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The Supreme Court Is All Tied Up |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=15772"><span class="small">Dahlia Lithwick, Slate </span></a>
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Tuesday, 19 April 2016 08:32 |
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Lithwick writes: "A bitter, partisan 4-4 ruling is on the cards over immigration, showing just how broken the system is."
Protesters attend the Fight for Families Rally in front of the Supreme Court of the United States on April 18, 2016, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Kris Connor/Getty Images)
The Supreme Court Is All Tied Up
By Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
19 April 16
 ast week, Sen. Orrin Hatch penned an op-ed suggesting that Democrats were trying to “deceive voters” with disingenuous claims “that the Supreme Court cannot function properly with fewer than nine justices on the bench.” After calling Democrats liars in various colorful ways, he concluded that “[t]he Senate’s determination to wait until after the election to consider a nominee will in no way impede the business of the judicial branch.”
Maybe.
Or maybe the judicial branch is about to get karate chopped in the face by the ugliest political fight of the year. Arguments on Monday in United States v. Texas, the partisan challenge to Obama’s executive actions that would have allowed more than 4 million undocumented immigrants to remain and work in the United States, certainly suggest a 4-4 tie is not just in the cards but also highly likely. Such a ruling would choke both the executive branch and the court, without affording much clarity or direction about the real scope of executive powers. Have fun with all that, Sen. Hatch.
The challenge in this case effectively asks whether President Obama’s 2014 tweaks to Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) and expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) exceed his authority. Obama issued these actions in response to congressional gridlock on immigration reform. The idea was that since Congress will not fund the deportation of the 11 million deportable immigrants, the administration would reserve deportation for dangerous offenders and allow others to temporarily remain, and to legally work.
But Texas and 25 other Republican-led states sued and had the executive actions blocked. The argument was that those actions exceed the president’s legal authority and that Texas suffered injury from them because the state issues drivers’ licenses to the beneficiaries of the program.
Obama supporters had hoped that this latter question—whether Texas’ voluntary granting of drivers’ licenses conferred the state with legal “standing” to come into a courtroom—would be a preferable escape than the prospect of a 4-4 tie. A tie would have the effect of upholding the nationwide injunction issued by a single district-court judge in Texas, until the case gets resolved on the merits. The case can then go back to the lower court and other cases can progress in other states. The clock would eventually run out on DACA. New courts and Congresses and presidents can fail to fix immigration for years to come. Again, how’s that working out for you, Sen. Hatch?
Most of Monday’s arguments suggest a court ready to break tidily 4-4 along party lines. Anthony Kennedy—who authored an important 2012 precedent that clarified that the president has ample executive power in the immigration context—says bluntly, “if the president is setting the policy and the Congress is executing it. That's ?just upside down.” Early on, John Roberts—who was thought at least to be suggestible on the question on whether Texas has standing to bring suit—performs a pile driver on Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. Roberts implies that there’s a legal contradiction in the government’s reply brief when Verrilli refers to undocumented immigrants covered under the executive actions as “lawfully present in the United States” on one page and then says “[a]liens with deferred action are present in violation of the law” less than a page later. “Now that must have been a hard sentence to write,” Roberts jabs.? (Or as Samuel Alito paraphrases: “How is it possible to lawfully work in the United States without lawfully being in the United States? I’m just talking about the English language.”)
Verrilli retorts “I actually had no trouble writing it, Mr. Chief Justice.” But we will spend most of the rest of the day fighting over this phrasing.
Roberts also quotes the president having said in 2013—about a year prior to his decision to expand DACA—that if he expanded DACA he “would be ignoring the law in a way that I think would be very difficult to defend legally.” The chief justice peers down at Verrilli, “What was he talking?about?” Verilli tries to explain that the president was just saying words. It doesn’t have the binding force of law.
The respondent doesn’t have any easier a time with the Supreme Court’s liberal wing than the petitioner has with its conservative side. As was the case in last month’s Texas abortion case, the court’s women ride rough over Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller. Justice Elena Kagan elicits from him the admission that maybe the same policy could stand with the words “lawfully present” removed from the guidelines. She also gets him to admit that maybe a policy in which the Obama Administration simply handed out cards to DAPA–eligible immigrants saying they were low-priority, without actually changing their status, could be permissible. So what’s the difference?
