Greenwald On Republicans Cheering Perry’s Record Number of
Executions:
This episode is creepy and disgusting… it's hardly
surprising for a country which long considered public hangings a form of
entertainment and in which support for the death penalty is mandated orthodoxy
for national politicians in both parties. Still, even for those who
believe in the death penalty, it should be a very somber and sober affair for
the state, with regimented premeditation, to end the life of a human being no
matter the crimes committed. Wildly cheering the execution of human
beings as though one's favorite football team just scored a touchdown is
primitive, twisted and base.
All of that would be true even if the death penalty were
perfectly applied and only clearly guilty people were killed. But in
the U.S., the exact opposite is true; see here to read about (and act to stop) a horrific though
typical example of a very likely innocent person about to be executed by
the State of Georgia. That Perry in particular likely enabled the execution of an innocent man -- as well
as numerous other highly disturbing killings, of the young and
mentally infirm -- makes the cheering all the more repellent. That
the death penalty in America has long been plagued by a serious racial bias makes it worse
still. That this death-cheering comes from a party that relentlessly
touts itself as "pro-life" and derides the other as The Party of Death -- and loves to
condemn Islam (in contrast to its war-loving self) as a death-glorifying cult -- only adds a layer of dark
irony.
This happened at a GOP debate, involving the current
GOP front-runner, and progressives are thus rushing forth to condemn
it (condemnations with which I largely agree). The Philadelphia
Daily News' Will Bunch called it "utterly
sickening" and "a pathetic new low in American politics."
Bunch added: "What you heard echoing in the Reagan Library last
night was not reason. It was bloodlust, pure and simple, and it was repulsive."
That's because "the cheering of executions is the hallmark of a sick
society -- one that's incapable of tackling its real demons and looking for
vengeance on whomever happens to be available."
-- Glenn Greenwald
9/11 Legacy and the New America
I don’t want to go into a long diatribe today on all the tragic
ways this country has been reconfigured since 9/11. Suffice to say, we’ve
nearly tripled defense spending since the attack, our Constitution has been
eviscerated, torture is not only common practice but now what passes as a
reasonable “debate”, we are bombing 5 Muslim countries as I write this and have
been at war with Afghanistan longer than any in history (in avenging the murder
of 3000 Americans we have killed in the neighborhood of a million…most
civilians), George Orwell’s “endless war” as a means of control through fear
has become our new reality, and fear itself is the new opiate of the masses.
Obviously….I could go on….but 9/11 DID change everything…tragically so. Read
today’s article I include by Chris Hedges for a fuller, and powerful,
encapsulation of this transformation.
Obama’s Speech/Plan: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
Let me be the first to say that both the speech, and the
plan itself, were better than I expected (though my expectations were low). I
do want to spend some time today on the specifics of the plan, just to remind
people that human lives ARE effected by public policy, and as modest as this
proposal is, it would do a lot of good…and the GOP will block it…this should
still matter to people.
As for the speech itself, he did, once again, show us a
glimpse of what his Presidency could have been, or could still be, when he got
into that “groove” that only he can…the cadence, the words, the charisma, and
all those other qualities that were so attractive about the guy in the first
place. There were even a few segments of the speech when I got that Obama
tingle again (even though I know it’s mostly bullshit)….others where I got that
Obama nausea feeling.
Politically speaking, it was a victory for him and if
nothing else, could be helpful to his re-election campaign. But, as you also
might have expected, it was a mixed bag for us progressives, as he both
provided glimpses of a more combative, populist spirit, along with his typical
triangulation, consisting of centrist tax cut propaganda, a hesitance to really take the GOP on head
first, and more hints that he was going to “tackle entitlement reform” (i.e.
cut social security and medicare benefits).
As such, I want to provide the kind of deserved, nuanced
analysis of the speech and the jobs plan itself, so by the least we can focus
our attention on supporting what was good in the speech and opposing what was
clearly bad. Generally speaking the President did go “bigger and bolder” than
many expected, while at the same time, he didn’t go nearly far enough…while
muddling his message and plan with GOP proposals that undercut the progressive
narrative and DON’T WORK!
