Photo/White House photographer Pete Souza

The Democratic Party’s embarrassing electoral disaster in Massachusetts, losing a seat held for 46 years by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, provided a clear warning that the party, and President Obama’s presidency, are headed for an epic trouncing this November, when all members of the House and a third of the Senate face reelection.

But all the frantic strategizing within the sclerotic Democratic Party leadership ignores the bigger crisis yet to come for this party that once brought the nation Social Security, unemployment compensation, public jobs programs and Medicare. That crisis is the economy, which is now showing signs of falling off a second cliff instead of beginning to recover.

Thanks to the abject failure of President Obama to boldly order up a massive jobs program and a full-blown economic stimulus program of public investment at the beginning of his term last spring, and his failure to attack the entrenched banking interests by smashing apart the mega-investment banks that had turned banking into a casino game, the economy has been left to stagnate for a year.

Unemployment has continued to rise, with the latest reports showing that layoffs have begun to re-accelerate. Unemployment rose in 43 states, including some of the biggest, in December and fell in only four. And we are only seeing the beginning of this new drive into the ditch. The most ominous, and totally predictable, trend is layoffs by the public sector–by towns, counties, states, and public bodies such as public universities, school districts, public hospitals and transit companies.

These layoffs which could ultimately number in the millions and which will have a knock-on effect on all kinds of other jobs, were deferred because of aid provided last year by the federal government, but no more federal aid is likely to be forthcoming and the money already provided runs out this summer. Look for official unemployment this year to move past the 11 percent record set in 1982. Meanwhile, real unemployment, which includes people who have given up looking for work, and those who have managed to get part-time work, is approaching 20 percent, and could eventually top 25 percent–a rate reminiscent of the Great Depression.

At the same time, the foreclosure crisis, and the related decline in home values which has put one-fourth of all homes “underwater,” meaning they’re worth less than the mortgage balance, continues unabated. Time magazine, in its first issue of the new year, predicts that at least as many homes will go into foreclosure in 2010 as in the record year just ended–over 3 million houses. Equally bad, the magazine says that many housing experts are predicting that property values, which have lost an average of 30 percent since 2006, will continue to decline until into 2013! Already, American homeowners have lost over $7 trillion in wealth because of property value declines, and they will continue to lose more.

In an economy where 72 percent of all financial activity involves consumers buying stuff, it is impossible to imagine where any growth or recovery in the economy could come from when the American people are being so battered financially.

For almost a year, the government has hidden this disaster behind a rising stock market, which rose in seeming contradiction to all the bad news, as companies slashed costs to eke out profits from drastically reduced revenues. Many analysts say that this bizarre behavior of the equities markets was the likely result of behind-the-scenes government intervention in markets. Consider this: for the whole period between March 9, 2009, when the market began its rebound, and the present, a period during which the equities markets recovered roughly 60 percent of the ground they’d lost in the last crash, corporations were net sellers of their stock, and retail investors were basically out of the market.

Foreign investors entered the market, but not in any huge way. Hedge funds, too, normally big players, were experiencing outflows of investor cash during most of the period, making it unlikely that they were investing either. Even pension funds, which were badly burned in the crash, were cautious investors over the past year. So who’s left? Suspicion falls on the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. This might explain why stocks have continued to rise on very low trading volume, and also why most of the upside has come, especially since last September, in after-hours trading in S&P futures, not in direct buying of shares during regular trading hours. If true, what this means is that the federal government has been doing what it fines hedge funds and investment banks for doing: manipulating the markets.

While the Fed and Treasury can theoretically manipulate the stock market, they cannot do this forever, and this past week, we have seen indications that the bull run in the market, whatever caused it, may have run out of steam.

If the economy does take a second plunge similar to what happened in late 2008 and 2009, Obama and the Democrats will have to accept the full blame. They had the opportunity last year to strike hard at the root causes of economic decline and at the sinister, greedy and corrupt activities of Wall Streets banks and investment banks. Because they chose instead to try and paper over the problem and accomodate those banks–even helping them to become bigger and more powerful– they will deserve the electoral drubbing that is coming.

It would be a huge and historic mistake for Democrats to listen to the advice of people like White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who are claiming that the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat to a Republican means it is necessary for the party to hew even further to the right. Yes, Massachusetts voters were voting for a guy who said he would kill the health bill in Congress, but polls suggest that his winning margin came from 7 percent of self-described liberal Democrats who told exit pollsters that the health bill was terrible and they wanted it killed.

That seven percent is a huge number, when you consider how hard it would be for most Democrats to vote for a hard-line conservative candidate–someone who openly advocates waterboarding of terrorist suspects, and who is adamantly anti-abortion rights.

What really turned the trick for the GOP candidate, Scott Brown, though, was the economy. The rank-and-file working person (Republican or Democrat), both in Massachusetts and in the US at large, has seen enough over the past year to conclude that the Democrats in Congress and the Man-o-Change in the White House do not have their interests at heart. They clearly see that this government’s actions in support of the banks, the insurance companies, and the other giant industries in the US, from autos to utilities, are not being taken in the cause of bringing benefits to the people, but are simply being done for the benefit of those industries and their leaders and key investors. It’s not even “trickle down” anymore. It’s just catering to the rich and powerful–the people who make all those fat campaign contributions.

This is why Obama’s sudden “pivot” (people who have real values don’t “pivot”) to a tacky “populist” rhetoric about “fat-cat bankers” is falling on deaf ears. It’s why Democratic leadership calls for Congress to just pass the wretched Senate version of the health bill are being viewed with disgust by the public.

Everyone realizes it’s all just image-mongering. Nobody in power in Washington, Democrat or Republican, is there to help the little folks.

It’s all about making the rich richer.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Scott Brown, the Republican Senator-elect from Massachusetts, defeated Democrat Martha Coakley in a special election Jan. 18 for the seat vacated by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. Photo/Wikimedia

The media punditry, corn-fed on conventional wisdom, are all atwitter about Tuesday’s Democratic debacle in Massachusetts, saying the trouncing of the Democratic candidate for the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s seat, state Attorney General Martha Coakley, by upstart State Senator Scott Brown means Democrats in Congress should abandon plans to push through a House-Senate compromise health bill, and instead just go with the Senate’s version of health “reform” legislation, thus circumventing a certain Republican filibuster attempt.

Brown campaigned promising to be the “41st vote” to kill the Obama health bill.

The Senate bill, remember, is the dreadful health bill version that outlaws abortion coverage for anyone getting subsidized insurance, and that taxes the hell out of health insurance benefits that are the mainstay of many middle-income and working-class families, not to mention mandating that people with low incomes spend significant assets they don’t have to buy lousy insurance they may not want or need. As bad as the House version is, the Senate bill is even worse.

It is a crummy bill, cobbled together from bits and pieces of self-serving elements submitted by health industry lobbyists, who have spent the last year swarming over the Senate like ants and maggots over a fetid, unrecognizeable lump of roadkill.

The call for the House to adopt the Senate plan, so as to avoid a filibuster, is advice that would doom the Democrats in 2010. While that might well be a good thing, given the sorry excuse for an alternative to the Republicans that the Democrats have become, I would argue that the time is right for the small rump of Democrats who are still progressives to take a stand.

Why?

Because they have the power to drive a stake through the corporatists who run the Democratic Party, and who have been working assiduously for decades to neuter the party and especially its progressives caucus. If progressive members of the House simply refuse to vote for the Senate version of the health bill, it cannot go forward.

The reason President Barack Obama’s health plan, the president’s and the Democratic Party’s support have all cratered even in that most emblematic Democratic state of Massachusetts is not that Republicans are resurgent. It is not even that unaffiliated voters have turned from Obama, though certainly some have. It’s that Democrats have become disgusted with the man they turned out for so enthusiastically in November 2008, with his “plan” for health “reform,” and with the party that they gave such a resounding victory to in Congress that same election and in 2006.

Democratic voters–especially liberal Democrats–are rightly feeling punked. Even those who did hold their noses and voted for Coakely in Massachusetts, were not doing it with any enthusiasm, and certainly weren’t hustling their friends and coworkers to vote along with them.

