UN expert slams US for not looking into torture claims | Raw Story

UN expert slams US for not looking into torture claims | Raw Story

GENEVA — The UN's independent expert on torture on Wednesday criticised the Obama administration for not investigating allegations of torture made when president George W. Bush was in power.

"This is my criticism of the Obama administration: There is not enough done to remedy what has been done in the past," Manfred Nowak, UN special rapporteur on torture, told journalists.

"I think it's a legal question," he said.

"The US are a part of the UN Convention against Torture, but there are very clear legal obligations -- wherever you have indications, complaints about torture, then you have to investigate them independently and effectively."

Editorial - The Torture Lawyers - NYTimes.com

Editorial - The Torture Lawyers - NYTimes.com

Published: February 24, 2010

Is this really the state of ethics in the American legal profession? Government lawyers who abused their offices to give the president license to get away with torture did nothing that merits a review by the bar?

A five-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s ethics watchdogs recommended a disciplinary review for the two lawyers who produced the infamous torture memos for former President George W. Bush, but they were overruled by a more senior Justice Department official.

The original investigation found that the lawyers, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, had committed “professional misconduct” in a series of memos starting in August 2002. First, they defined torture so narrowly as to make it almost impossible to accuse a jailer of torturing a prisoner, and they finally concluded that President Bush was free to ignore any law on the conduct of war.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility said appropriate bar associations should be asked to look at the actions of Mr. Yoo, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mr. Bybee, who was rewarded for his political loyalty with a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. It was a credible accounting, especially since some former officials, like Attorney General John Ashcroft, refused to cooperate and e-mails from Mr. Yoo were mysteriously missing.

But the more senior official, David Margolis, decided that Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee only had shown “poor judgment” and should not be disciplined. Mr. Margolis did not dispute that Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee mangled legal reasoning and produced work that ultimately was repudiated by the Bush administration itself. He criticized the professional responsibility office’s investigation on procedural grounds and excused Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee by noting that everyone was frightened after Sept. 11, 2001, and that they were in a hurry. ...

Op-Ed Columnist - The Bankruptcy Boys - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - The Bankruptcy Boys - NYTimes.com

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: February 21, 2010

O.K., the beast is starving. Now what? That’s the question confronting Republicans. But they’re refusing to answer, or even to engage in any serious discussion about what to do.

For readers who don’t know what I’m talking about: ever since Reagan, the G.O.P. has been run by people who want a much smaller government. In the famous words of the activist Grover Norquist, conservatives want to get the government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

But there has always been a political problem with this agenda. Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts?

The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be dubbed “starving the beast” during the Reagan years. The idea — propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol — was basically that sympathetic politicians should engage in a game of bait and switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government’s fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.

And the deficit came. True, more than half of this year’s budget deficit is the result of the Great Recession, which has both depressed revenues and required a temporary surge in spending to contain the damage. But even when the crisis is over, the budget will remain deeply in the red, largely as a result of Bush-era tax cuts (and Bush-era unfunded wars). And the combination of an aging population and rising medical costs will, unless something is done, lead to explosive debt growth after 2020.

So the beast is starving, as planned. It should be time, then, for conservatives to explain which parts of the beast they want to cut. And President Obama has, in effect, invited them to do just that, by calling for a bipartisan deficit commission....

Sen. Michael Bennet: Reform the Filibuster

Sen. Michael Bennet: Reform the Filibuster

During the past year I've had conversations with thousands of people from all parts of Colorado, and I've heard a common refrain: Washington isn't working. Last week, the obstructionist actions of Republican senator Jim Bunning left no doubt that the people of Colorado are right -- Washington is broken, and it's getting worse.

The filibuster was originally intended to protect minority rights and encourage meaningful debate on the Senate floor. Today, this important rule is being abused at an unprecedented rate, and it's grinding the business of the Senate to a standstill.

That's why I am introducing new legislation to reform the Senate's rules -- to reform the filibuster in a responsible, practical way. My bill protects minority rights, while allowing the Senate to more efficiently conduct the people's business and put an end to pointless delays.

The real problem is that the filibuster is being abused with unprecedented frequency. Individuals and parties are using it to obstruct progress, and the American people are paying the price.

Here are the specifics of my filibuster reform proposal:

• Ends anonymous holds so senators will have to answer to their constituents;
• Requires filibuster supporters to actually show up and vote;
• Filibusters at the beginning of debate will be eliminated so we can get back to the business of deliberating bills; and,
• Creates incentives to encourage bipartisanship and allows bills with bipartisan support to move more quickly. ...

Jim Bunning Repeatedly Blocks Unemployment Benefits Extension, Tells Dem 'Tough Shit'

Jim Bunning Repeatedly Blocks Unemployment Benefits Extension, Tells Dem 'Tough Shit'

...

Updated below: The Senate has now recessed for the weekend without taking action.

Jim Bunning, a Republican from Kentucky, is single-handedly blocking Senate action needed to prevent an estimated 1.2 million American workers from prematurely losing their unemployment benefits next month.

As Democratic senators asked again and again for unanimous consent for a vote on a 30-day extension Thursday night, Bunning refused to go along.

And when Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) begged him to drop his objection, Politico reports, Bunning replied: "Tough shit."

Bunning says he doesn't oppose extending benefits -- he just doesn't want the money that's required added to the deficit. He proposes paying for the 30-day extension with stimulus funds. The Senate's GOP leadership did not support him in his objections. ....

