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FOCUS | A Less Imperial President |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5903"><span class="small">Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Monday, 12 August 2013 12:01 |
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Tomasky writes: "I think it's pretty remarkable that a president, any president, announced, without absolutely being forced to, a series of steps that relinquish some degree of executive power."
President Barack Obama gestures during his news conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington on, 08/09/13. (photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
A Less Imperial President
By Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
12 August 13
Obama's NSA proposals may not have been broad and sweeping, but when was the last time any president gave up power when he didn't absolutely have to? Not since the presidency became imperial, says Michael Tomasky.
 redictably, everyone is unimpressed by the measures Barack Obama has announced to bring a little ray of transparency to America's surveillance programs. The New York Times editorialized that the president's proposed changes "only tinker around the edges" of our "abusive" surveillance programs. I wouldn't argue that the proposals will fundamentally remake the surveillance state. But nevertheless, I think it's pretty remarkable that a president, any president, announced, without absolutely being forced to, a series of steps that relinquish some degree of executive power. Of course he'll get no credit for that, because civil libertarians tend to be absolutists and other liberals tend to be afraid or even terrified of their wrath. Why this is so tells us some important things about contemporary liberalism.
First, what Obama said. Don't get me wrong. I'm hardly jumping up and down that the National Security Agency is going to have a full-time civil liberties and privacy officer. But two of Obama's other recommendations might have some bite. Reforming Section 215 of the Patriot Act, depending on the definition of the word "reform" that Congress settles on-frightening, as we know-is potentially a big deal. Section 215, which vastly expanded the FBI's ability to spy on American citizens in a number of ways, has long been the section of the act, or at least one of the sections, of greatest concern to the civil-liberties lobby. It's under 215 that the government is collecting all those telephone records. Obama wasn't terribly specific in his remarks on Friday; he just said he'll work with Congress "to put in place greater oversight, greater transparency, and constraints on the use of this authority." Even so, it would be the first narrowing of the Patriot Act since its passage.
The idea for having an adversarial presence at Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court hearings is potentially even a bigger deal. A special court system set up in the United States of America in which the judge hears only the government's side of the story, FISC has always been a case where a bright line was crossed. It's. There's just no way that's acceptable, and correcting it would end a blatantly (to me) unconstitutional practice.
As I was listening to these remarks, I kept thinking to myself about this paradox. No, they were not "bold and sweeping" proposals. At the same time, it sure seemed to me like this was the first time in my adult life I'd ever heard a sitting president propose checks on his administration that he didn't have to offer. And Obama didn't have to offer these. He was facing some political pressure, but polls have been pretty consistent in showing that a solid majority of the American public comes down on the side of what we might call controlled surveillance.
There was no mortal threat to his presidency here. Yet even so, he took a couple steps away from the imperial presidency. I think that's the first time since the presidency became imperial-after World War II, more or less-such a thing has happened. And Obama was, as he claimed Friday, headed down this course before the Snowden leaks. Those began on June 5. But on May 23, he gave a speech at the National Defense University in which he foreshadowed the moves he just announced. Combine all this with John Kerry's recent announcement that we have a plan for ending drone strikes in Pakistan, and you might have thought liberals would be cheering.
I suppose some liberals are. I am. But not civil libertarians. With them, it's all or nothing. If you're not signed on to the whole program, you might as well be Joe McCarthy. Environmentalists and tax reformers and campaigners for the poor and those fighting for greater consumer protections and even civil rights advocates understand that the political process is about compromise and getting what you can, and they acknowledge that there are such things in this world as competing compelling interests. But you are well advised not to try to mention such things to a civil libertarian.
The reason for their intransigence is that we (liberals) are trained to think of these liberties as being absolute and utterly nonnegotiable. But our history and our civic life shows that they are negotiated all the time. For all the "when one person loses his civil liberties, we all lose them" rhetoric, historically that's simply not the case. As with anything, there are degrees. The distinguished civil liberties lawyer Burt Neuborne wrote a fantastic piece about all this in The American Prospect in 2005, observing: "When I was national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union during the Reagan years and the board had sent me out to argue my umpteenth crèche case, I wrote a memo saying that I didn't take the job to stamp out the Virgin Mary."
