Presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens
Presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens
It was controversial when Bush imprisoned foreign nationals without charges; what about killing U.S. citizens?
Glenn Greenwald
Jan. 27, 2010
The Washington Post's Dana Priest today reports that "U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people." That's no surprise, of course, as Yemen is now another predominantly Muslim country (along with Somalia and Pakistan) in which our military is secretly involved to some unknown degree in combat operations without any declaration of war, without any public debate, and arguably (though not clearly) without any Congressional authorization. The exact role played by the U.S. in the late-December missile attacks in Yemen, which killed numerous civilians, is still unknown.
But buried in Priest's article is her revelation that American citizens are now being placed on a secret "hit list" of people whom the President has personally authorized to be killed:
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. . . .
The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."
Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including [New Mexico-born Islamic cleric Anwar] Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi's name has now been added.
Indeed, Aulaqi was clearly one of the prime targets of the late-December missile strikes in Yemen, as anonymous officials excitedly announced -- falsely, as it turns out -- that he was killed in one of those strikes.
Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests." They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, but killed -- produce at least as much controversy?
Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including American citizens. That's just the essence of war. That's why it's permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war zone but not, say, torture them once they're captured and helplessly detained. But combat is not what we're talking about here. The people on this "hit list" are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities. More critically still, the Obama administration -- like the Bush administration before it -- defines the "battlefield" as the entire world. So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks. That's quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.
As we well know from the last eight years, the authoritarians among us in both parties will, by definition, reflexively justify this conduct by insisting that the assassination targets are Terrorists and therefore deserve death. What they actually mean, however, is that the U.S. Government has accused them of being Terrorists, which (except in the mind of an authoritarian) is not the same thing as being a Terrorist. Numerous Guantanamo detainees accused by the U.S. Government of being Terrorists have turned out to be completely innocent, and the vast majority of federal judges who provided habeas review to detainees have found an almost complete lack of evidence to justify the accusations against them, and thus ordered them released. That includes scores of detainees held while the U.S. Government insisted that only the "Worst of the Worst" remained at the camp.
No evidence should be required for rational people to avoid assuming that Government accusations are inherently true, but for those do need it, there is a mountain of evidence proving that. And in this case, Anwar Aulaqi -- who, despite his name and religion, is every bit as much of an American citizen as Scott Brown and his daughters are -- has a family who vigorously denies that he is a Terrorist and is "pleading" with the U.S. Government not to murder their American son:
His anguish apparent, the father of Anwar al-Awlaki told CNN that his son is not a member of al Qaeda and is not hiding out with terrorists in southern Yemen.
"I am now afraid of what they will do with my son, he's not Osama Bin Laden, they want to make something out of him that he's not," said Dr. Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. . . .
"I will do my best to convince my son to do this (surrender), to come back but they are not giving me time, they want to kill my son. How can the American government kill one of their own citizens? This is a legal issue that needs to be answered," he said.
"If they give me time I can have some contact with my son but the problem is they are not giving me time," he said.
Who knows what the truth is here? That's why we have what are called "trials" -- or at least some process -- before we assume that government accusations are true and then mete out punishment accordingly. As Marcy Wheeler notes, the U.S. Government has not only repeatedly made false accusations of Terrorism against foreign nationals in the past, but against U.S. citizens as well. She observes: "I guess the tenuousness of those ties don’t really matter, when the President can dial up the assassination of an American citizen."
A 1981 Executive Order signed by Ronald Reagan provides: "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." Before the Geneva Conventions were first enacted, Abraham Lincoln -- in the middle of the Civil War -- directed Francis Lieber to articulate rules of conduct for war, and those were then incorporated into General Order 100, signed by Lincoln in April, 1863. Here is part of what it provided, in Section IX, entitled "Assassinations":
The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government, an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor, any more than the modern law of peace allows such intentional outlawry; on the contrary, it abhors such outrage. The sternest retaliation should follow the murder committed in consequence of such proclamation, made by whatever authority. Civilized nations look with horror upon offers of rewards for the assassination of enemies as relapses into barbarism.
Can anyone remotely reconcile that righteous proclamation with what the Obama administration is doing? And more generally, what legal basis exists for the President to unilaterally compile hit lists of American citizens he wants to be killed?
What's most striking of all is that it was recently revealed that, in Afghanistan, the U.S. had compiled a "hit list" of Afghan citizens it suspects of being drug traffickers or somehow associated with the Taliban, in order to target them for assassination. When that hit list was revealed, Afghan officials "fiercely" objected on the ground that it violates due process and undermines the rule of law to murder people without trials:
Gen. Mohammad Daud Daud, Afghanistan's deputy interior minister for counternarcotics efforts, praised U.S. and British special forces for their help recently in destroying drug labs and stashes of opium. But he said he worried that foreign troops would now act on their own to kill suspected drug lords, based on secret evidence, instead of handing them over for trial.
"They should respect our law, our constitution and our legal codes," Daud said. "We have a commitment to arrest these people on our own" . . . .
Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former Afghan interior minister, said that he had long urged the Pentagon and its NATO allies to crack down on drug smugglers and suppliers, and that he was glad that the military alliance had finally agreed to provide operational support for Afghan counternarcotics agents. But he said foreign troops needed to avoid the temptation to hunt down and kill traffickers on their own.
"There is a constitutional problem here. A person is innocent unless proven guilty," he said. "If you go off to kill or capture them, how do you prove that they are really guilty in terms of legal process?" . . .
So we're in Afghanistan to teach them about democracy, the rule of law, and basic precepts of Western justice. Meanwhile, Afghan officials vehemently object to the lawless, due-process-free assassination "hit list" of their citizens based on the unchecked say-so of the U.S. Government, and have to lecture us on the rule of law and Constitutional constraints. By stark contrast, our own Government, our media and our citizenry appear to find nothing wrong whatsoever with lawless assassinations aimed at our own citizens. And the most glaring question for those who critized Bush/Cheney detention policies but want to defend this: how could anyone possibly object to imprisoning foreign nationals without charges or due process at Guantanamo while approving of the assassination of U.S. citizens without any charges or due process?
UPDATE: In comments, sysprog documents the numerous countries condemned in 2009 by the U.S. State Department for "extra-judicial killings." I trust that it goes without saying that it's different (and better) when we do it than when They do it, because we're different (and better), but it still seems worth noting.
UPDATE II: James Joyner argues that this "hit list" policy is not much different than our drone attacks in Pakistan, which Obama has substantially escalated, and that "no one seems to be complaining about the President's authority" to kill suspected Terrorists there. Actually, there are substantial questions about the legality of those drone attacks, though the complete secrecy behind which the program operates makes those questions very difficult to address. Beyond that, though, there's a substantial difference between a government which (a) targets foreign nationals whom it claims are part of a enemy organization and (b) targets its own citizens for assassination without any due process. They both have substantial legal and moral problems, and killing innocent foreigners is obviously no better than killing one's own innocent citizens, but (a) is at least a fairly common act of war, whereas (b) -- as the U.S. Government itself has long argued -- is a hallmark of tyranny. There's a much greater danger from allowing a government to target its own citizens for extra-judicial killings.-- Glenn Greenwald
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Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Obamaphiles Are Running Out Of Excuses...
Sam Smith, Progressive Review
The Obamaphiles are scratching around for anything that might work . Eleanor Clift, whose knee jerks so badly she qualifies for early handicap airplane boarding, cites a CQ reports that says, "CQ rates Obama higher than any president in the last five decades in working his will on Capitol Hill, surpassing even the fabled Lyndon Johnson. Obama's success rate in the House and Senate on votes where he staked out a clear position was 96.7 percent, beating previous record-holder Johnson's 93 percent in 1965."
Says Clift: "People may not be talking about Obama's stimulus package in 2050, but fair-minded historians looking back will give him credit for pulling the economy back from the brink, and the $787 billion stimulus bill that he passed during his first hundred days with almost no Republican support was critical to the rescue effort. If Obama gets health-care reform, which seems likely, that will be an enduring achievement despite all the partisan nitpicking. He will have accomplished these things without some of the structural advantages LBJ enjoyed. The filibuster, which has its poisonous history in Southern segregationist efforts to kill civil-rights legislation, has morphed into a routine requirement for a supermajority of 60 votes on everything."
Rachel Maddow got real excited about this, too, as she interview sometime historian sometime hack Michael Beschloss:
MADDOW: Empirically, whether or not you like Obama's policies, but from a pure quantitative perspective in terms of what this president has done-how does President Obama's first year stack up against previous presidencies?
BESCHLOSS: Well, he is the equal of Franklin Roosevelt in his first year, LBJ in 1965 or Ronald Reagan in 1981. You know, Obama last year, or two years ago during the campaign, kept on saying, "I want to be a transforming president," like Roosevelt, like Johnson, like Reagan. And the breadth of the kind of things he has done-you're absolutely right to talk about them-I think suggests that that's what he's going to be. . .