OpEdNews - Article: The Seven Paragraphs: Released Binyan Mohamed Abuse Evidence Poses Problems for Both British and US Governments

OpEdNews - Article: The Seven Paragraphs: Released Binyan Mohamed Abuse Evidence Poses Problems for Both British and US Governments
...
In a major development in the struggle to curb the abuses committed as part of the War on Terror, the British government today released under court order previously redacted information on the abuse of Binyan Mohamed by US interrogators. Here are the seven paragraphs that were released which summarizes intelligence information which both the British and US governments fought hard to suppress:

It was reported that a new series of interviews was conducted by the United States authorities prior to 17 May 2002 as part of a new strategy designed by an expert interviewer.

v) It was reported that at some stage during that further interview process by the United States authorities, BM had been intentionally subjected to continuous sleep deprivation. The effects of the sleep deprivation were carefully observed.

vi) It was reported that combined with the sleep deprivation, threats and inducements were made to him. His fears of being removed from United States custody and "disappearing" were played upon.

vii) It was reported that the stress brought about by these deliberate tactics was increased by him being shackled in his interviews

viii) It was clear not only from the reports of the content of the interviews but also from the report that he was being kept under self-harm observation, that the interviews were having a marked effect upon him and causing him significant mental stress and suffering.

ix) We regret to have to conclude that the reports provide to the SyS [security services] made clear to anyone reading them that BM was being subjected to the treatment that we have described and the effect upon him of that intentional treatment.

x) The treatment reported, if had been administered on behalf of the United Kingdom, would clearly have been in breach of the undertakings given by the United Kingdom in 1972. Although it is not necessary for us to categorise the treatment reported, it could readily be contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities.

This case has aroused tremendous attention in Britain, as it clearly revealed British intelligence agents', and the British Government's, complicity in abuse of a British citizen. The British public, unlike much of the American, finds complicity in torture by its intelligence agents to be deeply disturbing.

The court decision ordering the release of this material is causing additional outrage because it violated hundreds of years of legal precedent in allowing only one side, the British government, to suggest changes in the decision. These changes were made without an opportunity of the defense to object. The letter to the court from the government lawyers requesting the changes was released, however. That letter gives a sense of what was excluded:

The master of the rolls' observations " will be read as statements by the court that the security service does not in fact operate a culture that respects human rights or abjures participation in coercive interrogation techniques.

Thus, the British government is afraid that the lies they perpetrated in the Binyan Mohamed case will disincline future courts from believing claims that the British government can be trusted when it asserts that they are opposed to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In other words, the court might correctly understand that the British government, like the US and many other governments, is a serial liar when it comes to abuses committed by its agents.

What may be less clear to US citizens is the potential enormous impact of the released information to the anti-torture struggle in the US. Marcy Wheeler [emptywheel] has pointed out the major significance of the apparent timing of Binyan Mohamed's abuse. It is reported to have occurred before a visit by an MI5 officer on May 17, 2002. The significance of the date is that it is before the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memos providing a legal cover for torture were issued in august, 2002.Thus, Binyan Mohamed's abuse, unlike later abuses, cannot be justified as being conducted in good faith under an authoritative legal opinion from the OLC.

Thus, this information just might provide an opportunity for prosecuting some of the torture perpetrators. And if the perpetrators are culpable, so may be those officials, however high they may be, who authorized the abuse. ...

Congressional Memo - As Senate Majority Shifts, So Does View of ‘Reconciliation’ - NYTimes.com

Congressional Memo - As Senate Majority Shifts, So Does View of ‘Reconciliation’ - NYTimes.com
...

Reconciliation in effect protects bills from filibusters and thus from the requirement for a 60-vote supermajority to end debate, and instead allows legislation with a budgetary impact to pass by a simple majority after limited debate. Minority parties — right now, the Republicans — tend to hate it.

But even as they fulminate about the unfairness, Republicans carry a long record of having employed reconciliation themselves on big and controversial legislative packages.

Sixteen of the 22 “reconciliation bills” that have made it through Congress were passed in the Senate when Republicans had majorities. Among them were the signature tax cuts of President George W. Bush, the 1996 overhaul of the welfare system, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicare Advantage insurance policies and the Cobra program allowing people who leave a job to pay to keep the health coverage their employer provided (the “R” and “A” in Cobra stand for “reconciliation act”).

“Is there something wrong with ‘majority rules’?” Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, once said of the reconciliation process when his party controlled the Senate. “I don’t think so.”

His objective then, in 2005, was an unsuccessful bill to allow drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge. Later that year, justifying reconciliation to pass a bill to reduce Medicaid spending, Mr. Gregg lamented, “You can’t get 60 votes because the party on the other side of the aisle simply refuses to do anything constructive in this area.”

That could be a Democrat’s quote today, but now Mr. Gregg is among the most vocal opponents of using reconciliation for the health care bill.

“The purpose of the Senate on something this complex and this comprehensive is to be a place where you have debate and you have amendments,” he said in an interview. “And if you have a decent bill you shouldn’t fear them.” ...

Only 21% Say U.S. Government Has Consent of the Governed ... Those with the Lowest Incomes are the Most Skeptical

Washington's Blog

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2010

"Only 21% Say U.S. Government Has Consent of the Governed ... Those with the Lowest Incomes are the Most Skeptical"

A new Rasmussen poll finds:

The founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, states that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Today, however, just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed.

***

Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters now view the federal government as a special interest group, and 70% believe that the government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.That helps explain why 75% of voters are angry at the policies of the federal government, and 63% say it would be better for the country if most members of Congress are defeated this November...

In his new book, In Search of Self-Governance, Scott Rasmussen observes that the American people are “united in the belief that our political system is broken, that politicians are corrupt, and that neither major political party has the answers.” He adds that “the gap between Americans who want to govern themselves and the politicians who want to rule over them may be as big today as the gap between the colonies and England during the 18th century.”