The fact that we are getting bogged down over the words “lawfully present” and whether Texas objects to DACA itself, or just the benefits it confers, is all highlighted when Justice Stephen Breyer launches into what can only be described as SCOTUS spoken-word poetry. It’s quite lovely really. Prufrockian. I feel the need to share it in full, verbatim:
I would like to ask a question:
The only thing I found here is about money,
really.
If there’s something else that’s worrying you,
It’s sort of hidden.
But money is money;
I understand that.
And my question is about standing.
And this is technical, but it’s important to me. ?
Looking at the briefs, awful lot of briefs, senators, both sides. Awful lot of briefs from states, both sides.
Members of Congress. Why?
Because this?has tremendous political valence. Keep that in mind. ?
Now, keeping that in mind, let’s go back to?two old cases which are scarcely mentioned. But old Supreme Court cases never die—
(Laughter.)
Unless, luckily, they’re overruled.
And a few have been. They’re submerged like? icebergs. ?
(Laughter)
I share this poem with you partially because it has the effect of rendering Keller nearly mute. But mainly I share it as a way of showing that this case, which never should have come to the court in the first place, is seemingly making the justices crazy. (Maybe here is where I should add that one of my kids wonders why I still need to bother going to my reporter job at the court if it’s just going to be a tie all the time.)
Toward the very end of an extremely long 90-minute argument, Kennedy signals that maybe challenging these guidelines was not the best tactical way for Texas to proceed with the lawsuit, and other approaches may have been more prudent. This might reflect his wish to find some other way for this suit to come out than a bitter, partisan tie.
There are thousands of protesters on the front plaza and sidewalks before the Supreme Court on Monday, chanting, cheering, and imploring the justices to take a hard look at them as they come—to use Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s words today—“out of the shadows.” The crowds make it clear: Whatever happens next in the marble palace, U.S. v. Texas will cast a serious shadow over the court and the 2016 election.
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US/Saudi Aggression in Yemen Celebrated by Co-Aggressor UAE |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 18 April 2016 14:14 |
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Boardman writes: "After a year in Yemen, the US/Saudi coalition has managed to reduce the region's poorest country to an almost unthinkable condition, where some 20 million Yemenis - about 80% of the population - need humanitarian assistance."
Emiratis welcoming a UAE military convoy as it travels from the Al-Hamra military base to Zayed city after returning from Yemen, on 7 November, 2015. (photo: AFP/HO/WAM)
US/Saudi Aggression in Yemen Celebrated by Co-Aggressor UAE
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
18 April 16
 he National is an English-language publication owned and operated by Abu Dhabi Media, the government-run media organization of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). There is no press freedom in the UAE. Government media report the government point of view, which rarely includes criticism of the government.
On March 26, the first anniversary of the UAE’s unprovoked attack on Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition of mostly Arab states, the UAE’s official media published a document about the carnage in Yemen illustrative of George Orwell’s observation: “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” The truth about the war in Yemen is a largely unreported secret. The UAE officially hides that truth from itself in an editorial in The National (which follows in its entirety, section by section). It begins with the headline:
After a year in Yemen, our resolve is firm
After a year in Yemen, the US/Saudi coalition has managed to reduce the region’s poorest country to an almost unthinkable condition, where some 20 million Yemenis – about 80% of the population – need humanitarian assistance. In a country both under attack and on the verge of mass famine, what does “our resolve is firm” really mean if not continued crimes against humanity? The UAE editorial’s first sentence has no discernible meaning at all:
The start one year ago of Operation Decisive Storm comes as a reminder of the importance of the war in Yemen.
The anniversary of an aggression – that the Saudis proclaimed would be brief and decisive – is important mostly for its irony. An official Saudi press release of March 25, 2015, quoted the Saudi ambassador to the US saying: “The operation will be limited in nature, and designed to protect the people of Yemen and its legitimate government from a takeover by the Houthis. A violent extremist militia.” By then the “legitimate” government of Yemen had fled to the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Not only has more than a year of US/Saudi-led war failed to achieve any significant military success, it has produced collateral damage on a massive scale, making the country of 25 million people perhaps the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. This reality makes a mockery of the UAE editorial's next assertion:
The UAE joined the Saudi-led coalition campaign driven by its commitment and dedication to maintaining security and establishing peace in the region.