MADDOW: That he'd be dealing with the economy. Can you give us some historical context for what challenges he was handed?
BESCHLOSS: It's almost unique in the last century. When FDR came in in 1933, we were in a terrible Great Depression, but in terms of foreign policy, the world was fairly quiet. And Roosevelt could spend his first term basically concentrating on the economy.
If you look at a case, for instance, like LBJ coming in in 1963, had to deal with the death of John Kennedy. But, again, the world was relatively quiet. He was able to concentrate on his domestic program.
In contrast, look at Obama coming in just a year ago. We were teetering--as you said--on the brink of another Great Depression. We had two wars, a struggle with terrorism. This is someone who had to deal with things on all sorts of fronts and engage with every single one of them.
Fortunately, Paul Rosenberg at Open Left cut through the crap:
News flash: Al Qaeda is not the Soviet Union or Red China. The military threats in LBJ's world dwarfed those in Obama's no matter how much Bush/Cheney Kool Aid the denizens of Versailles may drink. What's more, the mere fact that you face a major crisis such as the financial meltdown doesn't really count for much if your response is basically to turn your back on it.
Comparing Obama to FDR is nothing short of laughable. Heck, even on foreign policy, FDR's Good Neighbor Policy was more profound than anything Obama has done. But even the comparison to LBJ is patently absurd as well. Here's a list of Johnson's major accomplishments in his Great Society agenda that were passed in 1965, his first year after winning election on his own:
Civil rights
* Voting Rights Act of 1965
* Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965
War on Poverty
* Upward Bound
* Head Start
Education
* Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965
* Higher Education Act of 1965
Health
* Medicare
* Medicaid
Arts and Culture
* National Endowment for the Arts
* National Endowment for the Humanities
Consumer protection
* Cigarette Labeling Act of 1965
Environment
* Land and Water Conservation Act of 1965
* Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965
* Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act of 1965
The Civil Rights or health care accomplishments alone dwarf everything that Obama has accomplished this year. But one doesn't even have to look at such mega-epochal pieces of legislation. Consider how profoundly America has been changed by the Cigarette Labeling Act, or the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act. . . The comparison between Obama and LBJ is not even close to being close.
LBJ was an effective President. Obama is an efficient one. The difference is night and day. The only real valid comparison between the two men is that Obama is doubling down on LBJ's tragic mistake in Vietnam with his own embrace of the neo-cons brain-dead "long war" ideology.
The Obamaphiles are scratching around for anything that might work . Eleanor Clift, whose knee jerks so badly she qualifies for early handicap airplane boarding, cites a CQ reports that says, "CQ rates Obama higher than any president in the last five decades in working his will on Capitol Hill, surpassing even the fabled Lyndon Johnson. Obama's success rate in the House and Senate on votes where he staked out a clear position was 96.7 percent, beating previous record-holder Johnson's 93 percent in 1965."
Says Clift: "People may not be talking about Obama's stimulus package in 2050, but fair-minded historians looking back will give him credit for pulling the economy back from the brink, and the $787 billion stimulus bill that he passed during his first hundred days with almost no Republican support was critical to the rescue effort. If Obama gets health-care reform, which seems likely, that will be an enduring achievement despite all the partisan nitpicking. He will have accomplished these things without some of the structural advantages LBJ enjoyed. The filibuster, which has its poisonous history in Southern segregationist efforts to kill civil-rights legislation, has morphed into a routine requirement for a supermajority of 60 votes on everything."
Rachel Maddow got real excited about this, too, as she interview sometime historian sometime hack Michael Beschloss:
MADDOW: Empirically, whether or not you like Obama's policies, but from a pure quantitative perspective in terms of what this president has done-how does President Obama's first year stack up against previous presidencies?
BESCHLOSS: Well, he is the equal of Franklin Roosevelt in his first year, LBJ in 1965 or Ronald Reagan in 1981. You know, Obama last year, or two years ago during the campaign, kept on saying, "I want to be a transforming president," like Roosevelt, like Johnson, like Reagan. And the breadth of the kind of things he has done-you're absolutely right to talk about them-I think suggests that that's what he's going to be. . .
MADDOW: That he'd be dealing with the economy. Can you give us some historical context for what challenges he was handed?
BESCHLOSS: It's almost unique in the last century. When FDR came in in 1933, we were in a terrible Great Depression, but in terms of foreign policy, the world was fairly quiet. And Roosevelt could spend his first term basically concentrating on the economy.
If you look at a case, for instance, like LBJ coming in in 1963, had to deal with the death of John Kennedy. But, again, the world was relatively quiet. He was able to concentrate on his domestic program.
In contrast, look at Obama coming in just a year ago. We were teetering--as you said--on the brink of another Great Depression. We had two wars, a struggle with terrorism. This is someone who had to deal with things on all sorts of fronts and engage with every single one of them.
Fortunately, Paul Rosenberg at Open Left cut through the crap:
News flash: Al Qaeda is not the Soviet Union or Red China. The military threats in LBJ's world dwarfed those in Obama's no matter how much Bush/Cheney Kool Aid the denizens of Versailles may drink. What's more, the mere fact that you face a major crisis such as the financial meltdown doesn't really count for much if your response is basically to turn your back on it.
Comparing Obama to FDR is nothing short of laughable. Heck, even on foreign policy, FDR's Good Neighbor Policy was more profound than anything Obama has done. But even the comparison to LBJ is patently absurd as well. Here's a list of Johnson's major accomplishments in his Great Society agenda that were passed in 1965, his first year after winning election on his own:
Civil rights
* Voting Rights Act of 1965
* Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965
War on Poverty
* Upward Bound
* Head Start
Education
* Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965
* Higher Education Act of 1965
Health
* Medicare
* Medicaid
Arts and Culture
* National Endowment for the Arts
* National Endowment for the Humanities
Consumer protection
* Cigarette Labeling Act of 1965
Environment
* Land and Water Conservation Act of 1965
* Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965
* Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act of 1965
The Civil Rights or health care accomplishments alone dwarf everything that Obama has accomplished this year. But one doesn't even have to look at such mega-epochal pieces of legislation. Consider how profoundly America has been changed by the Cigarette Labeling Act, or the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act. . . The comparison between Obama and LBJ is not even close to being close.
LBJ was an effective President. Obama is an efficient one. The difference is night and day. The only real valid comparison between the two men is that Obama is doubling down on LBJ's tragic mistake in Vietnam with his own embrace of the neo-cons brain-dead "long war" ideology.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Obama's Expanding War On Terra
By Pete Stanislaw, Get Off This!
A new front is revealed in our Nobel Peace Laureate President's war for the last few resources left on Terra. That front is Yemen, with cruise missile attacks ordered by the commander-in-chief against alleged "al-Qaeda" targets for the purpose - we are repeatedly told - of fighting the threat of terrorism. The last cowardly lobbing of incredibly powerful ordnance across the Yemeni border killed a large group of high school-age boys. This brings the total of largely Muslim nations that our government's military is either occupying or bombing the shit out of from a safe distance to five - Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Yemen, the last two added since the new administration took office on a surge of pro-peace votes.
Since Yemen has been acknowledged to be a "covert" front in the alleged war on terror (until now), there may be others our government doesn't think we should know about. At this point, our docility in the face of utter lies and proclaimed absurdities is comic in the extreme. Whoever still believes that these violent interventions have anything at all to do with fighting terrorism is suffering from willful blindness.
In the last eight years, our government's military has done more to expand the cause(s) of terrorism on the planet than any nation accused (by our government) of "harboring" or "sponsoring" terrorists. The story for the mediated masses has always been that we have to "get in there and smoke 'em out", which makes for entertaining movies but lousy international relations, especially since it only takes 3 minutes of rational thought to realize that terrorism and terrorists are red herrings. How in hell does killing civilians in poor Muslim nations fight against angry extremists? Wouldn't such actions produce more angry extremists? Yes they would and indeed they do!
The object has never changed. Control over the resources which are absolutely necessary to sustain our wasteful and largely ignorant lifestyles remains the rationale for mass murder of those who happen to occupy the earth above said resources. The continued war and occupation in Afghanistan by the US forces as well as the puppet government we have entrenched there has much more to do with the completion and the securing of two oil and natural gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea across Afghanistan from existing Turkmenistan fields. They would continue through Pakistan to shipping ports in the south. Unfortunately, they will have to pass through areas controlled by the theocratic Taliban, who are actively maneuvering for position in whatever government should result in the aftermath of the violence. These fighters for their perceived birthright are known in the US mass media as "insurgents". One would do well to realize that they were here before our government's military was. This is their nation, when imperial powers aren't occupying it. But I digress.