***

Sixty percent (60%) of voters think that neither Republican political leaders nor Democratic political leaders have a good understanding of what is needed today. Thirty-five percent (35%) say Republicans and Democrats are so much alike that an entirely new political party is needed to represent the American people.

Nearly half of all voters believe that people randomly selected from the phone book could do as good a job as the current Congress.

It is not surprising - given the following - that this is largely viewed as a class issue:

• The poor have disproportionally suffered from unemployment

• PhD economist Dean Baker said that the true purpose of the bank rescues is "a massive redistribution of wealth to the bank shareholders and their top executives"

• Two leading IMF officials, the former Vice President of the Dallas Federal Reserve, and the the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City have all said that the United States is controlled by an oligarchy
  

• Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and many others have called our current system "socialism for the rich"
  

• PhD economist Michael Hudson says that the financial “parasites” are "sucking as much money out" as they can before "jumping ship"

• Warren Buffet said a couple of years ago: "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.”
  

As Rasmussen notes:

Those who earn more than $100,000 a year are more narrowly divided on the question, but those with lower incomes overwhelming reject the notion that today’s government has the consent from which to derive its just authority. Those with the lowest incomes are the most skeptical.

Bill Moyers & Thomas Frank: How America's Demented Politics Let the GOP Off the Hook for Their Giant Mess | | AlterNet

Bill Moyers & Thomas Frank: How America's Demented Politics Let the GOP Off the Hook for Their Giant Mess | | AlterNet

Bill Moyers interviews Thomas Frank on how our short attention span has allowed conservatives to escape blame for their role in the economic meltdown.

Because if you look back any further than the Obama Administration, since, I mean, 1980 in this country, we have been in the grip of, you know, of this pursuit of ever-purer free markets. That's what American politics has been about. That's what has delivered this, you know, the awful circumstances that we find ourselves in today. And to think that that's what's missing, that's what we need to get back to, is ...
...

BILL MOYERS: But what does it do to our politics when the very spokesmen for what some people have called a decade of conservative failure. I mean, remember before Obama, they turned a budget surplus into a deficit. They took us to war on fraudulent pretenses. They borrowed money to fight it. They presided over a stalemate in Afghanistan. They trashed the Constitution. They presided over the weakest economy in decades--

THOMAS FRANK: Not weak for everybody.

...

THOMAS FRANK: Think of all the crises and the disasters that you've described. And I would add to them things like the, what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And the Madoff scandal on Wall Street. And, you know, on and on and on. The Jack Abramoff scandal. The whole sordid career of Tom DeLay.

All of these things that we remember from the last decade. I mean, some of them that we're forgetting. Like who remembers all the scandals over earmarking, anymore? And who remembers all the scandals over Iraq reconstruction? All that, you know, disastrous, when we would hand it off to a private contractor to rebuild Iraq. And it would, you know, of course, it would fail.

Those things have all sort of been dwarfed by the economic disaster and the wreckage on Wall Street. But I would say to you that all of these things that we're describing here are of a piece. And that they all flow from the same ideas. And those ideas are the sort of conservative attitude towards government. And conservative attitudes towards governance. Okay?

...

THOMAS FRANK: Not always from design, but often. The Department of Labor, for example, the conservatives when they in office, routinely stuff the Department of Labor full of ideological cranks. And people that don't believe in the mission.

And the result is that it doesn't-- they don't enforce anything. Towards the very end of the Bush-era, the Department of Labor had been whittled down. It was a shell of its former self. And at the very end of the Bush Administration, one of the government accountability programs did a study of the Department of Labor. And, I'm smiling, because it's kind of amusing. It was like an old spy magazine prank.

They made up these horrendous labor violations around the country and phoned them in as complaints to the Department of Labor to see what they would do, okay? They responded to one out of ten of these, you know, where they called in as like, "Well, we got, you know, kids working in a meat packing plant during school hours. You know, can you, you going to do anything about that?" "No." Or you look at something like the Securities and Exchange Commission. These guys are supposed to be regulating, you know, the investment banks, okay? Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, that sort of thing. These guys were so under-funded, and not just under-funded, but you had people in charge of it who didn't believe in regulating Wall Street.

The BRAD BLOG : New Study Suggests CA's 2008 Prop 8 Election Results Could be Fraudulent or In Error

The BRAD BLOG : New Study Suggests CA's 2008 Prop 8 Election Results Could be Fraudulent or In Error

'Election Verification Exit Poll' analysis show tallies of 'Marriage Equality Ban' off by 7.5%, as high as 17.7% in some L.A. precincts...

In the November 2008 election, the tabulation of votes for California's Proposition 8 --- the controversial ballot measure which resulted in the repeal of marriage equality by, for the first time, amending the state's constitution to deny the rights of Californians --- was "probably corrupted".

That's the finding of a newly released study issued by a coalition of election integrity organizations, as based on their analysis of an Election Verification Exit Poll conducted in Los Angeles on the day of the 2008 general election. "An investigation is warranted," the study concludes, into the evidence which suggests a likelihood that either "fraud or gross errors" occurred in the tabulation of that specific ballot measure.

The complete 49-page study has now been released on a new website, WasProp8Straight.org.

The poll was conducted on Election Day by Election Defense Alliance, Protect California Ballots, and ElectionIntegrity.org and was designed and researched with the help of at least one well known exit pollster, Ken Warren of St. Louis University's The Warren Poll, for the express purpose of measuring the accuracy of the reported vote count. It functioned beautifully in general, by confirming the results of most of the issues and races on the ballot. On Proposition 4, for example, which concerned a similar hot-button issue --- parental notification for abortion --- polling results and official election results matched within 2%, well within the expected margin of error.