Yes, crèche displays and telephone data mining are different things. But both somehow elicit the same reaction from certain liberal quarters-outrage at this blatant violation, etc., etc. It's a reaction that reflects an overly legalistic liberalism equating legal wins with factual and moral ones. But here too, history speaks: they aren't the same thing. Schools were legally desegregated in 1954. They were factually and morally desegregated in much of the South about 20 years later, partially through the courts and partially through moral suasion that changed public opinion. Obama has public opinion to think about. And of course he has keeping the country safe to worry about, and no one at the ACLU is sitting in on those intel briefings and learning the things the president is learning every day about threats to the nation, and no one at the ACLU will be responsible if our wall of security is breached. Obama is responsible, and I think mere willingness of the man in that position to have this conversation, let alone take some concrete steps, does him enormous credit.
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FOCUS | Four Questions for Fed Chair Candidates |
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Monday, 12 August 2013 10:29 |
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Sanders and Warren write: "While the largest financial institutions and corporations in this country have been bailed out and are now back to making enormous profits and rewarding their executives with outsized compensation packages, recovery hasn't gone so well for the rest of America."
Elizabeth Warren at a campaign rally in Auburn, Massachusetts, 11/02/12. (photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Four Questions for Fed Chair Candidates
By Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Reader Supported News
12 August 13
 he decisions made by the next chair of the Federal Reserve will have a powerful impact on the economic well-being of every person in America.
While the largest financial institutions and corporations in this country have been bailed out and are now back to making enormous profits and rewarding their executives with outsized compensation packages, recovery hasn't gone so well for the rest of America. Middle class families have continued to lose ground economically, the number of Americans living in poverty is near an all-time high, and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider.
The next Fed chair will have enormous power and influence over our entire financial system and the direction of the economy. The Fed is responsible not only for our country's monetary policy, but it is also a key regulator of financial institutions. In our view, the president's nominee for Fed chair must be committed to improving the lives of working Americans who are still struggling through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
To that end, we think any Fed chair nominee should be able to answer the following four questions:
Question 1: Do you believe that the Fed's top priority should be to fulfill its full employment mandate?
The U.S. continues to face a major crisis in unemployment. When Wall Street was on the verge of collapse, the Fed acted aggressively and with a fierce sense of urgency to save the financial system. Will you act with the same sense of urgency to combat the unemployment crisis in America today, and will you make clear what specific actions you will take? What rate do you think is acceptable and should be the Fed's target?
Question 2: If you were to be confirmed as chair of the Fed, would you work to break up "too-big-to-fail" financial institutions so that they could no longer pose a catastrophic risk to the economy?
The financial institutions that are too-big-to-fail played a major role in undermining the American economy and driving our country into a severe recession in 2008. Yet today the four biggest banks are 30 percent bigger than they were then, and the six largest financial institutions now have assets equivalent to two-thirds of our GDP. By any measure, "Too Big" has gotten bigger. The risk they pose is clear. As Richard Fisher, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said last year, "institutions that amplified and prolonged the recent financial crisis remain a hindrance to full economic recovery and to the very ideal of American capitalism ... Achieving an economy relatively free from financial crises requires us to have the fortitude to break up the giant banks."
Question 3: Do you believe that the deregulation of Wall Street, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and exempting derivatives from regulation, significantly contributed to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?
The next chair of the Federal Reserve will play an important leadership role in dealing with too-big-to-fail banks and in shaping the rules that govern them, so it is important to assess the Fed chair's views toward deregulation, particularly toward the massive deregulations of the 1980's and 1990's that permitted the TBTF banks to take on huge risks. There is a lot more work to do in implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act and to minimize the risk of future crises, and the Fed will play a critical leadership role.
Question 4: What would you do to divert the $2 trillion in excess reserves that financial institutions have parked at the Fed into more productive purposes, such as helping small- and medium-sized businesses create jobs?