This is, almost literally, Orwellian in its “war is peace” mindset. From the start, the US/Saudi aggression has violated international law and committed war crimes against Yemeni civilians, using cluster bombs made in the USA (and sold to the Saudis with US taxpayer subsidies). The recently-released US State Department annual human rights report on Saudi Arabia for 2015 soft-pedals the allies’ slaughter of civilians in Yemen, and omits Saudi-dropped US cluster bombs entirely (perhaps because their lingering impact killing children over years and decades is deucedly hard to assess accurately, whereas profits can be tallied almost immediately). The full despicability of the Obama administration’s position on these inhumanities is revealed in its official unwillingness to speak on the record about the blatant hypocrisy of its morally indefensible defense of the murder of civilians for profit, as reported in The Intercept:
A State Department spokesperson, who would only comment on background, pointed out that the U.S. has called on both sides of the conflict to protect civilians. He also claimed that the use of cluster munitions is not a human rights violation because the United States has not signed the ban on cluster munitions.
The State Department spokesperson did not acknowledge that only one side bombs civilians (in schools, hospitals, markets, and homes) with US-made planes dropping US-made munitions. This follows a years-long US campaign in Yemen to kill civilians with US-made drones (still in use from outside the country).
Yemen is drawn as a coherent state on maps, but most of the Yemeni-Saudi border has never been officially defined. Yemen has an ancient culture in the western part of the country, but it has never been a coherent state. The Saudis and Yemenis have engaged in sporadic, armed conflict for decades. In particular, the Saudis and the Houthis have fought over northwest Yemen and neighboring southwest Saudi Arabia, which is home to a large Houthi population. Security in the region is not directly threatened by the Yemeni civil war. For any Arab state to talk like the UAE of establishing “peace in the region” is fundamentally hilarious.
The UAE has long been a source of support for the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh), as have Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait – all part of the coalition waging war on Yemen. Editorially, the UAE cloaks itself in the mantle of state legitimacy:
The coalition responded to the call by Yemen’s president Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi to restore his internationally recognised government to power.
To call the Hadi government “internationally recognized” is to fudge the reality that the Hadi government has only limited recognition among Yemenis. Hadi came to power through what US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power called, somewhat falsely, the “peaceful, inclusive, and consensus-driven political transition under the leadership of the legitimate President of Yemen, Abdo Rabbo Mansour Hadi.” One problem with this US formulation is that Hadi’s “legitimacy” derives from his being installed as president by an international diplomatic coup, followed by his election in a race in which he was the sole candidate. Essentially, there is no legitimate government of Yemen and has not been for decades at least. The present war of aggression by outside powers intervening in a multifaceted civil war relies for its justification on a variety of dishonest fictions. The Houthis are a sub-group of the Shi’ite Zaidis, who number about eight million in Yemen. The Zaidis governed northwest Yemen for 1,000 years, until 1962. The UAE editorial invents a different historical identity:
Houthi rebels had captured the capital of Sanaa, with the support of Iran and loyalists to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, and were advancing towards the southern city of Aden. On the way, they had killed civilians and destroyed neighbourhoods, leading to a vast humanitarian crisis.
Iran is widely scapegoated as a nefarious influence in Yemen, but there is little or no evidence of Iranian involvement on a scale that could possibly make a difference on the ground in Yemen. Iran’s support of the Houthis, their fellow Shi’ites, has been largely diplomatic, political, and presumably financial. Former president Saleh, who has a wide following of non-Houthis, was deposed in the coup that installed Hadi. When Saleh was president of Yemen, he also fought a Houthi insurrection. While there is little doubt that all sides in the Yemen civil war (including al Qaeda and ISIS) have committed war crimes of various degree, only the US/Saudi coalition has bombed defenseless civilian populations. There is a special deceit in the UAE suggestion that the Houthis in 2015 are the cause of the Yemen humanitarian crisis in 2016. A year of largely indiscriminate bombing by the US/Saudi forces is the more proximate and powerful cause, as is the year-long US/Saudi naval blockade that keeps Yemenis caught in the bomb range while at the same time denying them food, medicine, and other essentials for survival. Nevertheless, according to the UAE editorial, the Houthis – who have suffered attacks by ISIL – are somehow responsible for ISIL attacking coalition forces in the south:
The Houthis’ disregard for Yemen’s security created fertile ground for extremism to thrive, leading to the latest attacks by ISIL that killed 20 people in Aden on Friday.
