| Hold Him to His Progressive Pledges: Make Obama Do It. Friday, 16 November 2012 By Marjorie Cohn and Jeanne Mirer, Counterpunch | Op-Ed ENTER TRUTHOUT.ORG President Obama declared in his victory address on election night, “Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated . . . We want our children to live in an America that isn’t burdened by debt, that isn’t weakened by inequality, that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” Those were powerful words. But they must be followed with action. When he thanked his campaign workers, the former community organizer spoke emotionally from the heart. He ran an incredible grassroots campaign, which must now be turned into a movement to work with Occupy and other progressive groups to effect real change. Glenn Greenwald warned in The Guardian that progressives are bound to be disappointed again in Obama because we will be under pressure to conform when our demand that he not agree to cut Social Security or Medicare as part of a “grand bargain” does not succeed. But recall that in 1940, the great labor leader A. Philip Randolph prevailed upon FDR to improve the conditions of blacks and workers. The President responded, “I agree with everything you have said. Now make me do it.” It is up to us to make Obama do it. How we get the President to do the right things are the challenges we face. What we do know is that those who mobilized to defeat Romney and Ryan should not demobilize. Those progressive constituencies that supported the President must come together to speak with one voice on key issues. During the presidential election, many progressives were hesitant to vote for Barack Obama. They could not forget that he bailed out the huge banks with no accountability for the white-collar criminals who wreaked so much havoc on our economy while at the same time providing no relief for those whose homes were being foreclosed. Nor could they countenance Obama’s use of drones to summarily execute untold numbers of people, including many civilians. Progressives were upset that Obama failed to close Guantanamo, continuing to hold many people in indefinite detention without criminal charges. We were outraged that the President wanted to look forward and not hold any of those who authorized and committed torture accountable. He neglected to mention poverty during the campaign, despite the fact that 42.6 million people live below the poverty line in the United States. Obama also deported record numbers of undocumented immigrants and continued the Bush policy of warrantless eavesdropping. Before the election, Marjorie Cohn joined Daniel Ellsberg, Cornel West, Frances Fox Piven, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jim Hightower, Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen in issuing a call to progressive voters who were conflicted to ensure that we make defeating Romney a priority: “If you live in a close state, defeat Romney and his right-wing policies by voting Obama/Biden. If you live in a state where the outcome will be lopsided, you’re in a position to send a loud and clear vote of protest against Obama policies you oppose.” We “consistently challenged Obama policies (on civil liberties, war and bloated military spending, environment, potential cuts to Social Security and Medicare, to name a few)” but we knew “that the policies of a Romney/Ryan administration would be worse on many issues and better on none. Consider Romney’s recent vow to ‘change course’ toward even more war- mongering in the Middle East. Or their profound differences on abortion rights and Supreme Court picks.” The rest is history. President Obama was reelected handily, the only Democrat besides Franklin D. Roosevelt to win two terms with a majority of the popular vote. Women, gays, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, youth, and poor people understood the greater dangers of a Romney presidency. Obama prevailed in eight of the nine swing states. Although efforts to suppress the vote in communities of color in those swing states backfired, we know voter suppression is very real. Karl Rove & Co. used millions of dollars thanks to Citizens United to defeat Obama; luckily those dollars turned out to be ill-spent – on ads and not a comparable “ground game.” Maureen Dowd put it well: “Last time, Obama lifted up the base with his message of hope and change; this time the base lifted up Obama with the hope he will change.” With Obama’s reelection, we must do more than hope that Obama will change. We have a unique opportunity to demand Obama move in a progressive direction. The Affordable Care Act has survived so we can keep our kids on our health insurance policies until they turn 26, people with pre-existing conditions will not be denied insurance, and many who could not afford insurance before will be covered. But we must push for universal health care. Romney cannot pack the Supreme Court with more radical right-wingers. But we should pressure Obama to appoint true progressives to the highest court in the land. Romney cannot inflate military spending even more than the 20 percent of the U.S. budget it currently occupies. But we can demand a reduction in military spending, which adds significantly to the deficit, makes us no safer, and leeches money from education and health care. Whereas Romney sees workers as expendable when it comes