store to the big banks, saved a piece of candy for John Q, Public.  It authorized the creation of something called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 

Protect real people! Bachus wants no part of that!

The force behind the idea for the agency is Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor and expert on financial law who chaired the Congressional Oversight Panel to investigate the Troubled Assets Relief Program that bailed out the big banks that almost destroyed the U.S. economy in 2008-2009. She used the post as a bully pulpit to promote the idea of protecting common people from the ruthless madness of the greed-driven honchos of the humongous banks.

After Congress put the consumer bon-bon into the law that gave all the other candy to the banks, President Obama named Warren as an adviser, with the task of setting up the new bureau and recommending a director for it.  For the nonce, it's an ethereal thing, caught between darkness and dawn.

Warren herself, obviously, is the best person to head the bureau .  The Republicans, obviously, are gunning for her.  At a congressional hearing, Bachus told Warren her inchoate agency would be a "self-regulated, unchecked body governed by one person."

Nonsense, Warren responded. "If we had had this agency six years ago, eight years ago, we would not be in the mess we are today," she said.

Bachus has already enlisted Timmy Titmouse in his war on Warren.  (That would be Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the big banks' man in Washington.)  In a letter to Timmy, he wrote: "(R)eports about the role played by political appointees in the Treasury department — including those affiliated with the [CFPB], an agency that does not yet have any regulatory or enforcement authority — raise further questions about the [mortgage settlement] process.”

A more accurate way of putting this would be, "State attorneys general, frustrated by Republican friends of the big banks, asked Warren for advice about dealing with the mortgage settlement crisis."

The crisis is that hundreds of thousands of homeowners struggling to stave off foreclosure have been left in limbo by a government program that encourages mortgage companies to modify their loans. Delays by the banks in handling their cases have even left some homeowners worse off than before they entered the program. Fraudulent abuse of paperwork filings have further muddied the waters.

This in itself is a screaming example of exactly why we need the consumer protection bureau and need someone like Elizabeth Warren to head it.

But Big Business owns Bachus, as it owns Geithner, and virtually all of government, including the Supreme Court.  (Why won't Thomas and Scalia let the public see their travel records?  Have they Koched up something that's not quite kosher?)

Folks, we're in a card game where the deck is stacked against us. And we keep re-electing the same crooked dealers.

What Will Be the Lesson of Fukushima?

As someone who lived a gentle breeze away from Three Mile Island when its nuclear emergency took place, I have long been concerned about the proliferation of the technology to meet our increasing energy needs.

All of the chemical engineers I have known -- particularly my own brother, who was not a nuclear expert, and my favorite hiking companion, who was -- tried to persuade me that nuking was safe, clean, efficient and, while not perfect, still the best alternative to fossil fuel energy.  Their arguments -- particularly regarding improved safety technology since TMI -- were cogent.

Once, atop a mountain in southwest Virginia, my hiking friend and I looked eastward where once treed peaks filled the horizon, and were horrified to see moonscapes of mountaintop removal projects to obtain coal to fuel power plants. At that  moment the arguments for nuclear energy seemed particularly compelling. After all,  Chernobyl could never happen again.  Nor could TMI.

Now, tragically, we know otherwise.  We know that something unspeakably terrible can happen even in a technologically advanced society that has employed the best available science to make its nuclear plants safe.  Surely our hearts bleed for the people of Japan, on whom we inflicted Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as they now suffer the horrors of a powerful earthquake, a tsunami and new nuclear disaster.

Today we know not how all of this will end.  Workers have returned to the Fukushima nuclear plant to attempt to prevent the unspeakable from happening.  None of the world's nuclear experts who have been commenting on the disaster in Japan knows if this can be done.  Like us, they can only hope.

But this much is clear: Nuclear power is neither safe nor clean.  And, as the slogan elsewhere on this page reminds us, "Nature bats last."  Our planet has a fiery core; it has fault lines; its thin envelope of compatibility with human life has been tampered with by the very humans it protects.  We will have earthquakes; we will have tsunamis; we will have hurricanes; and we will pay the price of our tampering with Nature.

Nuclear plants  leak radioactive waste from underground pipes and radioactive waste pools into the ground water at sites all over the world. Science has yet to devise a method for adequately and safely handling long lived radioactive wastes.  Nuclear waste disposal was my hiking companion's  particular sub-specialty.  He spent the twilight of his working career trying to deal with the waste problem at the Hanford site where the first atomic bombs were created.