And the Obama/Democrat health care reform sellout is only one of their complaints. There is also the Obama cave-in to Wall Street, and his enormous escalation of the Afghanistan War, his failure to restore Constitutional government, and his wishy-washy efforts on climate change. And of course there’s the willing complicity of the Democrats in both houses of Congress.

It’s funny to recall that a year ago, it was common to hear pundits pronouncing the death of the Republican Party. Now, it appears that it is actually the Democratic Party that is headed for history’s dumpster–with President Obama and the party’s corrupt hack leadership in Congress in the driver’s seat of the careening truck.

Coakley was true to form as the party’s standard-bearer in this collapse. Even as her candidacy was heading for the rocks, instead of campaigning hard for the state’s liberal base, she headed off on January 12, just a week ahead of the special election, to pander to lobbyists from the health industry and collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bribes from them. No wonder her base deserted her or just stayed home!

Hell, if I were in Massachusetts, I’d vote have for Coakley’s GOP opponent. The former Cosmopolitan centerfold model may be just a buffer version of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, but at least he has vowed, if elected, to kill the Senate health bill.

For that alone he deserved progressive Democrats’ support.

The Mass. mayhem proves that Democrats in Congress area headed for a historic and well-earned rout this November. Progressive Democrats in House and Senate should be cutting themselves loose as soon as possible from this sinking ship and following the lead of Vermont’s independent Sen. Bernie Sanders. There is no home for progressives in the Democratic Party. They now have a historic opportunity to send the corporatist Democrats off to their well-deserved demise, while forging the Congressional core of something new: a true progressive opposition party representing America’s working people.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

In reviewing the columns over the past few years, we wrote against racism and animal cruelty. But, there’s still racism and animal cruelty, so we’ll still have to speak out on these critical social issues.

We wrote about tolerance and the acceptance of all races and religions. But, a large number of Americans apparently didn’t get the message, so we’ll have to try harder this year.

We wrote about the continued destruction of the environment and of ways people are trying to save it. Environmental concern is greater, but so is the ignorant prattling of those who believe global warming is a hoax.

We wrote against government corruption, bailouts, tax advantages for the rich and their corporations, governmental waste, and corporate greed. But, since they still exist, we’ll have to continue speaking against those as well.

We wrote about the effects of laying off long-time employees and of outsourcing jobs to “maximize profits.” But until Americans realize that “cheaper” doesn’t necessarily “better,” we’ll continue to have to write why exploitation knows no geographical boundaries.

We wrote in support of the rights of workers, for better working conditions and benefits at least equal to their managers. We didn’t expect to see anything change, but we were hopeful that a small minority of business owners who do respect the worker would influence the rest. Until that happens, we’ll still have to write about labor issues.

We wrote in support of helping the unemployed, the homeless, those without adequate health coverage—and against the political lunatics who continue to deny the disenfranchised and marginalized the basics of human life. Unfortunately, not much has changed over the past few years.

For many years, we had written about the need for health reform. At the end of last year, Americans got a partial victory, but there is still much more that needs to be done.

We wrote against the media’s fixation with celebrity skanks and scandals. We doubt anything will change this year, but we’ll still comment upon the media’s neglect of what’s important—and their fascination with what isn’t.

We wrote about why newspapers and magazines died, why the rest have downsized their staffs and the quality of their news product. We doubt anything will change this year, but we still have to bring the issues to the public.

We wrote about problems in the nation’s educational system, especially the failure to encourage intellectual curiosity and respect the tenets of academic integrity. But there are still those who believe education is best served by a program manacled by teaching-to-the-test mentality.

We had written forcefully against the previous president and vice-president when they strapped on their six-shooters and sent the nation into war in a country that posed no threat to us, while failing to adequately attack a country that housed the core of the al-Qaeda movement. We wrote about the Administration’s failure to provide adequate protection for the soldiers they sent into war or adequate and sustained mental and medical care when they returned home.

We wrote about the Administration’s belief in the use of torture and why it thought it was necessary to shred parts of the Constitution. Fortunately, last year, we saw a new administration that recognizes that torture is not only wrong but counter-productive to acquiring good information, and that the Constitutional fabric of the United States must be preserved, no many how many threats are made upon it. Unfortunately, at all levels of government, Constitutional violations still exist, and a new year won’t change our determination to bring to light these violations wherever and whenever they occur.

The hope we and this nation had for change we could believe in, and which we still hope will not die, has been diminished by the reality of petty politics, with the “Party of No” and its raucous Teabagger mutation blocking social change for America’s improvement.

We really want to be able to write columns about Americans who take care of each other, about leaders who concentrate upon fixing the social problems. But we know that’s only an ethereal ideal. So, we’ll just have to hope that the waters of social justice wear down, however slowly, the jagged rocks of haughty resistance.

Walter Brasch is a professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University. His most recent book is Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush. He can be reached at brasch@bloomu.edu.

Author’s note: This article was written several days before President Obama’s escalation speech at West Point, when it was first leaked that 30,000-plus troops would be bound for Afghanistan.  I offer this as argument that in less than a year, the Obama presidency is a failure, by his own campaign’s definition.  I do so in the hopes of being presented an argument that convincingly counters the evidence of Obama’s policy trajectories presented here.  And, as you will see, Sotomayor and the stimulus bill do not serve a sufficient counterweight to the general body of policy the Obama Administration has so far evinced.

The psychology of previous investment proscribes humans from responding rationally when conditions warrant or even demand.  If the investment has been heavy enough, the psychology behind the investment will insist that people hold on to it, no matter how badly the investment may tank.  This occurs at all scales.  The American public’s investment in Barack Obama is tanking badly.  The question at this point becomes, how much longer can the policy trend lines continue before the body of his political support collapses altogether?

***

President Obama has failed his mandate.

It’s not a happy thing to have to say.  Many won’t agree, desperately fending off the obvious. The campaign sloganeering, well, it turned out to be just that.  All the worse that so many had hoped otherwise. Obama has been embarrassingly supine in dealing with the know-nothings. The end game of which is what, exactly?  Republicans will suddenly — one day — apprehend their misbegotten ways and cuddle the furry kitten? The GOP and their agents continue the attacks, the lies, the filibusters — a well funded font of rancorous, racist, rancid bullshit.  Palin-Beck in 2012!  That’s the ticket.

The last straw was escalation in Afghanistan.  And didn’t he ever drag out the process of doing what the military told him he should do weeks ago?  Perhaps that was suppose to make him look steely-eyed and circumspect.  One wonders what the point of all this review was meant to reveal when the end product is to tap almost all the troops McChrystal wanted in the first place.  In fact, we almost suspect that McChrystal may have high-balled his numbers as a negotiation entry point.  Then again, maybe not.  Because McChrystal knows he is dealing with a Democrat, one who seems especially smitten with getting along.  Which meant, of course, that Obama would meet McChrystal’s opening bid, with the necessary appearance of due diligence of course, because, well, that’s how Democrats roll.  They are the party of looking like they’re for “the people.”  The “review” at this point looks like mere window dressing.  Whether it was or was not is unimportant.  Certainly, it is unimportant to those on the ground.

If this does go down with plus-30,000 troops, Obama can kiss it goodbye.  Here is the short of it.  One way or another, Afghanistan will be the doom of Obama.  Withdrawal is conventionally seen as political suicide. It matters not that the American and Afghan public would like to see this happen.  Obama will be “ravaged” by foes in Washington.  Just like LBJ fretted.  Once Afghanistan turns more deeply unpopular — more than now — political forces will then turn that against Obama, and it will become his Vietnam.  If this escalation is a cave to military pressure and political considerations (and really, what else could it be?), then Obama may think he is staving off a near term political hit.  In reality, he is only delaying political doom.  And worse, he is consigning to their deaths, who knows how many more thousands, ravaging the land and the lives of millions more.

Tellingly, the left are squabbling about whether Obama is worse than Bush.  Indeed, when one finds oneself in a position of defending any president by trying to demonstrate that they are “not worse than Bush,” or even mentioning, in a subjunctive clause, that Obama is not “worse than Bush,” the admission is plain: failure.

***
Obama has pathetically caved to most every Republican yowl on every domestic bill, only to watch no Republicans even vote for the butchered bill anyway.  The health care botch will be the same [see below].

Obama demands Israel halt building on the West Bank, only to watch Israel approve more building on the West Bank.