to maximizing profit, Obama must see to it that union rights are strengthened. He must also acknowledge the major role unions, union members and union households played in organizing the ground game and for his reelection. The President must commit himself to finding ways, including using his executive authority, to create good jobs. Instead of Obama’s unprecedented targeting of whistleblowers, we must urge him to abandon the policies that led to the commission of war crimes that people like Julian Assange and Bradley Manning have exposed. It is one thing to be pro-choice. Obama must push to make coverage for abortion available in all federal health insurance programs. Obama took an important step when he issued an executive order preventing the deportation of young people who came to the United States before they were 16 and have lived here continuously for five years. In his second term, Obama should end discrimination and racial profiling by the Department of Homeland Security and the mass arrests and detentions of immigrants. He should also work on comprehensive immigration reform that includes a reasonable pathway to citizenship. We must hold Obama to his pledge to protect Medicare and Social Security no matter how tempting it may be to weaken them in the impending deal to prevent us from going over the proverbial but not real “fiscal cliff.” Obama should also be pressured to stick to his self- proclaimed mandate to make the rich pay higher taxes. To help prevent another economic meltdown, Obama ought to push for strong regulation, especially in the banking and financial sectors of the economy. A financial transactions tax on Wall Street, hedge funds, etc., targeted to job creation and infrastructure must be seriously considered. The United States is a key player in the global economy. But the free trade regimes we have followed have only promoted growing inequality in this country and countries with whom we trade. We need fair trade that includes protections for workers, human rights and the environment. In order to work seriously to protect our environment, Obama must push for a heavy tax on carbon emissions and major regulation of coal, oil and gas companies. He must demand transition to renewables before it is too late to stop the ravages of storms like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. During his first campaign, Obama pledged to immediately “let folks know” whether the products they consume contain genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) by proper labeling. He has not yet made good on that promise despite overwhelming public support for labeling GMO’s. Large corporations, including Monsanto, spent $50 million to defeat Proposition 37 in California, which would have required such labeling. Although Obama has resisted Benjamin Netanyahu’s demands that the United States draw a red line to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapons capability, Obama has imposed punishing sanctions that are devastating to the Iranian people, and not necessarily targeted to the nuclear program, while not saying a word about Israel’s nuclear arsenal. He must not pander to the right-wing Israeli government on Iran or sacrifice the rights of Palestinians. After the election, Bill O’Reilly noted, “The white establishment is now the minority.” He was not talking about the white working class, but rather the white elite that has run our institutions since the country’s founding. O’ Reilly continued, “And the voters, many of them, feel that this economic system is stacked against them, and they want stuff.” These comments betray his racism and racial stereotypes because it was clear that the people he claimed “wanted stuff” were people of color. We need to reaffirm that all people have a right to live in a society in which the economy serves their interests, and that people are entitled to basic human rights. As stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human rights include economic rights – the right to a decent job, to organize and join unions, to a good education and quality health care, adequate housing, and to economic security when people become aged or disabled. While the President can always blame an obstructionist Congress for the need to “compromise,” the way he sets the terms of the debate will invariably determine the outcome. We know that President Obama, like any president of the United States, faces immense pressures from Wall Street (bankers), the Chamber of Commerce, the Military Industrial (Congressional) Complex, the Prison Industrial Complex, and the insurance, fossil fuel and gun industries. All of these lobbies seek to promote their own interests – including the rights of capital over labor, criminalization of broad segments of society, reliance on carbon-based energy sources and wars to obtain them. They aim to profit from health care and privatize as much as possible, and to ensure that people do not believe they have any entitlements to health care or social security. These are the many reasons to organize to make Obama do the right thing. But the burden is not only on the President. The burden is on us to organize the counter-pressure through all of the progressive constituencies. It is a challenge we must embrace. This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. |