The Good: Work Sharing, Infrastructure, State Aid
Clearly, the “tingling” part of the speech was when Obama made
the affirmative case for government action…something he does better than
anyone, yet rarely utilizes. This of course begs the question why doesn’t he do
it more often???
This concept that government does the things that we as
individuals can’t do on our own, is a direct rebuttal to the libertarian delusions
that were so prevalent in the Republican debate 24 hours earlier. The President
finally made the case for the public good, and our mutual responsibility to one
another…and how those principles are what made our country great. He talked
about the value of public high schools, of our research universities, of our
community colleges, of the GI Bill, and of Social Security and Medicare.
And he asked where would we all be without these public
goods, and how many people would have suffered without them. He was right to
propose repairing our infrastructure, funding our schools, providing jobs for
returning soldiers, refinancing federally backed mortgages at lower rates, and
extending unemployment insurance.
The $30 billion program aimed at modernizing American public
schools and community college will affect 35,000 public schools and thousands
of community colleges, and the design is to improve classrooms, make emergency
repairs, make schools more energy efficient, remove asbestos, and upgrade
technology with new science and computer labs.
And he was right to defend regulations against dangerous
corporate products, neatly saying that American workers shouldn’t have to
choose between a job and their safety.
The most bold and effective component of the bill (the question
becomes are these just “props” to keep the left happy or are they things he
will fight for?) is the work sharing concept, as Mike Lux details:
Work Sharing and unemployment insurance reform to prevent
layoffs. Preventing layoffs in the first place is a win-win for workers and
businesses. The President‘s plan calls for work sharing that would let
workers receive pro-rated UI benefits as compensation for a reduction in hours
at businesses that would otherwise lay workers off. Work sharing programs currently operate in about 20 states.
According to an OECD paper, during the recession,
work-sharing programs in Germany, Italy, and Japan reduced the drop in
employment from 2008 to 2009 by between 0.5 and 1 percentage points. The fact he proposed it is quite a pleasant surprise. The idea is that
companies can reduce hours and keep more workers, rather than laying someone
off. If it reduces involuntary layoffs by 20%, that’s 400,000
layoffs avoided a month. Even at 10%, it’s still 2.4 million jobs per year.
And it adds flexibility and quality of life to people who would otherwise be
unemployed and depressed.
The Bad: Too Much Tax Cuts, Too Bipartisan, Too Small
I just don’t get more tax cuts for businesses, particularly those
that would give businesses tax credits for firms that increase their hiring
next year, or firms that give wage increases. That acts as a wage increase in
some places, as a job subsidy in others. As we all know, businesses aren’t
hiring because people don’t have money to buy their products, not because they
just need more money to hire more workers…that aren’t needed.
But here’s where the speech and plan really went off the
rails. Once again, the President used right-wing talking points on
how Medicare and Medicaid have to be cut. Claiming that we need to make cuts in
Medicare and Medicaid benefits to pay for it is a terrible Sophie's Choice: who
do you want to sacrifice, workers or seniors? As Mike Lux notes again, “It's
terrible politics and terrible policy, and should be completely rejected. The
problem with Medicare and Medicaid costs has to do with the health care
industry -- many providers, drug companies, insurers -- driving up both public
and private health care costs. We don't need to cut benefits, we don't need to
squeeze already hurting states on Medicaid costs, and we don't need to raise
the retirement age.”
Here wee some other doozies:
- This Georgia "jobs" plan the President has adopted as his own is right-wing economics at its worst: make unemployed folks work for free, and rob unemployment benefits to pay for it.
- Way too much of this package in general is more tax cuts for business, which economists generally agree has far less of a direct impact in creating jobs than direct spending to create jobs.
- One of the biggest disappointments about this package is a missed opportunity: the President shouldn't just be focused on jobs, but on good jobs with good pay and good benefits. He should have announced that he was creating a White House office on good jobs, and executive orders to make sure that in all federal government contracting and procurement, the priority would be to work with companies that paid decent wages and had decent benefits. He could still do this, but the fact that in spite of some great rhetoric at the beginning of the speech about the importance of good jobs, none of the policy proposals in the speech seem directly related to insuring that new jobs that are created as a result of these measures will have decent pay or benefits.