My point is this: As Alexander Cockburn said in Counterpunch two months ago, President Obama's receiving the Nobel Peace Prize should come as acknowledgement that absurdity is part and parcel of the human condition. That he can order cruise missiles to be launched over sovereign borders the world over and still be regarded by the Nobel Committee as deserving of a Peace Prize is patently absurd.
Remember, Henry Kissinger has one too...
Friday, December 18, 2009
Chavez's Venezuela
An Interview With Eva Golinger
By Mike Whitney, Counterpunch
Eva Golinger is a Venezuelan-American attorney from New York living in Caracas, Venezuela since 2005 and author of “The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela” (2006 Olive Branch Press), “Bush vs. Chávez: Washington’s War on Venezuela” (2007, Monthly Review Press), “The Empire’s Web: Encyclopedia of Interventionism and Subversion”, “La Mirada del Imperio sobre el 4F: Los Documentos Desclasificados de Washington sobre la rebelión militar del 4 de febrero de 1992” and "La Agresión Permanente: USAID, NED y CIA".
Mike Whitney: The US media is very critical of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. He's frequently denounced as "anti-American", a "leftist strongman", and a dictator. Can you briefly summarize some of the positive social, economic and judicial changes for which Chavez is mainly responsible?Eva Golinger: The first and foremost important achievement during the Chávez administration is the 1999 Constitution, which, although not written nor decreed by Chávez himself, was created through his vision of change for Venezuela. The 1999 Constitution was, in fact, drafted - written - by the people of Venezuela in one of the most participatory examples of nation building, and then was ratified through popular national referendum by 75 per cent of Venezuelans. The 1999 Constitution is one of the most advanced in the world in the area of human rights. It guarantees the rights to housing, education, healthcare, food, indigenous lands, languages, women's rights, worker's rights, living wages and a whole host of other rights that few other countries recognize on a national level.
My favorite right in the Venezuelan Constitution is the right to a dignified life. That pretty much sums up all the others. Laws to implement these rights began to surface in 2001, with land reform, oil industry redistribution, tax laws and the creation of more than a dozen social programs - called missions - dedicated to addressing the basic needs of Venezuela's poor majority. In 2003, the first missions were directed at education and healthcare. Within two years, illiteracy was eradicated in the country and Venezuela was certified by UNESCO as a nation free of illiteracy. This was done with the help of a successful Cuban literacy program called "Yo si puedo" (Yes I can). Further educational missions were created to provide free universal education from primary to doctoral levels throughout the country. Today, Venezuela's population is much more educated than before, and adults who previously had no high school education now are encouraged to not only go through a secondary school program, but also university and graduate school.
The healthcare program, called "Barrio Adentro", has not only provided preventive healthcare to all Venezuelans - many who never had access to a doctor before - but also has guaranteed universal, free access to medical attention at the most advanced levels. MRIs, heart surgery, lab work, cancer treatments, are all provided free of cost to anyone (including foreigners) in need. Some of the most modern clinics, diagnostic treatment centers and hospitals have been built in the past five years under this program, placing Venezuela at the forefront of medical technology.
Other programs providing subsidized food and consumer products (Mercal, Pdval), job training (Mission Vuelvan Caras), subsidies to poor, single mothers (Madres del Barrio), attention to indigents and drug addicts (Mission Negra Hipolita) have reduced extreme poverty by 50 per cent and raised Venezuelans standard of living and quality of life. While nothing is perfect, these changes are extraordinary and have transformed Venezuela into a nation far different from what it looked like 10 years ago. In fact, the most important achievement that Hugo Chávez himself is directly responsible for is the level of participation in the political process. Today, millions of Venezuelans previously invisible and excluded are visible and included. Those who were always marginalized and ignored in Venezuela by prior governments today have a voice, are seen and heard, and are actively participating in the building of a new economic, political and social model in their country.
Whitney: On Monday, President Chavez threw a Venezuelan judge in jail on charges of abuse of power for freeing a high-profile banker. Do you think he overstepped his authority as executive or violated the principle of separation of powers? What does this say about Chavez's resolve to fight corruption?
Eva Golinger: President Chávez did not put anyone in jail. Venezuela has an Attorney General and an independent branch of government in charge of public prosecutions. Chávez did publicly accuse the judge of corruption and violating the law because that judge overstepped her authority by releasing an individual charged with corruption and other criminal acts from detention, despite the fact that a previous court had not granted conditional freedom or bail to the suspect. And, the judge released the suspect in a very irregular way, without the presence of the prosecutor, and through a back door. The suspect then fled the country.
This is part of Venezuela's fight against corruption. Unfortunately - as in a lot of countries - corruption is deeply rooted in the culture. The struggle to eradicate corruption is probably the most difficult of all and will probably not be achieved until new generations have grown up with different values and education. In the meantime, the Chávez administration is trying hard to ensure that corrupt public officials pay the consequences. That judge, for example, engaged in an act of corruption and abuse of authority by illegally releasing a suspect and therefore was charged by the Public Prosecutor's office and will be tried. It has nothing to do with what Chávez said or didn't say, it has to do with enforcing the law.
Whitney: Why is the United States building military bases in Colombia? Do they pose a threat to Chavez or the Bolivarian Revolution?
Eva Golinger: On October 30, the US formally entered into an agreement with the Colombian government to allow US access to seven military bases in Colombia and unlimited use of Colombian territory for military operations. The agreement itself is purported to be directed at counter-narcotics operations and counter-terrorism. But a US Air Force document released earlier this year discussing the need for a stronger US military presence in Colombia revealed the true intentions behind the military agreement. The document stated that the US military presence was necessary to combat the "constant threat from anti-US governments in the region". Clearly, that is a reference to Venezuela, and probably Bolivia, maybe Ecuador. It's no secret that Washington considers the Venezuelan government anti-US, though it's not true. Venezuela is anti-imperialist, but not anti-US. The US Air Force document also stated that the Colombian bases would be used to engage in "full spectrum military operations" throughout South America, and even talked about surveillance, intelligence and reconnaissance missions, and improving the capacity of US forces to execute "expeditionary warfare" in Latin America.
Clearly, this is a threat to the peoples of Latin America and particularly those nations targeted, such as Venezuela. Most people in the US don't know about this military agreement, but it they did, they should question why their government, led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, is preparing for war in South America. And, in the midst of an economic crisis with millions of people in the US losing jobs and homes, why are millions of dollars being spent on military bases in Colombia? The US Congress already approved $46 million for one of the bases in Colombia. And surely more funds will be supplied in the future.
Whitney: What is ALBA? Is it a viable alternative to the "free trade" blocs promoted by the US?
Eva Golinger: The Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas - Trade Agreement for the People, is a regional agreement created five years ago between Venezuela and Cuba, and now has 9 members: Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Dominica. ALBA is a trade agreement based on integration, cooperation and solidarity, contrary to US trade agreements which are based on competition and exploitation. It promotes a way of trading between nations that assures mutual benefits. For example, Venezuela sells oil to Cuba and Cuba pays with services - doctors, educators and technological experts that help to improve Venezuela's industries. Venezuela sells oil to Nicaragua and Nicaragua pays with food products, agricultural technology and aide to build Venezuela's own agricultural industry, which long ago was abandoned by prior governments only interested in the rich oil industry. ALBA seeks to not just provide economic benefits to its member nations, but also social and cultural advances. The idea is to find ways to help members develop and progress in all aspects of society. ALBA recently created a new currency, the SUCRE, which will be used as a form of exchange between member nations, eliminating the US dollar as the standard for trade.
Whitney: Are US NGOs and intelligence agents still trying to foment political instability in Venezuela or have those operations ceased since the failed coup?
Eva Golinger: In fact, the funding of political groups in Venezuela, and others throughout Latin America that promote US agenda, has increased since the April 2002 coup against President Chávez. Through two principal Department of State agencies, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US government has channeled more than $50 million to opposition groups in Venezuela since 2002. The USAID/NED budget to fund groups in Venezuela in 2010 is nearly $15 million, doubled from last year's $7 million. This is a state policy of Washington, which the Obama Administration plans to amp up. They call it "democracy promotion", but it's really democracy subversion and destabilization. Funding political groups favorable to Empire, equipping them with resources, strategizing to help formulate political platforms and campaigns - all geared towards regime change - is a new form of invasion, a silent invasion. Through USAID and NED, and their "partner NGOs" and contractors, such as Freedom House, International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute, Pan-American Development Foundation and Development Alternatives, Inc., hundreds of political groups, parties and programs are presently being funded in Venezuela to promote regime change against the Chávez government. US taxpayer dollars are being squandered on these efforts to overthrow a democratically elected government that simply isn't convenient for Washington. Remember, Venezuela has 24 per cent of world oil reserves. That's a lot!
