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Obama Is on a Roll, but Is His Presidency? |
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Tuesday, 07 July 2015 08:09 |
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Taibbi writes: "The right-wing media isn't right about much, not even by accident. But they might have one point: The press sometimes gives President Obama a pass when it shouldn't."
President Obama gives a speech on the Supreme Court's same-sex marriage decision. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Obama Is on a Roll, but Is His Presidency?
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
07 July 15
President Obama is finally having his presidential honeymoon – but it isn't all good news
 he right-wing media isn't right about much, not even by accident. But they might have one point: The press sometimes gives President Obama a pass when it shouldn't.
By almost any measure, Barack Obama is having the best stretch of his presidency.
He recently had big wins on health care and his loathsome trade agreement, sandwiched around a controversial hit-generating use of the n-word, a singing debut and the securing of a surprising bipartisan agreement on the use of peas in guacamole.
This week, he's teeing up a nuclear deal with Iran and a long-overdue effort to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba in what the networks are calling a "legacy-hunting" finale to his big momentum surge. More and more, the coverage of all of these stories has been less about the politics, and more about the angle of Barack Obama's ongoing personal quest for acceptance.
The stories all have an E! network feel to them, as in: Barack Obama whipped the Republicans in court, sealed a deal with Iran, makes America's tastiest guacamole and gets more web hits than Caitlyn Jenner. Can you say en fuego?
"It's fun being Barack Obama again!" blared CNN. “Obama Defies Second Term Slump,” announced The Hill, noting, in classic “Nixon is tanned, rested and ready” fashion, that, “Obama appears more confident and relaxed than ever.”
Donald Trump praised Obama's Charleston speech. The First Lady lit up the celebrity journo world when she released a beefcake shirtless photo of Barack as a young man. The president even rolled sixes as a sports fan, cheerfully chiming in on Jimmy Butler's new deal with his hometown Bulls.
Political reporters have always loved the angle of the White House as Buckingham palace, the first family as royalty. And with each new president there's always unconscious striving in the press corps for an American President-style plotline, in which the chief executive completes a personal psychological journey while in office, emerging at the end of his political trial not only triumphant, but happy.
With this administration, though, the personal journey story has been held in a perpetual state of coitus interruptus because Barack Obama the man has been under constant attack virtually from the moment the polls closed in 2008.
This president has had to take so much guff from the right wing – which has ludicrously painted him as a foreign-born Marxist and deemed him responsible for everything from McKinney to Sandy Hook to Ebola to the Baltimore riots to the (now sooner than expected) Rapture – that the press never got to scratch the Henry V mythmaking itch with this administration. Obama has mostly been too depressed and ashen for the role.
In recent weeks, the fog lifted. Obama didn't just win big in the same Supreme Court that once handed the presidency to George W. Bush. He also scored at a time when the Republican Party is in total shambles.
Things are so bad in the GOP tent that people like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are fleeing toward Obama politically in an attempt to escape the public relations carnage caused by the Republican presidential campaign.
One can only imagine the mood in the RNC offices when the second-leading candidate in the clown car race for the GOP nomination is a man who just described Mexican immigrants as rapists. Being a Republican this month is worse than being a Knicks fan in the Isiah Thomas years.
So Obama is finally enjoying the job. Even if you don't agree with his politics, it's hard not to appreciate that story arc, particularly considering the obvious racial component to the animus toward this president. Some of the world's meanest bigots and jackasses are Obama haters, and watching those people turtle is always quality entertainment.
But the coverage of this president's ongoing and generally sympathetic battle for personal acceptance sometimes distorts the political story. The press is beginning to cover Obama's political successes in value-neutral fashion, as though wins are wins, no matter what they mean.
In its "legacy-hunting" piece, for instance, CNN's Stephen Collinson wrote:
"[Obama's backers] claim big wins in his recall of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq and a nuclear arms reduction deal with Moscow, and they maintain that he repaired U.S. alliances in Europe strained by the Iraq war while reinvigorating U.S. standing in East Asia.