However, for Proposition 8 only, the official results varied from the Election Verification Exit Poll by an average of 7.75% in the 19 precincts polled. In some cases, the discrepancy was as high as 17.7%. That is, of course, far outside of the margin of expected error and certainly worthy of further investigation by officials. ...

Evan Bayh Presidential Run Chances? 'None, Whatsoever.' (VIDEO)

Evan Bayh Presidential Run Chances? 'None, Whatsoever.' (VIDEO)
...
The announcement gives Republicans a strong chance of capturing his seat and makes it likelier that the 59 votes that give Democrats command of the 100-seat Senate will dwindle.

Bayh, 54, said his passion for helping people is "not highly valued in Congress." He said he did not love the institution in which his father, Birch Bayh, had also represented Indiana.

"There's just too much brain-dead partisanship," Bayh said in a nationally broadcast interview Tuesday. He said the public will continue to harbor hostile feelings toward Congress "until we change this town." He also said that "the extremes of both parties have to be willing to accept compromises." ...

Indiana's Bayh, fed up with Congress, won't run again | McClatchy

Indiana's Bayh, fed up with Congress, won't run again | McClatchy

WASHINGTON — Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana said Monday that he was fed up with Congress and wouldn't seek re-election this year, the latest in a series of retirements spurred by frustration with dysfunction in Congress.
...

Bayh is one of a shrinking group of eight to 10 Democratic centrists who've traditionally worked closely with like-minded Republicans, usually on spending and tax matters.

"In Bayh you're looking at a serious legislator, a senior legislator, a moderate Democrat whose most important mission was to get things done," Denver-based political consultant Floyd Ciruli said. "Instead, he sees a place where he can't accomplish anything."

...

Bayh cited two recent examples of his disenchantment with the Senate's ability to achieve goals that the nation needs. A recent bid to create a powerful, independent commission to forge solutions for the burgeoning national debt got 53 votes but failed because it didn't get the 60 needed under Senate rules to cut off debate. Seven Republicans who'd originally co-sponsored the plan voted against it after they came under heavy pressure from party activists.

"Bayh was somebody who tried to reach out to both sides, and found it a lot harder," said John Pitney, a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College in California.

Last week's unraveling of a bipartisan jobs-creation bill also troubled Bayh. Leaders of both parties announced the package Thursday morning, only to see Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., scuttle most of it by the afternoon after objections from liberals and conservatives.

"All of this and much more has led me to believe that there are better ways to serve my fellow citizens, my beloved state and our nation than continued service in Congress," Bayh said. ...

Too Much | A Democracy in Deep Disrepair

Too Much | A Democracy in Deep Disrepair
February 13, 2010

In contemporary American political life, only the rich can afford to be politically impatient. The big question: How long will the rest of us tolerate such a unrepresentative political status quo?

By Sam Pizzigati

Four score years ago, amid the tumult of the Great Depression, Americans rethought their democracy. Out of that rethinking came the New Deal — and a generation of steadily growing equality and prosperity.

Might our current Great Recession trigger another new epoch of rethinking? Annie Lowrey, an editor with America’s most influential foreign policy journal, hopes so — and she’s doing her part. If we Americans believe in representative government, a Lowrey column suggested earlier this month, why do we tolerate an institution as anti-democratic as the U.S. Senate?

Our Senate allocates votes strictly by state. America’s 21 smallest states currently hold just a tenth of the nation’s total population. Yet these states have enough Senate votes, between them, to prevent the passage of any legislation.

What would happen, Lowrey wonders, if we allocated senators by some other yardstick? Imagine, she asks, if our 100 senators represented income brackets and not states, “with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent, and so on.”

If we allocated Senate votes that way, then 94 of our 100 senators would owe their election to Americans making under $100,000 a year.

In our current Senate, we have essentially the exact opposite. The vast majority of our senators owe their election to America’s most affluent.

Indeed, to reach the Senate today, you either have to be wealthy — two-thirds of our current senators have personal net worths over $1 million — or espouse an agenda that a significant number of wealthy contributors will find appealing.

And woe unto you should you turn, once in office, less appealing. The wealthy will turn the spigot off, as the Obama White House now seems to be learning. ...

Lawrence Lessig: The Democrats' Response to Citizens United: Not (Even Close to) Good Enough

Lawrence Lessig: The Democrats' Response to Citizens United: Not (Even Close to) Good Enough
...
The Leadership and the President want to do something about this.

Some numbers will put this issue in perspective. Candidates for Congress raised $1.2 billion in the 2008 campaign cycle. 10% of that came from contributions of $200 or less. In 2009, the Center for Responsive Politics reports, the total spent on lobbying in Washington climbed to the highest level in American history: $3.47 billion in total were spent wooing Congress, with just over $1 billion by the health and financial services sector alone. 1.3% of that total came from organized labor. And having now been liberated by the Supreme Court to spend corporate funds to promote or oppose any political candidate, many fear the skew in these numbers will only increase. If the top 400 American corporations in 2008 spent just 1% of their profits in political campaigns, that would be $6 billions -- 5x the total amount spent in the 2008 cycle, almost 50x the amount contributed in $200 contributions or less.

So against this background of profound distortion in the political speech market, what have the Democrats proposed? A handful of puny measures, none which will come close to addressing this growing corruption of democracy in America -- a democracy less and less dependent, as the Federalist Papers promised, "upon the People," and more and more dependent upon the campaign funders.

The Democratic Leadership's response is a mix of dubious effectiveness and obvious constitutional doubt. Two of the five proposals require more disclosure by corporations of campaign spending; two purport to ban speech from disfavored groups (foreigners, and government contractors); and one aims to regulate the price of television ads for political speech.