Five years ago, the Fed bailed out the largest financial institutions in the country but put no restrictions on the funds to make sure that lending increased for small businesses. At the same time, the Fed began paying interest on excess reserves, and the excess reserves parked at the Fed have skyrocketed as a result rather than going into productive lending. The reality is that, despite promises and intentions that the Fed's efforts would help support small businesses, much more work needs to get done to move money from Wall Street to Main Street.
The next Fed chair will have an opportunity to get our economy back on track and to help rebuild America's middle class. But that will require the right temperament and a willingness to take on Wall Street CEOs when necessary. It is critical that the next Fed chair make a genuine, long-term commitment to supporting those who don't have armies of lobbyists and lawyers to advance their interests in Washington -- working and middle-class families.
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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A Pathetic Day for the GOP |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27138"><span class="small">Brian Beutler, Salon</span></a>
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Monday, 12 August 2013 08:01 |
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Beutler reports: "Generally speaking, it's a bad idea to trash talk your boss and your company...If you trash talk your own candidate for public office and then get caught, you should probably resign."
Sen. Mitch McConnell. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
A Pathetic Day for the GOP
By Brian Beutler, Salon
12 August 13
Mitch McConnell is humiliated by a staffer, but can't fire him -- because the Tea Party has more power than he does.
 enerally speaking, it's a bad idea to trash talk your boss and your company - particularly to someone who might expose your true feelings to the public. It's a particularly bad idea to trash talk your boss and your company if you work in public relations and your boss is the company.
This is what kids these days call a "pro tip."
If you trash talk your own candidate for public office and then get caught, you should probably resign. Or at least expect to be let go. It's like the political equivalent of insubordination. If you somehow manage to keep your job, it says more about your employer than it does about you.
Which brings us to Mitch McConnell and his campaign manager Jesse Benton - a Ron Paul acolyte whom McConnell recruited ahead of his reelection campaign to shore up his weakened credibility with the right.
It was revealed on Thursday that six months ago Benton was surreptitiously recorded admitting what everyone assumed - that he was "sorta holdin' [his] nose for two years," to work for a guy whose last major ploy in Kentucky politics was a failed attempt to keep Ron Paul's son from becoming a senator. The marriage was conceived as one of convenience and political junkies didn't need Benton's confession to know that was the case.
But copping to it changes things. There's a difference between the general sense that President Obama had strained relations with military leadership in 2009, and Stan McChrystal emasculating his administration to a Rolling Stone reporter. We know how that story ended.
That Benton still has a job (another top McConnell aide told the New York Times he'd "absolutely" keep it) and the campaign is making light of the remark (see the cheesy picture above) is an implicit admission of McConnell's political weakness.
This isn't like the time Marco Rubio developed dry mouth during his State of the Union response speech and took an inelegant swig of water on live television. (That episode was easy to co-opt, and co-opting it elegantly neutralized the brief embarrassment he might have suffered otherwise.) It's an admission that McConnell would prefer to have his campaign managed by someone who admitted he doesn't believe in its mission rather than replace him with someone more loyal - because that would further antagonize conservative voters who don't trust him yet control his fate.
It's a metaphor for the control the right has claimed over the GOP since George W. Bush left office - a campaign-trail manifestation of the power back-bench Republicans have successfully asserted in both the House and Senate. And it's a harbinger of what they hope to do when it's time to pick their presidential candidate three years from now.
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FOCUS | The NSA-DEA Police State Tango |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=25436"><span class="small">Andrew O'Hehir, Salon</span></a>
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Sunday, 11 August 2013 09:36 |
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O'Hehir writes: "This is a genuinely sinister turn of events with a whiff of science-fiction nightmare, one that has sounded loud alarm bells for many people in the mainstream legal world."