Despite his faith in technology and his fellow scientists, there is still no safe, satisfactory way to deal with nuclear waste.

Several nuclear plants in this country are sited on, or perilously close to, fault lines. Perhaps that fact alone will prod us away from further nuclear dependency, away from filthy fossil fuels, and toward safe, renewable energy sources. Technically feasible renewable energy sources in the world are capable of producing up to six times more energy than current global demand.  Even now, nuclear plants around the globe deliver less energy than renewable sources of power.

Consider the recent coal mining disasters.  Consider the cost in money and wars of sucking a finite supply of petroleum out of the earth.  Consider the environmental consequences of gas and oil drilling.  Consider TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima.

Wind farms and solar panels do not kill.

For Tea Potters, Reality is SO Yesterday

The new breed of Tea Pot Republican is utterly oblivious to both fact and law.  That they win elections is testimony to the deliberate ignorance of too many American voters.  This is perhaps the core reason for pessimism about the American democratic experiment.

One of the worst examples to come to light is Martin Harty, a Barrington Republican elected to the Vermont legislature.  He's a nonagenarian who, according to his own party members in the legislature, is "constantly confused, easily swayed, hard of hearing, and prone to offer up unrelated commentary or go off on unrelated tangents." He recently told a constituent who manages a community mental health program that there are "too many defective people," and that such people should be "shipped to Siberia to freeze to death and clean up the population."

Then there's Michelle Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman whose lack of knowledge of American history would have disqualified her from voting under state regulations in many southern states before passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  She thinks the Battle of Concord took place in New Hampshire.

Republican folly and lawlessness is not limited to isolated fruitcakes like Harty, Bachmann and Rand Paul. The entire majority leadership of the House of Representatives qualifies.

For purely political purposes, these geniuses demanded that President Obama unilaterally declare and enforce a no-fly zone over Libya -- a clear act of war under international law.  We're already bleeding our military and our treasury fighting two other illegal, unwinnable wars.  These fools want us to launch a third?

If, indeed, a no-fly zone  is an effective instrument in bringing down a ruthless dictator and assisting a democratic revolution in Libya, the Arab League has offered a legal way of doing it by petitioning the United Nations to establish a no-fly zone.

As neighbor states to Libya, they act in strict accord with the United Nations Charter, Articles 41 and 42.  The first gives the Security Council authority to decide what measures NOT involving military force may be taken against any nation which mounts a breach of the peace. Article 42 allows military actions, such as the no-fly zone, when non-military tactics fail.

But the half-cocked crazies in the house majority can't be bothered with legal procedures and nuances of the law.  They're NRA card-carryin' whoop-de-doo Bush II cowboys who shoot first and ask questions later.

As long as someone else's sons and daughters are doing the real fighting.

Remember, too, that these great humanitarians told us, when Bush II's wars were squandering our surplus and plunging us into debt, that Saint Ronald the Reagan had proved that "deficits don't matter."

Except when you can make political capital by demonizing Obamacare, destroying unions and ruthlessly cutting funds for programs that millions of common citizens and unemployed Americans desperately need. Then suddenly the tea brains tell us the Deficit Bogeyman has to be slain this very minute.

Fact? Law? That's real world stuff.  Don't disturb their Tea Pot fantasies with reality.

Speak Not Truth, Lest Ye Be Fired (Part II)

Yesterday, P.J. Crowley, the State Department media spokesman, told an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that the military treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning was "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid." This is absolutely true.

The Quantico brig's torture and humiliation of Manning, who is accused of giving documents to WikiLeaks, is also barbaric, uncivilized, illegal and revolting.

Today President Obama fired Crowley.

No further comment is necessary.

On the Primrose Path to the Radish Patch

A friend who grows radishes in England has joined me in a quest for reasons for optimism about the United States, from which he emigrated a few years ago.

Another friend, who like the two of us once committed journalism for a living, opined that Republicans in Wisconsin and in the U.S. House of Representatives have "gone too far" and ignited a political back-fire.

We wanted to be persuaded but weren't, even though folks like Keith Olbermann and Robert Reich support the notion.

Suppose, for a moment, that the disgusting antics of the Republican majority in the House have, in fact, turned many independents and even a few intelligent Republicans against the party's extremism.  What would be the practical result?