Whatever “security” Yemen has had in recent years has been largely illusory. The US drone program in Yemen spent years creating insecurity and killing civilians until the US withdrew just ahead of the fall of the Hadi government (president Saleh had also sanctioned the lethal US military presence in Yemen). And why was the US there? Because Yemen was already “fertile ground for extremism,” in particular AQAP, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which now controls roughly half of Yemen’s southern coast, about 370 miles including the port city of Mukalla, with a 500,000 population. The effective allies in the US/Saudi war on the Houthis include not only the UAE and other coalition members, but also al Qaeda and ISIS – not in the sense that these “allies” share the same goals, but in the sense that the US/Saudi genocidal obsession with the Houthis has allowed and helped both ISIS and especially al Qaeda to expand and solidify positions in Yemen.
All the same, the UAE tries to blame the ISIL (ISIS) suicide bomb attacks in Aden on March 14, 2016, on the Houthis, when Aden is more or less under the military control of the Hadi government. Saudi and UAE forces have been deployed to Aden at least since July 2015, in limited numbers, to protect the Hadi government. The UAE has also secretly deployed hundreds of Colombian mercenary soldiers to Yemen, along with other mercenaries from Panama, El Salvador, and Chile, frequently commanded by Australians. During this same time period, neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE deployed any troops to fight ISIS in Syria. UAE troop strength in Yemen reportedly peaked in the fall of 2015 at about 5,000 troops of one nationality or another. Currently the UAE is estimated to have about 2,500 troops in Yemen as well as other deployments in Libya and Afghanistan. The UAE, with a population of about 6 million, has a military of some 65,000 active frontline personnel.
The UAE’s editorial summary of its year of war-making in Yemen relies on an imaginary threat of a wider war that would somehow have magically emerged from the possibility that the Houthis might secure their own country, or just part of it:
The precarious situation last year required swift intervention to guard against a wider conflict in the region. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Cooperation Council allies, including the UAE, realised that the security of Yemen was critical for the Arabian Peninsula at large and that a military operation would be required. Iran, which has a history of meddling in regional affairs, has been backing the Shiite Houthi group to fulfil its own nefarious agenda of expanding its footprint in the Middle East. Quite simply, unless we had taken firm action, our security would have been at risk. This has come at a great cost, including the lives of more than 80 UAE martyrs.
More than a year after collaborating in an aggressive war against Yemen, the UAE can cite no credible or rational or legal basis for joining the attack – unless “a nefarious agenda” turns out to be an obscure casus belli under international law. Worse, the UAE doesn’t even acknowledge, much less try to justify, the criminal brutality of its war.
This criminal brutality has been documented over and over by non-governmental organizations. Most recently, on April 7, Human Rights Watch issued a report centered on the war crime of bombing a civilian market, killing 97 civilians, 25 of them children. This is no isolated incident. The responsibility and guilt for these atrocities extends to those who sell the weapons as well as those who use them. As Human Rights Watch reported in part:
Since March 26, 2015, the UN and nongovernmental organizations have documented numerous airstrikes by coalition forces that violate the laws of war. The UN Panel of Experts on Yemen, established under UN Security Council Resolution 2140 (2013), in a report made public on January 26, “documented 119 coalition sorties relating to violations” of the laws of war.
Human Rights Watch has documented 36 unlawful airstrikes – some of which may amount to war crimes – which have killed at least 550 civilians. Human Rights Watch has also documented 15 attacks in which internationally banned cluster munitions were used in or near cities and villages, wounding or killing civilians…. The coalition has used at least six types of cluster munitions, three delivered by air-dropped bombs and three by ground-launched rockets….