File photo, scales of justice. (photo: unknown)
The NSA-DEA Police State Tango
By Andrew O'Hehir, Salon
11 August 13
 o the paranoid hippie pot dealer you knew in college was right all along: The feds really were after him. In the latest post-Snowden bombshell about the extent and consequences of government spying, we learned from Reuters reporters this week that a secret branch of the DEA called the Special Operations Division - so secret that nearly everything about it is classified, including the size of its budget and the location of its office - has been using the immense pools of data collected by the NSA, CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies to go after American citizens for ordinary drug crimes. Law enforcement agencies, meanwhile, have been coached to conceal the existence of the program and the source of the information by creating what's called a "parallel construction," a fake or misleading trail of evidence. So no one in the court system - not the defendant or the defense attorney, not even the prosecutor or the judge - can ever trace the case back to its true origins.
On one hand, we all knew more revelations were coming, and the idea that the government would go after drug suspects with the same dubious extrajudicial methods used to pursue terrorism suspects is a classic and not terribly surprising example of mission creep. Both groups have been held up as bogeymen for years, in order to scare the public into accepting ever nastier and more repressive laws. This gives government officials another chance to talk to us in their stern grown-up voices about how this isn't civics class, and sometimes they have to bend the rules to catch Really Bad People.
On the other hand, this is a genuinely sinister turn of events with a whiff of science-fiction nightmare, one that has sounded loud alarm bells for many people in the mainstream legal world. Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law professor who spent 18 years as a federal judge and cannot be accused of being a radical, told Reuters she finds the DEA story more troubling than anything in Edward Snowden's NSA leaks. It's the first clear evidence that the "special rules" and disregard for constitutional law that have characterized the hunt for so-called terrorists have crept into the domestic criminal justice system on a significant scale. "It sounds like they are phonying up investigations," she said. Maybe this is how a police state comes to America: Not with a bang, but with a parallel construction.
At this point, there are a lot more questions than answers about what Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Hanni Fakhoury has dubbed the DEA's "intelligence laundering" operation. Here are three big ones: How far does all this go? Where does it stop? And why doesn't the general public seem to give a damn? That last question partly reflects the fact that the NSA has evidently been tracking everybody's cell phone calls and emails, and that sounds scary. It's easy for many middle-class Americans to convince themselves that they have nothing to fear from the DEA, even if it has morphed into a dark secret-police force we're barely aware of. As revolutionary and noted hypocrite Thomas Jefferson once observed, the spread of tyranny only requires our silence.
Millions of people have been sent to prison on drug-war convictions over the last 20 years. Most of those people have been poor and black. We will never know how many of those cases resulted from secret evidence collected by spy agencies, but it might not be a small number. One of the Reuters articles that broke this story quotes DEA officials as saying that the "parallel construction" tactic had been used by the agency "virtually every day since the 1990s." Legal scholar Michelle Alexander, author of the recent bestseller "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," sent me an email from her family vacation to say that these revelations "certainly lead one reasonably to wonder how many people - especially poor people of color, who have been the primary targets in the drug war - have been spied on by the DEA in the name of national security."
From the outset, there have been moral, philosophical and technological connections between the war on drugs and the war on terror. Both campaigns involve the unprecedented expansion of executive power and the use of high-tech paramilitary policing. Both involve "adjusting" our supposedly cherished constitutional rights and privileges in the name of protecting us from evil. Both involve targets that are easy to demonize and marginalize, and both embody troubling questions about race, class and power. Most important of all, both conflicts are immensely expensive and shockingly self-destructive. If these parallel wars had been designed to fail - designed to create a state of permanent crisis, empower and enrich a caste of warrior-bureaucrats and undercut constitutional democracy - they could hardly have been designed more perfectly.
In the recent documentary "How to Make Money Selling Drugs," David Simon of "The Wire" and "Treme" describes the United States as a society that "hunts down and incarcerates poor people." Michelle Alexander's book depicts the mass imprisonment of African Americans as a new system of racial control that is more efficient than the old one precisely because it is veiled by official colorblindness. As investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill and others have documented, the borderless global war against al-Qaida has only widened and deepened mistrust of America all over the Arab and Muslim world, by too often resembling an indiscriminate campaign of murder and torture against civilians. Anwar al-Awlaki was a moderate Virginia imam who once gave a speech at the Pentagon, and was driven to the other side by his perception that the U.S. was waging war on Islam.