Obama shamefully and shamelessly pulled a complete one-eighty on the odious FISA amendment.  To his great pleasure now, as he only balloons the already expansive surveillance state [see below].  On the plus side, he did this before he was president.

Obama has adopted all Bush era legal positions and then some — even asserting sovereign immunity — in warrentless wiretap lawsuits and beyond.

Obama has quietly backed renewal of the worst of the PATRIOT Act provisions, and doing so over the objections of fellow Democrats.

Obama has only escalated, atrociously so given his “Si, se puede” campaign, immigration raids and harassment across the country, the American Apparel episode especially mean-spirited in a time of brutal recession.  Only recently, a janitorial company “quietly let go” many illegal immigrants, a move that is part of an Obama administration plan to  “thin the ranks of illegal immigrants by going after the companies that hire them.”  Now, there’s a plan.  All those homeless nurses and accountants piling up in LA tent cities can go work as janitors now that the illegals have been purged.

Obama has continued to assert the power to conduct extraordinary renditions, or, as the Italian court that convicted 23 Americans (22 CIA) of just such an operation called it, “kidnappings”.

Obama has continued to assert the power to hold detainees indefinitely, without charge.  Apparently, he intends to do so.

Obama has continued to assert the power to conduct military tribunals in lieu of trial.  Apparently, he intends to do so.

Obama has continued to assert the power to spy on Americans.  Apparently, he intends to do so. With sovereign immunity.

Obama has continued to assert the power to torture and abuse detainees secretly, specifically within the confines of US SOC base at Bagram, and a similar facility at Balad Air Base in Iraq.

Obama has adopted a position on the Guantanamo detainees so arbitrarily pendulous, it makes Bush look like a model of sober reason: no trials for anyone. Say what you will about that, but it is consistent.  Obama’s “position” is no position at all.  He’s all over the map.  Particle and wave.  “Whatever works.”  Yes, he really is a Democrat.

Obama will fail to close Guantanamo Bay as a detainee prison by his own deadline and admission.  Obama fired the man who was trying to close it according to Obama’s own agenda [see below].  I predict this may go on for years, as Obama attempts to keep the GOP from swatting him on the issue.  And once again, petty domestic politics drive policy.

Obama has overseen the worsening of conditions at Guantanamo Bay.

Obama has upped the US military footprint in South America by bumping up military presence in Colombia, with the lapdog enthusiasm of a visibly excited Uribe on full display.  Pissing off everyone else, of course, but no matter.  Tensions are bound to escalate beyond those already on the rise.

Obama displayed an unaccountable hypocrisy and equivocation regarding the Honduran coup, even as his administration railed against Tehran for election rigging.  Of course, the one-way outrage is not unaccountable at all, and certainly not when one’s own military base is quietly involved.

Obama has continued to embrace long standing US-resistance to treaties banning landmines and other passive, deadly weapons, weapons that kill thousands of children every year.  This, even as the world observed the 20 year anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the passing of which was notable only for the sole company the United States keeps in refusing ratification of that treaty: Somalia.

Obama has deployed private mercenaries in Somalia.

Obama has only continued the escalation of the Pentagon budget, and emergency off-the-books contingency funds.

Obama has more currently deployed troops in Iraq and Afghanistan than Bush ever did.  And he is about to up that unhappy fact in Afghanistan again.  Certainly, we will be assured there will be a timeline for withdrawal. And certainly, it will be a sham.

Obama is expanding the US “Embassy” in Islamabad to behemoth proportions, in keeping with the model presented to the world in Baghdad.  Pakistanis are fuming at this project, viewing it rightly as a “military and intelligence command outpost.”

Obama has promoted, rather than denounced and fired, the commander of JSOC, which oversaw extreme abuse and torture of detainees.  Under McChrstyal’s command, many subordinates were convicted of such crimes.  No one above of the rank of major was convicted, despite “the documented role of more senior officers and civilian officials in authorizing and then covering up these crimes.”

Obama intends that the “withdrawal” from Iraq will be as every bit as farcical as has always been planned.  Major permanent military bases (and a billion dollar embassy) holding 50-60,000 troops, scattered hither and pointedly yon.  Oil contracts are in the works.

Obama is escalating a global missile defense shield, first actively begun by Reagan, mandated by the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance and then later by the plowed under Project for the New American Century.  The putative suspension of the installations in Poland and Czech Republic was a technical ruse.  There will be missiles and radar in those places, and elsewhere, such Romania and Bulgaria.  Plans are afoot for footprints in Georgia, Azerbaijan and beyond the Caspian.

Obama has escalated pipeline negotiations throughout Central Asia.  This may not sound bad.  Did I mention that Blackwater and JSOC are conducting military operations in Uzbekistan?  No? Not yet?  [see below.]

Obama has escalated the drone war “dramatically” in Pakistan.  Blackwater appears to be fully involved.  Of course, the whole damned debacle is illegal, but no matter.

Obama continues to embrace the employment of Blackwater, which is roaming wild in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, and elsewhere.  Yes, Uzbekistan. In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan

“That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don’t know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan,” he said. “So, did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?” Obama has overseen a skyrocketing forty percent increase in private contractors in Afghanistan between June and September of this year.  There is some change here: no other president has overseen a war employing more private contractor personnel than Obama.  Private contractor personnel now comprise fifty-seven percent of all US personnel in Afghanistan.

Obama has coddled Wall Street beyond anyone’s wildest fears.  He has said not a word that I can discern about the bailout sham.  Is he sad that the Wall Street brethren who dumped vast sums on his meteoric rise to the White House behaved so badly before, during, and after the bailout? His administration is more vested with Wall Street chums than the Bush White House.  A ghastly embarrassment.

Obama got needlessly shabby on Greg Craig.  Another embarrassment.  A gross performance and easily as bad as anything Bush ever did.  But worse, because Craig was pushing Obama’s own agenda and got burned because Obama discovered some scary things that make that ol’ Constitution just as silly as Bush and Cheney always said it was.

Obama is watching key supporteres flee his administration, either forcibly or by choice: personal matters.

Obama is pushing the Congressional Black Caucus and the GOP together in refusing to address the concerns of the CBC regarding financial reform.  “Waters suggested the CBC’s 43 members could vote with the GOP to scuttle a variety of Democratic bills if Obama and Emanuel don’t address what she thinks is a lack of understanding of the CBC’s wide-ranging goals of reducing urban unemployment, home foreclosures and bank failures.” Obama continues to ignore the Don Siegelman miscarriage, and leaves Bush/Rove DoJ hacks in situ in Alabama.  Siegelman claims that there has  been  “no substantial change in the heart of the Department of Justice from the Bush-Rove Department of Justice.”  The judge who oversaw the travesty, Mark Fuller, is friends with all the DoJ Rovian Canarys, and had a personal grudge against Siegleman.  Fuller is in ownership of a defense contracting company that fuels Air Force One.

Obama stood back on health care reform and watched the carnage from the sidelines.  He stood nowhere, for nothing.  Congress made a hash of it, as is their wont.  Who knows what it will actually do, but it will get tens of millions of new customers for the insurance companies.  In all likelihood, the bill will wind up being a shameless corporate crap shoot, without the snake eyes.  The man who once said single payer was the obvious solution, sat on his hands while a vestigial public option was ravage further, and pernicious C Street amendments popped up like ulcerous sores.  Not a word.  He’ll sign anything at this point.

Obama has ramped up the secret surveillance state beyond mortal reckoning.  There are estimates, of course, wherein numbers drop into the $50-100 Billion* bin. Under Obama, the NSA is building a giant secret facility in Utah that will house a Yottabyte archive.  Surveillance state “Fusion Centers” are spreading like wildfire.

Obama has thrown out a trail balloon about cutting NASA’s budget.  Yes, let’s cut that one half of one percent of the federal budget that goes to that wastrel NASA.  All that fancy pants galavantin’ about the solar system, and … learnin’ stuff.  Can’t recall Bush threatening to cut the NASA budget.  He wanted to kill Hubble — the certitude of that “billions of years” talk shook his biblical bones — but at least he wanted to go to Mars or some crazy shit.  Now, NASA are talking to the Chinese about partnering up.  Change!   Not exactly the change I was imagining.