Whitney: How hard has Venezuela been hit by the economic crisis? Do the people understand Wall Street's role in the meltdown?
Eva Golinger: Actually, the Chávez government has taken important steps to shelter Venezuela from the financial crisis. People here in Venezuela absolutely understand Wall Street's role in the crisis and know that the US capitalist-consumerist system is principally responsible for causing the financial crisis, but also the climate crisis that the world is facing. The Venezuelan government took preventive steps against the financial crisis, such as withdrawing Venezuela's reserves from US banks two years ago, creating cushion funds to ensure social programs would not be cut and diversifying Venezuela's oil clientele so as not to be dependent solely on US clients. Recently, several banks have been nationalized by the Venezuelan government and others have been liquidated. But this was more due to the mismanagement and internal corruption within those banks. The Venezuelan government reacted quickly to take over the banks and guarantee customers' savings would not be lost. In fact, it's the first time in Venezuela's history that no customers have lost any of their money during a bank liquidation or takeover. This is part of the Chávez Administration's policy of prioritizing social needs over economic gain.
Whitney: Here's an excerpt from a special weekend report by Bloomberg News: "Americans have grown gloomier about both the economy and the nation’s direction over the past three months even as the U.S. shows signs of moving from recession to recovery. Almost half the people now feel less financially secure than when President Barack Obama took office in January... Fewer than 1 in 3 Americans think the economy will improve in the next six months... Only 32 per cent of poll respondents believe the country is headed in the right direction, down from 40 percent who said so in September." The frustration and disillusionment with the US political/economic system has never been greater in my lifetime. Do you think people in the United States are ready for their own Bolivarian Revolution and steps towards a more progressive, socialistic model of government?
Eva Golinger: The rise of Barack Obama neutralized a growing sentiment for profound change inside the US. Hopefully, the slowdown in US activism will only be temporary. South of the border, there is tremendous change taking place. New social, political and economic models are being built by popular grassroots movements in Venezuela, Bolivia and other Latin American nations that seek economic and social justice. I believe strongly that models in process, like the Bolivarian Revolution, provide inspiration and hope to those in the US and around the world that alternatives to US capitalism do exist and can be successful.
The US has a rich history of revolution. There are many groups inside the US dedicated to building a better, more humanist system. Unity and a collective vision are essential aspects of building a strong movement capable of moving forward. Every nation has its moment in history. This is the time of Latin America. But there is great hope that the people of the US will soon unite with their brothers and sisters south of the border to bring down Empire and help build a true world community based on social and economic justice for all.
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached atfergiewhitney@msn.com.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Not Even A Peanut
Counterpunch Diary By Alexander Cockburn
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12112009.html
A friend down the coast here in California called Wednesday to say that her mother, 95, had fallen, cracked her ribs, got a cough and told her daughters, “That’s it. I’m checking out.” She’s given up eating. I remembered all the arguments I’d had down the years with the old lady – a perennial optimist about Democrats when it came to assessing the likelihood that Carter or Clinton or Obama would ever actually serve up the progressive banquets they’d pledged on the campaign trail.
“Tell your mother that at least she won’t have to put up with me saying ‘I told you so, about Obama.’” Her daughter gave a deep, sad sigh. She too has been a loyal liberal Democrat all her life and now, she said, Obama’s breaking her heart. So many high hopes, and there’s a man accepting the Peace Prize with one hand, while signing deployment orders with the other, sending 30,000 more young soldiers to Afghanistan.
Imagine having one’s foot on the lip of the great abyss, dimly hearing the radio in the kitchen playing snatches of the appalling drivel served up by Obama in Oslo. “Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans.”
Obama was in peak form as self-righteous blowhard, proclaiming that “America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America’s commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.”
As his words hang in the air, captives of the Empire are being kidnapped and rendered to Bagram and other dungeons and tortured, all the while with no legal standing as “enemy combatants”. Stand naked in a cold cell, waiting for the next beating from your interrogators and listen to Obama being piped through the PA at max volume, right after ‘Born in the USA’ (sorry, Birthers): “We do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place… So let us reach for the world that ought to be -- that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.”
McCain loves the speech. Sarah Palin loves the speech. But that doesn’t mean Obama’s Oslo address was a Republican speech. When it comes to invoking “just wars” Republican presidents can go through the motions, but they haven’t got their hearts in it. Who needs to talk about justice as you drop high explosive and scrawl Death to Ragheads on the side of the bombs? When you want a just war, whistle up a Democrat who can talk with a straight face about installing democracy in the Balkans. After eight years of Bushian crudities the Empire needed an upgrade in its salespitch, which is why we have Obama. Back at the time of the medieval crusades, the Western kings used to take Holy Communion from their Archbishops before heading east to battle Islam and scour the land for booty. I thought the ceremony in that austere hall in Oslo was a straight lineal descent – as Obama accepted his wafer, in the form of the prize -- in this modern age a substantial check – and then pledged his holy war.
There have been yelps, but I detect a certain caution on the left, a certain reluctance to toss Obama on the dung heap where he belongs. Often it’s simple self-preservation. A great many nominally left organizations are dependent on liberal non-profit foundations whose executives are swift to cancel grants to those swerving from commitment to the Democratic cause and to the White House. Rather than confess to these coarse inhibitions, the progressives murmur about the lot of Afghan women, the monstrous Taliban, and sit on their hands. And they too see nothing wrong with Obama’s endless pledges to kill Bin Laden – a commitment that aroused ecstasy in Congress last week when General McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services Committee last Tuesday that the world can not defeat al Qaeda until Osama bin Laden is captured or killed.
As Pierre Sprey remarked in the hearing’s wake, “It's clear to me that, although Gen. McChrystal's credentials in the assassination business are impeccable, his assassination-based grand strategy is a shameless crib from that great strategic innovator, the USAF's Col. Worden (e.g., "decapitation of the enemy's leadership"--by air power, of course). Quibbles over authorship aside, victory through assassination is a brilliant grand strategy for America: it's cheap, particularly at a time when we're a bit strapped; it's politically irresistible to a nation raised on Terminator 2 and Tupac; and, for the defense intellectuals, it offers wonderfully clear cut measures of success. And, empirically speaking, it's got a great track record. Look how well a single well-conceived execution worked out for Pontius Pilate, the High Priests of the Second Temple, and the Roman Empire.”
Here’s a president who can’t even toss the progressives the one peanut a year they need to keep them happy. Obama’s refusal on the eve of Thanksgiving here ago to sign the U.S. on to the landmine ban was the breaking point for many.
The American Medical Association, mentioned by Clancy Sigal here earlier this week had a study reckoning that an estimated 24,000 people, mainly civilians, are killed or ripped apart by landmines and “unexploded ordinance” (cluster bombs) each year across the world. Mostly the victims are the rural poor, many of them children. As a senator, Barack Obama voted for the ban; as President, he’s against it. Looking at the AMA Report’s numbers it’s a safe bet to say that somewhere in the world, even as Obama invoked Martin Luther King and the peacelovers, some kids the same age as his own two daughters were killed or crippled by a landmine.
Obama could have tossed the peanut through the bars, and ratified the ban. The liberals would have cheered and then Obama could have told Rahm Emanuel to pass the word along to Congress that he’d much prefer the legislators not ratify his decision.
But Obama’s too chicken to risk a gesture like that. What people are suddenly realizing is that with Obama there is a absolute disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality. Is it cynicism? My own feeling is that Obama has spent so much of his life putting on the various acts necessary to get ahead in the world of powerful, rich white people that deception and self-deception have become innate and instinctive, several steps beyond crude manipulation. You could always tell when Bill Clinton was hamming it up. His face would redden slightly with the effort of contrived emotion.
Obama’s moralizing kitsch is a far smoother brand of cant. As Laura Flanders remarked here last week, he can say, as he did in his Afghan War speech at West Point, “Our union was founded in resistance to oppression,” then smile at his wife, descendant of oppressed slaves.
He has a picture of Muhammad Ali above his desk. On November 19 he wrote a tribute to Ali in USA Today praising "The Greatest" for "his unique ability to summon extraordinary strength and courage in the face of adversity, to navigate the storm and never lose his way."
Did Obama feel any disconnect between this tribute to the most famous draft resister in US history and the fact that at the very moment he was approving his speech writer’s work on the piece for USA Today he was pondering drafts of a speech announcing he was widening the war in Afghanistan?
Dave Zirin, a fine sports writer, put it well in a piece he wrote called “Message to Obama – You Can’t Have Muhammad Ali”:
“Would that Muhammad Ali still had his voice. Would that Parkinson's disease and dementia had not robbed us of his razor-sharp tongue. Maybe Muhammad Ali has been robbed of speech, but I think we can safely guess what the Champ would say in the face of Obama's war. We can safely guess, because he said it perfectly four decades ago:
‘Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.’”
