Cutting Social Security: really, really bad idea

Ezra Klein says he has become a convert fromt he "Let Grandma east catfood" persuasion to realizing that cutting Social Security is not a good idea at all. He explains in Making Social Security less generous isn't the answer Washington Post 09/05/2010:

Social Security provides disability insurance and survivor's benefits, but when people talk about it, they tend to be referring to its role as a program that provides income support to retirees. The average monthly benefit of $1,170 replaces about 39 percent of the person's pre-retirement earnings. Over the next two decades, the "replacement rate" is slated to drop to 31 percent. That is less than in most developed countries -- the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranks it 25 out of 30 member nations.

The system, in other words, is not that generous, and it's becoming less so every year. The age at which you can begin collecting full Social Security benefits is moving from 65 to 67, as part of a deal struck in the 1980s to ensure the system's solvency. And all this at a time when employers are getting rid of defined-benefit pensions, which means that most workers will have no guaranteed retirement income except for Social Security. [my emphasis]

And Democratic President Barack Obama, who was elected in part because he and his Party opposed the Cheney-Bush Social Security phase-out programmed, has appointed the Catfood Commission and stacked it with people who are almost certain to recommend Social Security cuts. A truly, genuinely bad policy.

Two important pro-Social Security sites to watch in the fight against Obama's Catfood Commission are Social Security Works and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Tags: social security

Democratic forebodings for November (1)

The netroots have gotten worried about the Democratic prospects in the fall. And I'm going to be commenting the next couple of days on some of those worries.

But first, some of the beter news Think Progress reports on some of the issues Republican candidates are having uniting their parties behind them in specific races: Scott Keyes, Republicans In Disarray: Losing Candidates Increasingly Unwilling To Unite Behind GOP Nominees Think Progress 08/31/2010. for instance:

CA-GOV: The bad blood didn't end after Meg Whitman trounced Steve Poizner on June 8. Whitman continued to attack Poizner on the radio, leading the latter to declare that Whitman "apparently hasn't gotten the memo that the primary is over" because she is "still misrepresenting my track record."

In this case, I'm not sure party unity on the Republican side means that much. Whitman is self-financing much of her campaign and is spending heavily on ad buys.

On the Democratic side, Jerry Brown is the Democratic nominee and should generate enough interest and excitement among the base to offset a lot of the discouragement California Democrats might feel over the course of the Obama administration to date.


But the Democrats have good reason to be worried. Unemployment is high, economic growth prospects are poor. Plus, the Republicans have a well-established popular story that they are doing a good job of pounding into public consciousness week-in, week-out. The Democrats hardly have a larger story line to frame the current situation at all. In the Republicans story for the general electorate, Big Gubment and snotty libruls hate you and are conspiring against you. Plus libruls hate America. And God. And support fundamentalist Islam.

Paul Waldman in They're With Stupid American Prospect Online 08/31/2010 gives a description of how the retail brand of this populism for the benefit of billionaires:

[The Republicans] must be careful to keep reminding people, however, that the elite at whom they need to be angry is not the economic elite. No, the elite scorned by the blue-collar poseurs is the cultural elite, the college professors and cosmopolitan urban dwellers, the know-it-alls who are insufficiently contemptuous of foreigners and insufficiently devoted to your religion. (This amounts to its own kind of snobbery; as Michael Kinsley wrote a few years ago, "It's the only kind of snobbery with any real power in America today: reverse snobbery.")

If Palin is the politician who defines the current moment for the right, the media figure of the moment is certainly Glenn Beck, who managed to get tens of thousands of his supporters to come to Washington on Saturday. While Palin tells her supporters that their problems come from smarty-pants urbanites, Beck pulls his down a rabbit hole of manic conspiracy theories, telling them that the path to true knowledge can be found only by forgetting everything anyone else tells them. Understanding will come not from deliberation but from revelation, he says. Watch my show, and I will reveal to you the hidden conspiracies to which others are blinded.