Obama’s glamour is wearing thin.  In fact, it’s threadbare.  The Chinese know it.  He’s a pushover.  In this, the investment cannot let go; he is so damned likable.

That is over.  Obama’s plain failure is obvious.  Unlike the election of 2000, 2008 was a known, vital cast, one the American public knew was important.  No one really thought or knew what the stakes would become in 2000 (except perhaps for those in on the fix).  Not so in 2008.  We all knew it.  The wreckage is everywhere.

The above is not an agenda bent on fixing any of it, but reeks of acquiescence and inertia. It demonstrates that Santos knew, two years ago, what we know now.

Mr. Obama, if this truly is your path for the United States, you have failed your mandate.  Not your Goldman Sachs mandate — clearly not — but the one entrusted to you by the American public, one that is desperate for a change of course.  One that still believed it was actually possible.  This is not that change of course.  Though admittedly persistent, as many a dead president may testify, this course is a dead end.  Instead of doing or even attempting to take on the necessary tasks at hand, you have folded across the board.  Cowardice in the face of potent adversaries? or were you in on this all along?

***
* Let’s just note the institutional proclivities here. Up to a $100 Billion per year into op tech to spy on Americans is unremarkable,  secret in fact, yet $80 Billion per year on health care for American citizens redounds to gross public spectacle, reason dragged through the shit strewn ditch, spat upon by clotpols with guns fully strapped.  Because health care for Americans, well, that’s some dangerous stuff, there.
—————–

Kenneth Anderson, an astronomer who has worked on a number of NASA projects, devotes his scientific training to observations and inferences about current affairs, politics and the media. He blogs at boneheadcompendium.com and can be reached at ken-AT-boneheadcompendium.com

Presidential power has been on a pathway of expansion beyond what the Constitution outlined, and what a government of, by, and for the people requires, since George Washington was president. That expansion, which hit the highway after World War II, got a turbo boost during the co-presidency of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Some of the new powers that those two stole from Congress, the courts, the states, and us the people are being abused less severely in this new age of Obama; others, more so; but far more crucially, in a pattern followed by recent presidencies, all are being maintained, if not expanded, and thus more firmly cemented into place for future presidents to use. Wherever you fall on the political spectrum, you are likely to strongly oppose some major decisions of some future presidents. So it shouldn’t be hard to envision some pretty undesirable consequences that might flow from presidential power that increasingly approaches the absolute.

Our television news and newspapers don’t seem terribly interested in this story, despite scraping its surface with reports on the many “czars” Obama has appointed or lectures on the importance of renewing, or only marginally amending, the PATRIOT Act. And Congress seems, if possible, even less interested. That’s not so surprising, given that we’ve replaced the three branches of government with the two parties, so that at any given time roughly half the members of Congress take as their leader a president who is theoretically supposed to execute the will of Congress. And the other half usually obey their party’s “leaders” in Congress, whose primary interest is in electing one of their own as the next president. Both parties continue to value presidential power itself either for its uses in the present, or for when their candidate is elected. Everyone wants to inherit the imperial presidency, not constrain it.

Under these circumstances, bills to create commissions investigating presidential abuses, to place a judicial check on claims of “state secrets,” limit the use of presidential signing statements, or to allow more than eight members of Congress to be given “security” briefings by the executive branch prove not to be priorities for either party.

These days, the old-fashioned idea of checking executive abuses of existing laws through the issuance of subpoenas or by impeachment is, in Washington, widely considered a scandalous proposition. Congress impeached a judge this year who had groped his employees, but Jay Bybee, who signed secret memos purporting to legalize aggressive war and torture, and who now holds a lifetime seat on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, is protected from such a step by his recent membership in the executive branch (and the displeasure Fox News would express toward his impeachment).

In April, Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked Bybee to testify, and the judge refused, just as many of his former colleagues in the Bush administration had in 2007 and 2008. Leahy may be unwilling to follow up by issuing a subpoena that even the new Department of Justice might refuse to enforce. The current department, for instance, allowed the White House Counsel to negotiate partial compliance with a House Judiciary Committee subpoena by former presidential advisor Karl Rove. And if Leahy is like most members of Congress, he will not even consider the option of using the Capitol Police to enforce a subpoena himself — something that no committee has done in 75 years.

All Power to the President

Any quick survey of the powers the presidency now claims would have to include the power to make laws, the power to make wars, the power to spend money, the power to make treaties, the power to grant immunity for crimes, the power to operate in secrecy, the power to spy without warrants, the power to detain without charge, and the power to torture.

Laws are still made by Congress, but they can be rewritten via signing statements; that is, statements announcing a president’s intention to violate particular sections of the very bill he is signing into law. Neither Congress nor President Obama has thrown out all of Bush’s extensive signing statements that did indeed alter laws. In fact, Obama has announced that his subordinates will review his predecessor’s signing statements only as the need arises.

This policy might please those imagining that the Obama administration will always make the right decision about whether to maintain or reject a Bush-made amendment to a law, but it does nothing to strip the presidency of the power to use the mechanism of the signing statement to re-make or amend or alter new laws. As it happens, Obama has already published his own law-making signing statements.

Presidents now also routinely determine national policy through executive orders and, in doing so, run the country out of the White House rather than through departments headed by officials approved by Congress. They also increasingly dictate a legislative agenda to Congress — and both members of Congress and members of the public generally accept without comment or opposition that inversion of our constitutional system. And then there are the secret memos.

In those secret memos, Bush’s lawyers in the Department of Justice dutifully “legalized” numerous illegal acts, including aggressive war and torture. Despite years of public back-and-forth between the White House and the Congress over the question of whether to ban torture, any act of complicity in torture was already a felony in the U.S. code under the Anti-Torture Act, which enforced the Convention Against Torture signed by President Ronald Reagan. However, the secret Justice Department memos were taken as the final word in legality, no matter what the law said.

Obama has directed the Justice Department not to prosecute those at the highest levels responsible for producing those memos, though he has permitted consideration — whether seriously intended or not — of the possibility of prosecuting a handful of low-ranking staffers who strayed beyond the illegal policies outlined in the memos. Not only does this bestow immunity on the most prominent criminals, reversing the approach — starting at the top — that the U.S. took at the Nuremburg war crimes trials after World War II, but it has the potential to create a terrifying precedent for the future. If a president can use his justice department to legalize a crime simply by asking a lawyer to write a memo, then who can doubt that a president has something approaching absolute power?

Presidents, not Congress, do indeed make wars now, whether or not they consult Jay Bybee’s memo on the subject. They make wars without congressional declarations of war, using instead vague bills to maintain a pretense of congressional involvement — and then they don’t even comply with the terms outlined in those authorizations. Illegal (as well as unconstitutional) as they may be, these wars can be expanded into apparently permanent occupations that include the construction of gigantic military bases from which additional wars may be launched. In the process, mercenaries often take the place of soldiers, and as “private contractors” they then operate even further from congressional oversight or the law.

To invade Iraq, President Bush spent money not appropriated for that purpose. He also gave himself the power to transfer money into “black budgets” beyond the purview of all but a few members of Congress, and so use it for secret tasks signed off on by his officials. Of course, massive secret budgets under the control of the president are nothing new, though they’ve grown through the years. Neither are they constitutional or sustainable.

On October 6th, the leaders of the two parties met with President Obama and, by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s account, let him know that he could end, decrease, maintain, or escalate the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan as he saw fit. The Senate had voted the previous week not to call on war commander Stanley McChrystal for public testimony about that ongoing war until after the president determines his war policy, which of course means a war policy for all of us. Two days later, in a surprising flicker of dissent, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey released a statement suggesting that, contrary to everything he’d said for years, he recognizes that Congress has the power to choose not to fund those wars and thereby to end them.

As his presidency was winding down, George W. Bush concluded an unofficial treaty (though it was called a Status of Forces Agreement) with the government of U.S.-occupied Iraq for three more years of war there without feeling the slightest need for it to be ratified by the Senate. Ever since, the U.S. military has actually violated the terms of that document, while its key commanders continued to publicly state their intention to remain in Iraq beyond the end of 2011, a clear violation of the agreement. In the meantime, this White House has used the treaty as cover for an ongoing illegal occupation of Iraq with, at this point, 120,000 U.S. troops and tens of thousands of private contractors.

Is Congress Broken?