But the Supreme Court has already signaled the uncertain power of Congress to control prices in this (in their view at least, increasingly competitive) speech market. And it is unlikely the Court will look favorably at a broad ban on government contractors speaking, especially when that ban is a response to its own ruling. And finally it is completely unclear how foreigners get regulated under the Court's reasoning in Citizens United: the whole point of that Court's rule was that the First Amendment didn't care about who the target of speech regulation was; whether person or not, the government was not allowed to "abridge the freedom of speech." Why that rule would be different when the entity silenced is French rather than corporate is completely obscure. ...

The winter of America's discontent - latimes.com

The winter of America's discontent - latimes.com
...
The legislative drama du jour is the standoff between the White House and Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), who has put a personal hold on more than 70 executive branch appointments until the Obama administration agrees to fund a couple of pork-barrel projects he has earmarked for his state. One involves tens of millions of dollars for an FBI laboratory focusing on improvised explosives -- something the bureau doesn't think it needs. The other involves contract specifications for an aerial tanker that Northrop Grumman and Airbus would manufacture in Alabama, if they win the deal. (Boeing also is competing for the plane, which it would build in Topeka, Kan., and Seattle.)

Unless the administration agrees to give Shelby what he wants, he intends to invoke an archaic senatorial privilege that allows him to prevent the chamber from considering any of the administration's nominees to executive branch vacancies, no matter how crucial. Without the 60 votes to force cloture -- another archaic convention -- there's nothing the Democrats or the White House can do.

Outside the Senate, Shelby's conduct would be called extortion; inside the chamber, it's a "parliamentary tactic."

It's also the sort of shabby situation that brings into sharp focus both the sources of congressional dysfunction and the popular discontent on both the left and right with the congressional parties. Earmarks and pork are anathema to a majority of conservatives and independents; the Senate's outdated, made-for-obstruction rules and susceptibility to special interests are a source of increasing frustration to liberals and some independents. Yet, here we have one senator from one Southern state obstructing with impunity an entire nation's business -- purely for his narrow constituency's financial interests.

You don't have to attend a "tea party" convention to see the corrosive effect this sort of otherworldly political navel-gazing has on American attitudes toward the institutions of national government and the parties vying to control them. Evidence of the damage is scattered throughout the recent polls:

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, for example, found that although 52% of the nation's voters retain a favorable view of President Obama, only 38% have a similar appraisal of the Democratic Party. The Republicans fare even worse; just 30%, fewer than 1 in 3 voters, view the GOP favorably.

�� Indicting the Supreme Court : Information Clearing House -� ICH

�� Indicting the Supreme Court : Information Clearing House -�ICH

...

Corporate money is the diseased life-blood of American politics; it carries its cancerous spores to all extremities.

The Supreme Court really should be named the Unbeseem Court. Without any Constitutional justification whatsoever, as Justice Holmes, dissenting in Lochner, pointed out, the Court has taken its task to be the constitutionalization of a totally immoral, rapacious, economic system instead of the promotion of justice, domestic tranquility, the general welfare, and the blessings of liberty. Consider this short list of examples:

· It is legal for a vendor to sell a product which does not work but illegal for a buyer to purchase a product with a check that does not work.

· During a corporate bankruptcy, the company's assets are distributed first to other companies and last, if anything remains, to employees and even people who have obtained judgments from courts for company wrongdoing.

· If a homebuyer who has paid regularly on his mortgage for 20 and even more years, who has paid the property taxes and the property's insurance, is forced to default for no fault of his own, such as a death, serious illness, or economic collapse, the mortgage holder gets to keep all the money and gets the house too, transferring the risk that investors are supposed to bear entirely to the buyer.

· Entire industries can uniformly require consumers to accept contracts that require them to relinquish their legal and even Constitutional rights.

· And those industries can also uniformly require consumers to accept contracts that the companies can change in any way at any time for any reason without gaining the consent of the consumer. Has a consumer ever had such a right?

· Companies can collect personal information on people without their consent yet are allowed to keep company secrets even those which hide wrongdoing, as when a civil case is settled and the company involved is allowed to not admit to any wrongdoing and the court seals the detailed record.

For more, see my piece How the Government Cheats Ordinary Taxpayers, but any astute reader can add items to this list.

...

Although Stevens has demolished the Court's rationale, there is one important inconsistency that he overlooks. Kennedy, in the majority opinion, quotes Douglas in United States v. Automobile Workers: “Under our Constitution it is We The People who are sovereign. The people have the final say. The legislators are their spokesmen. The people determine through their votes the destiny of the nation. It is therefore important—vitally important—that all channels of communications be open to them during every election, that no point of view be restrained or barred, and that the people have access to the views of every group in the community.” But there is a more important conclusion that follows from the first three sentences of this quotation and the Court's action.

Look at it this way. (1) The people are sovereign; they have the final say. (2) The legislators are their spokesmen. (3) The sovereign people have said on numerous occasions through their spokesmen that corporate financing of electioneering must be limited. Yet (4) the Court rejects such limitations which nullifies the people's sovereignty. Instead of the people having the final say, the final say is the Court's.

If the Court has the final say, then democracy in America is a sham. It simply does not exist and the Constitution has been subverted. No two ways about it: If the people don't have the final say, the people are not sovereign. The Court has merely allowed the people to vote and the legislature to enact laws only to the extent that those laws don't offend the sensibilities of the Court's members.

A Disadvantaged Class? The Corporate Speech Index | CommonDreams.org

A Disadvantaged Class? The Corporate Speech Index | CommonDreams.org

...

What may not be quite so obvious is how extraordinary are the resources that corporations can mobilize as against what is now spent on elections.