And for $9.95 a month, you can enroll in "Beck University," a series of online lectures from Beck-approved polemicists concerning the evils of government and the perfidy of progressives. It doesn't require any prerequisites, just a belief that actual universities are festering cauldrons of lies and liberal brainwashing, and a willingness to turn to Beck for all the education you'll ever want or need. [my emphasis]

So far, this has been the national Democratic strategy this year, hoping that the voters will look at the Republican candidates and decide they are worse than the Democrats, even if they are not particularly excited about the Dems. It's not a very encouraging strategy. But some of the Republican candidates are bad enough that it's not entirely frivolous, either.

Tags: 2010 elections, democratic party, republican party

Labor Day 2010: Origins of Labor Day

The US Department of Labor (DOL) provides a saccharine The History of Labor Day. Here's the goody-two-shoes version of the day's history:

The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883.

In 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, as originally proposed, and the Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow the example of New York and celebrate a "workingmen's holiday" on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.

Through the years the nation gave increasing emphasis to Labor Day. The first governmental recognition came through municipal ordinances passed during 1885 and 1886. From them developed the movement to secure state legislation. The first state bill was introduced into the New York legislature, but the first to become law was passed by Oregon on February 21, 1887. During the year four more states — Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York — created the Labor Day holiday by legislative enactment. By the end of the decade Connecticut, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania had followed suit. By 1894, 23 other states had adopted the holiday in honor of workers, and on June 28 of that year, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal holiday in the District of Columbia and the territories.

The word "Haymarket" does not appear in the DOL account. It does appear in the BBC's article How May Day Became a Workers' Holiday 10/04/2001.


The May Day of the title refers to May 1, celebrated around the world as International Workers Day. But for the most part, not in the US. What's the connection between "Haymarket", Labor Day and International Workers Day? The BBC article explains what the DOL version does not, that a number of labor unions established May 1, 1886, as a day on which general strikes should be held to highlight the demand for the eight-hour day:

National or local officials of the three main labour organisations present in the United States at the time, the FOTLU [Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada], the Knights of Labor and the [anarchist] International Working People's Association (IWPA) began preparing for a general strike to be held on that date. The national office of the Knights of Labor, the most conservative of these three organisations, opposed the strike. Local offices ignored Grand Master Workman Terence Powderly's letter of 13 March, 1886, forbidding members of the Knights to strike. The FOTLU and the IWPA organised aggressively. In particular, Albert Parsons and August Spies spoke to gatherings of working people in Chicago at every opportunity.

Parsons was a printer in Chicago who had been an Abolitionist prior to the Civil War, a Radical Republican (which meant something entirely different then than it does today!) who by 1886 was a socialist and active supporter of the union movement. Spies was a German immigrant who became an anarchist and the editor of the Arbeiter Zeitung.

The May 1 general strike went off successfully and peacefully in Chicago. But, two days later:

Some 65,000 workers were on strike in Chicago, including employees of the McCormick Harvester Works. About a quarter of a mile (0.16 km) away, August Spies was addressing a group of striking lumber workers at a rally. A group of the lumber workers decided to join the striking McCormick Harvester Works employees in confronting strike-breaking workers at the end of the work day.

At closing time, police officers charged the waiting strikers, with revolvers drawn. It was reported by one witness that, as the strikers retreated, the police 'opened fire into their backs. Boys and men were killed as they ran'. Most sources state that six strikers were killed, although some put the number of fatalities at four. Many more were injured.

In those days and through the 1930s in the US, gun thugs, cops and National Guards deployed on behalf of employers were commonly used against strikers and labor organizers. The workers organized a rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square for the next day to protest the police violence and killing.

The first speaker was August Spies, who took the police department to task as murderers. Then Albert Parsons spoke. Near the beginning of his speech, he made it clear that he was not calling on anybody to take any action that night, but was planning on simply stating the facts of the previous day's events. The Mayor made his way out of the crowd and told the police captain that the rally was peaceful and that the mobilised police officers should be put back onto regular duty. After Spies and Parsons had spoken, other, less charismatic, speakers took the platform. It was now about 10 o'clock at night. While Samuel Fielden was speaking, the 180 police officers, with clubs drawn and in military formation, closed in on the remaining participants of the rally. The police captain commanded that the rally 'immediately and peaceably disperse'.

