WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

 

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

 

The new police brutality law that Congress and the Department of Justice refuse to enforce

On December 18, 2014—in the immediate aftermath of the police killings of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, and Akai Gurley—Congress passed a law entitled the Death In Custody Reporting Act. you can see it here. President Obama signed it… Here's the thing: Our government is refusing to enforce this law. Attorney General Loretta Lynch all but said that the collection of this data, as mandated by law, is a very low priority for her and that she will not push it.  More

 

Now he tells us. . .

Former Fed Chair Bernanke Says Bankers Should Have Been Jailed For ’08 Crash

The former Fed chair told USA Today, “It would have been my preference to have more investigations of individual actions because obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm.” Bernanke did not name any specific individuals he thought should have been prosecuted, though given how intimately familiar he was with the inner-workings of the firms at the center of the 2008 financial crisis, he likely could have.   More

 

Corporate criminals cheat because they don't fear jail time. That must change. Now.

The change we seek is simple: Throw corporate criminals in jail—every time one of them breaks the law, every time one of them commits fraud on the rest of us by cheating or covering up. No more slaps on the wrist. No more getting off with a fine, which is typically levied against the corporation rather than the individual criminal. We need to put the fear of prison time into every suit who is even thinking about cheating… The question we really want percolating in the mind of a would-be corporate lawbreaker is this: If I cheat, am I likely to get caught and end up doing hard time behind bars? The only way to make a real dent in corporate crime is to make sure the conclusion they come to is yes.   More

 

 

The Trans-Pacific Free-Trade Charade

You will hear much about the importance of the TPP for “free trade.” The reality is that this is an agreement to manage its members’ trade and investment relations – and to do so on behalf of each country’s most powerful business lobbies. Make no mistake: It is evident from the main outstanding issues, over which negotiators are still haggling, that the TPP is not about “free” trade… It should surprise no one that America’s international agreements produce managed rather than free trade. That is what happens when the policymaking process is closed to non-business stakeholders – not to mention the people’s elected representatives in Congress.   More

 

Forty years of increased productivity = lower wages

Between 1948 and 1973, productivity and compensation went hand in hand. As productivity increased so did compensation. The gap grew during the turbulent economy of the 1970s, and then in the 1980s the gap increased and there was no looking back as wages went down while productivity went up.   While we are bringing more money home than we were 40 years ago, that money does not have the same buying power. Take the minimum wage: In 1967, the minimum wage was $1.40. Today, the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour—which when adjusted for inflation is 12.1 percent lower than it was in 1967… Measured in 2014 dollars, the median male full-time worker made $50,383 last year against $53,294 in 1973, according to new U.S. Census Bureau figures.   More

 

How Did the Democrats Become Favorites of the Rich?

The gulf between the two parties on socially fraught issues like abortion, immigration, same-sex marriage and voting rights remains vast. On economic issues, however, the Democratic Party has inched closer to the policy positions of conservatives, stepping back from championing the needs of working men and women, of the unemployed and of the so-called underclass. In this respect, the Democratic Party and its elected officials have come to resemble their Republican counterparts far more than the public focus on polarization would lead you to expect… the share of contributions to Democrats from the top 0.01 percent of adults — a much larger share of the population than the Forbes 400 list — has grown from about 7 percent of total campaign contributions in 1980 to more than 25 percent of contributions in 2012. The same pattern is visible among Republicans, where the growth of fundraising dependence on the superrich has been moving along the same trajectory… The practical reality is that the Democratic Party is now structurally disengaged from class-based populism, especially a form of economically redistributive populism that low-to-moderate-income whites would find inviting.   More

 

I wrote this in the Dorchester Reporter four years ago. . .

Obama needs to confront ‘malefactors of great wealth’

http://www.dotnews.com/columns/2011/obama-needs-confront-malefactors-great-wealth

 

*   *   *   *

Tuesday, October 13

Fight for $15 at the Massachusetts State House!

11am @ Massachusetts State House

LEGISLATION TO PROMOTE FAIR WAGES and Better Working Conditions

 

State House Hearings on:

a bill to create a $15 per hour minimum wage at fast food and big box stores;

a bill to ensure fair scheduling for workers;

a bill to raise the tipped minimum wage; and more.

These potential laws are the next step in our campaign fighting for fair wages and worker dignity in dozens of industries. The Fight for $15 has been racking up victories across the country this year, raising wages and improving working conditions from San Francisco to New York. Now it’s our turn to keep the momentum going. Each and every one of these bills has a chance of being passed, and that’s because legislators are responding to the pressure our movement has put on them. Sign up to attend the hearing and keep that pressure on.