Perhaps a few Democratic spines in the Senate might be stiffened against some of the more outrageous bills spewing out of the House.  But Harry Reid & Co. have already caved in on the big battle of this session:  they've accepted as real the Republican Deficit Bogeyman and the only question is how deep will the cuts be in essential  services and programs.  With near record unemployment, with retirement savings decimated for millions of older Americans, with the poorest health care in the civilized world, with urban infrastructure decayed and failing, we'll disembowel the programs we need most.

We'll keep excreting trillions on unwinnable wars, to beef up the profits of the defense and energy industries. 

Having maintained the fiction of a government of, by and for "the people" by making corporations people, all of the real people will lie down and expose their throats for convenient stomping by the hobnailed boots of Big Business.

But if folks really are steamed about what the Republicans are doing with their majorities, we will re-elect Barack Obama in 2012 and restore Democratic majorities in Congress.  Obama will make more concessions to the corporate oligarchs, post more foxes to guard more public henhouses, take away more civil liberties, and move the country still further to the right.  His second term policies will be virtually indistinguishable from Bush II's second-term policies.  You know, the ones that almost caused a second Great Depression.

The new Democrats in Congress will be clones of the ones still there: either thinly-disguised Republicans called "Blue Dogs," or spineless wimps who sell their souls to corporate America and go brain-dead when the far right shouts "Boo!"

As for Wisconsin, all you need to know is that its governor recently told a Christofascist meeting that every decision he makes is made on direct instructions from God, with whom he converses daily.

My radish-farming friend didn't flee these shores for political reasons, but to wed an English wife.  Politically, the Brits have problems enough of their own, but at least over there, a pol who hears voices from heaven is usually asked to undergo psychiatric examination.

Speak Not Truth, Lest Ye Be Fired

How deep we have sunk.  How backward we have regressed.  All the way down, all the way back to the black abyss of Orwell's 1984.

You can now be fired from your job for speaking the truth, in private, to your colleagues at work.

Vivian Schiller was forced out Wednesday as CEO of National Public Radio -- one of the last bastions of occasional truth in American media today -- because some slimeball wing nut came up with another entrapment video.

This one captured Ron Schiller -- an NPR executive who is not related to Vivian Schiller -- describing the so-called Tea Party movement as "racist" and "xenophobic."  Anyone who is not utterly deluded by Frank Luntz-Heritage Foundation bovine excrement knows that these terms are perfectly apt descriptors. 

The chairman of the board that fired Vivian Schiller said, "I recognize the magnitude of this news."

"News?"

What's "news" is that a Big Brother network now operates in this country  with absolute impunity to constitutional protections of privacy.

Watch what you say around the water cooler.  The Juvenile Spy Klan is everywhere.

How Blatant Lies Become "Fact" in These United States

A cartoon in today's local newspaper represents the outright lies a gullible electorate believes, partly because the mainstream media repeat them as fact without bothering to do basic journalism checking them out.

It depicts a thuggish, bloated figure labeled "unions" riding the back of a small, overburdened figure labeled "taxpayers."

Its creator accepted as fact the blatant lies that have been repeated countless times in print, on the radio and on television, especially since the Wisconsin public employe protests began.

The media have parroted without challenge Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's wildly untrue statements in support of his so-called "budget repair bill," a thinly-disguised attempt to destroy unionism in one of the states where it began.

Here is David Cay Johnson, multiple Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, best-selling author,  distinguished university lecturer (and registered Republican):

"(Walker) says he wants state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to "contribute more" to their pension and health insurance plans.

Accepting Gov. Walker' s assertions as fact, and failing to check, created the impression that somehow the workers are getting something extra, a gift from taxpayers. They are not.

Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin' s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.

How can that be? Because the "contributions" consist of money that employees chose to take as deferred wages – as pensions when they retire – rather than take immediately in cash. The same is true with the health care plan. If this were not so, a serious crime would be taking place, the gift of public funds rather than payment for services.

Thus, state workers are not being asked to simply "contribute more" to Wisconsin' s retirement system (or as the argument goes, "pay their fair share" of retirement costs as do employees in Wisconsin' s private sector who still have pensions and health insurance). They are being asked to accept a cut in their salaries so that the state of Wisconsin can use the money to fill the hole left by tax cuts and reduced audits of corporations in Wisconsin."

There are foolproof and longstanding laws of economic cause and effect that make this arrangement beneficial to both sides.