When many feared that Bush might pardon his subordinates for crimes he had himself authorized, the consensus among members of Congress and scholars was that he could, in fact, do such a thing. In some ways what both Bush and Obama have actually done is worse. With a big assist from Congress in the form of bills like the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act, they have worked to grant immunity for crimes without even naming the criminals or revealing what they have done. Obama’s Department of Justice is now arguing, appealing, or re-appealing in various court cases to keep secret the abuses of government officials and corporations involved in torture and warrantless spying. Recently, the Justice Department even argued that, when it comes to denying information to a court or the public, telecommunication corporations must be considered a part of the executive branch of the federal government, and earlier this year the administration threatened the British government with an end to intelligence sharing if it revealed evidence of torture.

President Obama announced that he will only claim the right to hide information from a court on the grounds that important “state secrets” are involved after careful review by lawyers at the Department of Justice. This may be an improvement over the Bush years — not exactly a hard standard to reach — but notably this decision still cedes not an ounce of power to any branch other than the executive, even as Obama’s lawyers make radical “state secrets” claims in attempts to block entire court cases, rather than over particular pieces of information.

While this president is ceding modest amounts of territory claimed by the previous one, he is ceding nothing when it comes to presidential power itself. For example, the president said he would release White House visitor logs (as the Bush administration had not), just not those already recorded, including the ones that held records of the visits of deal-making health insurance executives, nor any future logs that he thinks would endanger “national security.” That offers change of a sort, however modest, but leaves it entirely in the president’s hands to decide which logs to release.

This administration has indeed released some of the secret memos that Bush’s Department of Justice used to justify torture and never shared with the public, but only when compelled by courts. The Justice Department has, in fact, fought fiercely against their release and has redacted significant sections of them before making them public.

Bush claimed for the presidency the power to detain people without charge or legal process — and then used it. Obama stood in front of the U.S. Constitution in the National Archives in Washington and asserted the same power, in violation of the right of habeas corpus found in that torn and tattered document. Director of Central Intelligence Leon Panetta and presidential advisor David Axelrod have similarly made clear that the president still claims the power to engage in “harsh interrogation techniques” but chooses not to use it. Torture in this way has been transformed from a crime into a policy choice, with the intended message apparently being that we can stop torture temporarily by choosing to elect Democrats. This is perilous territory.

Perhaps presidents simply cannot be expected to give back powers gained by the executive branch, but shouldn’t we expect Congress to work to take them back on our behalf? When Alberto Gonzales resigned as attorney general, he did so because a rapidly growing list of members of Congress signed onto a one-sentence bill directing the House Judiciary Committee to investigate possible grounds for his impeachment. Such an approach toward Judge Jay Bybee could begin to restore the power of Congress to assert itself in other areas as well, while pressuring the Justice Department to enforce the law, and potentially making public a great deal of information through the subpoenas involved in any impeachment hearing, which does not permit claims of “executive privilege.” Information subpoenaed in an impeachment hearing must be produced, or the failure to produce it can become another impeachable offense.

Many of us probably consider our current president a much nicer guy than our local congressional representative. That doesn’t change the fact that influencing a president, or even a senator, via grassroots pressure is infinitely more difficult than influencing a member of the House of Representatives.

This is not a new discovery. After all, isn’t this, in part, why the House was given the power of the purse and the power of impeachment? Being closer to the ground, that body is, by its nature, going to be more amenable to democratic pressure and direction. If we want once again to have a real hand in making our nation’s policies, our best shot — admittedly still a distinctly uphill course — is to focus on the person who represents us in the House.

Unfortunately, we have to compel each of them to do something they have come to collectively fear: taking back the power originally bestowed on them and not on behalf of their party, but of their branch of government, of the Constitution to which they’ve sworn an oath, and of the proper sovereigns of this nation: we the people. Otherwise the chief legacy of the Obama years will, like those of his immediate predecessors, be the slide from republic into empire and the continuing growth of an imperial presidency.

David Swanson served as press secretary for Kucinich for President in 2004, runs the AfterDowningStreet.org website, and is the creator of Impeachbybee.org. His new book is Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press). He is now touring the country for the book. You can find out when the tour will be in your town by clicking here.

They started out by immediately blackballing any discussion of real health reform in the form of an expansion of Medicare to cover everyone of every age, which of course would have ended the problem of the uninsured, while cutting the nation’s overall health bill by at least a third, but in the process shutting down the private health insurance business.

Then they chipped away and are at this point on the verge of eliminating any so-called “public option” or government-run health insurance plan to even compete with the private insurance sector.

Finally, in a move as breathtakingly accommodating of the insurance industry as was the multi-trillion-dollar bailout financial bailout of Wall Street’s biggest banks, they proposed to require (on pain of a $3800 fine by the IRS) to require everyone in America to buy a health insurance plan from the private sector—a gift to the industry of some 40-50 million new unwilling customers.

But a combination of public outrage at this compulsory program of insurance and recognition that the inevitable government subsidy of low-income insurance buyers would be humongous has led Congress to backtrack, and start backing away from the mandatory aspect of this plan.

And now the private insurance industry, not satisfied that it has managed to practically dictate the terms of the health reform legislation so fare, and angry that it might not get those 40-50 million new forced customers, is reportedly threatening to turn around and knife the president and the Democratic Congress in the back.

They’re threatening to (gasp!) start running attack ads on the “reform” legislation.

Remember the old “Harry and Louise” ads the industry ran attacking Hillary and Bill Clinton’s health reform proposal back in the early 1990s?  Well, this time, it’ll be Harry and Louise attacking Obamacare.

I can see it now. America’s Health Insurance Plans, the lobby for the insurance industry vultures, will set up some nice-sounding front group with a name like People for a Healthier America, and they’ll fund a new ad campaign like this:

Harry will be sitting at the breakfast table, reading the local paper. He’ll look up from his coffee as Louise is puttering around by the sink.

“This ObamaCare looks like it’s gonna drive up our insurance premiums, hon.”

“What do you mean Harry?”

“Well it says here that they’re not going to force the poor folks to buy insurance, so most of ‘em will probably wait until they get sick and then buy it.”

“Well what’s wrong with that, dear?”

“Nothin’ ‘cept that the law would also prohibit the insurance companies from charging those sick folks higher premiums when they do finally come in to buy insurance.”

“Well, wouldn’t it be unfair to charge them more, when they need it?”

“It might seem that way Louise, but if the insurance company has to take a loss on them, they’re going to make it up by charging us good folks who have insurance more.”

“Oh my god, Harry! We’re already paying $6,000 a year for our insurance. What will our premiums go up to?

“Says here they could go up by another $1000 a year!”

Announcer: Don’t let Congress make you pay for the uninsured. Call your Senators and Representatives and the White House, and tell them to demand that every American be required to buy insurance immediately! This announcement is brought to you by People for a Healthier America.

It’s funny really, to see Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the biggest recipient in Congress of insurance industry money, who has spent the last few months working hand-in-glove with the insurance industry lobbyists to craft a bill to their liking, suddenly accusing his erstwhile financiers of doing a “hatchet job” on his bill. Actually, his bill has been a hatchet job itself on the whole concept of health care reform.

All of this, of course, was entirely predictable. Like HillaryCare before it, ObamaCare has been doomed from the start by its unwillingness to address the basic issue behind America’s twin crisis of health care: lack of access for those with lower incomes, and absurdly high cost for everyone.

What makes it all so pathetic is that America already has an excellent model for delivering quality health care: a single-payer system called Medicare. Everyone in America gets this program, just like in Canada, Germany, France, Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere. The only difference is that in those other countries, people get it from the day they’re born. In America, you have to wait until you are permanently disabled, or until you reach the age of 65.

Far from having to “start from scratch,” as Obama claimed in his last address to Congress in explaining why he was not proposing a single-payer solution despite its obvious success in other countries, solving America’s health crisis by adopting a single-payer system would be a simply matter of taking a system that works, and expanding it to cover everybody.

But of course that would have made the insurance industry furious. They’d have to go back to just selling life insurance and homeowners insurance and car insurance.

And so we can expect a new round of “Harry and Louise,” and ObamaCare will go down in flames.

You have to laugh at these Democrats. Even when they brazenly try to sell out, they get screwed.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

ACORN has long been one of Karl Rove's targets.