Obama also hunted down Osama bin Laden and employed a ruthless drone campaign and expansive surveillance program that have helped prevent another large-scale terror attack on U.S. soil."
Yikes! You know things have gotten weird when a Democratic White House is selling reporters on the idea that a "ruthless drone campaign" and an "expansive surveillance program" are feathers in their president's cap. If Bush bragged about those things, the streets of Washington would be filled with marchers.
Regarding that "expansive surveillance program": While we fawn over the president's guacamole here at home, people in the rest of the world have lately begun to wonder where they have to go to have a conversation without Barack Obama listening.
Just a few weeks ago, Obama met with Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff in Washington for the first time since news broke via the Snowden documents that the United States had bugged her phone. In the meeting, Obama took her to visit a new statue of Martin Luther King, with whom Rousseff has something in common – he too had his phones tapped by the U.S. government.
Then last week, after hearings in the German parliament about the Obama administration's record of spying on Germany, CNN reported that we not only may have tapped the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but also spied on private media organizations. In the latter case, it seems the CIA pressured German officials to take action against a state aide who was leaking sensitive material to the press, including Der Spiegel.
What kind of leaks? Back in 2005, Der Spiegel ran a damaging exposé about our disgusting extraordinary rendition policies. It also ran a series of stories based on the Wikileaks and Snowden documents, including some ugly stuff about the NSA's ongoing efforts to crack the encryption codes of domestic communications programs like Skype.
Speigel also originally reported on the bugging of Merkel's phone.
It's important to note that none of the magazine's reports compromised national or international security. But all of them were embarrassing to the United States politically. Obama had to take a personal call from an angered Merkel after the cell phone story.
Whatever the legitimate job of our intelligence agencies is, it's certainly not to protect a presidential administration from political embarrassment. Obama himself wrote a directive in 2014 insisting that intelligence collection is done "exclusively where there is a foreign intelligence purpose…and not for any other purposes."
Again, we would have savaged George Bush for this behavior. Back in the Bush years, progressive America was united in its concern about the expansion of the security state. We didn't want the government checking our library cards, much less bugging a politically irksome magazine, mass-collecting cell phone records or teaming up with private corporations to trap Skype transmissions.
But we don't talk about that stuff much now. In fact, even as the Washington press is gearing up early to script the post-mortems on the Obama administration, and more or less announcing that this president is going to get the conquering-Caesar treatment if he brings home the Iran and Cuba deals, the flip side of the Obama legacy is getting less and less ink.
Domestic spying, jailing of whistleblowers, spying on allies, spying on the media, spying for political gain, extralegal murder by flying robots and would-be regulators parachuting out of office straight into high-paying revolving-door jobs (good morning, Eric Holder) – all of these things mysteriously stopped being dealbreakers for American voters under Obama's watch.
There was little uproar this April when an American hostage named Warren Weinstein and an Italian named Giovanni Lo Porto were killed in a drone attack, and all Obama could do was channel Henry Kissinger and trot out the old "mistakes were made" line. (He actually said "deadly mistakes" were made.)
People learned to feel powerless to stop these things in the last eight years. So they stopped worrying about them. Maybe we developed outrage fatigue.
In many ways, the right wing's constant brainless persecution of Barack Obama the person has been self-defeating. They've cried wolf so many times about things like Obama's Trotskyite world domination plans or his efforts to lead U.N. takeovers of Lubbock, Texas, that they've dulled what otherwise might have been widespread concern over genuinely troubling government overreaches, the expansion of the surveillance state being an example.
Moreover they created a narrative about a personally martyred president that changed the way we think about politics. We learned to take sides for or against the all-consuming witch hunt of Obama the man, instead of debating the more prosaic question of what the U.S. government has been up to for the last seven years. Many of those things haven't been good.
This isn't about raining on Barack Obama's long-delayed parade. It's just worth pointing out that covering the human being is different than covering an administration. Getting the two stories confused is almost always a bad thing.