| PEACE ACTION FOR A SANE WORLD is the nation's largest grassroots peace network, with chapters and affiliates in over 30 states.We organize our grassroots network to place pressure on Congress and the Administration through write-in campaigns, Internet actions, citizen lobbying and direct action. Through a close relationship with progressive members of Congress, we play a key role in devising strategies to move forward peace legislation, and as a leading member of United for Peace and Justice nd the Win Without War coalition, we lend our expertise and large network to achieving common goals. Real change comes from the bottom up. We are committed to educating and organizing at the grassroots level. PEACE ACTION / Youngstown is the local chapter in Youngstown OH, merging the organization's national mission with efforts to build community peace campaign programs, including neighborhood restoration and the arts. Together, we have the power to be the change we wish to see in the world. We won't wait for the bombs to drop. Sign the petition at National to prevent war with Iran. |
| FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS, WE'VE WORKED FOR PEACE THROUGH COMMUNITY COMMITMENT, ISSUES INTERCHANGE AND ARTS PRESENTATIONS |
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| Palast's newest book, includes a 48-page comic book by Ted Rall, and a foreword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Palast investigates Karl Rove, the Koch Gang and their buck-buddies. |
| ."Who Owns the World?" Oct 26th, '12 Excerpt from interview with Noam Chomsky by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. NOAM CHOMSKY: In a few weeks, we’ll be commemorating the 50th anniversary of "the most dangerous moment in human history." Now, those are the words of historian, Kennedy adviser, Arthur Schlesinger. He was referring, of course, to the October 1962 missile crisis, "the most dangerous moment in human history." Others agree. Now, at that time, Kennedy raised the nuclear alert to the second- highest level, just short of launching weapons. He authorized NATO aircraft, with Turkish or other pilots, to take off, fly to Moscow and drop bombs, setting off a likely nuclear conflagration. At the peak of the missile crisis, Kennedy estimated the probability of nuclear war at perhaps 50 percent. It’ s a war that would destroy the Northern Hemisphere, President Eisenhower had warned. And facing that risk, Kennedy refused to agree publicly to an offer by Kruschev to end the crisis by simultaneous withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and U.S. missiles from Turkey. These were obsolete missiles. They were already being replaced by invulnerable Polaris submarines. But it was felt necessary to firmly establish the principle that Russia has no right to have any offensive weapons anywhere beyond the borders of the U.S.S.R., even to defend an ally against U.S. attack. That’s now recognized to be the prime reason for deploying missiles there, and actually a plausible one. Meanwhile, the United States must retain the right to have them all over the world, targeting Russia or China or any other enemy. In fact, in 1962, the United—we just recently learned, the United States had just secretly deployed nuclear missiles to Okinawa aimed at China. That was a moment of elevated regional tensions. All of that is very consistent with grand area conceptions, the ones I mentioned that were developed by Roosevelt’s planners. Well, fortunately, in 1962, Kruschev backed down. But the world can’t be assured of such sanity forever. And particularly threatening, in my view, is that intellectual opinion, and even scholarship, hail Kennedy’ s behavior as his finest hour. My own view is it’s one of the worst moments in history. Inability to face the truth about ourselves is all too common a feature of the intellectual culture, also personal life, has ominous implications. Well, 10 years later, in 1973, during the Israel-Arab War, Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert. The purpose was to warn the Russians to keep hands off while he was—so we’ve recently learned—he was secretly informing Israel that they were authorized to violate the ceasefire that had been imposed jointly by the U.S. and Russia. When Reagan came into office a couple of years later, the United States launched operations probing Russian defenses, flying in to Russia to probe defenses, and simulating air and naval attacks, meanwhile placing Pershing missiles in Germany that had a five- minute flight time to Russian targets. They were providing what the CIA called a "super-sudden first strike" capability. The Russians, not surprisingly, were deeply concerned. Actually, that led to a major war scare in 1983. There have been hundreds of cases when human intervention aborted a first-strike launch just minutes before launch. Now, that’s after automated systems gave false alarms. We don’t have Russian records, but there’s no doubt that their systems are far more accident- prone. Actually, it’s a near miracle that nuclear war has been avoided so far. Meanwhile, India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war several times, and the crises that led to that, especially Kashmir, remain. Both India and Pakistan have refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, along with Israel, and both of them have received U.S. support for development of their nuclear