In recent days, the Washington Post, the New York Times and other major news outlets have recounted the “troubled” history of the poor people’s advocacy group ACORN, but left out the five-year anti-ACORN campaign led by White House adviser Karl Rove and other Republican operatives.

Dropped down the memory hole is the fact that ACORN was at the center of the so-called “prosecutor-gate” scandal, when the Bush administration pressured U.S. Attorneys to bring indictments over the grassroots group’s voter-registration drives and then fired some prosecutors who resisted what they viewed as a partisan strategy not supported by solid evidence.

The latest furor over ACORN was touched off by conservative filmmaker James E. O’Keefe III and a right-wing columnist who posed as a couple planning to buy a house for use as a brothel and getting advice from a few ACORN employees, rather than being turned away.

The pair filmed their meetings at ACORN offices with a hidden-camera, producing a video that brought to a fever pitch the long-simmering Republican war against ACORN. The video was trumpeted by Fox News and other right-wing news outlets, starting a stampede in the mainstream press and in Congress, where a majority of panicked Democrats joined the herd in approving legislation to strip ACORN of federal funds.

The stampede, which trampled ACORN and its mostly black and Hispanic organizing staff, soon pulled in President Barack Obama, who often has touted his work as a community organizer in his youth. In an interview last Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Obama told host George Stephanopoulos that ACORN “deserves to be investigated.”

Yet, while bending to Republican demands to speak out against a poor people’s group, Obama continued to resist the notion that powerful Republicans from the Bush administration deserved to be investigated for authorizing the use of torture against prisoners in the “war on terror.”

In an interview with CBS’s “Face The Nation,” Obama downplayed the seriousness of an investigation authorized last month by Attorney General Eric Holder into several cases where CIA officers allegedly exceeded Justice Department guidelines during the interrogations.

“I have said consistently that I want to look forward and not backward when it comes to some of the problems that occurred under the previous administration, or when it came to interrogations,” Obama said. “My understanding is it’s not even a criminal investigation at this point.”

Stark Juxtaposition

That juxtaposition is a stark example of how Republicans – aided by the giant megaphone of the right-wing media – continue to keep Democrats on the defensive, while evidence of Republican guilt gets little sustained attention except at a handful of Internet sites.

That pattern holds true even for issues connected to ACORN.

For instance, much less media interest followed the House Judiciary Committee’s August release of Bush administration e-mails related to the role that Rove and other Bush administration officials played in the firings of nine U.S. attorneys amid a Republican effort to target ACORN’s voter- registration work during the 2004 presidential election between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry.

Two of the nine U.S. Attorneys who were fired in 2006 were targeted because they refused to bring criminal charges against individuals affiliated with ACORN. The firing of another U.S. Attorney was due, in large part, to his refusal to convene a grand jury and secure a voter-fraud indictment against individuals, some of who were affiliated with ACORN.

In a May 2, 2005, Rove deputy Scott Jennings sent to another Rove protégé Tim Griffin an e-mail, which said that in the fall of 2004, Bernalillo County’s Republican Sheriff Darren White and Pat Rogers and Mickey Barnett, Republican Party operatives in New Mexico, turned over hundreds of “suspected fraudulent voter registration forms” handled by ACORN workers. The e-mail was also forwarded to Leslie Fahrenkopf, Bush’s associate counsel.

In 2004, New Mexico was considered a swing state in the Bush-Kerry race and Bernalillo County had been targeted by ACORN for a major grassroots effort to register voters, which resulted in about 65,000 newly registered voters, many of who were low-income and minorities who tend to vote for Democrats.

Sheriff White challenged the integrity of some of the names on the voter registration rolls, according to then-New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias in his book, In Justice: Inside  the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration. White held a press conference along with other Republican officials in the county to call attention to the matter.

“The purported examples that were then produced included a woman who had correctly filled out two different registrations with slightly different signatures and another in which a husband, with his wife’s permission, had signed her name to the form,” Iglesias wrote. “It was demanded that I take action against what was perceived as rampant abuse of the system.”

Scant Evidence

Iglesias said he established an election fraud task force in September 2004 and spent more than two months probing claims of widespread voter fraud in his state. In testimony before a Senate committee in 2007, Iglesias said the task force received about 108 complaints of alleged voter fraud through a hotline over the course of about eight weeks.

“Most of the complaints made to the hotline were clearly not prosecutable – citizens would complain of their yard signs being removed from their property and de minimis matters like that,” Iglesias testified.

“Only one case of the over 100 referrals had potential. ACORN had employed a woman to register voters. The evidence showed she registered voters who did not have the legal right to vote. The law, 42 USC 1973 had the maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and a $5,000 fine.

“After personally reviewing the FBI investigative report and speaking to the agent, the prosecutor I had assigned, Mr. [Rumaldo] Armijo, and conferring with [a Justice Department official] I was of the opinion that the case was not provable. I, therefore, did not authorize a prosecution.

“I have subsequently learned that the State of New Mexico did not file any criminal cases as a result of the” election fraud task force.

Iglesias said Republican officials in his state were far less interested in election reforms and more intent on suppressing votes. He wrote in his book that the Justice Department issued a directive to every U.S. Attorney in the country to find and prosecute cases of voter fraud in their states during the height of hotly contested elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006, even though evidence was thin or non-existent.

During this period, ACORN had stepped up its voter registration efforts and boasted in press releases about registering tens of thousands of first-time voters.

Iglesias said in late summer 2002 he received an e-mail from the Justice Department suggesting “in no uncertain terms” that U.S. Attorneys should immediately begin working with local and state election officials “to offer whatever assistance we could in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases.”

Other pressure also came from congressional and state Republicans. In New Mexico, Barnett, Rogers  White were among Republican operatives who complained directly to Rove at the White House and to officials in Bush’s Justice Department that Iglesias would not prosecute ACORN employees. These unhappy Republicans demanded that Iglesias be replaced.

According to a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general released last year, “In a March 2006 e-mail forwarded to [Craig] Donsanto in the [Justice Department's] Public Integrity Section, Rogers complained about voter fraud in New Mexico and added, ‘I have calls in, to the USA [U.S. Attorney] and his main assistant, but they were not much help during the ACORN fraudulent registration debacle last election.”

In June 2006, Rogers sent Iglesias’s Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Rumaldo Armijo an e-mail, which said, “The voter fraud wars continue. Any indictment of the Acorn woman would be appreciated. . . . The ACLU/Wortheim [sic] democrats will turn to the camera and suggest fraud is not an issue, because the USA would have done something by now. Carpe Diem!” [Carpe Diem is translated, “seize the day.”]

Despite positive job reports, Iglesias was fired in December 2006 as part of a purge of nine federal prosecutors who were deemed not “loyal Bushies” or had other supposed shortcomings.

Last August, Rove went on Fox News to downplay his role in Iglesias’s firing, but acknowledged that he did pass on complaints to the Bush Justice Department about “the performance of the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, that he failed to go after ACORN in clear cases of vote fraud…”

Expanded Warfare

But the Republican war against ACORN didn’t stop with Iglesias.

In Missouri, former U.S. Attorney Todd Graves was another federal prosecutor who fell into disfavor with the Bush administration because of alleged inaction on ACORN and voter fraud issues.

Graves would not file criminal charges of voter fraud against four employees of ACORN, according to documents later released by the Justice Department in connection with the fired-prosecutors probe.

Graves also resisted pressure from Bradley Schlozman, head of the Bush Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, to file a lawsuit against Robin Carnahan, Missouri’s Democratic Secretary of State, on charges that Carnahan failed to take action on cases of voter fraud, Graves testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2007.

Graves was forced to resign in March 2006 and was replaced by Schlozman as Missouri’s acting U.S. Attorney. Schlozman then filed the civil suit against Carnahan.

The case was later dismissed by a federal court judge who ruled, “The United States has not shown that any Missouri resident was denied his or her right to vote as a result of deficiencies alleged by the United States. Nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred.”

Schlozman also filed federal criminal charges of voter registration fraud against members of ACORN five days before the November 2006 mid-term elections. Schlozman came under criticism for breaking with longstanding Justice Department policy against bringing voting related charges so close to an election.