Every day now I meet sad and angry people in this progressive part of northern California, furious at themselves at having believed in Obama, at a time in those early primaries and fundraisers last year when he needed them to believe. They kept on believing through most of this year, even as Obama threw one pledge after another out the window. After the landmine sell-out and the 30,000 deployment they’ve got nothing to hold on to, though many of them will stay with Obama till the end, particularly the blacks, holding on to the straightforward assumption, as Kevin Alexander Gray put it here last Wednesday that “He‘s doing the best he can under the circumstances– those ‘circumstances’ being white people.”
Maybe the 95-year will slip away, also feeling that Obama is doing the best he can “under the circumstances” of the American Empire, leaving younger, less blithe spirits with the thought that the sourest truth about Obama is that he’s not doing the best he can “under the circumstances”, that in fact he’s really a sleazeball.
Any president has the power to do something decent once in a while, even if it’s declaring a marine sanctuary, which was Jimmy Carter’s last act as president. Bill Clinton finally offended Hollywood liberals by refusing to pardon Leonard Peltier, something he could have done at of the stroke of the same pen he used to sign the pardon for Marc Rich, the billionaire crook fugitive from justice. Hollywood is still with Obama. If he was shot tomorrow, someone – maybe even Oliver Stone -- would rush to make a movie saying Obama was killed by the Pentagon because of his pledge to pull the troops out of Afghanistan two years from now.
Hopes die hard, but Obama has done a superlative job of assassinating them with all due dispatch.
Footnote: some would argue that Obama actually does have a peanut for the progressives and is preparing to toss it. The White House is reviewing its policy of barring presidents from sending letters of condolence to the families of members of the military who have committed suicide. The White House says that Obama cares about service members who kill themselves. If this goes through, given his deployments, he’ll be a busy man. Somehow this reminds me of Lenny Bruce’s joke about Pope John XX111, who had visited some scene of disaster and shed tears when he witnessed the destruction. “And the Pope cried,” Lenny would tell his audience in tones of wonder. “He cried!” Pause. “Why, any other Pope would have laughed himself sick.”
Stop Press. This just in: my friend down the coast writes to say her mother last night announced the Spirit had re-entered her body and that on reflection she realized it was bad timing to leave before Christmas, that it would really put a damper on the family celebration, and that she had chosen to stay around.
My father Claud died on December 15, 1981. His mind stayed keen till the end, shortly before which he opened one eye and murmured to me apropos developments in Poland I’d been telling him about: “I’m glad they’ve managed to split Solidarity.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12112009.html
A friend down the coast here in California called Wednesday to say that her mother, 95, had fallen, cracked her ribs, got a cough and told her daughters, “That’s it. I’m checking out.” She’s given up eating. I remembered all the arguments I’d had down the years with the old lady – a perennial optimist about Democrats when it came to assessing the likelihood that Carter or Clinton or Obama would ever actually serve up the progressive banquets they’d pledged on the campaign trail.
“Tell your mother that at least she won’t have to put up with me saying ‘I told you so, about Obama.’” Her daughter gave a deep, sad sigh. She too has been a loyal liberal Democrat all her life and now, she said, Obama’s breaking her heart. So many high hopes, and there’s a man accepting the Peace Prize with one hand, while signing deployment orders with the other, sending 30,000 more young soldiers to Afghanistan.
Imagine having one’s foot on the lip of the great abyss, dimly hearing the radio in the kitchen playing snatches of the appalling drivel served up by Obama in Oslo. “Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans.”
Obama was in peak form as self-righteous blowhard, proclaiming that “America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America’s commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.”
As his words hang in the air, captives of the Empire are being kidnapped and rendered to Bagram and other dungeons and tortured, all the while with no legal standing as “enemy combatants”. Stand naked in a cold cell, waiting for the next beating from your interrogators and listen to Obama being piped through the PA at max volume, right after ‘Born in the USA’ (sorry, Birthers): “We do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place… So let us reach for the world that ought to be -- that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.”
McCain loves the speech. Sarah Palin loves the speech. But that doesn’t mean Obama’s Oslo address was a Republican speech. When it comes to invoking “just wars” Republican presidents can go through the motions, but they haven’t got their hearts in it. Who needs to talk about justice as you drop high explosive and scrawl Death to Ragheads on the side of the bombs? When you want a just war, whistle up a Democrat who can talk with a straight face about installing democracy in the Balkans. After eight years of Bushian crudities the Empire needed an upgrade in its salespitch, which is why we have Obama. Back at the time of the medieval crusades, the Western kings used to take Holy Communion from their Archbishops before heading east to battle Islam and scour the land for booty. I thought the ceremony in that austere hall in Oslo was a straight lineal descent – as Obama accepted his wafer, in the form of the prize -- in this modern age a substantial check – and then pledged his holy war.
There have been yelps, but I detect a certain caution on the left, a certain reluctance to toss Obama on the dung heap where he belongs. Often it’s simple self-preservation. A great many nominally left organizations are dependent on liberal non-profit foundations whose executives are swift to cancel grants to those swerving from commitment to the Democratic cause and to the White House. Rather than confess to these coarse inhibitions, the progressives murmur about the lot of Afghan women, the monstrous Taliban, and sit on their hands. And they too see nothing wrong with Obama’s endless pledges to kill Bin Laden – a commitment that aroused ecstasy in Congress last week when General McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services Committee last Tuesday that the world can not defeat al Qaeda until Osama bin Laden is captured or killed.
As Pierre Sprey remarked in the hearing’s wake, “It's clear to me that, although Gen. McChrystal's credentials in the assassination business are impeccable, his assassination-based grand strategy is a shameless crib from that great strategic innovator, the USAF's Col. Worden (e.g., "decapitation of the enemy's leadership"--by air power, of course). Quibbles over authorship aside, victory through assassination is a brilliant grand strategy for America: it's cheap, particularly at a time when we're a bit strapped; it's politically irresistible to a nation raised on Terminator 2 and Tupac; and, for the defense intellectuals, it offers wonderfully clear cut measures of success. And, empirically speaking, it's got a great track record. Look how well a single well-conceived execution worked out for Pontius Pilate, the High Priests of the Second Temple, and the Roman Empire.”
Here’s a president who can’t even toss the progressives the one peanut a year they need to keep them happy. Obama’s refusal on the eve of Thanksgiving here ago to sign the U.S. on to the landmine ban was the breaking point for many.
The American Medical Association, mentioned by Clancy Sigal here earlier this week had a study reckoning that an estimated 24,000 people, mainly civilians, are killed or ripped apart by landmines and “unexploded ordinance” (cluster bombs) each year across the world. Mostly the victims are the rural poor, many of them children. As a senator, Barack Obama voted for the ban; as President, he’s against it. Looking at the AMA Report’s numbers it’s a safe bet to say that somewhere in the world, even as Obama invoked Martin Luther King and the peacelovers, some kids the same age as his own two daughters were killed or crippled by a landmine.
Obama could have tossed the peanut through the bars, and ratified the ban. The liberals would have cheered and then Obama could have told Rahm Emanuel to pass the word along to Congress that he’d much prefer the legislators not ratify his decision.
But Obama’s too chicken to risk a gesture like that. What people are suddenly realizing is that with Obama there is a absolute disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality. Is it cynicism? My own feeling is that Obama has spent so much of his life putting on the various acts necessary to get ahead in the world of powerful, rich white people that deception and self-deception have become innate and instinctive, several steps beyond crude manipulation. You could always tell when Bill Clinton was hamming it up. His face would redden slightly with the effort of contrived emotion.
Obama’s moralizing kitsch is a far smoother brand of cant. As Laura Flanders remarked here last week, he can say, as he did in his Afghan War speech at West Point, “Our union was founded in resistance to oppression,” then smile at his wife, descendant of oppressed slaves.
He has a picture of Muhammad Ali above his desk. On November 19 he wrote a tribute to Ali in USA Today praising "The Greatest" for "his unique ability to summon extraordinary strength and courage in the face of adversity, to navigate the storm and never lose his way."
Did Obama feel any disconnect between this tribute to the most famous draft resister in US history and the fact that at the very moment he was approving his speech writer’s work on the piece for USA Today he was pondering drafts of a speech announcing he was widening the war in Afghanistan?
Dave Zirin, a fine sports writer, put it well in a piece he wrote called “Message to Obama – You Can’t Have Muhammad Ali”:
“Would that Muhammad Ali still had his voice. Would that Parkinson's disease and dementia had not robbed us of his razor-sharp tongue. Maybe Muhammad Ali has been robbed of speech, but I think we can safely guess what the Champ would say in the face of Obama's war. We can safely guess, because he said it perfectly four decades ago:
‘Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.’”