None of these war crimes could possibly be committed by the Houthis and their allies, since they have no air force. Whatever the atrocities committed by Houthis, Saleh’s forces, or others, the humanitarian suffering in Yemen is overwhelmingly the responsibility of the US/Saudi coalition, however the UAE editorial may spin it:
The UAE has also contributed greatly to humanitarian efforts in Yemen, especially as Operation Restoring Hope got under way. More than Dh1.6 billion has been spent on infrastructure and aid programmes to provide our brothers and sisters there with electricity, food, health services, water, sanitation, fuel and transport. We will continue to help the civilian population. Of course, the ultimate goal is a political solution that restores the legitimate government.
In late April a year ago, the Saudis announced that Operation Decisive Storm was over and had achieved its goals. Saudis also announced the beginning of Operation Restoring Hope, which included airstrikes and other military actions, as well as some relief missions.
The claim that the UAE has spent more than 1.6 billion Dirham ($436 million) in and on Yemen is misleading. In 2015, the UAE apparently contributed that amount to United Nations humanitarian programs in Yemen, an amount exceeded only by Saudi Arabia. A contribution in the hundreds of millions of dollars appears generous, but represents only a couple of days of the cost of the war. Saudi Arabia is reportedly picking up most of the cost of the war: $200 million per day ($6 billion per month).
Joining a military campaign is never an easy decision to make, but in this case it was a necessary one. As the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Dr Anwar Gargash, said on Friday, the UAE is more powerful today with the sacrifice of its martyrs, and history will remember the important role Operation Decisive Storm has played in drawing “a line between acceptance and submission, and determination and will.”
So ends the official UAE version of its Yemen adventure, a version that imagines with complete falsity that the Houthi rebellion somehow put the UAE under threat of having to accept and submit. Accept and submit to what? The Houthi rebellion was a thousand miles from the UAE and has yet to go beyond Yemeni borders (except for the sporadic fighting along the Saudi border in the northwest). In reality, the US/Saudi coalition has long demanded that the Houthis accept and submit to domination by their Sunni enemies of a thousand years. Now, in mid-April 2015, an open-ended ceasefire of sorts is settling over Yemen, with the Houthis still in control of much of the country, and the Saudis continuing to bomb at will. Ironically, if anyone has so far shown true determination and will, it is the Houthis, in their resistance to a ruthless and relentless international coalition.
As for “joining a military campaign,” which the UAE officially says is “never an easy decision to make,” the UAE has apparently managed the difficult choice once again. Now the UAE has reportedly asked the US for significant increases in military support in order to escalate the war in Yemen against AQAP, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Officials in the US and the UAE refuse to comment on the report, which would be an expansion of fighting long under way. According to Iranian Press TV, tensions between Saudi Arabia and the UAE emerged after the UAE withdrew large numbers of troops following defeats in late 2015, leading to a recent plan by the Saudis to replace UAE troops with Jordanians.
On April 15, despite the five-day old truce, US drone strikes and US-made apache helicopters attacked the city of al-Houta, near Aden in south Yemen. Coalition officials said al Qaeda forces had withdrawn and the government controlled the city, with five soldiers reportedly killed in an operation that took four hours.
The ceasefire that started April 10 has continued to remain in effect around most of the country, despite some violations. In the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, more than 100 miles north of al-Houta and still under Houthi control, tens of thousands of demonstrators turned out on April 15 for peaceful protest against continued airstrikes by the US/Saudi coalition.
The UN special envoy leading the peace talks scheduled to begin in Kuwait says peace has never been as close as it is today. Those talks include only “government” and “rebel” representatives. Most of the belligerents, including the US/Saudi coalition, al Qaeda, and ISIS, will not be taking part.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: Why Can't The Nation & the Left Deal With Election Theft? |
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Monday, 18 April 2016 10:50 |
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Excerpt: "There is no way to verify the official tally on the electronic machines on which the majority of Americans will vote this fall. Nearly all the machines are a decade old, most are controlled by a single company (ES&S, owned by Warren Buffett) and the courts have ruled that the software is proprietary, making the vote counts beyond public scrutiny. In fact, they are beyond all independent monitoring altogether."
Ohio voters cast their ballots at the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Cincinnati. (photo: John Sommers II/Getty Images)
Why Can't The Nation & the Left Deal With Election Theft?
By Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
18 April 16
here are two things we all need to know about the upcoming 2016 election:
- Millions of likely Democratic voters have already been stripped from the voter rolls in critical states like Ohio. The key reporting on this has been done by the great Greg Palast, who has shown that a computer program coordinated by the Republican secretary of state of Kansas is being used in some two dozen states to steal from a substantial percentage of the citizenry their right to vote. The raw numbers are high enough that they could have a significant impact on the presidential, US Senate, House and many other elections this fall. The ACLU has now sued Jon Husted, Ohio’s secretary of state, over the stripping of two million citizens from Ohio's voter rolls.
- There is no way to verify the official tally on the electronic machines on which the majority of Americans will vote this fall. Nearly all the machines are a decade old, most are controlled by a single company (ES&S, owned by Warren Buffett) and the courts have ruled that the software is proprietary, making the vote counts beyond public scrutiny. In fact, they are beyond all independent monitoring altogether. In many key swing states (including Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Arizona) GOP governors and secretaries of state will have a free hand to flip the vote count to whatever they want it to be without detection or accountability. This could turn control of our government over to the GOP come November, as it did in 2000 and 2004.
These two critical markers of the upcoming national election are at center stage in our compendium The Flip & Strip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows and Electronic Election Theft (www.freepress.org / www.solartopia.org), which we’ll be publishing at the end of April.
For some reason many on the left have had a hard time accepting these realities. But they’re in fact far more critical than the question of who will make the better Democratic candidate.
In the interim, the usually solid Josh Holland has published a piece at The Nation with which we must take issue. It challenges writings that have put forward the idea that Hillary Clinton might be stealing the primaries from Bernie Sanders.
To avoid the circular firing squad in which the left indulges every election year, we should make it clear that we are both members of the Green Party. We prefer Bernie to Hillary, but like Jill Stein most of all. We hope Bernie at some point will establish a substantial string of grassroots training camps so the thousands of highly active young people who are supporting him will convert those energies to great long-term community organizing.
We are most concerned about the possibility of a GOP president come November. (For what it’s worth, we currently lay the highest odds of that nominee being the absolutely terrifying Paul Ryan. Ryan has said he won’t campaign for the nomination, but he has NOT said he’ll refuse it at a convention where he’ll be holding the gavel. His pockets will be stuffed with Koch cash. Enough said.)
We plead guilty to writing a piece at Reader Supported News pointing out that the exit polls show Bernie doing far better than the official vote count. Josh dismisses the reliability of exit polls, along with our mention of those in Germany. Suffice it to say that exit polling is the most reliable way we have of monitoring the vote count. In Germany they are usually within 1% of the official tally.
Here they are corrupted after the original compilations. They’re generally post-rigged to conform to the final official vote count, which is often pre-rigged. What matters is the original raw data, which we feel after much study is the gold standard for knowing how the public actually voted.
Of course that data can be messed with along the way. But at this point it’s the best we’ve got. And the original data can be hard to get. When statistician Ron Baiman requested original data from big-time pollster Warren Mitofsky (since deceased) Mitofsky told to him to “go fuck yourself.”
For some reason Josh drags “conspiracy theory” into the mix, with a lengthy soliloquy on 9/11. Neither of us writes about 9/11, though we know plenty of people who do. We find much of the official story not credible, but that’s about it at this point.
However, history warns us to be discerning about so-called conspiracy theories. Josh paints them all with a broad brush when he says they “tend to fall apart under the weight of their own internal illogic.”
But at the risk of rolling some eyeballs, here are (briefly) five that have proved indisputably true: Spain did NOT torpedo the battleship Maine in 1898, a false charge the led to a terrible war (the US Navy has confirmed the Maine blew up from the inside); the Lusitania WAS carrying munitions in 1915, as Germany argued; the Gulf of Tonkin incident NEVER happened, as confirmed by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara; Richard Nixon DID treasonably subvert Vietnam peace talks in 1968; and there were NO WMDs in Iraq.
Maybe we can leave the Mexican War; Pearl Harbor; the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK; and the “October Surprise” timing of the release of hostages from Iran in 1980-1981, etc., for another discussion.
About the elections of 2000 and 2004, we are way beyond conspiracy theory. That the voter rolls were stripped in numbers exceeding 90,000 throughout Florida 2000, and the vote count electronically flipped in Volusia County at the key moment, are simply beyond dispute. So is the reality that had the Supreme Court not stopped the recount, Gore would have won.