Schlozman testified before a Senate committee in 2007 that he received approval to file the voter registration fraud charges from a Justice Department ethics official. He later changed his testimony, was accused of perjury and was the subject of a federal investigation. The Justice Department, however, recently declined to prosecute Schlozman on allegations that he lied to Congress.

Earlier this year, a Justice Department watchdog investigation concluded that Schlozman broke the law by considering political and ideological affiliations in deciding who can serve in the civil rights division, where Schlozman supervised civil rights and voting rights attorneys from 2003 to 2006.

“My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section,” Schlozman said in a 2003 e-mail. “I too get to work with mold spores, but here in Civil Rights, we call them Voting Section attorneys,” he told a friend. Schlozman said, according to a DOJ watchdog report released in January, that it was his desire to rid the DOJ of the “Democrats” and “liberals” because they were “disloyal” and replace them with “real Americans” and “right-thinking Americans.”

Though the Republican war against ACORN contributed to the “prosecutor-gate” scandal, GOP operatives carried the fight into the 2008 presidential campaign seizing on some ACORN employees who apparently were padding their registration numbers by submitting bogus forms with fake names like “Mickey Mouse.”

For its part, ACORN has insisted that its own quality control flagged many of the suspicious registration forms before they were submitted to state officials and that state laws often require outside registration groups to submit all forms regardless of obvious problems.

Independent studies also have shown that phony registrations rarely result in illegally cast ballots because there are so many other safeguards built into the system.

For instance, from October 2002 to September 2005, a total of 70 people were convicted for federal election related crimes, according to figures compiled by the New York Times last year. Only 18 of those were for ineligible voting.

Exaggerating a Problem

That figure — 70 people — appears in a misleading report released July 23, a little more than a month before the ACORN videos were broadcast on Fox News. The report was prepared by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform.

The report – entitled “Is ACORN Intentionally Structured As a Criminal Enterprise?” – cited,  among other material, several dozen published reports from right-wing news organizations, including Fox News’ Glenn Beck, and Breitbart.com, whose proprietor, Andrew Breitbart, worked closely with Beck and the filmmakers of the ACORN video, to demonstrate that the organization has engaged in widespread criminal acts related to voter fraud, tax evasion and racketeering.

An in-depth search on Google and Lexis to support Issa’s claims that all 70 people he cited worked specifically for ACORN and were convicted of crimes does not turn up evidence – other than Issa’s claims – which had gone viral and were picked up by right-wing echo chamber of news organizations, talk radio and bloggers.

The actual conviction numbers Issa cites in his report don’t add up to 70 and those cases weren’t all convictions. Additionally, Issa cites employees who were charged or arrested on suspicion of registering bogus names on voter registration cards but it’s unclear whether they were ever convicted.

According to an Oct. 18, 2008, report in FactCheck.org, “Neither ACORN nor its employees have been found guilty of, or even charged with, casting fraudulent votes,” although “several ACORN canvassers have been found guilty of faking registration forms and others are being investigated. But the evidence that has surfaced so far shows they faked forms to get paid for work they didn’t do, not to stuff ballot boxes.

Indeed, the cases suggest that ACORN was the intended victim of the attempted fraud, in that the phony registration forms were part of an effort by employees to exaggerate their work product.

“No evidence has yet surfaced to show that the ACORN employees who submitted fraudulent registration forms intended to pave the way for illegal voting. Rather, they were trying to get paid by ACORN for doing no work. Dan Satterberg, the Republican prosecuting attorney in King County, Wash., where the largest ACORN case to date was prosecuted, said that the indicted ACORN employees were shirking responsibility, not plotting election fraud.”

The FactCheck.org report was prepared after Republican presidential candidate John McCain jumped on the anti-ACORN bandwagon, citing it at the third presidential debate. He declared ACORN “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

Web Ad

The McCain-Palin campaign put out a web ad titled “ACORN,” which carried the verbal endorsement of McCain.

The ad asked “Who is Barack Obama? A man with ‘a political baptism performed at warp speed.’ Vast ambition. After college, he moved to Chicago. Became a community organizer. There, Obama met Madeleine Talbot, part of the Chicago branch of ACORN. He was so impressive that he was asked to train the ACORN staff.

“What did ACORN in Chicago engage in? Bullying banks. Intimidation tactics. Disruption of business. ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans. The same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we’re in today.

“No wonder Obama’s campaign is trying to distance him from the group, saying, ‘Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN.’ But Obama’s ties to ACORN run long and deep. He taught classes for ACORN. They even endorsed him for President.

“But now ACORN is in trouble.”

The motive of Republicans in escalating the war on ACORN was suggested by a line in Rep. Issa’s report – to delegitimize Obama. On page five, the report states: “Documents provided by former ACORN employees and contained in this report demonstrate the degree to which ACORN and ACORN affiliates organized to elect President Barack Obama in 2008.”

A parallel between today’s ACORN attacks and those during Campaign 2008 is how the major U.S. news media mostly ignored the connections to the “prosecutor-gate” case. Last year, the press focused on anecdotes like Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo’s name showing up on one registration form.

The McCain campaign’s attempt to politicize ACORN – and hype the danger of voter fraud – also paralleled the allegations made by Republicans during the final days of Campaign 2004.

In October 2004, Marc Racicot, chairman of the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign, called on Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry to demand that ACORN and other voter registration groups stop engaging in voter registration fraud. Racicot said these registration efforts would “ultimately paralyze the effective ability of Americans to be able to vote in the next election.”

Media Campaign

Two weeks before the 2004 presidential election, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie and Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett announced the formation of a media campaign to counter what they claimed was voter registration fraud in nine Ohio counties.

“The reports of voter fraud in Ohio are some of the most alarming in the nation,” Gillespie said on Oct. 20, 2004.

In some ways the attacks on ACORN for allegedly signing up phony voters served as a cover for Republican efforts to purge real voters from the voting roles, a tactic that became infamous in the battleground states of Florida and Ohio.

In Florida, another battleground state in the 2004, President Bush’s brother Jeb was governor and the state’s Department of Law launched a statewide probe into voter registration fraud just two weeks before the presidential election. A press release from the Department of Law cited ACORN, which registered more than 212,000 new voters in the state.

In the two weeks before Election 2004, GOP officials raised similar concerns in Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and Pennsylvania.

Now, having finally succeeded in dealing a severe blow to ACORN with the undercover videos, Republicans are trying to expand the stain to Obama. In a speech on the House floor on Thursday, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, calle Obama “the star of ACORN, the lead, chief organizer…He walks with them all the way through.”

King then demanded that every House committee launch an investigation into ACORN and criticized as “a lame little announcement” that the Justice Department will look into the group’s activities.

At least two Democratic lawmakers, however, want to find out how the congressional backlash against ACORN will impact the low-income families and individuals the organization assists.

In a two-page letter sent Wednesday to Daniel Mullhollan, director of the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the investigative arm of Congress, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, requested CRS to “research and issue a comprehensive report concerning proposed and pending Congressional and other activity related” to ACORN.

“Because of the recent charges and countercharges that have been leveled at ACORN and various proposals for action, we believe it is important that CRS conduct a careful and objective analysis of a number of issues concerning ACORN,” the letter says.

Specifically, Conyers and Frank want CRS to provide details about the “pending and proposed [civil, criminal, congressional, and internal] investigations” into ACORN as well as requests for probes by lawmakers; details about the federal funds ACORN has received from various government agencies over the past five years; a description “of all instances, if any where ACORN violated the terms of its federal funding”; and the extent to which ACORN has helped place homeless and low-income families into homes.

Additionally, Conyers and Frank want the report to include details about the impact on elections from phony voter registration forms ACORN employees have filled out, and whether the undercover videos taken earlier this year at a few ACORN offices violated federal and state wiretapping laws.

Lastly, CRS was asked to determine whether the “Defund ACORN Act,” an amendment sponsored by Issa, that passed the House last week and other pieces of legislation aimed at specifically stripping ACORN of federal funds is unconstitutional or “would represent an unlawful bill of attainder.”

The claim that the “Defund ACORN Act” represented a bill-of-attainder violation was mentioned by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-New York, last week after the passage of the amendment.

“The Constitution says that Congress shall never pass a Bill of Attainder,” Nadler said during a floor speech after last week’s vote. “Bills of Attainder, no matter what their form, apply either to a named individual or to easily ascertainable members of a group, to inflict punishment. That’s exactly what this amendment does.