 

*   *   *   *

Wednesday, October 14 . . .  JOIN US!

Justice Reinvestment Act
Rally and Public Hearing11am, At the State House in Boston

The Justice Reinvestment Act will improve justice and safety, reduce
incarceration and invest millions of $ to create jobs for struggling families.

The entire Justice Reinvestment Act, S.64/H.1429, will be heard for the first time by the Joint Judiciary Committee. This will include Reducing Certain Low Level Felonies to Misdemeanors; Ending Collateral Sanctions at the RMV;
and Extraordinary Medical Placement (compassionate Release).  Our bill includes a Repeal of Mandatory Minimum Sentences, but that part was heard previously on June 9th.

We hope to capture the excitement and demonstrate the sheer volume of support the June 9th hearing generated. Your involvement is key to the success of ending mass incarceration in our state!  RSVP online HERE

 

*   *   *   *

RAISEUP MASSACHUSETTS is also asking for support for its

Campaign To Fund Our Schools and Transportation

 

New revenue is necessary to improve our public schools, rebuild crumbling roads and bridges, make college affordable, and invest in fast and reliable public transportation.  To move forward, the campaign must gather 64,750 certified signatures in 2015 and get at least 50 votes in the state Legislature in two constitutional conventions before going to the ballot in 2018.

 

What Our Constitutional Amendment Would Do

Our proposed constitutional amendment would create an additional tax of four percentage points on annual income above one million dollars. The new revenue generated by this tax could only be spent on quality public education, affordable public colleges and universities, and for repair and maintenance of roads, bridges, and public transportation. To ensure that the tax continues to apply only to the highest income residents, who have the ability to pay more, the one million dollar threshold would be adjusted each year to reflect cost-of-living
increases.

 

To find out more or to volunteer to work on the Constitutional Amendment Campaign see here.

 

*   *   *   *

NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

It’s a sad state of affairs when Stephen Walt, a highly respectable establishment figure from Harvard, is a rare voice in our country’s political class to argue for the importance of “Peace.”  This comes at a time when our permanent War Party spans the mainstream political spectrum from Republican Neocons to mainly Democratic Liberal Interventionists  -- and whose demands for more US military deployment around the world are endlessly trumpeted in the mainstream media. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton agrees with John McCain and nearly all the major Republican candidates that the US should “do more” in Syria – as if it weren’t glaringly obvious that the problem is that we have been doing too much. 

 

The latest scheme is the newly resurrected idea for a US-imposed “No-Fly Zone” in Syria.  Clinton supports it. Retired General Petraeus supports it. Liberal columnist Nicholas Kristoff is in favor. The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post are all on board. Nobel Peace Prize candidate John Kerry is said to be pushing for it. The idea is even backed, somewhat surprisingly, by one of the Members of Congress representing Dorchester, Stephen Lynch. What’s not to like? Remember how well that idea worked out in Libya! Thankfully, the new Russian presence in Syria probably makes the No-Fly Zone option unworkable, as President Obama seems to understand.

 

Meanwhile, the “Left” and the peace movement are rarely given any voice in our public discourse. Even in the progressive Bernie Sanders campaign, the issue of peace is at best an afterthought or a footnote. Oddly, the only consistent public voices for non-interventionism we are allowed to hear come from Donald Trump and the libertarian fringe of the Republican Party:  A few days ago, Tennessee Republican Rep. Jimmy Duncan made an impassioned plea on the House floor against wading further into the Syria quagmire; and it took Sen. Rand Paul to point out that the proposed No-Fly Zone “could lead to World War III.”  But mainstream Republicans, who always argue that “government is the problem” at home, seem to believe that military intervention by the US government abroad is the universal solution. Many elected Democrats agree with the second assertion.

 

STEPHEN WALT: Give Peace a Chance

The long march to November 2016 is now well underway… But there’s one important concept about which we won’t hear very much: peace.

Oh sure, it will get mentioned to justify additional military spending or even preventive military action — as in the phrase “peace through strength” — and Republican candidates will try to argue that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton endangered world peace from the moment they took office. But I don’t expect to hear any of the candidates say very much about peace itself or explain why they see it as a central objective in and of itself. There isn’t going to be a serious “peace candidate” in this election. Not even Bernie Sanders, whose website tries to reassure us that he’s no sandal-wearing Vermont peacenik… I suspect it is because we mistakenly confuse a desire for peace with weakness and we assume anyone who exhibits a passionate commitment to peace is some sort of “Kumbaya”-singing idealist who just doesn’t understand how the world works and is therefore not tough enough for the Big Job.   More

 