Now we can see that these two arms of the national-security octopus are intertwined as well. As John Shiffman, David Ingram and Kristina Cooke of Reuters reported in a series of articles over the past week, the DEA's Special Operations Division - originally created in 1994 to battle Latin American drug cartels - routinely funnels "information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans." We're talking about data collected by all the clandestine but theoretically legal means that Edward Snowden's leaks have told us about, data gathered in the name of combating terrorism that ends up being used for entirely different purposes. These are ordinary drug prosecutions with no links to terrorism or other national security issues, but in which the information that led to the original arrest is treated as a state secret.
Documents uncovered by Reuters specifically instruct federal agents and local police to "omit the SOD's involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony." Instead, cops and agents are told to "recreate the investigative trail" to make it look like regular police work. This is "parallel construction," a marvelous and terrifying bureaucratic neologism that in plain English appears to mean lying. For instance, it might mean claiming that a traffic stop that led to a drug bust stemmed from a broken taillight or an illegal left turn, rather than an NSA intercept, an overseas wiretap or a CIA informant.
Fakhoury's recent post on the EFF's DeepLinks blog explores various ways that these deliberate deceptions appear to violate the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and undercut the crucial role of legal scrutiny entrusted to the courts. They prevent judges from assessing the constitutionality of government surveillance (since they never even find out about it), and deprive criminal defendants of the venerable common-law right to examine and challenge the evidence against them. He also makes the broader point that the NSA's enormous trove of surveillance data has provoked an "unquenchable thirst for access" among other law enforcement agencies, whose leaders imagine all the wonderful things they could do with it.
All this underscores, of course, that while drug-war prosecutions are supposed to be just like other kinds of criminal cases, in practice they have a special status and are treated differently. But one may still ask, given that this administration and the last one (and quite likely the one before that) have repeatedly misled the public about the existence, extent and scope of surveillance programs, whether there is any reason to believe that the pipeline of secret data and the manipulation of the justice system is limited to drug cases. Should we be confident that NSA intercepts and foreign-intelligence wiretaps and "parallel construction" will never be used to build criminal cases against hackers, leakers, Occupy activists, investigative journalists, unfriendly pundits and any other dissidents on the left or the right whom the government decides to persecute?
"We have no assurances about any of that," Fakhoury told me by phone from his San Francisco office. "As information about these programs has unfolded and we keep learning more, we also see that at every step along the way the government has justified the program through fancy word games and legal language that does not mean what it appears to mean. Right now the government hasn't done anything to give anyone faith or trust that the limits they claim are actually in place."
In theory, the DEA disclosures could and should have outraged Americans across the political spectrum, especially when added to all the other bad things we've learned about our government this year. Except that blind partisan loyalty now trumps everything in national politics, and almost nothing about our country's slide toward soft police state still shocks anybody. Conservatives only care about civil liberties when they affect rich and/or rural white folks, and support any degree of tyranny when it comes to conducting the drug war and locking up poor people. As Bruce A. Dixon of Black Agenda Report notes, liberals of all races would have howled about this stuff under Bush-Cheney, but with a black Democrat in the White House they make excuses or pretend it isn't happening.
Maybe we're all just dazed by the tide of NSA revelations, distracted by celebrity sex scandals and the idiotic infighting of Washington, and insulated by the techno-workaholic bubble of ordinary life, in which America still seems like a calm and normal place. If I had to break it down, I would guess that half the population clings to the optimistic belief that reasonable people are in charge and things will work out for the best, while the other half has become entirely cynical. I mean, who still thinks that drug dealers have rights? That's so 20th century! The rest of us gave up those delusions when we got iPhones.
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hy is the nation more bitterly divided today than its been in eighty years? Why is there more anger, vituperation, and political polarization now than even during Joe McCarthys anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the tempestuous struggle for civil rights in the 1960s, the divisive Vietnam war, or the Watergate scandal?