Every day now I meet sad and angry people in this progressive part of northern California, furious at themselves at having believed in Obama, at a time in those early primaries and fundraisers last year when he needed them to believe. They kept on believing through most of this year, even as Obama threw one pledge after another out the window. After the landmine sell-out and the 30,000 deployment they’ve got nothing to hold on to, though many of them will stay with Obama till the end, particularly the blacks, holding on to the straightforward assumption, as Kevin Alexander Gray put it here last Wednesday that “He‘s doing the best he can under the circumstances– those ‘circumstances’ being white people.”
Maybe the 95-year will slip away, also feeling that Obama is doing the best he can “under the circumstances” of the American Empire, leaving younger, less blithe spirits with the thought that the sourest truth about Obama is that he’s not doing the best he can “under the circumstances”, that in fact he’s really a sleazeball.
Any president has the power to do something decent once in a while, even if it’s declaring a marine sanctuary, which was Jimmy Carter’s last act as president. Bill Clinton finally offended Hollywood liberals by refusing to pardon Leonard Peltier, something he could have done at of the stroke of the same pen he used to sign the pardon for Marc Rich, the billionaire crook fugitive from justice. Hollywood is still with Obama. If he was shot tomorrow, someone – maybe even Oliver Stone -- would rush to make a movie saying Obama was killed by the Pentagon because of his pledge to pull the troops out of Afghanistan two years from now.
Hopes die hard, but Obama has done a superlative job of assassinating them with all due dispatch.
Footnote: some would argue that Obama actually does have a peanut for the progressives and is preparing to toss it. The White House is reviewing its policy of barring presidents from sending letters of condolence to the families of members of the military who have committed suicide. The White House says that Obama cares about service members who kill themselves. If this goes through, given his deployments, he’ll be a busy man. Somehow this reminds me of Lenny Bruce’s joke about Pope John XX111, who had visited some scene of disaster and shed tears when he witnessed the destruction. “And the Pope cried,” Lenny would tell his audience in tones of wonder. “He cried!” Pause. “Why, any other Pope would have laughed himself sick.”
Stop Press. This just in: my friend down the coast writes to say her mother last night announced the Spirit had re-entered her body and that on reflection she realized it was bad timing to leave before Christmas, that it would really put a damper on the family celebration, and that she had chosen to stay around.
My father Claud died on December 15, 1981. His mind stayed keen till the end, shortly before which he opened one eye and murmured to me apropos developments in Poland I’d been telling him about: “I’m glad they’ve managed to split Solidarity.”
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
The AMA Steps Into the 20th Century
Doctors Light Up
By NORM KENT, COUNTERPUNCH
"Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man."
-- DEA Administrative Law Judge Francis Young Docket No. 86-22. 1988.
Better late than never, I suppose.
After decades of burying their head in the sand, the country's largest physician group, the American Medical Association (AMA), has reversed its long-held position that marijuana has no medical value. Now that the whole country has caught on, they have decided to jump into the ocean and see if they can’t swim and catch up to the ship that has left shore.
This is why the gay rights battle and pot advocates have so much in common. This decision is like the American Psychiatric Association saying there is nothing wrong with homosexuality years after gay rights professionals had formed coalitions in professions from law enforcement to medicine.
Nevertheless, to their belated credit, the AMA has called for a review of marijuana's status as a ‘Schedule 1’ drug with ‘no accepted medical use’ under the federal Controlled Substances Act. As a ‘Schedule 1’ controlled substance, in the same category as heroin, ecstasy and LSD, the federal laws for possession remain unduly harsh and the public access even for medical testing remains severely limited.
Reducing marijuana's federal classification even just to Schedule 2 -- the same class as cocaine, methadone, oxycodone and morphine -- would allow for more testing on the medical effects of marijuana. Since the government’s purported unwillingness to accept marijuana as an herb with medicinal value has been based on their allegation that all we have is limited anecdotal evidence, the scheduling conundrum becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The powers that be have been shouting we do not have enough evidence to reclassify while inhibiting the very research which could prove it. Politically savvy perhaps, but morally unconscionable.
Consequently, the rescheduling of marijuana is a critical battle that marijuana advocates must win. There is a terrible comfort zone the political left can succumb to if we find satisfaction that a particular administration is easing off on law enforcement. Political power is temporary. Those in office today can be voted out tomorrow. But those in office tomorrow will still have to follow the law in effect on that day. Thus, battles must be fought in courtrooms and legislatures. Laws must be changed now to insure change is permanent. Rescheduling initiatives must go forth.
Social activists have to understand that without pressure centrists will drift to the comfort zone of the right. The reason close to a million Americans are still getting arrested every year for marijuana possession is because so many people could care less about the laws and assume it is perfectly okay to light up where you want when they want. But some of you wind up like the South Florida judge, Lawrence M. Korda, who had spent 30 distinguished years on the bench. He decided to light up a single joint during a rock concert in a Hollywood, Florida park, and after a series of humiliating front page articles documenting his arrest, was forced to resign his position.
You can’t let up if you have the ball. For marijuana reformers, like gay rights proponents, the wave is on our side. We can’t get off the board. You have to ride it out and carry it to a new tomorrow. Yes, gay marriage may have lost a 31st state vote in Maine last month, but more significantly, scores of communities nationwide are extending homosexual couples the rights and privileges afforded heterosexuals, under the umbrella of domestic partnership ordinances. If your community is not, contact a city commissioner near you today.
It's been 72 years since the AMA has officially recognized that marijuana has therapeutic benefits. It’s been 30 years since Administrative Law Judge Francis Young ruled that rescheduling should occur. He was overruled by Presidents, politics, and the DEA. See Fred Gardner’s article about Judge Young here online in CounterPunch from early this Spring.
After three decades, it is time to honor Judge Young’s decision that cannabis has the capacity to provide medically based options in pain relief treatment. We know what they are, from taming nausea for cancer stricken patients to reducing neuropathic pain in those so suffering, whether from AIDS or multiple sclerosis or comparable ailments.
As stated by Aaron Houston of the successful Marijuana Policy Project, "Marijuana's Schedule I status is not just scientifically untenable, given the wealth of recent data showing it to be both safe and effective for chronic pain and other conditions, but it's been a major obstacle to needed research." The truth is more people died from spinach last year than pot. And a thousand people a year, I understand, overdose from aspirin. You don’t die from pot, just maybe ‘jones’ out a bit if you don’t have it.
The government has maintained a legally inconsistent position for decades regarding the scheduling of marijuana as an illegal drug with no justifiable medical uses. Even today, our government continues to operate the remnants of its once popular ‘Compassionate Use Protocol’ program, which allows the DEA to distribute marijuana cigarettes under a prescription to those deemed medically worthy to receive it. New applications have been denied for two decades. Only four patients are still alive who still receive medical marijuana thusly.
Ask yourself this: how can the government go into court and say there is no medical use for marijuana when its own DEA was and has been distributing it to dozens of patients for two decades? It is a case we must undertake again.
In changing its policy, the AMA said its goal was to clear the way to conduct clinical research, develop cannabis-based medicines and devise alternative ways to deliver the drug. But it is a lot more than that. Now it is time to pressure your congressman to pressure the Obama Administration to pressure the DEA to insure that the rescheduling occurs, and marijuana is removed from that list of drugs which can still lock your ass up in prison for years. Make no mistake about it. This change is not just about medically based research. This change is about insuring your freedom. It’s about preventing future lawmakers from using the ‘drug war’ as a tool to inhibit your liberty.
Freedom is a nice thing to have, and repressive pot laws are a stupid reason to take it away.
Norm Kent is a Fort Lauderdale based criminal defense lawyer who is a member of the board of directors of NORML. He publishes the www.browardlawblog.com and can be reached at norm@normkent.com
Obama's Flawed Case Against Single Payer
By ALAN NASSER, COUNTERPUNCH
The liberal imagination has broadened the scope of what it wants to dismiss as unrealistic, utopian and unpragmatic, i.e. as for all practical purposes impossible. These claims have typically been accompanied by the assurance that “This is not something that Americans would go for – it’s not the American way.” There are countless variations on this theme. Obama’s case against a single payer health care system is a conspicuous case in point. What distinguishes Obama’s position on this issue is not merely the weakness of his “arguments”, but the straight-ahead factual falsehood of the some of the counterclaims he has put forward in order to turn the desirable into the impossible.