As Fielden was protesting that the rally was peaceful, a bomb exploded in the ranks of the assembled police officers, killing one immediately and wounding 65 others, seven of whom later died of their injuries. The remaining police officers drew their revolvers and fired into the crowd, wounding 200 and killing an unknown number.

The BBC article describes the subsequent trials against anarchists who were railroaded by the courts. The bombing has never been fully clarified, though it is entirely possible that a Rudolph Schnaubelt, who was named by multiple witneses as the bomb-thrower, may have been "an agent provocateur hired by either the police department or the industrialists of Chicago." The BBC article continues:

In 1889, at the Marxist International Socialist Congress in Paris, a resolution was passed calling for a 'great international demonstration' for the eight hour day to take place on 1 May, 1890. On that date, there were May Day demonstrations in the United States and many European countries, as well as in Chile, Peru and Cuba.

In 1891, May Day was celebrated in Russia, Brazil and Ireland. China first celebrated May Day in 1920. In 1927, the holiday had spread to India, where there were demonstrations in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay.

As May Day was becoming a worldwide holiday, with the date having been chosen to commemorate the union fight for the eight-hour work day in the United States, within the United States itself the mainstream labour movement, now represented by the American Federation of Labor [AFL], was becoming more conservative. That organisation chose to support the first Monday in September as Labor Day. In 1894, federal legislation designating the September Labor Day holiday was passed and signed into law by the then-United States President, Grover Cleveland.

The date celebrated as International Workers Day all over the world was established to commemorate the disgrace of the Haymarket trials and the anti-labor violence connected with the celebration of May 1 in Chicago by a general strike to demand the eight-hour day. Conservative Democratic President Grover Cleveland in cooperation with the politically conservative AFL established Labor Day in the US as an alternative to International Workers Day.

While Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Frederick Engels (1820-1895) were very influential figures in the social-democratic movement in Europe. To what extent the Social Democratic Parties in the Socialist International of 1889 could be called "Marxist" is less clear-cut, although that's probably quibbling as far how we understand the terms we use today. But the leading Social Democratic Party in Europe, one with which Marx and Engels were closely associated, was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). In 1889, the SPD was still operating under the Gotha Program of 1875, about which Marx had expressed his differences in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, first published in part in 1890-91.

The SPD adopted a new program in 1891, when Marx had been dead several years. But his close collaborator Engels wrote A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891 (1891) indicating his differences with the official text. Brief English excerpts of both programs are availabe from the Hanover Historical Texts Project. The orginal German texts of both Das Gothaer Programm and Das Erfurter Programm are available online; both are short.

Tags: international workers day, labor day, labor movement

Labor Day 2010: Labor in the US today

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, No holiday for labor unions Washington Post 08/31/2010, looks at the state of union on this Labor Day in the US:

Unions are in trouble. They represent less than 13 percent of the workforce and less than 8 percent of private workers. Union workers still receive higher wages and are more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, pensions and paid sick leave than non-union workers. But when unions represented over 33 percent of all private workers in the 1940s, they drove wage increases for everyone -- non-union firms had to compete for good workers. Now, unions struggle just to defend their members' wages and benefits. Over the past decade before the Great Recession, productivity soared, profits rose and CEO pay skyrocketed, but most workers lost ground.

Unions face constant attacks from corporations and conservatives. The most recent campaign -- designed as always to divide workers from one another -- assails the pay and particularly the pensions of public employees. Why should they have pensions, when many workers have lost theirs and get, at best, a retirement savings plan at work? In fact, in a civilized society, we would ask the reverse question. How do we create pensions -- beyond Social Security -- for workers across the economy, leveling up, rather than down?