weapons programs, actually, until today, in the case of India, which is now a U.S. ally. War threats in the Middle East, which could become reality very soon, once again escalate the dangers. Well, fortunately, there’s a way out of this, a simple way. There’s a way to mitigate, maybe end, whatever threat Iran is alleged to pose. Very simple: move towards establishing a nuclear-weapons- free zone in the Middle East. Now, the opportunity is coming again this December. There’s an international conference scheduled to deal with this proposal. It has overwhelming international support, including, incidentally, a majority of the population in Israel. That’s fortunately. Unfortunately, it’s blocked by the United States and Israel. A couple of days ago, Israel announced that it’s not going to participate, and it won’t consider the matter until there’s a general regional peace. Obama takes the same stand. He also insists that any agreement must exclude Israel and even must exclude calls for other nations—meaning the U.S.—to provide information about Israeli nuclear activities. The United States and Israel can delay regional peace indefinitely. They’ve been doing that for 35 years on Israel-Palestine, virtual international isolation. It’s a long, important story that I don’t have time to go into here. So, therefore, there’s no hope for an easy way to end what the West regards as the most severe current crisis—no way unless there’s large-scale public pressure. But there can’t be large-scale public pressure unless people at least know about it. And the media have done a stellar job in averting that danger: nothing reported about the conference or about any of the background, no discussion, apart from specialist arms control journals where you can read about it. So, that blocks the easy way to end the worst existing crisis, unless people somehow find a way to break through this. World-renowned political dissident, linguist, author, and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Inst of Technology, Noam Chomsky Finish piece by entering link below DEMOCRACY NOW.ORG |
| Gregory Allyn Palast New York Times-bestselling Author...Freelance journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation and the British newspaper The Observer. His work frequently focuses on corporate malfeasance but has also been known to work with labor unions and consumer advocacy groups. Notably, he has claimed to have uncovered evidence that Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and Florida Elections Unit Chief Clay Roberts, along with the ChoicePoint corporation, rigged the ballots during the US Presidential Election of 2000 and again in 2004 when, he argued, the problems and machinations from 2000 continued, and that challenger John Kerry actually would have won if not for disproportional " spoilage" of Democratic votes. |
Activists Cheer
Court's Ruling
Against Indefinite
Detention Law
Urge Obama not to appeal, and
senators to vote against it this
fall Sept 12th, 2012, New
York - Judge Katherine Forrest
today ruled that the so-called
"indefinite detention" provision of
the fiscal 2012 National Defense
Author- ization Act violates the
Constitution and issued a
permanent injunction against its
use.
The law would have allowed
the military to indefinitely detain
civilians -- even Americans --
without charge or trial if they
are accused of certain crimes,
or even associated with certain
criminals. The lead plaintiff is
writer Chris Hedges. He is joined
by six others, including Noam
Chomsky and Pentagon Papers
leaker Daniel Ellsberg.
According to plaintiff and activist
Tangerine Bolen, "The steady
assault on the US Constitution
was dramatically slowed today,
as Judge Katherine Forrest ruled
in our favor.
After eleven years of witnessing
a radical departure from democracy
and fundamental civil liberties and
towards increased authoritarianism
-- all under the guise of the war on
terror --we have a ray of hope and
reason to keep the faith: in judges
who stand with the Constitution,
in the rule of law, and in all those
who sacrifice so much to preserve
our liberties.
Today is a day to celebrate."
Court's Ruling
Against Indefinite
Detention Law
Urge Obama not to appeal, and
senators to vote against it this
fall Sept 12th, 2012, New
York - Judge Katherine Forrest
today ruled that the so-called
"indefinite detention" provision of
the fiscal 2012 National Defense
Author- ization Act violates the
Constitution and issued a
permanent injunction against its
use.
The law would have allowed
the military to indefinitely detain
civilians -- even Americans --
without charge or trial if they
are accused of certain crimes,
or even associated with certain
criminals. The lead plaintiff is
writer Chris Hedges. He is joined
by six others, including Noam
Chomsky and Pentagon Papers
leaker Daniel Ellsberg.
According to plaintiff and activist
Tangerine Bolen, "The steady
assault on the US Constitution
was dramatically slowed today,
as Judge Katherine Forrest ruled
in our favor.
After eleven years of witnessing
a radical departure from democracy
and fundamental civil liberties and
towards increased authoritarianism
-- all under the guise of the war on
terror --we have a ray of hope and
reason to keep the faith: in judges
who stand with the Constitution,
in the rule of law, and in all those
who sacrifice so much to preserve
our liberties.