The Alleged Impossibility of Universal Health Care
In May and August, 2007 Obama stated his position on single payer:
"If you're starting from scratch, then a single-payer system'-a government-managed system like Canada's, which disconnects health insurance from employment-'would probably make sense. But we've got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that's not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they've known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside." (May, 2007)
" [W]hen we had a healthcare forum before I set up my healthcare plan here in Iowa there was a lot of resistance to a single-payer system. So what I believe is we should set up a series of choices....Over time it may be that we end up transitioning to such a system. For now, I just want to make sure every American is covered...I don't want to wait for that perfect system...” (August, 2007, at an Iowa roundtable)
Obama offers 5 reasons for not supporting single payer.
First: “..we’ve got all these legacy systems in place” simply means that our system is not single payer, and we’ve had it for a long time. Obama has turned himself into a bent sort of Burkean conservative: we have been marinating in a tradition which so permeates our way of being in the world that to do away with it would upset social life as we know it. This tradition includes…. insurance-industry-based health care! More mundanely: we haven’t got it, so we can’t have it.
Second: it would be hard to “manage the transition” from a deeply flawed system to a much better one. Harder than it was to effect the transition to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, desegregation, etc.? In each of these cases, what many people had “known for most of their lives” [was] “thrown by the wayside”. It belongs to the nature of any move from one way of doing things to a very different one that the transition will take some doing. That fact alone settles nothing. What matters is how urgent is the need for change. The US’s irrationally costly system which leaves millions uninsured, a fate suffered by the citizens of no other developed capitalist country, is surely intolerable. We have been given no reason to think that the cost of a transition to universal coverage is so great as to outweigh the massive benefits of this tried and tested arrangement. Obama’s excuses amount to a cleverly disguised a-priori argument against any consequential transformation of the status quo.
Third: the “difficulty” [i.e. costs] of “adjusting the culture to a different system”, given that there is “a lot of resistance to a single-payer system” , outweigh the benefits of single-payer. But what matters is not what a few selected Iowans are alleged to have felt about universal coverage. The demonstrated preferences of the democratic majority can’t be irrelevant.
On this issue Obama clearly means to imply that “Americans” don’t support single-payer. This is factually false. It’s improbable that Obama is unaware of the results of many surveys on this issue, the most recent, to my knowledge, having been conducted between December 14-20, 2007. The results of this Associated Press-Yahoo poll are worth reproducing as they were reported:
Subjects were asked which of the following 2 views comes closest to their own view:
!. The United States should continue the current health insurance system in which most people get their health insurance from private insurers, but some people have no insurance.
2. The United States should adopt a universal health insurance program in which everyone is covered under a program like Medicare that is run by the government and financed by taxpayers.
A majority of 65% supported 2, 34% supported 1 and 2% did not respond.
Those polled were also asked “Do you consider yourself a supporter of a single-payer health care system, that is a national health plan financed by taxpayers in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan, or not?”
55% answered Yes, 44% No and 2% did not respond. Single-payer still has a majority here, but a smaller one, probably due to the pollsters’ use of (what is to some) the red-flag term ‘single payer’. [View the full poll results at http://news.yahoo.com/]
Taxpayer funded, government-run health care insurance for all is a public, not a private, good, and it is the only political project that most Americans are on record as willing to pay higher taxes to achieve. There is in fact not “a lot of resistance” to a rational health care system. Obama knows this. But the interests of those who have heavily invested (literally) in him carry more weight than do the most pressing interests of the rest.
The Ideology of Individual Choice and the Logic of Solidarity
Fourth: Obama claims that a health care plan based on “a series of choices” is superior to one that leaves no choice but instead saddles everyone with the burden of full and affordable coverage. Pity those poor Europeans, deprived of their right to liberty by forced access to first-rate health care. In the City on the Hill, few things are more important than the right to choose: which health care system gives us the most choice? This way of thinking is saturated with the ideology of individualism and its private goods, and functions to obliterate solidarity, as opposed to self-interest, as a political and moral value. This is especially pernicious since, as we shall see, it is only concerted action motivated by solidarity that can bring about a health care system from which no one is excluded because they can’t afford it.
When Obama contradistinguishes choice from universal coverage he unwittingly underscores the irrelevance of individual, self-interested choice to political goals motivated by a commitment to solidarity. Preoccupation with the choice between one doctor and another, one plan or another, conceals a crucial assumption, namely that the fundamental issue underlying the health care debate is one about choice and liberty. An individualist ontology implies that our collective fate is a function of whether or not each individual member of society is savvy enough to make the free choices most likely to promote his or her self-interest. But are people who worry about access to health care really concerned with choice? What weighs upon them is that they can’t afford health care. No individual can make on her own the choice to turn the US into a country that makes health care affordable, available to all. Such a choice is not a choice by an individual about her own well being. It is not even a choice about the aggregate sum of each and every individual’s well being. It is a choice we make together about the kind of society we want to live in. To worry about health care because one cannot afford it is, on reflection, to lament the non-existence of a public good, universally accessible health care, one that can’t be reduced to the sum of all individual goods. The survey discussed above indicates that most Americans implicitly know this. The majority endorse a universally applicable measure, taxation, as a means to institute a universally available, i.e. public, good, access to health care. A universal tax, as for education, roadways, health care, is not an individual cost; it is a social cost. Correspondingly, universally accessible health care is not an individual good, it is a public good. The majority would prefer to live in the kind of society that features that public good. It’s a different kind of society from the one we’re currently stuck with.
That kind of society, and the public goods it prioritizes, can be achieved only if it is pursued as a goal by people acting in concert. That’s where solidarity is on display: in collective action motivated by the desire to achieve a public good.
The kinds of goals/goods in question typically involve bringing about a certain kind of society. For example: the kind of society that provides all with affordable health care, the kind of society that makes access to the means of life -e.g. a living wage- available to all, the kind of society that makes the meeting of human needs the principal motivator of economic production, the kind of society that assigns sufficient resources to the reduction of pollution and the preservation of nature,… Prattling on about individual choice creates a conceptual space within which considerations of solidarity and public goods cannot arise. Talking about solidarity in the language of individualism is like trying to score a field goal in baseball.
Obama references affordability in spite of himself when he claims (falsely) that he wants to “make sure that every American is covered”. The fundamental virtue of single payer is that it detaches insurance from employment and thereby from one’s level of income, so that everyone can afford health care. The question of choice doesn’t even arise if you can’t afford to keep yourself healthy. And come to think of it, were health care universally available, the question of affordability would not arise. Talk of being able to “afford” access to health care would be as misplaced as talk of being able to afford access to elementary education.
Solidarity As a Familiar Phenomenon
The issue is worth dwelling on. In everyday life we are all familiar with the pursuit of irreducibly social goods. Think of a family with kids. A rare and highly desirable work opportunity, but far from home, arises for spouse #1. Spouse #2 has come upon a comparable golden opportunity, also far from home. The family wants to stay together. A decision based on the good of either individual spouse would break up the family. What to do? It’s not uncommon in such a situation for the adults to look to determine what would be good for the family. And what’s good for the family is not the sum of spouse #1’s good plus spouse #2’s good, plus the goods of each individual child. We cannot commensurate and then sum up these different and sometimes incompatible goods. The good of the family is irreducibly social, just like universally accessible health care. Families and households act in solidarity all the time.
Obama’s repeated insistence on the market as the primary agent in distributing resources precludes consideration of questions of solidarity from the outset. He is the instrument of domestic advisors benighted by preposterous economic theories hailing the efficiency and liberty-promoting virtues of the market. For these wags the pursuit of individual self-interest, plus competition, makes the world go round and secures for us all the freedom we (are allowed to) want. As we have seen above, the restriction of human-welfare-enhancing political choices to the realm of competition and self-interest deprives us of the freedom collectively to choose to live in the kind of society that provides copious public goods. That’s a big freedom lost.
The Political Psychology of Solidarity
A sense of solidarity is far more prevalent in much of Europe than it is in the Land of the Free. In a New York Times article titled “For the French, Solidarity Still Counts” (by Youseff M. Ibrahim, Dec. 20, 1995), the author describes public reaction in France to a three-week strike by public workers supported by “hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who filled the streets of every major city in France.” Workers were protesting then Prime Minister Juppe’s proposal to slash medical, social welfare and benefit payments. According to the Times:
“Polls showed an astonishing amount of sympathy on the part of those who did not participate in the strike and who suffered the paralysis of mass transit and essential services. Many people explained that they supported the strike because the Government’s austerity programs are stripping layer after layer of subsidies that permitted French families of even the most modest means to sample the cultural and culinary treasures that only the rich can afford.”
One recipient of the social wage was a woman receiving the standard subsidy extended to pregnant women. The subsidy will continue, for each child, until the child reaches 18. Said the woman: “This is the foundation of our Republican system… Equality and fraternity are not mere slogans here. For me the engagement by the state is an expression of solidarity that gives us values… I think most French people want France’s values to be decided by this spirit, not by cold, remote, economic summits that speak of deficits and competition. That was the message of the strikes.”