She doesn't use the term "neoliberalism," aka, the Washington Consensus, the main ideology of economic "globalization." But she reminds us about how organized labor how so often been right in its criticism of such policies on international trade, economic inequality and deregulation. On the latter, she writes:

On government regulation, labor fought a pitched battle against privatization and deregulation that Reagan conservatives and New Democrats made fashionable. Now in one area after another, privatization has been revealed as a source of waste, fraud and abuse -- from Halliburton to Blackwater. Deregulation contributed directly to the corporate and financial debauch that brought the economy down, with the human costs apparent from the Gulf of Mexico to Appalachia to the eggs we eat.

And she reminds us that it is not anti-union reactionaries who the heirs of the civil rights movement:

Last Saturday in Washington, Glenn Beck tried to lay claim to the civil rights movement. That same day in Detroit, we saw the real thing: The UAW, SEIU and AFSCME joining with the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the NAACP, the Urban League, ministers and civil rights activists to march for jobs and justice. Union support was vital to the Rev. Martin Luther King's march on Washington 47 years ago. And union support is vital to civil rights movements -- from immigration reform to equal pay for women to the fight for jobs -- today.

For the Democratic Party and the immediate future of progressive politics in the US, one of the greatest missed opportunities of the Obama administration is its failure to even attempt to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would give union organizing the protection it needs in today's conditions. And stronger union movement would mean stronger progressive politics and a stronger Democratic Party. But with a Democratic President appointing a Catfood Commission stacked to recommend the next step in the phase-out of Social Security, you really have to wonder whether today's Democratic Party will ever be capable of fighting for the interest of working people effectively. They will have to be forced to do so. And unions are a key group with a strong incentive to do so.

Robert Reich in How to End the Great Recession New York Times 09/02/2010 looks at inequality and its role in causing economic crises. He observes:

The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income. ...

Policies that generate more widely shared prosperity lead to stronger and more sustainable economic growth — and that's good for everyone. The rich are better off with a smaller percentage of a fast-growing economy than a larger share of an economy that’s barely moving. That's the Labor Day lesson we learned decades ago; until we remember it again, we'll be stuck in the Great Recession.

labor day, labor movement

Gareth Porter interview with TheRealNews on Pentagon pressure to keep soldiers in Iraq

Tags: gareth porter, iraq war

Poor prospects for Israel-Palestine peace talks

Peace talks are formally under way again between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. Hamas is excluded from the negotiations. Stephen Walt is pessimistic about the prospect of these talks bringing a permanent settlement of the issues, as he explains in Direct talks déjà vu Foreign Policy 08/30/2010:

Here's the basic problem: Unless the new "framework" is very detailed and specific about the core issues -- borders, the status of East Jerusalem, the refugee issue, etc., -- we will once again have a situation where spoilers on both sides have both an incentive and the opportunity to do whatever they can to disrupt the process. And even if it were close to a detailed final-status agreement, a ten-year implementation schedule provides those same spoilers (or malevolent third parties) with all the time they will need to try to derail the deal. I can easily imagine Netanyahu and other hardliners being happy with this arrangement, as they would be able to keep expanding settlements (either openly or covertly) while the talks drag on, which is what has happened ever since Oslo (and under both Likud and Labor governments). Ironically, some members of Hamas might secretly welcome this outcome too, because it would further discredit moderates like Abbas and Fayyad. And there is little reason to think the United States would do a better job of managing the process than it did in 1990s.

The great paradox of the negotiations is that United States is clearly willing and able to put great pressure on both Fatah and Hamas (albeit in different ways), even though that is like squeezing a dry lemon by now. Fatah has already recognized Israel's existence and has surrendered any claims to 78 percent of original Mandate Palestine; all they are bargaining over now is the share they will get of the remaining 22 percent. Moreover, that 22 percent is already dotted with Israeli settlements (containing about 500,000 people), and carved up by settler-only bypass roads, checkpoints, fences, and walls. And even if they were to get an independent state on all of that remaining 22 percent (which isn't likely) they will probably have to agree to some significant constraints on Palestinian sovereignty and they are going to have to compromise in some fashion on the issue of the "right of return." The obvious point is that when you've got next to nothing, you've got very little left to give up, no matter how hard Uncle Sam twists your arm. [my emphasis]

Ali Abuniimah is also pessimistic in Hamas, the I.R.A. and Us New York Times 08/28/2010:

Both the Irish and Middle Eastern conflicts figure prominently in American domestic politics — yet both have played out in very different ways. The United States allowed the Irish-American lobby to help steer policy toward the weaker side: the Irish government in Dublin and Sinn Fein and other nationalist parties in the north. At times, the United States put intense pressure on the British government, leveling the field so that negotiations could result in an agreement with broad support. By contrast, the American government let the Israel lobby shift the balance of United States support toward the stronger of the two parties: Israel.