Understanding them requires a bit more time, study and effort than simply repeating what politicians like Walker say, as too many journalists today are wont to do. But here, from the economist Dean Baker, is an easy-to-grasp explanation:

"At the center of the right's story is the view that governments are somehow being reckless or irresponsible when they provide guaranteed pensions for their workers. They tell us that these guaranteed benefits will bankrupt state and local governments, imposing impossible burdens on future taxpayers.

This story can be easily shown to be untrue. While the right has been scaring the public with talk of a trillion dollars in unfunded liability in state pensions, this sum can also be expressed as about 0.2 percent of state income over the time-frame in which the liabilities will have to be paid.

In other words, if states raise 20 cents in taxes or cut 20 cents in other spending for every hundred dollars of future income, they will be able to meet their current pension obligations. This is not a trivial sum, but it doesn't seem likely to bankrupt our youth either.

Furthermore, the vast majority of this shortfall was due to the plunge in the stock market that followed the collapse of the housing bubble. Overly generous pensions were not the problem. The problem here were the greedy Wall Street types who profited from the housing bubble and the incompetent economists who did not see it. Of course the market has recovered much of its losses, so future years' pension reports are likely to show that most of shortfall has already been eliminated.

But it is important to understand the basic logic of defined benefit pensions, since many are trying to eliminate them altogether. Defined benefit pensions are in effect a form of insurance. They guarantee workers a level of retirement income based on the years that they work.

This guarantee of future income is more valuable to workers than getting the same amount of money in salary since it would be very expensive for workers to buy the same insurance from the financial industry. From the standpoint of the government, the insurance is virtually costless.

State and local governments will survive into the indefinite future. If the stock market is down any given year or set of years there is little consequence for a government offering a pension fund. Of course, a down market would be devastating for an individual worker if it happens at the point where he/she retires.

This simple logic means that governments can give workers something that is of great value - a guaranteed retirement income -- at very little cost. (Research shows that even after adding in pensions, health care and other benefits, public sector workers are paid slightly less than their private-sector counterparts.  This means that because governments offer defined benefit pensions they can either attract better workers at the same pay, or the same quality workers at lower pay, than if they did not offer pensions. This is as basic as economics gets."

Facts, basic economics, logic, legal precedent, even the Constitution -- --  none of these seem to modify in anyway the bullying anti-intellecutal nonsense of the prevailing Tea Pot element of the Republican party.  And far too many members of the voting public believe their lies.

The United States of Hypocrisy

A conservative friend, in a recent e-mail, deplored certain politicians of his own persuasion who preach "family values" but practice them only at home, while keeping a tootsie on the side in a hot pillow joint.

Hypocrisy indeed is rife in our public affairs and is not limited to sexual peccadillos, hetero- or homo-.

Can anything be more hypocritical than the words of the Nobel Laureate in the White House and his Secretary of State, demanding that other countries improve their "record" on human rights?

This government's treatment of a young citizen, Bradley Manning, is not merely criminal.  It is not merely inhumane.  It is not merely contrary to the Geneva Conventions.  It is not merely torture.  It is beneath contempt.  It is barbaric.  It demeans every United States citizen who does not cry out against it.

Barack Obama knows this is happening.  If he did not explicitly authorize it, his silence gives tacit consent.

Hillary Clinton knows this is happening.  Yet she dared to give a speech about human rights and remain silent when a 73-year-old man was physically abused by federal thugs for silently protesting her hypocrisy by standing and turning his back to her.

When both of them were contending for the Democratic party's presidential nomination, they decried the Bush administration's use of torture on so-called "enemy combatants" who were in fact political prisoners.  Yet they allow the torture of an innocent citizen soldier-- innocent under the law because he has yet to be tried on any charge -- under the vile and transparent subterfuge that his captors are protecting him from self-harm.  When Manning himself sarcastically pointed out this hypocrisy, the military authorities simply heaped more cruelties on him.

United States Senators and Congressmen on both sides of the aisle know this is happening.  Their silence on the matter is deafening; they're too busy tilting at windmills like the Deficit Bogeyman to fret over the loss of human rights here at home.

This is a sick country.  Neither political party has produced anyone remotely resembling the sort of leader who can make it well again -- financially, morally, politically or ethically.

If such a someone were to emerge from the background, he'd get my vote even if he had half a dozen tootsies on the side.