- Another big missed opportunity: we should be helping pay for all these jobs programs with more taxes on the financial speculation that destroyed the economy in the first place.
As Mike Lux points out, “He needed to talk about how the
irresponsibility of the last ten years -- no oversight of Wall Street
speculators, not paying for wars and big tax cuts to the wealthy -- created an
entire decade without job or income growth, and created the housing bubble --
the combination of which wrecked the economy and put us in the deepest hole we
have been in since the Great Depression. He needed to explain that times are
not business as usual, that times like these create the need for bold and
urgent action. By not doing that, I fear voters will not get why what he is
proposing is different and needed, and will make it far easier for Republicans
to just attack this as the same old stimulus policies that didn't work before."
All in all, in many ways, while better than expected, it was
a profound missed opportunity. For one, he undercuts his own message on
government action and spending when he’s simultaneously preparing to give a
deficit reduction plan, with the Super Committee waiting in the wings to cut
$1.5 trillion in spending…which wipes out any small amount of ‘stimulus’ in his
plan.
As David Dayen noted, "He also failed to propose a federal jobs program. He failed
to call on the banks to halt foreclosures for a year. All told, his proposals
won’t make a huge dent in the overall unemployment rate.
Even the payroll tax cut for individuals is actually pretty
regressive. The top 5 percent of taxpayers (those earning, on average, about
$550,000) will rake in almost $1,300 while those in the lower 60 percent (those
making about $28,750) will take home only about $150, according to a new report
by Citizens for Tax Justice
Remember, corporations are already sitting on nearly $2
trillion in cash…so an employer payroll tax cut will increase these cash
holdings without any guarantee of additional hiring. As Citizens for Tax
Justice Points out, “Corporations were sitting on $1.9 trillion in liquid
assets during the first quarter of 2011 (the most current data), the largest
such sum ever recorded. Moreover, they made a record $3.8 trillion in profits
in the second quarter of 2011. Most companies are not using their cash to hire
new employees now. A tax cut will just fatten their bottom line.”
I agree with David Dayen when he wrote, “I came away from
the speech wondering why Obama hasn’t been making the affirmative case for
government action all along. If he had been, he—and the country—would be a lot
better off today. The president must built national support for his plan.
That’s going to require him to campaign—not for himself but for an agenda, and
for a vision. He must become the explainer-in-chief, using the bully pulpit to
create a new narrative that counters the Republican “get-government-out-of-the-way”
fantasy. And he can’t stop until he succeeds, any more than Ronald Reagan could
stop when he was wrangling with Tip O’Neill back in the 1980s. President
Obama’s speech to the Congress did not go big enough. But it did outline a
vision that was a good deal bolder than the one he advanced over the wasted
summer of 2011—when Republican talking points about the debt ceiling dominated
the discourse, and compromise with the unconscionable was the order of the day.
Now, Obama has a chance to shift the debate, to appeal to
the great mass of Americans who are more worried about jobs than debt ceilings.
He can win this debate, and in so doing he can put pressure on Congressional
Republicans to act. Then, if they fail to do so, the president and his party will
be positioned to fight the 2012 election on their terms."
Jobs Created by Plan
Warts and all…this plan DESERVES to be passed…because it
will do SOMETHING (but the GOP will oppose everything good in it). Here’s the
numbers:
- Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics and a top John McCain adviser in 2008, estimates that the president’s plan would add 1.9 MILLION jobs, increase economic growth by 2 percentage points in 2012 and lower unemployment by one full percentage point. Zandi added:
- MacroEconomic Advisors, a private firm, said the plan could add 1.3 MILLION non-farm jobs in 2012 and another 800,000 jobs in 2013.
- The Economic Policy Institute estimates the plan would increase employment by 4.3 MILLION jobs over the next two years. Accounting for programs that are due to expire and are simply being extended, this means a net increase of 2.6 MILLION jobs.