The near-monopoly once held by pro-Likud hardliners in the Israel lobby in the US is at least loosening up, with the increasing prominence of more realistic groups like J Street, who are also more representative of the outlook of American Jews than AIPAC, still the best-known and most powerful of the the pro-Likud lobbies in the US.

J Street's M.J. Rosenberg writes in Brilliant Op-ed in Times On Why Mideast Talks Without Hamas Are A Farce TPM Cafe 08/29/2010, commenting on Abunimah's op-ed: "Bottom line: this week's negotiations are probably going nowhere because (1) Hamas is excluded and (2) the United States is in Netanyahu's pocket."

Tags: israel

Krugman on the too-timid stimulus of 2009

Paul Krugman in The Real Story New York Times 09/02/2010 recounts the history of dueling predictions on the adequate and effects of the 2009 stimulus bill. The national deficit was a phantom fear then, and is still so today.

But the too-small stimulus is one of the key events in what is likely to be remembered two years of squandered opportunities by Obama and the Democrats. Their electoral prospects in November are threatened by the ailing economy and high unemployment. Krugman writes, "The actual lessons of 2009-2010, then, are that scare stories about stimulus are wrong, and that stimulus works when it is applied. But it wasn't applied on a sufficient scale. And we need another round." As he notes, we are unlikely to get it. Or at least much of it. And even "Japanese-style deflation is looking like a real possibility," he says, referring to the still-lingering underperformance of the Japanese economy in the wake of their own burst financial bubble in the 1990s.

Krugman gives a somewhat different take on the history of the stimulus at his blog in The Economic Narrative 09/01/2010. Here he focuses on the dangers of disinformation and bad analysis obscuring the real lessons of the 2009 stimulus:

The way the right wants to tell the story — and, I'm afraid, the way it will play in November — is that the Obama team went all out for Keynesian policies, and they failed. So back to supply-side economics!

The point, of course, is that that is not at all what happened. A straight Keynesian analysis implied the need for a much bigger program, more oriented toward spending, than the administration proposed. And people like me said that at the time — we're not talking about hindsight.

And also at his blog, Paradoxes Of Deleveraging And Releveraging 09/03/2010, he gives a useful sketch of why a badly misguided focus on the deficit - which Democratic policymakers seem to actually take seriously while Republicans use deficit hysteria to opposed Democratic programs like Social Security - could wind up prolonging the current Great Recession by far longer than necessary.

Finally, if you're in the mood for David "Bobo" Brooks, his latest New York Times column is about his fantasy of what could have been of Obama had been even more impressed with Herbert Hoover economics from the first day of his Presidency: The Alternate History 09/02/2010.

Tags: us economy

"Liberal" concern trolls: Earl Ofari Hutchinson

If Earl Ofari Hutchinson is any measure, Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby may be able to keep up the liberal concern-troll act for quite a while. In Beck Speaks for the White Majority Huffington Post 08/29/2010, Hutchinson promotes the FOX News position that Real Americans hate Obama. His pitch is pretty transpartent:

Despite the PT Barnum, con man hype, Beck speaks to the majority's unvarnished hostility to liberal Democrats, big government, the elites, Wall Street, abortion, gay rights, taxes, and obtrusive government, and most of all President Obama's policies, and him. Beck and Palin have masterfully stoked white disaffection with Obama. A July Washington Post/ABC News poll found that a bare 40 percent of whites approve of the job he's doing. This was the lowest rating among this crucial voter demographic since the start of his presidency.