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The Choice Ahead: A Private Health-Insurance Monopoly or a Single Payer |
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Monday, 06 July 2015 13:46 |
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Reich writes: "The Supreme Court's recent blessing of Obamacare has precipitated a rush among the nation's biggest health insurers to consolidate into two or three behemoths."
Robert Reich. (photo: Robert Reich)
The Choice Ahead: A Private Health-Insurance Monopoly or a Single Payer
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
06 July 15
he Supreme Court’s recent blessing of Obamacare has precipitated a rush among the nation’s biggest health insurers to consolidate into two or three behemoths.
The result will be good for their shareholders and executives, but bad for the rest of us – who will pay through the nose for the health insurance we need.
We have another choice, but before I get to it let me give you some background.
Last week, Aetna announced it would spend $35 billion to buy rival Humana in a deal that will create the second-largest health insurer in the nation, with 33 million members.
The combination will claim a large share of the insurance market in many states – 88 percent in Kansas and 58 percent in Iowa, for example.
A week before Aetna’s announcement, Anthem disclosed its $47 billion offer for giant insurer Cigna. If the deal goes through, the combined firm will become the largest health insurer in America.
Meanwhile, middle-sized and small insurers are being gobbled up. Centene just announced a $6.3 billion deal to acquire Health Net. Earlier this year Anthem bought Simply Healthcare Holdings for $800 million.
Executives say these combinations will make their companies more efficient, allowing them to gain economies of scale and squeeze waste out of the system.
This is what big companies always say when they acquire rivals.
Their real purpose is to give the giant health insurers more bargaining leverage over employees, consumers, state regulators, and healthcare providers (which have also been consolidating).
The big health insurers have money to make these acquisitions because their Medicare businesses have been growing and Obamacare is bringing in hundreds of thousands of new customers. They’ve also been cutting payrolls and squeezing more work out of their employees.
This is also why their stock values have skyrocketed. A few months ago the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 Managed Health Care Index hit its highest level in more than twenty years. Since 2010, the biggest for-profit insurers have outperformed the entire S&P 500.
Insurers are seeking rate hikes of 20 to 40 percent for next year because they think they already have enough economic and political clout to get them.
That’s not what they’re telling federal and state regulators, of course. They say rate increases are necessary because people enrolling in Obamacare are sicker than they expected, and they’re losing money.
Remember, this an industry with rising share values and wads of cash for mergers and acquisitions.
It also has enough dough to bestow huge pay packages on its top executives. The CEOs of the five largest for-profit health insurance companies each raked in $10 to $15 million last year.
After the mergers, the biggest insurers will have even larger profits, higher share values, and fatter pay packages for their top brass.
There’s abundant evidence that when health insurers merge, premiums rise. For example, Leemore Dafny, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and her two co-authors, found that after Aetna merged with Prudential HealthCare in 1999, premiums rose 7 percent higher than had the merger not occurred.
The problem isn’t Obamacare. The real problem is the current patchwork of state insurance regulations, insurance commissioners, and federal regulators can’t stop the tidal wave of mergers, or limit the economic and political power of the emerging giants.
Which is why, ultimately, American will have to make a choice.
If we continue in the direction we’re headed we’ll soon have a health insurance system dominated by two or three mammoth for-profit corporations capable of squeezing employees and consumers for all they’re worth – and handing over the profits to their shareholders and executives.
The alternative is a government-run single payer system – such as is in place in almost every other advanced economy – dedicated to lower premiums and better care.
Which do you prefer?
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FOCUS: Today's Civilian Victims in Yemen Will Be Ignored Because US and Its Allies Are Responsible |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29455"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept</span></a>
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Monday, 06 July 2015 11:27 |
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Greenwald writes: "In Fayoush, Yemen this morning, just outside of Aden, 'a massive airstrike' hit a marketplace and killed at least 45 civilians, wounding another 50."