Wars and Jobs
Here’s another job killer and a way to reduce the deficit….end
the wars and cut defense spending. According to WarCosts.com, every $1 billion
spent on wars equals 3200 jobs. According to the Political
Economy Research Institute’s (PERI) 2009 study, when you compare it to
other ways of spending the money, every $1 billion spent for military purposes
costs us, at minimum, 3,222 jobs. At the upper end, war spending costs us
17,500 or more jobs per billion dollars. Military spending creates fewer jobs,
both directly and indirectly, than every other kind of spending studied by
PERI. So, given that we spend well
in excess of $700 billion every year on war in this country, it’s fair to
say that our obsession with war spending is sucking the life right out of our
economy.
VIDEO SECTION
As Frank Rich notes, and this is important in understanding
why the GOP will fight to death even to stop something like high speed rail…they don't accept the notion that government is capable
of doing anything to improve people's lives, they don't believe in government,
period, and ANY government success undermines this ideology…and of course they
don't want the economy to get any better because that would mean President
Obama's chances of getting reelected get better.
This was an excellent editorial on the Dylan Ratigan show
by Toure regarding 9/11, how we celebrate it (in a sick way), and what we have become
since:
ARTICLE SECTION
A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe, By Chris Hedges
BRILLIANCE…from Chris Hedges…A FEW CLIPS:
The dead in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field
in Pennsylvania were used to sanctify the state’s lust for war. To question the
rush to war became to dishonor our martyrs. Those of us who knew that the
attacks were rooted in the long night of humiliation and suffering inflicted by
Israel on the Palestinians, the imposition of our military bases in the Middle
East and in the brutal Arab dictatorships that we funded and supported became
apostates. We became defenders of the indefensible. We were apologists, as Christopher Hitchens shouted
at me on a stage in Berkeley, “for suicide bombers.”
Because few cared to examine our activities in the Muslim
world, the attacks became certified as incomprehensible by the state and its
lap dogs, the press. Those who carried out the attacks were branded as rising
out of a culture and religion that was at best primitive and probably evil. The
Quran—although it forbids suicide as well as the murder of women and
children—was painted as a manual for fanaticism and terror. The attackers
embodied the titanic clash of civilizations, the cosmic battle under way
between good and evil, the forces of light and darkness. Images of the planes
crashing into the towers and heroic rescuers emerging from the rubble were
played and replayed. We were deluged with painful stories of the survivors and
victims. The deaths and falling towers became iconographic. The ceremonies of
remembrance were skillfully hijacked by the purveyors of war and hatred. They
became vehicles to justify doing to others what had been done to us. And as
innocents died here, soon other innocents began to die in the Muslim world. A
life for a life. Murder for murder. Death for death. Terror for terror.
SNIP
We have still not woken up to whom we have become, to the
fatal erosion of domestic and international law and the senseless waste of lives,
resources and trillions of dollars to wage wars that ultimately we can never
win. We do not see that our own faces have become as contorted as the faces of
the demented hijackers who seized the three commercial jetliners a decade ago.
We do not grasp that Osama bin Laden’s twisted vision of a world of
indiscriminate violence and terror has triumphed. The attacks turned us into
monsters, grotesque ghouls, sadists and killers who drop bombs on village
children and waterboard those we kidnap, strip of their rights and hold for
years without due process. We acted before we were able to think. And it is the
satanic lust of violence that has us locked in its grip.
SNIP
We could have gone another route. We could have built on the
profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the
attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including
in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11,
was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence
agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death
but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that
we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing.
It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts
of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We
became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We
descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is
that the assholes, on each side, won.