There was more bad news. In rapid succession, forty-three percent of white voters strongly disapprove of the job Obama is doing, while less than 20 percent strongly approved. More than half of college-educated whites disapproved of the job he is doing, and, among white college-educated women, Obama's approval numbers dipped below 50 percent for the first time in his presidency.

The disaffection with Obama was not just from white Republicans, or even white independents. That was expected. It came from white Democrats. The racial split among Democrats was evident in the Democratic primaries. Democratic presidential foe Hilary Clinton consistently and in some states handily beat out Obama among white Democrats. The split did not evaporate with Obama's win. Conservative congressional Democrats get elected largely with white votes in conservative leaning districts and they have been the least enthusiastic about Obama's policies. [my emphasis]

What a mush of partial information and bad analysis! Here he conflates disaffection with Obama among white Democrats with support for Glenn Beck, which is just silly. The Democratic base voters most disaffected with Obama right now include many liberal Democrats who don't think Obama and the national Party are doing enough to counter the hate propaganda from clowns like Beck.

Do the majority of whites harbor "unvarnished hostility to liberal Democrats, big government, the elites, Wall Street, abortion, gay rights, taxes, and obtrusive government"? No. Are a majority of US whites Mormon fundamentalists like Beck? No. Is there a white majority who shares Beck's John Birch Society-like conspiracy theory of history? No.

But the toxic combination of bad economic conditions with the failure of the Democrats to establish a clear narrative to challenge the Republican attacks on Big Gubment are giving the Republicans who do assert such hostility a chance they don't deserve in this year's elections. But understanding that reality isn't helped by such a big exaggeration of Beck's popularity.

Tags: 2010 elections, radical right

The Democrats seriously need to keep their heads together on defending Social Security

Laurence Lewis at Daily Kos provides some important perspective on the current situation of the Democrats going into this fall's elections in Life support 09/02/2010:

It was just about a year ago that we were hearing stories about President Obama's intention to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Again. The president's most ardent defenders insisted that we shouldn't listen to unnamed and anonymous sources, and should instead wait and see what happened. And then when he escalated, pretty much as had been reported, we were told that it was the right move, and we should support it. The same dynamic played out with the public option. For months, while it became increasingly apparent that the president wouldn't fight for a public option, we were told that he kept saying he supported one, and we didn't know what was going on behind the scenes. When the public option was punted, we were told that it never had been all that important, anyway, and the health insurance bill that was passed was all kinds of wonderful, so we should just be appreciative and grateful.

The same dynamic is playing out with the Catfood Commission. We are being told not to worry, and that Social Security won't be gutted, and it's just an advisory committee, and on and on. And it seems likely that there is an element of truth in the defense, but only an element. It doesn't seem likely that Social Security will be gutted, but don't be surprised if it is incrementally stripped down. An older retirement age. Less benefits. Things that can be defended by those reflexively inclined to defend. We'll hear that it wasn't as bad as we'd feared, so we should accept it and support it. But as with the incremental rollback of reproductive rights that was folded into the health insurance bill, it's the momentum that will matter most. Democrats buying into Republican framings. Democrats leading a movement backwards. Democrats refusing to stand on principle, on issues that should be core Democratic principles. [my emphasis]

If the Democrats can't get it together to block cuts in Social Security, no matter what form they take, what is the purpose of the Party?

Tags: 2010 elections, democratic party

Scott Horton on Obama's authoritarian "war on whistleblowers"

Human rights attorney Scott Horton reminds us in Obama's War on Whistleblowers No Comment 08/31/2010 that in this regard, the Obama administration really is worse from a liberal and human-rights viewpoint than Bush. That may be partially because in the Valerie Plame case, his administration was using leaks to discredit Joseph Wilson's revelations about his Iraq War lies. But Horton writes:

As a young lawyer, Obama represented a whistleblower; as a presidential candidate, he pledged to "strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government." But as president, Obama has unleashed the most aggressive assault on whistleblowers Washington has ever seen—surpassing even George W. Bush. The latest example comes in a remarkable prosecution of Steven Kim, a well-known scholar of North Korea’s nuclear program.