Today is a day to celebrate."
| Must reads. Scroll down for. Vietnam Veteran Mike Hastle Arrested at Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza Hold Him to His Progressive Pledges. Make Obama Do It Truthout.org. You can Vote But Can You Vote for Democracy? Robt Shetterly Afghanistan: The Who Cares War? (Not Exactly, But It Fails the Real Definition of a Just War) Kevin Martin, Truthout| |
| "No matter how cynical you get, it's almost impossible to keep up." - Lily Tomlin |
| Veterans and Allies Arrested in New York as Afghanistan War Enters Year 12 |
| A Law Unto Itself - Decades of Political Tyranny at the IRS by KARL GROSSMAN May 16, 2013 President Barack Obama got it right and wrong Monday when he stated, “If you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and nonpartisan way, then that is outrageous, it is contrary to our traditions.” He was right in declaring it was “outrageous” for the IRS to target conservative organizations for tough tax treatment. But he was incorrect in saying “it is contrary to our traditions.” For the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has for decades gone after organizations and individuals that take stands in conflict with the federal government at the time. This has been a tradition, an outrageous tradition. It is exposed in detail by David Burnham, longtime New York Times investigative reporter, in his 1991 book A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power. He relates how President Franklin D. Roosevelt likely “set the stage for the use of the tax agency for political purposes by most subsequent presidents.” Burnham writes about how a former U.S. Treasury Secretary, banker Andrew Mellon, was a special IRS target under FDR. During the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, he recounts, the focus of the IRS’s efforts “at political control” were civil rights organizations and those against the U.S. engaging in the Vietnam War. Nixon’s “enemies list” and his scheme to use the IRS against those on it is what the current IRS scandal is being most compared. History Professor John A. Andrew III in his 2002 book Power to Destroy: The Political Uses of the IRS from Kennedy to Nixon—its title drawn from U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall’s dictum “The power to tax is the power to destroy”—focuses further on this tradition. He tells of how John F. Kennedy administration’s “Ideological Organizations Project” investigated, intimidated and challenged the tax-exempt status of right-wing groups including the John Birch Society. Then, with a turn of the White House to the right with Nixon came investigations, he writes, of such entities as the Jerry Rubin Foundation, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Center for Corporate Responsibility. During the Reagan administration, I had my own experience with the IRS— ostensibly because of a book I wrote. Nicaragua: America’s New Vietnam? involved reporting from what was then a war zone in Nicaragua and in Florida—where I interviewed leaders of the contras who were working with the CIA to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government—and Honduras, being set up as a tarmac for U.S. intervention in Nicaragua. I visited a U.S. military base there. The book warned against a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua (subsequently decided against by the Reagan White House after the Iran- contra scandal). The book was published in 1985 and soon afterwards I was hit with an IRS audit. It would be more, I was informed, than my showing up at an IRS office. The IRS was to come to my house for a “field audit.” The investigator sat on one side of our dining room table and on the other side was me and my accountant, Peter Berger of Shelter Island. What would be an all-day event started with the investigator asking me to detail how much my family spent on food each week and then, slowly, methodically, going through other expenses. Then he went through income. He obviously was seeking to determine on this fishing expedition whether income exceeded expenses. He went through receipts for business expenses including restaurant receipts, asking who I ate with. He sorted through receipts for office supplies. By mid-afternoon, he had gotten nowhere. At that point, having been hours together, a somewhat weird relationship had been formed. And he began to tell me how his dream in college was to become a journalist. He expanded on that, and then asked: “Have you ever faced retaliation?” “What do you think this is?” I responded. He was taken back—insisting my name had come up “at random.” In the end, all he did was trim some of what was listed as business use of my home phone. Was I being retaliated against for the book I had written? One would never know. Recently, I ran into accountant Berger, now retired, and he commented about how that day at my house was the strangest IRS audit he had ever been involved in. The IRS has been beyond reform. Burnham writes in A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power that a “political imperative of not messing with the IRS” has become “close to being a law of nature almost as unbending as the force of gravity.” It is “rarely examined by Congress.” President Obama announced yesterday that the acting commissioner of the IRS was asked and agreed to tender his resignation as a result of the scandal. That’s a small start. Far more important is somehow ending the tradition of IRS political tyranny. Fundamental change in the IRS is called for. Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College of New York, is the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet. Grossman is an associate of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion. |