Consider these juxtapositions --

----

Total amount spent on federal elections in the 2008 election cycle: $5.285 billion [2]

Amount spent by Obama campaign in the 2008 election: $730 million [3]

Average amount raised by incumbent Members of the House of Representatives in the 2008 election: $1.356 million (challengers: $335,101) [4]

Average amount raised by incumbent Senators in the 2008 election: $8.741 million (challengers: $1,152,146) [5]

Exxon profits 2007-2008: $85 billion [6]

Top-selling drug, Lipitor, revenues, 2007-2008: $27 billion [7]

Goldman Sachs bonus and compensation expense for 2009: $16.2 billion [8]

Value of Lockheed's defense contracts in 2008: $15 billion [9]

The amount spent on cigarette advertising and promotion by the five largest cigarette companies in the United States in 2006: $12.49 billion [10]

Microsoft cash on hand: $33.4 billion [11] ...

TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect

TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect

The Comprehensively Broken Senate.

The latest breakdown in the operations of the world's most farcical legislative body thatPaul mentions below should serve as a reminder that the Senate's crazy anti-democratic rules go well beyond the filibuster. As Mark Tushnet recently noted, getting rid of the filibuster in itself probably wouldn't accomplish very much:

Changing the rule over the objections of a cohesive minority that's big enough -- as the Republican minority is -- would immobilize the Senate because an enormous amount of the Senate's work gets done by unanimous consent to the waiver of otherwise applicable rules. (Remember the contretemps over reading Senator Sanders's substitute amendment for the health care reform bill? The rules require reading such amendments, which almost never happens because the proposer seeks and obtains unanimous consent to waive that rule.) By denying unanimous consent to such waivers, a minority can stall legislation almost as effectively as it can through the modern form of the filibuster.

The problems posed by non-filibuster obstructions can also be seen in Republican threatsto derail a Senate reconciliation vote on health care. But this brings us the other issue Paul discusses, the asymmetry in how the two parties approach minority obstruction. (As an example of how shameless the GOP has become, take Jim DeMint's assertionthat using the majority voting rules that prevail in pretty much every other legislative body in the world would be "tyrannical"; tyranny of minorities of one, apparently, doesn't count.)

I think Paul identifies the critical fact here: Until Senate Democrats realize that the Republican minority is simply no longer willing to adhere to norms that allowed the institution to function despite its stupid rules, basic governance will be enormously difficult. Dems need to realize that the party in power will be held responsible by the electorate for these failures either way, so they need to do what they can to move the Senate toward majority rule.

--Scott Lemieux

McCamy Taylor's Journal - Democracy in America (1787-2010) RIP

McCamy Taylor's Journal - Democracy in America (1787-2010) RIP

...

Under the Bush Jr. administration, there was no enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, a linchpin of our democracy. Instead, the DOJ rubber stamped illegal minority vote suppressing redistricting in Texas and a Poll Tax in Georgia. Companies like Diebold boldly stole elections in Georgia, 2002 and later across the country. Suddenly Democrats had to be leading by more than the margin of error in the polls, otherwise the machines would cook the results and Republicans would stage upset victories.

But even that was not enough for the supporters of corporate fascism who call themselves names like the New Federalists. This year, their operatives in the Supreme Court placed the last nail in the coffin of our democracy.

The US Supreme Court has struck down a major portion of a 2002 campaign-finance reform law, saying it violates the free-speech right of corporations to engage in public debate of political issues.

In a landmark 5-to-4 decision announced Thursday, the high court overturned a 1990 legal precedent and reversed a position it took in 2003, when a different lineup of justices upheld government restrictions on independent political expenditures by corporations during elections.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2010/...

Note that the corporate media, when it bothered to cover this story, always talked about how corporations and unions would now be allowed to contribute as much as they wanted to federal campaigns. As if the and unions made it alright.

Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision to reshape the way elections were conducted. Though the decision does not directly address them, its logic also applies to the labor unions that are often at political odds with big business.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/polit...

In a landmark ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down laws that banned corporations from using their own money to support or oppose candidates for public office.
By 5-4 vote, the court overturned federal laws, in effect for decades, that prevented corporations from using their profits to buy political campaign ads. The decision, which almost certainly will also allow labor unions to participate more freely in campaigns, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34822247/ns/po... /

To compare corporations and unions is not simply a case of apples and oranges. Try whales and minnows. According to one source

Since 1990, labor unions have contributed over $667 million in election campaigns in the United States, of which $614 million or 92 percent went to support Democratic candidates. In 2008, unions spent $74.5 million in campaign contributions, with $68.3 million going to the Democratic Party. Already, unions have contributed $6.5 million to the 2010 elections, and $6 million has gone to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C.
http://www.aier.org/research/briefs/1550-o...

Let’s do some math. Nine elections since 1990. $667 million spent. That averages out to be about $70 million an election. Now, compare that to (mostly) corporate spending in 2008 alone…

In the 2008 election cycle, nearly $6 billion was spent on all federal campaigns, including more than $1 billion from corporate political action committees, trade associations, executives and lobbyists.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5880...

More math. $1 billion minus $70 million equals…

Corporate “citizens” are more equal than union “citizens.” No wonder Congress failed to vote on the Employee Free Choice Act, even when they had a clear 60 vote majority in the Senate. Now, they will blame that woman from Massachusetts for their failure to follow through on their promises to labor, the same way they will blame her for their failure to do fuck about health care.

Bought and sold, that describes our Congress, our president, our Supreme Court. Welcome to the New Federalist United States. If it seems strangely familiar, that might be because it resembles Mussolini’s Italy, a land where corporations ruled and everyone else paid.

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini ...