In Ohio 2004, it’s also beyond dispute that more than 300,000 voters were stripped from the registration rolls from mostly Democratic urban areas, and that the vote count was flipped by 6.7% from Kerry to Bush between 12:20 and 2 a.m. on machines in a basement in Chattanooga where the servers for Karl Rove and the Republican National Committee also resided. Thousands of Ohioans were deliberately robbed of their vote with the stripping of precincts and denial of voting machines and back-up paper ballots in African-American and student strongholds. In an election with an official victory margin of 118,775, more than 250,000 votes remain uncounted to this day. Thousands of provisional ballots were also pitched in the trash, as they already have been in this primary season, and will be again in November.
Imagine a world in which, instead of George W. Bush, Al Gore had been inaugurated as the rightfully elected president in 2001, or John Kerry in 2005. It’s easy if you open your eyes to what actually happened in those elections, and terrifying if you think about what could happen this year.
For some reason, Josh also takes us into the purported mind of a Hillary operative who would never think of rigging a primary election because she was winning anyway.
This a bit hard to follow. But let’s just say that the exit polls have indicated Bernie doing better than the official vote count, that (according to Richard Charnin) Bernie won all the hand-counted precincts in Massachusetts but lost all the machine-counted ones, and that all the caucuses have been extremely messy and open to all sorts of manipulation by both sides.
Far more important to say is that the voting machines this fall will be significantly more vulnerable to being flipped than ever before, because they are now nearly all at least ten years old. Some are decrepit enough to have been used to play PacMan or the University of Michigan fight song in public displays.
For us, the most significant event of the primary season has been the 5-hour lines in Arizona and the one-hour lines in Wisconsin. We are less concerned about whether Hillary did this to Bernie than we are worried that these will become the defining moments on the rigged path to a GOP victory in November.
Josh, if you’re reading this, we repeat our invitation to come on our radio shows (http://prn.fm/hosts-harvey-wasserman/ and http://www.talktainmentradio.com/shows/fightback.html).
Meantime, how about a piece on the “strip and flip” realities both the Democrats and the Greens will face come November? Whether it’s Hillary, Bernie, or Jill, as things stand now we are certain to see deliberately engineered long lines that will disenfranchise countless young, African-American. and Hispanic voters. We also know that in certain key swing states, the electronic vote count will come out however the hell the governor wants it to.
To you this may be conspiracy theory. But remember the Maine.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored six books on election integrity, including the upcoming Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows and Electronic Election Theft (www.freepress.org / www.solartopia.org). Bob’s Fitrakis Files are at www.freepress.org. Harvey’s America at the Brink of Rebirth: The Organic Spiral of US History will be out soon at www.solartopia.org.
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Robber Baron Recessions |
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Monday, 18 April 2016 08:40 |
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Krugman writes: "When Verizon workers went on strike last week, they were mainly protesting efforts to outsource work to low-wage, non-union contractors. But they were also angry about the company's unwillingness to invest in its own business."
Paul Krugman. (photo: Getty Images)
Robber Baron Recessions
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
18 April 16
 hen Verizon workers went on strike last week, they were mainly protesting efforts to outsource work to low-wage, non-union contractors. But they were also angry about the company’s unwillingness to invest in its own business. In particular, Verizon has shown a remarkable lack of interest in expanding its Fios high-speed Internet network, despite strong demand.
But why doesn’t Verizon want to invest? Probably because it doesn’t have to: many customers have no place else to go, so the company can treat its broadband business as a cash cow, with no need to spend money on providing better service (or, speaking from personal experience, on maintaining existing service).
And Verizon’s case isn’t unique. In recent years many economists, including people like Larry Summers and yours truly, have come to the conclusion that growing monopoly power is a big problem for the U.S. economy — and not just because it raises profits at the expense of wages. Verizon-type stories, in which lack of competition reduces the incentive to invest, may contribute to persistent economic weakness.
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our years ago, if you had asked me who I would vote for in this presidential election, I would have said Hillary Clinton. However, in the last four years, my views of Hillary have changed and as I dig into her past and notice inconsistencies. She has been flip-flopping her whole life, and while changing opinions isn’t a crime, someone who is running for the presidency should have unwavering consistency in backing up campaign promises.