Like most area experts at the top of the game, Kim does consulting for the State Department. He works for Lawrence Livermore Labs and was on secondment to the State Department at the time of the events in question. Now, however, Kim finds himself under indictment by the Justice Department. His crime? He spoke to Fox News about how the North Koreans were likely to react to proposed sanction measures. Former prosecutor and Johns Hopkins professor Ruth Wedgwood says that the Fox News report "contains completely unremarkable observations about what a country would do if it was sanctioned for its poor behavior. These kinds of observations were well known to anyone paying attention to public sources and ought not be the basis for making someone a federal felon." I couldn’t agree more. [my emphasis]

The Democratic base and the general public should hold Obama accountable to live up to his campaign promise on this. So should the media, but for most of them in the US, that's almost laughable to expect.

Tags: authoritarianism, obama administration

Iraq War: Mission Accomplished yet again

The best I can say about Obama's Iraq War policy is that he stuck to the withdrawal schedule for "combat" troops that the Cheney-Bush administration had negotiated at the insistence of the Iraqi government. It's better than McCain's 100 Years War there.

Felipe Sahagún writes in El Mundo that the official end of combat operations for the US in Iraq is Un cambio semántico (A semantic change) 31.08.2010. Fifty thousand official troops remain there. And the situation in Iraq is still very unsettled. As Greg Mitchell tweeted on 08/18/2010, "Meanwhile, 6 more Americans killed in Iraq, meaning 19 in 4 days."

We're on the way out. But not fast enough. And the use of secret operations and mercenary contractors, which Obama has continued and is even expanding, makes the nature of this "change" even more problematic.

And praising the great George W. Bush, who violated the Congressional authorization of October 2002 in invading Iraq, took the country to war under fabricated premises, and committed various other war crimes in the process? What is Obama thinking? He should be investigating and prosecuting Bush for the torture crimes especially, not praising him on national TV. (Just a couple of months before the Congressional elections, to boot!) Joan Walsh writes in Obama, Bush, Beck and Hagee Salon 08/31/2010:

I didn't expect Obama to excoriate the neocon chickenhawks who lied us into war, but I wasn't entirely prepared for his praising the president who got us into this mess. But he did ...

Wouldn't it be lovely if Bush repaid Obama's stretching the truth a bit there by speaking out to Republicans who falsely believe Obama is Muslim, that he wasn't born here, or to the 52 % of Bush's party who say our president supports the imposition of Islamic law in this country. (Oh, and the former president might also join some of his colleagues in supporting the right of New York Muslims to build the Park 51 Community Center near Ground Zero). I won't hold my breath; Democratic statesmanship and generosity is almost always a one way street.

It appears that Obama is still operating on the delusion - and it is truly a delusion if this is what he's thinking - that he's going to be able to establish some kind of "post-partisan" harmony on the basis of fully endorsing the national security state and perpetual war while focusing on the entirely phony threat of budget deficits as an excuse to slash Social Security.

This does not look good.

Here is the official text: Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the End of Combat Operations in Iraq 08/31/2010. Immediately after praising his awful predecessor, he continued with the pretence that our mammoth military establishment is necessary to save us from the mighty superpower "Al Qaeda":

The greatness of our democracy is grounded in our ability to move beyond our differences, and to learn from our experience as we confront the many challenges ahead. [Post-partisanship!] And no challenge is more essential to our security than our fight against al Qaeda.

Americans across the political spectrum supported the use of force against those who attacked us on 9/11. Now, as we approach our 10th year of combat in Afghanistan, there are those who are understandably asking tough questions about our mission there. But we must never lose sight of what's at stake. As we speak, al Qaeda continues to plot against us, and its leadership remains anchored in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. We will disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda, while preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a base for terrorists. And because of our drawdown in Iraq, we are now able to apply the resources necessary to go on offense. In fact, over the last 19 months, nearly a dozen al Qaeda leaders -- and hundreds of al Qaeda's extremist allies -- have been killed or captured around the world.

Tags: iraq war, militarism