This past March one million demonstrated across France in protest of proposed cutbacks in the wake of the financial crisis. I am currently living in France for a stretch of time and have witnessed frequent strikes and other expressions of resistance to neoliberal austerity measures. A sad and stark contrast to the sitting-duck posture of so many US workers.
The Times article provides an implicit explanation of why it is that in France and other European countries there is no general resentment of social benefits available, for example, to single mothers, while in the US more than a few working people oppose this kind of support. The Times reports that the subsidy offered to the woman quoted above “is extended to every mother in France regardless of economic or marital status.” In France benefits to single mothers are not regarded as “special treatment” denied to the responsible and hard-working. There is neither social nor psychological soil in which to plant the seeds of resentment, since the single mother is the recipient of a public good available to all mothers.
Fifth and finally: “I just want to make sure every American is covered...I don't want to wait for that perfect system...” If the president truly wanted to guarantee universal coverage he would not have taken single-payer off the table before discussions began. Whatever is finally settled upon, government will neither negotiate drug prices nor regulate premiums, so we know now that millions will remain uninsured. Obama has known that all along.
Obama rigs the game by characterizing single-payer as “that perfect system”. One of the major weapons in the party-liners’ arsenal is to portray those who believe in greater possibilities as naïve utopians blind to the truism that a “perfect world” is impossible in what William F. Buckley liked to call “this veil of tears”. The logic is fine: since there are no finite limits to the greater possibilities of goodness, and perfection is conceived, as Anselm reminds us, as that greater than which none can be conceived, it follows that perfection is impossile down here. But whoever introduced mumbo-jumbo about perfection in the first place? Isn’t the elimination of a great deal of unnecessary suffering enough? Last I recall, single-payer advocates claim merely (sic) that it is way better than what we are offered. That’s pretty good.
Obama’s case against single-payer frames health-care priorities in the language of atomic individualism. Hence, the range of possible outcomes is determined for the worse before discussion begins. I am suggesting that a good part of our resistance and organizing should consist in reminders that an alternative way of thinking and acting is already on display in some of our common practices, and in already existing benefits won for other populations by aiming at public goods to be achieved by concerted action in solidarity.
Hope that helps.
Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of Political Economy and Philosophy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He can be reached at nassera@evergreen.edu
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
The Public Opt-Out
By Peter Stanislaw, Get Off This!
Many progressives, liberals, and moderate conservatives (a dying breed) are celebrating the inclusion of a viable public option in the proposed Health Care Reform Bill, an accomplishment which should make Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid proud. Fighting the influence of Olympia Snow on the Senate Finance Committee - who has stated that a public option would give the public sector too much of an advantage in the health care market - Reid was able to place the option into the bill with a compromise engineered by Charles Schumer, Senator from New York, for states to be able to opt out.
While this sounds fair on the surface, it should be remembered that it is not a "people's" opt-out plan, but a state plan. The roughly 154 million people who live in states where conservatives control the governor's mansion and/or the state legislature will probably never have a chance to enroll in a government-sponsored plan, and will have to choose from the plans offered by the entrenched insurance industry. The influence of the states that do opt for the government plan may not be enough to effect any true competition in the area of premiums, deductibles, co-pays and costs for services.
This compromise is being played out in the corporate media as being the best of both worlds. No mention is made of the facts that the public option was a severe compromise from the majority desire for a single-payer plan in the first place, or that the insurance industry has undue influence among the people's representatives. The opt-out plan is too far from perfect and we are not finished in our goal of effecting a true transformation of health care in these Relatively United States.
We must keep the pressure on - we can make a difference.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
White House v. Fox News: a War Obama Can Win
By Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch
The jousting between the White House and Fox News is drawing grave warnings from pundits to Obama’s team that this is a losing issue for their man. They quote the old tag, “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.”
The jousting between the White House and Fox News is drawing grave warnings from pundits to Obama’s team that this is a losing issue for their man. They quote the old tag, “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.”
Certainly the jabbing has been refreshingly vigorous. Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, explains Obama’s refusal to appear on Fox News by saying, "Fox News often operates either as the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party. We're going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent."
"I want to show you right where the enemy is located," Beck screams to his adoring three-million audience as he circles Rupert Murdoch's Fox News headquarters in green ink on a map of New York. "This is the enemy, America!"
Surely, it was a no-brainer for the White House. Fox’s troupe of right wingers will trash Obama, whatever Dunn says. Why not please your own political base by showing a little backbone and giving Murdoch a slap on the snout?
Besides, history suggests that if the White House keeps up the small arms fire and doesn’t lose its cool, in the end it will carry the day, and edge Fox as a network operation into the Glen Beck insane asylum, viewed with derision by even more millions of Americans.
In the case of the Obama administration there's the added bonus that after surrendering abjectly to every powerful interest group in America, they're at last showing an appetite for a scuffle.
Many presidents have seen political benefit in setting up the press as irresponsible mudslingers, overpaid, lazy and politically biased, which is most people reckon it is anyway. The champion here was Richard Nixon who unleashed Pat Buchanan and the late William Safire, and those famous lines for vice president Spiro Agnew, including the rather playful “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
Actually it’s a measure of how sloppy the Nixon people were that across the entire Watergate Scandal they failed to excavate Carl Bernstein’s family ties to the Communist Party, nor the fact that every few weeks Bernstein would take time off from his investigative labors with Bob Woodward and drive up to Vermont to visit his cousin Shoshana who at that time was living under an alias in Brattleboro, one jump ahead of the FBI which had her on its Ten Most Wanted list as a radical bomber. People often overestimate the surveillance capacities of the state. One leak of that info to one of Nixon’s pet columnists and the Watergate scandal would have been over.
But in some of the famous exchanges from Nixon-time, it was the president who came out ahead in the eyes of public opinion. I can remember watching the clash between Nixon and Dan Rather in a press conference in 1974 as the Watergate scandal neared its climax. When Rather stood up, Nixon’s people in the room booed and Rather’s colleagues cheered. Nixon, on the stage, looked down at Rather and asked with heavy sarcasm, 'Are you running for something?' Dan snapped back, 'No, sir, are you?' Many people took Rather’s response as smartass, and out of place. But then, Rather was never the brightest bulb on the block.
Nixon’s chief weapon of coercion before the 1972 election was the Joint Operating Agreement, which suspended normal anti-trust rules so that competing newspapers in one town could, in the name of newspaper preservation, collude in fixing advertising rates. In the ’72 race Nixon collected a record number of newspaper endorsements.
Another weapon in the wars between White House and press was a tax audit or an indictment. In the 1930s,Moe Annenberg, with close mob ties and co-owner of the Race Wire, ATT’s fourth biggest customer, owned The Philadelphia Inquirer and used it to support Republican politicians in Pennsylvania and attack Roosevelt. FDR promptly turned for help to David Stern, publisher of the Philadelphia Record and the New York Post. Stern promoted an IRS investigation and Moe pulled three years in jail. (Moe was the father of a former US ambassador to the Court of St James, Walter Annenberg – who spent many diligent years winching his family’s reputation out of the mud.)
Some presidents, like Kennedy and Reagan, had no need to foment a public feud with the press, since the press in all essentials was in their pockets anyway. Carter furnishes the classic case of someone who simply lost the initiative and fatally allowed the press to make fun of him as a wimp, in his canoe beating off a giant rabbit with a paddle, or passing out during a jog, or whining about “malaise”.
The most intricate story is that of the jousting between the Clintons and the press, from the moment, almost fatal to his initial presidential campaign, that Murdoch’s National Star exposed Clinton’s long affair in Little Rock with Gennifer Flowers in January, 1993.
Hillary Clinton threw down the gauntlet on January 27, 1998, at the onset of the Lewinsky affair, when she told Matt Lauer of NBC that “the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."
At the time plenty of people made fun of HRC for this, but it was undoubtedly smart politics, just as the attack on Fox News is now. It fired up Clinton’s base, and allowed an extensive cottage industry to thrive, unearthing the rightwing conspirators and their financial backers, such as Richard Mellon Scaife.
Seventy-five years ago, it mattered greatly to FDR what the Philadelphia Inquirer was saying about him. Obama’s White House probably cares about the New York Times and the Washington Post but not much else. The Wall Street Journal has loathed Obama from the getgo. The Fox Network is really the only enemy with mass appeal and as I suggested at the start it’s not political rocket science to go after it. Tone matters here. The barbs should not be whiny, but caustic and good humored, to the effect that this is not a news medium but the propaganda wing of the Republican Party, as Dunn says. It’s essential not to blink. Glenn Beck is connected to sanity by a pretty thin mooring rope. A few months of this and he’ll probably pop, either going back on the bottle or slithering into a psychotic break, though some would say this is a nightly event anyway.
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