House destroyed by Saudi-led airstrike in Saana. (photo: Hani Mohammed/AP)
Today's Civilian Victims in Yemen Will Be Ignored Because US and Its Allies Are Responsible
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
06 July 15
 n Fayoush, Yemen this morning, just outside of Aden, “a massive airstrike” hit a marketplace and killed at least 45 civilians, wounding another 50. Officials told the AP that “bodies were strewn about following the strike.” The bombing was carried out by what is typically referred to as a “Saudi-led coalition”; it is rarely mentioned in Western media reports that the U.S. is providing very substantial support to this “Saudi-led” war in Yemen, now in its fifth month, which has repeatedly, recklessly killed Yemeni civilians.
Because these deaths of innocents are at the hands of the U.S. government and its despotic allies, it is very predictable how they will be covered in the U.S. None of the victims will be profiled in American media; it’ll be very surprising if any of their names are even mentioned. No major American television outlet will interview their grieving families. Americans will never learn about their extinguished life aspirations, or the children turned into orphans, or the parents who will now bury their infants. There will be no #FayoushStrong Twitter hashtags trending in the U.S. It’ll be like it never happened: blissful ignorance.
This is the pattern that repeats itself over and over. Just see the stone-cold media silence when President Obama, weeks after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, ordered a cruise missile strike in Yemen, complete with cluster bombs, which ended the lives of 35 women and children, none of whose humanity was acknowledged in virtually any Western media reports.
All of that stands in the starkest contrast to the intense victim focus whenever an American or Westerner is killed by an individual Muslim. Indeed, Americans just spent the last week inundated with melodramatic “warnings” from the U.S. government — mindlessly amplified as always by their media — that they faced serious terror on their most sacred day from ISIS monsters: a “threat” that, as usual, proved to be nonexistent.
This media imbalance is a vital propaganda tool. In U.S. media land, Americans are always the victims of violence and terrorism, always menaced and threatened by violent Muslim savages, always targeted for no reason whatsoever other than primitive Islamic barbarism. That mythology is sustained by literally disappearing America’s own victims, pretending they don’t exist, denying their importance through the casual invocation of clichés we’ve been trained to spout (collateral damage) and, most importantly of all, never humanizing them under any circumstances.
This is how the American self-perception as perpetual victim of terrorism, but never its perpetrator, is sustained. It’s also what fuels the belief that They are propagandized but We aren’t. While these deaths will be concealed from the American public, people in that part of the world will hear much about them: just as Americans heard almost nothing about the Al Jazeera journalist imprisoned for years in Guantanamo with no charges, Sami al-Hajj, while he was a cause celebre in the Muslim world, leading Americans to believe that only the Bad Countries, but never Us, imprison journalists. From this latest Yemen bombing and so many like it, the resulting differences in worldviews and perspectives isn’t be because “they” are propagandized, but because “we” are.
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FOCUS: Whining White Southerners |
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Monday, 06 July 2015 10:11 |
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Parry writes: "Some brave white Southerners, including the son of segregationist Strom Thurmond, have spoken out against Confederate symbols like the battle flag, but many whites still react with fury at calls for retiring those symbols and other honors bestowed on Confederate leaders."
Supporters gather for a rally to protest the removal of the flags from the Confederate Memorial Saturday, June 27, 2015, in Montgomery, Alabama. (photo: Julie Bennett/AL.com)
Whining White Southerners
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
06 July 15
Some brave white Southerners, including the son of segregationist Strom Thurmond, have spoken out against Confederate symbols like the battle flag, but many whites still react with fury at calls for retiring those symbols and other honors bestowed on Confederate leaders, writes Robert Parry.
 henever there’s a suggestion that the Confederate battle flag should be retired to museums or that the name of Confederate President Jefferson Davis should be removed from major highways, there comes the predictable accusation that such moves amount to “rewriting our history” – but nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a case of recognizing the real history.