Orwell, 9/11, Emmanuel Goldstein and WikiLeaks, by Glenn Greenwald
Before I get to Greenwald, it should be noted that the Patriot
Act provisions have been reauthorized three times “despite an equal number of
Justice Department reports revealing massive and systemic abuses.” And get
these new numbers, Patriot Act search warrants have been used the following
ways (remember, it was sold to us as SOLELY for fighting terrorism):
For drugs: 1618
For Fraud: 122
For Terrorism: 15
As Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting explains, a lot of this disconnect between the public’s understanding of such abuses falls in the laps of the media, who downplay the impact of measures like the Protect America Act of 2007, which allowed near open-ended surveillance of emails and phone calls, by interpreting them narrowly, as involving only “communications between potential terrorists” (CBS Evening News, 8/4/07), or “government’s power to eavesdrop on foreign terror suspects” (ABC World News, 8/5/07), explained Aziz Huq of the Brennan Center for Justice. And that’s a key problem. “As soon as you say somebody’s a terrorism suspect, well, that’s the end of it, we don’t need to worry about them,” Huq told CounterSpin (8/10/07):
The problem the media rarely pick up on is the government
thinks people are suspects all the time, and it’s often wrong. [That’s] the
whole point of having processes, the whole point of having institutions, the
whole point of having a Bill of Rights. Framing this issue as “Is this a bad guy or is this not a
bad guy?” and if it’s a bad guy, we can spy on them, we can do what have you to
them, that misses out on what’s really at stake.
That’s the thing: Media submerge the reality of the assault
on civil rights every time they report the state’s overreaches as being about
“terror-fighting tools,” as the AP (5/26/11) described Patriot Act provisions.
Under a system of civil liberties, people are regarded as criminals after being
convicted of crimes—not deemed to be so beforehand to facilitate stripping them
of rights.
A FEW CLIPS FROM GREENWALD:
A strikingly good piece of investigative journalism from
Associated Press finds that accusations about the damage done by WikiLeaks'
latest release are -- yet again -- wildly overstated and without any factual
basis. These most recent warnings have centered on WikiLeaks' exposure of
diplomatic sources whom the released cables indicated should be "strictly
protected." While unable to examine all of the names in the
cables, AP focused on the ones "the State Department seemed to categorize
as most risky." It found that many of them are "comfortable
with their names in the open and no one fearing death."
SNIP
For three reasons, AP's findings are anything but
surprising. First, that the U.S. Government declares something Very
Secret hardly means it is; this is a secrecy-obsessed government that
reflexively declares even the most banal matters to be "sensitive"
and off-limits to the public, as proven by the release of hundreds of thousands
of "secret" documents that reveal nothing. Second, there
is an established history of extremely exaggerated government and media claims
about the harm done by WikiLeaks releases; that's why, when examining
the events last week that prompted the release of the unredacted cables, I
wrote: "Serious caution is warranted in making claims about the
damage caused by publication of these cables."
Third, and most important for present purposes, this is what
the U.S. government and its media-servants do; it's their modus operandi.
Whomever the government wants to demonize at any given moment is
subjected to this same process. On a moment's notice, the full propaganda
system is activated against the New Enemy, indiscriminate accusations are
unleashed, personal foibles are exposed, collective hatred among all Decent
People is mandated, and it then instantly becomes heretical to question the
caricature of evil that has been manufactured.
That's how dictators and other assorted miscreants with whom
the U.S. was tightly allied for years or even decades are overnight
converted into The Root of All Evil, The Supreme Villain who Must be
Vanquished (Saddam, Osama bin Laden, Gadaffi, Mubarak). Americans who were
perfectly content to have their government in bed with these individuals
suddenly stand up and demand, on cue, that no expense be spared to eradicate
them. Often, the demonization campaign contains some truth -- the
nation's long-time-friends-converted-overnight-into-Enemies really have
committed atrocious acts or, as a new innovation of Nixonian tactics aimed at
Daniel Ellsberg, even harboredcreepy porn (!) -- but the ritual of collective hatred renders any
facts a mere accident. Once everyone's contempt is successfully directed
toward the Chosen Enemy, it matters little what they actually did or did not
do: such a profound menace are they to all that is Good that exaggerations
or even lies about their bad acts are ennobled, in service of a Good Cause;
conversely, to question the demonization or object to what is done to them is,
by definition, to side with Evil.
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