Total Sensory Deprivation, Confined Spaces, And The Inquisition - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Total Sensory Deprivation, Confined Spaces, And The Inquisition -

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Another detail we discovered about then torture techniques adopted by Bush and Cheney was confinement in tiny boxes and total sensory deprivation. This was done to Jose Padilla, an American citizen, for years. with permanent shackles, ear-muffs and goggles to blind him.

We also know that the Cheney regime put individuals in upright coffins, as well as using the stress positions photographed below. Since the CIA destroyed all the evidence of many of its torture sessions - with impunity - and since the Obama administration seeking to "move on" from what it itself called "torture" (itself making the Obama administration more baldly in violation of the Geneva conventions than even the Bush administration which publicly claimed it was not torturing anyone) - we have no photos of this. But here again is a still from a Youtube of the Peruvian Inquisition Museum in Lima, Peru, which shows a torture victim both forced into a stress position and into sensory deprivation. It's not clear what horrors apart from total dark and soundlessness were in that box - maybe the insect the CIA used to terrify one victim or the caged rat made famous in Nineteen-Eight-Four - but the concept is clearly identical:

Here's Padilla's total sensory deprivation:

Here's a victim of the Peruvian Inquisition:

There is simply no dispute that the US, under Bush and Cheney, authorized classic torture techniques from the Inquisition to the Gestapo and to the Khmer Rouge. I'm sorry, Mr president, but I refuse to move on until these war criminals are held accountable and brought to justice.

Time to Tax Financial Speculation | CommonDreams.org

Time to Tax Financial Speculation | CommonDreams.org

For those of us who want the financial industry to serve people and the planet rather than dominate them, this is the most exciting reform under serious consideration on the world stage.

by Sarah Anderson

For decades, international activists have been pushing the idea of a tax on financial transactions. Such a tax would give us a twofer: a drop in short-term speculation that serves no productive purpose and leads to dangerous bubbles, and 2) loads of money that could be used for good things, like health, climate, and jobs programs.

Today, we’re closer to achieving this two-for-one deal than we’ll probably ever be in our lifetimes. Reeling from the worst financial crisis in 80 years, policymakers are not only desperate for new sources of revenue, they’re more open to rethinking the role of Wall Street and making sure it serves real economic needs.

To take advantage of these new opportunities, a wide range of activists, including trade unionists, international health advocates, and climate justice groups, have come together to move this decades-old proposition into practice. Their efforts are gaining traction—and even some celebrity support.

The specific proposal is to tax trades of all types of financial assets, including stock, derivatives, and currencies. The tax rate would be so low that ordinary investors wouldn’t even notice it. Some U.S. legislative proposals would even exempt retirement funds and mutual funds, the primary middle class investment vehicles. The real target would be the hedge fund investors and other high fliers in the global casino, who make most of their money through high-frequency betting on short-term market movements that often have nothing to do with what’s going on in the real economy. Since the tax would apply to each of these transactions, it would make this type of speculative gambling much less profitable and encourage more long-term, patient investment.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research has analyzed the likely impact of a set of taxes, ranging from 0.01 percent on currency transactions to 0.25 percent on stock trades. Assuming that trading volumes dropped by 50 percent, these taxes could raise more than $175 billion per year in the United States alone.

The call for such taxes has been particularly loud in Europe, where activists have managed to win promises of support from leaders of the three largest economies—the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. But more pressure is needed to make speculation taxes a reality. ...

Is Our Democracy Becoming a Joke? | CommonDreams.org

Is Our Democracy Becoming a Joke? | CommonDreams.org

...

America’s most profitable corporations tend to be oil companies. Even after a steep decline in profits from the year before, Exxon Mobil earned profits totaling nearly $20 billion in 2009. Not coincidentally, the Chamber has increasingly urged skepticism on action on climate change. The Chamber’s leaders have gone so far as to equate climate legislation with “suicide bombing the American economy for the promise of green jobs in heaven.”

A handful of major companies, including Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. and Apple Inc., have left the Chamber to protest its climate change positions. The Yes Men’s stunt drew attention to the outrageous propositions the Chamber of Commerce was putting forward while bankrolling a campaign so out of step with climate science.

...

With a 5–4 vote, the Court ruled last month in Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission that corporations like Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and others can now spend as much money as they wish promoting political candidates.

This virtually ensures that politicians will be increasingly beholden to oil interests. We’ll soon have in place a situation where “Citizen” Exxon will be lobbying “Politician” Chevron, with no evidence of their corporate sponsorship. ...

Moving On Up and Hitting a Wall: Social Mobility in the U.S. and Europe | CommonDreams.org

Moving On Up and Hitting a Wall: Social Mobility in the U.S. and Europe | CommonDreams.org

by Michelle Chen

America: land of opportunity... if you're lucky enough to be born into one. The crumbling of the American Dream is in plain view across the country, especially in the urban centers and desolate ghost towns that have long been hollowed of their economic promise. A new comparative study shows just how far America's mythology has slipped on a global scale.

According a report on social mobility published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], the United States ranks pretty poorly among industrialized nations on intergenerational advancement--that is, the ability to transcend the socioeconomic class, income level, and educational attainment of your family. So that whole bootstraps thing? It looks like that quintessential self-made man is more at home in Norway than Our Town.

In patterns of socioeconomic gains across generations, the United States ranked on par with France, Italy and the United Kingdom on some measures. Some trends were generally constant throughout the countries studied, such as the correlation between educational attainment and fathers' and sons' wages. And some socioeconomic barriers that are uniquely, and shamefully, American:

Mobility in earnings across pairs of fathers and sons is particularly low in France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, while mobility is higher in the Nordic countries, Australia and Canada....