What America needs – perhaps now more than ever – is a serious reexamination of its true history, not the pleasant palliatives offered in textbooks approved by Southern-dominated boards appointed by right-wing politicians. Under such benighted tutelage, popular U.S. history as taught in public schools has become primarily a brainwashing exercise, an ideological foundation for “American exceptionalism,” the jumping-off point for today’s endless wars.
Plus, given America’s continuing racial tensions, it’s particularly important to throw away the rose-colored glasses used to view the issues of slavery and the antebellum South, happy scenes of elegantly dressed white people lounging on the veranda of a stately plantation house, sipping mint juleps while being cooled by fans waved by contented and placid Negroes, a white supremacist’s happiest dream.
A June 24 column by Harold Meyerson cited a recent book — The Half Has Never Been Told by Cornell University history professor Edward Baptist —that explodes the enduring white Southern myth of the kindly and beneficent plantation. Baptist argues that even the word “plantation” should be tossed into the trash bin of historical euphemisms, replaced by the more accurate phrase “slave labor camp,” albeit one with a large, pretty house in the center.
“Torture” is also a word that should apply, Baptist argues, with African-American slaves routinely whipped for falling short of their production quotas. This behavior was not just common among the most ignorant of Southern slaveholders but was a practice employed even by Thomas Jefferson.
According to documents at Monticello, Jefferson had slave boys as young as 10 whipped. In another important book that strips away the excuses employed to ameliorate the evils of slavery, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves by historian Henry Wiencek disclosed a plantation report to Jefferson explaining that his nail factory was doing well because “the small ones” – ages 10, 11 and 12 – were being whipped by overseer, Gabriel Lilly, “for truancy.”
Jefferson and other slaveholders in the older slave states like Virginia, where the soil had become over-farmed and depleted, also found financial salvation in breeding slaves for the newer (and even more brutal) slave states of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
Jefferson even calculated that a fertile female had a higher financial value than a strapping male in the fields, all the better to help him pay for his extravagant lifestyle and cover his mounting debts. (According to Wiencek’s book and many other accounts, Jefferson also personally contributed to the breeding process by imposing himself sexually on his female property.)
The Deep South
Baptist’s book provides an overview of the slave economy as more than 800,000 slaves from the Mid-Atlantic region were sold to the Deep South’s cotton planters who employed even a crueler system than in Virginia and Maryland. Slaves often were forced to travel by foot and in chains and worked under the constant “threat of torture.”
Even after slavery was outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment at the end of the Civil War, Southern whites refused to accept their guilt in the atrocities inflicted on African-Americans. Many whites fancied themselves the victims of “Yankee aggression” as they replaced slavery with another grotesque system, Jim Crow segregation often enforced by lynching blacks.
Around 1920, at the height of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, the Daughters of the Confederacy honored Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who before the war had been a prominent Mississippi slaveholder, by naming major roadways in the South after him, including stretches of Route 1 in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.
That roadway skirted some historic African-American neighborhoods settled by slaves freed by President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Many ex-slaves – escaping the Confederacy – ended up in a refugee camp called Freedman’s Village not far from the current site of the Pentagon.
During the Civil War, the area also was the location of Camp Casey, a training base for U.S. Colored Troops who then marched south to fight to end slavery. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mystery of the Civil War’s Camp Casey.”]
Under orders of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his War Department, captured black Union troops were not to be treated as soldiers but rather as slaves in insurrection, meaning that they could be executed or put into slavery regardless of their pre-war status. In several battles late in the Civil War, surrendering USCT solders were murdered, apparently including some of the soldiers from Camp Casey at the Battle of the Crater.