Top U.S. Commander: American Troops Need to Stay in Afghanistan

The U.S. Army general leading the 14,000-strong NATO force in Afghanistan made a plea on Tuesday to leave American forces in Afghanistan longer to train the faltering Afghan security forces, a move that would require President Barack Obama to scrap his December 2016 timeline for withdrawing the last U.S. troops from the country.  Afghans still “cannot handle the fight alone” without American close air support and a special operations counterterrorism force to hit Taliban leadership, Gen. John Campbell told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “It will take time for them to build their human capital” in logistics and managing their forces in the field, meaning Afghan forces will need international assistance “well beyond this year.” Campbell said he has provided the White House a variety of options on troop strength, but he hedged when asked specifically how many of the 9,800 American troops should remain in Afghanistan and for how long.   More

 

Billions From U.S. Fail to Sustain Foreign Forces

With alarming frequency in recent years, thousands of American-trained security forces in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia have collapsed, stalled or defected, calling into question the effectiveness of the tens of billions of dollars spent by the United States on foreign military training programs, as well as a central tenet of the Obama administration’s approach to combating insurgencies… The American military has trained soldiers in scores of countries for decades. But after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that mission jumped in ambition and scale, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the ultimate goal was to replace the large American armies deployed there.  The push to rebuild the Iraqi Army that the United States disbanded after the 2003 invasion had largely succeeded by the time American troops withdrew eight years later. But that $25 billion effort quickly crumbled after the Americans left, when the politicization of the army leadership under Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki eroded the military’s effectiveness at all levels, American officials said.    More

 

One Day After Warning Russia of Civilian Casualties, the U.S. Bombs a Hospital in Afghanistan

This strike on a hospital in Afghanistan comes days after the Saudi-led coalition bombed a wedding in Yemen that killed more than 130 people. After days of silence from the U.S. Government – which has actively participated from the start in the heinous bombing of Yemen – Ambassador Power finally acknowledged the wedding massacre, but treated it like some natural disaster that has nothing to do with the U.S.: “Terrible news from Yemen of killing of innocent civilians & aid workers. Urgently need pol solution to crisis,” she tweeted… The formula by now is clear: bombing whatever countries it wants, justifying it all by reflexively labeling their targets as “terrorists,” and then dishonestly denying or casually dismissing the civilians they slaughter as “collateral damage.” If one were to construct a list of all the countries in the world based on their credibility to condemn Russia for using this exact rhetorical template in Syria, the U.S. would literally be last on that list.    More

 

Why Bombing the Kunduz Hospital Was Probably a War Crime

Hospitals enjoy special status protecting them from deliberate attack, and they are generally filled with protected persons — medical personnel, civilians, and sick or wounded soldiers, enemy as well as friendly — none of whom may be willfully wounded or killed.

“While hospitals can lose that protection if they’re being used for military purposes, the standard is very high,” says James Ross, the legal and policy director at Human Rights Watch. What if the unsubstantiated Afghan claims about Taliban fighters being deployed at the hospital are true? “Even if this were the case it would have not have allowed for the kind of attacks that struck the hospital.”   More

 

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has published a factsheet on the bombing here

 

Afghan Doctor Slaughter Pulls Back Curtain

Senior U.S. military officers have told Dana Priest of the Washington Post that more than 50 percent of U.S. special forces night raids target the wrong person or house. But that didn’t stop President Obama making them a central tactic in his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, boosting the number of night raids from 20 raids in May 2009 to 1,000 per month a year later… Maybe the attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz will force more Americans to confront the ugly reality of the devastating air war our country has waged across half a dozen countries for 14 years.   More

 

Why the U.S. Owns the Rise of Islamic State and the Syria Disaster

By November 2012, al-Qaida’s Syrian franchise, al-Nusra Front, had 6,000 to 10,000 troops—mostly foreign fighters—under its command and was regarded as the most disciplined and effective fighting force in the field. The CIA’s Gulf allies armed brigades that had allied themselves with al-Nusra—or were ready to do so. A Qatari intelligence officer is said to have declared, “I will send weapons to al-Qaeda if it will help” topple Assad.  The CIA officials overseeing the covert operation knew very well what their Sunni allies were doing. After the U.S. shipments from Benghazi stopped in September 2012 because of the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post there, a CIA analysis reminded President Obama that the covert operation in Afghanistan had ended up creating a Frankenstein monster… If the Bush administration destabilized Iraq in order to increase U.S. military presence and power in the Middle East, the Obama administration has countenanced a proxy war that has destabilized and Syria because of his primary concern with consolidating the U.S. alliances with the Saudis and the other Sunni regimes.   More