The influence of parental socio-economic status on students' achievement in secondary education is particularly strong in Belgium, France and the United States, while it is weaker in some Nordic countries, as well as in Canada and Korea. Moreover, in many OECD countries, including all the large continental European ones, students' achievement is strongly influenced by their school environment....

in the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States and France... at least 40% of the economic advantage that high-earnings fathers have over low-earnings fathers is transmitted to their sons.

The findings expose the entrenchment of a class hierarchy even in supposedly modern, diverse democracies. It seems inheritance is still a major driver of opportunity, even in the land of the free. America does stand out among our more regressive European brethren, however, in that we utterly lack the social safety nets that have served as a buffer against structural inequality. While class divisions in France or England may be frustrating in terms of individual opportunity, lower-class status for the French and British is far less likely to result in a family death sentence due to lack of health care.

Perhaps because of the countries studied vary widely in their demographic mix, the study does not explore in detail how race and ethnicity track socioeconomic status and by extension, intergenerational mobility. As a singularly American institution, institutional racism intersects with and sometimes trumps class divides. A 2009 Pew study on economic mobility found links between racial and economic segregation that dictate the fate of whole generations of Black children. Over time, their individual prospects were directly tied to the advancement, or regression, of their communities:

• Four in five black children who started in the top three quintiles experienced downward mobility, compared with just two in five white children. Three in five white children who started in the bottom two quintiles experienced upward mobility, versus just one in four black children.

• If black and white children had grown up in neighborhoods with similar poverty rates (i.e., if whites had grown up where blacks did or blacks had grown up where whites did), the gap in downward mobility between them would be smaller by one-fourth to one-third.

• Neighborhood poverty alone accounts for a greater portion of the black-white downward mobility gap than the effects of parental education, occupation, labor force participation, and a range of other family characteristics combined.

But the OECD study parses the impact of social policy in shaping, or reversing, some of the legacy of inequality. Mobility can be promoted through investing quality schools and early childhood education, encouraging socioeconomic integration, progressive welfare policies that even out wealth inequality, and financial aid to broaden higher education opportunities for students of disadvantaged backgrounds. But redistribution of material resources can only go so far in a society where opportunity often hangs on the color line--as race can't be erased through education or tax policy. And in a democratic society, racial identity and community ties should be allowed to continue across generations, even as poverty and hardship are overcome. ...

Moving On Up and Hitting a Wall: Social Mobility in the U.S. and Europe | CommonDreams.org

Moving On Up and Hitting a Wall: Social Mobility in the U.S. and Europe | CommonDreams.org

by Michelle Chen

America: land of opportunity... if you're lucky enough to be born into one. The crumbling of the American Dream is in plain view across the country, especially in the urban centers and desolate ghost towns that have long been hollowed of their economic promise. A new comparative study shows just how far America's mythology has slipped on a global scale.

According a report on social mobility published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], the United States ranks pretty poorly among industrialized nations on intergenerational advancement--that is, the ability to transcend the socioeconomic class, income level, and educational attainment of your family. So that whole bootstraps thing? It looks like that quintessential self-made man is more at home in Norway than Our Town.

In patterns of socioeconomic gains across generations, the United States ranked on par with France, Italy and the United Kingdom on some measures. Some trends were generally constant throughout the countries studied, such as the correlation between educational attainment and fathers' and sons' wages. And some socioeconomic barriers that are uniquely, and shamefully, American:

Mobility in earnings across pairs of fathers and sons is particularly low in France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, while mobility is higher in the Nordic countries, Australia and Canada....

The influence of parental socio-economic status on students' achievement in secondary education is particularly strong in Belgium, France and the United States, while it is weaker in some Nordic countries, as well as in Canada and Korea. Moreover, in many OECD countries, including all the large continental European ones, students' achievement is strongly influenced by their school environment....

in the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States and France... at least 40% of the economic advantage that high-earnings fathers have over low-earnings fathers is transmitted to their sons.

The findings expose the entrenchment of a class hierarchy even in supposedly modern, diverse democracies. It seems inheritance is still a major driver of opportunity, even in the land of the free. America does stand out among our more regressive European brethren, however, in that we utterly lack the social safety nets that have served as a buffer against structural inequality. While class divisions in France or England may be frustrating in terms of individual opportunity, lower-class status for the French and British is far less likely to result in a family death sentence due to lack of health care.

Perhaps because of the countries studied vary widely in their demographic mix, the study does not explore in detail how race and ethnicity track socioeconomic status and by extension, intergenerational mobility. As a singularly American institution, institutional racism intersects with and sometimes trumps class divides. A 2009 Pew study on economic mobility found links between racial and economic segregation that dictate the fate of whole generations of Black children. Over time, their individual prospects were directly tied to the advancement, or regression, of their communities:

• Four in five black children who started in the top three quintiles experienced downward mobility, compared with just two in five white children. Three in five white children who started in the bottom two quintiles experienced upward mobility, versus just one in four black children.

• If black and white children had grown up in neighborhoods with similar poverty rates (i.e., if whites had grown up where blacks did or blacks had grown up where whites did), the gap in downward mobility between them would be smaller by one-fourth to one-third.

• Neighborhood poverty alone accounts for a greater portion of the black-white downward mobility gap than the effects of parental education, occupation, labor force participation, and a range of other family characteristics combined.

But the OECD study parses the impact of social policy in shaping, or reversing, some of the legacy of inequality. Mobility can be promoted through investing quality schools and early childhood education, encouraging socioeconomic integration, progressive welfare policies that even out wealth inequality, and financial aid to broaden higher education opportunities for students of disadvantaged backgrounds. But redistribution of material resources can only go so far in a society where opportunity often hangs on the color line--as race can't be erased through education or tax policy. And in a democratic society, racial identity and community ties should be allowed to continue across generations, even as poverty and hardship are overcome. ...