“It may be that ACORN is guilty of various infractions, and, if so, it ought to be vetted, or maybe sanctioned, by the appropriate administrative agency or by the judiciary. Congress must not be in the business of punishing individual organizations or people without trial.”

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka

There Are Really Two Questions:

1) Which Side Are the Democrats On?

2) Which Side Are the Labor Unions On?

It is refreshing to hear the new head of the AFL-CIO, former mineworker and Mineworkers President Richard Trumka, get mad at sell-out Democrats and make a threat not to “support” them next year.

As Trumka pointed out in a talk to the Center for American Progress this week, for years, Democratic politicians, and the Democrats as a Party, have counted on the labor movement to get out the vote of its membership on Election Day, only to turn on workers after getting to Washington, on the issues that really matter, like jobs-killing free trade agreements, the gutting of bankruptcy law and credit law protections, and, most recently, the undermining of needed labor law reform.

Trumka, quoting from a famous Florence Reece song popularized by Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson, said that going forward, Democrats will have to make it clear to labor “Which side are you on?”

But really, that’s only half the question. Florence Reece, in her song, was asking that question of workers themselves. And indeed, the reason Democrats have become such traitors to working class interests in recent decades is that the labor movement itself has not answered Florence Reece’s question resolutely or honestly.

The hard reality is that, despite years of betrayal by Democratic politicians and by the Democratic Party, labor unions have continued year after year to answer the call to rally their ever diminishing members during campaign seasons to go door to door doing the hard work of rallying voters for ever more treacherous candidates, and to do massive “get-out-the-vote” campaigns on Election Day, as they did this past November to assure the election of solid Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and the election of President Barack Obama. Labor has also donated princely sums collected from members to Democratic candidates and to the Democratic National Committee.

And just as predictably, Congressional Democrats, and the new president, have been betraying their labor base. After vowing to pass the Employee Free Choice Act this year, which as written would have ended years of weakening of labor’s right to organize unions by ending the cumbersome requirement for “secret ballot” elections to establish union representation, in favor of just obtaining signed cards supporting a union from a majority of workers, Obama and the Democrats in Congress caved in to pressure from the business lobby, and trashed the bill. If it passes at all in its present form (which is pretty iffy), it will leave secret ballot elections in place—a process which managements have long ago figured out how to delay endlessly, and to subvert, to the point that it is now next to impossible to unionize new workplaces.

It’s fine to say, as Trumka is doing, that labor will no longer support politicians who sell-out labor on its issues, but what good is that really, if those politicians simply replace labor with more money from business interests? It doesn’t help things that once the sell-outs get elected, instead of attacking their betrayals, labor gets sucked into compromises. Just look at health care “reform.” For decades, the labor movement has advocated a single-payer approach, yet when President Obama and the Democrats began putting together a health “reform” package this spring, most of organized labor started backing the pathetic “public option” plan, buying into Obama’s pre-emptive compromise approach. Now health care reform appears to be pretty much a dead letter. The same thing is happening to labor law reform, with labor caving in and backing a weakened version of the EFCA.

The only way to really make Democrats stop these kinds of betrayals is for labor to decide “which side it is on” and to actively oppose those who sell labor out.

Trumka, as head of the AFL-CIO, is in a position to make a fundamental change in labor’s relationship with the Democratic Party.  He should announce plans to encourage the formation of a new labor party, which would run its own candidates for office in key districts. Labor, uniquely, is in a position to do this.  It has the money and the numbers to be able to easily get on the ballot in every state even by as early as next year.

In some states, like New York, parties are able to cross list candidates, so instead of just endorsing a Democratic candidate who seemed to be supportive, a labor party could nominate that person as its own candidate. Votes for the candidate could be made either on the Democratic line, or the labor party line. But to get on the labor party line, a candidate would have to be a genuine labor party candidate. Failure to back labor once in office would mean no more labor party line.

And in states where there is not such cross listing allowed, running candidates on a labor party ticket would be a much bigger threat to sell-out Democrats than just running candidates in the Democratic Primary. And with good candidates, some labor party candidates would certainly win their races, becoming a third force in Congress.

The time is ripe for a labor party. Polls report that more and more people are quitting the Republican and Democratic Parties in disgust. They have no home at this point, and labor party would offer them that home, which would accelerate the decline of the two major parties—basically hollowed out husks that only manage to stand up because they are stuffed with corporate swag.

So what’s the answer President Trumka? Which side are you on?

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story cited Joe Hill as the composer of Which Side Are You On? Thanks to reader Daniel Millstone for pointing out that Florence Reece wrote the song.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and long-time labor writer and activist. A founder of the National Writers Union, he also organized a labor union of food service workers at Sarah Lawrence College and worked on the United Farmworkers Union grape boycott in New York City. He is author of The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work can be found at thiscantbehappening.net

There’s Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some “due process” even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.

I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn’t torture, still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture “if needed,” and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while protecting the corporations and government officials involved.

If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road. And of course, he would have held onto his Secretary of Defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.

Bush would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow through). His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United States never intended to actually leave. He’d surely be maintaining current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan and talking about a new “surge” there. He’d probably also be escalating the campaign he launched late in his second term to use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan’s tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.

If Bush were still “the decider” he’d be employing mercenaries like Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon Group and he might even be expanding the number of private security contractors in Afghanistan. In fact, the whole executive branch would be packed with disreputable corporate executive types. You’d have somebody like John (“May I torture this one some more, please?”) Rizzo still serving, at least for a while, as general counsel at the CIA. The White House and Justice Department would be crawling with corporate cronies, people like John Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones, and Eric Holder. Most of the top prosecutors hired at the Department of Justice for political purposes would still be on the job. And political prisoners, like former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and former top Democratic donor Paul Minor would still be abandoned to their fate.

In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in his second term would still be rolling along — with a similar crowd of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would certainly have been reappointed to run the Fed. And Bush’s third term would have guaranteed that there would be none of the monkeying around with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that the Democrats proposed or promised in their losing presidential campaign. At this point in Bush’s third term, no significant new effort would have begun to restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either.

If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush, the third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn such proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no way of knowing just whom he’d been talking to.

During Bush’s second term, some of the lowest ranking torturers from Abu Ghraib were prosecuted as bad apples, while those officials responsible for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib remained untouched. If the public continued to push for justice for torturers during the early months of Bush’s third term, he would certainly have gone with another bad apple approach, perhaps targeting only low-ranking CIA interrogators and CIA contractors for prosecution. Bush would undoubtedly have decreed that any higher-ups would not be touched, that we should now be looking forward, not backward. And he would thereby have cemented in place the power of presidents to grant immunity for crimes they themselves authorized.

If Bush were in his third term, some of his first and second term secrets might, by now, have been forced out into the open by lawsuits, but what Americans actually read wouldn’t be significantly worse than what we’d already known. What documents saw the light of day would surely have had large portions of their pages redacted, and the vast bulk of documentation that might prove threatening would remain hidden from the public eye. Bush’s lawyers would be fighting in court, with ever grander claims of executive power, to keep his wrongdoing out of sight.

Now, here’s the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama’s first term to date. In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama’s presidency in its first seven months.

Which doesn’t mean there aren’t differences in the two moments. For one thing, Democrats have now joined Republicans in approving expanded presidential powers and even — in the case of wars, military strikes, lawless detention and rendition, warrantless spying, and the obstruction of justice — presidential crimes. In addition, in the new Democratic era of goodwill, peace and justice movements have been strikingly defunded and, in some cases, even shut down. Many progressive groups now, in fact, take their signals from the president and his team, rather than bringing the public’s demands to his doorstep.

If we really were in Bush’s third term, people would be far more active and outraged. There would already be a major push to really end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. Undoubtedly, the Democrats still wouldn’t impeach Bush, especially since they’d be able to vote him out before his fourth term, and surely four more years of him wouldn’t make all that much difference.

This story was originally published on TomDispatch.com.

David Swanson is the author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press, 2009). He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia and served as press secretary for Kucinich for President in 2004. Swanson is just beginning a book tour of 48 cities and hopes to see you on the road. Check out his tour schedule by clicking here.