So, the message of Jefferson Davis Highway was always a warning to African-Americans that they were never too far from the hand of white power. The message of Southern white defiance was repeated in 1964 when Jefferson Davis’s name was added to a stretch of Route 110 near the Pentagon as a Virginian riposte to the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
This fury of white victimhood has been on display again in recent years with the hysterical conspiracy-mongering about President Barack Obama’s birthplace, the Republican Party’s assault on voting rights, the examples of police brutality targeting blacks, and the resurfacing of violent white supremacy as in the nine murders at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Some Brave Southerners
After the Charleston church massacre on June 17, some white politicians did step forward and renounce the South’s long history of racism, slavery and segregation. State Sen. Paul Thurmond, son of longtime segregationist Gov. and Sen. Strom Thurmond, joined in calling for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from South Carolina’s Statehouse grounds.
“I am aware of my heritage, but my appreciation for the things my forebears accomplished to make my life better does not mean that I must believe that they always made the right decisions,” Thurmond said. “And for the life of me, I will never understand how anyone could fight a civil war based in part on the desire to continue the practice of slavery.”
But other white Southerners continued to play the “we’re the real victims here” card or to make up endless excuses for slavery and segregation. Some claimed to be simply standing up for “history” by defending the symbols of the slave South. [For a sample of these attitudes, see comments to Consortiumnews.com’s “Confronting Southern ‘Victimhood.’”]
In Arlington, where I had urged the County Board to petition the state legislature to remove Jefferson Davis’s name from Route 1 and Route 110, there was an angry backlash to the idea from some county residents as well as support from others. One group recommended that, in Virginia, Davis’s name be replaced by the name of African-American tennis player Arthur Ashe, who – unlike Davis – actually came from Virginia.
But resistance to the idea continued. On July 2, Consortiumnews.com’s assistant editor Chelsea Gilmour, who was the author of the article about the training of U.S. Colored Troops at Camp Casey, posted an online petition to change the name of Jefferson Davis Highway to a Facebook group page, “I grew up in Arlington, VA,” which has nearly 13,600 members who mostly share old pictures of Arlington, talk about shops that used to exist, and share memories from their time in Arlington.
However, when the petition was posted, Gilmour said, “Within seconds, a tidal wave of comments began appearing, generally along the lines of: ‘Are you kidding?!,’ … ‘I will not sign this,’ ‘Why are you trying to rewrite history?!,’ … ‘This is the history of Arlington and the South and we can’t change it.’ … Additionally, a number of personal insults were directed towards me. … When [one commenter who had responded ‘Idiot!’ was] asked by another commentor why his previous comments had been so personally disrespectful towards me, he replied, ‘This is an attack on my Arlington, my Virginia, my South!’”
Taking Down a Petition
Then, there were demands that the petition be removed from the Facebook page. “Within 45 minutes of posting the petition, it had been removed by the administrator of the page,” Gilmour said. “The hateful reaction from a county which has always prided itself on being ‘liberal’ and ‘open to diversity’ was surprising and disheartening.”
When another person posted the petition separately, it was immediately removed again.
This hostility and close-mindedness have been characteristics of many white Southerners for generations. Rather than acknowledge the historic evils of slavery and segregation – and do whatever they could to make amends to African-Americans – too many white Southerners and racists from other parts of the United States have wallowed in their own delusional victimhood.
Instead of confronting the real and ugly history, they have devised a fictional one that is reinforced by the many symbols of the Confederacy, from the many statues of Confederate generals to the Confederate battle flag (now waved as an international symbol of white supremacy) to the honors given to Confederate President (and Mississippi slaveholder) Jefferson Davis.
It is also not an affront to history to recognize the evil realities of history. Even in the Soviet Union – after the crimes of Josef Stalin were exposed – the government stripped his name from the city of Stalingrad, despite that city’s enormous historical importance as a turning point of World War II. The renaming of the city was an acknowledgement of a very dark history. But, so too, is the history of American slavery.
When President Barack Obama went to Charleston on June 26 to deliver the eulogy for one of the massacre victims, State Sen. Clementa Pinckney, Obama read and then sang words from the hymn “Amazing Grace.” Why his choice was so appropriate was that the lyrics were written by Englishman John Newton, an Eighteenth Century slave trader — “a wretch like me” — who repented for the evil that he had helped inflict.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.
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ared Bernstein
